Like Winning the Lottery!

Usually things go "okay." It's not perfect; some things don't work as you'd like them, but it works out in the end. Of course, there are those hell days where if it can break, fail, show up late, be the wrong color, weight, style or flavor, it will.

As shoots go, I can say this most recent — my first gig as a freelancer since I was released from permanent employment — would go in that "okay" category, but perilously close to the "hell" category.

I don't wish to dwell there. For as bad as some parts were, the client asked me to see the project through its minimal edit the next day, which was an unexpected second day of work, and at a producer's rate, for which I bill $250 more per day!

No, the part upon which I wish to dwell came after I was finished with the shoot.

Because the client couldn't get either a reasonably timed flight or a reasonably priced flight to get me back home from Boston Thursday, I was stuck there for the night. I had contacted Mr. Schprock a day before my trip to see if he might want to get together, but he had unalterable plans (I'm guessing Thursday is sex night in the Schprock abode). Dee J Wave, my friend from Flashback Alternatives had commented that she lived only three hours away, but I would never ask her to travel six hours just to hang with me for two.

As I rode in the cab in a downtown section of the city, I contemplated my options for the evening. I was booked in the near vicinity of the airport at a Comfort Inn & Suites, which, often enough, are roadside motels with the slimmest of amenities, so it was a 50-50 chance that there would be a restaurant in the hotel. I considered just dumping off at the hotel the gear I was carrying and returning to the city for a meal and a stroll. I even considered another option as we drove past a strip club, but that would have just proved frustrating in the long run.

At one point, where the traffic seemed the thickest my cab crawled through, I saw a man standing in the street waving a triangular orange flag and pointing at a space between buildings. It reminded me of the scenes around Wrigley Field in Chicago on a Cubs home game day where guys hawk parking spaces near the venue where they will park your car for a steep fee, and where they'll park your car so tightly into their lot that you can't hope to leave until the last guy parked chooses to leave. The thought ran through my head, "We must be near Fenway Park. There's probably a Red Sox game tonight."

And then the thought hit me: "THERE'S PROBABLY A RED SOX GAME TONIGHT!" Suddenly a night baseball game seemed like an excellent idea! I checked my watch and it was only around 4:30. I guessed the game would start around 7:00. When I got to the hotel (where there does happen to be a restaurant on the premises!) I did dump the gear in storage, and I asked a young guy behind the counter about a game that night.

"You got tickets?!" he asked me incredulously.

"No," was my reply. "I'll see what they have at the gate."

He went online and checked, and indeed the Red Sox were playing at home that night. But, he told me, the Sox were playing the Toronto Blue Jays, and "those games are usually sold out." He also had told me of the plethora of places around Fenway Park where I could get a bite to eat. I figured I could head down to Fenway, see if I could get a ticket and, if I couldn't, then I would eat at one of the dozens of places I was told are there.

The guy was incredibly helpful. He pulled out a map of the Boston transit system, the "T," and showed me which train line to take, and which train terminuses I had to look for, where to switch lines, and the best place to get off the train for Fenway.

I left the hotel at 5:30, on the Comfort Inn & Suites complementary airport shuttle. I asked the bus driver about how to get back to the hotel after the Red Sox game.

"You got tickets?!" he asked me incredulously. Damn! Are Red Sox tickets that difficult to come by?

The shuttle took me to the "T" Blue Line Airport Station. A train came within a minute or two, and I rode it past four stops to Government Center, where I switched to the Green Line, where another train arrived within seconds of when I did. The trains on this line are more like big trolley cars, and they were packed with people, most of who were headed for the game, too. The throng on the train could have been a warning for me that my chances were slim for getting a ticket.

From the Green Line stop at Kenmore I walked with the throng headed for the game. People were boisterous, but they were very nice. No one talked to me, nor did anyone bother me. The crowd dispersed into the larger throng surrounding Fenway Park, and I located the "Game Day Tickets" booths. They were cordoned off with metal barricades manned by Fenway security staff. This could have been another omen.

I walked up to one of the security guys and asked, gesturing to the barricades, "So does this mean the game is completely sold out?"

The guy replied, "I dunno. You can go ask at the window." He told me it was okay to go around the barricade.

At the window the playful woman looked up single seat availabilities and told me there was a seat available in Section 25. A seating diagram taped to the ticket window showed the section to be about 50 to 100 rows back from the third base line, starting about ten feet down the line from home plate.

"Cool! How much?"

Fifty dollas was the price. That's not a typo, by the way.... I asked if there were any less expensive seats, and she said there were not.

Then she said there was also some singles available in Section 93, which the diagram showed to be an upper deck seat down the first base line and in right field beyond first base.

She said, "Let me check the seats." After a mere second or two she practically shouted, "OOH! You gotta take the seat in Section 25. It's row one! The guy in front of you, in the last row of the section in front of you, paid 90 dollas for his seat. It's a great seat!"

I complimented her salesmanship and dropped my debit card into the tray. I wandered into the bowels of the stadium and got my bearings somewhat. I was quite hungry, so before I even checked out my seat, I went on the hunt for food. A few minutes later, with a beer in one hand and an Italian sausage in the other, I went to my seat.


The pre-game goings on going on...

And what a grand seat it was! I was close enough to read the names on the players' jerseys, but not close enough to smell them. At 6:30 it was still an absolutely gorgeous day. The sun was still high enough in the sky to alight on the grass on the field, but the shadows grew longer by the minute. There were some festivities on the field, with some honored kids bestowed with the opportunity to pose for photos with The Big Green Monster character, a really great sounding high school(?) female quartet singing the Canadian national anthem, an equally talented Latina singing the US National Anthem, and a couple different people out to toss the ceremonial first pitch.


PLAY BALL!


The Big Green Monster!

The game commenced, and the first inning ended with a Red Sox run on the scoreboard. There was one home run in the game, many great plays, and the Toronto Blue Jays out hit the Red Sox, but the Red Sox emerged victorious in the end. It wasn't until the fifth inning or so, when I looked at the American League standings board at the far left field end at the bottom of the famous Big Green Monster, that I realized why everyone was so eager to know if I had tickets. I never knew that the Toronto Blue Jays were in first place in the American League Eastern Division, and the Red Sox were in second place, just a game and a half behind them! What I also didn't know was that this game was the final in the series in which the Red Sox had already taken two games. If you were a Red Sox fan, this was the. game. to attend!

What a perfect night! There was at least one ticket to be had; the people in the seats all around me were civil at worst, friendly at best; the weather could not have been any better — the temperature was perfect; the food and drink were tasty (I also had a big slice of pizza and another beer in the 6th inning!); the view was spectacular; I was in the second greatest ballpark in the nation (sorry, Beantown...nothing will surpass Wrigley Field in my heart!); and the home team won.

To borrow from Marc Cohn's great song "Walking In Memphis," had anyone asked me that evening if I was a Red Sox fan, my reply would have been, "I am tonight!"

It was a perfect brew of circumstances: time on my hands, a legendary baseball park in the vicinity, an unbelievably gorgeous day and evening, and the well-timed thought to give it a go and take the chance that I could get a ticket. I think Murphy was asleep that night and was unable to enforce his law.

Well, Murphy is Irish. Maybe he's a Boston Red Sox fan.




End note: The next morning I did get the chance to meet up with Mr. Schprock for breakfast, and I told him about the baseball game.

"You got tickets?!" he asked me incredulously.

I guess I'm a lucky, lucky man!




°

Lost In Boston

My first time ever in Boston was in the middle of a road trip back in 1990. My best friend, Lu, needed to get to Lenox, Massachusetts, for his second summer away from university as a boys’ camp counselor. I needed to get away after a non-stop year-and-a-half of classes and work, and I had suggested the road trip to serve a dual purpose: get him to Lenox, and get me on a vacation.

As university students, we had become adept at finding the cheapest way around things. The previous summer Lu had boarded a Greyhound bus for Lenox, and endured a 26-hour nightmare of multiple stops, changing buses and sleep deprivation. But it only cost him about a hundred bucks! I proposed we split the cost of gas, despite the fact that it had peaked at an outrageous $1.16 per gallon that spring, and he suggested we sleep at a youth hostel along the way, where the cost was about $10 for each of us, plus a couple of house chores we had to do to earn our keep.

When the semester ended near the end of May, we both went home to spend a few days with our families, and then it was time to travel. I’ve always been drawn to the open road. If I hadn’t discovered the field I’m in now, I probably would eventually have pursued a career as a truck driver or something. It’s probably why I went for – and have held – the job I have now. However, now that I have seen the dangers with which it is fraught, and the amount of under-the-table diplomacy it involves, the career of freight hauling no longer holds any allure. Regardless, I have always been drawn to the open road. And so it was that I lobbied my buddy for us to avoid the speed and convenience of Interstate 80 and opt instead for the quaint solitude of US Route 30, to which we had easy access because it runs right through our home town. He agreed, and off we went.

Nine hours later we were only half the distance we could have been on the interstate, and we were both getting pretty tired. We consulted the hostel guide and found that we were only an hour or so away from one in (Upper Sandusky?), Ohio, so we headed there.

We paid our ten dollars and were told that the kitchen needed cleaning. One would think that two former military guys like us (he was in the Marines, I the Air Force) would be no strangers to kitchen duty. Well, we weren’t; but it doesn’t mean we liked it. I’m sure I did more, but all I remember was polishing the toaster which I recall was so disgusting when I picked it up that I wondered why no hostelers before us had been tasked with cleaning it. Then it dawned on me that perhaps they HAD been! YYIICCHH!!

The next morning Lu asked if we could just hop on the interstate for the rest of the trip because the camp was only open during the summer, and he didn’t want to miss it. We were in Lenox by nightfall. Lu introduced me to a couple of the friends he had made the previous summer, and they showed us where we could bunk for the night. It was a fairly rustic cabin, and I gather that Lenox is considerably farther north than any climate in which I had existed in the prior two years. Or maybe it was just a freakishly cold night for late May. Either way, the blanket the guys gave me might as well have been a sheet of facial tissue for as warm as it kept me. Needless to say, I got no sleep that night for fear that if I did sleep, I would have been found blue and lifeless in the morning, huddled under that paper-thin patch of cloth.

In the morning I bid farewell to my buddy and headed south. The rest of my trip had me destined for Long Island, New York to visit my friend, Linda, who had just been graduated from my same course of study, and had moved back home; and then for Washington, D.C., to visit my friend CJ whom I had met and befriended in Great Falls, Montana while I was in the Air Force. You might think I’m protecting her identity by using only her initials, but that’s what she goes by. CJ. It would seem awkward to me to call her by her given name.

But first I wanted to spend some time in Boston. I looked for another youth hostel and found one listed in the guide book, located right smack in the middle of downtown. I followed the directions in the book and… they were useless. The highway exit the book told me to take didn’t exist. I could see from the highway above the surface streets one or two important-looking colonial era buildings, historical relics of our nation’s birth and infancy, but I could find no logical route to get down there. I took the next exit I came to, figuring I would hit the surface streets, find my bearings and go around the block to get where I wanted to be. That's when I learned there's no such thing as "going around the block" in Boston. Instead, I wound up on an entrance ramp BACK onto the highway! It quickly became like that nightmare where you are unable to find something important, and no matter where you look, it’s not there, and you’re forever hunting for it to the point that you want to scream. And scream I did!

I doubled back and found the same exit and, after making the SAME STUPID MOVE that got me back on the highway again, I returned and tried something different. That put me on a side street that took me to the edge of downtown. I pulled into the parking lot of a body shop or auto mechanic’s shop and asked the grimy, yet kindly employee standing just outside the building for directions. I am not exaggerating when I say that this is the essence of how he told me to get back to the city center (imagine the thickest Boston accent you’ve ever heard): Yeah, you go don tuh thuh cona theea and turn left. Then, when you get to where Bruno’s hot dooawg stand used ta be, you make anutha left…”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not from around here. I don’t know where anything used to be.”

He looked at me blankly for a second, and then he said, “Oh. Okay. Then turn arond heea, go ten, fifteen blocks chroo Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, theea…”

I offered my thanks and drove away. I eventually found my way back to city center and decided that the only way I was going to get to see anything or find the hostel was on foot. I parked somewhere – I don’t remember if it was on the street or in a parking garage – and with guide in hand, I set out to find the hostel.

I found the intersection nearest the hostel. It was a street on two levels. I walked to where the little map showed me the hostel was, in the middle of the block. The address didn’t exist. I made my way down to the lower level. The address didn’t exist. I spent an hour of the time I had hoped to explore this American Revolution Era city looking for this stupid youth hostel which, as far as I could ever tell, didn’t even exist!

The exercise in futility over, I said, “Screw it!” (I didn’t REALLY say “SCREW it,” but you get the picture) and I vowed never to return to the stupid city of Boston. I hopped back in the Jeep and continued south, and spent the night at a sleazy motel in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

It wasn’t until 2004 that I returned to Boston – this time on business, and I had locals to drive me around – and I learned that, especially in the summer, it is an incredibly beautiful place with wonderful old buildings and not ungraceful new ones, and large, green, quiet parks all over the place. And I can’t forget to mention the historical buildings and locales, and The Freedom Trail, a line of red paint or red paving bricks in the walks, which leads you to notable historic locations throughout downtown.

And then, Wednesday night, I finally met a friend in Boston: Mr. Schprock. He met me at my hotel, and we walked about 7 miles to Faneuil Hall marketplace where he suggested any number of restaurants and left it up to me to choose. I deferred to his knowledge of which place was true Boston dining and, in a very slight Boston accent he said, “That would be Durgin Park.”

We paused to try to avoid the direct gaze of a staggering drunk homeless (I think?) person who appeared to be sizing me up 1) for how much money he thought I might give him; 2) as an out-of-towner; b) to locate the softest part of my skull where he could bash it in for however much money he thought he could take from me. He never even so much as looked at Schprock. Just me. Maybe he doesn’t like tall, slim, thick-haired men.

He must have overheard us because, as we headed for the Durgin Park, ahead of us so did our new friend who also made a bee-line (okay, a heavily pollen-laden and substantially inebriated bee) for the men’s room. I swear he must have eavesdropped on our conversation, because that was the first stop I wanted to make when we got to the restaurant!

I went against my usual tradition of ordering anything formerly hoofed and instead went with the broiled seafood platter. And then I proceeded to talk Mr. Schprock’s ear off while we discussed every topic from writing to the macro-economics of the nation of Burundi. It was a great evening, even though we encountered not even one stripper – at least none that we know of. For those of you who have ever wished to meet him, he’s everything you would expect. For those of you who hate him, he’s really a nice guy. And when he walked me back to my hotel (had he not, I’d be lost in Boston again!) and we said our good-byes, we shook hands as friends.

(If you see Mr. Schprock, he’s very self-conscious about the ear thing. It landed right in his plate, and he ate it without even realizing it. So try not to mention it. And don’t stare. It’s rude.)