Rain Out

Gretchen and I had been living in Oxford, it was 2001. When our time there was up, we blew all our deposit money on mailing our crap back to the U.S. and changed our flights to stopover on the East Coast. It was June, and hockey was on television at Gretchen’s sister’s house in Larchmont, New York. Amidst the family visit, we decided to borrow a car and drive up to Boston and visit Karen. The complexities of East Coast highways (make that turnpikes, parkways, and so forth) seemed challenging, but we managed the drive. And waiting was Schmeer: we hiked up into the Somerville apartment and balanced our bags between the perilous piles of books, papers, photographs. Karen made us coffee in the golden sunflowered kitchen and we plunged into the catch up part of the visit, before emerging in the Thirsty Scholar (I always made her go there because I was flummoxed by the miracle of having a pub downstairs). We were pronouncing it, ‘da terstee scole-air’, our fake Irish accents sounded like fake pirate accents. This is how we made plans. One of the plans was a going to Fenway for a game. However, we had no tickets and there were none to be had when we called. We decided that we would go anyway and scalp tickets. A day game. We rode the T to Fenway, wandered around with plenty of time. Getting into a bar was a heroic effort, as each and every seemed packed with game dayers. Finally, we crowded into a slot behind a door, pressed up against the window and leveraged the bartender into drinks. The sky was heavy, the light gray, and surges of thick mist came and went. It didn’t look good, but we walked to the park and started listening to the scalpers. A wiry guy had three tickets that were pretty close on the third base side. I felt very illicit—looking this way and that—but Karen was worse: ‘you have to do it, Matt’ and she sidled off out of view, like we were in high school and I was buying certain health products or a DeBarge cassette single. I fumbled with the money, had to ask twice how much, and didn’t get change. My worry that the tickets were fake melted as we went inside the park and milled around underneath before heading to our seats. The rain was falling and game time came and went. We sat, just under the roof above, talking, watching the rain, waiting. People started to leave, but we stuck it out until the announcement over the P.A. that the game was called. We filed out, slowly, and back to the T, disappointed and moist. Back above the Thirsty Scholar we started thinking about dinner, but Karen made some kind of fruit juice slushy vodka concoction. We started making a list of the songs that were huge hits but that we hated with bilious venomous disgust. We sang them. ‘Let’s Hear It For the Boy’, ‘Who’s Holding Donna Now?’, ‘Zanz Kant Danz’: it was despicable and reprehensible. The rain fell some more. Further blender related beverages. Maybe we should get take-out. ‘Rico Suave’ and Four Non-Blondes. Utterly repugnant and loathsome. We could just go downstairs to the scole-arrrrrrh! ‘One Night in Bangkok’, ‘Walkin’ On Sunshine’. We never made it to the Sox and we never made it out that night. I told Karen she should return the tickets for the refund and it turned out that the scalper messed up and she came away with forty extra dollars. Missed the game, got wet, made money, suffered the bad music juke. It was such a good trip to Boston, we did it again a year or so later.

Macy Gray and Erykah Badu - Sweet Baby