Nobody Bats a Thousand Read Free Page A

kid.
    “A coke?”
    “Jimmy, give this kid a coke, and ask Little Al to come talk to me if you see him,” Big Al said before he walked back through the dining room to the kitchen. From the tone of his voice, most would anticipate a serious father-son confrontation, but I knew better.  You see it had taken Big Al nearly forty years and five daughters until he finally welcomed his male legacy into the world. I was sure this was the reason he seemed to indulge his namesake more than anyone else on the planet, and even if there was a dispute and a little screaming and a few personal threats, among Italians this was business as usual as long as there weren’t any major blows or bloodletting, so I wasn’t worried that there was any major problem.
    The soundman took his coke with him into the banquet room, and I walked to the end of the bar to check on Jane and her little band of admirers. The fattest and loudest guy signaled for another round. Though I was twenty feet away making the drinks I picked up enough of their conversation with my rabbit ears to calculate that at least one of Jane’s new friends was a car dealer or wholesaler. Knowing she had rolled and t otaled her car the week before, she of course coming through u nscathed , I figured that Jane figured her chances of soon driving a used Seville or Lincoln for free were about as good as most people estimate their chances of getting one matching number on lottery ticket. I quietly delivered the drinks and took the guy’s money as discreetly as possibly, so as not to interrupt and throw her off her game.
    Bam! A dull thud was followed by a hollow clink.  Fatboy, who had just knocked over his beer, caught the bottle on the first bounce but still cou ldn’t avoid a bit of spillage. “Oh, shit! Hit it with my damn elbow.”
    “Listen to this,” Randy said. “Talk about not taking personal responsibility, now he’s down to blaming his individual body parts.”
    “Hey, don’t knock it, Fatboy, the last time I got arrested for public intoxication I told the cops I was sober but it was my shoes that was drunk. It didn’t work, but I had them going for awhile.”
    As I was cleaning up Fatboy’s mess, in through the door walked four emaciated youths in black leather jackets, T-shirts and jeans. All four wore heavy thick-soled boots, which seemed to have a mind of their own. The four, all with lush conditioned hair past their shoulders, tooled up to the bar in a firm horizontal line.
    “Three Beck’s and a club soda,” their leader spoke.
    “I need to see IDs from all of you.”
    The leader sniffed, exchanged a quick small twisted smile with his pals, and then looked back at me. “We’re the band,” he said with a frustrated smirk I took as his way of showing me he almost forgave me for being so stupid.
    “Great, I’m the bartender, you got IDs?”
    They paused, then started sheepishly digging through their pockets, and I felt great that I had kept the red carpet stored in the closet and stopped them short. Ten years before I’d worked for nearly two years at the Palace , a four-hundred-seat club in San Francisco. There I learned that the true professionals, the well-known cats, the road warriors who had toured all over the world doing music for a living, were almost always po lite, true gentlemen, but most of the local rock star wanna bes  were pompous jerks who seemed to think their lives were a big remake of A Hard Day’s Night . They were egotistical shitheads with a need to be set straight and pulled back to reality, almost as a civic duty, by working stiffs like myself.
    “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I added insult by barely glancing at the driver’s licenses they had worked so hard to produce. “Okay, I got lots of club soda but if you really got your hearts set on Beck’s, the closest one is at the liquor store about a mile away.”
    They agreed on three Coors.
    “Eight-fifty. ” I waited.
    “Well, uh, JR said we’d have a free