What if a Polar Bear wrestled an Eel?

My colleague and I were in Chicago for a week long training and decided to celebrate completion by attending a Major League Baseball Game. The Cubs were out of town but there were White Sox tickets available for a song - good ones! I haven't really been able to root for the American League since the adoption of the designated hitter rule - Charley Finley's dark legacy excusing pitchers from the batting lineup - but I decided to risk spontaneous combustion and go along. Besides: I have a new zoom lens and baseball games are a primary reason I was longing for one.

It was a cool, clear late August evening. We rode the El in from our hotel in Rosemont and got to the stadium in time for the Orioles' batting practice. Audra, my colleague, invited a young AmeriCorps alumni from the South Side - a known Sox fan. "You don't grow up on the South Side and root for the Cubs," says Jermaine.

I'm a Cardinals fan, although it's hard to be brave with the Redbirds trailing the hated Reds this late in the season. Most of my baseball experience has involved Cubs/Cardinals matches at Wrigley or Busch. The new US Cellular Field was large, beautiful and, from the seventh row in left field, surprisingly intimate. A little too intimate, as it turned out.

Robyn and I were once invited to go to a Cubs/Cardinal game at Wrigley as part of an event sponsored by my brother-in-law's employer. We all boarded a bus in the morning and rode directly to the game. The price was right and the convenience seemed inarguable, so we signed on. At 8:00 a.m. as we boarded, we noticed that a large majority of the passengers were beginning to drink. By the time we got to Rush Street, the cumulative blood alcohol content on the bus had reached near epidemic proportions. At the game, the serious drinking began.

My friends know I don't mind lying around the shanty and getting a good buzz on. At deserted cabins among close friends I might even drink in the morning ("If you don't start in the morning, how can you drink all day?"). That said, the bus ride home was a little excerpt from one of the inner circles of Hell. Robyn and I sat crouched in our seats as people stumbled around the bus, taking turns vomiting in the small bus bathroom, clogging both the toilet and the sink. People would occasionally try to interact with us, urging us to drink, of course. "What is that? A BOOK?!?" To be fair, my brother in law was also appalled by his co-workers and apologized profusely. I will never ride a bus to a Cubs game again. I suspect Redbirds fans would have been more mature.

Meanwhile, back in the relative present, the Sox game was really good, from a Chicago standpoint. Carl Jackson was pitching 98 miles per hour and the Orioles were batting like schoolgirls (apologies to schoolgirls everywhere!). It was a festival of singles and there was plenty of action on the base paths. Juan Pierre stole his 50th base. Behind us, two Sox fans, young men in the obligatory jerseys, were beginning to show the effects of the suds, their comments delivered in clipped Chicago diction.

"If a polar bear got into a wrestling match with a chimpanzee, who doya think would win!"
"I dunno. Is the bear sober?"
"It wouldn't make any fucking difference, you moron!" the first guy explained. He paused. "Fuckin' sober."
"My money's on the bear." Various combination of animal wrestling matches were discussed and evaluated, punctuated by insults and epithets and occasional pity observations. "You're drunk."

They also evaluated the size and shape of various players.

"Juan Pierre is a fuckin' midget. They say he's five foot fuckin' seven but that first baseman towers over him?"
"Konerko's a lazy son of a bitch. He hasn't had an RBI in months and he sits on his fat ass collecting a salary."
"If that fucking midget Juan Pierre wrestled a chimpanzee, who do you think would win?"

I looked around and blessedly there were no children in immediate earshot. Hope springs eternal, though. The boys' volume was increasing with their blood alcohol content.

"You're drunk."
"I'm a fuckin' extrovert. I say what I think. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke."
"I can hold it better'n you, you pussy. This is nothin." It was about the 7th inning stretch when the fan told a story about a Sox/Yankees game just after 9/11. The Yankees were ahead and they were apparently "taking advantage" of the disaster to drum up some cheap sympathy. Offended, our hero tells how he addressed the issue.

"I yelled at 'em that I hoped the fucking building fell on 'em. I let 'em have it, the phony assholes. I gave 'em a piece of my mind before they kicked us out. We were drinking vodka lemonade from that thermos I used to carry to school with my name on it and we were fuckin' lit. When they kicked us out of the game, I puked on the El, remember that?"
"You were drunk."
" . . . had to fuckin' evacuate, and left that fucking thermos behind for evidence."
"You're drunk. You talk too much."
"If you catch the next foul ball in your teeth I'll run out on the fucking field and wrestle that midget Juan Pierre to the fuckin' ground."

I can't really do this dialogue justice, since it ran on - wrestling match ups with animals and baseball players interspersed with profanity and surprisingly revealing stories of old revelries delivered without shame or insight - for the better part of eight innings. It didn't ruin our game. We're adults and we showed up with no kids in tow. For some reason, perhaps divine intervention, there were few kids near us and I'm sure these gentlemen were drowned out for most of the kids by the other fans. Had I spent my hard earned money to take my family to a ball game, I would have been forced to wrestle that guy to the ground like a chimpanzee or perhaps that midget Juan Pierre.

Instead, I listened in amazement, in awe. What must it be like for everyone around you to know more about your soul than you do?