My Dad tells me of this place he calls “The Secret City”. The Secret City doesn’t exist in one place–in fact, it exists in many places, all over the world. It is that wonderful store or restaurant that does something exceptionally well, something out of the ordinary, and is, of course, a secret to most of the world. Beanbender’s Beer Garden, featured in D. Manus Pinkwater’s Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death is such a place, albeit in literature and not life, and one I’ve been looking for all my life (as is the Snark Theater as well, and its all-night buffet of classic black and white films).
Posts tagged: The End of Baseball
THE TOUR WINDS DOWN
GOTHAM, DAY THREE
The great news: Detroit Tigers 8, New York Yankees 4.
That’s a sweep for my favorite nine. I was at last night’s game, an utterly miserable evening spent in the upper deck in right field (actually my favorite seats in any ballpark) as a driving mist made the bill on my cap drip onto my ruined scorecard. It also didn’t help that StubHub.com claimed that I was saving tons of money by purchasing a $45 ticket for $30, when it turns out that on that particular night those same $45 tickets were selling for $5. Yes, that’s five bucks. If there’s one thing I know it’s this: on the street or on the net, I have absolutely no luck whatsoever with scalpers. They get me every time.
GOTHAM
New York City. Like Chicago, I’m having a blast, but unfortunately like Chicago I and my little book can’t entice anyone to attend these readings. My agent, Paul Bresnick, was there, as was Walter Vatter, my publicist at Ivan R. Dee. And two other guys and a lady who I think was just using the back row to rest and read the stack of books she was carrying. Afterwards, she seemed to poke disdainfully at the table of my books in the back. Ah well.
CHICAGO
Every place looks pretty much the same when it’s raining endlessly. Minnesota and Wisconsin. Rural Illinois and the suburban wasteland of Chicago. Michigan. Ontario. Upstate New York. Flatlands, farms, industry, and all their trappings, from the barns to the truck stops to the smokestacks belching out what looks like more clouds, to the rest stops that all seem to serve the same awful coffee they’re now calling “gourmet”. Between two magical readings–both very different–and the suddenly strange landscape around Cooperstown, New York (where I’m now staying at the charming and low-key Mohican Motel), it’s been nothing but an endless, rainy drive with repeating landscapes.
FUNKY HIGHWAY 90/94
Driving through the buttery heart of Wisconsin in my rented Chevy Cobalt, dubbed “The Storm Trooper” by our neighbor Rachel (it’s as white and mildly menacing as the Star Wars jerks), I find myself jabbing at the scan button looking for music to keep me awake on this miserable, rainy drive. One can only listen to NPR for a limited amount of time. How much more analysis of the Pennsylvania primary can you digest, anyway? So I turn, as usual, to the vast wasteland of AM radio, in search of the oldies.
BATTER UP! THE TOUR BEGINS
What a long, strange trip it’s been: I started The End of Baseball in the summer of 2001. Ten drafts, thirty-four rejections later, and countless hours spent writing and researching the thing in the confines of my office and here we are–the book is published, and even better, people are reading it and I get the privilege of talking to readers in a bookstore. After many seasons of grim solitude, I can tell you that this is a wonderment.
