Especially before the end of the school year, day games on a random Tuesday or Thursday were usually pretty desolate. The towering double deck stadium announcing crowds of 10,000 or 13,000… with maybe half or two-thirds of that actually in attendance. We didn’t see the point of being the only two people in section 331 and would constantly try to weasel an upgrade…

But those damn ushers… All of them seemed impossibly old and grumpy and oddly omnipresent to our 16 year old selves. Even on the rare occasions when my dad would take me to a game, they never seemed nice or helpful or even remotely polite. They didn’t have an axe to grind with truant teenagers, clearly their only function appeared to be keeping everybody in the seat they payed for. Over the course of many attempts we learned that the best way to combat them was to go head on… to brazenly stroll right past them… looking like we belonged… showing confidence against their menacing glares… Trying to go to a section that was usher-free was always a recipe for disaster… as if the old men were spirited away under the seats, watching security cameras and setting up an elaborate sting operation. Success was making it more then two innings before getting found out… but it seemed as we were almost always found out.

God damn we hated those old fucks. Thankfully, once ownership changed hands, the old men were seemingly whisked away. Here one season, gone the next… maybe internment camps were set up in some out of the way northern Michigan town… The rude old men simply vanished… Replaced by nicer old men who seemed to give you a knowing wink, without ever actually winking, more interested in that dollar you would throw their way for wiping off your seat and less interested in examining your documentation.

Of course in the end, my friend and I missed the usher game… the cat and mouse… We still took the free seat upgrade at every game we attended… but something was missing. That undeniable thrill of getting away with something when the odds were against you… Damn those ushers were good at their jobs…

Pete Millerman said…
I believe he was spotted again in the late ’90s at Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place in the company of that other spectre-like presence of yore – that former Village Idiot regular known somewhat ominously only as “The Raiders of the Lost Ark Guy.”

This latter personage was a presence familiar chiefly for his hysteria-inflected nasal voice (all the better to scream continually and in legnthy discourse about a variety of unseemly subject matter above deafening music), his Andy Partridge-spectacles and earring, his affinity for Nazi trivia, pornography, horror films, gore, and cheap scotch, and ultimately for surfacing – a wraith like apparition up to God knows what mischief – on windy, desolate East Village evenings that always seemed pregnant with bad energy and some extreme premonition of cold foreboding.

Like some arcane ritual of dark magick I feel in my bones now a creeping fear that I may well have somehow summoned one or the other of these shadowy phantasms of legend. That they now rise to stalk the wintry streets, awaiting a chance encounter on a corner, in a bar, on a stairway, or just in our subconscious somewhere…and thus sincerely apologize.

12:34 AM

fakehash smoker said…
Bucky DID flinch. That I remember. And we laughed. Oh how laughed.

3:18 AM