Stuck In An Elevator

by Alan Barasky

Damn curveball. It’s been my arch enemy forever. Couldn’t hit it in Little League, didn’t learn to hit it after three summers of baseball camp and can’t hit one now. I know the family and friends who watched my latest batters’ box buffoonery — just last night — are still laughing.

That’s not an assumption. I can see them laughing right now. They’re not guffawing about my baseball prowess anymore, but I still blame it all on that freak pitch.

See, there are only four teams in my adult baseball league and we all know each other’s strengths and weaknesses at the plate. So when Jake Banning, Downtown Tavern’s best pitcher, started me out with two hard ones down and away for strikes, I knew his next pitch had to be that sweeping curve he loves to throw when he gets ahead in the count – especially to me. You know the one – it starts out coming right at your head and then suddenly breaks across the plate and leaves you – or me, anyway – flailing at the ball and feeling silly as you try to stop yourself from falling backwards.

So I call time and tell myself to stay in the batter’s box – no bailing out this time. Then I really dig in with my back foot and wait for that curve. And here it comes, just like I thought – right at my head. Hang in there, it’s gonna break, hang in there . . . SHIT!

Son of a bitch threw me another fastball – only this time up and in. The good news is I did hang in there – bad news is that egg-sized lump I have on the side of my face. You can even see the ball’s stitching imprinted underneath my eye.

But my face is not why family and friends attending my sister’s wedding are laughing now. And it’s not why I’m in this fishbowl of an elevator – one of those glass boxes that deposits guests in the interior atrium of a hotel that apparently is a greenhouse wanna be. No, that is due to my other curveball-related injury. Apparently I dug myself into that batter’s box so determinedly that when I belatedly realized panic was indeed appropriate and tried to run away from Jake’s high hard one, I ripped a tendon in my back foot. And so here I am, on crutches at my sister’s wedding, forced to take this exhibitionist’s delight of an elevator down a measly four stories from my room.

But even that doesn’t explain the laughter I can actually hear floating up through space now. And it’s not that my friends have noticed the elevator alarm. Or that my family sees that the lights inside this thing have gone out. Or that everyone has figured out that we’re not moving. It’s not even that they’re all lighting up my cell phone. No, what’s really got them convulsing down there amidst all that fake greenery is who is up here with me – just the two of us.

Tell me again why my sister had to invite my ex-wife?