Yankee Stadium

New York, NY

Saturday night, I walked off a building, breaking my back and heel. Tuesday, I was fitted for crutches and a steel torso brace at a place coincidentally called Yankee Bionics; I say coincidentally because, Friday, I left for a previously scheduled road trip to watch the team that was then known as the Cleveland Indians play at Yankee Stadium.

I never mentioned to my friend—the person driving us to New York—that I had broken my back; in fact, I don’t think we spoke at all during the week leading up to the trip. We merely assumed we would both be in the agreed-upon meeting place in time for the outing. My friend pulled into the driveway, and I exited my apartment in crutches and a full metal torso brace.

“What happened?” she asked

“A non-trivial roof miscalculation,” I answered, “but it looks worse than it is.”

“What is ‘it’?” she asked.

“A broken back—three places—and a shattered heel.”

“Actually,” she countered, “that’s exactly what it looks like.”

We started the drive, figuring on about a seven-hour drive to Manhattan. Like all Ohioans that had never left Cleveland, we did not account for traffic and assumed we would have no problems finding street parking in Manhattan.

This was my first exposure to the difference in scale between big cities and small cities. People from small cities do not tolerate, nor grasp, the entropies of big city traffic. When you encounter traffic in a small city, you eventually come to the cause of it: some accident, or lane consolidation, or disabled vehicle. You assume that you will see the reason for this traffic so much that, if the delay is significant enough, you might angrily yell, “People better be dead up there!”

You get no such resolution in a big city: you reach no lane closure nor the encouraging signs of dead people. It’s causeless delay; slowness, stacked upon slowness.

In many ways, Chicago (where I live now) has the worst traffic in America. Statistically it ranks second to Boston. And certainly, people from LA and Houston claim to have more crowded highways, but what makes Chicago traffic so bad is that its drivers never seem to expect it. Ask any Chicago driver how long the drive will take and they answer “twenty minutes.” They put no thought into traffic or distance; reflexively it’s “twenty” for everything: a house across town, Soldier Field, the fucking airport. Thus, they drive with the anger and aggression of someone who left the house expecting to arrive on time. Chicago is nine million drivers on the road at the same moment, each convinced that if they could just get ahead of the one car in front of them, everything would be fine.

I did not own a car in Chicago when I first moved but I quickly understood how aggressive its drivers were one week in the mid ‘00s when a Southwest flight slid off the runway at Midway airport. The plane went through a concrete embankment before stopping on the road outside—Cicero Avenue—an important multilane road. I was new to the city and remember them interviewing passengers on the plane, which went something like this: “I have never been so scared in my life! Our plane slid right off the runway! Mud was going everywhere, then we went through a God-damned wall! And we ended up out on this road and all the cars…they were passing us and honking at us!”

The reporter then started blithely asking follow-up questions about the plane, completely ignoring the fact that the interviewee had just described one of the most terrifying and hilarious things I’ve heard in my life: Chicago drivers witnessed a jet plane crash into the road before them and were at best unbothered and at worst mildly irritated. How aggressive are these people, I wondered—nay, feared—that they are honking and passing a functioning 737 that just broke through a wall, like the Kool-Aid Man, with its engines on!? I cannot imagine the conversations in those cars:

CHICAGO DRIVER: Oh, now, what’s this asshole trying to do?

[Plane breaks through wall; engines deafeningly loud; blowing litter and debris everywhere]

CHICAGO DRIVER: Are you serious, guy!

[Chicago driver accelerates to claim the lane that a four engine jet airplane is sliding into]

CHICAGO DRIVER’S WIFE: [screams] Honey, just stop!

CHICAGO DRIVER: I got da right of way! ‘This moron doesn’t even have a blinker on! [holds down horn] I said we would be there in twenty minutes and we will!
 

I was expecting New York drivers to be frighteningly aggressive, but I found them to be mannerly, though I think it stemmed more from abject nihilism than kindness. They would create room for you to merge on the highway; they maintained safe distances; outward signs of kindness. These were not drivers, like in Cleveland or Chicago, that were under the misapprehension they could reach their destination in twenty minutes. These were drivers that accepted: what does having one more Pontiac in front of me mean, if there are two million cars before us? The volume of traffic created a defeatedness that bordered upon kindness.

This was one of the things I mentioned to friends in Ohio upon returning: how nice everyone was.

“Really? I always heard New Yorkers were assholes!” my friends exclaimed.

“No, that’s wrong,” I answered. “They are assholes to each other.” They have a kind of code where they speak to each other with frightening violence, but treat tourists with business-like kindness, sort of like how feuding armies agree not to kill civilians.
 

WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?

Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.

 

This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.

 

Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.

 

Purchase Full Book:

    Digital                                 $4.99

    Paperback                   $14.99

    Audio                                     $19.99

 

This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.

 

I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.

—S. B-F

We spent the first night having a great time in Manhattan. The next day we woke up and soon left for Yankee Stadium (to see the Cleveland Indians play). As we were getting ready, someone pointed out that it was forecasted to be very hot; I said I’d heard the same and asked for my bag. Someone grabbed my large, overstuffed duffel bag and nearly threw it into the next room.

“Jesus!” they exclaimed. “What’s in that? It weighs nothing!”

“Oh, just my stuff,” I answered, unzipping it.

Dozens of impossibly long, white tube socks popped out like snakes from a gag jar.

Like everyone else, I had heard the temperature would be in the 90s that weekend and my metal torso brace was brutal in the sun; it was difficult to weather ten minutes in the heat in it, let alone a nine-inning baseball game. So, I went to a Big And Tall store and bought three packs of their longest white tube socks.

I took my shirt off and started tying the tube socks tightly around my belly.

“This is my summer cast,” I explained.

We got into the stadium and the usher noticed my crutches and large cast and that it was 100 degrees and I was sweating like I had been poisoned.

“Buddy, you might want to think about the handicap section,” the usher suggested.

“Ah, do I qualify?” I asked.

“Well, ya can’t fucking walk, so, yeah, I’d say ya qualify.”

He pointed to where our new seats would be and they were in a section of the stadium that we could never normally afford. We happily relocated to that section.

“Sean! These seats are amazing!” someone gasped.

“I know!” I concurred. “They say that when I’m fifty, I’m going to regret walking off a building but, I gotta say, so far there’s been almost no downside!”

Which was true: traveling with a big, painful injury is the best. People hold doors open for you, give up seats, help you carry beers back to the table; it restores your faith in America, that most people are genuinely kind. On each interaction, the person helping me with a door or a seat or a bag would ask, “What happened?”

“I’m a big Huey Lewis and The News fan and, well, one thing led to another. I fell off a building.”

There would be a pause, while they absorbed all that, then a confident agreement: “Yeah, great band.”
 

The Cleveland Indians went up big in the second inning and we were all cheering, and the Yankee fans around us were being really cool—almost laughing—about it. We took in more of the area around us and noticed that the women near us were uncommonly gorgeous; the entire section was full of bizarrely well-dressed beautiful women. Our buddy from Cleveland had told us the previous night that everyone in New York City dresses better than back home, but that had seemed like hyperbole until that moment. We also began to notice that these women were exceptionally well-informed about the players: cheering for utility players that would not normally get this level of support. It was after a few more innings and beers, that the penny dropped: we were seated next to the players’ wives.

You are not aware of how psychopathic the average fan’s cheering is until you sit next to someone with a human connection to one of the players. Standard cheers like “FUCK YOU, ya redneck moron! Go back to Oklahoma and FUCK A SHEEP!”; you know, all the usual things that us fans love to hear and say, sound a tad excessive when you scream it next to that player’s wife; the other, loving half that is helping to raise a family with him. Suddenly it seems that these traditions might not be the healthiest way to engage another human.

We continued to root for the Indians, but the newfound knowledge of who our neighbors were caused us to be more conciliatory in our cheers. Plus, everyone began to introduce themselves to one another and it was in general a good time, despite the scorching heat. And perhaps due to the heat, or how much fun we are having, the cold beers began to go down ever more quickly and, by the third inning, we were out of money.

“No big deal,” I announced, and began to unfasten my cast. I fiddled with some of the pockets inside it and raised it my mouth.

“What is he doing?” someone in our group asked

“We snuck vodka into his cast,” my buddy answered.

“It’s 92 degrees! You are going to drink vodka that’s been inside his cast all day long, in 92 degrees?”

I passed the cast to my buddy and we thought about the question for a moment.

“Well, the human body temperature is 98 degrees,” I replied, eventually.

“Yeah, so technically we are cooling ourselves down,” my buddy added as he took a swig.

It turns out that when you drink vodka warmed to about your body’s temperature, its effects are doubled. Or at least that’s how I defend losing the next ten hours of memories. My next conscious recollection jumps forward to me suddenly (or at least it seemed sudden) inside a bar on the Lower East side; it was late at night and we were with a new group of people, all unfamiliar to me. Drinking while you are within a blackout is the closest we earthlings can get to being teleported from a spaceship. You open your eyes and find yourself in a brand-new locale, even though you could have sworn that just a second earlier you were on what amounted to a different planet.

More damning, my last memory before the timejump/teleportation was taking back my cast, raising it to have another sip of vodka and assuring the people next to us: “Don’t worry we are the last people you need to worry about on this trip.”

Then I lost ten hours.

This is standard for me. My final words before a blackout are always the most wrongly optimistic statement I’ve said that week. It’s never anything like, “I’m worried I’ve been drinking too fast.” No, it’s always something ironically cheerful like, “I couldn’t have a bad night in this city if I tried!” Then I wake up in a cemetery with a separated shoulder.

I think it’s because our brains are highly thematic— they like a story with a climax—and wish to end on the right note. I imagine the neurons within the brain complaining about rising levels of booze—“We need to initiate blackout protocols!”—but there’s an old grizzled neuron in the front, an old veteran who knows when to hold steady, yelling, “Not yet! Not yet!” It’s around that point that you say something like “I DON’T THINK LONG ISLAND ICE TEAS EVEN AFFECT ME!” and that’s when the hoary old cerebral commander yells, “NOW! Shut it all down NOW!”

Your brain wants you to remember that hubris. It wants you to recall that last, damning sentence. And it’s equally as choosy about when it wakes you from a blackout.

You never come out of an active blackout in the middle of great sex or just after you have finished an amazing story, with everyone around you laughing. It’s always at a new bar, in a totally different part of town, and you are settling the bill for seventeen people you don’t recognize. Again the old weathered neuron in your brain sees you offering to pay your last week’s salary in drinks for people you don’t know and announces to the rest of the brain: “OK team, let’s bring him out of the blackout to remember this! This is a keeper, for sure!”

Regaining sentience in an unfamiliar New York watering hole, I found myself not only buying a round of drinks but paying in cash, which was worrisome because my last previous memory was drinking out of a cast (in front of the Yankee wives, no less) precisely because I had no money on me. Yet now I somehow had $400 in readies on me. As scary as it is to suddenly come to penniless, it is far more frightening to retain your wits and discover you now have more money on you. I would rather find human blood on me.

“Thanks for the beers!” someone yelled after I settled the bill.

“My pleasure,” I answered to whomever, while still trying to assemble where I am and how I got there.

“Can I reach over you and grab my beer?” I asked no one in particular, and proceeded to do just that and took a long sip.

This was the moment when New York got less friendly. In less than a minute I was thrown out the bar and yelled at for vomiting.

But I did not vomit.

What happened was, the thing that I had reached over and grabbed was not my drink, but rather, a candle. I was so drunk that I picked up, and sipped from, a lit candle. I don’t know if you have ever reached a place where you were sufficiently smashed to mistake a warm, flaming illumination for your beer and raise it to your lips but, well, let me satisfy your curiosity as to what happens when you do that. When you take a long, confident sip from a burning candle you have two immediate and pressing issues. First is the hot wax scalding its way through your mouth, burning everything from the roof to the floor; and secondly and shortly thereafter as the wax reaches the back of your throat—much like lava meeting the ocean—it starts to cool and coagulate. Your new predicament is you have a soft but growing ball of wax stuck jammed against your epiglottis, very much creating the sensation that you are choking.

So you start spitting out the wax so as to not asphyxiate, and it’s an ugly, loud combination of spit and wax and, in general, you do not look well. And this was precisely the state I was in when the bar’s bouncers grabbed me and escorted me outside. It took three bouncers, not because they thought I was that dangerous, but because two were holding my crutches while the main big guy just hoisted me out. I should point out that I was still wearing my summer cast made entirely of cotton socks which was why, as the big guy started to carry me I heard him say, “This guy must have some weird health problems.” I looked super fat but felt like a big blanket when he picked me up.

They deposited me outside, with a reprimand: “You’re out of here! You just vomited in the bar!”

“False,” I countered, “that was not vomit, sir! I’ve never vomited in a public house!” (When drunk I have a tendency to talk like a bad Shakespearean actor, in a doomed effort to sound more sober.)

“What?” They weren’t buying it.

“That was a candle!” I explained. “I mistook a candle for my draft! I was spitting not vomit, sir, but wax! Hot wax! Wax hotter than Icarus’s melted wings, sirs!”

They found it so funny that a guy as visibly injured as I was, with a torso that felt like an alpaca’s coat, demanded to be allowed back into the bar because he drank a candle (as though that’s the level of sobriety you want in your establishment) that they allowed it. Again, New York is the nicest city in the world.

We were kicked out five minutes later when I mistook a stranger’s red wine for my beer and tried to finish it.
 

The next day we woke up to find it even hotter.
 

Nonetheless, we decided that before leaving the city, we would walk (for what seemed like three miles) to a make-shift memorial for John F. Kennedy, Jr. He had died a few days earlier in a plane crash, and my friends wanted to pay their respects.

We brought flowers, laid them down, and one of my friends opined:

“It really shows you how short life is; how it can be taken at any moment.”

One by one the group agreed, something along the lines of, “Yep; you said it.” When it was my turn, I merely exhaled wearily—I was so hot from walking on crutches in the heat while wearing a vest made of cotton footwear—and said, “Honestly, I think I’ve learned that lesson.” I did a sign of the cross and headed into the nearest bar while the rest of them said longer goodbyes.

Inside the bar I ordered “your coldest drink.” The bartender made me a chilled vodka martini and handed it to me. I started laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, “something wrong with the drink?”

“No, not at all, buddy” I explained, “it’s just that yesterday I drank the most opposite version of this drink you can think of.”