The Yips Bar
The Yips Bar
By Rob Sobel
It was an early August game against the St. Louis Cardinals at home, in slow-paced and otherwise stress-free San Diego, when three popups were hit to Brian “Brick” Bozeman in a matter of two innings, and all three of them fell to his side.
He started to walk. That’s what he did. He just walked, only stopping briefly to grab his wallet from his locker, moving past employees and personnel he had known for years down in the stadium’s tunnels, some he knew by name, head down, no eye contact, trotting purposefully out the players’ exit, past several luxury cars, including his own, making it all the way to the Tijuana River Valley before getting scared shitless.
He hitched a ride back to town from a long-haired loner in a hiccup-y Crown Vic that smelled of skunk and he got onto an airplane still in his uniform—minus his cleats, which they made him remove as possible weapons (he purchased sandals at the airport)—and landed in Phoenix by dawn.
Then he walked more, in devastating heat, following his legs and the vortexes of Sedona, ending up in a town just outside Nothing, Arizona, where he stumbled upon an old-timey pub properly called Next to Nothing.
He walked up towards this bar in the middle of a dusty plain, around nothing, and nowhere. This was what he needed; where he was headed. A place where the beers were brandless; the music quaint. It looked displaced out of New Orleans, a double-gallery house with accommodations upstairs above the bar, where shadows, he saw, moved to and fro.
He walked inside.
The barkeep, wiping a spot clean on the bartop, eyed Brick up as he entered, almost expectantly. A man with chiseled features and muddy-black eyes, bristly-bald head, and a perpetual grin, a guy who could play the villain in a million movies, but here, in Nothing, he was congenial to the atmosphere.
“And you must be Brian Bozeman,” he said in a deep broadcaster voice.
“Brick,” Bozeman said before realizing it was odd the guy knew his name at all. “Wait, how’d you—”
“Take a seat,” the barkeep said, and you wouldn’t dare question him.
__________
Brick took a seat at the bar and drank a glass of water and a pint of beer. Then the barkeep refilled him on both. After some time the woman next to him, in her seventies and doused in teal-based makeup, said hello to him in a smoker’s raspy voice and then whispered, even scratchier from the throat,
“I know who you are.”
“I bet you do,” Brick said somberly, nodding his head. “News reached here already?” looking around for TVs, though he couldn’t spot any.
“I’m Sammie Van Sustren,” she said, putting out a dainty hand. Brick shook it. “Why do they call you Brick?” flicking the end of her cigarette into an ashtray.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I was the same size as I am now. Muscles out to here. Same forearms, if you could believe it. Was always short though.”
“Ahhh,” she said. “The name traveled with you.”
“Right,” he said. “It was bestowed upon me at an early age.”
“But your fear has not traveled with you here, now, has it?”
“My fear?”
“Those silly popups,” she said, almost childishly. There was no other way of saying the word it seemed.
“Popups,” he said, and shivered.
“Those popups surely got the best of you, didn’t they?”
“Alright, you two,” the barkeep said, leaning over towards them. “Let’s keep things positive.”
“I’m here because I forgot how to act,” she said. “Been here ever since. Thirty-five years.”
“How’d you forget how to do that?” Brick said.
“It’s actually more complicated than catching a pop fly ball, if you ask me.”
“Alright,” the barkeep said. “Up,” sending a thumb into the air in front of Sammie Van Sustren’s smoke-clouded face.
She switched seats with a sweaty middle-aged man who looked vaguely familiar to Brick. He said his name and shook Brick’s hand.
“Was the world’s fourth-ranked chess player,” the man said. “Suddenly, out of the blue, couldn’t beat a fourth grader playing for the first time. My hands. See—they wouldn’t move the pieces. They’d just shake crazily above the board.”
“Steady to me,” Brick said, looking at his hands on the bartop. The man ignored this and began introducing the rest of the barroom to Brick.
“Over there,” he said. “Fighter pilot. Can’t even get the thing off the ground anymore.”
“Can’t get a balloon in the air,” the fighter pilot said from across the room.
“And her? Fashion model. Couldn’t pose, whatever this means. Lost the touch. The feel. Completely.”
“You’re very pretty,” Brick said to the fashion model.
“Real good it does me next to Nothing,” she said, sipping from a martini.
“Over there in the back, greatest piano man ever to walk this earth. Fingers tremble if he’s twenty feet from a piano now.”
“Thirty feet,” the piano man said, “lately.”
The man went on. A famous dog whisperer who could no longer whisper. A well-known real-estate mogul who could no longer schmooze. A psychic medium who could no longer communicate with the dead, nor lie about being able to when necessary.
“You’re still in uniform,” the chess player said, looking Brick up and down with a wide smile, like appraising some foreign object washed ashore. “But with sandals.”
Brick looked down at himself as though he had forgotten.
“Change of clothes, and a bed,” the barkeep said. “All yours upstairs,” dropping a key to the bartop. “Room 4E.”
“Sort of like error, second base,” Van Sustren shouted from the other side of the bar.
__________
“Who was the last one to leave?” Brick said the next day.
“It was in 1997,” the piano man said. “A guy like you left. Couldn’t hit the rim on a foul shot. Forget about getting it in the basket. He couldn’t hit the side of a barn with the ball if he was at a foul line. Any line. Draw a line in the sand the guy would start having seizures. Straight lines gave him the willies. Could barely get the ball above his head at the worst point of it. Got up and left here one day. Not a word to anyone. Was cured. It just hits you when it’s settled. Guy must’ve been seven feet tall.”
“’97 was a while back now.”
“When you’re Next to Nothing, what’s time?” the piano man said, sipping from his gin and tonic.
“I see your point.”
“Scratch that,” the piano man said. “Big shot heart surgeon was here. Now that’s a real Type A personality. Stammered in here hands going in all different directions, eyes all wild and a-goggle, shouting about never being able to do heart surgery ever again. Guy was out in less than a year. He was a real hoot to have around though.”
“Damn,” Brick said, taking a sip from his beer. “You think you’ll ever get out?”
“Me?” the piano man said. “No. No, I don’t think so. At this point? I think I’m a lifer, Brick. By choice though. Remember that.”
“Don’t you ever miss it?”
“Every morning. Every night. I still play in my dreams though. I’m still good in my dreams.”
“That’s good at least,” Brick said. “I had nightmares of popups all last night.”
“I like to think it was just in the cards. Easier to sleep that way, anyhow. I should be thankful I got as many years as I did. Got in here at age forty-two. That’s a lot of years I had there tinkling the ivories. A lot of crowds. A lot of crowds of people I pleased.”
“I miss it already,” Brick said. “But I know I still got the yips.”
“Think about how you got here in the first place. That’s some mystical shit that went on back there across the plain of lived life, my friend. And something mystical is going to take you out of here. Going out’s the same as coming in.”
“You just know.”
“Nu-uh. You don’t know anything. There’s nothing. You don’t know or not know. You just walk. Your legs tell you. That’s how it works.”
“That’s how it was for the basketball player and the heart surgeon?”
“You bet your ass. Irish goodbye. Back to work.”
“You think they’d remember you if they saw you again?”
“Who? People? We’re not in limbo here, kid. You’re not in a coma. As much as it might seem like it. Of course they would. If my legs ever took me to them.”
Brick seemed contemplative, staring into his beer. Got to corral a man in when he stares into his drink, the piano man thought.
“I walked up to that doorframe many times,” the piano man said. “When I had first come in. Like you. First five years, must’ve stood at that door, I don’t know, countless times.”
“I got the heaviest whiff of it,” Brick said. “Last night. You know what I mean? The smell. It smelled like it did when I was a kid.”
“Whiff of what?”
“Baseball. Like the whole sport. All in one smell.”
“Oh, I know that feeling. But mine is a dungy barroom usually—not so unlike this place.”
“It’s more than the smell of the glove leather and your sweaty hand on a hot summer day. It’s more than that. It’s the whole game. The way it smelled when I first started to play. It’s hard to explain.”
“I know what you mean.”
“It’s uncontrollable. Woke up with this pain in my heart. This longing. Felt like I was dying.”
“The past is a burden. Yes sir it is.”
“It’s all I know how to do. And I didn’t even get my big contract yet. And it turned on me—just like that.”
“It wasn’t the game turned on you,” the piano man said. “It was that noggin you got. That clunky thing in between your shoulders.”
“I guess so. Just sucks.”
“Our brains are all coiled up, shit, they could be blamed for just about everything.”
“You’d think knowing that it was the brain’s fault would be enough to move on from it.”
“Yeah. Don’t work that way. Unfortunately.”
“Like we could just flip a switch.”
“No sir.”
“I’ve been here one night,” Brick said. “Already feels like a lifetime.”
“I don’t even want to say how long I’ve been here. I know how long it’s been, but I can’t much get myself to utter it out loud.”
A long pause hung in the barroom. Some silences here could last days. But then Brick said, “Will I get better?”
“How the hell should I know?” the piano man said. “I ain’t no doctor.”
__________
Three weeks and he never stood by the door. Three weeks and just that smell, just that longing. But—
“I stopped dreaming about the popup,” Brick said.
“That must be a start,” Sammie Van Sustren said.
“People always think it’s golfers. With the yips.”
“Oh honey try being on a Broadway stage with a lump in your throat.”
“Stage fright,” Brick said. “Is that the same as the yips?”
“Worse, honey.”
Brick laughed. Somehow he had established a bond with the former actress. The barkeep still kept a wary eye on the two of them.
“When was the first time?” Brick said.
“Long ago,” she said and coughed like it was all hard to stomach. “March the eighth. 1984. The Belasco Theatre. Opening night. I was replaced immediately.”
“Jeez,” he said and felt stupid for saying it.
“Tough business, show biz.”
“I could only imagine.”
“But if you can’t speak a line of dialogue while you’re up there, you can’t really blame anyone but yourself. Am I right?”
“I guess so,” he said.
“I haven’t stopped dreaming about it. My throat all closed up on a big, wide stage.”
“You think it’s a good sign? For me? To stop dreaming about the popup?”
“Could be. Everyone’s different. Old Bobby Albright forgot how to cook. His restaurant lost some accolade because of it. Two bad nights. ‘Bad’ might not be the word—nightmarish. That’s the word for all this.Completely forgot all the basics to cooking. Man was running a Michelin restaurant. In Paris.”
“That’s a bad place to forget how to cook.”
“He was up and gone from here after two days though. It all came back to him.”
“Really?”
The barkeep budded in, leaned over, swung a rag over his shoulder, said, “Even I couldn’t believe it. I might know who’s coming. But I don’t know when they’re leaving.”
Barkeep walked off. Brick thought about this, staring into his empty pint. He imagined a popup coming to him out of a hazy sky, a white pill lost in the sun, tracking it, following it, moving back to be able to come in on it, feeling confident and light of foot, smacking the mitt once, corralling it in. He could imagine that in the day but not at night.
__________
Just days later he stood up and went to the door.
He felt his heart quicken. His feet felt like lead. There in the doorframe, looking out. Vast space. Nothingness. Nothing at all. Sand and dust and sky and emptiness like a blank page. A lost highway in the middle distance. The wind picked up as he stood there, like some otherworldly force pushing him back inside.
Everyone kept quiet as he took up his spot back at the bar. But Sammie Van Sustren said,
“Maybe next time, Big Leaguer,” making the barkeep give her the evil eye.
Brick nodded and nearly shed a tear and didn’t use words but said enough. The barkeep brought him a fresh pint.
He dreamt the night before of catching one right out of the lights. Lost in the blinding milky glow, still somehow tracking it, his glove up—can of corn. He thought that might have been it. A sign.
He drank from his beer, took a big breath of that rawhide smell of baseball all around him. And then they all heard a car door slam shut.
The barkeep fastidiously got his rag ready and said,
“We got a live one,” moving to the only open spot at the bar.
Brick turned his neck to watch the door and in walked an unassuming man in jeans, black shoes, flannel button-up and suede jacket, horned-rimmed glasses clouding the features on his face, and a satchel bag looped over a shoulder. Maybe around forty. He pushed on his glasses to move them back on the rim of his nose and seemed to want to say something but couldn’t find the words.
“You must be Art Spooner,” the barkeep said.
The man seemed to contemplate his own name.
Finally, he said,
“I can’t write.”
Barkeep smiled grandly, wiped the bar clean, said,
“Take a seat.”
__________
“A writer?” said the piano man just moments later. “What we need in here is a psychiatrist.”
“Too bad they’d have the yips,” the fashion model said down the bar.
They all gazed deeply into their pints and rocks glasses at this hard truth, including the writer, who drank something of a deep purple hue like a potion. Brick Bozeman rested his head beside his tall yellow beer and fell almost instantaneously asleep.
He slept ceaselessly for days. Odder things had occurred—odder things had brought them all to these exact coordinates—and so they let him sleep beside his pint. Dreamless and ceaseless. As full and brimful as his beer, but dreamless, waking softly occasionally for a sip or a quick bar pretzel, only solidly waking up at the sound of dense laughter in a kind of underwater distance.
He emerged out of it like coming to the end of a dewy, morning fog, the bar reading hazy and blurry at first and the sounds all around him tinny in his ears, except for the laughter, which was thick and reverberant, echoing more so off the walls inside his head than in the room—carefree and ceaseless as his sleep.
No one watched him as he lifted his head off the bartop, though he felt like it was a turbulent thing, waking up. Head upright, he saw the room clearly. He saw the writer, in a robe now, with what looked like a mimosa by his jittering hand, trying to jot down perhaps a string of two or three semi-coherent sentences. The piano man inside his own head, thoughts thick and musty in front of his face. The fashion model, the actress, the chess whiz, the psychic, all of them along the bar silent and inward and stricken and baffled by their own undoing.
But the laughter remained. Somewhere. In some kind of nearer reality now.
Brick turned to face the door. What looked like noon light shot through the cracks in the doorframe, setting its outline aglow. He walked to it, toward the laughter, and didn’t turn to see who was watching him. He opened the door the second he got to it, the world at high noon blinding him instantly in a fit of laughter and clangorous metal thuds and the general sounds of excavation, murmurs, errant shouts.
Through his fingers held to his face, he let the world reveal itself in time. Let his eyes readjust to the sunlight. Across the dusty plain, the wind whipping at him again, making his eyes go wet, his vision blurry. In the distance, he saw the color orange, bodies moving in the gnashing light. A highway crew, perhaps. Or prisoners. At it diligently, finding enough reason to laugh at the day. A vision of his Little League team in their orange short-sleeves.
He walked towards them, fighting the wind, one foot and then the next, whoever they were, tackling whatever their assignment was for the day, he was heading toward them blind now, losing sight of them in the wind and the sun, but still hearing their laughter.
Rob Sobel’s fiction has appeared in Lunch Ticket, New York Tyrant, The Magnolia Review, and other publications, and he was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a degree in English from James Madison University, where he won a Departmental Award for Creative Writing. As an All-League shortstop in high school, he had some trouble, briefly, with infield pop-ups. He lives in northern New Jersey.
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