Nobody Bats a Thousand (12 page)

“I’ll say.
Now
I really hope I’m not blacked out. This is good shit. I want to remember this.”

Just then, a tall guy with long hair, a beard and a leather vest walked up and stood next to Mary Jean. “Can I buy you a beer?”

“I can buy my own beer, thanks.”

“Just trying to be polite.”

“Sure you were. Just like right now you’re politely staring at my t
its. Here, I’ll show you polite.” With a quick motion
Mary Jean tossed the beer from her glass into the guy’s face.

“Y
ou bitch!” T
he tall guy backhanded Mary Jean’s pitcher. The beer flew out all over the bartender still sitting on the stool behind the bar.

“You!”
Tom jumped up, brushing at his chest.  The tall bearded guy paused to think, then turned and raced out the front door.
Tom,
filled with energy and anger, jumped over the bar and was quickly out of the building in pursuit.

Mary Jean looked at her empty glass. She took a drag from one of her cigarettes as she considered walking behind the bar to fill her glass but quickly decided against it. “I think I should go,” she said out loud.

Mary Jean daintily brought herself off the barstool and navigated in a slight serpentine through the bar and out the back door. She grabbed Nadine by the shoulder and pulled her out of a communal smoking circle. “Come on, we’re leaving.”

Down the alley to the street, a few blocks south, a right turn just before Broadway, they preceded west with little conversation and even less awareness of anything around them. They turned a corner, saw Maggie’s house and, as they got to the driveway, a cop in a green uniform bent over inspecting MJ’s damaged fender.

“Oh shit.
” Mary Jean grabbed Nadine’s sleeve. “Come on, keep going.”

Nadine pulled away from MJ’s grasp. “Don’t worry, it’s just my brother.”

“How long has he been a cop?”

“Maybe six months.”
Nadine approached her sibling with MJ in tow.
“Hey, Danny.”

“Hey, sis.
Hey, Mary Jean, long
time
no see.”

“Must be, I didn’t know you were a cop.”

“Well, officially I’m state police, but I never go outside the institution.”

“Institution?”

“The prison, he’s a prison guard.”

“Correction officer,” Danny sternly corrected his sister.
“Fastes
t growing industry in the state.”
H
e smiled. “I keep telling sis she should apply. The pay’s good. A lot better than she can make cutting hair.” He glanced around the side of Mary Jean’s Rambler. “The thing is I can’t get to this headlight until tomorrow. I’m on my way to work right now, is that okay?”

“Sure, sure, no hurry,” said Mary Jean, placated by the paranoia brought on by the uniform.

“Man, aren’t hit and run accidents a bitch?  Whoever this guy was, he must have backed into you pretty hard.”

“She was driving.” Mary Jean pointed directly at Nadine.

“I thought the car was parked?”

“Yeah, it was parked, but…. I gotta go.” Leaving Nadine to deal with the degeneration of the deception, Mary Jean went up the stairs and into the small apartment. After sighting in her bed, she plopped down and within minutes was out, drawn into slumber land, just as the fog-masked sun outside her window was doing the same.

Sometime later, amid darkness and confusion, MJ awoke to take three aspirins and an Ativan to deal with both her current headache and the shakes she knew to be lurking right around the corner. In the dark, on her way to the kitchen for a glass of water to wash down the drugs, she ran headfirst into the bedroom wall. “We have to quit meeting like this,” she said directly to the sheet rock. Then, after three more shaky steps into the other room, she was startled by three loud knocks on the front door. Filled to the brim with guilt and paranoia over whatever might have happened during her recent bout of drunkenness, MJ stood silent as the knocking continued.

“Who is it?” she asked softly after finally deciding there was no way out.

“It’s me, Maggie. You girls aren’t sleeping are you?”

“No, no,” Mary Jean said as she opened the door. “At least I’m not.” She looked over at Nadine on the couch, just now opening her eyes, her being bathed in the light of the TV.

“Good, good, I hate to
wake anyone up.” S
he grinned. “
Oh, look at me lying again. Ac
tually I love to wake people up.
”
H
er eyes gleamed behind the thick glasses. “I just wanted to let you know I’ve got us a meeting set up with Bill Bennett tomorrow right after the protest at the Pyramid Theater.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got a ride to the theater
, but I thought maybe you could pick me up and we’d go from there.”

“Sure, that’d be okay. But let me get this straight about the guy we’re meeting. He’s a private detective with a degree from Berkeley?”

“Oh, he never finished up his degree. He purposely came up short, but that’s a long story.”

“And I hear his family got rich from owning a basketball team
that doesn’t exist
, and they don’t trust him with the inheritance.”

“Another long story.”

“And he owns a TV station?”

“He just bought that recently. Basically it’s some sort of tax write-off. I don’t know what it’s all about, but he did tell me I should watch it, that I might get a kick out of it.” Maggie stepped into the small living room. “I don’t watch a lot of television. I can only get the strong stations anyway since my antenna fell over years ago, and I’ve never bothered to fix it. I’ve never been able to pick up his station, but he told me it’s on
cable too. Would you mind?” Maggie looked down at Nadine. “It’s channel 63.”

Nadine picked up the controls and punched in the numbers. A still picture came on, thick black block letters on a white background:

YOU ARE STUPID

Maggie grinned and looked at Mary Jean. “That’s Bill all right.”

“I suppose I
should
meet this guy.”

Nadine unlocked her focus from the TV and looked at the other two in the room. “I don’t get it.”

MJ shook her head and turned to Maggie. “So what time should I come get you?”

“The protest starts at twelve, anytime after that. I was hoping you might want to join us. The more the merrier.”

Maggie bid goodnight to her two tenants, and MJ locked the door behind her.

“Doesn’t the picture ever change?” Nadine was still tuned into channel 63.

“Let me know if it doe
s. But don’t wake me
to tell me.
” MJ closed the bedroom door, got back into bed, closed her eyes, and waited for the aspirins to cure her pain and the Ativan to ease her misery.

The day of the protest to save the Pyramid the sun burned away the fog and made the sky clear, blue and bright for the first time in weeks. Mary Jean showed up about twelve-thirtyish, and parked in a coffee shop parking lot, which was directly across Wilson Avenue from the Pyramid Theater. The long overdue sun and beautiful sky made her feel so happy she could barely stand her bubbly self.  Standing near her car, her sunglasses reflecting and her body soaking in the rays, she studied the situation across the street.

There was a decent size crowd, but not much happening. The crowd was in the parking lot beside and behind the theater, separated from a huge crane and other heavy equipment by a fragile temporary cyclone fence. A few workmen in hardhats were just hanging around inside the fence, talking and looking around, a few smoking cigarettes, while the crowd on the other side was doing the same.

Maggie, her tall big body with tiny feet on one end and a salt and pepper bun on the other, wasn’t hard to spot. She was on the sidewalk near a pizza parlor, apart from the main crowd, pontificating to her own small band of followers. MJ crossed the three lanes of Wilson, checking for traffic on the one-way street.

“Hello, girl,” Maggie greeted.

“So what exactly is going on?”

“Well, not
the turnout I would have liked.” S
he looked around at the six or eight middle-aged people milling around her. “It’s not like the old days. I guess now mos
t people have day jobs and such.
” Maggie nodded in the direction of the crowd behind the theater. “At least Dennis got his college kids out here, though none of them seem too focused on the effort just yet.”

“The workmen aren’t tearing anything down. Are they just taking a smoke break?”

“Oh that, actually
we took care of that yesterday.
”
Maggie tapped a gentleman wearing overalls and a long gray ponytail on the back.  He turned and smiled, showing a large expanse of buckteeth. “This is Roger
Kater
. He makes beautiful pottery for a living, but he is still licensed to practice law. He filed an injunction for us. We’re trying to get the theater declared a national landmark.

“It stopped ‘em for a while,”
Kater
spoke, still grinning like he’d just won the lottery.

“So we can go?”

“Not just yet.
” Maggie looked down the street. From her position on the sidewalk she could she see both the front and back of the theater with just a slight turn of her head. “Actually we were hoping for a little press coverage. I saw some little jerk from the newspaper walking around but only one local TV news van
has showed up, and they don’t seem to be in too big of a hurry to get set up.”

Just then a noise, a chant, began from the farthest part of the crowd fifty yards away.  Finally it grew loud enough to become
discernible
:

       
                              
 
“Don’t get rid

                                         Of our
py
-
ra
-mid

                                          Don’t get rid

                                          Of our
py
-
ra
-mid…”

The crowd around the fence began to get involved, tightening, swaying and chanting, piece by piece, down the line like a slow wave coming to life, some kids nodding to or elbowing their colleagues, urging their involvement. The inspiration for the crowd’s awakening came into focus: Dr. Dennis Christian, slowly walking, panning the crowd with a large 16mm camera perched on his shoulder. He came to the end of the crowd, stopped filming, and the chanting died quicker than the end
ing
of a bad blind date
. The only action left was a shirtless kid with long black hair who had attached himself to the fence in a crucifix position with two pairs of toy handcuffs. MJ and Maggie watched the kid as he fought his cheap bindings, and mugged in pain in a performance worthy of the valedictorian of the William
Shatner
School of Overacting.

“At least he seems somewhat sincere,” Mary Jean said rather insincerely.

“Yeah, sincerely nuts.
”
Maggie looked down the sidewalk at a large van that had pulled up in front of the theater. “Oh goody,” she said as the back doors of the van swung open, and out came ten or twelve members of the Ashland SWAT team. The cops, looking like solders, holding their helmets, shields, and other pieces of riot gear, moved slowly and looked relaxed and pleasant, chatting among themselves like they were more concerned with the point spread of that night’s Lakers game than the prospect of any type of confrontation.

“It looks like some hysterical good citizen must have made a believable phone call downtown about the growing
potential for a full-scale riot.
” Maggie winked at Mary Jean. “Do me a favor would you,
dearie
?
Go talk to Dennis for just a bit.”

“Do I have to?”

“Please, just for a bit, keep him busy so he doesn’t do any filming for a while.”

MJ approached the full-tenured vagabond. He seemed very pleased to see her again.

“Pretty good turnout,” MJ initiated the small talk.

“Not bad, not bad. Had to offer extra credit to my students as a little motivation, still it’s rewarding to see our youth involved in a project of benefit to the community.”

“They only seem to get excited when you have the camera on them.”

“What can I say? These are the children of the television generation. They’ve been schooled, entertained, and babysat by the boob tube. It would seem almost unnatural for them to not get some type of intrinsic gratification from the power of the lens.”