(Scrolling back to 1949 in this memoir will provide baseball junkies with the very essence of the game and the father/son relationship to it)

                                                  DRINKING AND GAMBLING

1968, South Lake Tahoe

     I was working the 3 till 11 evening shift at Harrah’s Club as a barboy hoping to gain enough experience to become a bartender, so I could gain the inside track on getting laid, as I’d been on a drought since getting out of the army and was currently having no success during the very height of the sexual revolution in California of all places.

     I had tried wooing Cindy, a pretty and prim recent college graduate from Portland who was going to be a high school English teacher after her summer of being a Keno runner and partying with her college room mate. I worked the busy Keno bar and after work we sat with our free drink tickets (I bought all our drinks) and had literary discussions and she was impressed I’d written a novel which I’d sent to a publishing house in New York. We drove around the lake one night and when I tried to kiss her she pulled away and said, “Can’t we just be friends?” When I drove her back to her apartment, where parties were going on all around us, I tried again and she said, “I really want to be your friend, but I’m not that kind of girl?”

     “What kind of girl is that, Cindy?”

     “The kind who sleeps around.”

     “All I wanted was a kiss, Cindy.”

     “Well…I have to know you better.”

     “We’ve been sitting drinking together every night for two weeks. How much more do you want to know me?”

     “Oh Dell, I don’t know…” She issued me a quick kiss on the cheek and disappeared.

     The following night she alit beside me at the Keno bar at 11:15. This time I did not light her cigarette or buy her a drink and she asked what was wrong and I told her I needed something more than a peck on the cheek, that I wanted a girl friend for more than just yakking, and she asked what that “more” was, and I told her I needed the warmth of a woman’s body and the affection and passion of her heart and soul; in short, I wanted to get laid. She told me she was not ready for that and just wanted to be my friend and I found myself accusing the poor thing of being a tease and sat and got drunk quick and she cried and left and I hit on another girl who wouldn’t talk to me and finally gravitated to the blackjack tables where I was plied with free drinks until dawn. I broke even.

      There was the cocktail waitress, the only one who wasn’t cold and cynical and older than me, Ginger, from Memphis, long-legged in fishnet hose, blond lacquered hair, too heavily made-up for as pretty and fine featured as she was, stacked, Monroe-like, evidently sleeping with a few bartenders. I bar b cued for her in the front yard of my little one-bedroom apartment connected to a triplex 8 miles from Harrah’s on the California side of the Y and highway 50. The steaks and potatoes came out perfect. Once inside, I got her drunk. I got to first base, second, when she shut me down, claiming, “Ah’m not that kind-a girl, honeybun.

     “That’s not what I heard.”

     “What y’all heard, Day-uhl?”

     “I heard you were giving it out.” I immediately hated myself.

     “Who said that awful thang ‘bout me?”

     “All the bartenders.”

     “Well, it’s a damn lie! Y’all take me home raht now!”

      I refused. Like a broken giraffe, sobbing, she set off toward her place 8 miles away on high heels. My landlord, a notorious ski professional and playboy, picked her up, took her home to his far end of the triplex, and walked her past me the following morning as I recovered from hangover.

     “How’s the latest redhot lover in Lake Tahoe today?” he grinned.

     I went inside, could not get my next novel going—The Woman Hater—and arrived at the conclusion I was repellant to women. At work, where I feared Ginger and Cindy had spread the word of my swinishness, I found myself striking out with all the girls recruited for summer jobs from colleges like Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa—cream of the crop—who were fucking the fraternity boys recruited from the same schools. I was odd man out. I sat in the employees cafeteria by myself watching baseball on the lone TV, saw guys I’d played with and against like Stephenson, Ollie Brown, my old pal Paul Schaal, Ed Sukla, Bob Bailey, half the guys from the Legion all Star team, and others, in the Big Show, and I felt like my life had finally come to nothing.

     At this point, it wasn’t getting any better. My parents, especially Dad, wanted to know how their kid was doing, but I purposely had no phone and refused to write. My only companion was the big 100 pound Alaskan husky belonging to a family across the street. He waited for me every night as I arrived in a drunken stupor and accompanied me on a walk to the lake, where I sat and considered what the fuck this was all about and how and where had I gone wrong and why, after at least a 4 year hiatus, I was starting to punch myself in the face again.

     (Next Sunday installment: Drinking and Gambling II)