Play ball!

It was opening day at Fenway Park today, and over 2 hours after the game has ended "The Greatest Fans in the World" are still staggering around my neighborhood in a cloud of alcohol.

I have never been a fan of baseball, but after putting up with these yutzes for 14 years I have grown to loathe baseball in general and the Red Sox in particular. It is duller than watching paint dry, but I think drying paint would probably present too great an intellectual challenge to the average Sox fan.

I am hard pressed to put my finger on what gets under my skin the most. Watching fat suburbanites dressed up in oversized baseball shirts carrying baseball gloves is pretty annoying. Having happy intoxicated fans scream "FAGGOT" out of the windows of yellow school buses is not up there with snow flakes and kittens either.

Perhaps most bothersome is the smug satisfaction that radiates off of them. Somehow, lining the pockets of a group of drug addicted, serial sex offenders qualifies as a worth while activity up there with curing cancer.

They have no reason to doubt their noble cause either. The media, the Red Sox organization and the pudgy little jerk in the mayors office will all tell you if you are in any doubt that they are "The Greatest Fans in the World!" and that the Red Sox are "The Greatest Team in the World". Never mind that it seems they have only won the World Series twice in the course of a century.

Among the privileges of this club are permission to vomit and urinate where ever you choose, pick fights with residents of the city, terrorize elderly people and smash in car windows, and on occasion overturn or set fire to cars with plates from the state the team is playing against. I don't even want to go into the whole New York thing.

You would think that these happy souls would be satisfied with this, but you would be wrong. Like most bullys, they have an Achilles heel. They are all terrified of the city. Put them within sight of the stadium and they are as bombastic as can be. Suggest they use public transit and the blench and quail. So they squeeze their bloated alcoholic bodies into their oversized SUV's and drive into town, snarling traffic for hours. This is where they go wrong. Many are willing to pay the obscene prices charged for parking, but there are always a few who are slow to learn and the little dears park in resident only spaces. That is when my little black and evil ganomish heart sings. Because there is a fleet of tow trucks in the pay of the city just waiting to tow these jerks cars.

Of an evening I like to occasionally sit on my front steps and watch the ballet that is the dance of the tow trucks. Once in a while, the baseball oafs will decide to be clever and park in the alleys. These are all paid parking spaces. An old pal Bunny had one such spot that he rented so friends would be able to park if they drove in to visit. On game nights he sat by the window with the phone. If some halfwit pulled in and staggered off in the direction of the stadium, he would call the tow company. Then if he was home when the game ended he would resume his station at his window for a little quiet entertainment when the one of the greatest fans in the world came back looking for his car and wondering if he had gotten so shit hammered he couldn't remember where he'd parked the family car.

It's going to be a long six months, but it is one of the prices that must be paid for living in a relatively cheap apartment. It is making me wonder once again about moving. Not just out of this neighborhood but out of this city and leaving it to the ball fans.