Gps Read online

  Jeff was at a point where he begged for distraction. Tonight, he prayed that Ascondo — allegedly developing quickly as a hard-hitting, fast-moving switch-hitter — would show him something that would get him out of there early, and maybe into something more dangerous and fun, but more likely into his hotel room drunk and alone. Again.

  At the moment, Ascondo was showing him little more than a fan of sunflower seed shells streaming from the Dominican’s lips as he stood otherwise motionless in the outfield, a few thin clouds of the moths of summer performing their nightly ballet in the buzzing lights above him.

  Usually in Jeff’s experience, early season minor league crowds buzzed much less than the lights as they spent the night in and out of conversation about life and the game, giving each an equal share all night long. The minor leagues sometimes worked in reverse from the big leagues. At the beginning of the season, there was still school, taxes and other bullshit for most people to worry about. It really took the boredom of summer sometimes to make the games interesting to fans.

  To Jeff, baseball was now uninteresting from early April to late August. Only in the offseason did the game seem remotely appealing to him. This was no typical early-season crowd, unfortunately. Tonight was some kids night at the park, which meant Jeff got bumped back from his usual stoop 10 rows behind home plate — he spent his working life either there or in the 10th row down the first base side — and forced him to listen to more shrieks than a cave full of bats every time someone hit the ball.

  The kiddies were out in force, ingesting sugar in seemingly lethal doses as moms doled out cash from purses like bookies. Needless to say, they were talking up a storm, reminding Jeff of how much kid-talking always got done on the airplanes on which he was trying to sleep over the years.

  And then Riley’s voice was back again, his former voice of reason and now just his former wife. He could only bring himself to dial her number when he’d stared down a couple rounds of Bushmills these days. But even those bad decisions and awkward conversations had become less and less frequent with the maturation of Jeff’s relationship with Irish whiskey.

  His estranged wife’s voice had never ceased to be the one inside Jeff’s head, until a new female voice began to dominate his thoughts that spring and summer. It was Riley that had been saying from their earliest days together that Jeff’s cynical view of people was dangerously close to too much, and that he needed to beef up his tolerance to pretty much everything. God, that had been forever ago.

  And now, of course, he thought about that goddamn GPS, still sitting on top of the beer fridge in the garage at home, still in the box. He’d wanted to bring it to Georgia to help christen his official foray into car-only travel this baseball season, but had sped out of New Orleans way later than he’d hoped that morning after drinking way more than he’d hoped the night before. He had left the expensive — and ill-intended somehow, maybe? Maybe — gift from his almost-ex-wife right there in the garage.

  Ascondo, he noticed casually, was standing on the top step of the Sand Gnats dugout now, waiting to scoot out to the on-deck circle and, Jeff hoped, do something that’s easy to scout, like hit a first-pitch home run. Not likely.

  The GPS had come into Jeff’s life at a time when he’d started to scrutinize everything attached to Riley, and for that reason it didn’t shock him that it ended up being the last gift exchanged between the two before the split. It was so fitting, Jeff had found he rather liked the GPS now, or at least the idea of it, and had come to be almost giddy about using the thing, even if only to spite her in some ridiculous, Jeff sort of way.

  For about 10 minutes last Christmas, he believed that thing he’d unwrapped, which had arrived with a tipsy Riley at about 3 that morning, was a symbol of some new, happier life for both of them. Not long after, he’d found the sarcasm he just knew was programmed somewhere into that magical direction-finding thing. Riley, putting her LSU education to work, had decided this piece of gadgetry was some sort of solution to Jeff’s hatred for plane travel and his constant, unrelenting stress.

  He’d been scouting baseball talent in some manner and for various teams for 15 years — after his own playing career fizzled in a blink his sophomore year at UConn — and he had hated airports and the people inside them for almost just as long. The GPS, he imagined Riley thinking gleefully to herself, would rejuvenate his career, a big reset button he could plug into his cigarette lighter. Always the perfect little solution to Jeff’s nonstop problems.

  The GPS symbolized the new leaf she was turning over for him. It was so simple to her. Those two-hour flights from Houston to Phoenix? Why not turn them into 16-hour drives instead? It was comical then, and as Ascondo waved pathetically at a high-arcing slider for strike three, it seemed more so now. He almost shrieked in delightful impersonation of the fictional airport lady he’d dreamed up.

  Jeff shuffled up the stadium steps and through the sparsely-populated concourse toward the exit gate — it was only the bottom of the fourth inning, but it was clear Ascondo was pure shit and couldn’t hit a breaking ball if he ran one over with his car — and he wore a smile that was becoming more and more common for him, the kind worn by death row inmates who have long since realized every minute leading up to the last one will be a lot easier than the last one.

  So find some way to enjoy them.

  - 2 -

  “In four, hundred, feet, turn right … In three, hundred, feet, turn right … Arriving at destination, on left.”

  Jeff was still smiling two days later as he drove through the crowded streets of the French Quarter, where he almost never went anymore unless his brother or one of his few remaining friends made it to town on a weekend he was actually in town.

  He loved the city, had called it home for six years now and did so in a defining love-it-or-leave-it time for New Orleans. Far from a native, Jeff always felt when Katrina came blowing through in 2005 that, in some way, he became almost as important a resident as the ones he always listened to — either playing improv jazz or just drunkenly gabbing — in the Frenchmen Street bars he loved.

  The storm forced every survivor that still had a front door to walk into to either find some way to stick it out or to cut and run forever. Jeff was one of those lucky ones whose life hadn’t been ripped in half by the storm, and he vowed to stick it out even if it meant three different addresses in the same part of town in less than three years, and it did.

  Sticking it out also meant, as it turned out, scouting for the Houston Astros those first three seasons, then catching on with the fledgling Washington Nationals, with whom he spent two difficult years as a minor league advisor and regional scout right after the hurricane. Last season, he’d pulled off the trick a third time by catching on with the New York Mets, and all of it was made possible by his stubborn allegiance to the city of New Orleans and his connections to its Triple-A club, the Zephyrs, which had affiliations with those three clubs during those years. If what he’d heard at spring training was true, he’d face the challenge again next season when the Zephyrs were apparently set to align with the Florida Marlins. Yuk.

  As was the case for millions of others along the Gulf Coast, the autumn of 2005 became a major milepost in Jeff’s life. Not because of any physical devastation, however, but because everything around him was changing and he wasn’t, at least not for the better. Instead of the annual January Dominican trip he’d twice dragged Riley on — kicking and screaming on the first one and then talking vacation home possibilities after the second — Jeff and his wife spent all but one of the post-Katrina months doing anything and everything they could to volunteer in the hardest-hit parts of their town. They lived mostly off her award-winning columns in the Times-Picayune.

  Strangely, in the days before the storm made landfall the paper had granted her a month off on the simple promise she would be back in early October to spend the next year, or longer, trying to explain to the rest of the world what was happening. Perhaps the Pic was already sensing most of the substance of her work thereafter would be extracted from the desolate streets in which she and Jeff ended up toiling almost every day until spring. And for those months it was, at least the months after the couple’s September escape from their devastated hometown.

  Strange, Jeff always thought, that a Times-Picayune journalist would be leaving New Orleans in the days before Katrina with no plans to return for a month, but who was he to judge? He was going with her, as the Zephyrs had evacuated to Oklahoma City on Aug. 26, three days before the storm made landfall. When they got back, Jeff and Riley also managed to make time to move from their pre-marriage apartment into a house. Another odd Katrina irony, Jeff now thought.

  As the storm approached, Riley’s parents had hatched their own cut-and-run plan, offering to their daughter the house on Carondelet Street they’d moved into after getting married in 1972, with an understanding they didn’t care to return except for visits to her. About the same time, Jeff and his wife got the hell out of Dodge too. They cashed in some of Jeff’s vault of frequent-flier miles and headed west to Arizona.

  Jeff’s tenet of, “I’m not flying anywhere I’m not being paid to go,” of course, had to finally give way. That had been Jeff’s line for years, and his distaste for flying eventually led to this whole driving-everywhere idea that Riley had sprung on him. The couple’s pre-Katrina flight to Phoenix — where Riley spent the month evaluating her life and crying over what she called her lost hometown and Jeff spent the month evaluating the many different flavors and intensities of whiskey — was the first and only pleasure flight the couple ever made other than the two Dominican trips, and it fell well short of its billing.

  In the months after their return, it was double-duty — hauling, dragging, sorting and sweating, and late-night writing
for Riley. Both of them burned the candle at both ends right into Jeff’s next baseball season. But the couple rejoiced in the fact it had managed to live all but that first month of its post-hurricane life in the Carondelet Street house, the one which Riley’s parents fled when they “finally got out of that poor, heartbroken old town.”

  “In two, hundred, feet, turn right.”

  Jeff was amazed when the GPS woman had methodically chirped out exact directions to that familiar Carondelet Street address. He steered street by street from his crappy new, yet very old, place on Esplanade Avenue on the northeast end of the Quarter to the place where he’d spent the last two and a half years of his life and his marriage — mostly happy, he thought.

  His old address was one he thought he’d earned for the long term, one that would be tied to him for a long time. While it might have been mostly Riley’s paycheck that had allowed them to make the choices they made while they lived there together — including him switching teams like an aging free agent — Jeff felt he’d paid his dues when he was covered in mud and sweat that post-Katrina winter. It was a time when he often had to leave that scene of despair and fly to Florida during spring training, sometimes doing both jobs on the same day.

  Anyway, it was the address that immediately came to him as he started tinkering with the GPS that morning. At first, he just sat on the couch and stared at it with skeptical interest from across the room. But soon, he had pushed his coffee mug aside and was fumbling it around in his hands and frowning at it like a Rubik’s Cube before finally figuring out how to snap the windshield mount into place and connect the power cable to its source.

  Jeff had come stumbling into his apartment in the middle of the night after hauling some serious ass from Georgia. He’d skipped the middle innings in Savannah, and the late innings, and the hotel room and just spent the night driving back. Why?

  “Well, to stew over my life here at home, of course,” he had said aloud to the empty room, still smiling. “To type my ex-wife’s address — my former address — into a GPS and take a spin by the old house.”

  Retrieving the GPS off the fridge in the garage was one of the first things Jeff had done when he arrived home barely awake enough to steer the car up to the curb. A hundred miles earlier, he’d had a mind to stop at the store to buy a bottle for when he got back into town. He went straight home to bed instead, but not before flicking on the garage light to see, in the hulking shadows of his mostly-unused-at-the-moment furniture, that little box on top of the fridge with the words “WARREN SAT-NAV SYSTEMS” written on the side.

  Even that level of technology had made Jeff want to sleep first, preferring to see the magic of satellite-guided travel in the morning. So he had descended the garage steps and fetched the box and, after a quick peek inside, had left it on the table which, along with the couch had made it out of what was now Riley’s house and into general use in his apartment. Then he’d made the short trip down the hall to his bed.

  There, his cat, Lefty — which he always wished was named after Lefty Grove or even Steve Carlton but in fact had been named by a forgettable former girlfriend for the cat’s propensity to lead every action since kittenhood with his caramel-colored left paw — watched in disinterested daze.

  Lefty had proven not long after his and Jeff’s arrival in New Orleans in the late winter of 2002 that he — like many other males new to the city of New Orleans — might not be able to handle what the streets had to offer on a nightly basis here, so the otherwise black cat spent his time dominating the apartment alone, with only the sounds of the city and a self-feeding, self-watering dish he likely often feared would run out to keep him company.

  “Arriving at destination, on left.”

  There was Riley’s clunky Jetta parked out front, her ‘Eracism’ bumper sticker fading almost as fast as the woman’s free time to devote to worthy causes, and to unworthy ones like Jeff. As he neared the house, Jeff gave the gas pedal an extra nudge and quickly pushed his own crappy Celica past the house, as always laden in Mrs. Peletier’s bougainvillea, bringing back enough memories to force Jeff to not even consider glancing over at it as he passed.

  “Off-route. Recalculating.”

  “No fucking kidding, off-route,” Jeff agreed to himself, as he fumbled to find the CANCEL button on the right side of the GPS, which he had wrestled into place at the center of his windshield that morning, thumbing up his driving view into a comical pattern of smudges.

  “Turn right, then, turn right, then, turn right and arrive at destination, on left.”

  Jeff began fighting with the buttons on the GPS to make the woman shut up, but ultimately he opted to yank the adaptor right out of the cigarette lighter. Riley’s little gift had served him well. He couldn’t wait to drive on streets he didn’t know as well as these, couldn’t wait to be forced to rely on that woman to find his way for him. Oh God, the irony in that, he thought, roaring back toward Esplanade without any consideration of how far away his next right or left was.

  Was that the elusive triple play of Riley-related funnies he’d thought of just today, the fact that she’d bought him something to help him find his way about two weeks before handing him his walking papers?

  That thought deserved a drink and perhaps a little more thought and a little additional drinking. It was Tuesday, he didn’t have to be in Albuquerque until Thursday night and this was just the way things were going for Jeff right now. He even remembered to yank the GPS off the windshield when he pulled up to his apartment, and he began loudly impersonating his new-found friend on his way in the door and up the steps.

  “Turn key, then, open door. Walk up, 20 stairs, then, turn left. Walk 20 paces, then, turn left. Unzip pants, then, take piss.

  “And when I leave for New Mexico, you’re going to do most of the driving for me,” he said minutes later as he set the GPS back on the table.

  Like he often did, Jeff sauntered east on foot about five hours later, away from the Quarter, after leaving Lefty to his own devices for the night. The other cat in his life, The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen, was his first and likely last stop for the evening, but that didn’t mean it was going to be a short night. It meant if the atmosphere was dead when he got there, he’d simply wait it out.

  - 3 -

  The thing about The Spotted Cat, and New Orleans in general, is that it really is the drinking man’s place. For one thing, if you wait your turn, you can almost always steal a seat at the bar, and usually the tourists aren’t likely to wait you out. Combine that with a typical balmy night and a wait staff that understands the needs of the drinker, and losing track of time really can become something of a pastime.

  Jeff added another layer of proof to that theory, doing the closest thing one can really do in New Orleans to close down a bar — he made sure he was the only one still there at 3:34 a.m. and called it a night. Much later that morning, Jeff and Lefty did their usual — a quick living room pow-wow during which he felt guilty for all the time he didn’t spend with his only real companion. But both of them were resigned to the fact Jeff just didn’t have the kind of life that gave him all of his nights at home, cooking and entertaining and hanging around with his cat.

  That was evident in the decor of the Esplanade upstairs apartment, which looked onto a classic New Orleans courtyard, complete with a stone fountain and wrought-iron patio chairs. Like most of the things in Jeff’s life, the old courtyard was a good thing left waiting to happen.

  He often gazed down from the apartment window and imagined himself having drinks with some mysterious New Orleans female in a perfectly swept, lush green courtyard, his cat of some 10 odd years curled up in its own chair. One look out that window now suggested no life whatsoever down there, just a square of windswept debris that in all likelihood still contained relics of Katrina’s wind and water onslaught.

  Jeff knew, as he looked down at Lefty rolling back and forth in front of him, that it was pointless to try to explain to an animal the whys and hows of anything, especially to a cat. They have a way of calling your bullshit, and to them it usually boils down to the same question: Are you staying or leaving? As usual, Jeff was leaving.