Archive for the ‘Evansville’ tag
The Tragedy of Donnie Baseball
This piece originally appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly, Fall 2008
MATTINGLY’S 23, DON MATTINGLY’S EPONYMOUS RESTAURANT in his hometown of Evansville, Indiana, is closed now. The legendary New York Yankees first baseman closed it in 1996, the summer after he retired, officially citing escalating expenses and increased competition from chain restaurants. “People were not coming in anymore,” a spokeswoman told The New York Times. It was a sports bar and grill filled with memorabilia, naturally, though mostly from athletes Mattingly himself idolized, not from his own career. A full-size basketball hoop and free throw lane stood near the bar, flanked by a locker holding a Larry Bird uniform. Oversized pictures adorned the walls, monuments to his hitting idols Rod Carew and Ted Williams, plus Yankee greats who go by last name only: Ruth, Gehrig, and DiMaggio. The restaurant’s most popular tables sat inside a boxing ring, and nearby a scoreboard displayed baseball and college basketball standings. The restaurant was located next to a movie theater just off Morgan Avenue on Evansville’s burgeoning east side, so it’s likely that it did suffer from the dozens of Chili’s, Applebee’s, and TGI Friday’s clones popping up along Morgan and the intersecting Green River Road, which formed the main retail drag for the old river town, the third largest city in the state. But it’s depressing to think that Evansville’s residents could so easily abandon their hometown hero, who, at the height of his career in the mid-1980’s, was the most dominant hitter in the game.
Express Motivation
There is a point when you’re cleaning out the drainage grate of an auto shop, on your hands and knees and up to your elbows in filth, when you realize that at 19 years old you ought to think carefully about your future. I worked on the cleanup crew for Expressway Dodge in Evansville, Indiana the summer after my freshman year at Indiana University. The drain was clogged after I attempted to clean a garbage can from the auto bay where we sprayed undercoat onto the bellies of new Dodge Rams, Intrepids, and Neons to protect them from rock chips and muffle road noise. This particular garbage can was used for empty containers of undercoat. Our spray nozzle didn’t completely finish a container before it tapped out, so the remaining few ounces of thick tar was tossed along with it, safety cap never reattached. Over the course of the summer, this residual goo trickled down into a three-inch thick layer on the bottom of the garbage can that, when I sprayed it with cold water trying to rinse it out, hardened into the consistency of licorice Twizzlers. The nightcrawler-sized chunks of tar that I managed to dislodge from the bottom of the can washed down the drain running the center of the shop and packed the foundation for an impromptu wading pool of ashy water and petroleum-based fluids that greeted me when I returned from lunch. The passel of mechanics gathered around the mess had a high time watching me reach through the swirling rainbows and soggy paper towels to fish out the blockage. The tide subsided eventually, and I squatted on the sidewalk behind the shop and wrung out my socks.