|
ARCHIVES
|
League Night Posting Date: Mar 2 2008 11:58AM The cavemen gather, huddling close, as if against the weather. The circle they make around the food is tight. Their hands grab at the dripping, fatty limbs of the dead beasts piled before them. Each wing, each leg of charred flesh disappears into a mouth and comes out just bones, stripped clean of the proteins that are so critical to their diet and the flavours that make the day somehow more worthwhile. The primitives grunt back and forth as they chew, pointing and gesturing as a substitute for the rigors of a language made of words and grammar. Finally, a hairy wrist pulls across grease-coated lips.
“Dude, pass me a wet nap.”
“A what?”
“Pass me the wet nap before I wipe my hands on your Yankees cap.”
“Don’t touch my Yankees cap.”
“Then pass me a wet nap.”
“Don’t touch my Yankees cap.”
“Just pass me the freakin’ wet nap, Yogi Berra.”
The jugs of beer come like sacrifices, with stacks chicken wings partnered with suicide sauce on the side and tiny tubs of blue cheese dressing made without actual cheese. There’s a plate of carrots and celery that always vanishes inexplicably and a big pizza on a beat-down aluminum stand that has to go back to the kitchen if there’s a second large pie on the way. There’s a hockey game on the outdated big screen television that’s washed out by the lights over the bar – always hockey, maybe football, but any sport will do in a pinch, especially women’s tennis.
The boys are eating back the calories they lost to a couple hours of creaking activity. It’s league night. Industrial league night. It’s Thursday night. Volleyball night. It’s Tuesday night and hockey. It’s Wednesday and basketball, Monday and slo-pitch. The sport is irrelevant. Any excuse to wear matching shirts and ankle braces. Any reason to yell out loud and pretend the competition means something more than bragging rights, when there’s nothing more important than that – ever.
It’s a group of men with wives and kids and vasectomies, a team of Joes with girlfriends, snowboards and dads who worked for the company. It’s men with Corvettes from the wrong decade, minivans with DVD players and fancy import cars made unfancy by roof racks and baby seats. It’s men with bald spots and groin pulls, back pain and morning commutes.
It’s men who go to the bar with the cheapest draft beer, not to save the money, but because those are the bars with the deals for teams and what’s the point of being a team if there isn’t a deal to be had, some reward for the camaraderie, some recognition from the economy that this relationship is special? Plus, those bars are the ones with the smallest turtle necks on the biggest-breasted waitresses.
Every man around the table believes that his skills – in both athletics and waitress-charming – have deteriorated the least since high school, since college, since we started playing together, since the start of the season, since seven o’clock this evening. There are compliments given to get compliments back, like pudgy women shopping together for dresses. There are theories about the Maple Leafs, about Seinfeld, about the virtues of satellite television versus cable, of X-Box versus PlayStation, of Ginger versus Mary Anne, of pepperoni versus sausage.
There are stories told, and told again, usually to the people who were there when the events actually happened. The tales are mostly true, or at least based on a true story, and involve sports, home electronics, renovations, cars, travel or brushes with famous people. The best stories, the ones that get everyone’s attention, that never tire of being told and retold, involve digestion – good digestion, bad digestion, indigestion and redigestion. Everything else is simply uninteresting. There is no talk of feelings, families, hopes, dreams or failures. No one finds out when the wedding is, when the baby was born, how the girls are doing in school, why the mother went into the hospital or how the in-laws are reacting to the big news. These are subjects for women, and they are not here.
And that, of course, makes league night the best night of the week by far …
For the women. |
