Out Like a Lamb

 

In all deference to my friends and family in the Oklahoma City area, I don’t much care for your municipality.  I’m sure this is due to the circumstances surrounding my visits as well as the destinations within the city. But alas, volleyball regionals beckoned, and the family descended upon the red dirt pancake for the weekend.  

The final dropkick to the solar plexus of the season came Wednesday morning.  After weeks of believing we would be starting Saturday afternoon at 3pm, we learned that we’d been moved to 9am.  No big deal except most of the team had canceled their Friday night hotel reservations when the original schedule had been published.  When my half-assed attempt to foster activism fizzled, most of us were left with an early morning drive down the turnpike.

OKRVA’s regional tournament is held on the Oklahoma State Fairgrounds–a nondescript expanse of concrete, miscellaneous buildings, and barns.  At the center, and our destination, was the Bennett Event Center, named for the NBA franchise thief himself. What is it about central Oklahoma and its love for larceny, anyway?  The event center is an enormous building capable of being converted into practically anything.  Sport Court and nets transformed it into a massive volleyball tournament this past weekend.  

One thing I like about the Bennett Center is the functioning cooling system.  An early spring heatwave pushed temperatures into the 90s over the weekend.  Add several thousand people and you’ve got the potential for a toasty arena.  Neither air conditioning nor heat is a given at our home facility.  At $15 per day, it’s the least they could do.

Fortunately, we missed the morning rush at the gate.  Still, admission was a palaver thanks to the gatekeepers–a pair of persnickety cottonheads that weren’t quite up to the challenge of working a low-turnout polling precinct.  When we arrived, admission wristbands were handed out for self-service.  Clearly, the help’s diminished fine motor skills would have pushed the line well into the parking lot if they had been attaching wristbands to attendees.   

The day did not start well.  The five-week gap between tournaments was obvious from the outset.  Flashes of brilliance were negated by painful whisky tango foxtrot sequences.  Our girls lost their first match.  Though play improved, they dropped the second match as well.

I went to the car after the second match to retrieve provisions.  Exiting the arena into the lobby, I passed a mawkish sexagenarian man in a tricked-out mobility scooter.  He was manning that particular exit.  His back was to me, but I could see him eating lunch from a Great Value nonsectional Styrofoam plate.  Nearing the completion of his meal, I could see various juices pooling around the rim of the nearly empty plate.  A clump of something resembling potato salad remained.

Returning the same way I’d departed; I noticed a plaque on the wall honoring the building’s namesake.  Evidently, he’d been instrumental in making the complex what it was.  Not as instrumental as decades of tax money, but instrumental, nonetheless.

The man on the scooter was still working on his glob of potato salad when I returned. He was a large man who, by the looks of his arms, had been noodling in sulfuric acid.   I flashed my wristband and tried to reenter the arena.  He addressed me in a mondegreen growl.  

            “Dis essit only!”

            “Excuse me?”

            “Got go o’er dare.”

            I arched my eyebrows in condescending comprehension.

            “Essit only,” he reiterated. 

            “Makes sense,” I said, rolling my eyes. 

At the designated entrance, the cottons were like two monkeys humping a football as they teamed up to scan a man’s E-ticket from his iPhone.  I displayed my wristband and entered without waiting for an acknowledgment.

With time to kill, my wife and I visited Smoothie Shack for a late-morning supplement.  The smoothies were good, but I had a surprise. Tucked in my backpack was a small bottle of Tito’s that, like Roy Wilkens’s red, black, and green liberation jumpsuit, I’d been saving for just the proper occasion.  

A couple of moms joined us, and I offered discrete splashes of vodka to enhance their drinks.  The four of us sat on the floor, backs to the wall, and drinking like a skid row of volleyball parents.

Our girls were 0 for 3 in the morning session.  Most of the team enjoyed a long lunch at a restaurant that was like a recreation center with a kitchen and bar.  It catered to obstreperous loitering which is what we did.  After lunch, we checked into our home in the 405, a tidy chain hotel near the freeway.  When we arrived, a transient swap meet of sorts was in progress, as the down-and-out rearranged the contents of their pilfered shopping carts in the penumbra of a serpentine line of saplings. 

After checking in, my wife and I were met at the elevators by a stout boy, approximately seven years old wearing arm floaties and cowboy boots.  He was headed to the pool with his parents wearily in tow.  My wife and daughter then went shopping with a few other players and their mothers. 

Enervated and grimy, I set the air conditioning to 64 and took a shower. When I check into a hotel anymore, I transform into a sybarite.   With the room cooling rapidly, I fell onto the bed and flipped on the television.  Over the next couple of hours with the aid of the in-room Showtime app, I was reminded how damned good Californication was in its first three seasons.

Somewhere between Batesy’s mangina and Sue Colini licking Runkle’s head, I discovered that I’d left my toiletries bag at home.  As usual, it was Walmart to the rescue.  It truly is one of the great things about ubiquity.  From my sixty-four-degree third-floor hotel room overlooking a busy OnCue gas station, I punched Walmart into my iPhone.  Within seconds, I discovered I was less than two miles from the nearest location.

A large Chevrolet pickup truck with a lime-green emblem cut me off to make the exit ramp, providing an apropos beginning to my excursion.  It only got worse.  

The Walmart SuperCenter near I-40 and Reno is the trashiest place I’ve seen in a long time.  Sketchier than a pothead’s memory, the visuals began in the parking lot.  This was the kind of store that had theft-protection devices on candy bars.

The store smelled like low-end reefer, with notes of body odor and fried food. The floor was sticky.  I collected my items and got into the self-check line.  Two young associates were serving as fat controllers and conversing loudly.  One extended a finger with a two-inch nail painted bright yellow, directing me to an open register.

            “Shee-it, girl,” said one.  “No. Way. Boo.”

The drive back to the hotel was brief but eventful.  A man with a fishing cart was at the side of the access road, wading in a large red dirt mud puddle.  From the freeway, it looked like a man basting himself in tomato roux. 

 

            *           *           *           *

Sunday morning had our team in the annex.  It was a step down from the main arena, but a step above the horse barn.  Our game was delayed.  There were no platform officials available, so we waited for another match to end.  Then I saw him.  Shaped like a capital D and lording over a match with lowbrow arrogance and testing the structural integrity of a CourtsGalore platform, it was none other than Fat Albert, the official I had words with at the tournament in March.  

            “No, no, no,” I said to my wife, pointing in his general direction.  “We’re getting him, I bet!”

            “Oh no,” she groaned.

He moved between courts as though his destination was the electric chair.  Before starting our game, he stopped in the hospitality room to gormandize the spread.  We waited.

Fifteen minutes later, my fear was confirmed when Fat Albert waddled toward the platform at the side of our court. Without Tito’s to add to a smoothie, I opted for punctilious.  And maintaining a low profile, moving from my baseline seat to a standing spot parallel to the platform and behind a structural beam. 

            “I’m sure his integrity is impeccable,” I said to the parents behind whom I was lurking.   “I just wouldn’t want my presence to have any influence.”  

Our girls started strong and were playing their best volleyball of the weekend when play was inexplicably halted.  As we wondered what was going on, Fat Albert pulled out a bag of potato chips, which he crushed, anteater style. After a momentum-killing twenty-minute delay, we learned that the girls working the scoring table had spilled soda on the score sheet.  A new one had to be located, then had to be recopied–by hand–from the soiled one.  

That proved to be the end of the season.  Fat Albert made a handful of curious calls, but it didn’t matter. We’d roared in back in December like a lion.  We exited in May like a lamb.  

For a late lunch, a few of us repaired to The Collective, which sounds like the brainchild of bearded, popped-collar trust fund entrepreneurs that refuse to peel the Feel the Bern bumper stickers from their Priuses. In essence, it’s a food court without a mall, designed for hipsters that claim an affinity for Indo-Chinese-Cajun fusion. This is not necessarily a criticism.  My wife and I hate deconstructed sushi with lo-so soy sauce–with chopsticks, pinkies out. 

We had almost finished eating when the building was overtaken by the young and aimless.  A group of loud young women with a champagne bottle took over the table across from ours and proceeded to get louder. Turgid, sausage-cased breasts adorned with script writing like permanent name tags squirmed to escape scoop tops.  One lady got up to retrieve her order as I was getting a soda refill.  Her trunk looked like a pair of Queen 2 pantyhose filled with cottage cheese, with her appendages pointing outward like an inverted triangle.

When the nightclub on the other side of the wall fired up for a matinee, we knew we’d overstayed our welcome. It had been a long weekend with a long drive ahead. 

And then, the peculiar emptiness that comes with the end of a season.