The Bat Out of Hell

I rather enjoyed reminiscing about past experiences, so I'm going to do it again! This particular experience occurred when I was a freshman in high school and I was at tryouts for the baseball team. For some reason I was practicing with the JV team, probably because I could field somewhat well. My fielding was one of my best areas in the game, if not my strongest. I think that I owe this to a drill which I thought of more as just having fun! My dad would stand at the edge of our driveway facing the garage. I would position myself in front of the garage armed only with my glove. My dad would then toss up tennis balls and hit them with a tennis racket toward the opening of the garage and I would field them! It was so much fun and probably the reason I could field somewhat smoothly.

I did a little bit of this, too

The weather around here sucks ass so we were having batting practice in our shitty gym where the batting cage was set up. We had a designated on deck circle where the person who was up next could get some practice swings in. I had just finished batting and I had gone back to my bag to put my bat away and take off my batting gloves. I would also like to add that my bag was nowhere near the designated on deck circle, who would have guessed. I had just finished putting my batting gloves in my bag when I stood up and turned around. What did I see when I turned around, not much but a blur and something hitting me in the face hard. I just stood there and touched the top of my right eye with my hand. When I looked at my hand it was covered in blood and I saw blood dripping to the floor. My teammates rushed me to the locker room where they did their best to clean me up and my mom was called to take me to the hospital. I'm sure the janitor loved me because now he had to clean up the long trail of blood!

This guy got off way too easy

Apparently I had been struck in the face with the bat wielded by my teammate who was on deck. I'm still certain that I was not in the on deck area, but who cares now, that was about six or seven years ago now. This was not just an ordinary bat either, it had a weight taped onto it, a practice bat. So I took a weighted bat to the face, more specifically, to my right eyebrow. My mom came to pick me up and brought me to the local hospital's emergency room. I still remember telling the emergency room people why I was there. The women on at that time looked at me horrified and asked me if I had been in a gang fight. Absolutely classic! Yeah, I got in a gang fight then got my mom to drive me to the hospital and calmly strolled into the emergency room, no big deal. I just hope for everyone's sake that the people who did this to me don't find us here, then shit's going down!

I had to wait forever in that emergency room. I remember seeing people walk out with the most miniscule issues, too. There was this one guy who came out with a band-aid on his thumb. Then there were those other people there complaining about the common cold, in the emergency room. I ended up getting three or four stitches and now there is a thin line on my eyebrow where hair no longer grows. I still remember going to school the next day, too. I had this patch over my eye and a couple of times I heard people say "hey, that must be the kid who got hit in the face with the bat."

Telling stories from my past is fun! Stay tuned for more coming soon! At least I hope coming soon.

I Said What?

Chase's comment on my most recent article brought up a very good memory from high school that I would like to share because it is marginally funny and entertaining. If anything, it might make you think about laughing or something. Anyways, it happened our final glorious year of high school. Chase and I, along with another of our friends, were blessed with the great fortune of placement in the same gym/study period. This was awesome because I didn't have to hang out with all the weirdos I didn't know, and it was the last period of the day so I could leave school early on the days we went to study!

Let me first provide a description of the gym class. Chase and I were without a doubt the minorities in a class filled with Puerto Ricans and probably some other ethnic groups. I'm too ignorant to know all the ethnic groups by which I was surrounded. Our other friend that I mentioned was in the class with us is Puerto Rican, but he's very different from his brethren. I'll refer to the other people in the gym class as the majority in this particular post. So, the majorities were the classic high school students who thought they were great at every sport, regardless if we were playing basketball, football, softball, it didn't matter, they thought they were great at it. No matter how many bricks they put up, how many passes they dropped, or how slow they actually moved, in their heads they were superstars. That must be why most of them didn't play any sports even at the high school level. My apologies, some of the majority might have been on the 3,209 person football roster.

Gym class itself was, and I have no doubt in my mind that it still is, a complete joke. Really all that the "physical education" teachers did was take attendance and then give us a ball. "Here's a basketball. Now try to get it in that hoop." I just remembered the stupid fitness test thing we had to pass each year, what a load of garbage. On this one particular day we were "playing" softball. I didn't give a shit about anything going on in gym class, so Chase, our majority friend, and I were just standing in the outfield chatting. Somehow we got on the subject of girlfriends. The conversation was flowing along smoothly, nothing out of the ordinary, until the utterance of the question. The question was served up by our majority friend. The question: "How about you, Toninho (I get to refer to myself in the third-person with my blog name!), have you ever had a girlfriend?" Before I get to the answer to this question, I must first give background information on my friendship with Chase and our majority friend.

I will start with our majority friend. I had first met him in fifth grade, I believe. So we certainly knew each other, but we hadn't hung out or anything at this point. We were on good terms and were beginning to develop a good friendship. I'll just say that we didn't know very much about one another in particular. As for Chase, I had just met him about halfway through the previous school year. I don't know why it took so long for our paths to cross, but we met in a totally awesome English class! We had hung out once outside of school for the first time at the very end of junior year and were in the process of mixing our groups of friends together. However, we still didn't know each other too well. So all three of us were friends, but not extremely close friends that know all the mannerisms and tendencies of each other, at least not at that point. Make a sense? That might be somewhat funny if you get it. If not, then you can blame China. This information is important when thinking about how my response to the question weighed between my companions.

The utterance of the question brought with it silence among the three of us. My simple, concise, straight to the point reply verbatim: "Nah, I'm pretty gay." Silence. More silence. And a little more silence. Then I laughed, bringing delight to our little pow-wow. This historic moment remains a focal point in the development of our friendship. I hope you enjoyed the story, and if you didn't, you can suck my big, fat, hairy left toe!