Vikki Goes To A Baseball Game
© 2007 by Michael Mort
[If you haven’t read my short story titled “A Dating Danger,” you definitely should read that one first (this story spoils too much about that one). “A Dating Danger” has been my most popular story posted on these pages. Many men have told me they want to see more of Vikki. So here she is again, in a new season of the year.]I hadn’t seen Vikki for several months after that weird date we had in the spring. I couldn’t get out of my mind the fact that she beat up those guys right in front of me, then was so nonchalant about it. That unnerved me. But every time I told my buddies, or even random guys I would meet, about Vikki, they all said I was crazy for not seeing her anymore. I started to think about it again, and yeah, I finally saw their point. A hot woman who can really take care of herself—and maybe even take care of me, if it came down to that. The more I rehashed the incident in my mind, the more I remembered the part about how gorgeous she was on our last date and the more I forgot about the damage she had caused my ego. I made up my mind: I had been a dummy and I should ask her out again.
It was August, that miserably hot and sticky month in Washington, DC when even the birds seem to want to flee. But of course, there is one redeeming factor now in DC: We have a major league baseball team. And I had season’s tickets.
So, after more than three months of not having seen Vikki, I steeled my nerves and called her.
“Hey, stranger,” she answered. Her voice was flat, no hint of joy. But at least she knew it was me, so I was still programmed into her cell phone.
“Hiya, gorgeous. Sorry I haven’t been available lately. It’s been, um…work! What a bitch of a time!” I hesitated. She didn’t reply so I continued. “But I keep thinking about how fun you are and I’ve been meaning to call you to go do something.” Another pause. Nothing from the other end. I started to sweat. “So, anyway, I was just wondering. The Nationals are playing the Yankees this weekend at RFK and I have really great seats. Would you, uh, like to go?” More silence. “You still there?” I asked sheepishly.
“Yeah. Just thinking.” She sounded totally noncommittal. I gulped. She continued. “You happened to stumble on a passion of mine. Baseball.” I smiled. “But,” she said, and I frowned, “what do you mean by ‘great seats’?”
“Ten rows up from the Nationals dugout?”
“Okay!” Suddenly she sounded chipper. “I’ll go!”
“Sunday? Pick you up at 11:30?” I said.
“Sure!” she answered.
“Oh. We’ll be in the sun part of the time,” I added hastily.
“No prob! See you then!”
I hung up and wiped my sweaty palms on my pants.
I knocked on Vikki’s door and she yanked it open with a “Tah-dah!” My thought was, “Ooh-la-la!” On her head she wore a red Washington Nationals baseball cap. Below that, her long black hair was fed into two pigtails that she had pulled forward over her bare shoulders to rest on her chest, which was covered by a tight white tube-top. That came down to her bare, flat midriff which showed off her belly-button ring. Her tight little short-shorts were also red to match the cap, and at the other end of those long, slender legs she wore white tennies. To top it off, her skin was the bronze color of a TV goddess from a sunscreen commercial.
Oh why had I waited so long to contact her again?!
“Lemme get my glove,” she giggled as I stared at her with my mouth open.
We weren’t exactly late for the game, but the cop stopping me to give me a speeding ticket on the way did slow me down a bit. I had, um, not paid attention to the fact that a cop was tailing me. My mind—and eyes—had been elsewhere, as you might imagine. Vikki seemed unaffected by the cop or my ticket. But I, of course, felt emasculated. I tried to brush it off, but for some reason, as soon as we reached the ballpark, the first thing I wanted was a beer.
It was scorching in the stands, without a whisper of a breeze to breath. Vikki told me she’d already put on sunscreen. For sure she looked cool as an ice cold Bud. I, on the other hand, felt my skin sizzling like one of those hotdogs on rollers at concessions. I downed another cold beer as soon as I could get the man lugging the cooler over to me. Got him to give me some ice cubes too, but those melted instantly on contact with my skin.
The game was looking like a pitchers’ duel. The Yankees scored one run in the second on an error and a double. Otherwise, nothing much was happening on the field. I wanted to put my arm around Vikki’s bare shoulders, but it was too damn hot to feel sweaty skin on sizzling skin.
A middle-aged woman came over and started talking to the family behind us while she kneeled on the steps in the aisle next to our seats. Their conversation was family stuff: kids, camp, braces, private school tuition. Her mouth was probably closer to my ear than to the people she was talking to, and she was loud. It distracted and irritated me a lot.
I got another beer.
The men in front of us and to our right were all Yankees fans. They whooped and hollered approval at every Yankee advantage, and booed mercilessly at the Nationals’ foibles. That pissed me off.
Just as I was wiping the sweat out of my sunburned eyes with the cool plastic cup which held my fourth beer, the man behind me relinquished his seat next to his wife so the woman who had been kneeling in the aisle could sit down and the two housewives could gab even more. I was about to turn around and tell those damned women toshut up, when I felt Vikki stand up next to me. Her head was tilted skyward. I looked up just in time to see a foul ball ricochet off the upper deck overhead and fall back down in our general direction. Vikki bolted past me, her baseball glove clipping my beer hand and sloshing some of my beer onto the crotch of my pants. I was trying to wipe myself dry with those worthless little paper napkins they give you at the concession stand, when I heard the altercation in the aisle behind me. The next thing I knew, Vikki was edging past me to her seat, wearing a giant grin and hold a bright white baseball.
“How…where…?” I stammered while looking around. All the men who had also gone for the foul ball were shaking their heads and heading back to their seats.
Vikki beamed. “It bounced off some guy’s hands, then bounced off a seat back. I snagged it out of the air before it could hit anything else.”
“Nice going!” said one of those busybody women behind us.
“Oh, shut your pie hole!” I snapped at her.
“Honey!” Vikki scolded me. “That was uncalled for!”
“Yeah? Well they’ve been bugging me the whole game with their loud talking.”
“I know,” she whispered back to me. “Me too. But you can’t treat them like that after they just congratulated me.”
I got another beer.
Gradually the game reached the bottom of the seventh. The sun had just hidden itself behind the upper deck of the stadium and I was feeling a lot better. Except for the fact that my vision was a little blurry and I was having trouble forming coherent sentences. Vikki elbowed me excitedly.
“Wha’?” I said and my head bobbed a little.
“We have men on First and Third and nobody out!” she gushed. “We’re bound to tie the game here…if not go ahead!” She said this with a rising voice, and I saw her kick the seat-back of that Yankee-rooting weenie guy in front of her as she crossed her legs—legs which right now looked particularly long and soft and tanned and—
“Oh! Sorry!” Vikki said as the guy looked over his shoulder with a sneer. “Just a little excited up here. This is the good part. See?”
Apparently the guy didn’t see, for his sneer lingered briefly before he turned back around. Frankly, I was having trouble seeing as well. Sweat in the eyes, or something, was giving me double vision. Wait! Did she just say, “Excited?” My blurry eyes widened.
Suddenly pan-de-monium!
The stands erupted in a mixture of jubilant cheering and cries of anguish. I’d missed what had happened. Replaying things in my mind, all I could remember was Vikki’s long tanned legs and something about her being excited. But she was standing next to me again. What now?! Her head, which she was clutching in her hands, was shaking back and forth, sending her pigtails flying side to side.
I stood up. “Wha’ hap’n’d? Wha’ hap’n’d? I missed it!” I screamed.
“They called a squeeze play! A squeeze play for God sakes! And the batter missed bunting the ball! Oh my God! The runner from Third was tagged out at Home. Then they got the runner from First in a run-down between Second and Third, and he was tagged out. Oh my God, I can’t believe this! Now there are two outs and no one on base!”
The Yankee-rooting creeps in front of us were whooping it up, taunting us, jeering at as. That’s when I remembered I was with a woman who had a black-belt in karate.
“Sic ’em, Vikki!” I said.
“What?” Vikki yelled back at me over the din of the crowd.
I blinked as I realized how stupid I had just sounded. I gathered my senses slightly and said, “Oh, this is sick, Vikki!”
We sat down. The batter struck out to end the inning. I wanted to hide behind something so the Yankee-rooting vermin couldn’t see me.
Our rookie pitcher continued to hold the Yankees into the eighth inning. It was still a one-run ballgame. He had done an amazing job against those god-like hitters from the Bronx. But our guy was pulled after walking one batter in the middle of the eighth, so he couldn’t be a winner today.
Now our team trotted onto the field for the bottom of the ninth, score still 1-0 but looking grim. I was trying to sober up on ice-cold Coca-Colas, thinking forward to what Vikki and I might do after the game. “My place” had a good ring to it. I’d need to come up with something to do for her, or with her, or to her, to console her grief at the loss. I could tell she was really into this game. My mind was racing. I was planning on being a winner today.
The Yankee “closer,” their fearsome short-relief pitcher, struck out our first man up, then walked our second batter. Now the whole crowd was on it’s feet. There were jeers from the Yankee fans who expected a double play to end the game. There were shouts of encouragement from the Nationals fans, for our cleanup hitter was approaching the plate. And the air was electric.
Vikki said, “He just needs to schmack one outta here.”
I cracked a smile. “Schmack one outta here?”
“Yeah. Just schmack it! Right over there!” She pointed to the left field wall. My eyes lingered on the bold lettering. “360,” it read. For some reason, I couldn’t remember if that was feet or yards. Nah, couldn’t be—
CRACK!
Suddenly the stadium collectively caught it’s breath for a split second. Then the sound of 45,000 human voices screaming at top of their lungs deafened me. The ball sailed over the left field wall exactly where Vikki had just pointed! 2-1! We won! We beat the Yankees!
Vikki and I grabbed each other by the arms, screaming our heads off, and jumped up and down on the metal floor of the stands, which shook ominously as if we—the thousands of riotous Nationals fans—were causing an earthquake. Then Vikki, my gorgeous date, pointed right at the dejected Yankee fans in front of us, alternately jabbing forward with her right, then her left index finger, yelling, “Nah-nah-nah-nah! Nah-nah-nah-nah! Hey-hey-hey! Oh yeah!” The three burly men looked pitiful. They slinked out into the aisle shaking their heads and passed us as they walked up the steps.
Fifteen minutes later, Vikki and I were walking to my car. I was high as a kite on testosterone. My team had just beat the f-ing Yankees, man! And my date was the hottest chick for miles around! All that crap with the speeding ticket I had gotten on the way here be damned. I was “it” on a stick!
We rounded a corner in the parking lot, and there, leaning against a rusty blue Ford pickup truck with New York plates, were the three dudes who’d sat in front of us back in the stadium. What a sorry lot! They each held a can of Bud. But what struck me was their friggin’ Yankee baseball caps.
Now I wanted a Yankee baseball cap as a souvenir. Sort of a war trophy. I was particularly emboldened by the fact that I knew, but these clueless New Yorkers did not, that this super-hot, super sexy, super gorgeous chick at my side could kick the collective asses of these three, plus all the other dweebie Yankee fans combined!
I marched right up to them. Vikki followed me.
“Gimme yer—hic!—hat,” I demanded, somewhat imperiously.
“Say what?” The three dudes chuckled.
I felt Vikki grab my arm. “Honey?” she said.
“I said—,” I started and wobbled slightly. Vikki tugged my arm. “Gimme yer hat!”
“Honey,” Vikki said. “Let’s leave these nice gentlemen be. Their team just lost. They might want to commiserate.”
“Yeah, dude. We wanna commiserate ova heah! Leave us be!”
Their New York accented mocking of Vikki really riled me. Now they were going to feel the sting of our anger…well, mostly her sting. But I’d be there to mop them up!
“Come on Vikki! Let’s get ’em!” I staggered forward, toward the dudes.
But Vikki yanked me backward by the arm, straightening me up. I felt myself spin around to face her. How’d she do that—?
“No!” Vikki said slowly through gritted teeth. “We are going this way! Now come with me, and hand me the keys to your car. I always wanted to drive that Porsche.” That last sentence she said a little louder and aimed it over my shoulder, at the dudes who were now behind me.
“Ooh! Prick drives a Porsch’!” I heard them laugh as I was forced to step away with Vikki’s hand tightly clenched around my arm. I started to turn and tell them it was pronounced “Porsch-a” but I felt my arm being squeezed tighter and I was forced to stumble forward alongside my beautiful, sexy, angry date.
Vikki drove. I dozed. Needless to say, the phrase “my place” didn’t have quite the meaning I had been hoping for after the game.