Bat Catching, George Verongos [good books to read in english .TXT] 📗

It was about 7:30 and the big dark orange sun was hanging low on the summer horizon. The temperature was already starting to drop and a warm breeze was slithering through the treetops. I took the alley that ran along our garage in the back since I knew my dad would be on the front steps smoking, drinking a beer and watering the lawn. I parked my bike in the garage and quietly made my way to the back door. I thought I would sneak in and check with Mom on Dad’s status. As I slid the screen door shut behind me I heard the far off laughter of several people that was obviously coming from the front yard. No one was in the house so I crept over to the big bay window in the family room where I could spy the front steps. There was like a dozen people in our front yard drinking beer and yuckin’ it up. A bunch of neighbors were over and a couple of my sisters’ neighborhood friends. Just then I heard the front door slam shut and saw Sophia go past the door way towards the bathroom. A heard the toilet flush and she appeared in the kitchen.
“Oh, what are you doing? I thought you were at Jeff’s.” She said startled.
“I was. What’s going on here?” I asked
“Nuthin’, help me take some beers out.” And she handed me four beers from the fridge and I followed her towards the front door. Again, my plans were foiled I wanted to talk to Dad but I couldn’t now. Would it be better later when he was drunk and everyone had left or would that be the worst time to talk to him. Damn it, what am I gonna do? As we walked out the front door and I made my way through the maze of people sitting on the steps I was greeted by our guests.
“Hey there he is.”
“Hi Georgie boy.”
“There’s the landscaping mogul.”
“It’s almost football season, huh George”
“There’s the bigguy.”
I was a bigger than the average kid and participated in a lot of sports; football, basketball, wrestling and track at school and in the summer I played baseball for the city parks and attended football camp, wrestling camp, basketball camp and soccer camp. This too was the fruits of my dad’s labor making him proud and fueling a lot of guy talk with his friends. By the time I was in forth grade and eligible to play organized sports I was as tall as some of my teachers. My mother had to make my basketball uniform because they didn’t have one to fit me. My mother had to go buy me an adult sized flag belt for flag football. I was a champion wrestler. I sucked at the act of wrestling but there was never anyone in my weight class so I always won by default. Needless to say every coach in my present and future schools had their eye on me and that also was a source of pride for my father. Of course that’s why I eventually rebelled by developing a love for Volleyball and Tennis. I didn’t realize it at the time but this could have actually killed my father. It wasn’t until after he died that I stopped playing the sports he approved of and spent my extra curricular high school time focused on Tennis, Volleyball, Drama, and Music. Now that would have killed him.
So I said my hellos and received several hair touslings as I passed out the beers I was carrying making sure to give one to my dad. There wasn’t anyone my age there and Sophia and her friends were doing cartwheels and talking about girlie stuff so I decided to stay in the man crowd hoping this would reinforce my manly status with my father. I think I caught Dad glancing my way a few times but he still didn’t talk to me. The other guys did though. They asked me about baseball, and the wrestling camp I had just finished. We talked a little about the NFL I think my favorite team then was The Cowboys but I often wore these really cool Oiler tube socks that had three stripes: one reddish orange flanked by two turquoise and a little drill thingy with oil spurting out the top in reddish orange as well. As soon as one of the guys was slurping the last drops of beer from his can I would bolt inside and grab more before my dad could order me to. I was on it, and I always gave my dad a beer first. I was gonna keep feeding him beers till he fell off his lawn chair. It was almost dark and Jeff came riding up the walkway. I was glad to see him because more of the neighbor hood kids were gathering and they were more Sophia’s age with a history of abusing ands teasing me, so it was good to have someone on my side. These neighborhood kids would often hang out in the summer on our lawn with my sisters. There favorite summer’s night past time, besides steeling kisses, copping feels and sneaking beers from their numerous parents’ garage refrigerators was a game called Ghost in the Graveyard. Basically it was like reverse Hide and Go Seek with a shit load of screaming and usually some injuries and blood shed which was probably due to the amount of beer they were able to steal. How you played was you divided into two teams. Both teams would start at a central location deemed the “safe zone” usually a tree or a square of pavement worked well. The Ghost group would run and hide as the Gravedigger group would cover their eyes and chant out loud…
”One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock around. Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock around. Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock around. Ten o’clock here, eleven o’clock there,” and then yell really loud “TWELVE O’CLOCK GHOST IN THE GRAVEYARD!”
Then the Gravediggers would split up and go searching for the Ghosts. Now here is where it gets crazy. The object is for the Gravediggers to find a hidden Ghost. When they do they yell, “Ghost in the Graveyard!” Which let’s the other Gravediggers know a ghost has been found and they need to high tail it back to the “safe zone” with out being tapped by any Ghosts. It also let’s the other hiding Ghosts know that one has been found and they all come out of hiding and run back to the “safe zone” trying to tap any Gravedigger they can. It also must be played in as close to pitch-blackness as possible so as to increase the chances of making out while you hide and having a collision as everyone races back to the “safe zone”. The game usually started with five or six horny teens but after one round, droves of hormone laden, pimply faced, peach fuzzed, short-short wearing teenagers seemed to migrate in the night towards the spooky grope-a-thon. I think that’s why the Gravediggers yelled “TWELVE O’CLOCK GHOST IN THE GRAVEYARD!” so loud as to announce to any sex-crazed teen within earshot that it was time to get funky. But tonight something different would happen something I still have a hard time believing. It was getting pretty late and mumblings of “Ghost in the Graveyard” started to erupt. Most of the adults had dispersed leaving my mother and Nana sitting on the steps and my dad sitting in a lawn chair totally shit faced. There were a few neighborhood teens sitting in the grass with my sister including a couple of older (16 or 17 years old) boys when one of them said, “Look, a bat!” and pointed toward the street light. And sure enough a few little bats were spastically fluttering around the light slurping up insects and everyone suddenly became an expert on bats.
“Oh my god, Mary.” Said Nana, “They’ll fly into your hair.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Esther. Bats don’t attack people.” Said my mother.
“They use fruit bats in Vampire movies because they are bigger than actual vampire bats.” Said one of the neighborhood dudes. Then the other one informed us,
“Bats use radar to see because they are blind. That’s how they fly in the dark so good. That must be where they got that saying –Blind as a bat- from too.”
I noticed my dad had slipped away. He must have gone to bed or inside to watch TV.
I was just thinking about how I would play it with him tomorrow when he came around the side of the house carrying some long pole or something. As he got closer I could see that he was actually carrying three 2x4’s that were sloppily nailed together to make a crooked 12-foot pole of sorts. I think he just ran into the garage and hammered them together right then but I don’t recall hearing any hammering and there were at least 4 three-inch long nails in it that I would have definitely heard the hammering of on this quiet summer night. Or is it scarier to think he already had this “tool” made, ready and waiting somewhere in the garage. Anyway, it was another of his ingenious inventions and I’m not being facetious, his homemade tools always did the job intended no matter how messed-up they looked. He was all business as he marched into the front yard.
“Gus, what is that?” Questioned my mother, “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to show these kids how to catch bats.” He replied like my mother’s questions were completely inane and unfounded, like it was obvious what he was going to do. He spoke with such conviction I almost expected my mom to reply to him…Oh of course, Honey. How stupid of me. And that of course is your bat-catcher.
As soon as my dad’s words hit the ear holes of the two teenage boys they looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Right on!” and jumped to their feet.
“Now I’ll show you hippie dippies how we pass the time in Greece.” Promised my father.
“Kids, back up” commanded my mother to me and Jeff.
“Boy, your dad’s really drunk.” Observed Jeff with an air of impressiveness.
My dad pulled a blue bandana from his back pocket. He always carried a hanky and tried to get me to do it as well but as soon as realized you carried a days worth of boogers around in your pocket and that was the point of having a hanky, well I had to pass. I’m guessing that since he had been carrying this hanky around all day it too was full of boogers. He proceeds to tie the hanky to one end of the “bat catcher”. As he prepares for his demonstration he explains in an accent reinforced by fifteen beers.
“Bats dun yoos theirr eyes. Day yoos theirr brrain.” He squints and uses the middle finger of his right hand to thump his temple. Oh course it looked like he was flipping us off.
Since last year when my sister imparted the knowledge