Dec. 3, 1989: God rest ye merry, gentlemen

Thing you have to understand is that Duke is a big man. Not so tall as all that, maybe six feet if you get him in platform shoes, not that in your wildest imagination would you ever want Duke on platform shoes, but for argument’s sake, six feet in platform shoes. Wide though, maybe 300 pounds, maybe 350, and not strictly all beef, either. There’s surplusage amidst the billows and folds, enough for a couple seasons of hibernating at the normal rate. Duke’s okay with it and so are we.

Duke needs nourishment. See Duke eat and you think of some wild pumpkin vine that turns out 200-pound pumpkins, where if you want the 200-pound pumpkins you gotta feed in the tons of water and fertilizer. Duke can lay waste to groceries, in other words. No shame in that, big man like him eating like he does. It’s other people that can get mean, like the time Duke is in St. Louis and the guy playing guitar in the country-western band stops playing when Duke walks by and says into his mike, “Hey, how many hot dogs can you eat?”

Isn’t nice at all, but when Baumer hears Duke tell that particular story he gets an idea, sort of idea that comes to Baumer naturally but wouldn’t occur to most guys in a year of ruminating.

“How many hot dogs can you eat, Dukester?” Baumer asks him without too much of the underhanded tone Baumer’s voice can get sometimes.

“Well, I’m not too much of a connie-sewer of hot dogs, not as much as some of them entries,” Duke says. Like a lot of big guys Duke isn’t bothered by much. Bulk who could get blown away in a strong wind says it’s because they got so much ballast they’re like one of those kids’ toys where you punch it and it pops right back up again. Bozo the Clown is one. You punch these big guys in real life, hit ‘em a shot or two like losing their job and kids in trouble, and they pop right back up. You get the feeling Duke’s taken a couple of those punches, but he’s popped back up good as anyone would have a right to.

“I like spare ribs,” he goes on, “when Charlie gets them two crackpots goin’ and she’s got spare ribs in ‘em both, I can eat both of ‘em without stopping. Spare ribs, now that’s a meal that hits the spot. Gotta get the ones with meat on ‘em, not the kind where they call ‘em ‘spare ribs’ ‘cause they spare the meat. Nope, spare ribs in a crackpot there with sauce – ketchup, brown sugar, maybe some A-1 – and then hand me a fork and stand back.”

“But how many hot dogs, Duke? How many hot dogs can you eat?” Baumer’s really trying to be gentle with the guy but it’s wearing on him since gentle isn’t his usual thing.

“Hot dogs? Never counted in one sitting, but I figure I could do 30, 40 easy. Maybe more if I was really hungry, if you depraved me of food, you know.”

“What if there was money involved?”

“If there was money involved I’d eat until they’d have to wheel me away on a girlie.”

Then Baumer tells Duke his plan, which we had already figured out because we know how Baumer’s mind works. Baumer wants to stage some eating contests pitting Duke against whatever competition he can find. Maybe there’ll be some local contests at corn roasts or lutefisk suppers or whatever, and if Duke does well enough there Baumer’ll take him to card shows and have him eat against the competition there. Big guys go to card shows. It’s the major leagues. If Duke wants to eat his way to the top that’s the way to go.

One of the coin guys hears about Baumer's plan over the cubicle and says, "You can call it the 'Eat the Rich Tour.'" He's an anarchist.

Duke listens to the plan and says he’s all for it. “If there’s money involved and the food is free, I couldn’t say no. It’d be inconcealable,” he says. Baumer and Duke shake on the deal.

Holidays you’d think there’d be no shortage of venues for a professional eater to eat, but if they’re out there Baumer’s not finding them. So Baumer, who sees that quick payday shining like four o'clock sun, starts worrying about his meal ticket, so to speak, getting out of eating shape ahead of the matches Baumer has planned for lord-knows-when. That’s when Baumer hit on the idea of the holiday party.

Normally a holiday party would be about the last thing Baumer would want to be involved with, since all the holidays mean to Baumer is more trouble shaking money out of his deadbeat advertisers. But this year one of his advertisers had gotten real rich off of some Babe Ruth autographs he had gotten from the widow of the clubhouse boy who signed them in the first place, so he sent Baumer a big packing crate full of all kinds of booze. Everything from good whiskey to a two-liter bottle of wine coolers was in that crate, and Baumer, for all his faults, isn’t what you’d call a drinking man. Baumer’s idea for the party was to break open the crate and everyone bring a dish to pass, and work in Duke on some competitive eating there, so he wouldn’t lose his edge.

Only thing was, Baumer just told the people he invited about the front half of the deal. The thing about keeping Duke in training he didn’t tell them, maybe because he didn’t want the idea to get around that Baumer had an ulterior motive, even though everyone he invited figured it was Baumer, and Baumer always has an ulterior motive.

Of course, Baumer tells Duke he wants him to really do some damage. “Think of it as your last big run before a marathon,” Baumer tells him before realizing that talking to Duke about running marathons isn’t going to make any sort of impact whatsoever.

Publisher was overcome enough by Baumer’s gesture to offer his house as a location for the party. Nice house, all logs on the outside and inside, tucked back in the woods couple miles out of town. Shows what you can get around here when you’re a publisher and your wife is daughter of the guy who owns the furniture store and funeral home. Good furniture inside obviously, huge dining-room set and all.

Everyone shows up a little early to the party, figuring that’s the best way to get their choice of booze, even though with everyone showing up early no one gets exactly what they want. Everyone’s there early except Duke, who isn’t a drinking man mainly because it takes away from his eating. “Stomach’s only got so much room – why waste space on something that’s not going to stick around a while?”, he says. Table’s laid out nicely, everyone’s dishes right out there for the buffet they figure they’ll have later once Duke shows up and everyone’s got about two-thirds of a bottle of something in them.

Seven o’clock right on schedule Duke comes piling into the place. By this time everyone’s sort of drifted away from the dining room with their drinks. They’re downstairs looking at the autographed footballs or playing pool or watching the football game on TV, this being the time of year when there’s always a football game on TV. Duke throws his coat over a chair and is pretty much drawn into the dining room. He pulls out one of the dining-room chairs and sits himself down in front of this huge buffet of food, grabs a fork, brings some of the dishes over his way, and starts eating right out of them, no plate or anything.

Duke pretty much reduced three or four casseroles to the bones when some of the other guests come shuffling back upstairs. They’re hungry enough about this time, especially after thinking about the food they’d brought and everyone else had brought, and when they see mostly three-quarters empty serving dishes and Duke leaning back with a smile on his face they aren’t too far out of it to put together two and two and figure Duke it was had done the damage. They aren’t very happy about it, either, even when Duke points out kind of sensibly that they had done the damage to the booze and he had done damage to the food, and it’s just a matter of picking your poison. Publisher’s the maddest guy of all, maybe because he was worried about the dining-room chair Duke was sitting on.

Party doesn’t last too much longer after that. People pick around for a little something to stay their stomachs and knock down the booze, snatch up what’s left of their dishes, grab their favorite bottles and their coats and pile out. Duke’s too happy to move much; besides, there are leftovers. He doesn’t get how he ruined the publisher’s lovely spread.

Baumer’s about the last one out, and the publisher takes him arm before Baumer can slide out the door. “I know you had a reason for doing this, besides the booze,” publisher says. “When I find out, it’d better be a good one.” That’s all he can say, ‘cause how can you fire a guy makes the company more money than any other single individual? Baumer nods his head and slides the rest of the way out the door.

As he heads out to his car, though, Baumer has a smile on his face, big a smile as Baumer can muster. He starts humming a Christmas song, too. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” it is. Nothing’s letting Baumer dismay. He’s found his ticket to the big leagues.

Nov. 24, 1989: Great Job, Except You Gotta Work Sundays

Way the day before Thanksgiving is around this place, no one is left around except the ones that haven’t anyplace else to go, like it is day before Christmas and around New Year’s and all such holidays. You’d think it’d be the best time to get serious work done, with two-thirds the gang gone and all, but one person’s singing “Over the River and Through the Woods” most the day, another person’s on his phone to his family all the time and you’d think it was Albania where they were from the amount of shouting he had to do to make himself heard, and another person just wants to mingle, and so even if working serious was your intent you couldn’t any more get serious work done than you could make a turkey dinner out of venison.

People that hang around are people who live here, people without any family and people whose family live too far away so it’s too expensive to go, which means it’s the usual die-hards holding down the fort-- O’Strowsky, Bulk, Baumer, Mort, and Don and Maggie, plus the postcard lady, the coin guys (King George is around, from the sound of things), and the old-cars crew. Baumer can even act mellow day before Thanksgiving because all the deadlines are dead and no one’s around for him to call on the phone and harass for money or lie about position.

Day like this, when it winds down around toward the end and everyone only moves fast when they’re cleaning up their desk and bustling out the door, people talk about whatever pops into their heads, which with sports guys is sports. Bulk I think it was started playing the “stupid kicker” game, where he names off a kicker and anyone else who’s playing has to name off someone worse. Surprising amount of ground rules with this game, like there are some kickers so stupid that they’re off limits. Happy Feller is one, because even if Happy Feller had been good he’d still have been Happy Feller, and that’s enough to win the stupid-kicker game by itself. Dean Dorsey is another one off limits. He’s a Packer kicker who once shanked an extra point so bad it went out of bounds. Wasn’t a Packer kicker for long, shanking extra points out of bounds like that, but longevity’s not a requirement in the stupid-kicker game.

Mort had won the stupid kicker game with Richie Szaro, so then people started talking about stupid positions in general, and what the most useless job is on a football team. Obviously you talk to a football coach he tells you every position’s important on a football team, and that’s Baumer’s line, too, but guys with imagination, like the editors, don’t settle for that explanation.

“I don’t know if it’s useless or not, but I know the best position on a football team,” Bulk says. “Backup quarterback. What’s better than backup quarterback? You go in when the starter’s hurt. If you do good you’re a hero. You do bad, what’d you expect? You’re a backup quarterback. Look at Zeke Bratkowski all those years. Goes in when Starr is hurt, throws three touchdown passes, he’s a hero, next week he’s on the bench again. No pressure in that. Gary Cuozzo, Earl Morrall, all those guys. Backup quarterbacks. Nothing better.”

“Yeah, you gotta draw the line between the backup quarterback and the third-string quarterback,” Mort says. “Third-string, you never even get to play. Maybe you’re on the taxi squad, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re cut because they need another offensive tackle that week. Drive you nuts, living like that. It’s like this issue of the magazine they need you to edit the feature article and next issue they decide to do a photo spread instead, so it’s so long. Second-string, though, they always need you. Good job there.”

“What I think the guy is with the best job is the guy hikes the ball to the punter,” O’Strowsky says, and right away everyone knows he’s right, that the best job on a football team is the guy who hikes the ball to the punter or kicker, but they let him go on and say why anyway. “You’re not the usual center, so you’re not getting beat up on all game by these nose tackles and big defensive tackles and middle linebackers. You got maybe eight plays max where you’re in. Less if your team is any good. Eight plays is about the right amount to play in a game. Keeps the blood flowing, keeps you in shape. People are trying to kind of speed-rush past you and you’re trying to get the ball hiked and then hustle downfield, so it’s not a deal where you have to be 300 pounds and so muscle-bound you can’t lift your arms over your head. Not saying a skinny guy like me could do it, but almost. Gotta believe you could do that job until you’re 40, at least, without so much damage as a sore wrist when you get up in the morning.”

“Not like Jim Otto, where it takes him half the day just to get out of bed and the other half the day just to get back in bed,” says Mort, who comes from the place where Jim Otto went to high school.

“Yeah, right, like that,” O’Strowsky says.

“Gets paid enough, too,” Mort says, and heads nod around the area, even Baumer, seeing as the talk had turned to dollars-and-cents money. "Great job."

"Great job," O'Strowsky says, but with that Polish-Irish glint in his voice, "great job all right, but you gotta work Sundays."

“Think it’s too late for me? I think I’ve got the wrists for the job,” Bulk says. He may have the wrists for the job but the rest of him is in need of about 100 pounds of development.

“Perhaps,” O’Strowsky says, deadpan like he can get. “Why don’t you go home and see? In fact, why don’t we all go home and see?” And everyone who was pretending to work stops pretending, grabs their coats and bolts. No one cares to stop them.