Although this story contains things from the world in which we live, it should be read as a work of fiction. All characters are fictional and not based on any actual living person. The events that take place in this story are entirely the product of my imagination.
Jack Armstrong pulled the Jeep Wrangler into the designated parking spot next to the dive bar. The plate on his bright yellow jeep proclaimed him a veteran of the already two-decade-old century’s wars, this one, the so called “Operation Enduring Freedom,” which now after almost twenty years of continuous war was a catch-all name for anyone who’d deployed to anywhere in the world outside Iraq in the never-ending effort to stop terrorism or line the coffers of the weapons industry, depending on your political point of view, or more accurately, which Kool Aid you preferred to consume.
His wife’s car bore the other plate from his service in Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Jack never could figure out why the federal governement made a distinction between Iraq and every other place, and he really didn’t care. All he knew was the great state of Texas, his beloved home state to which he’d returned after retirement — the real one; not the, “I’m retired from this and now I’m gonna go do that,” one — gave veterans not one, but two plates for their service, if they’d served in more than one war. So he took advantage of the very friendly policy and got his two plates. He paid a total of six bucks every year to renew the plates on both vehicles.
He loved Texas. Always had. Even all those years when he was away. What was it again? Left in ‘86 to go to college and play some football and baseball and returned in 2017. 31 years. How was it possible he hadn’t been back for that long?
Well, everything he had done after college, for one.
The undergrad degree, although interesting subject matter, had prepared him for nothing in the real world other than graduate or law school. Then three months before he was supposed to start, there came the shocking call from the major-league baseball team saying they’d drafted him in a middle round and wanted him to come play minor-league baseball. What the hell, he thought. Law school could wait. Come to think of it, everything could wait. He was only 22 after all.
That decision had consumed another five years as he actually believed performance on the field — rather than franchise politics — could actually give him a shot at the big leagues. He’d bounced around to towns as random and far flung as Madison, Wisconsin, Tacoma, Washington, Lake Elsinore, California, Asheville, North Carolina, and Billings, Montana, in the seemingly never-ending effort to catch the eye of whoever in the front office was making the decisions. To no avail it seemed. It was another thing he never could figure out. Hell, he hit .373 one year at AA with 23 home runs— was the league batting champion no less — and no one as much as batted an eyelash.
It didn’t get him an invite to spring training the following year, nor even an elevation to AAA. The elevation to AAA wouldn’t come for another year, when he was in in the middle of a bad slump. Go figure. Sometimes it appeared that AAA, rather than being that last steppingstone to the big leagues, was in reality the place the franchise sent minor-league players they had lost interest in to whither on the vine. It was indeed very strange.
Hitting .325 at AAA in the final week of the minor league season in August, 1995, he hit a towering three-run home run in the bottom of the 12th inning to win the game for Billings, high-fived all the little kids who’d stayed after to get his autograph, went into the locker room, and after draining an ice-cold Ranier in a single pull, promptly retired from baseball on the spot. He figured it was as good a moment as any to quit. He had put no thought whatsoever into it. It was a split-second decision really. He made most of his important decisions this way, actually. He had great gut instincts. But seriously, how could you top that?
His manager was stunned. “Hell! The big league club was talking about maybe bringing you up when they expand the rosters in September. What am I supposed to tell them now?”
This was total horseshit and he’d heard it all before. Add to this the fact that his current big league franchise was literally in last place place in the American League West, 17 games out of first, and that had clinched it.
“I tell you what,” Jack told his manager. “I’m getting on the road. I’m driving to southeast Missouri to see my parents. I’ve got plenty of time. If they decide they just have to have me, call me. Because it’s a long drive. I’ll stop wherever I am and get on a plane.” He shook hands with his teammates, packed his bags, and drove off into the shimmering late summer Montana night.
But of course, the call never came. As he knew it wouldn’t. All the way across the southeastern part of the state, the overnight stop at the Motel 6 in South Dakota, not during the $5.99 grand slam with the banana waffles at Dennys or in the early morning light as he weaved over the hills and through the cornfields of Iowa. It never came. They didn’t give a shit.
He could hit .373. He could have a 97 percent fielding percentage at third base. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered if you weren’t one of franchise’s golden boys. Spending his last three seasons bouncing back-and-forth between double and triple A had proved this.
And he was tired. Tired of the bullshit. Tired of the long bus rides. Tired of flying around on propeller-driven airplanes around gargantuan thunderstorms out west. Tired of always having a new coach or a new manager. Tired of the crappy hotels. Tired of the 20 dollars per day per diem. Tired of fast food. Tired of never getting a chance with the big league club.
Couldn’t they have at least brought him up while someone was on the disabled list? For just 21 days? Apparently not. No; maybe he was too dangerous for them. He might actually take advantage of it and that would present them with a problem. They might have to find a spot on the roster for a guy who didn’t really figure into their plans.
The ugly truth was the farm leagues only existed so the top draft picks could have eight other players around them to get their necessary reps on the way to the show. It didn’t matter that nine out of every ten draft picks on average would flame out and never make it. That scene in a Bull Durham where the manager tells Crash Davis he can quit or keep playing baseball? It was so true. If you hadn’t gone in the top three rounds, you were simply a commodity until they either had no more use for you, or you decided it was time to do something else. And when Jack Armstrong hit that last homer, he knew it was time.
He quit on his terms, not theirs. And anyone had to admit it was a pretty nice way to go out, hitting a ball about 440 feet into the left-center field bleachers.
He still had that last bat somewhere. But he’d long ago forgotten where. It didn’t really matter.
But by June of the year he graduated from law school a few years later, he was suddenly pushing 30. Having figured out that he hated law school only six weeks into his first year, he wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do with a degree. Having no better ideas, he stuck with it.
Eventually meeting his future wife in that unlikeliest of places helped him figure out that he wanted to stay. And people kept repeating the mantra, “You can do anything with a law degree.” These were always people who didn’t have a law degree and were not lawyers. The fact of the matter was you could do exactly one thing with a law degree: Be a lawyer.
After graduation, he treaded water for a few months in a stifling corporate law department, and he quickly couldn’t see himself doing that for the rest of his life. No way.
That’s why two weeks before his 30th birthday, the maximum age to do it, he found himself in Quantico, Virginia. The decision had been nearly as hasty as the decision to quit baseball, yet it was the opposite: It was a determination to do something new and untried, and at his age, maybe even a little foolhardy. It was another one of those, if not spur of the moment, quickly-made decisions that had again turned out to be the right one.
And now he looked back on it after the span of another 20 some odd years and chuckled. Time was a very strange thing indeed. Sometimes it seemed just like yesterday that he had arrived there, and at other times, it seemed an entire lifetime ago. So much had happened between then and now.
He and his young family had gone everywhere it seemed. Southern California, the DC area several times, back to Southern California, the crystal coast of North Carolina (one of the best kept secrets on the East Coast), the Florida panhandle, and even Hawaii. There’d been a few deployments in between.
The boys were now in their twenties, and having grown up military brats, they had no intention of moving around like Jack and their mother had. They were putting down roots in the town the family had finally stopped in for more than three years, and they weren’t going anywhere. And this was fine with Jack; he was proud and happy for them. They seemed to want a home that didn’t move. But he just couldn’t be like that. As he and many of his former military buddies liked to say, “I have about a 36-month attention span.” It was true.
After he left the military, he’d gone straight into a series of federal jobs. There was never one that completely satisfied and consumed him like his military career had, and that was okay. Nothing was going to measure up, and he knew that going in.
So after his federal pension finally vested along with his military retirement, he had walked in one day — just like he did after that long ago minor-league baseball game — and dropped his papers. The job was never his identity. It wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t the source of his self-worth or esteem. Baseball hadn’t been. Military service hadn’t been. No job had ever been. It was all a means to an end.
Very few people actually realized this. And the ones who didn’t would never be fully, truly happy, no matter how much money they made or how big a house they lived in. No, once all this was done, it was time to do what he really wanted to do. He actually realized this long before his formal retirement, and started to do a lot of these things while he was still working. It had become a situation where everything he did between Monday and Friday between eight and five funded everything else that he really wanted to do between five and whenever and on Saturdays and Sundays.
As years went by, these different interests and careers created a strange situation. They rolled along in the same direction down parallel tracks, like trains separated from one another’s view, so that none of the passengers ever saw one another, let alone the other trains. The tracks never crossed back over another. Each had no idea the others existed.
The way he saw it, his life consisted of four or five groups of people on different trains. There was the group that people knew him as baseball star Jack, who he’d grown up with and broke contact with when he went to college. That group knew him as the Emilio Estevez character in The Breakfast Club, the jock.
There were the old sports teammates from his college and minor league days. A very small group because they frankly didn’t have much to talk about and had all — most of them anyway — gone on with their lives to bigger and better things.
Then there were the people on the law school train. He had a small handful of close friends on that train, but they were lifelong. This was the smallest group.
Then there was the military train. Lots of folks on that one. Probably the largest group and longest train for a lot of reasons. Along with the common bond and shared hardships and triumphs, it was a fiercely loyal group that withstood lengthy separations well. He could meet up with one of these guys tomorrow after not having seen him in twenty years and it would be as if it had only been one week.
And then there was the current group. The one that knew very little about any of the other groups. Unless they had done their own, obscure research, none of them knew anything about the baseball, the legal career, or the military service. Yeah, the small eagle, globe, and anchor tattoo on the outside of his left deltoid might give it away to an educated observer when he was changing out of a wetsuit in the parking lot down by the jetty or something. But he usually never let it go uncovered. It wasn’t meant to be seen anyway. It was more like a brand, burned into his skin like it was to his very soul.
No, the current group knew him only as Jack Armstrong, local owner of Jack’s Surf and Bike Shop, right across the state highway that ran between his store and the only really good surf break on the south Texas Gulf coast. The guy who was open before dawn, serving up rich Hawaiian dark roast that blasted the senses awake, and who — after you were done in the morning — would follow that up with these crazy good breakfast burritos or empanadas if you came back.
And after closing up the shop at five, Jack would open the back garage door of the building for Happy Hour, which ran from five to seven. He had four rotating beers on tap and only four. Because that’s all you really needed.
And once Happy Hour on Thursdays and Fridays had gotten you well-started and ready for whatever was going to come later, Jack closed down for good at seven. He turned off the lights, locked up the shop, and got in the Jeep.
It took a grand total of ten minutes for him to drive over to the dive bar where he parked his bright yellow Jeep in the designated parking spot. He reached in the back and pulled out the Breedlove dreadnaught and made his way into the dimly-lit Front Street Bar and Grill.
On Thursday and Friday nights it was time to meet up with some people from the current group. It was a group that had never mixed with any of the other groups. And Jack liked it that way. “Compartmentalized,” he called it.
To the residents of the small beach village, he was simply the surf and bike shop guy; the man who surfed every morning before opening his store; creator of the best breakfast burritos in town; and a man rumored in some local circles to be an old Marine ; and of course, frontman for The Lounge Crickets.
