Read Online 333 Miles by Craig Birk - Free Book Online

McGillis, Top
Gun. ”
    Alex: “Shit, how did that last this long.
Okay, E-liz-a-beth Shue. Cocktail. ”
    Gary: “Good one. Nicole Kidman, Far and
Away. ”
    Alex: “You actually saw that?”
    Gary: “No, I just remember the preview.”
    Roger: “Jeanne Tripplehorn, The
Firm. ”
    Mike: “Okay, give me a minute . . . Didn’t he
fuck Brad Pitt in Interview With a Vampire ?”
    Alex: “No dude, I don’t think we can give you
that one.”
    Gary (eagerly): “Is that a loss?”
    Alex: “Yes, unless Mikey can come up with
another one in five seconds.”
    Mike: “What about the six-year-old girl in
the vampire movie?”
    Alex: “Christ. What’s wrong with you?
No.”
    Mike: “That’s all I got. This is
bullshit.”
    Gary: “Ah very nice, that means I take the
pot and Alex gets second.”
    Mike: “Great, so I’m already down twenty
bucks and we are not even to Nevada yet?”
    Gary: “Shit, we’re not even to Barstow yet.
You are in for a world of hurt.”
    Mike: “This is bullshit.”
    Alex: “Jesus, chill out, Sourpuss.”
    Roger: “I really need Stanford to hit. Let’s
play another game for double the stakes.”
     
     
    Interlude Four
    Mike (9)
     
    It was a picture-perfect day at Scripps
Ranch, twenty miles northeast of downtown San Diego. A slight wind
carried the smell of the sea air, and random puffy white clouds
floating overhead provided periodic respite from the warm sun. Much
to the delight of the kids, as well as the parents, an occasional
F-14 Tomcat from Miramar Marine Air Station buzzed over the field
on its way back to base.
    The weather was ideal, and so was the
baseball diamond hosting the day’s Little League game between the
Mets and the Royals. One of the fathers from the Cubs (one of the
other teams in the league) had started a bio-tech firm that was
bought out by Genentech. This particular dad had a fetish for
baseball diamonds and dropped $475,000 into turning the Scripps
Ranch Little League diamond into one of the finest places to play
baseball on the West Coast. It was complete with sunken dugouts, a
padded home run fence, bullpens, an electronic scoreboard, and
seating for up to five hundred people. The field itself was
brilliantly manicured. People joked that it was better than Jack
Murphy Stadium where the Padres played. Somewhat unfortunately, the
dad’s name was Schtupp, so the complex was officially renamed
Schtupp Field. There were still plenty of errors made on Schtupp
Field, but here, unlike most youth leagues around the country, bad
hops were rarely the cause of any of them.
    Mike Bochner showed up this particular day
expecting to play third base and hit sixth in the lineup, as he
usually did. Mr. Schtupp also funded an official league scorekeeper
who printed out a stats sheet for the league, called Schtupp’s
Stats. Years later, in college, Mike would joke with some of his
childhood buddies about what their Schtupp stats were with the
ladies, but at the time they took their baseball numbers very
seriously. Some of the parents felt that displaying all of the
kids’ statistics for everyone to see was inappropriate and
unhealthy for those who had very low batting averages or high ERAs.
Already showing signs of being the conservative Republican he would
become years later, Mike found these parents to be “pussies” (a
newly learned word he thoroughly enjoyed using) and felt they
needed to deal with reality and quit being so politically correct.
He astutely observed that most of the parents who objected happened
to be the ones whose kids tended to suck. Mike was hitting a
respectable .315 at the time.
    Five minutes before the game, Walter Chen,
one of the kids who had a very low batting average, was practicing
his swing in left field. He neglected to look behind him and his
follow-through hit Tyler Jones, the Mets’ best pitcher (arguably
the best in the whole league), squarely in the jaw. Tyler dropped
to the ground as blood sprayed out in every direction. Some of