States of Confusion by Paul Jury

States of Confusion by Paul Jury

Author:Paul Jury [Jury, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General, TRAVEL / United States / General, TRAVEL / Road Travel
Publisher: Adams Media, an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
Published: 2011-05-02T00:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 27

GEORGIA

Beers in High School

I was awakened early the next morning by a call from my mom.

“Paul? You okay?”

“Yeah,” I managed, pulling my head out of the gap between the Imposter’s passenger headrest and the door, where it was wedged. “Why?”

“I read your blog from last night. You sounded down. You described the night as, hold on . . . ‘blacker than a panther at midnight in a cave. In a black hole.’ Your metaphors always get really lame when you’re in a funk.”

“Yeah, I’m okay.” The sunrise streamed through the windshield and burned my tired eyes. The sun was pushing itself up for another day, whether I liked it or not.

“I had a fight with Sarah, and I’m kind of sick.” I climbed over into the driver’s seat. “It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.”

“Well,” said my mom. “You know you’re always welcome to take a break and stop in with us for a few days if you need some company.”

Wonderful. A temptation I didn’t need. “Yeah, I’m afraid there’s not much company down here.”

“What about Luke?” my mom said.

Luke. I hadn’t thought of him.

Luke had been a high-school baseball teammate who, after getting his journalism degree, had taken an internship at CNN Sports in Atlanta. We’d fallen out of touch, but my mom still kept up with Luke’s mother.

“He might still be in Atlanta,” she said. “You could at least e-mail him. Here, I think I’ve got his contact info . . .”

Sometimes having a friendly Minnesota mother was very helpful.

Last I’d heard, Luke hadn’t liked his internship much, so it was a long shot. But the possibility of a familiar face was worth it. I fired off a quick e-mail.

I drove on, and cut back onto the small highways that snaked their way through the Carolina hills at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains. Something was pushing me on to Georgia. It was only fifty miles west, and I’d have to swing through there anyway, even if I still opted to hook north afterward.

Luke and I had been teammates on, among other places, an unfortunate Fall Ball team that was probably the worst either of us had ever played on.We were the two primary pitchers, and until that point had been mowing down batters in spring and summer leagues, inflating our hopes of someday being paid millions to toss a small leather sphere through the air a few times a week. But Fall League was something else. It was where all the serious suburban players came to forget about soccer and football and focus on milking division-one schools out of scholarship money. Our ragtag bunch of city kids was ill-equipped to handle the challenge. The first pitch I threw that season was crushed into a line drive that knocked a dent in the metal 380 sign on the centerfield wall.

Our team lost nearly every game that season, and Luke and I took turns being hammered on by high-school juniors with twenty-inch biceps and names like Brock Van Chisel.



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