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2001-03-12 - 11:17 p.m.

Florida on Jack's birthday

Holy cow, I forgot Jack's birthday. (Thanks, Casey.)

March 12, 1922, Ti Jean - Jack Kerouac - was born. Here I am in Florida, the state in which he drank his last drink, and I've done nothing to celebrate. I did go out to dinner, did have three pints, did come back to the hotel and have another beer, but nothing with Jack in mind.

So I must have another, drink it in the nude in honor of Jack. Um, OK, I'll just have a beer.

I get up and go to the fridge, struggle with the lousy bottle opener I have and crack the top off a bottle of Pacifico. I drink to you, Jack, where ever you are.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars�ll be out, and don�t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what�s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

The end of "On The Road"

MONDAY, MARCH 12
CLEARWATER, FLA.

Damn! My hotel does have HBO. Huh. Wish I�d found that out Sunday. Well, it was fun watching with David, but I could�ve caught some of their other fine programing. But it�s not totally my fault: The channel guide says it should be channel 67 or something, but it�s channel 7. Of course, I should�ve known they had it somewhere by the HBO program guide in the room. They don�t normally leave them around if they don�t offer HBO.

Tonight�s episode of �Undressed� has too much bad dialogue and not enough 20-year-old chicks in their underwear.

What the hell am I doing? I don�t watch this crap at home � why the hell am I watching it here? It must have been all the bronzed baseball babes I saw today.

I met David this morning at McCabe�s, a local breakfast joint owned and operated by a full-blooded, �Far And Away� accented Irish chap. The pancakes were perfect, filling me up so much that after my 10 a.m. breakfast, I did not eat again until returning to my hotel room at 4:30, and that was only crackers. Dinner was at Flanigan�s Irish Pub in Dunedin.

After breakfast, we went over to the Phillies complex, where the lowest minor leaguers were playing an exhibition game against a small college from Louisville, Kentucky. As it turned out in this small world, Dave went there his freshman year before being drafted into the Army. When he resumed his college career, he did so at Canisius in Buffalo. Dave shot some photos of the game � he actually knew the coach � and then I stretched out on the quiet bleachers on the other side of the complex to watch the higher Class A players finish their infield and batting practice drills. Then it was over to the Blue Jays complex at Dunedin where the two organizations� Class A teams would face each other this afternoon.

We were there early, and walking to the fields we saw a man and woman finishing their fast-food lunch underneath the shade of one of the few small trees near the diamonds. Their son was scheduled to pitch that afternoon, and Dave offered to take some pictures for the Texas couple, handing out his photo business cards and telling them he�d send them the prints once he developed them.

So I spent an afternoon in the sun, watching the first intersquad exhibition game between Phillies minor league players, some of whom will become Lakewood BlueClaws in April. It�s very hard to cover a team that does not have any players (for certain) yet. I�ve tried to explain to my bosses several times that the Phillies will not decide who�s coming to Lakewood until the last week of spring training. Still, they want me down here to cover a team that does not exist. I filed my story, taking care only to call the manager and coaches � the only definite ones � �BlueClaws,� because no one else is certain at this point. (Again, I�ve told them this.) Then I notice a message on the office computer system when I log on to add something to my story that asks if this is Lakewood. Well, if you�d read the story, you�d get the explanation. And if you�d listened to me recently, you�d understand. God. Some people.

A day in the sun � and my face shows it. I put on the sunscreen, but I guess five hours out beneath the UV rays is enough to thwart it. David and I went to dinner in tiny downtown Dunedin (Old Dunedin, not to be confused with ugly strip-mall Dunedin, which is like every ugly strip-mall city in Florida) at Flanigan�s. Dave�s Irish on his father�s side, Scottish on his mother�s. The pub was rather empty on a Monday night, with no live entertainment scheduled. Katie was our waitress, but we also chatted with red-headed Shannon Murphy, who refilled our drinks a couple of times. Dave�s the kind of guy who doesn�t give a shit what you think. At first, he may come off brash or rude, but give him a second and he�ll break into an infectious, low laugh that�ll have you smiling. A man passed us on his way to the restroom and said, �How you doing?� Dave replied, �Fine.�

�I was sitting at a bar like this one night,� Dave told me smiling, leaning back in his chair, one hand on his pint. �And a guy walked by and said, �How�s it going?� �None of your fucking business,� I said. I waited a minute and then started laughing. He said, �That�s the best answer anyone�s ever given,� he said.�

Dave also has an eye for photo opportunities. As well as being an outstanding sports photographer, he sees pictures in everything. I take an interest in it all because it�s my main hobby and the way he does it � taking his film to one-hour labs and all � is exactly how I would do it, if I wanted to go into that kind of work. As it is, I�m just happy with it as a hobby. Anyway, Dave showed me some pictures from a recent major league exhibition game in Tampa between the Yankees and Phillies. He had Mike Mussina on the mound, Pat Burrell at bat, and a few extra shots of buxom beauties in the stands. It�s Florida in March, so of course every other woman you see here is in a tank top or halter top. On his computer, he titled the photo �Two Pair.� You�d get a kick out of it too, if you were being shown these pictures by a happily married (30 years in July) white-haired Scottish-Irish photographer from the Jersey Shore.

I realized some years ago that I�m probably more likely to meet my future wife at a ballgame somewhere than at a bar anywhere. I�m more likely to strike up a conversation and have more in common with a gal stretched out on the bleachers or sitting back in a plastic ballpark seat than I am with a chick dressed up for the night, holding a cigarette while she waits for another drink. Just looking at a girl at a baseball game makes her a little more attractive to me. I had the good fortune of sitting downwind from a sweet-smelling leggy blonde this afternoon, and it made the day on the hard, metal bleachers in the hot, relentless sun a little more bearable. I don�t care that it was the centerfielder�s girlfriend or that it might have only been her shampoo that made her smell so good, it made my day just a little better.

Tomorrow my plan is to sleep in � until about 10 a.m. I might go for a morning swim when I wake up, before heading over to the Phillies complex for the afternoon game against the Blue Jays.

And I�m getting paid for this? Damn.

I close with a joke, as told by David, the Irish-Scottish photographer:

Three women are talking about their boyfriends. One says, �If you had to name your man after a soft drink, what would it be? My man is 7up, because he�s got seven and it�s up all the time.�

The second plays along: �My man is Mountain Dew, because when he mounts me, he do it right.�

The third claims, �My man is Jack Daniels.�

The other two are confused. �Jack Daniels?� they say. �That�s not a soft drink, that�s a hard liquor.�

�That�s right!� the third woman says.

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