It was one of those lazy summer nights after 10 p.m. in the Dramestic bag room. The kind of night where the only thing heavier than the baggage was the boredom. Just four of us left: NoSlack the Lead, Barfload, Rocky McYap, and me, Stan the Innocent (don’t let the court records tell you otherwise).
The bagroom roll-up doors? Wide open.
The breeze? Glorious.
The work ethic? Missing in action.
Barfload had just finished delivering a final suitcase to a plane heading somewhere irrelevant. He came back, ditched the jitney just outside the bagroom like it was a hot dog wrapper, and declared, “Let’s play some BASEBALL!”
Now, we didn’t have an actual bat. What we did have was a broken chock, split right down the middle like an airline’s budget. We taped a handle on it using that infamously defective “might-as-well-be-bubblegum” tape from Stores. For the ball? A rolled-up wad of duct tape. Major League Garbage.
I stepped up to the plate. NoSlack took the mound (which in this case was a pile of unscanned duffels). He pitched. I hit moonshots out the door. It was going great… until he smirked and said:
“Last pitch. Watch the change-up!”
He threw some off-speed junk, I swung like Babe Ruth having a seizure, and the bat—ahem, chock—launched out of my hands like it had a mind of its own.
CRASH.
Right through the front windshield of the parked jitney.
DOUBLE CRASH.
Out the back windshield too. Like a bat-shaped missile on a mission from chaos.
Glass. Everywhere. Silence. Until…
Rocky sprang into action like a foul-mouthed boy scout on Red Bull.
“BARFLOAD! Hide the evidence!”
“STAN! Wipe your greasy fingerprints off that thing!”
“NoSlack! Pretend like you’re doing your job!”
“ME? I’ll scream at everyone till they do it!”
Barfload swept glass like it was going out of style. I buffed that steering wheel like I was cleaning up for CSI. NoSlack buried himself in load sheets pretending not to know us.
Then I, Stan the Oblivious, drove the busted, glass-crunching jitney to the millwrights in total stealth mode… by which I mean no headlights and a heart rate of 240 bpm. I ditched the chock in a garbage bin near Gate 101 like it was a mafia hit.
Next morning, NoSlack was back on shift when a voice crackled over the radio:
“Uh… has anyone seen Jitney #42?”
To this day, I still laugh at how fast Rocky snapped into crisis mode. Like MacGyver. If MacGyver yelled a lot and didn’t wear deodorant.
Moral of the story:
Don’t bring a taped chock to a bagroom baseball game.
Also, never let Stan the Innocent bat clean-up.
