A nice, quiet place for a drink.
“One of the most endearing things about baseball history is that it’s so packed with bullshit.” –John Thorn, MLB official historian
Joe Marty’s is a small-ish little bar and grill stuffed to the gills with baseball memorabilia located on a hobo-strewn, dusty section of Broadway in Sacramento, California. It isn’t uncommon to see a few meth needles lying around; the old Chinese ladies with shopping carts and straw hats are oblivious to the nefarious items as they go about their business of poking stray cans from garbage bins in filth infested alleys. This street was the hip place to be at one time, high school kids would cruise in low riders up and down the street trying to hook up with a hot girl or guy, but that was 40 years ago.
There used to be a P.C.L. ballpark a few blocks away, but a wayward cigarette caught fire with a peanut and, poof, up it went in a ball of flames in 1948: a metaphor for a city that can, like a petulant child, never seem to take care of the nice things that it gets. Today, a Target store sits where the ballpark used to be, with the bodies of the forefathers of the city neatly tucked away in the earth for over 150 years in the cemetery across the street.
I was at Joe’s for Game 7 when the Cubbies finally kicked the billygoat in the face and won their first World Series in over 100 years– not the first American institution to be seemingly forever mired in a curse, as this seems to be the lot in life for the rich just much as the poor in a heartless, money-hungry mechanism such as ours. Erstwhile, they say every dog has their day, and I had a shit-eating grin on my face as the swarms of Cubs fans jumped around me in transcendent jubilation: and as someone who enjoys seeing a rarity such as pure and unadulterated glee, I was also enjoying it historically as something more rare than Haley’s Comet or a sober Irishman. I felt that I was a kindred spirit to the ghosts that had suffered with this team and were no doubt sleeping more peacefully even though their lives had been long forgotten. I drunkenly kissed an Indians fan clad in Chief Wahoo amid the fracas although she was too young too know Albert Belle and didn’t seem too be broken up about the game. I wonder if she was from Cleveland?
This is my goodbye letter. See you later Sacramento.
