Mailbox Baseball

I was reminded this morning of a rather shameful memory. I feel a little guilty.

In my teener days, I was once one of a mob of irresponsible hooligans who thought it was funny to drive up and down the rural routes and bash mailboxes with baseball bats.

I have no real excuse other than "it was a small town, we had nothing to do, and I was not properly supervised.” But the fact is, I was old enough to know better, and enough of a jackass that I went out and did it anyway. I regret this, now that I'm a graybeard with a lawn and everything.

I'm pretty sure we were responsible for at least two home projects on one rural route, both involving building brick cairns, in which mailboxes were embedded. Sure, we could have dealt with them, but dynamite's hard to get and tricky to use, particularly when drunk and driving at high speeds, right?

But I do remember one particular incident in which we went whizzing past the El Indio apartments. It was an apartment complex, out in the middle of nowhere, some two or three miles out of town. And they had a STRING of mailboxes, all mounted side by side on a two-by-four, mounted at the proper height for the mailman. We'd smashed several off the board at once, and my friend Loopy had a secret ambition of being able to clear the entire board with one big swipe as we drove by.

We'd necessitated the reconstruction and replacement of the mailbox frameworks twice, now. And still, we persisted. We only did this once every six weeks or so, and the idea of closed circuit cameras ... well, they'd been invented and were in use, but they were a distant, futuristic thing, in use to protect banks and government secret projects, not ratty little apartments in rural areas. We felt safe enough.

Until the night Candy went to bat.

Candy was a short guy, and had as clear a case of Napoleon Syndrome as ever I'd seen, and he swore he was going to clear that stinkin' board of every mailbox in one swipe. This would recharge his masculinity for at least two, three days, right? And of course, he was drunk as a lord at the time. He regarded Jack Daniels as man fuel.

We cruised past the apartments. The mailboxes were there. And they were still mounted on a framework that looked like a hitching post... but we noticed that the hitching post was now made of welded steel pipe as big around as my leg, and sunk into the ground in cement. But there was a long two-by-four atop it, with the mailboxes screwed down to the wood. We were still good to go. We drove a ways, drinking merrily all the way, and made our way back to that particular road... and then Loopy hit the gas. Thirty, forty, fifty miles an hour...

Candy climbed up and sat in the passenger window. The bat was ready. And the boy was quite spifflicated. I guess it says something that not a one of us saw any kind of potential disaster in this. Indeed, looking back, I am ashamed of our foolishness. We got up to about sixty, and Candy braced himself... and swung.

WHANG.

Candy vanished. It was as he'd been snatched out of the car by Godzilla, or blasted out an airlock. He was yanked out so hard and fast, one of his sneakers spun in the air, and landed in my lap. Whatthehell?

Loopy hit the brakes, but at that speed, we'd gone nearly a hundred yards before he could stop, reverse, and get back to where Candy lay in the gravel, beside the road, BEHIND the mailboxes. The mailboxes were completely undamaged. He'd gone flying. Whatthehell?

It was Lightnin' who figured it out. He opened the mailbox on the end, the one Candy had smacked. It was full of cement. We later found out that the owner of the place had got fed up, and after having the steel pipe framework made, had obtained a mailbox, drilled a hole in the bottom, inserted several rebars through it, filled the mailbox with concrete... and then inserted the rebars through a hole in the two-by-four and into the cement filled steel pipe. Smacking that thing with an aluminum ball bat must have been like smacking a brick wall. And Candy had done it at 55 miles an hour.... with all the drunken strength he could muster.

Amazingly, Candy was relatively undamaged; I'd have laid odds he'd have broken his arms or spine with the impact, or worse when he landed from a car traveling 55. We pondered calling for help; one should not move an injured person. So, like idiots, we grabbed him and stuffed him (and a noticeably bent aluminum bat) into the car as lights came on up at the apartment building, and we vanished into the night.

Candy survived just fine, although he wrenched his back real good, and his face looked rather interesting as a result of having landed on it fairly hard on a gravel shoulder. Astonishingly, his nose was not broken. He did report his arms feeling rather painfully noodly for days afterwards, due to a series of sprains that would have sidelined any footballer. I personally attribute it to his profound state of intoxication, as it's a known fact that a drunk can take an impact that'd squash a sober person like a tomato; I'm quite sure Candy was still idly wondering what had gone wrong as his face hit the gravel.

Mailbox Baseball kind of lost its appeal after that, and we meekly moved on to safer entertainments.

The lesson was clear: some folks can get sticky about their private property... and sometimes, karma bites back.

Take from this what you will.