Before During Bill Vaughn’s Incredible Butt-Kicking Machine While I try to get my body in shape for sport by stretching and running, followed by a nice Bombay martini for the heart, I discovered that the best way to prepare my mind for competition is the Incredible Butt- Kicking Machine (patent pending). On the day before a tennis match, for example, I’ll slip on my Butt-Kicker, crank the kicks-per-minute gauge to a leisurely four or five, and go about my business with a regular reminder of what I have to do to whip the guy on the other side of the net. It’s a sort of note-to-self, without the relentless monky-business of putting up sticky-backs all over the place. The Hunger Artistes 7 The Hunger Artistes It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle. But it’s the mathematical potential for a single game to last forever, in a suspended world where no clock rules the day, that aligns baseball as much with the dead as the living. And so one tempestuous afternoon in May it seemed right and proper that we should spend three hours at Chicago’s Wrigley Field, home of the much-loved Cubs, then drive through twenty miles of urban wasteland to a vast necropolis called St. Mary’s Cemetery in order to search among the graves for a former midget named Eddie Gaedel. The drizzle was chilled and the wind was gusting, but we were snug and perfectly self-contained units, zipped up as we were in our Amazing and Versatile Food Suits (patent pend- ing). And this was why the Mexican groundskeeper and his wife were staring at us wide-eyed from the safety of their pickup. Poking among the headstones, our hoods up to keep our heads dry, our suits gleaming white even in the demi-light, we looked a little like ghosts, and a lot like toxic waste workers. Although I had long since quaffed all the beer in my Brew Bladder, I still had enough icy Bombay in the flask stored in my Cold Pocket for a very satisfying martini. And the Chicago-style Brat I’d 8 First, a little Chee-Chee Then, as I was pouring draft into the bladder strapped around my chest, two thirty-something sisters in blue Cubs caps began reading in unison the words silk-screened on our backs. “Ask me about the Amazing and Versatile Food Suit,” they chanted, lingering on the last two words, possibly because they were formed from graphics of sliced melons, cheeseburgers, and franks. When we turned around to face them they began laughing. But as we unwound our spiel, walking them through the many fine features of the Suit, they became all-business. “But dis, dis is just wrong,” the shorter one said in that caustic, sibilant accent you can only acquire by growing up within an El ride of the Loop. “What is?” Victor asked. She patted the Spalding out- fielder’s glove attached to a clip on my chest. “See, you’d never get dat mitt offa dare in time to snag a foul.” “Yeah, you gotta get dat glove on a bungee,” the taller one said. “Sumpin dat stretches. Udderwise, yer gonna take one upside da noggin.” Victor and I stared at each other. Insights like this, demon- strations of how little the minds of two self-absorbed middle- aged men can accomplish, even when given a limited task and years to finish it, were exactly why we had decided to take the Food Suit to the people. Another woman in the clot of fans who had gathered around us stepped forward to get a better look at the Brew Bladder. “At last,” she said, nodding her head in approval, making the storm of Irish-red hair there shudder like a prairie fire. “Some- body’s done something interesting with catheters.” At this point in our development plan the bladder was actually only a cheap medical product called a “center entry bedside drainage bag.” “Of course, it’s just a model,” I offered. “Our bag will be insulated and a whole lot bigger.” The Hunger Artistes 9 packed into my Hot Pocket was, indeed, still toasty, although I wished then that I had refilled my Condiment Dispenser with more of that good deli mustard they lay on at the ball park. Victor Lieberman was sipping a vile blend of Cuervo and Coca-Cola from his suck tube, and snacking on the Pig Sand- wich he’d bought at Wrigley on the way out. Although the Food Suit was still a flawed invention we re-created every time we put it on, we were exuberant about the excellent results of the day’s shakedown cruise. While the purveyors of sports cars and cologne paid focus groups to determine how best to peddle their wares, the Food Suit guys went forth boldly into the maw, the very stadiums where we intended our product would be used. Here we harvested ideas from its actual future customers, the fans who would joyously wear the Suit themselves one day or buy it for their loved ones. Although possessed by a random and antic genius, Lieber- man is no different than me—he puts his Food Suit on one leg at a time. And when we’re done putting our Food Suits on one leg at a time, filling our Brew Bladders with beer, stuffing our Hot Pockets with grilled meats and our Cold Pockets with dessert, then topping our flasks with liquor and securing our outfielder’s gloves to our persons, we are better prepared for a day at the ballpark than any other baseball fans in the world. And the way they had been staring—those Cubs fans streaming by us toward the gates of Wrigley—they seemed to know they were in the presence of a bleacher revolution. “You got balls, man,” a twenty-something thug had in- formed us the moment we stepped through the turnstile into the friendly confines. “Coming in here like that.” I had the sense that this guy, who was built in the statuesque manner of Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa, might enjoy taking a swing at me. But when he stepped closer and I flinched, he only smiled. “I got to have me one of them.” 10 First, a little Chee-Chee don’t think you’d much care for. Or—” “Depends,” Victor said. “Depends on what?” Red said. “No, the adult diaper.” “You’re wearing a diaper?” “They’re great,” Victor said. “Wicks moisture away from your skin. And I would say it has a ten-beer capacity. End of the day you just toss it.” “This is what fly fishermen back home in Montana wear,” I explained. “They put on a Depends, slip into their sweats, pull on their waders, load up their float tube with brewski, and fish away.” Red was sold. “You on the Web?” “Go to foodsuit-dot-com,” Victor said. There is, of course, nothing new under the sun. Innovations are simply rearrangements of the same old matter, or more of the same old matter heaped on. Take the Mach3 razor, for example. Or Big Bertha, the golf club. Meld a picnic basket with a cooler, refabricate this hybrid into a garment, and you’ve got the Food Suit. Apply for a patent and suddenly the Food Suit is an in- vention that at least on paper is as capable of transforming the world of garments as much as Ron Popeil’s Vegematic changed the act of chopping. Our idea was born in a sudden drugged brainstorm that struck Victor and myself in 1981, a year after we met during a poker game at his Studio City condo on the other side of Hol- lywood. We were following the Freeway Series, a California classic pitting the Dodgers against the Angels in the best of three preseason games. We’d driven to Palm Springs for game one, where I had yelled out to Reggie Jackson how sharp he looked, and the Angels’ famous designated hitter had yelled The Hunger Artistes 11 “In order to get by the two-beer rule,” Victor added. This announcement met with general merriment. In May of 1999, when 75 fans were ejected from Wrigley after the bleacher bums littered the field with garbage in response to an umpire’s bad call, Cubs ownership announced that brewski sales would be limited to two per customer instead of the previous four. But since you could always go back to the concessions for another double, and many fans enjoyed getting hammered before the game at sprawling sports bars in the neighborhood such as the Cubbie Bear, the rule was widely considered a joke. Just two days before our visit to Wrigley, during a night game Victor had attended, a drunken Cubbie fan had leaned over the short wall beside the enemy’s bull pen, and allegedly punched Dodger catcher Chad Kreuter in the back of the head before snatching the man’s cap. Kreuter responded by going into the stands after the guy. When the rest of the bullpen waded in as well, where they were instantly soaked with beer and ice and pelted with food, a hockey-like flurry of fists ensued resulting in the arrests of three civilians and the suspension of 19 Dodger players and coaches, although the league chickened out and overturned 12 of those suspensions a month later.