The Pancake Batter
The Pancake Batter is doomed. He is going to fail tonight, everyone will cheer, and I will be inspired by all of this to write a book about a bunch of mutant telekinetics in Orlando, Florida. The Pancake Batter is ignorant of all of this. To him, at this moment, it just seems like a good night to play baseball. Honestly, I don’t even know he exists yet, and I’m probably in line for a pretzel.
The Pancake Batter is a twenty year-old prospect playing for the Staten Island Yankees, a minor league team playing in Coney Island on a Friday evening against the Brooklyn Cyclones. The Cyclones, cruel masters of fate, have deemed him the Pancake Batter for the evening. The significance being that if he strikes out three times, everyone in the stadium can exchange their ticket at the International House of Pancakes for free pancakes. Everyone wants him to fail, because everyone loves free pancakes.
He steps up to the plate, ready to disappoint these fans. Strike one. Strike Two. Strike Three swinging. He strikes out because no one can run from fate, especially not the Pancake Batter.
********************
My new novel, Orlando People, centers on a young woman, Gretch, who like many born in Orlando in the early 1980s, later developed the power to move objects with her mind. Gretch, however, is a dud, only able to lift small items a couple feet above her head. And only while sitting. Her life is a series of disappointments and disasters. Shaquille O’Neal leaves her beloved Orlando Magic, her father goes to prison, and her whole life seems headed down the drain. Then she witnesses a murder and is drawn into a conspiracy that puts her and her city in imminent peril. To say the novel and everything in it are inspired by one minor league baseball game I watched is untrue. It is a story about my hometown. I was born in Florida Hospital Orlando. I am a proud alum of JCC Preschool in Maitland, Altamonte Elementary, Milwee Middle School, and Lyman High School. There are hundreds of tiny moments, maybe thousands, that all sparked something in this book.
Here’s one:
May 1992: I know I watched the NBA Draft Lottery where Orlando won the first pick and the opportunity to draft Shaq, but I don’t remember it. Maybe I was in the living room. I’m sure I threw my arms in the air and hollered with joy. Seems likely, but that memory is hidden away somewhere. The one that sticks with me is the day after, sitting in my father’s car as he drove me to school. My fifth grade year, I caught rides with him on his way to work because I wanted to get there early to assist the PE teachers setting up the equipment. After my fellow helpers and I finished, they let us grab basketballs and play on the outdoor courts until school started. I usually got in about 45 minutes of gametime, my newly pubescent self likely walking into class smelling like an old gym bag.
A few years earlier when it was explained to me that Orlando was getting an NBA team, I asked multiple versions of “Are you sure that’s right?” because I could not imagine Orlando being significant enough to merit that. I loved my Magic from before Day One. I loved Terry Catledge and Sam Vincent and Scott Skiles and Mark Acres and Reggie Theus and Nick Anderson. They were a very bad team. But, then Shaq.
With all the memories of the Magic, all the games I went to, monster dunks I cheered, and playoff games where I shouted my face off next to my Dad, I remember the car ride best. The anticipation of the thing. The idea that my team and my town would matter and that I was going to talk to my friends about it in just a few minutes.
********************
The Pancake Batter stands at the plate again in the top of the fourth inning. There is hope. He is leading off the inning and his team is up 3-0. He will not strike out this time. He will hit that ball so hard it will rip the seams and shake the earth and cause the awful moniker they gave him for the evening to disintegrate. He bumps the ball harmlessly to the third baseman, who throws him out at first without drama.
The crowd, seeing their hopes for three strikeouts diminished, boos. I turn to my friends and ask, “Why’s everybody mad at that dude?”
********************
And here is another:
I left Orlando in 1999 to attend the University of Florida, graduated in 2003, and then had no clue what I was going to do. I accepted a job selling water purifiers in Gainesville before I decided it was a scam and quit ten minutes after accepting the offer. I nearly had a job at a chain bookstore, but they gave me a psychological profile to fill out and I failed it. I am, apparently, a danger. I found a job as a paraprofessional at a school for kids Grades 3-8 with communication disorders. Too dangerous for books, just right for small children.
Among my duties, I had to supervise recess. The kids played basketball on a 10 by 10 slab of concrete with a rickety rim definitely not set a regulation height. After a few weeks of watching what, to my eyes, looked much more like rugby, I decided to start a basketball team. Ten kids signed up, and we joined the YMCA league. We were terrible. Genuinely very bad. All of us. I was a bad coach, the kids were still learning the rules of the game.
We all loved it.
My kids loved being the school’s team. They named themselves the Hawks because they believed the bird on the school’s logo was a hawk. When I told the principal that, she said, “Eagles. The school is the Eagles.” I said, “Well, we’re the Hawks.” They lost every single one of their first six games. We lost to a team that only had four kids show up. We lost and then we ate pizza. It was great.
And then Game Seven. We held a slim leading with time ticking down. The opposing team dribbled to half court ready to set up a play to destroy our hopes. Our best player gambled on a pass and won, stealing it, driving the length of the floor and sealing the win. A few moments later the buzzer sounded and my kids stormed the court. I should mention, this is not normal for a regular season 6-8 grade YMCA rec league game. Win or lose, you just get in line, shake your opponents’ hands, and say “Good game.” That’s it.
“Guys!” I yelled. “Guys! Everybody! Stop! We have to shake hands.” After a few more moments where I realized the kids were only getting more amped as they sprinted back and forth across the floor, I shouted, “Guys! It’s not the Super Bowl!”
A sixth grader, one whom I said seen grow in maturity and confidence over the season ran right up to me and said, “It feels like the Super Bowl.”
I’m gonna hold onto that one forever. But with that, I have to hold onto a moment a few months later, when I gathered the players from the team in a classroom to tell them I was moving to New York, that someone else would have to coach the team next year. I told them before I told my coworkers. I told them before I told most of my friends. Eight years after Shaq left to go to Los Angeles and I felt betrayed, I was choosing my life and career over these kids. I try to remember if I realized that in that moment or if just feels like I should have looking back.
********************
All the Pancake Batter has to do is not strike out in the top of the sixth and he will spoil everyone’s evening. His team is up 4-0, and while it does not seem like anyone in the crowd is concerned about the outcome of this game, it would likely feel pretty sweet to get a home run in this spot with a runner on to give them a dominant 6-0 lead. It would be highly unlikely that the Pancake Batter would get two more at bats, so not striking out here would rip those delicious pancakes out of the mouths of all the Cyclones fans rooting for him to fail.
He watches the ball go past him. Just looks at it go by as the umpire yells, “Strike!” and he is out. Perhaps he thinks to himself, “Probably shoulda swung at that one.” But, regardless, it is too late. The Pancake Better has struck out for the second time and has made a date with destiny for his next at-bat.
“He’s a what?” I ask someone.
“Pancake Batter,” they say.
“What’s a Pancake Batter?” I ask, but I can’t hear the answer because everyone is cheering too loud at his strike out and I don’t care enough to ask again.
********************
Here’s another one: I was not in Orlando for the housing collapse, but it struck in a way that hurt so many people I cared about. No, it destroyed people. I don’t even really like discussing it, other than to say that I have never appreciated the descriptions of Orlando as a shallow tourist trap. The collapse and hardship that followed showed the resilience of Central Florida, something its residents have had to show too many times in recent years.
The moment that sticks in my head, the moment I revisit at least once a week since it first happened in late 2007 was when my mom, who worked for a home builder in Seminole County, called me and said that her company was laying people off. That they kept laying people off. This was before the major financial collapses, before Bear Stearns. I said to her, and this is another one that will never leave me, “It’s gotta turn around. It’s not like people are going to stop buying houses.” A few weeks later the owners of the company decided to fold the business while they could still pay severance to the remaining employees and my mother spent the next year and a half looking for work.
********************
Everyone is on their feet for the Pancake Batter. It is the top of the ninth. The last chance for him to strike-out. Every fan in the stadium is screaming at the top of their lungs. What had been for the last few hours a chill July evening has transformed into raucous gladiator sport, the crowd feverishly chanting for the demise of the Pancake Batter.
Foul ball, strike one. Caught the corner, strike two.
“Everybody gets pancakes if he strikes out?” I ask.
“Yeah!” someone shouts in my ear. “At IHOP!”
I join the crowd, adding the volume of my voice to theirs. The Pancake Batter waits on a pitch, it slips past him, and the crowd pauses, only to the see the Umpire signal “Ball.” We demand his blood. The Pancake Batter fouls off the next pitch, and all of us feel it. We have reached the Singularity. That moment when the Pancake Batter ceases to be potential and becomes what he is meant to be. He swings defiantly at the air as the ball sneaks past him. Strike Three.
I have seen buzzer beaters, walk-off home runs, miracle Hail Mary touchdowns. I have never seen anything like the crowd at MCU Park in Coney Island when the Pancake Batter records his third strike-out. It is joy and relief and triumph and realization of dreams come true.
I watch the Pancake Batter walk back to the dugout and I think about how odd it must be to be so gifted only to fail like this. To be one of the top 1% of baseball players in the entire world, and end up the butt of a joke for a bunch of pancake-loving monsters like us. This man was good enough to play professional baseball, but not good enough to make AA or AAA, not even sniffing the Majors. I empathize with him. I think of my time writing sketch comedy in New York and seeing some people go on to work big-time TV jobs while others, some of the funniest and most talented people I ever met in my life, never got a break. Extraordinary people made to feel ordinary. I want to write about someone with a gift that has made them feel small.
The night after the game I am in an Uber, headed from the Lower East Side to Far Rockaway, the final leg of this weekend’s bachelor party. One of them has brought a young lady he is seeing and she is ripping the life out of everyone else in the car.
“Babe!” she says in a bizarre and exaggerated accent, possible mocking something I don’t recognize or maybe this is just her thing. “Babe!” she repeats.
“Yes,” my friend says.
“Oh my God, babe!”
“She’s doing a bit,” my friend says to me.
I nod. She is loud and drunk and angry at every mention my friend makes of any other female. “She sounds fat!” She then goes on for several minutes about someone she hates and we are assured this other person is very awful as she breaks the narrative to yell, “Babe! Babe!”
It is a fifty minute drive from the Lower East Side to Far Rockaway.
In the midst of another tale, halfway to our destination, she offhandedly says, “When I was at Stetson-”
I interrupt immediately and ask, “Wait, are you Orlando People?”
I look back from the front seat to see a shocked look, almost as though I had outed her as a jewel thief and slapped cuffs on her. She is frozen until she, in her normal human voice, says, “What?”
“Stetson,” I say. That’s outside Orlando. Are you Orlando People?”
After a fascinatingly long pause, she answers, “Yes.”
I checked and the Pancake Batter is still playing baseball, still Single A Minor League, but now for the Charleston Riverdogs. I searched for more about him and I found a tweet from the team with video of him about to walk up to bat after hitting a home run his last time up. The camera pans to a group of young boys watching and cheering him on. “We love you!” one of them shouts.
A theme in all my books is that success and failure are situational. Some of us find the right place and the right people. Orlando People is about those of us for whom Orlando is the right place. Gretch, the main character, has a tattoo on her arm, with words from an Italian epic poem called Orlando Furioso. It roughly translates to “I sing of ladies and knights and weapons and love and chivalry.” Well, I sing to you of Publix subs and timeshares, eternally unfinished skyscrapers and personal injury attorneys, of bad traffic and worse humidity, Shaq and Penny, alligators and strip malls, of a town that is just as weird as people think but far stronger than it gets credit for. I sing of Orlando People, and I hope you’ll check it out.
The Pancake Batter is a twenty year-old prospect playing for the Staten Island Yankees, a minor league team playing in Coney Island on a Friday evening against the Brooklyn Cyclones. The Cyclones, cruel masters of fate, have deemed him the Pancake Batter for the evening. The significance being that if he strikes out three times, everyone in the stadium can exchange their ticket at the International House of Pancakes for free pancakes. Everyone wants him to fail, because everyone loves free pancakes.
He steps up to the plate, ready to disappoint these fans. Strike one. Strike Two. Strike Three swinging. He strikes out because no one can run from fate, especially not the Pancake Batter.
********************
My new novel, Orlando People, centers on a young woman, Gretch, who like many born in Orlando in the early 1980s, later developed the power to move objects with her mind. Gretch, however, is a dud, only able to lift small items a couple feet above her head. And only while sitting. Her life is a series of disappointments and disasters. Shaquille O’Neal leaves her beloved Orlando Magic, her father goes to prison, and her whole life seems headed down the drain. Then she witnesses a murder and is drawn into a conspiracy that puts her and her city in imminent peril. To say the novel and everything in it are inspired by one minor league baseball game I watched is untrue. It is a story about my hometown. I was born in Florida Hospital Orlando. I am a proud alum of JCC Preschool in Maitland, Altamonte Elementary, Milwee Middle School, and Lyman High School. There are hundreds of tiny moments, maybe thousands, that all sparked something in this book.
Here’s one:
May 1992: I know I watched the NBA Draft Lottery where Orlando won the first pick and the opportunity to draft Shaq, but I don’t remember it. Maybe I was in the living room. I’m sure I threw my arms in the air and hollered with joy. Seems likely, but that memory is hidden away somewhere. The one that sticks with me is the day after, sitting in my father’s car as he drove me to school. My fifth grade year, I caught rides with him on his way to work because I wanted to get there early to assist the PE teachers setting up the equipment. After my fellow helpers and I finished, they let us grab basketballs and play on the outdoor courts until school started. I usually got in about 45 minutes of gametime, my newly pubescent self likely walking into class smelling like an old gym bag.
A few years earlier when it was explained to me that Orlando was getting an NBA team, I asked multiple versions of “Are you sure that’s right?” because I could not imagine Orlando being significant enough to merit that. I loved my Magic from before Day One. I loved Terry Catledge and Sam Vincent and Scott Skiles and Mark Acres and Reggie Theus and Nick Anderson. They were a very bad team. But, then Shaq.
With all the memories of the Magic, all the games I went to, monster dunks I cheered, and playoff games where I shouted my face off next to my Dad, I remember the car ride best. The anticipation of the thing. The idea that my team and my town would matter and that I was going to talk to my friends about it in just a few minutes.
********************
The Pancake Batter stands at the plate again in the top of the fourth inning. There is hope. He is leading off the inning and his team is up 3-0. He will not strike out this time. He will hit that ball so hard it will rip the seams and shake the earth and cause the awful moniker they gave him for the evening to disintegrate. He bumps the ball harmlessly to the third baseman, who throws him out at first without drama.
The crowd, seeing their hopes for three strikeouts diminished, boos. I turn to my friends and ask, “Why’s everybody mad at that dude?”
********************
And here is another:
I left Orlando in 1999 to attend the University of Florida, graduated in 2003, and then had no clue what I was going to do. I accepted a job selling water purifiers in Gainesville before I decided it was a scam and quit ten minutes after accepting the offer. I nearly had a job at a chain bookstore, but they gave me a psychological profile to fill out and I failed it. I am, apparently, a danger. I found a job as a paraprofessional at a school for kids Grades 3-8 with communication disorders. Too dangerous for books, just right for small children.
Among my duties, I had to supervise recess. The kids played basketball on a 10 by 10 slab of concrete with a rickety rim definitely not set a regulation height. After a few weeks of watching what, to my eyes, looked much more like rugby, I decided to start a basketball team. Ten kids signed up, and we joined the YMCA league. We were terrible. Genuinely very bad. All of us. I was a bad coach, the kids were still learning the rules of the game.
We all loved it.
My kids loved being the school’s team. They named themselves the Hawks because they believed the bird on the school’s logo was a hawk. When I told the principal that, she said, “Eagles. The school is the Eagles.” I said, “Well, we’re the Hawks.” They lost every single one of their first six games. We lost to a team that only had four kids show up. We lost and then we ate pizza. It was great.
And then Game Seven. We held a slim leading with time ticking down. The opposing team dribbled to half court ready to set up a play to destroy our hopes. Our best player gambled on a pass and won, stealing it, driving the length of the floor and sealing the win. A few moments later the buzzer sounded and my kids stormed the court. I should mention, this is not normal for a regular season 6-8 grade YMCA rec league game. Win or lose, you just get in line, shake your opponents’ hands, and say “Good game.” That’s it.
“Guys!” I yelled. “Guys! Everybody! Stop! We have to shake hands.” After a few more moments where I realized the kids were only getting more amped as they sprinted back and forth across the floor, I shouted, “Guys! It’s not the Super Bowl!”
A sixth grader, one whom I said seen grow in maturity and confidence over the season ran right up to me and said, “It feels like the Super Bowl.”
I’m gonna hold onto that one forever. But with that, I have to hold onto a moment a few months later, when I gathered the players from the team in a classroom to tell them I was moving to New York, that someone else would have to coach the team next year. I told them before I told my coworkers. I told them before I told most of my friends. Eight years after Shaq left to go to Los Angeles and I felt betrayed, I was choosing my life and career over these kids. I try to remember if I realized that in that moment or if just feels like I should have looking back.
********************
All the Pancake Batter has to do is not strike out in the top of the sixth and he will spoil everyone’s evening. His team is up 4-0, and while it does not seem like anyone in the crowd is concerned about the outcome of this game, it would likely feel pretty sweet to get a home run in this spot with a runner on to give them a dominant 6-0 lead. It would be highly unlikely that the Pancake Batter would get two more at bats, so not striking out here would rip those delicious pancakes out of the mouths of all the Cyclones fans rooting for him to fail.
He watches the ball go past him. Just looks at it go by as the umpire yells, “Strike!” and he is out. Perhaps he thinks to himself, “Probably shoulda swung at that one.” But, regardless, it is too late. The Pancake Better has struck out for the second time and has made a date with destiny for his next at-bat.
“He’s a what?” I ask someone.
“Pancake Batter,” they say.
“What’s a Pancake Batter?” I ask, but I can’t hear the answer because everyone is cheering too loud at his strike out and I don’t care enough to ask again.
********************
Here’s another one: I was not in Orlando for the housing collapse, but it struck in a way that hurt so many people I cared about. No, it destroyed people. I don’t even really like discussing it, other than to say that I have never appreciated the descriptions of Orlando as a shallow tourist trap. The collapse and hardship that followed showed the resilience of Central Florida, something its residents have had to show too many times in recent years.
The moment that sticks in my head, the moment I revisit at least once a week since it first happened in late 2007 was when my mom, who worked for a home builder in Seminole County, called me and said that her company was laying people off. That they kept laying people off. This was before the major financial collapses, before Bear Stearns. I said to her, and this is another one that will never leave me, “It’s gotta turn around. It’s not like people are going to stop buying houses.” A few weeks later the owners of the company decided to fold the business while they could still pay severance to the remaining employees and my mother spent the next year and a half looking for work.
********************
Everyone is on their feet for the Pancake Batter. It is the top of the ninth. The last chance for him to strike-out. Every fan in the stadium is screaming at the top of their lungs. What had been for the last few hours a chill July evening has transformed into raucous gladiator sport, the crowd feverishly chanting for the demise of the Pancake Batter.
Foul ball, strike one. Caught the corner, strike two.
“Everybody gets pancakes if he strikes out?” I ask.
“Yeah!” someone shouts in my ear. “At IHOP!”
I join the crowd, adding the volume of my voice to theirs. The Pancake Batter waits on a pitch, it slips past him, and the crowd pauses, only to the see the Umpire signal “Ball.” We demand his blood. The Pancake Batter fouls off the next pitch, and all of us feel it. We have reached the Singularity. That moment when the Pancake Batter ceases to be potential and becomes what he is meant to be. He swings defiantly at the air as the ball sneaks past him. Strike Three.
I have seen buzzer beaters, walk-off home runs, miracle Hail Mary touchdowns. I have never seen anything like the crowd at MCU Park in Coney Island when the Pancake Batter records his third strike-out. It is joy and relief and triumph and realization of dreams come true.
I watch the Pancake Batter walk back to the dugout and I think about how odd it must be to be so gifted only to fail like this. To be one of the top 1% of baseball players in the entire world, and end up the butt of a joke for a bunch of pancake-loving monsters like us. This man was good enough to play professional baseball, but not good enough to make AA or AAA, not even sniffing the Majors. I empathize with him. I think of my time writing sketch comedy in New York and seeing some people go on to work big-time TV jobs while others, some of the funniest and most talented people I ever met in my life, never got a break. Extraordinary people made to feel ordinary. I want to write about someone with a gift that has made them feel small.
The night after the game I am in an Uber, headed from the Lower East Side to Far Rockaway, the final leg of this weekend’s bachelor party. One of them has brought a young lady he is seeing and she is ripping the life out of everyone else in the car.
“Babe!” she says in a bizarre and exaggerated accent, possible mocking something I don’t recognize or maybe this is just her thing. “Babe!” she repeats.
“Yes,” my friend says.
“Oh my God, babe!”
“She’s doing a bit,” my friend says to me.
I nod. She is loud and drunk and angry at every mention my friend makes of any other female. “She sounds fat!” She then goes on for several minutes about someone she hates and we are assured this other person is very awful as she breaks the narrative to yell, “Babe! Babe!”
It is a fifty minute drive from the Lower East Side to Far Rockaway.
In the midst of another tale, halfway to our destination, she offhandedly says, “When I was at Stetson-”
I interrupt immediately and ask, “Wait, are you Orlando People?”
I look back from the front seat to see a shocked look, almost as though I had outed her as a jewel thief and slapped cuffs on her. She is frozen until she, in her normal human voice, says, “What?”
“Stetson,” I say. That’s outside Orlando. Are you Orlando People?”
After a fascinatingly long pause, she answers, “Yes.”
I checked and the Pancake Batter is still playing baseball, still Single A Minor League, but now for the Charleston Riverdogs. I searched for more about him and I found a tweet from the team with video of him about to walk up to bat after hitting a home run his last time up. The camera pans to a group of young boys watching and cheering him on. “We love you!” one of them shouts.
A theme in all my books is that success and failure are situational. Some of us find the right place and the right people. Orlando People is about those of us for whom Orlando is the right place. Gretch, the main character, has a tattoo on her arm, with words from an Italian epic poem called Orlando Furioso. It roughly translates to “I sing of ladies and knights and weapons and love and chivalry.” Well, I sing to you of Publix subs and timeshares, eternally unfinished skyscrapers and personal injury attorneys, of bad traffic and worse humidity, Shaq and Penny, alligators and strip malls, of a town that is just as weird as people think but far stronger than it gets credit for. I sing of Orlando People, and I hope you’ll check it out.
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