I was playing poker on a recent Saturday night with a few friends. Most of us are married with kids, so the night out was a welcome reprieve. We played outside on a new deck that a friend had built. He had been given redwood for free, so he decided to build a deck. It was a good deck. It was solid. It was also unexpected. I couldn’t figure out when he had the time to put the thing together. It takes time and patience to build a deck. Things rarely come about by happenstance. Things rarely shock us anymore. We have too much warning. We can see to far into the future.
At some point in the evening, I asked one of the guys who lived at the house, “Doesn’t your brother live in Joplin?”
“He was looking for bodies twenty minutes after the tornado had finished,” he said.
I hadn’t seen his brother for some time, but I knew he was living somewhere in the region. I knew he had moved to Kansas City a few years earlier. I knew he was married, had kids, and had gotten a job with a production company in Joplin. Our conversation was short. I didn’t really want to prod. I didn’t want to ruin the mood. We were having fun. There was no need to talk tragedy. We moved on. We ate sausages and drank beer. Too much processing ruins poker nights.
A few days after the poker night, I rang my friend’s brother in Joplin. He was out at a lake with his family. It had been a while since we had seen each other. We talked a little about the tragedy, about the tornado, but most of his stories were about things that had happened to other people. His family was doing well, and he had helped some in the aftermath, but he didn’t have much to add. He was being humble. He pointed me in the direction of another friend: Brandon Bellegarde. Brandon Bellegarde saw more. Brandon Bellegarde was in the thick of the madness.
“My wife stayed with our daughter and our neighbor’s children. We hopped in my truck and made it across town in about ten minutes—we were movin’ pretty quick. We pulled up on 18th and Virginia I believe is what it is. One block off of Main Street, two blocks off of 20th Street. We pulled up there and it was just,” he thought for a moment. “The scene was unbelievable… it was just… there were huge flames… huge fire. You could hear gas mains popping, but it sounded like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Saving Private Ryan or anything or movies like that, but it sounded like gunshots going off in the distance just like a battle. People were walking around: bleeding, missing limbs, skin peeled off, bodies, people impaled,” he stopped.
When I was twelve, and deep in the throws of a Mickey Mantle obsession, Joplin, Missouri existed in my brain like a mythical crossroads. Mickey Mantle was, in a metaphorical sense, the Robert Johnson of baseball. He was an intensely flawed fallen person of baseball perfection. His talents were otherworldly. There’s no telling the deal he struck. Most deals with the devil are pretty good, until you read the fine print. Mickey Mantle died August 13, 1995. Mickey Mantle has now been dead in my life longer than he was alive.
I remember the trip pretty well. We stopped and ate chicken fried chicken at a small cafe. We were on our way to Branson to see family. I remember the chicken fried chicken very well. We had been eating chicken fried steak every day. We would eventually go back to the chicken fried steak, but the chicken fried chicken still sticks as a meal remembered because of a collective sense of forced nostalgia. The chicken fried chicken place was next to a baseball card shop. At least I think it was a baseball card shop. It could have been an antique store. I can’t really remember the specifics of the shop. The shop didn’t resonate like the chicken fried chicken.
I do remember that the shop had a glass display case filled with varying relics related to Mickey Mantle. I was just a kid; I didn’t have much money, so I could only buy two things: a coaster from his defunct hotel and a Joplin Miners minor league program. The program was in good shape. It still is. I bought it for twelve dollars. It features a picture of Mickey Mantle looking innocent, unaware of how the next fifty years would move, would shake, and would twist, would turn. He was listed as a shortstop. He wouldn’t stay a shortstop for very long.
We also visited Mickey Mantle’s Holiday Inn Motel. At the time, the motel was still standing, but it was vacant. Weeds had begun to sprout in cracked clusters throughout the parking lot. I wanted to pick through some trash. I think we just ended up taking a picture. The weeds were yellow. They had been growing for some time. I have since seen pictures of the motel. The pictures hold a certain amount of nostalgia and kitsch that makes me wish I had seen them in their original glory.
When I think about Brandon Bellegarde and the aftermath of the tornado, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the severity of the entire situation. I have seen pictures. My uncle drives a truck from Riverside to Connecticut each week. He drove through a few days after the disaster. He sent a few emails with pictures. The town was reduced to rubble. As far as I know, much of the rubble is still present. As of a couple months ago, many of the victims were beginning to fall prey to a flesh eating fungus. It’s a thing I can’t wrap my mind around. It’s a thing I can’t comprehend.
The reality of the situation isn’t abstract to the people who live in Joplin. “We did search and rescue that night right after the storm. My neighbor, his wife, was the one who said we gotta’ do something,” said Brandon. “Me, I was thinking I’ve got to keep my family safe. But she was like, ‘we gotta’ do something.’ It was actually her idea to go out there,” he said.
“When we got out there, it was non-stop. People would walk to you; you’d just help them. You’d load them in a truck. You’d unbury them from bricks, whatever. Pull them out of cars and you’d just load them in a truck and you’d take them to a center that was established. We went through the night doing that and into the next day.”
I still pull out the Joplin Miners program out from time to time. I look at it more as a good find, a commodity, but I’ll never sell it. It is a memory. It is the memory of a good thing that happened: the chicken fried chicken, being twelve in Missouri. Mickey Mantle’s life was a life of extremes. He could have been the greatest. He was Hobbsian in the worst sense. His dad died young. He thought he was supposed to die young too. He didn’t come across as the best husband. The game that he loved ate away at him like a flesh eating fungus. His best friend died in a car crash. Mickey died, sixteen years ago this August, when his liver gave out. These things happen. These things happen way too often, which is why I might stop driving soon, why I might stop putting electronics to my head, and why I might quit drinking. Maybe. It doesn’t really matter though, these types of things will still happen whether we like it or not. They will happen to me and mine…which is why I watch baseball, in a vein attempt to understand things that aren’t meant to be understood.
