College Night Disaster

• Yankees: 4
• Orioles: 0
• Sold: 98 beers

It was Camden on a Friday night, Yankees in town for a three-game series. The makings of a great night, so potentially good I skipped Friday night in Philly to be there. What I didn't heed were Beerman Neal's warning: that College Night could hurt the whole thing.

Themed nights are supposed to be clever ways of getting asses in seats that would otherwise be empty. If you're going to have a Gay Night, do it on a Tuesday. Stitch n' Pitch (a charming RFK promotion that invited local knitting enthusiasts to work on their wool sweaters while taking in the game) is fine for a Monday. No one's there those days. But Friday night specials for college kids -- for whom every night is a potential weekend -- is dumb. And this one attracted enough colleges pukes to fill not one side of the upper deck, but just about the whole thing.

That was disheartening enough, but a third-party subcontractor was brought in to provide 15 extra vendors to add to the ranks. There were twice as many beer tickets on the board as usual, a mixed blessing since I was able to get one but terrible since there were twice as many vendors competing for the same customers.

It was bad enough having to card just about every last person in that upper deck (I swear I didn't look as young at age 22 as these collegians did, unless at age 36 I'm aging more than I realize), and getting no tips from people who have barely enough to cover the $6.75 to begin with. Then things got worse. The vending manager racing in, waving her arms to cut off, announcing that there were to be no more beer sales at all in the upper deck. From that point on, everyone had to drop to the lower deck. So it turned out that twice as many vendors were selling to half a stadium's worth of people. By the start of the seventh inning and last call, I was so incredulous at having sold only four cases (when I'd hope to be up to ten), that I took a chance on a double load, praying for a pitching change. No luck: after a brisk six outs, I managed to unload exactly two beers, then had to get it back upstairs. Only the indulgence of a sympathetic elevator operator saved me from having to take six flights of steps.

What a disaster. I could have gone to Philly, or at least have chosen peanuts and had some fun flipping them while making a killing.

It might seem from reading this blog as if vending leaves me wrung out, disappointed, unhappy. This has been true recently, but it isn't always so. Vending is a job; it is about the money, but not entirely about the money, not by a longshot. It's about being there and performing a role in a stadium full of people, feeling and feeding off their energy; about having a clearly definable task and throwing yourself into it full force, being called again and again and from all sides, feeling necessary, and moving so fast during the brief time allotted that any sense of time is lost, and a flow takes hold, a flow of sweat and faces and the roaring moaning crowds' emotion hanging in the atmosphere, and two hundred brief energetic conversations one after another, carrying you through the most intense labors and not feeling it at all, instead feeling a sense of elation and connection and -- this may seem an overstatement, but it's not -- transcendance. And it's about being willing to do it again and again, night after night. Top vendors love the money, sure, but I think they're like me and are digging for that extra tremor and shiver on the skin that's the feeling of being alive, and it's why having tonight's circumstances blocking that feeling can turn anticipation into such disappointment. Again, I might be completely going overboard on all of this, and maybe it's just me, but those that don't get this feeling at least once in a while are missing out. We all have our avocations. Some people collect stamps.