Historically, I have had a shaky relationship with sports.

I lived for baseball in the late 80s and early 90s. My friend Adam and I would spend any funds we came across on baseball cards from 7-11. How many Cal Ripken Jr cards can one kid own? Try one card for every day in that reliable Oriole’s consecutive game streak.

I was obsessed with the 1989 Cubs when I was nine, and I followed the White Sox in 1994 when they were supposed to win it all – a great team, led by the incredible Bo Jackson. I thought for sure there would be a White Sox-Expos Fall Classic.

The MLBPA went on strike that year, cancelling the final fifty games of the season as well as the Playoffs and the World Series. After that I was shattered. I checked out. Literally never again after age fourteen, would I consolidate efforts and energy to follow a sport even half as vigorously.

I stopped caring on any passionate level. It was as if a switch went off in me.

I enjoyed dodgeball in PE class, and I really am coordinated. But in the scheme of things, I’m just not a competitive person. I guess I enjoy chess and running by myself because really, I’m just competing against me.

Save for baseball, every sporting event I go to I spend most of my mental energy analyzing the remaining minutes before I get to leave. I count down clocks for every quarter of a basketball game, chunking and compartmentalizing my boredom into the seconds of the digital time, wishing I was almost anywhere else. A winter football game is my version of Hell.

All of this meandering is just to say that after that 1994 White Sox season, I became more entrenched in music and art. I began to find my identity in subcultures of both. I can’t say if the 94 season was officially the cause, or if I just naturally drifted into hip hop and grunge and weed and general 1990s teenage apathy. Probably a little of nature and nurture both.

In eighth grade my mom signed me and Adam up for a weekly art class at a place called Betty’s Art Barn, located somewhere west of Manteno. Bonfield or Limestone. It was one of those hazy towns you come upon between farmland and woodland, only signifying a presence by a green guide sign showing the town name and population.

Adam and I once skipped baseball practice in 8^th grade for an art event we were a part of through Betty’s Art Barn. I remember getting made fun of for skipping the practice.

“Ryan and Adam skipped practice to go to the Art Institute!”, Andrew Deitrich would jeer. In an odd way I felt proud. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, I’m sure. But ironically, a visit to the Art Institute may have been way cooler than what we were actually doing.

But Betty’s Art Barn was more than the art class experience. The best part was being able to drive on our own to the establishment through the back country roads, after we turned sixteen. And yes, we did attend Betty’s Art Barn for multiple geeky-ass years.

We were a couple of punks creating our own entertainment on the rural highways – turning on high beams one second before an oncoming car would pass from the other direction, and other shenanigans and what not. Mostly tomfoolery all the while blasting 2Pac and Bone Thug CDs.

We had these two comedic genius-level guys we knew named Tim & Brian Engler. They would merely invent words to be funny, and Adam and I would soak it all up, adopting the words into our daily lexicon.

Cap, Capcom, Bot, Gaybot, Marty McDick, and so the list goes…

Tim & Brian once told us that they pulled their car over to the side of the road, got out of the vehicle and just stared up at the sky. They said people in other cars followed suit by also pulling over to get out and look at the sky. Tim & Brian would then get back in the car and drive away while the other people were left in the dust just gazing into the clouds, wondering what was up there.

This idea cracked us up, and Adam and I tried this multiple times. Alas no other cars fell for it. Look, we were funny but to be sure, we were no Tim & Brian Engler.

We had this ploy. Treating the country roadway as our own personal playground, we performed gaming as if we were the green hovercraft in F-Zero. When a car approached from behind us on the dusty road, we’d slow down enough to where the driver of the car would imminently become impatient enough to begin the passing process, pulling into the oncoming traffic lane.

When the car became parallel to us in the next lane we’d speed up and not let them pass. The other driver, confused would speed up as well, as they were the ones in the oncoming traffic lane and they were the ones facing death if another car was approaching head on.

I could get my mom’s Dodge Caravan up to 90 miles per hour. That sounds like a fib but I’m here to tell you; it’s been accomplished.

Inevitably in this gambit, the other car either had to go faster than us in order to pass us, or they had to fall back, either way inspiring road rage or complete and utter fear, depending on the driver I suppose.

One time we tried it with this grizzled old hill jack in a beater pick up. He passed us in a huffing rage, flipping us off, screaming obscenities to the likes of which we had never heard before. We slowed way down and hit a right through a gravel road just hoping and praying he would not follow. His car braked for a bit as he rolled around the idea of pursuit. The idea of murder.

I do believe, based on the sheer laser gleam of hatred in his eye, that he would have killed us both, leaving us as two wilting teenage bodies in a mass minivan grave. Rusting in the corn field of a backwoods road for some farmer to discover after a week or so, we’d make a pair of dopey ass corpses in baggy jeans. That flash of quick terror was enough to leave a scar on us. We stopped doing that after that incident.

We made it to Betty’s art class that night only to find the grizzled old man was… there. Like, in the classroom, located in the attic of the barn. We quickly came to find that the man was Betty’s husband.

There was no way to escape.

He didn’t seem to recognize us, but we were not entirely sure. Was he perhaps biding his time until Betty was out of sight? After leaving the classroom to walk back to his house, and seeing the 1987 powder blue minivan parked out front, had he put it together? We spent the class in cold fear, and we left that night into the dark parking lot, wondering if he was waiting in the shrubbery, ready to slit our throats before burning down the Art Barn in a suicidal rage.

I’m here to tell you – there’s no way he didn’t fashion the puzzle. He gave us the break of a lifetime.

…

One night during classwork of colored charcoal, Betty informed us that she was housing a female Brazilian foreign exchange student. Highschool-age. She not only implied, but stated outright that one of us should take her to her homecoming dance, out in whatever country school it was that she was going to.

We had a Brazilian exchange student at our own high school and believe me, based on the idea of her, we were both giddy with excitement at the idea of this potential arbitrage opportunity. Both our heads swirled on the drive home, with the prospect of taking advantage of the chance of becoming the art geek with the attractive foreign girl on our arm. Maybe one of us could go to her dance, and the other could bring her to our own dance?

The next week during class Betty brought her exchange student into the Barn in the form of an introductory showcase. In a split second all hopes were dashed in an awkward anticlimactic moment of truth in physical reveal. Neither of us were motivated to pursue.  

…

Most nights we were the only two students in the class. Once in a while it was just me by myself with Betty in the secluded barn at night. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for some sort of odd sexual encounter with my country-side art instructor. Not that she ever gave any of those signals of course. This was just a carnal, awkward teenage male fantasy of which I probably wouldn’t even have known how to handle. God knows I had already pissed her husband off enough as it was.

Some nights there was one other kid in attendance. He had like, micro arms as the result of some sort of birth defect. But he could wield a paintbrush and work with watercolor like it was nobody’s god damn business. He was way more talented and entirely more creative and artistic than both Adam and I combined.

He did a portrait of Tiger Woods than even topped my picture of Flesh ‘n Bone – the often-jailed, lost, fifth member of Bone Thugs (if you didn’t know), who I was obsessed with for some strange reason.

I remember my mom driving me to some sort of woodshop to apply for a job and I saw the micro-arms kid there working. That is the end of that anecdote. There’s nothing else to that story.

…

At some point my final visit to Betty’s Art Barn would be unbeknownst to me, my final visit to Betty’s Art Barn. I still remember leaving behind an unfinished abstract oil painting of a chessboard with water spilled over it, causing the black and white squares to be warped and magnified. Probably some subconscious symbol of chess being the only game I would care about in the future.

Perhaps one day I’ll travel back to get it. That is after I securely obtain the knowledge that the grizzled old husband has been long since dead.