the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt seven)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

New Orleans is very beautiful and very painful. New York is not that beautiful and not that painful. It is just a normal American town. Whereas New Orleans has a caliber of beauty among the massive oaks, at times a vision of paradise, but there is an unvarnished truth about it, and there are your memories and those held dear. I miss the society of my beloved father. I am pursued by my memories. I might be on the midnight train from Penn Station populated by wino lunatics on my way to Orient through the summer crowds, but in my mind’s eye I must set my sights on that white white house beside the palm tree in New Orleans, with its sweet gaiety. I must find my way back.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt six)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Hobby and I had left the office late, to go out that night to the ball park, which had been named, oddly enough, for a pitcher from Louisiana, Sportsman’s Paradise. It was a glamorous night in New York. The temperature was ninety degrees. I take a perverse satisfaction in the heat because the Northerners can’t stand it, they’re not used to it, whereas the Southerners are. Also it was humid and the sky was a thick cobalt blue as night fell.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt five)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

He was telling me about a pitcher who thought it was his day off and took LSD. He happened to hear on the radio that his team was playing that night in Chicago—which he had forgotten. So he hopped on a plane to Chicago tripping on LSD and pitched a no-hitter.

Later he was on trial and told the judge that when you’re on LSD in a ball game, it makes the ball look like a grapefruit when it’s coming at you so it’s easier to hit.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt four)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Friday evening after work, the young men go to the baseball games, in their suits and ties and sunglasses, having plain American fun. It touches my heart, because they don’t have plain American fun where I come from, it is too exotic and remote for that, it is the dark side. They don’t have baseball in New Orleans. It’s not normal enough to have baseball.

In New York I learned quite a bit about baseball as to many a Northerner it is his great love. But what interested me about it was not perhaps the same thing that interested them. I like how all the ball players have marital problems and personality problems and need sports psychiatrists, and especially in baseball where you don’t have to be that athletic or it’s not as strenuous in a way the players are all dissipated wrecks with drug problems, chain-smoking. That would maybe work in New Orleans. Baseball would maybe work in New Orleans because all the players are dissipated wrecks with troubled relationships with their fathers, chain-smoking. But they are tough guys. Except for when they retire, then they cry. The whole thing is an emotional roller coaster, at least for me, trying to keep up with their problems. That’s what I like about it.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt three)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

There were ancient unpainted houses crumbling on the Gulf beside huge palms, and plaques on the houses designating their old age with French heraldry—it being a French town, near to Mobile. Mardi Gras was begun there one midnight by some drunk young men who later brought it to New Orleans.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt two)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

It was hurricane season. There was the ceaseless news of hurricanes coming up from the Gulf Coast. Born-again Christians raved on the radio. There was a hint of disaster. The palm trees were slightly awry in the storm, leaning dangerously toward the old hotel, in the black night.

But the news of the hurricanes only made it more exciting, adding a certain dark gaiety, while the storm lashed against the palms.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt one)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

“Guess what?” he said shyly. “There’s a continent called Nuttin and they make nuts there.”

“Oh really? Well, there’s a certain continent I know of called Europe, with a certain country called France, and a certain person that I know of forgot the whole entire thing.”

“Do you like cole slaw?” Al said urgently. “I don’t.”

Conversation with a three-year-old involves wide leaps among a disparate variety of subjects.