“Joey! C’mon, it’s just a game,” Regina shouted out, as Joey Dunning took a bat to a Gatorade water cooler. It obviously wasn’t to Joey. To Joey, it was an existential crisis to strike out three times in a company sponsored slow-pitch softball game. Companies organize these company functions, so we stupid people can have fun, and we were having fun until Joey took a bat to one of those insulated Gatorade coolers with a beverage dispenser. If Joey hits it once or twice, it’s a thing that draws attention. If he hits it as hard as he can, eight to nine times, it’s a human being imploding, and we watch with our mouths open, like this,” Barry said mimicking the expression. “We pretty much know life isn’t going the way Joey planned, and that this might be one of the worst days of Joey’s otherwise miserable life. What do we do? Do we laugh ourselves to tears? Not at the time. At the time, it’s shocking, kind of sad, and a little pathetic. We’re in tears later, replaying every second of it, every swear word he used, and replaying our reactions to it. One of my buddies actually took a picture of the Gatorade cooler after the it was all over, and he saved it. He didn’t know why he saved it, but the next time something bad happened to me, he texted that picture to me with a caption, “It could be worse.”

“Nothing excites the coward more than seeing a hero fall,” Dave Chapelle once said, “because it justifies their cowardly existence.” That doesn’t quite nail this scenario, because Joey wasn’t anyone’s hero. He was a good-looking guy, though, and a body-builder, who had none of the problems we did attracting women. So, did we kind of relish seeing the worst moment of such a man’s life? We did. All of us did.

The Germans have a term for laughing at another person’s pain. Schadenfreude. Leave it to the Germans to develop a term for laughing at the destruction of another person. And for any offended Germans out there, I’m part German, so I can say that. We laugh when someone trips and falls in the hall and leaves makeup on that carpeted wall. It’s funny, and we all know it. Even when we fall, we know it’s funny, no matter how painful and tragic it is. We know someone, somewhere will develop some material about it that they will share with their friends for years.

I laugh at other people’s pain, and I expect them to laugh at mine. Without knowing the exact definition of yin and yang, we all understand how nature balances itself out through opposite but interconnected forces. As long as it doesn’t involve something debilitating, we all enjoy seeing someone else fall. The bigger the better, and the level of emotional and physical pain one incurs corresponds to the comedic value of the situation. Some say it’s karma, and as a person who laughs at other people’s pain, I know I’m going to get mine, and you know you’re going to get yours. We know karma is going to reach around and bite us in some very tender areas.

We’ve all experienced some levels of karma, but something tells us that ain’t it. That’s just the tip. We’ve done a whole lot of laughing at others, and we know that there’s more to come. We know we’ll get ours. We know there will come a day when we’re old and decrepit, hooked up to some machine that sustains life, and some intern will come into our room, see us gasping for air, and he’ll find it hilarious.

We might expect a little sympathy from a hospital employee, but all institutions have good employees and poor ones. As death creeps up on us, the emotional hysteria will probably lead us to yell something like, “What are you laughing at? I’m dying here, for Cripes sakes!” When we cool down and recognize that we don’t have the strength to fight death anymore, we’ll either acknowledge that we deserve it for laughing so hard at so many others on the worst days of their life, or we might see the humor in it too. Seriously, are you so sick that you’ll probably be laughing with the orderly who’s laughing at your death mask?

“You should’ve seen your face,” that orderly will say, “You were all like …” Barry mimicked the orderly’s imitation of his desperate gasp for breath. 

‘I know,’ we say, chuckling, ‘but you gotta remember I am dying here. No, I’m not saying it’s not funny. I’m just saying that when you’re taking your last breath, it’s probably going to hurt, and if you’re wondering if it is your last breath, you’re probably going to make some embarrassing faces too.’

When that day comes, we might regret laughing so hard at a grown man beating a Gatorade cooler with such intense frustration, or we might not, depending on sadistic we are.

I don’t know how women would handle this situation, but when a guy strikes out three times at a slow-pitch company outing, in front of everyone he works with every day, forty hours a week, it’s our version of a Promethean hell. The story of Prometheus is that the gods wanted to find a creative way to punish him for introducing humans to fire. The gods decided to bind him to a rock and have an eagle eat the liver out of his body for the rest of eternity. Have you ever seen a bird eat? It’s not clean. Even a large eagle has a relatively small mouth, and they don’t have teeth. So, if they’re going to eat your liver out, they have to stick a talon in you to balance you, while they rip it out bit by tiny bit. Yeah, the gods knew how to bring the pain. As the tale of Prometheus tale goes, once this eagle is finally done carrying out that torturous punishment, Prometheus’ liver grows back the next day, and the eagle rips it out again, and again, for the rest of eternity. 

As horrific as that punishment is to picture, I’m willing to bet that most men in the audience here tonight would prefer that torturous afterlife, for the rest of eternity, to striking out three times in slow-pitch softball, in front of all of your friends and drinking buddies. Why, well, as with the repetitive torture Prometheus experienced, we will relive that moment over and over for the next thirty years. You might think it’s over, and you might finally reach a point where you’re no longer staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, reliving it over and over, seeing all of the faces, hearing the silence that followed, and remembering that little kid giggling when you went Al Capone on the Gatorade cooler. If you have mean, sadistic friends like I do, you know they’re going to bring it up, and force you to go through your own version of Promethean hell.

What’s worse, physical pain or mentally reliving your worst day at-bat for the rest of your life. Now, if you’re a regular softball player, like I was, you’re going to mess up a lot. You’re going to make horrendous, humiliating errors, but you can try to erase it next week by making some good plays. Joey, to my knowledge, never played softball, or any other sports, after this game. My bet is that he remembers that moment from 10pm until 1AM, staring at the ceiling, listening to his wife snore, for the rest of his life, and then when he mercifully finds sleep, it invades his nightmares.

Joey was a big body builder type. Most of us go to the gym about two times a week. I’m betting Joey was a five-to-six-day-a-weeker, so we naturally thought the man was built for athletic domination. We could tell that Joey thought that too. He was on my team, and I was behind him in the batting order. I wanted him to do well, of course, because I wanted our team to win, but I didn’t want him to do so well that my little blooper singles would be an afterthought. The ropey muscles on this guy’s forearms made me think I was in trouble. The outfielders backed up for him. We all thought Joey was going to put on a clinic. He had brand new batting gloves that it looked like he purchased just for this company outing. He even had wrist bands. Who wears wrist bands to a company outing? Between pitches, he adjusted the fit of his gloves and fiddled with his wrist bands, just like Major Leaguers. It was so shocking to see him strike out on three pitches that first time that when the other team even ribbed him a little, in a good-natured way, we all kind of giggled. It was all polite and fun.

So, what’s the best resolution we might develop for the inability to hit a huge softball coming at you incredibly slow? Whenever we substitute a good solution with the best, most perfect solution, we often end up choosing the worst. Joey’s solution was to swing faster and harder? In his second at-bat, Joey swung so hard he fell down. Yikes! We could almost hear the nails going into the intangible walls of his nightmares, building a permanent fixture in there.

Seeing as how we were at a company function, and the sense of competition between our teams was fun more than anything else, the pitcher lofted the last two pitches up of Joey’s second at-bat, with the greatest of ease,” Barry said mimicking the soft toss. “The way we might pitch to a five-year-old who is having trouble hitting the ball, and in a scene that will probably play in Joey’s nightmares for the rest of his life, he missed both of them. Would you laugh at this man self-destructing right in front of you?” Barry paused for all the laughing yesses in the audience. “You would? While witnessing the worst moment in someone’s life?”

We all say yes at a comedy club, three to four drinks in, but when it’s someone you know, someone you see at work every day, forty hours a week?” Barry paused to survey the crowd. “We all would. We all do, because we have grievances, petty personal and impersonal grievances. We have grievances against mother nature, God, and the world and everyone in it. If you don’t find failure funny, let me add this. After Joey’s second strikeout, there were groans all over the field on our team and the opposing one. Even the men who envied how easily Joey picked up women, dropped that grievance and began rooting for him. We were all cheering for him. Even though he fell on his ass after the third strike of his second at-bat, someone yelled out, “That’s all-right Joey! Get ‘em next time!” The other team was even saying stuff to cheer him on, being good sports and all. 

Now with the third and final strikeout, let me ask you what do you think would be the worst possible reaction you can think of following a third strikeout in slow-pitch softball? Try to put yourself in Joey’s shoes, and think what reaction might haunt you for the rest of your life?” Barry asked the audience. A few people shouted some reactions out. “More teasing? Laughter? Wrong. How about silence? If you asked me, prior to this display, I probably would’ve said more teasing and more laughter too, but that day taught me that silence, claustrophobic silence is the worst possible reaction you can give to someone striking out in slow-pitch softball. Why? Every other reaction gives us some direction for our anger. If Billy laughs, we can say, “How dare you laugh at me Billy, I was trying so hard, and that was so embarrassing, and you laugh? What is wrong with you? You cold-heartless bastard?” If someone tries to soften the blow, by encouraging us in some way, we can say, “Aw, shut it!” to their condescending sympathy, but silence? Silence causes you to eat the moment whole without lubricants or anything to aid in the digestion process, and it festers in some black hole in our innards for the rest of eternity, and the only outlet we can find is an inanimate object that can be used to retain the temperature of drink products.

As cold and sadistic as we are, we’re not even close to as cold and sadistic as children can be, because they don’t understand how to apply sympathy, and they haven’t experienced enough failure in life to be empathetic. They just think a guy going ballistic on a water cooler is hysterical. “Is he joking dad?” No, now look away.

We try to cover their eyes, but they fight it. This isn’t something they see every day, so they fight to watch it. “Why is he so mad, dad?” they ask far too loud. “Was he mad because he struck out?”

Yes, now for God’s sakes quit staring and join the rest of us, pretending this isn’t happening. The other parents in the audience don’t even laugh at our boy’s innocent, loud questions. They maintain the silence.

Kid won’t let stuff like this go either. “Why did Joey do that?” they ask on the car ride home.

“Joey had no idea he was common. He thought he was special. He thought he’d be a contender, a somebody, some kind of prodigy. Some part of him thought he might be Major League baseball material. He thought that when he was your age, we all did, but he doesn’t play recreational sports the way some of us do, so he never learned that he wasn’t special. He had no idea that by the time he was thirty, the only thing anyone would pay him for was data entry. Missing those slow-pitch softballs, told him that he’s no better than the rest of us, and that was quite shocking to him. 

“Some of us played sports when we were kids, and we played softball in recreational leagues when we aged out of most sports, and we all made horrible errors everyone enjoyed. Sweet little, old ladies laughed at us, “Idiot!” they’d say. Joey, obviously, never went through all that. We made errors that were so awful they were met with silence, and trust me nothing is worse than silence. They don’t even try to cheer us up after a while, because we’re so awful. They allow us to go back to the dugout in silent shame. After that, we realize that we aren’t half as good as we thought we were. Everyone who plays any sport goes through that, but Joey never did. Joey preferred sitting in the stands, laughing at us losers, thinking about his potential for greatness. That company softball game was his big chance, the moment he thought he’d realize all his hopes and dreams of being a prodigy that no one ever heard of before. Joey believed the mythology of Joey that Joey built, and he thought he had potential to be great at something, anything, but he didn’t really do anything about it. He believed something would come along, something would happen, and when it didn’t, when he realized that he was no better than those of us he laughed at for working so hard at stuff that came naturally to him, he took it out on a Gatorade cooler.”

It was a meaningless slow-pitch softball game, at a company outing, and I’m sure that the twenty-something people who were there that day don’t even remember the day, the game, or the fact that we even had an outing. The joke here is that Joey remembers, or that he’ll never be able to forget it. The joke is that in some small way, this meaningless game ruined his life in some meaningful way. I’m almost positive it didn’t. I didn’t talk to Joey before this company outing, and I didn’t after it, so I don’t know the if, when, or how he worked through it. I don’t even know if Joey had to work through it, or if he’s the type to obsesses over such matters. Joey might have moved on as if nothing happened that day, but if he’s anything like me he dreads quiet moments, because they remind him of the silence, he heard that day after the third strike of his third at-bat. If he’s anything like me, those intermittent quiet moments have a tendency of popping up at the oddest times, and I’m sure Joey doesn’t even know why he now has a preference for some kind of noise, music, TV, or anything that makes noise in his background, because of what happened after that third and final strikeout at that company function. You’ve no doubt heard the cliché deafening silence. Yeah, that’s the type of silence that puts an exclamation point on top of one of the top ten worst moments of his life. It’s the type of silence that almost allows you to hear the facial muscles of the players, on both sides, twitch into a cringe.

It strains credulity to me to think that Joey doesn’t remember this day. If I ever asked him about it, and he said, “Huh, I don’t remember that we even had a company outing.” I’d immediately think he was lying. How could he forget falling on his keister the way he did, the way that pitcher lofted him pitches the way we would a five-year-old, the deafening silence that followed his third strikeout, and, of course, destroying a water cooler in frustration? (Even though he hit it eight, nine times, Joey didn’t damage the container, which either speaks to Gatorade’s sound construction of it, or Joey’s ineptitude as a batter, but Joey did offer the owner compensation for the cooler if there was any damage to it. The owner said it worked fine, and no compensation was necessary). If Joey is able to forget all that, because he is blessed with such a short-term memory that he only thinks about today and tomorrow, then all the power to him. It was such a meaningless game, as I wrote, that I don’t doubt that most of the players, and the people watching, have long forgotten about it.  If Joey was able to forget the specifics of his failure that day, or the day in general, it probably speaks to the sound construction of the brain, and its ability to just forget that which could, even in small, insignificant ways, plague us and diminish our quality of life.