Bob Sanchez’ BS

School starts on Monday, and I’ve been in the teacher’s office all week preparing for the upcoming semester. Who am I kidding, I’ve been spending most of the time fixing up baseball reports and doing crossword puzzles, I don’t need a whole stinkin’ week to make copies and revise last year’s lesson plans.

For the past two summers, I’ve been free of the Monday-Friday grind, free to wander around Japan, watching baseball players and looking for the best, the cheapest, the most left-handed, whatever.

The end of August comes and I have to come to grips with my “normal” life - English teacher and frequent weekend traveler. Gone will be leisurely rides down to the stadium for BP, no more will I be able to take scouts, radio guys, and journalists out for information - I mean, dinner. Time for tight schedules and running to make the last train, whoopee!

I’m sneaking out of school early tomorrow to get to Nagoya on time to see a baseball game with the big boss. He comes once a year and it’s a huge chance for me to pick his brain and attempt to see what he sees.

I did this last year after my first week on the job at school, same city, same big boss. Nagoya is like Japan’s Chicago: the “second city” with the third-highest population, right in the middle of the country, and the consensus is that there are many better places to live and work. It’s about 350 miles and four and a half hours by train away from Kochi.

I had Saturday and Sunday off, and got lucky with a pair of day games, which meant I could see Sunday’s game, have dinner with the boss, and make it back to Kochi on the last set of trains.

In theory. The Nagoya-Kochi swing requires a transfer in Okayama, the main island’s gateway city to the island of Shikoku. The bullet train doesn’t reach Shikoku, so it’s local express trains from Okayama. The last train to Kochi departs shortly after 9:30 p.m..

The bullet train stopped dead on the tracks 10 minutes out of Nagoya, citing torrential rain as the reason. We passengers would not see a drop of this alleged downpour until two hours later, but the conductor was nice enough to keep us in that same spot so we wouldn’t miss a bit of the action.

We finally got to Okayama at about the time I was expecting to arrive home in Kochi, another two and a half hours south. The last train to Kochi had not waited for us, and now I was wondering how the heck I was going to make it to work on time and what I was going to tell the teachers.

I checked on my cell phone and saw that the very first train out of Okayama would get me to Kochi at 8:15 the next morning. Class started at 8:45. I was disheveled, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with a beard that would be three days old by the time I got to school. Not good for your second week on a shirt-and-tie gig!

The conductor told me to go to the “Train Hotel on Track 9″ and wait for the next morning’s first train out at 5:30. “What the heck is a Train Hotel?” I asked him, and he just pointed toward Track 9.

I expected a waiting room waiting with fold-out beds, personal TVs, and bidets or some other kind of Japanese modern convenience. However, upon arriving at Track 9, I saw that the conductor had merely opened up a local traincar and allowed everyone to get in a stake their claims on all the double seats while I was dreaming about my personal fanny freshener.

I elbowed my way into a cramped, single seat and pouted the next 5 hours away. To the railway company’s credit, they brought everyone a McDonald’s hamburger and a bottle of tea, and they took care of the excuse slips then and there, preventing a big ugly line from forming at 5 a.m. (It’s a crime to be late to work in this country, and about the only thing that can bail you out is a late slip from a transportation company).

A few stops away from Kochi the next morning, I started seeing students from my school get on the train and panicked. I didn’t know if I was going to make it on time, let alone have to explain why I looked (and probably smelled) the way I did, and the last thing I wanted was students talking about seeing Mr. Mac on the train in a garish Hawaiian shirt.

I raced to the taxi area at Kochi Station and barked out my address to the driver, who took the back way and avoided all the traffic lights. I ran up to my apartment, dumped the suitcase, showered and shaved, and threw on a shirt and tie.

At that time, I lived about 500 feet away from school, so I bolted out the door and made it to the office with five minutes to spare for the first of five classes that day. No excuse slip or explanation necessary, smooooooth!!!

I wasn’t happy about the way it had happened, but because of that thunderstorm I realized that I could stay out for Sunday night games in the big cities if I planned to stay the night in Okayama and packed a shirt and tie for Mondays.

So began the ritual of booking a capsule hotel in Okayama on Sunday nights, where I’d spend about four and a half hours trying to sleep in my human kennel that, to my frustration, is probably exactly five feet and 11 and a half inches long. Take the early train, cab it to school, stash the suitcase, straighten the tie, BOOM morning meeting. Fresh Mac (thumbs up, big dopey smile)! Oh yeah, just lazed around the apartment all weekend, no big deal.

I think my favorite part is stashing the suitcase, because I always think, “STASH the SUITCASE!” while I’m doing it. It adds to the whole double-agent atmosphere that is only half-imagined.

The school would definitely say no to this arrangement, which is one big reason why I don’t tell anyone there about my moonlighting. For me, the only risk is the train schedule. I know that I have the energy to make it work, all I need is for the train to be on time. I’ve done it about a dozen times now with a dozen dandy Mondays to show for it. It’s what I need to do to do my best for the baseball job.

Hopefully this becomes a baker’s dozen, going down without a hitch on the anniversary of the day I almost had to teach in a Japanese school with a Hawaiian shirt and a five o’clock shadow.