March 2- Baseball in suite L7, Fenway Park

This is a story that begins at a Purim ball. A couple of years ago, a hastily thrown-together consortium consisting of myself and three chums bid on four tickets to a luxury box at Fenway Park. Bidding was spirited, but we prevailed. The tickets were for a game against the Oakland A's. We had just lost the last 5 out of 6 games. The masochism that is Red Sox Nation was grumbling, the seismic readings were setting off alarms. Panic was raising its ugly head, its yellow fangs dripping slime, its eyes blood red, its beating wings fanning ever more fear and anguish. "The team has no heart"; "the manager has no brains." "All is lost"; "the curse continues." And now we face the mighty Athletics of Oakland. "We're doomed!"

Typical Red Sox stuff.

Into this malaise we four intrepid fans entered the Park by an obscure gate tucked away in the corner of the building. Up we walked, higher and higher until we came to a long corridor lined with framed enlargements of "Sports Illustrated" covers depicting Red Sox players and history. The air was hushed and fresh, the floor carpeted, not the concrete slab slippery with beer, smelling vaguely of yeast, which is what greets most fans entering the Park. This was the entrance to Olympus, after all. We stopped in at the Red Sox Hall of Fame, a room bearing bronze tablets of heroes of the remote and immediate past. It was the anteroom of a fancy restaurant with windows overlooking the playing field. We did not linger but moved on for another 50 feet until we came to Suite L7, ours for the night.

L7 has its own clean private bathroom-what else would you expect? It is, in essence, a large foyer with a kitchen, the refrigerator stocked with beer and soda, wine and bottled water; it has three steam tables, (treyf meat); a table of cheeses and crackers, sliced vegetables and dip; it has a comfortable leather couch facing a TV tuned to NESN; bowls of chips, bags of Cracker Jacks, and a glass wall from which the field seems to pour forth below. Our seats were just beyond the glass walls; Frank, our personal attendant, showed us to them and took care of our needs. (One need I had was that when the pizza arrived, it was doused with pepperoni. Couldn't eat it, of course, so Frank arranged for a plain cheese.) At one point he announced that the cookies had come in. At another we saw that in the adjacent suite a woman was dispensing Ben and Jerry's ice cream. We were stuffed, of course, but eagerly awaited our turn, which, tragically, never came. But the view! We were up above the masses, between home plate and third base. No obstructions-no venders, no poles, no other patrons could interfere with our view. I felt like a Republican. As the sun was setting, we looked out over the right field bleachers and saw the skyscrapers of downtown Boston turn a glorious burnt umber until the color slowly faded over several innings. The sight of those buildings alone was nearly worth the price of admission.
Oh, and there was a baseball game, too. We won, 11-0 but we always kept a nervous eye on the scoreboard, as all true Sox fans do, to see what the Yankees were doing in their game at the Stadium. Ha, ha! They were in the process of losing to the then lowly Tigers of Detroit. The suite, a triumph! The view, a triumph! The victory, a triumph! The Yankees losing while we were winning, a triumph triumph! The fact that our checks had cleared three months before so that we had the feeling that all this was free, another triumph!

The problem, of course, is that we were all so spoiled by L7 and the ambrosia and the nectar to which we knew we would never return, that leaving was no less a forever exile from Olympus than Adam's and Eve's (to mix my mythologies). Being in the suite was not quite comparable to seeing the Kotel for the first time, but for baseball lovers, it was a pure delight. It was perfect luxury. As it all began on Purim, we all brought our groggers and as their batters went down one by one, we generated a "smother-out-the-sound-of-Haman's-name" noise. That is, when we weren't stuffing our faces.