After a tearful goodbye, we made our way to Brighton to find Tom’s friend Greg. He has a small apartment that he shares with his Fiancé, Rachel, and we’d be crashing there for the next two nights. It was Thursday night and the Red Sox were in town, so Tom and I wanted to go to Fenway and check that item off of the bucket list. Given that the Red Sox aren’t good this season we figured we’d be able to scalp tickets on the cheap.
We took the T train into town and walked across a bridge and approached Fenway from behind the infamous Green Monster. The first scalper we encountered rode a bike up and down the bridge, holding the handlebars with one hand and tickets in the other. He had an accent straight out of some Ben Afleck movie. He could have played a crony in Good Will Hunting, The Departed or The Town without any acting lessons. We were an hour late for the game, and this guy had the stones to ask for $50 per ticket. Dealing with scalpers can sometimes involve extensive negotiation. If he was going to high-ball us, we’d need to give him a floor level offer to eventually meet in the middle. My first offer was $40 for 3 tickets. He acted insulted, called me “pawmpous” for requesting such a low price, and continued to share his accented opinions on the offer while riding next to us on his bike. He pointed to another scalper and said with sarcasm, “Go talk to that guy will. He’ll probably sell you 3 for $40”. So naturally, we took his suggestion and went to try our luck with this other gentleman. Once he saw the wheels of business turning with our new vendor, our Southie friend was suddenly apologetic, hoping to save the deal. But no dice. His loss.
We bought 3 tickets for $50 from this older, white haired scalper, with an equally thick Boston accent. He had a lot to say, all at a high volume, and not all of it coherent. But to solidify the deal, he agreed to walk us to the gate to prove the validity of the tickets. On the way, he starting talking about the changes in Boston over time, specifically the difference between the blue collars and white collars that mesh together in the city. He told us, “Boston is gettin’ full of buppies…”
“What are buppies?”
“Buppies, Buppies, Buppies! You know? Boston-Yuppies! You can put that on Instagram!”
This interaction was all screamed, of course. And we were only two feet away. He also told us that he was a part of the MLB Mastercard commercial from a few years back. “Mastercard paid me $10,750 to be in that commercial” That’s an extremely specific number, and for this story’s sake, I’m going to choose to believe it. I asked to take his picture, and he chose to strike a pose by throwing both of his hands straight up in the air, opening his mouth, and bulging his eyes. Not a very traditional pose, but I guess it suits his personality.
After all the fuss of walking us to the gate, two of the tickets turned out to be fakes. Why would he offer to walk us to gate after selling us fake tickets? My theory is that he knew he had fake tickets in his selection, but I don’t think he knew which were real. My ticket got rejected by the ticket scanner, and I shot him a frustrated look. He ran over to give us all of the remaining tickets he had. “Here, take ‘em all! There’s real ones in here.” One of them scanned in green, and the turnstiles opened. We stepped inside and looked back for our guy, but he was already cruising in the opposite direction. I guess we were his last sale for the night. The ticket scanner said “That guy is crazy, he’s here every single night. He’ll be back tomorrow.”
-Paul Scolieri
