Beer and a Chat with Carl Deuker
By Jay Craig
Read Ballard Writers on other Ballard Writers every couple of weeks. If you join our group, you may enter your name on a slip of paper and put it in Bob Dalrymple’s hat. We’ll draw the name of someone for you to profile and someone else to profile you. Who will it be? The surprise is all part of the fun. Today, Jay Craig interviews Carl Deuker.
We scheduled our interview for a Thursday in mid-May at my go-to beer joint, the Market Arms. Unfortunately, it was the local Norwegian’s version of Cinco de Mayo and the place was packed because it’s on the parade route. We instead went to the Sloop and I was really hoping Amanda, who I’ve known for years from Mulleady’s and the Olde P, was working and not the blonde who was on the last time I was there, several months earlier.
Several months earlier, I was there eating dinner at the bar when an attractive woman sits down and starts talking to me. After a few beers she suggested we go find her ex-boyfriend, who was last seen at the George and Dragon, and start making out in front of him. “He won’t know WHAT to think,” she said, putting her hand on my leg.
The ex-boyfriend dumped her a few months ago and she’s been stalking him ever since. Getting him back was the only thing that mattered to her and none of her friends or even her mother would talk to her anymore. She’s slept with four guys already and even THAT hasn’t worked. I thought I’d be doing her a favor by being very honest and direct about how messed up she was and when she started crying loudly the blonde bartender gave me such a frustrated and nasty look I avoided the Sloop from then on.
But now the blonde bartender had dyed her hair and was currently a brunette. Maybe this meant I got a clean slate, I thought. We took a table and after a bit of a wait, the blonde/brunette got us some beers and told us she was the only one on, hinting that we should go up to the bar for our next round.
A couple days earlier, in preparation for my first interview, I went around looking for an Interview Notebook. They don’t actually make Interview Notebooks so I had to take a few sheets of paper and fold them in half. Since it would have felt rude to be writing things while he was talking, their blankness was glaring up at me the entire interview. It reminded me of a last minute high school book report on Moby Dick that was a bunch of blank pages stapled together and titled, On the Whiteness of the Whale. It got a ‘not funny’ F.
Carl grew up in Northern California and followed the 49ers, disregarding immediately, even at a young age, the dirty Raiders of the lowly AFC. I judge a lot about man based on his football politics and when he told me that he, too, didn’t pay any attention to the Seahawks until Holmgren came in and then a year later got switched over to the NFC, I knew he was alright. Plus, he knows who Sonny Jurgensen is.
When Carl was a little kid, his mother got a call that her husband, provider for her and their two young children, had died of a heart attack while he was out on the road. He told me to imagine what that must have been like for her and, of course, I couldn’t.
There wasn’t much in the way of support back then and things weren’t easy for the young family. One of his earliest thoughts was that he needed to do well in school, and not to impress anybody, but because life was going to be harder without a dad.
Since he’s got a bunch of books and they’re apparently very good, I just assumed he was a full time writer. “Oh god no. That would be horrible,” he winced.
Carl’s married with a daughter, teaches sixth grade, enjoys golf, plays the recorder, follows sports in addition to football, and publishes a book every two years or so.
As we finished our beers I asked if I could send him an email to follow up on some things and he thought I probably had more than enough. “I think these interviews are only supposed to be 400 words.”
Since the blonde brunette bartender was too busy to come out from behind the bar, we had to guess at the tab. We left a messy pile of bills and didn’t bus our glasses, but I’m pretty sure there was a good tip.
Carl Deuker is the author of several young adult novels featuring sports. Read more about him at his page on ballardwriters.org.