Scary flashbacks hit home at ballpark (04/09/08)

"You're back," somebody said to me the other day.

"Sort of," I said.

Last month, I was involved in another project in the former Soviet Union for two weeks. And while I am physically pretty much back to normal after the effects of jet lag and 24 hours of travel each way, I sometimes find myself flashing back and forth between here and there.

Sunday was one of those times.

It was a gorgeous afternoon, and we'd gone up to Fort Wayne to see the Wizards in their fourth game of the young minor league season. The sun was shining, I was relaxing, and the other side of the world was - well - on the other side of the world.

Then Lance Zawadzki came to the plate.

It's a tradition at some minor league ballparks for home team players to have "theme music" that the public address system plays before they bat.

Usually, it's pretty routine stuff. Lots of players seem to like Eric Clapton's "Layla" because we hear it every year.

But Sunday afternoon, when Zawadzki came to the plate, the PA speakers blurted out, "Baby, don't hurt me! Don't hurt me!"

And I was suddenly back in Moldova, flying down a terrible and terrifying highway.

The primary focus of last month's project was to conduct a seminar for students at the School of Advanced Journalism in Chisinau. But it also involved five university lectures at various spots in Moldova and ten newspaper "house calls" to discuss their progress toward independence. Seven of those newspaper visits were out in the provinces, and all of them required a driver.

That's where the dreadful strains of an old pop song by some guy named Haddaway come in.

The original driver assigned to the project was ill, so his brother was filling in.

At least, that's the story given by the driver who showed up. Based upon his later record for credibility, I'm not so sure.

Petru, the driver, showed up outside my hotel the morning of my first road trip last month. He was dapper, a little plump, and he was driving a very nice Mercedes, quite a step up from the battered vehicles I'm used to. People who moonlight as drivers in that part of the world are people who need the cash, and people who need cash don't often drive Mercedes.

Vitalie, my interpreter, showed up at the same time, and we set off.

Twenty minutes later, Vitalie told me he thought the driver was out of his mind.

Not a good sign.

In the course of that 20 minutes, Petru had claimed to be a high-ranking official in a political party that was in the process of forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

He'd hinted that he might be in a ministry-level position after the next election.

And it got worse. Before long he had also claimed to have made a killing in the Chisinau real estate market, netting him $350,000 and to have turned down multi-million Euro offers for some land he had bought in Romania.

If any of that is true, Vitalie and I wondered, why in the heck is he driving an American around for a few bucks?

The short answer, of course, is that we didn't believe any of it was true.

Petru, as a driver, had his quirks. He stayed on the road, pretty much, though we did clock some time on the sidewalks.

And he had two cell phones with him at all times. Both had distinctive ring tones. One was a novelty voice saying, "Hello, hello," in a way that became grating instantly.

The second was a snippet of a popular song. You guessed it, "Baby don't hurt me! Don't hurt me!"

Petru, in addition to his tendency to embellish the facts, also liked to drive fast.

That's not easy in Moldova. The roads are awful. Even the best highways are just short of dangerous.

No problem for Petru.

In the former Soviet Union, I often don't use my seat belt. It's not considered a very macho thing to do, and it can be interpreted as an insult to the driver.

With Petru, I didn't care about insults. I buckled up.

When you're flying down a Moldovan highway at 160 kph (that's 96 mph or thereabouts), there's only one thought on your mind: "Baby don't hurt me! Don't hurt me!"[[In-content Ad]]