

CUBBIEPHRENIA

BB Sheehan

Published by BB Sheehan at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 BB Sheehan

The Cubs are going to win the World Series. This is the next year that all the fans have been talking about for the last hundred years. Sometimes at the end of April I stop telling myself the lie. Sometimes I make it until the end of June. Sometime I curse out my Uncle Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy for cursing me with Cubbiephrenia.

What about next year? I can't think about next year. I'm looking at the next pitch. I'm seeing the next base hit. I'm not some daydreaming kid waiting, next, next, next. I'm starting to think about the Cubs the way I started thinking about school, maybe there is something they aren't telling us.

I used to sleepwalk when I was little and one morning I woke up to see a baseball field in front of me and I turned around to look at the sunrise to see that I was an inch away from a cliff and a drop that would have set me into the waves of the Pacific Ocean. My parents were running towards me with horror movie looks in their eyes and I can only imagine what it had looked like as I walked, sleeping, along the cliff's edge. I took this as a message that I was meant to play baseball. My parents took it as a message that I should be locked in my room at night.

I always dream about baseball. Last night my mom was playing shortstop and I hit feeble ground ball after feeble ground ball that she kicked off the field like she was in a soccer match. She didn't bother trying to pick them up with her fielder's glove. Mom, at shortstop with her hands resting on her hips and her accusing eyes glaring at me for having such contempt of the maternal order to think that I could smack anything past her into the outfield. I woke up exhausted and tried to go back to sleep to wipe the dream away and conjure a better image in my brain.

Last week's dream, I should start giving them names and numbers, I singled to lead off the inning and from first base I looked at the third base coach for the sign – steal, hit and run, or no play and I saw the Pope standing in the third base coaches box, giving me the signals. He was in full Pope Regalia with his Little Bo Peep staff to guide his sheep, and he scratched his nose and pulled on his ear lobe until I didn't know if I was supposed to run, steal or walk on water. Finally he gave me his blessing and walked towards the dugout. The pitcher picked me off of first base, because I was watching the Pope and not the pitcher. The Pope may be wise about a lot of things, but don't expect him to help you much once you step between the lines.

I used to play a mythological, two out, bases loaded, bottom of the ninth in game seven of the World Series with my team down by three runs kind of a dream. I crush the game winning home run. It hits the ancient scoreboard so hard it rocks the frame of the board back and forth and the rocking pops the rusted rivets. The scoreboard comes down and ripples a tsunami sized wave through the stands. People are flying out of their seats. By the time I touch home plate the place is a wreck, but the crowd loves it and cheers harder. I don't have that dream anymore. I'm just glad I never told anybody about it.

I'm getting too old to dream. I'm in the going to school life, no parents, nobody over my age, nobody under my age, and classrooms are just a place to meet up with your friends. We're at the age where we're supposed to realize that we're going to have to work for everything. We're not the ones that screwed up the world. We're the ones that are going to get it right and we have the style and glide of a Cadillac Escalade. I can't be afraid of winning. Who's afraid of the Escalade?

I'm still in the early innings. Things can happen now and the game will seem predictable, but you can't predict what will happen latter just because something happened now and it seemed to answer the question of what would happen later. Just when you think it is all too good and the whatever begins to fall in place with the what the hell, something comes blasting out from way past the great something else altogether and puts you in a place on the bad side of disgrace.

I guess you can see where the story is going, but you don't know what the final score is going to be after only the first inning. You know we're going to play nine, no rainouts today. As long as we're all misunderstanding the same thing in the same way I guess we'll be alright.

Sometimes I think of the play by play announcers in radio or TV like the one I imagine sometimes when I watch baseball with the sound off and the announcers saying, "That's right Lon" and "Right back at you Ron".
CHAPTER 2

Mr. Shane is crazy. No one goofs off in his English class because it isn't worth the trouble. He looks like he spends most of his time shopping for automatic weapons. There is a rumor that he killed a kid when he taught at Dada Middle School down the hill.

Another rumor is that Mr. Shane is writing a book about life as a teacher at Dada High School. You'd think he'd tell a story about something interesting, but I guess you do stuff like that when you're crazy. He's always trying to get into our business, stealing notes (confiscating!) and eavesdropping on all the juicy gossip. We fight back by dropping a bunch of pervy notes on the floor like, "See Mr. Shane naked at www.mrshaneisaperv.com". He jots down notes all class. Something sad about the man, his master plan is an also ran.

What kind of story can he tell anyway that hasn't been told before? He wants us to understand Shakespeare then he says all the characters are crazy and it is all sound and fury in a tale told by an idiot.

To quote Shakespeare, "In, out quickie candle. Life's a brief virgin, then you're screwed." Jasmine Pepper told me that and I've got to believe that she knows what she is talking about. She said she read all of Shakespeare when she was recovering from a car accident at the age of thirteen. She seems to know things about people that they don't know about themselves. She says I'm smart for a jock. She likes baseball, but she'd never sleep with a ballplayer, since it would be such a cliché. I haven't been around long enough to know what a cliché is, you have to see everything two or three times at least, but she has had a long time to watch and see things when she was getting well. I have to watch Jasmine Pepper and make sure her sense of humor doesn't punk me in the wrong places.

So one day we steal Mr. Shane's journal. We stage a fight in the hallway and Shane Man runs to the rescue and comes back to find his notebook gone.

Mr. Shane doesn't know at first that his writings are gone, but he knows something has happened in the room. We're quiet so long a fossil could form in the air. He walks around the room and eyeballs each and every student carefully. He doesn't determine anything the first time around, and then he repeats his behavior again so everyone notices. Most people ignore Mr. S. and he acts like that is a good thing, but now he is studying everyone and even the students who couldn't pick him out of a police line-up are looking at el maestro loco. "You know something don't you kid", he says. His eyes accuse me. "If you think you can get a baseball scholarship without my recommendation you are wrong. I know a thing or two about the old ballgame." If it is about something old he knows about it. He doesn't know where his notebook is and I'm the last person that is going to set him straight.

"Huh", I manage with my best dumb jock reply.

I'm thinking at this point that there will be no more Mr. Shane to deal with once I graduate.
CHAPTER 2

In my other life I play baseball and play chauffeur for my drunken uncle St. Sligo O'Shaunessy when he's had too much too drink which is too much of the time. I'm not really sure if he is on Mom or Dad's side of the family since neither of them wants to climb into the family tree with Uncle. He's from Chicago where he was a Catholic and a Cub fan. He always says that like it means something, "I was a Catholic and a Cub fan". When he says that, he could be on either side, in keeping with the family tradition of not making sense when we talk.

I asked him once why he left Chicago and the Cubs and moved here. Drunk as he was, without bothering to open his eyes he said, "I was arrested for extrapolating in public." I'm not sure what you're doing when you are extrapolating, but I can assure I've never done it in public or in my room. He doesn't smell, but he looks like he has a heavy stink cloud above his head. I think he is a Cub fan more than a Catholic. He always talks about the Cubs and never goes to church. I'm sure the reason my parents have pawned him off on me is a lesson, one of the endless, pointless lessons that they as parental units feel they must give to me before the Great Governmental Department of Parental Impeachment files charges against them, in public, with full media scrutiny. You don't want to end up like poor old Uncle Saint Sligo. Go to church.

Some scouts have noticed that I always seem to be where the ball is hit when it is hit in my direction and therefore catchable. Anybody could do it if they watched enough and they knew what to look for when the bat connects with the pitch.

In the first inning you test out the pitcher. Or the pitcher tests you. The sooner your team passes this test the better. If you're thinking of scoring with your girlfriend at this point you should quit the game. Maybe call into the radio station, "This one goes out to Lou and Rachel. You know I'd give the whole thing up for you"

I don't want to talk about just baseball. The story is all mixed up in time, so I'll try to give the time and the dates for those of you keeping score at home. St. Sligo is a baseball expert. The world is full of them. He talks about players nobody else talks about like Ed Bouchee who played first base for the Cubs before being traded to the Mets in the early sixties. He knows this because he didn't work a lot and spent a lot of his time at Wrigley or bars near Wrigley watching the Cubs on WGN and listening to a drunken announcer named Jack Brickhouse who did the drunken play-by-play before Harry Carey took over the job.

The story Saint tells over and over, so many times that I can complete the sentences is about opening day in 1969. "I thought the Cubs won the World Series that day and so did everyone else. Backup catcher Gene Oliver said that summer that he would jump off the John Hancock Building if the Cubs didn't win the pennant. I waited a couple of months after the season ended, but he never jumped."
CHAPTER 3

The city high school baseball tournament is going on this week. Our team, the Breakers, made the final sixteen mostly because we have Lloyd Fleming pitching for our team. He's practically married to a rich girl from a private school on the other side of the peninsula. She heard he's going to be a star and sign a multimillion dollar contract when he decides to go pro. He doesn't talk to us much anymore. Too big league.

Most of the guys I hang with play on my summer league team, The Catalina Kids and we get girls that are less than rich although I've never met one who is really poor. Jenna follows our crowd and is maybe too Catholic for me in a good way in that even though she may want it I'd still feel like a deviant trying to get it, not that I want her to be a sex pig or a let's make a deal girl like my last girl friend, but she does have sacred issues that I can see myself violating.

I'm not going to compare baseball to making it with a girl. You know that story before you tell it; games have been played and girls have been made; first base, second base, rounding third and heading for home and he scores standing up! Mr. Shane doesn't want anyone to use exclamation points when they write, since he sees it as the same as shouting and if we wrote correctly we wouldn't have to shout. Mr. Shane yells at us all the time, so take this you crazy Nazi!!!! Mr. Shane is getting crazier everyday. Sometimes in class he'll just write in his journal and ignore everyone like we were in some alternate universe and he couldn't contact us on any wavelength. So sit down and shut up Mr. Shane you stupid monkey punker!!!!

St. Sligo fancies himself to be a writer also. I'm sure somewhere buried in a bureau of dirty socks is a Cubs chronicle; pages of beer-soaked-ink staining the virgin pages of the vanilla, once blank, now soiled, empty reams of parchment. That's how I'd write if I was trying to impress Jasmine Pepper, but I wouldn't write because I couldn't write well enough to impress her in a way she needs to be impressed.

St. Sligo is put in commission of a crime, the act of obtaining liquor for us in the underage drinking zone. We give him money for a bottle of scotch and two cases of cold ones. He gets the scotch and we get the cold ones. The teammates and crew go to the beach and party and he stays in the car. I knew the chauffeuring thing would work out.
CHAPTER 4

And now some of today's lineup; not all of them are baseball players. At the beach and drinking too fast:

THE GUYS

SQUIRREL A.

Always grabbing his nuts. Utility fielder. Will be lucky to work for a utility company. Can't hit. Can't spell his name. Loves to chase foul balls hit over the cliff.

MILTON HESTON

Claims he is related to the guy that played Ben Hur. Plays baseball like an accountant. Not a bad pitcher although he doesn't scare any batters. Stares at "Stacked" in his spare time.

SAM "STREAKS" MANE

"Streaks", not for winning or losing or running around naked, but for the racing stripes he imprints on the bottom of his underwear.

THE GIRLS

KATIE FORTUNE (FORTUNE COOKIE)

Have sex with her and she'll tell you your future. She sees children on the pregnant horizon.

JASMINE PEPPER

Too smart to be pretty, too pretty to be smart.

JAMEY STACHT

Not insulted to be called STACKED. Proud of her breasts. Would walk around topless if it weren't illegal.

LANA GRAMORA

She gives me less, even when she posed as my girlfriend. With Lana all the boys want more-a, more-a, more-a. She's probably nice if you ever got to know her, more-a.
CHAPTER 4

So some floating thoughts and blazing wisdom from a beach day in May:

"Sometimes you can tell from the way a guy stands that he is going to lose" – Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy.

"The sound of pencil sharpeners drives me to visions of terrorism and assassination" – Mr. Shane.

"How many quarters are there in a baseball game?" – Gina Gramora.

"It depends on who is throwing spare change at you" - Baseball gods.

"It is difficult to be original is such an old game" – J.P.

Cookie works in the attendance office and fixes the computer so that it would show that we were in school even though we were beachside. We're at the beach, drinking in an illegal fashion when we should be in class. This is better than the party on the beach beer commercials except for a couple of guys who got into a fight, which is something they never show in a commercial; a drunken brawl with two guys going berserk for no better reason than their brains are boiling in booze in the hot spring sun.

Saint Sligo stayed in the car to drink from his bottle and read the rant of Mr. Shane: "All that is wrong with the world you can find in the thoughts of a teenager.

They are the Mongol Hordes, the Huns, the morally shunned. They are Bolshevik terrorists intending to overthrow sanity in the minds of all protectors of intelligence. The mind is a minefield in which I tread.

They have nicknamed me Smelly Shane and they have scrawled those words on the desks, doors, floors and walls. Smelly Shane is a _________; fill in the blank with horrible expletive paired with a depraved title. Smelly Shane is a freaking, goat humping sex maniac.

The school system rewards this behavior. Why don't they just put up a sign,

"DADA HIGH SCHOOL WELCOMES THE FUTURE FELONS CLUB OF AMERICA". These kids are so stupid that they think they are smart. Fascinated by shiny objects and things that make loud noises, I treat them like sleepwalkers; careful not to startle them or their chewing gum might fall out of their mouth and stick to the floor.

Rumor has it that they have to commit a crime to join their club. The principal blames me. O'Really is behind them. He is the mastermind to this plot. I have a plan for him."

CHAPTER 5* * * * *

There's the cliché, no pain, no gain, that coaches like to say when they're treating you like a dog who just put a piss signature on the new living room carpet. There is pain involved in getting caught ditching. Pain because Coach Paul made a deal with the Dean about my punishment. Part one, the punishment starts at 6:00 a.m. Part two, I'm outside my house wearing running shoes and sweats. Part three, Coach Paul was parked outside my house in his shiny new Chevy. I had to run to school while Coach followed me in his Chevy. That couldn't have been good for his gas mileage. He thanks me for my concern about his fuel budget and tells me to shut up and start running. We get to school without me throwing up.

"Where are you're street clothes?"

I don't answer.

"You left them at home didn't you?"

He has been waiting to ask that question for the last mile and one half.

I start running back home. Coach follows. I hurl on the second trip back to school. At school I shower and put on the civilian clothes that Coach carried in a bag in his car.

Yesterday was fun, but now I'm back to being a bad kid and the adults act like you've violated something sacred and no one will talk to you; you, the carrier of some evil human mutation. It was one of those days where you could hear silence everywhere. By second period I had met up with friends and the silence was gone and we were laughing and ready to ditch out for the beach.

In English Mr. Shane tried to start on me when someone yelled, "jackal" from the back of class. 'Jackals' was his favorite word for us in his notes. A chorus of coughing noises sounding like, "jackals, jackals", bounced off of the walls. Shane's face turned purple and he forgot to breathe.

A muffled voice was heard, "He's dead, jackals!" Shane twisted his neck to see who spoke. Quiet, like someone hit the mute switch. Shane breathed. He walked slowly back to his desk and fell into his chair. He slouched down to his bottom desk drawer and pulled out a small plastic water bottle and drank the contents before popping a couple of cough drops into his mouth.

A coughing sound came from the back of the room, "Vodka, vodka."

The liquid helped restore the color to his face. His eyes crossed slightly and he picked up his pen to start a new entry into a new journal: "Maybe I'm Beelzebub, Evil Incarnate, the devil. Give me a pitchfork, light up the fires. I'll show these little serpents the medieval dragon burning my brain. One day a great mutiny will come and all the mutants will rise up and perpetrate massacre of Biblical proportions. Time for the cyanide pill. The world ended and no one noticed."
CHAPTER 6

Baseball makes you crazy. Jasmine is at the game today and announces that today is a great day for a game, hot dogs, peckerwoods and crackerjacks. Gramora corrects, "Try hotdogs, peanuts and crackerjacks."

The old ball game. Jasmine is probably kidding us about not caring if she ever gets back. Is she kidding us and not caring if we know it or not? She does raise the IQ of any group she is in by several digits. I see her looking at someone in the stands and notice Mr. Shane is here to put a curse on us like that goat in the Cubs' curse story that Saint always tells no matter who is listening.

Shane watches. He takes the game more seriously than god, but I think he is plotting to kill us; doing his homework now about how and when he will dispatch us like some hash smoking assassin. Give up Bin Laden, Mr. Shane will kill us first.

Focus on the field. This game will kill you if don't pay attention.

5 – 1 in the fourth. We're winning. I look up; it looks like Mr. Shane has a vodka bottle in a suicide squeeze play of his own.

"I think he wants to put a curse on you," says Jasmine.

"Like he's a warlock," I said.

The coach hears my conversation. No talking to girls during the game. He's staring at me like he is the Pope and I'm in hell. He's about to say something when Fleming hits a three run homer to put the game out of reach. Fleming can hit and pitch and take the coach's mind off of little indiscretions by the players.

We move up a notch in the playoffs. I played a good game, but Fleming gets all the attention in the press with his big way of looking and playing like he is in the big leagues already.

"Who are you playing next?" Jasmine whispers.

"Western Village. San Fernando Valley."

"From Prom to Porn."

"What?"

"They've had more prom queens turn porn star than any other school in the country. Their school motto should be, 'From Prom To Porn'."

The coach is watching. I go to other end of the bench to look at the bats even though I probably won't bat until next inning at the earliest. The coach talks to the assistants, not so worried now that we have a big lead.

I look at JP and laugh at the porno joke. The girl, more fun telling a joke than some girls I've been with rolling naked.
CHAPTER 7

Game time, Western Village. I'm afraid we're in trouble. The whole team is checking out the other team's girlfriends trying to figure out which ones are promising porn actresses.

"Why don't you just go over and ask them to audition," J.P. says.

She always seems to know where the mind is traveling. Lana G. jumps in.

"They're not the only bitches that know how to audition. They're not real actresses anyway."

"Take it off Lana G.", yells Squirrel J.

"Three laps guys", yells Coach. "Three laps. And watch where you're running."

We stumble out of the dugout trying to think of a style of running that an XXX rated girl would notice. I try to think of ways to keep the team focused on the game, but I can't find a solution.

Milton jogs to my side, straining to suck air even at our lazy pace.

"I think I can tell the ones that are going to turn porn star."

"All of them?" I answer.

"No, the ones with the fake boobs. They get the implants because they want to be sure they get all the action."

"Did you test them all yourself?"

"No you can see for yourself. Fakes are hard as rocks. They don't have the same bounce of a natural."

Milton's essay on fake boobs as an indication of porn activity is cut short by a fall as he is tripped up by his own footwork and the left foot of Jay, an outfielder. We're still in the pregame warm-up and our starting pitcher is done for the day. He holds his ankle and does his, "I'm in pain" wiggle dance to the ground.

We carry Milton back and lay him out behind the dugout so the trainer can ice his ankle. Coach and the assistants come over and stare at his ankle and stare at his face. Milton keeps his head down. Coach and the assistants shake their heads and walk to the far end of the dugout. They stand in a tight circle and talk. A muttering huddle. Their heads bob up and down and they look around from player to player. None of us look like we can pitch.

Lloyd Fleming talks to them. Thinks he is a coach. He talks and everyone looks at me.

Coach motions to me

"Mickey, come here."

I meet with the huddle.

"Fleming says you can pitch," Coach says.

I nod.

"No wonder your teachers don't like you. You never answer their questions."

He tries to smile.

"I've pitched for most teams I've been on."

"Why are you telling me this now?"

"I didn't think you needed me as a pitcher."

"Could you let the coaches do the coaching? I need a gamer. Do you think you can pitch today?"

"Sure, I can pitch."

I warm up with Fleming and the coaches watching.

"Got some giddy-up on the heater. What else can you throw," asks Coach.

"I haven't thrown a curve for a while, but I can throw a change-up without tipping it off."

"Throw the curve."

The curve ball was five feet higher than the catcher's reach.

"Let's go with the heater and the change-up."

"Okay Coach."

Coach looks at Fleming.

"Show him how to grip the curve."

Fleming nods and shows me. I imitate the grip.

"Take a little bit off your fastball when you throw it. They'll think it's a fat pitch until it breaks and then it's too late."

"Throw the damn ball," Coach said. "We don't have time for the whole lecture series."

No time to be nervous. Joe Rico the catcher called for the changeup on the first pitch. The batter taps an easy groundball to the second baseman. One out.

Joe Rico to the mound.

"That was supposed to be a fastball."

"You gave me the sign."

We go over the signs again.

"Don't piss coach off. He'll take it out on one of us."

"I know."

Rico runs back to the plate. Three innings later we're up 2 to 0. We're batting and Rico sits next to me.

"The ump asked about you."

Some of the umps are scouts or have a scout's phone number.

"Yeah."

"Next batter, try your curve on the first pitch."

"Okay coach."

The curve worked. A weak pop-up. Either I'm good or these guys can't hit their grandmother. Easy so far. I keep my mind off of porn queens for two hours and we win. The ump asks me how long I'd been pitching. He listens without changing his expression, nods and walks away. My arm feels good. Everyone slaps me on the back and we're two wins away from the city championship.
CHAPTER 8

MR. SHANE'S NEW NOTEBOOK

They're stealing my thoughts. Next they will be eating my entrails. The pack of jackals is circling; sniffing out the prey; looking for weak spots in my defenses.

They stole my journal and posted it on My Space. The principal called me in to the office and asked me to explain myself. I am not on trial. Treating me like I was misbehaving school boy. Those were just a few pages of my notes. The real story will be told.

On My Space there were two pictures. One of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter and one of me as myself. The caption – "SEPARATED AT BIRTH?"

They are not original.

I wrote that I fell asleep once in class. Just once. I told the principal I was writing a short story. He told me to be careful. Kids make accusations about anything these days. Everything that is wrong with the world is happening in high school.

They made fun of my line about my students being future felons by posting pictures of some of the worst students looking like they were mug shots taken at the police station. Lock those mugs up. Throw away the key.

We're a country of misfits. I'm the last sane man. The last one to make sense. Give me a blindfold and a cigarette and shoot your last bullet straight and true.
CHAPTER 9

I have my first pitching dream. I dream that Albert Pujos was staring at me out of a cloud. Instead of a dark cloud hanging over it was a silver cloud with the superimposed face of Al P tacked on the side like a special effect in a low budget movie. Every time I look at the cloud he is watching me. He never changes expressions. He just watches me with predator's eyes. How is he going to kill me? In his eyes I'm already dead. I won't suffer long. He'll kill me quickly and efficiently; no toying around with the prey. He was taught not to play with his food as a youngster. I remember that I saw him strike out once. I guess he decided to feed the pitcher to someone else. I wake up with no appetite. I lost it somewhere in the clouds.

CHAPTER 10

Two more teams to beat. The next one is a gang, better at being thugs than being baseball players. They have tattoos and stand around posing in the nasty manner of a raunchy rap video, but it isn't helping them play baseball.

Lloyd Fleming shuts them down, almost a no-hitter and it is obvious that they couldn't hit him if they threw their bats at the pitcher's mound. We're going to the finals.

Finals, game day. By rules we can't use our best pitcher, Fleming, since we just used him in the last game. Coach has two pitchers warm up before the game, Wayne Knotts and me. Wayne has a better arm, but we all seem to agree that he is a guy capable of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

So I pitch and we win. The team scores a lot of runs, 11, and I gave up 4, which I didn't care about – we got the W. The win happened so quick I don't really remember the other team's players. Our names are in the paper. Everything is a big deal. The guy in the paper wrote that I had learned instant mastery over the split fingered fastball which wasn't true, but it did sound good when JP read it over and over again to me in bed.

One cliché down. The girl sleeps with the jock who wins the big game. One down, so many more to go.

I think I'm in love and I want to jump up and down on the bed and tell the world, but I know better so I'll shut up and not tell anyone including Jasmine Pepper.

"Let's get tattoos," she says.

"Sports are making you stupid."

"I'm supposed to say that to you."

"See, it really is making you stupid."

"Maybe it's just the sex."

She smiles and we have sex again.

Sex can make you stupid? If sex can make you stupid then I want to be the dumbest man in the world and Jasmine is just the one to take me to that idiot place. Let me die stupid. Die stupid, die.
CHAPTER 11

Mr. Shane is going to flunk me just to make it hard to get a college scholarship.

A couple days after the championship, a Friday afternoon, the kind of day that Shane uses to start his weekend early, someone asks him if he likes teaching. He looks tipsy and ignores the question while taking role.

"Will all the students who are absent today please raise their hands. No one. Perfect attendance. Good."

When someone points out that he didn't make any sense he explains.

"I know. Just like to say that to see if anyone is listening."

Again the question about whether he likes teaching comes up.

"Teaching, teaching. Do I like teaching? Let me say that I started out teaching middle school. I didn't like it. After teaching seventh graders the only twelve year old I wanted to see at the end of the day was Johnny Walker.

One day I handed out index cards and asked the students to write down any question about any subject. Do you know what that sounded like?

First question: Why were the Greeks so famous for their erections?

Second question: Is your refrigerator running? 'Yes I told them, it's chasing Prince Albert in a can.'

Third question: Are people from Ghana called gonorrheans? No they are not.

Fourth question: Can I say Lake Titicaca three times, quickly? I could, but I won't.

Don't get me started about teaching."

You can't get him started about teaching because he doesn't know anything about the subject.

"Don't get me started about teaching," he goes on, "you just go ahead and do your work and I'll just go behind my desk and crawl into the fetal position and suck my thumb. That's what you want isn't it?"

He is done. Mr. Shane strikes again. Marvin captures the whole speech on his I-Phone. Shane sits in his chair and swivels his back to the class and takes another drink from his 'water bottle'. After a moment or two he pulls out a notebook and begins to scribble.

There has to be way to get around Mr. Shane. Why should a man who leaves such a small imprint on the earth have such a big say so in my world.
CHAPTER 12

Dinner. I tell Mom and Dad about Mr. Shane.

"If nothing else I think that you are learning a lesson about alcohol abuse and the damage it does and the way it ruins peoples lives." Mom's advice.

"I know Mom. What about St. Sligo? Is his life ruined?"

"He didn't need alcohol to ruin his life," said Dad.

"It didn't help", said Mom. "He had himself and that's enough to ruin anyone's life. What about that woman he left at the altar in Chicago? Didn't he ruin her life?"

"It was ruined the day she met him."

They don't talk about him often, so I stay out of the way and listen quietly. There is a story about Saint that everyone repeats whether they believe it or not which just goes to prove that if a story is told often enough it is the truth whether it happened or not. Any politician will tell you that is the gospel.

St. Sligo knows that himself. He always tells me, "Some people have substance, some are just full of it."

The story is about a woman he left in Chicago, or maybe she left him, but it was all a problem because of an argument about the Cubs.

Mom's face tightened.

"He's just a bum."

"What does he do for money?" I asked.

"He freeloads off of society."

Dad rolls his eyes.

"He does have a source of income."

"What does he do, rob banks?"

"He lives off of his investments," says Dad.

"So he had a job at one time?"

Mom shakes her head and stabs at her food.

"No one has ever seen him work. God forbid that would be the end of the world."

"Where did he get the money to invest?"

"He was born lucky," Mom says.

"He can't be that lucky, he's a Cub fan."

"He won the lottery," says Dad.

Mom steps in.

"You know it wasn't the lottery honey, it was the Irish sweepstakes. His great aunt bought him a ticket on the day he was born. A winning ticket. Since she bought the ticket for him she put the money in a special account for him in his name. He found out about it when he was twenty one and he hasn't worked a day since then."

"Not that he amounted to much before that," says Dad, "or would have amounted to anything."

"We'll never know will we?"

"That's a cool story."

"No it isn't," says Mom, "there is nothing cool about a bum."

"That's why when I make my fortune," says Dad, "I'll give it away instead of giving it to you. I'm afraid all that money will ruin you."

"Thanks Dad."

"All what money?"

"Good one Mom."

"Thanks honey."

"I'm trying to keep things honest."

So there, they finally revealed the dark secret of St. Sligo's source of income. I guess they were waiting until I was old enough to handle the massive impact of the truth. I wonder how much he has left. My uncle, the girl ditcher and trust fund abuser now wastes all his money and his brain cells on the kookoo juice. There is probably more to it, but it took me eighteen years to get that much information out of them and I didn't want to push it any further.

The next time I drive the sainted one to his destinations and he is appropriately intoxicated I ask him about Chicago.

"You're parents told you about the woman, didn't they? I can see how you're looking differently at me. I never asked them not to talk. Everyone hears that story sooner or later. I've never been in love. Big deal. Maybe I was, I might have been. I could have been. Love is for crazy people. I'm madly in love. I'm going out of my head. Crazy people. Why was she so much better than the next girl?"

"Because you loved her?"

"You should marry J.P."

"Get out of the car."

"I can't I'm drinking."

Stalemate. Sligo laughs and takes a sip.

"See how it goes. You don't like the scrutiny either."

I nod. I reach my hand out for the bottle, but Sligo holds it away.

"No, no, I can arrange a bad marriage for you, but I'm not going to be the one to put the drinking thing on you."

"So you think J.P. and I would be a bad match."

"Who knows? You never know until you're married."

I reach my hand out again and he still shakes his head no. Somewhere in there is the code of Sligo, in Latin, backwards, forward, sideways. Lord help us all. Da Vinci had it easy.

Marriage? I'm still in high school. Some girls have joined the making babies parade arcade. Bing, bing, bing goes the trolley. Call me a cad, but don't call me Dad. I'm too young to die. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm still a young man. Don't weigh me down. I'm going to have a bad dream tonight. Maybe unconscious forces will challenge me in a Freud Vs. Darth Vader kind of way. The beard and the cigar against the hairless one behind the mask.

I'm getting dizzy. I need to lie down. Thinking about J.P. has got me thinking too much.
CHAPTER 13

In the park with the gang; not playing ball, not playing anything at all at least not anything with rules that can be written down, these are the high school times the ones that last forever even though they are almost over and gone and then I am in the land of, "What do we do now." You always think something is going to happen, but sometimes nothing happens. Then the next year happens and the next year happens and then you end up sounding like your parents.

CHAPTER 14

Dreaming again. I wake up with a vivid image. I'm walking a tightrope that is strung across the infield attached to the third base and first base grandstand roofs. The ballpark is packed and the crowd is on its feet cheering wildly. I'm in my underwear, the baseball hose and I'm using a Louisville Slugger as a balancing stick. Below me are my family and friends and everyone in my life at this time.

St. Sligo is riding a unicycle and drinking whiskey from a big bottle.

Mr. Shane is riding a horse bareback, standing up, holding the reins in his teeth and shooting pistols in the air with his free hands.

Mom and Dad are wearing fencing outfits without the masks. They wave their swords furiously at each other. Their eyes are covered with black cartoon circles.

J.P. is dressed like a nasty rap vid dancer, shaking her booty. Her eyes are covered with an identity hiding black strips like the ones used in porn personal ads.

The rest of my friends and teammates are on an old style carousel, riding the painted ponies up and down in a circle.

I'm moving slowly across the wire. J.P. jumps on a trampoline and vaults herself up to the tightrope.

She spins, she twirls, she flips herself in the air and grabs the tightrope at the last second to breach her fall.

I stumble. She climbs onto the line. I'm swaying. I'm trying not to look at J.P. or I'll fall. I fall.

I fall out of bed. I'm awake just before I hit the floor.

Mom knocks on the door and barges in looking like she is still scared from last night's dinner conversation.

"We're you drinking with your uncle last night?"

"No."

"Then why are you falling out of bed?"

"If I was drinking I would have fallen down last night. I had a bad dream. I almost died in my dream. They say if,"

"I know. No one dies in their dreams."

"Prove it."

"Drop dead. Now get dressed and have some breakfast."

"If I drop dead and come to breakfast I'll be like the living dead movie zombies who likes crispy bacon."

Mom slams the door.

The smell of crispy bacon finds its way to my bedroom door. I'm alive. I roam the earth. I eat bacon. Farmer John's.
CHAPTER 15

I'm not bipolar, but sometimes the right side of my brain isn't talking to the left side of my brain.

When I'm on a baseball field the baseball side of my brain kicks in and I don't let anything else mess with it.

I think there is a baseball side of the brain that leads to addiction. Scientists have not detected a baseball area of the brain, but ball players all know it when they see it.

There are things about baseball that just don't make sense otherwise.

Sometimes you outscore a team and sometimes you beat them. If you get them to think that they have no chance of winning against you, then you've beaten them. Right now I'm outscoring the competition, but I don't think I intimidate anybody. They all think they have a shot at beating me.

Friday night and someone mentions night baseball. We caravan to White Point Park and hop the chain link fence at the baseball field. We have a bag of fluorescent painted baseballs and three flashlights. Three of the girls try to keep the lights focused on the ball when it is in play. It is a full moon, so with the combination of the day glow baseballs, the flashlights and the moonlight we've changed the rules of the game a little. Sometimes it works, sometimes it is like playing while wearing a blindfold.

Uncle buys the booze for us and we drop him off at one of the old seafront dives in the Bukowski neighborhood with promises that we won't forget where he was even if he forgets. If we both forget then we are in real trouble.

We can't hit the ball out of the infield which is good since we forgot to bring bases. We split into teams and split open the first twelve pack. It's hard to keep track of whose beer is whose in the dark.

"Drink it down fast. Just chug it. That way you don't have to keep track of whose beer is whose," Milton says.

We drink faster and play worse. Fortune Cookie runs down the first base line and sits down.

"I'm first base. Tag me out."

If we are quickly losing grasp of some of the subtleties of the game no one seems to care.

The flashlight girls throw baseballs at each other until all the balls are AWOL.

"I need some balls," yells Gina.

"What's the score," yells someone.

"Count your balls," yells someone else.

"I'm streaking, I'm streaking," Lana yells.

All flashlights shine on Lana. She is telling the truth.

"Let's streak!"

"Are those police cars?"

A police helicopter flies up from behind the cliffs and throws its searchlight on the field. It flits around the grass and settles on Lana.

"My clothes, my clothes."

We scramble over the fence. The police run after us, but they can't chase the smiles from their faces. They focus their attention of Lana.

I walk home. There is a police car in front of the house.

I left my friends, my car and my uncle. I think I'll lose my parents. I can sleep in the bushes or find a friend who hasn't been arrested and stay in their bushes. What will I say to the parents?

"Yes I saw the girls running around naked. I was tempted to subdue them and make a citizens arrest on charges of public indecency except for the fact that they looked more than decent to me and we weren't being that public on a scale of one to pornography. If the police hadn't shown up this wouldn't have been public at all."

I park my ass in some neighbors' bushes until the police leave. I saunter into the house nonchalantly. I am unmasked by my parents. Evil walks amongst them.

"Where the hell have you been?"

"Put the gun down Mom."

"You're lucky I don't have a gun. I would have popped a cap into your empty head a long time ago."

"Abortion is not retroactive."

"I'm going to re-abort your sorry ass."

"Mom you have to stop watching rap videos."

"The police had to drive Sligo home tonight", Dad said.

Mom sounds like she's had some drinks. Dad sounds like the voice of reason.

"While you and your girls were out having your orgy in the park we were trying to explain you to the police."

"Dear, I'll handle this", says Dad.

"Is Saint alright?"

"We'll see when he wakes up in the morning. The police were kind enough to drop him at his house."

"He buys them enough beer."

"Honey, that's bribery. If there's a bad habit he knows about it doesn't he?"

"So you kids had a good time at the park?" asked Dad.

"The police seemed to be having a good time."

"So much for law enforcement? What if it had been a terrorist attack?", asked Mom.

"Naked terrorists?" Dad asked.

CHAPTER 16

Morning. No breakfast. Mom and Dad sit in the kitchen.

"Well, no reason for me to be here," I mutter with great stealth.

"Sit," says Mother like a Siberian border guard.

I sit.

"I have one thing to say to you young man."

"Yes."

She slaps me.

"I get the message Mom."

She bursts into tears.

"Look at what you made me do. You made me slap my only son."

"I'm sorry Mom."

She slaps me again.

"You made me cry."

"Isn't that what sons are supposed to do?"

Trying to be funny.

"Who told you that, your father?"

She slaps Dad across the face. Dad stands.

"I'm going to the diner for breakfast."

I stand.

"Go," Mom says, "go infidels, escape while you can."

In the car Dad says, "Your Mother is going through the change."

I nod like we both know what the change is, but we never will know even though we can pretend to know. And they say that men can't fake it.

I'm afraid that Dad is going to try to convey some kind of message now that we are in the car together, but I think he is just hungry and wants to get away from Mom while he eats. I'm hungry. We go to the diner to have some greasy hash browns with our eggs and bacon.
CHAPTER 17

JP's parents are gone again.

"Well boy you done got yourself in one big ole heap a trouble" says JP.

"Don't talk to me like that Jasmine. You sound like something from the Dukes of Hazzard."

"Why you is getting mighty uppity . You got somekind of problem wit me boy, me being a big time San Pedro hillbilly and all."

"Hillbilly?"

"Hell yeah. That's what I'm talking about."

"Can you stop talking like that?"

"What's it to ya Gomer?"

"I am not a hillbilly."

"Yer running from the law in yer pickup truck and yer nee-glectin yer eddycation. That sounds like a hillbilly to me."

"You're not very good at starting fights."

"I don't want to fight. I want to have fun. Talk to me dirty in hillbilly. Talk to me real good."

"You better shut your pretty little mouth before I open up a can of whoop ass on your nasty freakin bee-hind."

"Golly, you shore do know how to say the right thing to a lady."

Later, we're talking now with our clothes off.

"You don't like being called a hillbilly. That's good."

"What brought that up?"

"I've been watching a lot of movies lately."

"Yeah."

"Well the English actors all play noble characters and speak so properly and smartly and win awards for that, but for an American actor to win an award they have to play a mental defective from the south."

"Like Forrest Gump or George Bush."

"Shaazaam, you got it."

"So that makes me a hillbilly."

"Yes, we all are. We say things like night owl. How many day owls do you know? If an American uses intelligence and speaks smartly no one believes them."

"But they believe idiots."

"Exactly. They think an idiot is too stupid to fool them. They can't get fooled by an idiot? It's the smart guys they look out for."

"Even a hillbilly can figure out an idiot. Like you figured me out."

"You all hillbillies talk too much."

"Well shut my mouth."
CHAPTER 18

"There is no slacking in baseball" said Uncle Sligo.

"How would you know? You lead the world in slacking. They didn't keep stats on slacking until you came along."

St. Sligo O'Shaunessy, master slacker, has taken it upon himself to explain the game of baseball to me.

"I'm a trailblazer. I 'm trying to help you blaze your own trail."

"I'm blazing, I'm blazing. Can't you see me blazing?"

"I will help you blaze brighter."

"As long as you don't make me flaming."

"No flaming, I don't do flaming."

"How are you going to help me? All you do is drink and watch baseball."

"The great Yogi Berra once said that you can observe a lot just by watching and that still is true."

"You're not going to sing, 'Take Me Out To The Ballgame' are you?"

St. Sligo picks up the baseball bat and walks away a few paces. He turns and faces me.

"Guess who I am?"

He holds up the bat up like Luke Skywalker holding a light saber.

"Don't make me do this."

"You must be the force."

I throw the ball at him. He smacks it into the ground. I throw another one and he repeats his action.

"What are we doing?"

"Centering. You must find the exact center of the ball and hit it with the exact center of the bat. The center of each is the size of a pinhead."

"So I'm supposed to find my inner pinhead?"

"Find it and label it."

"Label it. I can see why you drink."

"Okay, pinhead is not a good name for it."

"You want me to pinpoint my baseball mind."

Sligo collapses to the ground.

"Brilliant, why didn't I think of that?"

We go to work on emptying the ice chest of beers one by one.

"Do you know what you will need to make it?"

"A new liver?"

"If you don't know."

"Right now I need some luck."

"You can't rely on that. You have talent."

"I have to find my game."

"Find the game."

"Find the game."
CHAPTER 19

"So you and your uncle had some drinks," said J.P., "that's not exactly news."

"He's worried about my baseball career."

"Was he waxing poetically?"

"No he was trying to talk like a real baseball guy."

"He's seen enough baseball. He should have some idea what he is talking about by now."

"He talks a good game."

"A baseball career. Money, women, fame and still get to play baseball."

We are in J.P.'s room. Her parents are out of town for the weekend. Again she has a short attention span on the subject of baseball.

"Why don't you step up to the plate slugger."

"Are you waxing poetically?"

"You don't want to wax all by yourself do you?"
CHAPTER 20

THE SAINT SLIGO CHRONICLES

Hear ye, hear ye, on this day I do hereby decree myself to be the writer of great things. A scribe non-pariel, a poet unleashed. I shall place ink to parchment and inspire the masses as well as those in smaller groups. You shall see métier of ample portion. For once someone will explain it all in words that make sense so one and all can read those words and say, a-ha, that is it! Or did I see that in a soft drink commercial?

There is always the risk of confusion when extrapolating on logic.

Thinking makes me tired.

My brain hurts.

I need a drink.

Goodnight.
CHAPTER 21

A baseball is thrown at my face. It will hit me between the eyes. A tiny pill with shades of red forming from the spinning seams. It spins to a point precisely; a pinpoint area dead center between my eyes. I wake up before it hits me. Feel the force, right across the bridge of your nose.

CHAPTER 22

I am Shane, Shane of Anger, Shane of Middle School, Shane of High School, Shane the one who will have the final say. Shane of the ages - the last line of defense to battle the treason against reason that is perpetrated so wantonly in the halls of our schools. I live in a world that only Dostoyevsky could comprehend. Only he could explain the permeability of the disease to my soul. A diseased soul is better than no soul and I live in the land of those with no soul. I can't live long when every day is an execution. Every night is a long Russian winter. Everyday I wake up in the morning and feel the need for a blindfold, a cigarette and a firing squad. Everyday I go to school and greet the mini Bolshevik siege against the Leningrad of my being. Can we build a campus with size enough to squeeze in all these miscreants? Or should I be a sniper and deal with each of them on an individual basis. I could develop my own nuclear arsenal. There must be a manual that I can find online.
CHAPTER 23

Let me say something about teachers. I'm not including Mr. Shane since he isn't really a person. Teachers are not understood in the way that most people are understood. Not that I can't understand them when they speak, they speak well and I get what they are talking about, but I 'm not always sure where they are coming from. Why would they do this job? Most of the time no one cares except them. Some of them care, some are probably just faking it and sleepwalking until they reach the sleep which they can't walk away from.

One teacher is good, but his voice is boring and listening to him is like taking a drug or having the oxygen taken out of the room. Kids heads start dropping to the desk, then snapping back up as they catch themselves falling into a haze.

The teacher doesn't get why we're falling sleep and slams a book on the desk when he gets mad and frustrated, "Open eyed coma, open eyed coma, you are all in an open eyed coma!"

We've learned to ask a lot of questions to break up the monotony. We're not mean to him. We all like him and we know it is not his fault that he is boring. He was just born that way. One kid with long hair covers up his sleeping by combing his hair over his face so no one knows if his eyes are open or closed and it muffles the snoring. The teacher will stand in front of him and comb his own hair in front of his face to see if the long haired kid notices. He never does.

Once the teacher had the class leave five minutes early, lunch was next and we left the kid alone in the class snoring in the dark. A couple of kids stayed in the hall to see how long it would take for him to notice. Five minutes later he came running out the door and ran straight into the locker across the hall and fell to the floor on his ass and did the 'cockroach on its back kicking legs in the air dance' before he realized his place in the universe at that moment in time.
CHAPTER 24

Grades. Got to make the grade. You don't want to be in a tour bus that gets stuck on a hill. That's what Mom says because it happened to her once in Jamaica when she went for a short tour with what turned out to be a band of spliff spewing tourists. She didn't say much about the trip except that Jamaican food tastes like the best food in the world after a trip like that. I tried to explain that in an essay for Mr. Shane and he sent it to the Dean claiming that my parents were encouraging drug use among minors – me.

CHAPTER 25

They always want me to make a list in school. They want me to make a list of things to make lists about.

Things I can make a list about:

1) Making a list.

2) Things to do when not making a list.

3) Everything else.

You have to make plans to make a list. Before you make plans you have to make a list of things that you can make plans for:

1) I plan to make a list.

2) I plan to make more plans.

3) I will list all my plans.

I need to plan my life. To do that I need to do the following:

1) Wake up.

2) Go to school.

3) Go home.

4) Eat.

5) Sleep.

That's not a good list. I need more details. I need to plan more details. I don't just need a plan. I need a master plan.

J.P. never seems to have plan written down. She manages to keep it all arranged in her head and she is the most organized person that I've ever known in my short disorganized life. Mom says I've been dumbed down to the point of not thinking anymore. Dad calls it Zen. Mom calls that, "you say that one more time and I'm going to scream." That's what happens when you've been married for a long time. I'll have to make a note on my plan list to never get married. Every time you see a story of those adventurers who make a list of exciting things they want to do before they die you never see marriage anywhere on the list. Marriage doesn't belong on a list with sky diving and cliff jumping. Marriage makes people jump out of windows, but that isn't an adventurous kind of a leap.
CHAPTER 26

I, the Shane, live to write again. I can put posters on the wall and like everything else they will be ignored in studious fashion. I can't say what I really want to say to these apoplectic pygmies. Everyone makes excuses for them. "It's just a phase that they are going through." They turn their cell phones on, they turn their I-pods on, they turn on their little game playing devices like somehow it is going to illuminate their dark little existence.

If I could write a program that would cause all these devices to explode simultaneously I would do it. They would probably think that it is all part of the show and run out and buy another one to see if that would detonate again.

If I could write a program that would end the world I would. We are now undergoing a phase that we call death. I'm phasing you out of life. In my soul I'm a dog and I'm making sick howling noises.

I've been made this way by the buffoon rube attitude. I can't do this anymore. I'd rather sell life insurance to rap stars.

Freaks. Trying to exterminate me. Trying to tell me what to do on some intergalactic wavelength. I'd jump out of the windows, but they've painted the windows shut.

I've got papers to grade. Maybe I'll just throw them all away and drink and watch the Dodgers or the Angels. Most fans will watch one or the other, but I'll watch both with manual dexterity and a remote control. I'm tired of English class. Too many words. I should have been a music teacher except that I'm tone deaf and can't carry a tune. There is a migraine drum beat that is my heart pounding blood to my brain that I don't want to hear. Maybe someday my head will explode in front of the class just to make a point. They say it is all good unless it is bad.
CHAPTER 27

Sligo and Shane ran into each other at a local sports bar.

"You're the kind of guy people like to punch in the nose," Sligo says.

"Are you trying to intimidate me?"

"No, I'm trying to punch you in the nose."

"You don't scare me. You don't look like much and you can't do that sitting down."

"I'm going to finish my drink first."

Then they have drinks and talk about baseball.

"The Cubs will beat the Dodgers this year."

"No they won't. They won't beat anyone. They'll never beat anyone."

St. Sligo thinks to slug him, but he decides to have another drink instead. I walk in the bar, since I'm his ride home and it is time to go.

"Time already," says Uncle.

Shane turns and looks at me like I've been sent to kill him. I leave.

"I was afraid it would end like this," said Shane.

"What, what about my nephew would end like this?"

"He's your nephew?

Uncle finishes his drink and meets me outside. I explain Mr. Shane to him and he walks back inside.

"Where are you going?"

"To punch him in the nose."

I can't grab him so I go to bring the car around.

Shane runs out a side door and is gone down the street before Sligo has a chance to do anything.

At school the next morning I'm called into the Assistant Principal's office. The Dean, an A.P., and a school police officer are in the office. The Dean is settled behind the desk, the A.P. is in chair by the desk's side and the campus cop stands by the door.

"We just spoke to your parents."
CHAPTER 28

"So they think you're a killer," says J.P.

"No, they think Shane is a wanker. They were trying not to laugh the whole time."

"You're a gangster thug now."

"I thought I was a redneck hillbilly."

"You a thug OG redneck hillbilly."

"Stop saying stupid things."

"I'm an American, I've got rights. You a gangsta goober."

J.P. did funny country gangster perp walk.

"What is that?"

"I'm trying to do a gangster thug redneck hillbilly walk."

"You know how when you made faces when you were kid and your parents told you to stop it or your face would stay that way?"

"Sure."

"Stop walking and talking stupid or you're going to stay stupid."

"If I become stupid who would notice?"

"Just me."

J.P. sits down.

"Let's be serious" J.P. said.

"You're still making fun."

"I can't believe that wanker said he was going to press charges. All you did was drive your uncle."

"Mr. Shane is the only one taking this seriously. The Dean even said that if Shane didn't want to have altercations with intoxicated people he should stay out of bars. The administration is just covering their asses. That's what they do."

"Nothing is going to happen."

"It was more like they were telling me to watch out for Shane. They just wanted to make sure I wasn't hanging out in bars."
CHAPTER 29

SHANE'S WAY

Another attempt on my life. I am surrounded. This is the season of the saboteur. Maybe I could hide in the mountains for a few months and come back when the heat is less intense. Somehow I must take over the schools and rule them until they see reason.

If the schools need a trial by fire, then I'll be the one to make them burn. War or metaphor, what will it be?

I will hide and I will seek an answer to all of the world's problems.

First I will get a restraining order against O'Really's family especially the uncle, the assassin, St. Sligo O'Shaunnessey. I could challenge him to duel.

I must go back to school and listen to the imbeciles as they babble their incoherent jibberish. Babble on and pay my bills you bastard sons and daughters of Babylon. Young laugh whores. Whoring any sense they may have for a few moments of cheap laughter.

I have a headache. I forgot to eat. I've had nothing, but a bag of potato chips in the past two days. There is no point in eating now, my headache will still be there when I am done with dessert.
CHAPTER 30

Now I'm in trouble with the law with the help of my evil accomplice, uncle St. Sligo O'Shaunnessey.

Mr. Shane tells me I have to write an Abraham Lincoln type speech about the Trade Center terror attack of 9/11. That was a few years ago and now I have to pretend I'm Honest Abe and come up with a Gettysburg Address type oratory.

"Four Square and several years ago our fear fathers did go forth and multiply and divide with mathematical certainty and came to this continent to get away from the other continent from which they were no longer wanted in great numbers. It is with disagreeable uncertainty that I speak with you today."

J.P. says she will write it for me; she volunteered and is serious about it in way that I don't understand. Mr. Shane wants it Monday which means he wants me to spend my whole weekend pretending I'm Abe the Babe. Maybe J.P. wants to write the speech to practice running for President. She likes some games better than others and she likes playing the 'play Mr. Shane for a fool game' more than most games. She was so serious she didn't invite me over on Saturday afternoon even though her parents were not home.

Monday I'm in the hallway and Shane sees me and asks me if I have my Lincoln speech ready. I nod and he walks away without saying a thing.

English class. Shane announces to the class that I have a special project that I want to read to the class. First he reads the Gettysburg Address and explains the assignment that he gave me for punishment, but he doesn't explain that it is for punishment or why I would deserve punishment.

First Shane takes it from me and looks at it studiously. He knows something is wrong, but he hands it back to me without realizing that it is not my hand writing. Here's the speech:

"In centuries long past settlers found in this city a sanctuary to complete their pilgrimage. Today this history remains true as pilgrims flock here to escape the tyranny, intolerance and outright terrorism of a secular creation that plagues the planet.

On September 11, 2001 a testimony of evil threatened the sanctity of our religious expression. This failed crusade took the lives, but not the souls of the great many martyrs of different religions who toiled here in their quest for freedom.

On September 11 of next year let there be a pledge to ring the bell of religious freedom. On the morning of the 11th let leaders of all religions pray on the now consecrated grounds and designate an area where anyone of any faith can come and pray without evil intervention and let the bells toll in every church, temple, synagogue and holy place at that time to remember the fallen, the everyday religious heroes, that their prayers were not in vain and that those who have made a pilgrimage of belief have made a stand to make faith work here and in so doing make it work everywhere ad infinitum."

I finish the speech that J.P. wrote. A few kids were listening, but most don't know what is going on, they're just zoned in a different space, some staring blankly as if listening to music even without the I-pod earpieces hanging on their heads. J.P., usually smiling, is serious, almost frowning, so I'm careful not to make any mistakes. The ones that listen give me weird looks like I had an out of body experience and I was channeling the thoughts of a much more intelligent person.

"O'Really," Mr. Shane says, "could you stand up?"

I stand up. What does he want now?

"What is that part about the bells? Who are you, Quasimodo? From the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The bells, the bells. Are you high? Do you need a drug test?"

"I'm just an idiot sir. I should be executed at dawn."

"If we executed all the stupid people there would be nobody left."

"It would make your job a lot easier."

Shane covers his ears,

"The bells, the bells."

I hope he knows what he is talking about. Nobody else wants to hear what he has to say.

"I'm tired of shitake mushroom heads walking around spreading your Bolshevik and acting like you are so smart. You're so stupid you think you're smart, because you're too stupid to know what smart is. If you saw smart you would think it was stupid, because,...,you're stupid!"

His face is red. The bulging veins in his neck are blue.

"I, I,...,"

He sputters and makes animal noises. I think he is going to attack me and put a choke hold on my neck.

He slams his fist on the desk and screams.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid."

Time to state the obvious.

"Sir, are you calling us stupid?"

I'm baiting a wild animal. He steps towards me like he will attack.

"Yes, I'm calling you stupid."

I can barely hear his voice.

The Dean walks into the room.

"Is everything alright?"

"Yes, fine," Shane says, "we were just acting out the speeches of Abraham Lincoln."

"The famous you're so stupid speech?"

Shane forgets that he is too mad to breathe and the Dean leaves the room.
CHAPTER 31

Me, Quasimodo, do hear them Parisian cathedral bells ringing, pounding in my estranged brain. Some guys like Shane never quit, always looking for a new and interesting ways of making an ass of himself.

"He's like a one man show," J.P. says. "My Mom used to take me to these little theatres and sometimes they only had one performer and they would rant and rave about all their problems."

"Maybe the actor couldn't afford a psychiatrist."

"They couldn't afford props or lighting. This was low to no budget."

"Sounds like a reality show."

"I don't think these people would be allowed on TV except for a triple homicide."

"What kind of show would Shane do?"

"He could do a one man show about his sex life."

"Mr. Shane, the Amazing Jerkaton. He'd have to make stuff up."

"He does that all the time."

"I think he is putting a hex on my brain."

"Try not to think about it."

"I can't get it out of my head. Once I heard this stupid song about summer during the summer and couldn't get it out of my head until September."

"What was the song?"

"Ahhhh, now that song is in my head again."

"Maybe you'll forget about Shane."

"Ahhh, I'll have to kill someone."

"You are going crazy. If dogs start talking to you, you don't have to listen to them."

"What?

"Made you think didn't it? It's a zen question. What is the sound of one dog talking?"

"Ruff, ruff."

"There is no sound, there is no dog."

"Ruff, ruff."

"A dog with fleas cannot flee."

"Woof, woof."

CHAPTER * *

He is going to flunk me. Teachers have to send out notices to the parents eight weeks before the end of the semester if they think there is a possibility the student will get a failing grade.

My card is on the table. Mom put it there, but she refuses to look at it or talk. She will come up with a family conspiracy theory as to why I'm failing. Mom is going to think that I caught some kind of alchy slacker virus from Uncle Sligo and that I'm doomed to a downwardly mobile descent into a skid row vomitorium.
CHAPTER 32

Mom and Dad together are plaid. They're like the clothes that you want to wear around home, but you don't want to be seen with at the mall. Things are wearing out for them in a feeling old vein; too much of the sunrise/sunset makes their eyes tired and I think the best way to help them would be to leave and take my idea of fun somewhere else because I think that my idea of fun is a part of what wears them down.

The neighbor's kids have all moved out and a lot of Mom and Dad's friends have moved to condos and they always remark on the young couples with their little children who have moved into the old houses recently. Sometimes Mom looks out the window like she's not sure where she is for a few seconds. I see it in the older relatives, that look like they knew it was going to happen, but they didn't expect to get old so fast. They're shocked like they paid too much to see a bad horror flick. A song came on the radio once and the singer screamed, "Hope I die before I get old", and Dad turned it off and said, "Too late for that".

CHAPTER 33

The ballgame on the radio dream.

Lon and Ron with the play by play.

LON: This game will be underway faster than you can say, "That's right Lon."

RON: That's right Lon. And today we will see the debut of a pitcher who will give us the preview of what looks to be a stunner of a career. All before you can say "That's right Ron".

LON: Right you are Ronnie boy. The Catalina Kid, Mickey O'Really is on the mound for the Big Town Bombers. He has got a smorgasbord of stuff in his pitching pantry.

RON: I get hungry just thinking about it.

LON: That's right Ron. He pitches what looks like an all you can eat platter, but the batters walk away hungry every time.

RON: Batters think they are going straight for dessert, but they strike out on the appetizer tray.

LON: I get hungry thinking about his fastball.

RON: A plump and juicy hot dog.

LON: With ketchup and mustard.

RON: And relish.

LON: Lots of relish. Sometimes it looks more like a polish sausage.

RON: A German frankenfurter.

LON: A foot long frankenfurter.

RON: With sauerkrauten.

LON: With enough sauerkraut to invade France.

RON: Just don't tip over the pastry cart.

LON: And always tip your waitress.

RON: Always be nice to the people that handle your food.

LON: The Catalina Kid is serving it up today.

RON: That's right Lon. And how about his curveball?

LON: It's on the takeout menu.

RON: Don't get me started on take out, I'll never stop eating.

LON: Oh so right you are Ronnie boy.

CHAPTER 34

"What did the cannibal say to the headhunter?"

"I don't know, what?"

"I could go for a little Chinese."

Marvin wants to be a comedian and practices his jokes when we sit on the bench.

"That's good Marvin, you should keep that one."

"You should be laughing if it's funny."

"I can't laugh during a game. Coach will want to know what is so funny."

"Tell him the joke."

"Coach doesn't like jokes."

Marvin bats likes he tells jokes; he just flails away until he hits something. He even runs funny. He looks like he is swimming, but he is running on dry land with his legs kicking and his arms churning through the air like the paddlewheels on an old steamboat.

I don't know why it is so difficult for some people to run and jump. Not that I am so good at it, it just seems that other people are so bad at it. It is something you can work on and develop. Marvin spends more time being funny than he does running. Some times the coaches try not to watch when Marvin is running because they'll start laughing and we all know what a bad impression that will bring.

Marvin never strikes out even when he strikes out. He's already on to the next thing, flailing away like a windmill.

I glad we have most of the team together for the summer league. We won't get to see Marvin run much after July.
CHAPTER 34

The Cubs will win the World Series. I tell Sligo that when he doesn't seem so cheery. He gives me a 'you're a good kid but you've got a lot to learn' look. The Cubs will win the World Series, if baseball survives long enough and they don't change the name to the Lakeland Chubs and they don't rename Wrigley Field Preparation H Park, yes the Cubs will win the World Series. I think, I think. The odds are if you just show up you're going to win something once in a while. The 1984 Cubs almost went to the World Series. St. Sligo said: "They were the opposite of the 1919 Black Sox, who lost games to spite their owner, the 1984 Cubs tried to win to throw it in the owners face, "Don't make us out to be losers you bean counting masters of the also-rans and never-rans."

I heard that one a few times and I've tried to tell it to other people, but most people don't remember why the Black Sox were called the Black Sox and they think I'm trying slip a racist comment into the conversation. That's the problem with losing, only your Mother remembers and even she will try to change the subject to something a little more exciting.

Winning isn't everything, but it is a hell of a lot more fun than losing.
CHAPTER 35

Mom might be a terrorist. She seems so mad at me sometimes I'm afraid she'll pack me with explosives and use me as an incendiary device to take out someone she's feuded with for decades. Otherwise I'm of no use to her in the day to day combat of deadly daily life. I'm a team player. Hopefully I won't think too much to be a good bomb. Just light the fuse and point me in the right direction.

She isn't always mad at me. I just don't think I'm what she expected in a son. I won't be running for President any time soon. What does she expect?

Dad smokes. He smokes at least one pack of Marlboros a day, sometimes a pack and half. Mom says it is killing him slowly, day to day, as it runs down his health. I can't really see it that clearly although he does look a lot older that Mom even though they are close together in age. He tries to stay young by dressing all wrong for his age, but it just makes him look like an old guy in young kids clothing.
CHAPTER 36

Sex, of course, can be a distraction since at my age you spend more time thinking about the sex playing field than the baseball playing field and there are a lot more sex games going on than there are baseball games. Everyone is in a frenzy. People get worked up about lot of things besides sex although S-E-X is at the top of the list. People who don't get sexed up a lot tend to get all worked up about things that no one else cares about. Sex always feels like it means something, but when you try to explain it you end up sounding like a pervert.

When you're my age nothing else is quite so interesting. And we think we are so fascinating like no one else in the universe had ever discovered sex before – Morons! We'll probably save the universe by letting everyone have sex. I mean, not everyone. I'll just take what I want. What are you looking at? Freak! Maybe sex isn't for everybody. It's weird how parents try to look like they don't know anything about sex, maybe they forgot about it because they are too old to do it, wouldn't their stuff just fall apart? And wouldn't they look in a mirror and see how unyoung and unsexy they are in relation to the young sexiness of the young sexy things.

Sex, sex, sex, make your dirty joke here. Sex, sex, sex, say the words you think they want to hear. Time to move on.

CHAPTER 37

ST. SLIGO'S BASEBALL QUARTERLY CHRONICLE

Ode To The Losers:

Back off you virus inducing wannabes.

Don't get near me.

And stop watching the Cubs.

Find another team.

Branch Rickey once said, "luck is the residue of design."

By luck he meant good luck.

Cubs luck is the residue of the never-never ran.
CHAPTER 38

ST. SLIGO'S NEXT BASEBALL QUARTERLY CHRONICLE

Waiting for October. I am waiting for October, Indian Summer, when the leaves, brown, yellow and red conjure in the evening haze the spirit of seasons past burnt to ash. October. I'll save money on World Series tickets this year. There is always a positive. No running around trying to find a scalper who will be glad to rip me off because I need to be in the bleachers at Wrigley when the Cubs are in the World Series.

Again they've found a way to lose. Again they've played like they are cursed. I can't drive a stake through their hearts, they're still alive and cursed or not it is still only a game. They are only human and humans are no match for the curse.

An old song comes on the soul classic station, drifting through the evening, "Sitting in the park, waiting for youuuu,...,". Other songs, "waiting for a moment that just won't come.", or a rave up rocker from the sixties, "So tired, tired of waiting, tired of waiting for you".

Waiting for the end of this game.

Waiting. Where is the end to this waiting?

October. Wait until next year. I'll sit a dark room and with sunglasses on I'll listen to sad, slow blues for an hour or so just to lay the season to rest. Requiem for the season. Last rites for the stats page. Off to the tavern. It's football season.
CHAPTER 39

The ball doesn't care if you win or lose or how you play the game, so it isn't worth getting mad at it no matter how mad you get at the dumb ass piece of cowhide.

I was mad at the ball a few years ago, so I took a bunch of scruffy, tattered hardballs into the backyard and beat them into the ground to the point that you would need a shovel to dig them out. I realized it was a pointless exercise when my bat snapped and I had to buy a new one. Dad mowed the lawn a couple of days later and was baffled why the lawn was sprouting up baseballs.

The four seamed monster rules my life. The sun rises, the sun sets and the ball spins round. To everything there is a baseball season. How many cows must die for this game? How many trees must fall? This game will drive me crazy. Sorry about all the nutso talk. I've been in English class too long. We call it Shane damage.

I watched one of those science shows where they demonstrate why sometimes one thing happens and why sometimes another thing happens and they did all these crazy experiments and showed that the movement of the ball is changed by the seams and the rotation of the ball. All I have to do is figure out how to control that and make it work for me when I want it to work. The game is simple and that is what makes it so hard.
CHAPTER 40

I forgot to mention that I have two sisters, brats, 8 and 14, who I always forget to mention. The 14 year old wants my room and the 8 year old wants the 14 year olds room. I avoid them by staying out too late and everytime I see them they ask, "When are you going to move out?" Don't ask me their names, we're feuding and they don't really want to talk to me or act like I exist, so I just don't exist for them unless they want a favor.

CHAPTER 41

No remembers that I was a champion. The college people are telling me to try Junior College for a year, then transfer when I get my grades into a respectable neighborhood.

The scouts who came to check out Lloyd Fleming wrote down my name. Lloyd gets a big money contract and skips college and he gone out east playing AA ball. He's got baseball money and a shoe contract in case he makes it super-big, then he has to figure out if he is a ball player or a shoe salesman.

A couple of semi-pro teams want me to play for them, if I can juggle the schedules. I'm getting a rep as a ringer, but I'm going to have do a lot better than that if I'm going to go pro.

J.P. is going Ivy League. She's probably the only one from Dada High School that could make that leap and not get dizzy. The San Pedro Hillbillies will miss her, but not too much. Maybe she'll come back and get into politics, because a lot of times people who do well in politics are smart people who know how to talk to not so smart people without insulting their lack of intelligence.

I looked at the Junior Colleges and I don't like the idea. I like a college where you get the full package university town life style. A community commuter college sounds boring. I wouldn't do that well because I couldn't get into the deal.

J.P. will find we don't have much in common when she leaves for school in the fall. We could talk about it, but we won't because we are both afraid that it wouldn't do any good. We're busy at not talking about it right now. Once she said we'll have to try 'Abstencia in abstract' and see what happens. Future, future, future. Always talking about the future these days and the future is a fantasy.
CHAPTER 42

The last days of August. Sad school feeling is in the air, but I'm not going to school. That high school group has scattered all out of San Pedro, like they all had a small town fear that if they didn't get out this year they would never get out and they would have to sit around listening to the same old stories until they turned into skeletons. Got to have plans. I help Marvin drive to UC Santa Barbara. If he doesn't party too much he could graduate in five or six years. I'm missing a party or falling out of place in a race or whatever is happening isn't good.

I need to get away from home. Here are some of the conversation fragments I've had with my parents in the past couple of weeks:

"Any schools lined up for next semester?"

"Do you have a job yet?"

"I talked to the manager at the super market. They're looking for baggers."

"Is it too late to sign up for Junior College?"

"So do want to be like your Uncle Sligo. You'd better win the lottery soon. Have you been drinking?"

"When are you moving out?"

"Maybe we'll put the house up for sale and move. Without you."
CHAPTER 43

Sligo offers me the use of his in-law apartment, then he tries to talk me out of moving into the unit.

"I'm suspicious and I've been consorting."

He is intoxicated.

"With who," I ask.

"With people who go to the racetrack."

"So?"

"Maybe you shouldn't be around such people."

"Why?"

"I think Homeland Security is spying on me."

"Why?"

"Because I'm an American and I'm a danger to myself."

"So they're going to arrest you to keep you safe from your dangerous lifestyle."

"If they don't execute me first."

"Let's look at your pro-American traits."

"Okay."

"You drink beer like you're in a TV commercial."

"Guilty."

"You spend all of your free time watching sports."

"American sports. Guilty."

"You judge a woman by the size of her breasts."

"Mostly guilty."

"You've had gay thoughts about George W. Bush."

"Not guilty. Good trick question."

"Almost gotcha by-golly."

"Who is golly and why is he bi?"

"Don't go there."

"You're darn tootin pilgrim."

"All you're guilty of is winning the Irish Sweepstakes and retiring wealthy at an early age. You've done little work in your adult life. Why would Homeland Security be afraid of that?"

"They're afraid I might run for President."

"You can't, you were born in Ireland."

"I don't want to piss off your Mother. Please don't move in here."

"She's already mad. This could be a good thing. After eighteen years I think she needs a break from me. Is it okay if my girlfriend stays here?"

"You really want to me to get in trouble with your Mom."

"Who needs to know? She's going away to school soon anyway."

"She won't be your girlfriend for long."

"You sound like my mother."

"Don't worry about your parents. I've got a job I'm going to hire you for."

I knew this was a bad idea.

"Don't panic yet. Let me tell you the idea and then you can panic. I'm going to build a web site and I need a website administrator."

"It has to be earn while you learn. I've never done a website before."

"Don't worry. Everybody is new at it."

I bought a how to book from some build a web site Buddha who declared his supremacy over his small field of digitized ideas. I'm not one to put my faith in supreme edens or any one thing of great faith. The planet moves along without faith or belief. I said that to J.P. once and it was the only time she looked at me like I was trying to feed her a line.

Sligo had all the material for the site. I just had to put it together.
CHAPTER 44

CUBBIEPHRENIA.COM

Cubbiephrenia – a mental condition brought on by excessive exposure to a professional baseball team on the North side of Chicago, commonly known as the Chicago Cubs. Symptoms include, believing in the impossible; losing in a situation that you should win; finding an inexplicably stupid way to screw up a good situation; not learning from past failures and repeating symptoms one, two and three in an obsessive manner.

Cubbiephrenia is distinguished from another form a mental anguish called the Cub Fan Syndrome. The Cub Fan Syndrome affects the casual observer of Wrigley Field mayhem. Although the symptoms are similar to Cubbiephrenia they are less intense and will wear off several hours after the traumatic incident, better known as a Cubs game.

The Wrigley tourist will sometimes try to mimic the symptoms in an attempt to fit in with his or her fellow Wrigley inebriants, but they do not fool anyone and are generally relieved to find that they did not suffer any permanent damage.

SIGNS YOU MIGHT BE A CUB FAN

1.On the day you were born your parents looked at you and said, "Wait until next year."

2.When you were twelve your parents tried to trade you for Joe Pepitone.

3.When playing hardball you injure yourself, out for the season, during warm ups in spring training.

4.You learned the game by dropping pop flies, letting ground balls go through your legs and striking out in key situations.

5.You've heard the song 'Hit The Road Jack' so many times you think all Cub pitchers are named Jack.

6.You think you are multitasking when you drink a shot and a beer.

7.You play a video game called, 'Are You Smarter Than Sammy Sosa?' and lose.

SIGNS THAT THE CUBS ARE CURSED:

Mark Cuban wants to buy the team.

You sacrifice a goat and your wife starts to look like one.

Your star player hits over sixty home runs and still does not win the home run title.

You think one of the Cub players would be a good quarterback for the Bears.

CHAPTER

Now I'm playing way too little baseball and I'm drinking way too much. I'm turning into St. Sligo O'Shaunessey! Ahhhh! I'm not him. I'm Sergeant Mickey O'Really.

I miss Jasmine Pepper at times like these, she's the best one to understand the crazy talk I talk.

Mom is worried about me, but then again that seems to be the purpose in her life. If I was normal she would worry that I was too normal and that maybe I should get more fun out of life. I'm living at St. Sligo's house of sin and she should worry about me as I crash and burn my way through the days.
CHAPTER 45

Sligo did a trip to the old country and comes back from Ireland flush. He says he made some investments before the Irish economic turnaround and got out before the economic fall down and now it is like he has won the Irish Sweepstakes twice. For Christmas he bought a week at the Cubs fantasy camp in Arizona for Dad and himself. I don't know much about fantasy camps, but I don't think they have to dress up like goats even if it is the Cubs.

Mom is glad we'll be away annoying someone else. She said she was going to find her own fantasy camps and live her dreams, but I didn't have the nerve to ask what her dreams were despite the implication that having a son like me was not exactly how she planned to spend her days. Love you Mom. What kind of camp would you go to?

Please don't tell me.
CHAPTER 46

On the first day of fantasy camp the baseball field lit up with a gilded blaze of shimmering white light. I didn't imagine the light. Dad and I were hit by lightning.

I wake up. Dad and a group of camp people are standing over me and the trainers are reviving me, which they do, but they study me in a silent serious stare that makes me wonder if I'm okay or just dead and having an out of body observance of my death scene. I just want to go to sleep, but they keep trying to wake me up.

Mom is upset when she finds out. She told us that this was a bad idea. It feels like a bad idea because I hurt everywhere. I got a jolt. Dad got a light shock.

Cubs luck. Sligo says that. The first words I hear when I come to are 'Cubs luck' followed by a bunch of people telling him to shut up.

Sligo and Dad play ball on the second day of camp and I watch from the stands since I can't play anyway, I'm too young. Randy Hundley comes over to see how I'm doing and I lie to him and tell him I'm feeling great even though I'm not, but I can't let a tough old catcher like Randy Hundley know that I can't handle a little lightning blast from the sky. He slaps me on the back and I try not to wince.

"Can you play ball like your old man? He sure can play."

I look at Dad and he is running around the bases like he is my age.

Every baseball story needs a little magic and the magic here is that Dad and I are having a lightning invoked age reversal switch. Usually in the movies people will have a personality switch, but this time I'm old and he's young.

"Yeah, it's like magic. He looks like a kid again."

And I feel a flash of light away from death. I walk like I've been beaten with an old age club. Sligo is showing the anti-aging effects of doing nothing all his life. As a ball player all he can do is hit. He is a statue in the outfield and a target on the base paths, but he is a hitting machine. At times he is deceptively fast. He may be last in the morning in wind sprints, but he is first in the lunch line everyday. Some players have a nose for the game, he has an instinct for the catering truck.

By the afternoon game I feel I'm watching a slow motion replay instead of a game in real time. Dad is different like he has a new set of batteries and Sligo is sober so I barely recognize him as the mythological beast of Irish legend. This is the most sober I've ever seen him while in the confines of a ball park and I realize it could be a first. On this day in baseball history St. Sligo O'Shaunessy shows up to the ballpark stone cold sober. He looks like he needs a couple of drinks so he can remember where he is and why he is wearing a Cubs uniform.

I was worried that this might be the sports version of a Star Trek convention with an arena filled with geekazoids from far flung planetary places. Now I see it just a bunch of old guys with time and money who like baseball enough to spend their vacation playing the game.

When I asked Sligo why he wanted to go to the camp he said, "My life is so meaningless I should take up golf." Golf was never his game.

By the late game Wednesday Dad is the only sign of life on the field. I'm not going to complain about the old gimps on the field because I feel like the old gimp this time. I can't imagine feeling like this everyday, but these old farts have been living like this for years.
CHAPTER 47

"There is more to baseball," Sligo said over his steak dinner at the Pink Pony.

"There is more to baseball than what?" I asked.

"There is more to baseball. There is always more to baseball."

"I thought I was going to hear something that made sense, some great words of philosophy."

Dad stayed out of the discussion and ate his steak quietly, not wanting to ruin it by talking to Sligo. It was Thursday night, so there were two more days of baseball to be played and he was the talk of the camp, playing like a twenty-three year old rookie who was born to play the game.

"Why do I need a philosophy when there is baseball?"

"Mickey, Saint doesn't have to do much explaining in his line of work."

"I think the lightning strike hot wired your brain," said Sligo, "keep playing like you're playing and you might get drafted next year as the oldest rookie or the youngest old timer ever to play the game."

Dad just laughed and shook his head.

"I can't play like he can play," Dad said as he tapped one of my shoulders, "I just wish he was crazy about the game instead of lazy."

"I was watching the rookie camp this morning. They're all bigger, faster, skilled and strong."

"So you're going to talk yourself out of it."

"If I don't talk myself out of it who will?"

"Maybe your Mother is right. You've been hanging around him too long."

Sligo ignores the comment.

"Maybe when you're feeling better you'll feel better about playing baseball."

"Why do I feel like crap and you feel so good. It was the same bolt of lightning."

"I got the positive charge and you got the negative charge."

"Are you sure it works like that?"

"It makes as much sense as anything."

"Is the Mother still mad at me?" Sligo spoke.

"Of course she is," said Dad, "she's always mad at you, but now she is, well, she's still mad at you. This was your idea."

"You think she'd be happy that I got you out of the house."

"She has a right to be angry."

"For what?"

"For any reason."
CHAPTER 48

I'm the only person my age here except for the guys in the rookie camp which holds their spring training earlier than the MLB team. I scout it out when the golden oldies are finishing up the end of their games. They're all good. The coaches watch everything and tell them "do this, do that" and hope that their advice will break through to the kids. Some of the guys are going somewhere and where they are going is a place where I want to be found. Signing a contract must be like finding money in a suitcase by the side of the road. They're doing drills, improving their skills, while paying their bills. I feel I'm missing out, I'm off of the team bus, I'm doing a Google search without a keyboard. As Billy Williams said about hitting, "it's all about putting ash to cowhide". It's baseball and I've been able to play ball while the summer wind is blowing. I've got to find a way to keep the ball in play.

CHAPTER 49

Thursday. No one has been hit on the head or hurt themselves tripping over the foul lines or pulled a muscle while trying to stretch a single into a double play. There is some surprisingly smart play, even if they look like they're playing under water and running like mimes.

The play of the day as they say everyday in a sports channel way is between two gents of the 'you really can't tell how old they are' category. They're still walking upright above ground as Sligo says. He'll say stuff like, "See that guy, he's got abs of steel. Too bad he stole them from a fat guy named Steele."

The play: the ball is hit half way to the mound. If it was golf they would let the next foursome play through, but they play it out. The pitcher on the mound behind the pitching machine charged off of the mound as fast as his seventy-five year old wheels could spin him across the grass. It looks like an easy swinging bunt single, but there is nothing easy about this play. If the base runner was moving any slower he'd be doing the moonwalk. The big wheels are spinning, kicking up dirt, but the vehicle is on a collision course with nothing. After some serious pursuit the pitcher finally catches up with the ball and without keeling over he picks up the rawhide and shot-puts it in the direction of first base. The ball floats through the air and inches its way past the runner and it reminds me of the name of one of Willie Shakes plays that J.P. told me about, 'Mucho Doo Doo About Nothing'.

"I don't think a motion detector would have picked up that play," Sligo says.

There is no clock in baseball and any old kind of a hit is still a hit and an out is still an out no matter how long it takes to play out.

"The clock may be running out on some of the campers", says Sligo, "but they haven't run out of baseball. It is kind of a hurrah even if it is not their last one. No one remembers the next to last hurrah, they just remember the last one."

He's been giving speeches lately about what we're looking at and he is giving it his best play by play effort. Maybe there is magic in the game if you can make a bunch of old men feel good.
CHAPTER 50

Saturday. Dad is dead and so is the magic.

I wake up and feel strange because I feel normal again and I didn't feel normal all week. I was out early for breakfast and I come back to find paramedics in Dad's room. He looks peaceful, but we aren't.

Everything stops and you wonder if it is right to get things going again. Mom wants me to move back home to help around the house and help with the girls even though the girls don't want me there and I think they might be right. Cubbiephrenia isn't making any money, but St. Sligo is still paying me to keep the site running. Mom won't talk to Sligo and we all know that she blames him for Dad being dead which is a heavy load of blame. Crazy as he is Sligo doesn't control the skies, the thunder and the lightning.

I had to get away so I went to the cliffs where people go to jump or to throw things or to listen to the prayer of the ocean and hope that it will stop the screaming in their brain. I look at the water and it is choppy, not a surfer anywhere on the coast.

My Dad is dead?
CHAPTER 51

Not to be alarmist, Dad didn't die. Yes, we were struck by lightning and Mom asks so many times, "What if the both of you were killed", that I start to think it and have it in my dreams that Dad did die and that Sligo and I are directly responsible for an action and a dead result that we could never revive.

So it is scary, but in a delayed reaction feeling I don't have time to think and I wasn't reminded to think about it until I see Mom after fantasy camp week. She always thinks my brain is short circuited and she has no doubt now that the gods have taken the time to give me electro-shock just to make sure that I knew I was still alive.

Baseball still has magic and I still have more than my share of bad dreams about death, lightning and bean balls. Dad's energy level hasn't died, but he has gone back to being an older guy who stands up and goes to work every day without the excitement and the fantasy camp bounce in his step.
CHAPTER 52

Parents like secrets. One my parents kept to themselves was about baseball and me. What they did not want to mention was that I had been selected in the MLB draft.

I'm number thirteen in the thirteenth round according to the General Manager of the New York Mets. Mom and Dad had managed to block all information regarding the subject. They told Sligo and they all decided that I am not ready for the pros, the thinking existing that the pros are for phenoms and college ball is for possibilities.

The Mets. I do know about the Mets. Sligo can't deal with the Mets. Sligo has a history with the Mets, the premise being that all Cub fans have a history with the Mets going back to the beginning of the Mets. The league expanded and the Mets appeared and they were much loved by the Cubs people because the New Yorkers had fielded a team that was even worse than the Cubs and as everyone from Chicago knows, losing that badly and consistently is not easy. They started out a bad substitute for baseball and ended up killing everyone else's World Series dreams in 1969. One man's miracle is another man's misery.

The umpire yells play ball, the crowd stands and cheers and the Cub fans pray for a miracle. All you can do is buy your ticket, drink your beer cold and dream for an afternoon.

There is a dinner at home with the family and Mom has issues a probationary pardon to Sligo to join us for a drinkless dinner.

"I'll be your agent," says Sligo.

I don't know who to look at to see if this is a joke.

"I've done all the necessary paper work. I can call the Mets office and negotiate for you."

"Okay. I thought you didn't like the Mets."

"I'd like to stick it to them the same way they stuck it to me."

"What about school?" Mom asks.

"If he does it right he'll never have to work in his life."

"I don't see why that is such a wonderful goal. You're talking about selling my boy off like he is a piece of furniture," Mom says.

"If your sofa can hit a curveball I'll sell it to the Yankees."

"I want to sign. Talk to the Mets."

Silence.

"Good luck on your career son."

"Are you sure that's not the lightning talking?" says Mom. "Sligo you've got my son into this. The least you could do is say a prayer on his behalf.

"Yes, I can. I can say a prayer."

St. Sligo bows his head and makes the sign of the cross with his right hand.

"God help us all!"

Amen.
CHAPTER 53

The deal is made and it is agreed that I'll play for the Brooklyn Cyclones, a AA ballclub named after an amusement park ride on Coney Island. It happens quickly with everything moving too fast and soon I find myself in a locker room waiting for the manager to make an entrance and introduce himself.

He walks in and stands at the center of the room. He keeps taking his cap off and running his hand through his hair like he was checking to see that it was all still in place on his head. He looks around the room once and the talking stops. He doesn't say his name or introduce himself. You know he is Frank Chessi or you don't.

"Play by the cliché kids, play by the cliché. Play it all the way. Play it everyday. Be like wee Willie Keeler, hit it where they ain't. I used to think that a cliché had something to do with French hookers. If you don't know something look it up.

Don't think too much, but don't play stupid.

Don't get into a pissing contest with a pissant .

Don't start thinking about how big you are. Ball players aren't larger than life; they're just a hell of a lot bigger than most people.

A player hit .390 one year, but all people remember about him is that he got hemorrhoids in the World Series. Don't be in a hurry to be a hero. Good things come to those who wait, not to those who masturbate. Some things speak for themselves. Some things don't need to be talked about.

There are a lot of outs in this business. Three strikes and you're out. We've got fly outs, ground outs, fake outs, rain outs and then we've got down and outs. Most of the kids that were here last year are out, out of professional baseball. They found out, yes, they found out, that baseball needed them, not as ball players, but needed them as paying customers. It is a business and a business needs to cash out.

There's the phone. They're probably calling to fire me. Don't try to make sense of it. Sometimes this life is like that high fly ball. You yell, 'I got it, I got it'. Then the wind kicks in, the ball is gone over the fence and you're in second place on someone else's highlight reel."

He takes off his cap, brushes his hand through his hair, snaps the cap back on his head and walks into his office to slam the door shut and pick up the phone. Frank Chessi.
CHAPTER 54

Dad and Sligo made the trip, but Dad had to go back after a couple of days. We did the tour of the boroughs. Coney Island is like a place that only exists in stories as an excuse to have some cheap laughs on someone else's admission ticket to a strangely amusing ride through freakland with the kind of human that humankind points it's fingers at unkindly. After Dad leaves Sligo starts making up his own history of the area.

"Indians invented baseball. Pilgrims shot musket balls at them and the Indians would hit the balls back with clubs."

There is too much time to fill here even for Sligo so he flies back to the west coast with a promise to return soon.

I'm left here with a cast of baseball possibles and a promise to call J.P. There is a group of us and we're all from somewhere else except Pizza Boy Pizzarelli who is from Brooklyn and seems to know about half the people in the neighborhood.

Elmer Presley is from Tennessee and "yes sir" he will answer when you ask him if he is somehow related to Elvis the King. He says he is not sure "in answer to your next probable question", if he is better at singing or playing baseball. Unless he works on his game in a big way he should start practicing his rendition of the National Anthem since singing that song before the game is the only way he'll get into a ballpark without paying after this season is over and his contract is done.

Before we can say "Thank you very much" Elmer gets a band together and says we've got to go see him and we go to see if he can sing, especially those who think that his name is not really Presley. In a local bar he takes the stage with a three piece rockabilly band and three female backup singers. He introduces the first song.

"I'd like to introduce you to an itty bitty ditty I wrote called "Elvis Ain't Dead".

He riffs some notes on the guitar and sings:

"They say the devil runs this town

I saw an angel in the lost and found.

Don't think I'll make heavens stairs

The way I'm playing I ain't got a prayer.

Try to remember what the singer said.

'What you say was it, the singer said?'

The singer said, 'Elvis ain't dead, he's in my head'

Thank you very much.

(Repeat refrain)

Viva Las Vegas has stripped me down

I dance on lonely street like a clown

Here comes a walking bass, piano taking chase

The band needs a singer, a song in place

What you say was it, the singer said?

The singer said, 'Elvis ain't dead, he's in my head'

Thank you very much.

(Repeat refrain)
CHAPTER 55

"I'm Taylor 'The Legend' LeGrand. Call me The Ledge."

He is my locker neighbor. He is talking to me on the first day I enter the locker room before I set my equipment down.

"I'm black."

I look at him and he is right. He's black. I hate it when people lie about stuff like that just to look cool.

"Do you hate me?"

"Hate you? I don't even know who the fuck you are. Give me some time"

"I'm 'The Ledge'"

"You don't have to tell me twice."

"I just did. Maybe you do hate me."

Enough said.

Clarence "Needles" Nova has trouble using his talent on the field, but has a talent for finding trouble off the field. This will probably keep him off the field even though he is the natural of the group, the one who could play the game blindfolded. No one has ever seen him use needles, but the nickname fits his drug marinated person.

He quickly disappears after practice and no one will see him for a long time and if you run into him he'll shine you on, "hey how you doing" and shuffle past to drift away to a different place.

Rami Manirah grew up in South Central LA where his parents owned and operated a dry cleaning store after moving from England when he was three years old.

"Dad saw a baseball game on TV and said, 'this is like cricket except their uniforms are dirty and they have teeth on the bottom of their shoes.' He thought a country this dirty needed someone who could clean things. He was right."

Manny surfs and speaks in the Southern California accent that they call a non-accent because it doesn't sound like it is from anywhere else.

"When I was twelve my Dad said to me, 'Son this is America. Either you invent something or you play baseball. Everyone else is just a salesman. And if you do play baseball, keep it in your pants. Nothing ruins a ball player faster than women.

Also, you are slow and lazy. Baseball is a good choice for you.'"

Rami is built more like a Buddha than an athlete, but he has a knack for turning any type of pitch around in the opposite direction and watching it fly over the outfield fence. A first baseman is born. In the outfield he is a place where easy outs disappear and come back as doubles and triples.

Batting coaches avoid Rami. They don't want to be credited with ruining his swing, his form, although they watch him carefully to figure out what it is he is doing so they won't look stupid talking about art when they have spent their life studying science.

Ichabod Grobnick grew up in Pittsburgh Steeler country and thought he would be a quarterback , a Joe Namath, a Joe Montana, a Ben Roethlisberger. He is a lineman that wants to be a quarterback. In baseball they are called catchers.

Call him I-Grob or I-G or don't call him at all, he'll call you and he'll call you whatever name he wants to call you. He doesn't have metal plates in his head, but from the way he plays it must be one of his career goals. Everyone has a gimmick these days. I think he is more of a Bible belt catcher than a Steeler belt catcher. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not be vain in the playing of God's game. He'll be in the bigs soon if he doesn't kill himself putting on his gear.

Nimrod Songalong is from the Philippines and he is in the process of legally changing his name from the Tagalog original to an American moniker, Flip Songa. There was an Ellis Island tradition of changing peoples names for convenience when immigrants were processed into the country. Tradition is a nice way of saying that lazy, underpaid clerks didn't bother to respect the people enough when they crossed the border to get their names right. In Flips case a lazy clerk would have been a good thing. Nimrod knows how to cook adobo, a Philippine stew, so a lot of players end up hanging out at his place just to get a taste of a real meal.
CHAPTER 56

So I'm dreaming again, hoping I don't talk in my sleep and my roommates pick up on what they think is going on in my mind at night. In this dream J.P. and I are sitting at the counter of a neighborhood type diner in some neighborhood in Brooklyn. Casey Stengel sits behind the cash register by the entrance door. Babe Ruth commands the biggest booth in the restaurant in the company of a flotilla of call girls. Joe DiMaggio is in a booth by himself drinking coffee. Willie Mays works the grill, chatting up customers and using his spatula like a sling. Derek Jeter works the counter and Don Zimmer busses the tables.

"Classy joint," I say.

"Swanky," says J.P.

"Maybe I can get a job here."

"You've got to be a hall of famer to sling hash here."

"It's a goal of mine."

"Maybe I could be a waitress in a room like this, like in the movies with DeNiro, Pacino or better, Leo the Cap."

"Leo? You're on a first name basis with Leo?"

"It's a goal of mine."

"It's good to have goals."

I look out the front window and there is St. Sligo on the outside looking in and wearing a Cubs uniform. It starts raining. Lightning hits him, but he doesn't flinch or blink. A tornado flies in the distance. Wrigley Field, spinning, is tossed through the sky by the force of the twister. Auntie Em can't save it now.

CHAPTER 57

J.P. looks at me as I wake up from the dream.

"Another bad one."

"It didn't have a happy ending."

"What happened?"

"The baseball gods punished St. Sligo."

"They do every year."

J.P. is staying with me for the summer instead of going back to L.A.

I tell her the dream.

"Can I work at the café that Leo likes?"

"I'll make some phone calls."
CHAPTER 58

Sligo visits for the first game.

"Just came to check on my favorite client"

"Thanks Uncle."

"No problem. Be careful. If you don't make the team you're contractually obligated to work the Coney Island geek shows for one year."

"You're trying to be amusing aren't you?"

"What could be more amusing than Coney Island?"

"Why don't you have another six or seven beers to go with your hot dogs. It'll be more fun."

"I'm trying to look professional."

We are eating at Nathan's.

"This is Nathan's," says Sligo. "This is the first hot dog stand in America. In fact the early settlers bought Coney Island from the Indians for twenty-four hot dogs."

"Why twenty-four?"

"I don't know. They're Indians, not accountants. They didn't understand compound interest."

When Uncle talks it isn't always easy to determine if he is talking just to talk, talking to make a point or talking just to show that he is being held hostage by his own imagination; taken prisoner, kidnapped and dropped off in some remote and desolate landscape away from real people.

"You don't want to end up a Coney Island Baby."

"That doesn't sound good."

"The pressure is to get out of the minor leagues or you're just another Coney Island Baby."

"Sounds like a song sung by a guy wearing a straw hat and playing the banjo."

"Cubbiephrenia is catching."

"Are you making any money with it?"

"I need some sponsors for the ad revenue. I get a lot of drunken bloggers spewing misspelled obscenities."

"You don't mind if I don't tell anyone I'm involved. It might be a conflict of interest."

"Don't even think about it. You've got to be about hardball 24/7. Leave the fan business to the fans. Even if this is the minor leagues you're still a pro."
CHAPTER 59

At Columbia I walk across the campus to see what I'm missing and feel like my brain needs steroids. Columbia University: where the elite meet to geek and freak. J.P. makes friends easily here in a way that makes me feel like I'm missing something. Even some of the minor leaguers have had four years of college, four years of studying, thinking and bullshitting before having to face the hard head of adult real time politics.

It is good to take a break and the only reason that brings the group together. The jocko slobs in the locker room are interested in my cross town intellectual pursuit, but most of them have never heard of Columbia since none of the Lions sports teams are talked about on ESPN.

J.P.'s roommate is a radical feminist who takes a serious bent to all areas of J.P.'s everydays.

"She's got my back," J.P. says.

She also has a poster on the wall that states:

"No phallus will delay us,

No penis can demean us."

She hangs sex toys on a rack on the wall over her bed that in too many ways reminds me of a gun shot rack in the back of a pick up truck in the South although I can't explain why I make that connection.
CHAPTER 60

Zack Rodriguez, steps down from the bigs and onto our little playing field two days after we reported, for the purpose of rehab after minor surgery to his right knee. We try not to stare or act foolish like a fan or get in way of his big league walk. He doesn't see people when he moves, he just goes past looking forward as if seeing in the air some invisible knowledge of baseball that is only in his field of vision. He doesn't stop and chat about his long term mega million dollar contract or the steroid use that has put a big 'but' on his Hall of Fame chances.

"How's the knee?" Coach asks him.

"My bags are packed."

"I can see that," said Coach, "Can I borrow five million dollars?"

"You couldn't afford the interest."

"I wasn't going to pay it back."

"Good to see you Coach."

"Good luck Champ."

Grobnick looks at Z-Rod and says to no one directly, "Steroids, maybe I should take some."

Half the guys are thinking the same thing. It's Brahma Bull vs. Bambi and Bambi needs to get big fast.

So I sleep and have a steroid dream:

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I'm the biggest balloon on the street. I'm attacked by King Kong who is being chased by a regiment of soldiers.

I dispatch King Kong with a haymaker punch and float away from the scene with the infantry and helicopters in pursuit.

I float to the top of the Empire State Building and my tethers get tangled up with the antennae at the top of the building. Fighter planes attack. I snap free from my tethers. Tracer bullets rip through the sheath of the balloon.

Spinning and wheezing I buzz off across the Manhattan skyline propelled by the air of my bursting balloon towards Yankee Stadium.
CHAPTER 61

I'm working out without steroids. I'll work on my timing. There are a lot of guys on steroids who can't hit the ball out of the infield because they can't make contact with a pitch. Some guys have muscles so big they have forgotten how to run, but still believe the size of their muscles has replaced the need to use their brains. They think they are going to swing at fat pitches, but they are just going to flail at the bait of sucker pitch after sucker pitch.

I can hit so the coaches aren't sure if they want me as a pitcher or an everyday player. It is a problem for the coaches and so it is a problem for me since the coaches would rather find a prospect who isn't a problem.

Chances in hell. I'm a teenager and I'm worrying about chances in hell. Maybe if I start out worrying about chances in hell it will give me the force to blast my way all the way to limbo. It is a Catholic way of thinking. Original sin. We were born with sin on our souls. We are through before we even get started.

"Worse things can happen. You can become meek and try to lead a perfect life,"

says J.P.

"That's me."

"Right. Or you will say the hell with it – it doesn't make any difference what I do because I'm already damned."

"Fuck it."

"There is third option."

"The law of threes."

"You can find a religion that gives you better odds than slim to none."

"A bigger better religion with more options for more people. More god all the time."

"You need a god that doesn't look at you and say 'Go to hell'.

"Get thine ass out of here damn it."

"In baseball you're guilty as hell and no one wants to hear your prayer."

"Baseball has superstition. It doesn't need religion."

"Pagan."

I get more questions from home about J.P. than I do about baseball which is their way of saying without saying that they think I have more of a future with her than I do with baseball. She's taking classes in Advanced World Economics and I'm taking Advanced Kid Games 101. At least I'm making more money than she is for all her thinking.

We never talk about the specifics of us together the way you talk to a coach about the mechanics of your batting swing.
CHAPTER 62

Food. Lance thinks about drugs, we think about dinner. Coach talks to us about food and says that an army marches on its stomach and he doesn't mean we crawl on our

bellies like reptiles. He says a hungry man is an angry man and he isn't much good as a soldier. You play when you're so hungry you can't think and you'll get hit in the head so hard that you won't have to worry about that thinking thing for too long.

We talk about where we're going to eat more than we talk about ball. We talk about food all day and end up at IHOP where you can eat and not talk. Rami says he is afraid that he will eat his way out of baseball. "I know I'm fat man. I went the beach the other day and the sea lions threw harpoons at me."

He smokes weed and eats when he isn't playing baseball. He probably doesn't know how much he eats, he just puts food in his mouth on an automatic reflex.

"My favorite food group is beer. That is one food that you get the immediate results. It tastes good and you get that energy boost that gives you a charge."

J.P. sneaks me into the cafeteria when she can for a binge - no - purge face stuffing food fest that ends when I get tired of chewing. She isn't used to New York yet. She's stressed and she doesn't eat when she stressed.

I think it is because there is something about Manhattan that makes you think that you're not working hard enough. She can talk to anyone, but she is okay when she is sitting by herself just thinking and not going crazy on her own time. She's quiet when I eat, like she is trying to take her mind off of food.
CHAPTER 62

When Cressi isn't talking about baseball he reads the newspaper and rants.

"Too many MBAs. You've got too many degrees cooking at the wrong temperature. You got to make something to make money. Why are they getting bonus points for putting up zeros? What you call a player who just shows up and collects a fat paycheck for doing nothing? A major leaguer."

CHAPTER 63

So at this point in the story game you're wondering how to fill in your scorecard. Maybe you're thinking it will be predictable the way a baseball game is predictable in that it has nine innings, the batters get three strikes and there is always another game tomorrow.

You could be thinking how Uncle Sligo will screw this up for me since he is just the man for that job. He has been helpful in keeping my story going. Will I give it all up for my high school sweetheart and lead the life that I was brought up to live?
CHAPTER 64

Lon and Ron Show

LON: Its a beautiful day for a ballgame today Ron.

RON: That's right Lon. If I wasn't a professional broadcaster I would break into a song.

LON: Like a gay musical number? Which team are you playing for Ron?

RON: There's no singing in the press box. I report I don't play.

LON: How about a musical about real guys?

RON: No dolls?

LON: Dolls are alright, but the songs gotta be the kind of song a guy would sing. 'Gotta pee, gotta pee, let the urine be free'.

RON: You know what kind of guys would sing that?

LON: What kind of guys Ron?

RON: Guys without girlfriends.

LON: You know that one 'doe a deer'?

RON: You're just trying to get me to say 'yes dear'.

LON: So the next line is fa, a long long way to run.

RON: Where are you going with this?

LON: Fa. If the Von Trapp family lived in the Swiss Alps why do they say fa instead of far? Are they really from Brooklyn?

RON: You got a problem wit dat?

LON: That's a big la dee da to you Ron.
CHAPTER 65

"The coach says I'm not mean enough to win. What do I have to do, kill someone to show how tough I am?"

"Why don't you kill the Coach?" says J.P.

"That would solve a lot of problems."

"That would be bad enough to impress the macho boys."

"Maybe I should kill them all."

What is a bad man? According to any woman, men are bad by nature and are only acceptable with a tolerable amount of badness. Bad can be good in sports. Is it essential? According to the book of St. Sligo:

"They said Ernie Banks was too nice to be a champion and that nice guys never win.

I've known some assholes that couldn't win a prize with a box of crackerjacks. What about the other Cubs. They weren't all Mr. Congeniality and they couldn't win a thing."
CHAPTER 66

Opening day. I don't care if it is the minor leagues it is opening freaking day and I am in uniform on the playing field with a bat in my hand and a pitcher who's already counting to get me out with a get stupid pitch that I'm going to rock his idiot head off with a four seamed line drive.

CHAPTER 67

Don't think too much, but don't play stupid. I've been thinking about it, but not in a stupid way, not that anyone would purposely think stupid; they would try to think a smart thought, but a dumb thought would come out and they wouldn't recognize the difference.

What Cressi was saying or trying to say, so I think, is that when you're playing the game you should have thought of everything before hand because when the ball is flying you won't have time to think, you'll only have time to make or not make a play. And if you don't make the play they'll want to know, 'What the hell were you thinking?'.

And you say, " I don't want to think about it."

"Oh yeah? Well you should have thought of that before."

Cressi is going to think I'm being a wise ass.

He watches me during drills.

"You can play ball. You're that kid from California. LA?" Cressi says.

"San Pedro."

"Where's that?"

" Near Catalina."

"Catalina? I almost went there once but I didn't have my passport."

You don't need passport, it's part of California."

"That was a joke. I used to have a place there when I played for the Dodgers."

"You should have had a MVP for a couple of those years."

"I like you Catalina. You know how to talk to a manager. I heard you were something of a wise ass."

"No sir. That is some bad information."

"Good. You know what happens to wise asses in this game?"

"No sir."

"They get traded to Cleveland."

"That's got to hurt."

"That is nothing compared to the stinging end of your wit."

"You're joking again."

"Yes I am. Good come back Shecky."

"Sometimes I sting myself."

"Yeah, well make sure the door is locked and the radio is turned up."
CHAPTER 68

The Lon and Ron Show

Lon: Yes Ronnie boy it looks like our man Mickey O'Really has signed up with that beast of the boroughs, the Brooklyn Cyclones of Coney Island.

Ron: Hard to believe Lon. Seems like only yesterday he was trying to fit his pubes into his first cup.

Lon: Raised his voice an octave and put hair on his chest at the same time.

Ron: That's no easy feat.

Lon: Looking over the schedule I can't help but take notice of their promotional nights.

Ron: Nothing says minor league baseball like the promotional nights.

Lon: Here's one for kids twelve and under, it's the 'chase an old man with a stick competition.'

Ron: Always a favorite of mine. You should see the kids' faces light up when they chase that old man.

Lon: On July 7 it's the Official Geek for a day contest. Dress like a geek and win prizes. The person voted biggest geek is crowned the official 'Geek for a day'.

Ron: I can't think of a better way to watch a baseball game than dressed as complete geek.

Lon: And of course in August it is senior citizen Greco-Roman nude wrestling night.

Ron: Did we mention the door prizes?

Lon: Yes, it's true - door prizes. On the final day of the season the first one thousand people will win free passes to go Newark, New Jersey and see the Tomb of the Unknown Gangster.

Ron: It is a very impressive monument. There is ten foot tall statue of gangster and plaque with an inscription that reads, "What are you looking at?".

Lon: Our boy Mickey has a lot to look forward to.

Ron: And that doesn't even include the game of baseball.
CHAPTER 69

"It is like the old war movies where the buddies stay close together and no one lets the new guy bum any cigarettes," I tell J.P.

"The old black and white movies where there is always a guy from Brooklyn or the Bronx."

"They sent this guy out today, he hasn't been here two weeks and he got the pink slip."

"And then a sniper shot him."

"You're taking the metaphor too far."

"Metaphor. That's a big word for a jocko."

"Yeah, you asked me if I met another girl. No, I met ah four."

"Now we're going from a war movie to the Marx Brothers. Next you'll be doing the gal a day joke."

"Are we not going to be together much longer?"

"I'm supposed to be asking these questions. Just do you're job and don't think"

"Now you're my coach. I don't need another coach."

"Drop and give me twenty."

She is laughing.

"Just drop then."

"Is that another famous quote?"

"Straight from the immoral bardster."

"You should write all your stuff down."

"Why?"

"Because I can't remember it all and sometimes I want to use what you say to sound witty, but when I say it everything sounds different and not so smart."

"You say the nicest things to me. They sound smart when you say them."

"You're a liar."

"I' m telling the truth. This just goes to prove my theory about the truth."

"You have a theory about the truth."

"I have a theory about everything."

"I know. What is your theory about the truth?"

"If you tell the truth people will laugh, get mad or call you a liar."

"So it is better just to lie."

"No, you have to always tell me the truth."

"And you'll never lie to me?"

"I'm an independent woman. I have to lie when necessary and sometimes just for practice."

"So you have learned something in college."

"I'd be lying if I said I didn't".
CHAPTER 70

A 'walk on' shows up and says he can pitch. He also says he crossed the Mexican border after pole vaulting over the wall into California and riding freight trains to New York because he had heard that a friend of his was playing ball here. Even though no one has heard of his friend and one believes him the Latino players rally and harass the coaches into letting him throw to a couple of hitters.

Manny "Eyebrows" Sombrero smuggled in a ninety-nine mile an hour fastball that he could use to knock a taco out of the hand of a Tijuana tourist at a hundred paces.

Immigration won't be confiscating that heater. The coaches started working on his papers after three pitches. He works fast, pitching like he is late for a date with Angelina Jolie, but he talks slow like Brad Pitt just showed up and left with his girlfriend.

After practice he draws a crowd of players who want to hear his story and soon enough someone asks why he is called "Eyebrows". His own eyebrows are pencil thin.

"I learned to pitch from the wise old man in my little village we used to call The Ghost because when talked to him you felt that you were talking to the spirit of the dead he spoke with that much wisdom. I asked him how to make my fastball invisible and he stood up and showed me without saying a word. After that day no one could hit me.

The first batter I pitch against after that push against the plate so I get pissed off and I want to see him dance. I throw to push him back and the ball brushes his face. When the catcher throws the ball back I feel something funny and I look in my glove and it looks like caterpillars, but no, I pick up the ball and look at it, what is it I see? Two eyebrows look at me like they are pasted on the ball. So now every time I pitch close, the batter checks his face to see if he still has his eyebrows."

Even "The Legend" checks his eyebrows after hearing the story. Coach Chessi name for Eyebrows is Sal because the story reminds him of a pitcher called Sal "The Barber" Maglie who was famous for his close shave and a trim.

'Eyebrows' is in and a player never to be mentioned later is given his pink slip and a long bus ride home to give him time to think about what the hell just happened.
CHAPTER 71

"I was talking back home" says Jasmine."

Jasmine talks to everyone and keeps in contact with everyone. Her parents are working just to pay her phone bills.

"Mr. Shane finally lost it. He jumped out of his classroom window screaming, 'I can't take it, I can't the kids'. The police had to chase him down and they took him away as a threat to himself and others."

"Time for the sanity hearing."

"He flunked that a long time ago. He said he was going to tear out his eyes so they put him in a straight jacket. He showed up at school a couple of weeks later to pick up his things after school one day, but a couple of kids saw him trying not be seen."

"It finally happened."

"The LA Times picked up the story, I should have kept the paper - "TEACHING EVIL" and a picture of him under the screaming headline. They're using him as a symbol for everything that is wrong with schools and teaching today."

"Mr. S represents evil."

"Teaching isn't for everyone. I don't know anyone that wants to be a teacher."

"Not the way we treat them."

"And if someone wants to be a teacher they should be waterboarded to see if they can take the punishment."

"Like we're not punishment enough."

"They're going to suffer any way you look at it."

"If I was a teacher I'd use a taser."

"Or a cattle prod."

"Some people shouldn't be teachers and I'm one of them."
CHAPTER 72

Our second homestand and the team asks Elmer Presley to sing the national anthem before the first game. Before the second game they ask him to leave. Everyone circles around him as he takes the pink slip off of his locker and reads the inevitable. I thought they would have given him more time. You never know when a guy is going to turn his game around and you never know when his game won't turn around, but the coaches grow bored quickly of someone who isn't turning their game around with an apparent great lack of effort.

Maybe he is in the wrong talent contest. Maybe the coaches got tired of him singing and dancing in the showers, one thing we won't miss about good old Elmer.

Failure is inevitable on some days. Just try not to do it two days in a row. Three days in a row is worse and so on and some such.

We lose two in a row and Rami walks around the locker room singing, "we suck, we suck, we have no luck cause we suck".

Everyone tells Rami to shut up, but he doesn't since he doesn't spend a lot of time listening to anybody because he is always talking. I don't want that cheer getting in my head and getting stuck there to hear over and over in a form of torture until my thought process disintegrates and my confidence on the field is worn to nothing. Rami comes by again, singing and I get mad and yell, "Rami shut the hell up". Rami looks at me like I'm a mad man and one of the coaches pops his head out of the office to see if there is a throwdown.

The next day Raj hits two home runs and as soon as he is in the locker room he is singing, "they suck, they suck, they have no luck cause they suck".

Everyone laughs because it is Raj and everyone laughs when Raj talks. Raj continues to walk around the locker room, talking, not concerned whether anyone is listening or laughing.

"Some hitters can do and some hitters can't do. If a hitter can't do they'll never be due,because they have the can't do, never due voodoo."
CHAPTER 73

"Okay sit down and listen big shots and little shots. We're here to make Coney Island proud. If we can't do that at least we can have the satisfaction of making the Mets organization glad they signed you."

Chessi was giving the wind up and the pitch. None of us want to coach minor league baseball in our retirement days, but then none of us can imagine being retirement old. We can't imagine being thirty years old. They'll have to have an umpire to throw Chessi out of the old ballgame.

Needles walks in and sits down and stares off across the room, maybe hearing voices in his head. Chessi keeps talking without looking at Needles.

"You don't want to be walking around out there looking like a squirrel without a nut. Don't go leaving your nuts in places you don't remember.

We've played some games and we're six and three. Winning two games for every one we lose. In some sports that is not good, but if you do that in baseball you might be having a championship season.

If you want to get attention play for winning team. Play for a winning team and everyone pays atttention . Nova, see me in my office if you can find it."

It looks like the big strikeout for Needles.

The game starts and Nova is on the field still tweaking, twitching and scratching where he's itching. I'm pitching tomorrow so I'm sitting and watching and trying to figure out what the coach is thinking and how he is moving the subtleties and deciphering the opponents strategic components. Both teams are trying to do the same thing while trying to get the other team guessing that they're doing something different. Nova strikes out on three pitches in the first inning and the coaches don't look at each other because they don't want to talk about what they're looking at or they'll have to get dramatic. To stop it they're going to have to substitute and make up a story about a pulled muscle.

Chessi can't help himself. "Nova, you're up Uranus on the Goodship Lollygag."

Nova's lights are dimming. Not sure he even knows it is Cressi yelling or just a drunken fan. Cressi shakes his head.

"Wrong planet, wrong fucking planet."

Needles falls. A soft fall to the outfield grass to end what I'm guessing is a hard crash from three or four nights without sleep. I don't think they'll bother with a drug test or a pink slip. Needles didn't spend much time on hellos or goodbyes back in the day when he was a player.

Chessi points at me so I find my fielders glove and run for center field while the coaches and the trainer help Nova off the field. The hitters will try to hit the ball to center to the new guy who they think doesn't know what he is doing since he can't find a starting position on a minor league team. We snag a couple of easy flies after a strike out and it is one, two, three I need to find a bat.

I'm up third.

Ichabod singles, first up. Rami looks for the sign from the third base coach and he takes so long and he raises eyebrows to question whether he is reading the right sign that the other team guesses that he is going to bunt. He bunts. The ball is bunted hard over the third baseman's head down the third base line. He made the right mistake. Ichabod ran on the pitch and scores from first and Rami ends up with a bunt double. The pitcher is thrown off his game enough that he sends me a fastball down the middle of the plate and I send it back for a home run.

The next time I bat they start me out with a changeup like I guessed and I second guessed it back into the bleachers.

Chessi sees me after the game.

"What the hell am I going to with a player like you? Play you or pitch you?"

I didn't want to confuse him. I'm pitching tomorrow. He doesn't want to say too much to keep me from thinking too much. I'm pitching, I'm hitting, I'm doing my job. I'm thinking I can play this game.

Needles is gone. I'm pitching and as long as I don't let any hitters send a pitch on a bleacher ride I should be okay. I'm hungry, but I eat light on the day I'm on the pitching mound. I can't have full stomach weighing me down when I'm working and reading the hitters mind if they have a thought or just working when I know they're going on instinct. I don't have a reverse the rotation of the planet pitch so I just try to use the stuff that cuts sharply just before it crosses the plate. It looks like they can hammer the ball, but they can't. Two round surfaces cannot hit squarely, so the pitcher should have the advantage. When I'm swinging the bat I'm trying to hit a spot the size of pin on the basball.

When I'm pitching I'm throwing to a pin head.

Sometimes it works like that.

I had a good week and I had bad week. I'll hear about the bad week for as long as I'm here. J.P. remembers the good week. I'm not sure the coaches remember anything that isn't a mistake.

"The loss column is filled with mistakes and so is this team" says Chessi.

Some guys get the 'I'm a mistake?' mug on their face then peek around to see if anyone caught the give away look.

"Start playing in the win column. No one remembers losers. If you don't get remembered you won't get a phone call."

I've got to play like I'm not just glad to be here, but like I mean business which means something new to me - work habits.

"O'Really, you're doing some good things out there. Sometimes you look you know what you're doing. I hope you know what you're doing, because when other teams figure out what you're doing their going to find a way to make sure you don't do it anymore. So figure out what the hell you're doing and learn to do it better."

Doing what? I'm playing baseball, that's what I'm doing.

We're a traveling road show on an upper New York State bus tour. We're a sporting circus with a real purpose. Win. Play baseball and win. Simple.

One day we suck. Simple. One day we win. Simple.

It isn't like high school where you have your friends there and you see them all the time. There are always people to like and to not like and the stress is on being all for the team, but you've got to know that going in or soon you'll be going back out.

We'll stop in a town and play three games in three consecutive days. Some of the locals know their players, some come just out of curiosity.
CHAPTER 74

"What are you studying now?" I ask J.P.

I pay J.P. a pre-trip visit.

"Magic sarcasticism."

"What the hell is that?"

"South American writers are a part of a literarary movement called magic realism. Americans are the magic sarcastics. They want to believe in Santa Claus, but mock the idea at the same time."

"Like you make fun of me, but you're serious during sex."

"Magic sarcasticism. You don't want to take things too seriously."

"How did you come up with that?"

"It's for my future of literature class. We ask questions like, will there be books on

Twitter?"

"Why not. We're not going to read them anyway."

"So that is the future."

"How did they like you're fantastic sarcastic idea?"

"They couldn't tell if I was joking or serious."

"Isn't that the whole point?"

"Most of it. They thought I had to work on it a little more."

"They just wish they had thought of it first."

"Right, they'll knock it down then they'll write term papers about it next semester."

J.P. wants to take the road trip. We're going to Vermont too and she's never been there. I don't know what she's expecting to see, a bunch of Quakers, Amish and maple syrup makers?

The Vermont Lake Monsters play it cute with the logo, a Disney smurk, an unwicked smiling behemoth that wouldn't scare a two year old. Too bad we don't play a doofus of a dinosaur, but a team with a hot pitching staff that has shut down hitters. J.P. and a batch of her sophisto ciao-ciaos are doing the maple syrup drive and want to enjoy a ladies night at the ball yard by the lake.

I'm a hot batter now, so I'm not a pitcher I'm an everyday outfielder without a drug habit.

Saint Sligo shows up unannounced and uses his agent privileges to sit right behind the dugout and pays the beer vendor a twenty up front to make sure the bubba-cola is extra icy and frequent. Always the pro. Global warming is no match for Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy's quest for ultra frosty beer at the ballpark.

I'm in the on deck circle in the first inning and I hear Sligo, "pssssst."

"You can't hear me I'm just another fan. I heard you're girlfriend is here tonight. Don't let it be a distraction."

I've got a distraction telling me not to be distracted. I look at Sligo and all the people around him are watching him and not the game. A line drive foul will give any of them an old school brain scan. I'm watching them and not the game. Sligo strikes again. I can handle it. All I have to do is go to bat and show them my big league swing. I show them the swing three times quickly and sit down before anyone dies of shock and awe at the incredibleness of my technique. If I do that again Saint will tell me to keep my eye in the ballgame. It is the time in the story where something happens like a dramatic reversal of fortune for the main character and what better place for that to happen than here in Vermont in a strange ballpark while my girlfriend and uncle watch. Okay J.P. spent most of her time talking to her friends and just a little time watching me play. I knew I was in trouble when J.P.'s roommate bolted out of the stands across the infield and slid into second base. As security took her into the stands she managed to give J.P. a big wet kiss full on the lips. The Ledge walks by me in the dugout and reacts to my reaction.

"Damn Catalina. You in trouble. You're girlfriend is getting more booty than you are."

Not funny because it is true.

Sligo hands me a beer in the locker room after the game and drinks well from his own bottle.

"Some surprising action out there on the field tonight. I'm not sure how to tally that one in the scorecard. The good news is she only got to second base."

"I'm sure she'll tell me it didn't mean anything and that she was just playing."

"Let her explain."

"Yeah. Okay."

"Then you can dump her."

"Dumping is good."

"But you can still friends."

"Still friendly. Still with the banter and the chit chat."

"And the small talk."

"Still saying hey how you doing you second base stealing lying witch."

"Witchy, but friendly."

Cressi calls me into the office before our last game of the series. He points an unlit cigarette at me. He always carries a cigarette, but I've never actually seen him smoke one.

"You alright kid?"

I nod.

"She pulled a turnaround on you."

"Yeah you know loves laborers got lost."

"Where do you get this shit?"

He waves his cigarette at me.

"Don't worry Catalina. Ted Williams didn't call it the major fucking leagues for nothing."

"But I'm in AA ball"

"You're no Ted Williams, but if you work on you're game you'll be a big leaguer."

"Thanks Coach."

"I'm sorry kid."

"I've had other girlfriends before."

"That's not what I'm talking about."

"Coach?"

"I'm sorry I've got to let you go."

"Come on Coach. It isn't like we were married or something."

"It's not the girl. It's your Uncle. Your agent. He's driving the front office nuts. He called the owner of the Mets once and told him how to do his job."

"You want me to fire him?"

"He's your uncle. It wouldn't make any difference. They already made the decision. I talked to your Uncle. He's going to take you back to New York."

I stood still. Nothing to say. Nowhere to go.

Cressi stood and shook my hand.

"Let me call some friends. You're not through with the old ball game yet."

I nodded and walked out of the office.

Coney Island Baby. You're a Coney Island Baby now.

Sligo offers to resign as we drive back to NYC.

He could resign from the human race and no one would miss him.

"You can pull over. I'll find my way back."

"We're still in Vermont. You have two choices, a canoe or a sleighride. The sleighrides start in late November so I would recommend the canoe."

I jumped into the backseat.

"Shut up and drive."

"Yes Master."

"And can the ironic sarcastic attitude you drunken frog."

"I'm sober."

"That's no excuse for your behavior. I don't care how little you've had to drink. This ain't the freaking Irish Sweepstakes. This is my freaking life sweepstakes and I just got freaking swept under thanks to you."

I found his booze stash under the back seat.

"I had a teacher who said that the only twelve year old he wanted to see was Johnny Walker."

"You found the J Walker Black."

"Who's crying now?"

"Take it easy. If throw you throw up in my car I can't be your agent anymore."

"I thought it was in my contract."

"Never trust an agent. I lied to you about the throwing up in the car part."

"Let Johnny be the judge."

Johnny be good, johnny be quick.

I've just been Coney'd.

Play the song. I'm a Coney Island Baby now. I'm on the rollercoaster ride to freaksville. I guess I've just been here for low rent laughs and carny house amusements.

I tell Uncle to wait out front once we're at my place in Brookyn and I go upstairs to pack a suitcase. I drop the suitcase off in his car and tell him I have to go back upstairs and pick up something I forgot.

I walk out the back door and walkdown an alley and some side streets thinking I might find a recruitment office for the French Foriegn Legion so they could give me an assignment somewhere on the east coast of Africa.

I'm fading into the past, worn and washed out like the old posters and the last of the creaky wood planks of the boardwalk. All I need is the clown makeup, big shoes and rancid banter, "Hi kids, it's Stinky the Clown. Watch me make my baseball career and girlfriend disappear."

"Hit me kids I'm a walking whopee cushion, a flat on my feet gawking windbag. Let the flatulence fly, don't make Stinky cry."

Don't laugh for me Coney Island. You can't make me smile. Your handshake buzzers, your glasses that see through womens clothing, your rubber chickens, your fake vomit props, your three card monte dealers, your bearded lady, your fire breather with the burnt tongue, your rigged ring toss, your rabid animal acts, your host of sucker bets are all old jokes that have gone their way. Smiles bend. Laughter fends. Old jokes never die, they just fart away.

You always end up somewhere. I end up here. When people end up somewhere they start thinking that they should be some place else. They start looking around. Who did this to me? I should be over there. Why can't I be over there? Where are the people who put me here? Why aren't they here? They got a better deal over there.

It's like they teach you in school. Don't try too hard. That stupid song they sing to you in the early grades. The one about the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain and what did he see? The other side of the mountain. So why did he bother getting up in the morning, blah, blah, blah.

They could make it more fun if he found a female bear in heat and he chased her for ten miles and then he humped her until he had to hibernate. What rhymes with hibernate?

So here I am walking the streets on the other side of Coney Island. Just like baseball. You've got suckers, hustlers and heroes. Just follow the bouncing ball. The organ grinder music hits me like a bad flu shot, no cure, just instant ailment.

I'm ready to ride the rails to Mexico and pole vault into Tijuana. I go from one dive bar to the next. One drink and I'm gone because I don't fit in around these here parts. I'll walk in and get stares and I know there'll soon be questions that I don't want to hear because I don't want to talk to anybody.

A police patrol car parks outside the third or fourth bar. I think he has been following me, so I walk through the bar and go straight out the back door. I look at the strange creatures haunting the alleyway and walk back into the bar and out the front door. I'm right, I'm being followed. The driver activates the searchlight and nails me with the beam.

"Mickey, get in the car."

Sligo. Paying off the police again.

"Did they arrest you for vandalizing my career?"

"I'm helping them serve and protect."

"And you're serving up bullshit."

The strange episode of Coney Island and the Brooklyn Cyclones is coming to a close and I'm like a character on the hurting end of a sad, slow Sinatra song. Set 'em up Joe.

The police drop us at Sligo's car. Sligo waits for me to get in his ride before he gets in thinking I'll bolt again and he won't get the police to help him a second time.

"When they write your story baseball historians will use this an example of the hurdles you had to leap."

"What kind of leap are you going to take?"

"The historical kind."

"So this is all about you. You just want your picture in the book at the part of the story where I think I'm washed out of baseball at a young age."

"Maybe I should write the book. I'll get the story straight."

"What book. I haven't done anything yet?"

"Don't get tripped up by the little things."

"That's what Roadrunner says before he drops the anvil on Coyote's head."

"All Roadrunner ever said is 'beep, beep'."

Sligo reaches back and grabs the bottle of Johnny Walker.

"Now you're making sense."
CHAPTER 75

I thought I was wailing along, on my way to a big baseball season, but here I am back in San Pedro for the Fourth of July. No Yankee doodle dandy fancy dancing, just the summer winds prancing off the cliffs to some old school summertime blues number. Now I'm obsessed and I want to find my way back into baseball because I see now there is a chance of it happening where in high school everyone talked about Lloyd Fleming and no one was paying attention to anyone else. Fleming signed on for big time bucks and he's already playing AAA for the Cardinals and they're talking about him in 'stars of the future' terms.

I'm back in Pedro with no team and no girl friend and don't talk about my agent, I'm free of agents. I don't want to live with Sligo and my sisters took my bedroom. Some friends of mine have rented a ratty ass old house on the funky side of a hill looking over the freeway and they had an extra room so I stashed my meager belongings in the room.

Sligo says he is going to make it up to me for my Coney Island days and he is going to keep me on the payroll of Cubbiephrenia to keep the site up and running. I'm getting some calls to be a ringer for teams in the semipro leagues and Sligo is talking about sneaking me into the MLB Rookie League camp in Mesa, Arizona.

I wasn't gone that long so it isn't like everyone has forgotten what I look like, but the old town looks smaller than it used to just a few months ago. In August I see J.P. at a party and we talk for the first time since the Vermont Lake Monsters and she says she misses me and we end up together for the night. We don't talk about second base or stolen kisses or lesbian affairs or if that was what was happening. People always ask what the big deal is for me with J.P. and I can't answer because I'm not going to say that I like her because she is on the fair side of my foul pole.
CHAPTER 75

I have my face on a baseball card. I haven't talked to you for a while, but things have changed. I live in Iowa now and it's been a couple of years since I talked to you last. Some people go to Paris. I went to Iowa, not for the food but to play AAA baseball with the Iowa Cubs. It is that time in my life where I'd better act like I know what I'm doing in a serious way or they'll be asking me to leave in a serious way and they'll give some serious instructions on how I should leave. There was talk that I was going to the club in Chicago so the baseball card people took some pictures of me and I did my best Gary Cooper pose and hoped my photo sense would show up on the little piece of cardboard.

I'm making some money, but everyone is telling me to go easy on the spending. Sligo always says, "time goes fast, but money goes faster".

CHAPTER 76

There aren't many songs about Iowa which maybe is why they send us here to a place we don't want to be so we'll try harder to get out. The big leagues are the goal. My roommate plays the guitar and on a long bus ride through the fields of corn we decided to write a song dedicated to a place the coastal people think is Ohio.

Oh Iowa, you're a heifer in a thong,

Don't blame me if you think I'm wrong,

I'm in a place where I don't belong,

I pray all day your corn will make me strong.

I can't tell one corn stalk from another.

Hiding in the silk and green cover,

All yellow corn here sister and brother,

In a hot pot screaming for their mother.

Oh Iowa won't your cows come home

And bring back a milkshake with foam

Would you hit me between the eyes

If I asked for a steak and big, big fries.

Corndogs for everyone. That's as far as we got before they threatened to throw us off of the bus. The good thing is there isn't much to do here besides play baseball, but the bad thing is you can't play baseball twenty-four seven. The coaches and managers and minor league lifers can sit around and talk baseball for hours and it's good for me to hang out and listen and get what I can from what they're saying.

Anything you want to say about me, I play baseball, I drink beer and I live in a trailer, go ahead and tell it to the corn. The corn don't care. They probably have a joke here somewhere in the archives, what has ears but cannot hear? Enough. Shut up and get the corn cob out of your ear.
CHAPTER 77

I fired Sligo. After I got back to Pedro from the Cyclones, Mom and Dad sat me down at the kitchen table after they put the girls to bed and told some episodes from the Sligo saga. I had heard of the one when he was going to get married, but made the girl wait until the Cubs won the World Series, he was so sure. ne spring the police arrested him at 3:00 am. A few nights before the start of the season he had snuck into Wrigley and sat in the bleachers in the pouring rain drinking from a big bottle of Jack Daniels. He went quietly and the police led him away to keepan eye on him; bservation they called it. Just a rainy night in Wrigley.

He lost his mind again in 2003 after the Cubs lost the National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins. He drank himself silly. When he woke a couple of days later he was convinced that he had saved the Cubs in game six by knocking down a fan who was going to catch a foul ball headed for the first row of the seats and thereby allowing Moises Alou to make a spectacular catch and help save the Cubs lead.

The fan dropped the ball and Moises Alou caught flak and a lot of people think it started a chain reaction of events that led to the Marlins going to the World Series instead of the Cubs. Sligo had punched out a leprechaun in an Irish bar that the house had hired to entertain guests.

He went back to his place in California and never went back to Chicago after it was determined that he was no longer a threat to leprechauns or anyone else.

Mom and Dad don't want me to take on the burden of making the Cubs win a World Series. Look what it did to Sligo and he was just a fan. Made him just another drunken leprechaun hiding like Johnny in the corn and barley. I'm sure there is an Irishman somewhere who could make sense of that one. Saints preserve us. God willing. As I live and breathe. Mea culpa, mea culpa. I'm not sorry. I didn't do anything. If you can't take the incense get off of the altar.
CHAPTER 78

I've got to pay attention. I learned in San Pedro that sleepwalkers shouldn't live near cliffs. A lot people are sleepwalkers or as one teacher used to tell us, people are in an open eyed coma.

Sometimes when I watch TV I feel like a zombie that has been hypnotized by some mind programming master. Watching TV one night I saw Mr. Shane and it looks like he is not teaching anymore. He has an obscure reality show about himself except he isn't Mr. Shane anymore, he calls himself Eddie Wrecks which is a play on words from Oedipus Rex, an old Greek story about a guy who blinded himself after killing his father and sleeping with his mother. That isn't a role model I would follow, but it fits Mr. Shane. He didn't blind himself, but he wears blind guy patches over both of his eyes. He says he is he is doing the show to dramatize what life is like for blind people. J.P. called one night and told me about it and I started watching the show. J.P. says it is wrong because there is an implication in the premise that people go blind because they did something wrong. Mr. Shane should be punished, but I could think of punishments more medieval that would fit the crime of being Mr. Shane.

He isn't very good at being blind. He's always breaking stuff and yelling at the TV crew about being a great misunderstood artist and that they are all imbeciles for not getting what he is doing. He isn't misunderstood, he just doesn't know what he is thinking about when he talks. The crew doesn't care because they're getting paid whether he yells or not and when he yells at them they get camera time.

J.P. calls once in a while and we always end up talking about crazy Shane. We haven't gotten used to calling him Eddie. J.P. will talk about things going on at school and New York and all work they are doing and the plans they're making. Me, I'll walk around Des Moines sometimes on my days off and see all the pregnant women going to the stores as they go on with their lives with no need for me and my baseball skills and I wonder if I'm doing the right plan here, stepping out of the mainstream and playing in a baseball daydream. I guess I'll just go to the trailer and watch Eddie Wrecks: Blind Like Me.
CHAPTER 79

They are more serious here in AAA ball. More like businessmen in baseball suits. I think I saw Sligo in the stands at last night's game. He was wearing a dapper hat and sunglasses, though it was night, and he took notes like he was a scout in a baseball movie from the black and white days of Hollywood. He was keeping his mouth shut. Every time I looked for him he would be somewhere else from where he had been before, but I knew it was Sligo because he was watching me, not the rest of the game and he put his scorecard in front of his face every time I looked in the stands. Some players get the radiant lady in white who beguile them, me I get St. Sligo O'Shaunessy, booze hound extraordinaire, as my guardian angel.

If he screws this up I'm going to get him blind drunk and drop him in the middle of a corn field on a moonless night. I don't need him around making me look like a suckers bet. I don't need him around looking like the ghost of baseball past. I've got to get out of here and he has got to get out of here. We have got to be away from each other except maybe together for family gatherings.

I accept the jinx. I was being ungrateful to Sligo. He kept true to his promise to keep me in baseball shoes and he hooked me up with another agent who made a good deal with the Cubs who were looking for a versatile player who could hit and field a lot of different positions on defense. Sligo brought me the curse. I must accept that burden and I must be the one to make the break.

There must be some kind of a code or secret society that is working to defeat the Cubs. They couldn't be doing all of this by themselves. Sabotage! Maybe it is people like Shane or Eddie Wrecks or whatever name he is using this week who bring such negative wavelengths of epic proportions to the game that they could sink Wrigley Field to the bottom of Lake Michigan by their evil presence alone. It is strange that I would meet two twisted Cub fans, one good, one evil when I used to live two thousand miles away from Chicago and the Cubs are a team I used to love to see lose to the Dodgers. Some years you could just count on the Dodgers beating the Cubs. I have to put a stop to the Dodgers now. I'm saying this because I'm thinking optimistically and planning on making the MLB Cubs.

These people in Iowa, they work hard with no complaint and when they have fun they don't excuse themselves. A ballplayer could do well taking that attitude. These fans in Iowa understand baseball down to their box scores. Home field advantage, Iowa!

Sometime I lose my place when I'm here and I see a mall and I think I might be in Pacoima or Burbank and I realize I'm nowhere near anyone I know, I'm just in a mall that looks like anywhere, anyplace in any states of the great united ones. Say hey, it's another mall USA.

There is a pitcher who pitches like he is from the other side. They don't trust him as a starter because he is so wild if he was allowed to throw a full nine innings he would have killed half the cows in the county while striking out the side. The way they talk about this guy is that he has an arm like an elephant trunk except he doesn't spew water when he hurls.

He has a one hundred mile an hour fastball and he doesn't smell like a pachyderm, so he has a good chance of making it out of the minors leagues.

I pick up a bat and stand against the gargantuan who is obliterating the next generation of those who would stand lonely in the batting box. The gargantuan is not a ballplayer. He can throw the ball a hundred miles an hour, but he can not pitch the ball a hundred miles an hour.

He cannot throw anything that isn't over the batters head or for a quick stop at the backstop behind the catcher. He could hit you with a wild pitch three states away. You're safer in the batter box. I'll take my chances and go tusk to tusk with old elephant arm.

So I go extra bases against the elephant man in a simulation game and I get noticed. He throws so hard if you make contact the ball is going to rocket back if you don't break your bat or your arms. You want me to be your dog, but I'm going to take that bone you're throwing and make it a chew toy. Try playing with my life and head with a hundred mile an hour fast ball and I have to take the life out of it before it gets me. Baseball good and evil 101, for all those school boys at home who are taking notes.

One guy here when he gets mad says, "Horseshoes!"

We immediately branded him as a weirdo and stole his expression, "Horseshoes", like we had thought of it in our sleep. Some people say "This sucks". "Horseshoes. I don't believe his simpleton act because he spends most of his time reading books about mind control and hypnosis and he stands on the mound like he is some Vegas magician who has come to make our batting averages disappear. He'll strike out the side and come back to the dugout all awshucks, twernt nothin, an innocent babe amid the throng of evil. Horseshoes, not even close. He is on my team, but if he wasn't I'd make his magic act disappear real fast.

I don't get the religious guys and how they think that holy stuff applies to baseball. Baseball is not biblical. The bible was written before baseball ever started and the rules of baseball do in no way mention religion.

The Friends of the Secret Code of the Cubs have devised a reason that the gods or The God would be angry and vindictive with the Cubs and thereby causing them to lose to the point of excess. The reason is a secret, because the gods don't have to explain themselves to anybody. And the Friends of the Secret Code of the Cubs don't know anything, but they can say it is a secret and thereby absolve themselves from actually speaking the truth on a subject that they know nothing about. The secret remains a secret and the code is hereby unbreakable.
CHAPTER 80

Baseball tomorrow in the corn. Enough talking. Let's play ball. Ballplayers are drinking too much here in Iowa, but if there is a drug that baseball authorities will give you a hearty slap on the back for using it is beer. I think baseball exists to sell beer. They sell enough of it during a game and they have enough commercials for it during the games on TV. I'm starting to think that they don't trust players who don't drink. It's bad for business. Some wise ass friend of Sligo's told him that the Cub's luck was really the residue of cheap beer. Wise ass friends can be right. CHAPTER

Saint Sligo is spending his summer in Chicago, reading the local sportswriters who are trying to outguess themselves on how the Cubs are not going to make it to the World Series much less lose the World Series. Yes, Sligo used to say, if we were just lucky enough to lose a World Series I'd be happy. St. Sligo is in Chicago preparing my grand entrance, but he better keep his mouth shut, because he knows it doesn't work like he thinks it does, making it to the major leagues.

CHAPTER 81

I'm dreaming again. I'm at an old timers game and I'm introduced, but no one remembers me, so all the crowd starts booing me and the worker wall in right field opens up and the grim reaper comes running out after me, the new version of the chase an old man with a stick competition except this time the stick is a gigantic sickle. The announcer incites the crowd, "ladies and gentleman, introducing Slash Sickle" and the crowd is in a Roman Coliseum frenzy. I escape Slash, but there is giant bobble head doll with my name on it in center field and Slash incites the crowd further by taking a few hacks at it before knocking my head out of the park. The crowd wants more so I appease the crowd by blowing up my head like it is inflatable and throwing it into the grandstand where the crowd tosses my head back and forth between the lower deck and the upper deck like a beach ball at Dodger Stadium. I wake up sweating. So wrong. They don't throw beach balls at Wrigley.
CHAPTER 82

The Legend has arrived from the Mets and he remembered me, "Oh yeah, the guy with all the lesbian chicks." I could tell him that they weren't all lesbian and that you can call a lesbian a chick at your own risk, but it was good to see a familiar face. "Man we couldn't believe they let you go. You can play." It's good to see the Legend.

"So Ledge, are you still black?"

"Damn you're still a wise ass. Maybe that's why they canned your ass. Yeah I'm still black. Can you still jump like you're not white? We couldn't believe this guy. White guys aren't supposed to jump. They're supposed to hug the ground like they own it and they're afraid someone is going to steal it."

So I show Ledge the town with some of the team who haven't gone to church. Church is good, but it is a Wednesday night and we don't have a game tomorrow.

Ledge says he doesn't eat Chinese and he doesn't gamble so Ho Chi Mini's is out of the question.

There is a bar here called Twist Mellows that thinks it is still on the old chitlin circuit and they book any band still playing old school soulful oldies. It is a favorite with the drinking ballplayers because they get recognized there and the other drinkers buy them drinks.

"I like a place like this", says Ledge, "but too much blues, you lose, but damn we aren't in New York City. Shit I've been here two days and I'm going crazy already. I couldn't understand ghetto fellows going to those small town colleges and end up robbing gas stations. Hell they're just trying to see if anyone changes expression out in these here hills."

Play ball.

A young lovely walks by and asked us if we are ballplayers.

"No goddamit we came here for the cow convention." The Ledge says his piece and leaves.

Moooo. The Ledge just pissed off a lot of cows and their mothers. Horseshoes.
CHAPTER 83

So I'm not down on Sligo like sometimes I want to be. He is a good help with clichés since there are true facts clichés and there are clichés that hacks have learned that makes them sound like they know what they are talking about, while they're making hay, in the pouring rain, while the sun shines. True fact clichés you learn in Little League. Keep your eye on the ball. Play'em one game at a time. Saying, hey batter, hey batter, swing will make a batter swing at a bad pitch and strike out. Sorry, hacks talking. Hey batter chatter puts the pitchers mind at rest in Little League, because when he hears you jabbering he knows you haven't run off with the rest of the team to get ice cream. If the pitcher thinks you're out eating ice cream with the rest of the team he'll try to strike everybody out, but he can't since the last person to bat was his grandmother and she hit a grand slam home run. Obviously, chatter doesn't work.

They like the name Mickey O'Really here in Chicago. After the trip to New Orleans we little kids of AAA got to play a game at Wrigley while the parent club wasn't looking. So our pitcher is named O'Riley and all of sudden I hear people in the stands saying, "O'Really? No O'Riley", and laughing like it was the funniest joke in the history of Irish jokes. Pretty soon they'll be laughing at, "Patty-O? Patio furniture." Get it? I need to stay focused on baseball.

As far as buying drinks these fans want to buy you the damn bar. The Ledge notices and I tell him I can give him an Irish nickname if he gives me a few seconds to think about it.

"Damn O'Really, you think the ambition in my life is to be some big, red nose alcoholic. I am one ambitious mother. But then again these guys are buying me the good stuff. Call me great googily mooga ."

"Sorry, those are my cousins."

"Call me Bishop O'Pastor."

"The honorable Bishop O'Pastor.

Now the drinks are talking. Irish psychotherapy. All you need is a license to pour.

St. Sligo walked into the bar near closing time and bought everybody a drink. He's thinking this is the year of the Cub.

"Get your ass moving and get out of the little league. You want to be on the team when they are champs. They'll name a street after you. They'll name a church after you. The Pope will have you declared a saint. A real saint, not just a saint in name. The patron saint of baseball."

I didn't remember much from the few times I had been in a Catholic Church and I'm not sure what a patron saint is, but I don't think baseball and saints get along too well.

"Bless you Uncle, I'll work on it, but don't expect any miracles."

"I don't, I'm a Cub fan. But hurry up. Soriano just woke up from two month coma and Ramirez is back off the Disabled List. The Cubs are in first and it is almost August, but Houston is making a move and there is always St. Louis to worry about."

Like I'm going to go to the World Series from AAA in three months like it is some freaking Disney kid movie all predictable and happy that parents show their kids until they send them out into the world to get their asses kicked.

"Why don't we to church tomorrow morning and pray for a quick ascension for me to the major leagues," I said

"Don't crack wise about the big leagues in the sky. They might knock you down to single A ball."

"The gods are that swift with the payback."

"Don't draw attention to yourself like that. They don't even need a reason to get you like that. Don't bet against the house. The house always wins. The house built it and the house makes the rules."

"Did you get that one from the bible?"

"No, but I have another one from the bible. Thou shalt not be a wiseass or the heavens will smite thee the way Albert Pujols smites a fastball."

"Into the left field bleachers."

"Yes that way."

I finish my drink and try to picture the next step in our chat.

"So are you going to find that secret society that is keeping the Cubs from winning."

"What, the management?"

"No, the Friends of the Secret Code of the Cubs."

"That's the best name they could come up with? Who are they?"

"It's a secret."

"Where did you find out about them?"

"I didn't, but they have to exist. How else can you explain all those losing teams?"

Sligo pushes my empty glass away to make a point.

"No more drinking for you. You can't handle it."

"You need to start your own society."

"You need to sober up."

"Enemies of the Secret Code of the Cubs."

"Oh no, it's happened to you already. You're a cubbiephreniac. Thinking about the Cubs has made you crazy. Maybe I can get you traded to another team."

"No, this is the way it's got to be. I have to destroy the secret code and only then can the Cubs win the World Series."

"I'm going to send you back to your parents with a note apologizing for ruining the life of their only son."

"You can send me back to my parents after the Cubs win the World Series."

"They may never see you again."

"Fine, I couldn't face them with anything less than the ring of the World Series."

"They don't care about that."

"They will. Oh yes they will."

"Talk to me tomorrow when you're sober."

Sobering words from the king of insobriety.
CHAPTER 84

So I dream again that night the Enemies of the Secret Code of the Cubs are having a secret midnight meeting. Candles light the big room and it is filled with cubbittes in their traditional garb although their faces are obscured by blue and red bandannas. The center of the room has some kind of druid looking sacrificial altar and the grand cubby bear marshal presides over the dark ceremony. The victim is brought in. It wears a Cubs uniform and cap. The name on the back of the uniform, O'REALLY. The crowd spins the victim around. It is a goat, but a goat that looks like me. The crowd cheers and the marshal raises his sword.

CHAPTER 85

I'm getting jumpy. My quasi-girlfriend tells me bedtime stories and they give me nightmares. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. No point in getting delirious. I can't wait to get back on field and straighten out a few line drives over the fence. Chicago was great. We play a game not just in a major league stadium, we play in Wrigley Field. The players on the Las Vegas 51's felt like winners just being there too and they left winners, beating us 4-3 in a game we should have won.

I should be sending postcards, "I'm playing at Wrigley", but I don't because I'm not playing at Wrigley any more, I'm back in Iowa playing for the "Battling Cornstalks" better known as the Iowa Cubs. It's last call at Twist Mellows and I've got maybe two drinks left before I start feeling like a Chicago style alchy. I've got to move on to the great fields of sobriety for a different look at things. I should be surfing, but now I'm driving a 63 Chevy and playing old school soul oldies. Good thinking. The gift of sobriety has made me want to go out and drink to excess. I'm not a song writer, I'm a ballplayer, but I think any song writer on the planet would see the love song somewhere in my life even though most people who meet me wouldn't think for a second that anyone would love me even for a misinformed minute. I think that's where rap came from. Those guys knew that no woman in their right mind would look at them twice so they decided that their only chance was to gangster bitches.

I'd make up my own rap song, but I can't think of rhyme dumb enough to get the attention of an audience and where is rap without an audience, just a strange noise in the night going bump, bump, fuck you bitch, make some noise or I'll kill you, no, shut up or I'll kill you, do something or I'll kill you. Shut up bitch. Rap can just die out on it's own.

I called home and Dad answered and there was a lot of quiet, not to be shocked or anything but there was always a lot of quiet when Dad and I were talking. It sounded like everything was okay and the sisters who never wanted to know me were okay and Mom was okay, but she didn't want to talk which meant that she wasn't okay and that the reason she wasn't okay didn't necessarily have to do with me, but it might have or not. I'm glad I called home and got that all cleared up, so I can concentrate on baseball.

The Iowa Cubs need a catcher, so they tried me out at the position and now I'm playing there every day. I've always played a lot of different positions. I can be a catcher, but the only question is, how long can I be a catcher? It's the dirtiest job in baseball besides being an umpire and after a couple days of it my knees and lower back start to ache, but I can handle the job so they give it to me. I've been a pitcher, so the pitchers listen to me or at least they nod their heads when I talk which sometimes means they're acting like they are listening to me, but are planning to go ahead and do whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place. I do what I can to make them better pitchers and make them win. I don't want no Coney Island babies up there pretending to be pitchers.

Sometimes when a batter is up there and full of it, thinking he belongs in the hall of fame I chant, "you're a Coney Island baby now, you're a Coney Island baby." Usually they don't know what I'm saying, but it distracts them enough, because maybe they think they should know what I'm saying. The important thing is to get them to think which a lot of them just aren't good at.

The All Star break is coming up. I didn't make the team which is bad. I've played all over the diamond and that doesn't always get you notice the way being a good position player will get you notice. We have a break and I'm going back to San Pedro for a couple of days.

My sisters meet me at the door. "Baseball, borinnng." That's all they can say around me. So I do the parent and family thing for five minutes and the phone rings and it's J.P. and she tells me there is going to be a game at White Point Park with the high school crew and that I should be there. I tell everyone about the call and my sisters go, "baseball, borinnnng".
CHAPTER 86

The Lon and Ron Show:

Lon: Looks like our boy O'Really has gone to the park to meet up with his onetime, sometime used to be.

Ron: Don't know what to expect from this one. This is no woman in white. Last year she led the Ivy Leagues in breakups.

Lon: Still learning what she can in college.

Ron: From the looks of it she hasn't forgotten what O'Really is all about. She is sitting in the stands with a meatball and mushroom pizza from Sorrento's.

Lon: A classic. Don't forget to mention the ice cold six pack of beer in the little cooler.

Ron: It looks like she forgot to invite the rest of the gang.

Lon: There could be more to this rendezvous than meets the eye.

Ron: Here's Mickey O'Really. He looks around and wonders where everyone is.

Lon: He sees J.P. and the pizza.

Ron: I'm not sure which one he saw first. I've heard of the carrot and the stick, but this one is the pizza, beer and the stick.

Lon: Mickey and J.P. are friendly, they seem okay, but Mickey is still looking around, oh here is the rest of the gang. Two cars are pulling up. Mickey and J.P. won't have to drink alone.

Ron: That was close. I'd hate to see O'Really's homecoming spoiled by a lack of support.

Lon: He's not going to eat all that pizza by himself is he?

Ron: He's always been a team player.

Lon: And so has his girlfriend.
CHAPTER 87

I can't get too comfortable, I'm back in Iowa before I even get some sleep. No time to think about where I'm from or where I'm going and I promise I won't get homesick. Once you've seen Iowa it is hard to think of your old neighborhood in just the same old way. I should have brought a pizza with me. There aren't too many Italians here. I guess they didn't migrate to places where you can make corn liquor, but you can't make wine, because the grapes are as wrong as the growing conditions. J.P. bit my neck so I wouldn't forget about her for at least a couple of days. I'll just tell the team that I was hit by a pitch.

The team didn't have any questions, they all had their own trips and now we're back all with stories to tell that maybe we'll get to someday when things aren't as fast and we're older and slow enough to enjoy the drawn out telling of a story. Young people don't like long stories. Everything is a long story to old people. Maybe that's why we don't always like to listen to each other talk. Players don't want to talk too much here about little stories, because soon they will be where they talk about us like we're a big story.

CHAPTER 88

Chicago. Major League Baseball. I'm leaving Iowa. Don't want to be a one song wonder. I'm going to that place I want to be even if I am player twenty-five on a twenty-five man team. It's like being the last player picked in a ball yard pick-up game and being made to play right field if another player gets injured and makes room for you on the field. I'll take it. They say they need three catchers on the team, so here I am catcher number three, guaranteed no one will remember me before they can forget about me. The Iowa coach tells me to bring my gear, but reminds me that I'll probably catch a cold from the Lake Michigan breezes before I catch a pitch from a major league pitcher. He plays in the tough love league. No one sends him cards at Christmas unless the team is playing and they need a line-up card. Ho, ho, ho, here's today's lineup. If Santa Claus strikes out, it just isn't his day and there's always next year. Time to toughen up the little elves.
CHAPTER 89

"I've had to make a decision."

St. Sligo is funniest when he thinks he is serious. He is being serious now and I am trying not to break out in a ridiculous grin. We are in a Wrigleyville bar after my first night at Wrigley. The first games I wore the uniform we were on the road in Cincinnati and Colorado. I didn't play. The players aren't sure who I am, maybe a super eccentric fan who thinks I am really on the team when I clearly don't belong on the bus.

"It was me" says Sligo.

I don't know what to say. I don't know what he is talking about.

"What, you killed the Kennedys?"

"Almost as bad. I put the curse on the Cubs. All that goat stuff is crap."

"Remember a few nights ago when you thought I had too much to drink and you started talking about sobriety."

"That was just the booze talking."

"No matter, you still made sense."

"Statistically that is likely to happen."

"You've been talking to Bill James again."

"Enough with your obscure references. I am responsible for the curse on the Cubs."

"Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated?"

"You know there are two things about JFK's murder that anyone alive then carries with them. They remember where they were when the heard the news and they have theory about what really happened."

Now he is really serious. I've heard this story before, just stay with me.

"I was on the grassy knoll with Uncle Billy Bob. He was teaching me how to clean a hunting rifle and something went wrong."

I know that Sligo didn't move to the US of A until 1964, but a good story is a good story even if it is completely fecal matter.

"Somehow the Warren Report failed to mention that."

"Since when did you become a conspiracy buff? I came here to talk about baseball."

"Let's talk."

"It was the summer of 69."

"Goddamn hippie."

"No, goddamn Cub fan. I didn't really get baseball at first but I found the left field bleachers to be like a big open air bar and they opened before a lot of the local joints did. Thank god for day baseball. So I got to know some of the regulars in the lean years around 1966 and they were generous enough to explain the intricacies of the game. Not everything they said was true. I found out later that I didn't really have to buy everyone a beer after the opposing team hit a home run. The Cubs sucked, but I was having a good time making American friends. Then came the summer of 69. The Cubs were becoming big time bashers and I met a wonderful young lovely who I promised to marry as soon as the Cubs were finished winning the World Series. Well history is history. She didn't like it when I said wait until next year."

So this is the curse?

"So this is the curse."

I just thought that.

"The curse is a lack of commitment."

"Where is she now Slig?"

"I moved to California. I'm not sure what happened to her."

"Didn't you ever want to look her up?"

"Yeah, but I never did. I've made a decision. My lack of commitment put the real curse on the Cubs. As penance I can never set foot in Wrigley again until the Cubs win the World Series."

"What about the neighborhood bars?"

"This isn't eternal damnation. This is penance. There's a big difference you freaking heathen."

Which is shorter, eternal damnation, or the length of time it will take the Cubs to win the World Series? I'm not going to argue over statistics.

"So you'll never set foot in Wrigley again?"

"They have to win the World Series. Then I'll wait until next year and I'll be there on Opening Day."

He is serious and he has a plan. I'll stay out of the way.

CHAPTER90

So you think I've got it all worked out with the Cubs in first place and me finding a way to get with the big club, plus Sligo taking himself out of the old ballgame just to wander the streets of Wrigleyville with his radio headset on while recording every moment on his scorecard. One of the beat reporters notices that I'm always talking to St. before and after the games and decides to do a story on him, because he thinks I've befriended a homeless man. Cub fans like the story and all of a sudden I have a fan club and the fan club notices that the Cubs won ten in a row since I was called up from Iowa even though the only time I'm near the field during the games is to warm-up pitchers in the bull pen. A bigger fan club starts in the bleachers called The Sons of Sligo. They check on Uncle's whereabouts during the game and cheer him especially late in the game after a few cold ones. When he gets tired of walking he'll take a break in Murphy's Bleachers especially during the hot August day games. I don't think he has had to buy a drink yet. People are impressed with his resolve and hope that one day he'll be back in the stands at Wrigley, buying his own beer for a change.

The writer gets Sligo to talk about the Cubbiephrenia website, so he has to hire a professional web person to handle all the hits. He came up with a new category that he borrowed from the Irish.

Cubs Proverbs, A Blessing or A Curse:

"Beware the Ivy, it hides a brick wall."

"Put silk on a goat and it's still a goat." (Okay that one is Irish)

"Beware of Greeks bearing goats."

"A curse is just a curse."

"May the goats of hell bite your butt."

"May your wife and children root for the White Sox."
CHAPTER 91

I'm back in Iowa. Back at Wrigley my fan club is following St. Sligo around before, after and during the home games. The management was worried that I would get rusty since I'm not getting any real game time experience. They told me I would be with the Iowa team, playing everyday for two weeks and then I'd be back in Chicago as the third catcher for the stretch drive. The Cubs lost the first two games after I went to Iowa and the fans saw that as a sign that I should return immediately. Even the Sons of Sligo club is getting involved, making signs and sending drunken babbling messages to their favorite blogs. I'm afraid that seeing me play might change their opinion about where I belong so for the next two weeks I'm happy being in Iowa.

The team wants to know about my vacation in the show. I give them the whole story until they're tired of it. Even though I didn't play they are looking at me to see if I'm still the same person and how all that attention affected my humble nature. I wasn't up there long, but somehow things have changed. No one bothered to fill me in on how it went here and I forgot to ask.

Now everyone I know from Pedro wants to see me at Wrigley, but I tell them that for right now I'm not making any promises. Hey, don't wait, come on and see me play in Iowa. Have all the corn you can eat.

The fans here want to know who I saw and what I heard, so I tried not to get into specifics, especially since I didn't know many, but now I'm signing autographs and people are taking my picture. All in Iowa. I'm in a good place in the human race today and I'm playing the game.

I'm living and dying the game now and at night I talk to fans at the local brew house. One of them, a guy whose name I never remember, but I remember him because he is always talking about his dog and how I should get one just like it. He tells me about this weird cable show with a guy who wears black eye patches to look like he is blind. I say, "Eddie Wrecks" and the dog guy says, "yes, and you know what is really weird is the blind guy talks about you". I'm a little worried. This is bad PR. The wrong kind of attention. I've already got Sligo stealing headlines. If they connect me with Shane/Wrecks the press will think I'm a weirdo magnet from Lala Land and start asking me if I ever hung out with the Manson Family.

Shane was dangerous enough as a teacher, now he is ranting and raving on TV. So the dog guy arranges for the bar to show the next "Eddie Wrecks: Blind Like Me" and with word of mouth we get a good crowd. Shane is acting like he is blind and hosting a TV talk show to highlight awareness about blind people. One thing he overlooked is that the show won't help blind people. They can't see it. They're blind!!! He is wearing stupid black eye patches that he keeps lifting, like no one is going to notice that he is peeking. He doesn't really use the show to help the blind. He just rants and raves about whatever he wants to just like he did in the classroom.

He is good for laughs. Except one guy in the crowd stands up and yells, "This guy is making fun of blind people. My little sister is blind and there's nothing funny about that."

Shane holds up my picture, then pretends he is looking at it even though he has blinders on.

"This man is part of a conspiracy to ruin baseball."

Everyone boos.

"I have a memo here from the proper authorities, which I would read if I could, you see I'm blind."

Several people yell, "You're not blind."

"This memo is from a highly secure source on an always right, never wrong channeling the news from heaven straight to your soul on a show called "Belief It Or Go To Hell".

No one has heard of the show. I think he is making it up. He holds up my picture again.

"My sources will follow this alleged baseball player and we will detect the wrong to which he belongs."

Booing and sympathy is all I hear. The sympathy of the crowd is nice, but I have a stalker bringing his holy hell night my way.

I should be good, but I'm in crazy territory. Maybe the extra adrenaline of being stalked by a psycho will sharpen up my game, make me look like I'm playing for my life which I am. Like at the beach most people are just floating, but some are really surfing, because in surfing, if you're doing it right it could kill you.

J.P. shows up in my bar in Iowa unannounced and is not surprised to see me talking to a couple of cute young fans.

"Enjoying the perks of stardom you stud stallion you?"

"Are you stalking me too?"

"Yes, but in a good way."

I couldn't think of a better way. I look at her now and yes, maybe I'd give the whole thing up for her.

"Shane wants to kill you."

"He had his chances in high school."

"He'll take his chance with his new show."

"I don't know what I did to him that any other student didn't do to him."

"I think he wants to be you."

"That's good. If he wanted to be you he'd have to dress as a woman and go around kissing lesbians."

"They'd make a man out of him."

"Or take it if you know what I mean."

"You have to be careful. The man is crazy and he is obsessed with you."

"I'm obsessed with you."

"Now you're talking crazy. You're obsessed with baseball, not with me."

"You're like an umpire calling me out when I'm safe. You think because you say it it's true."

"Maybe it is true."

The conversation ends and we find a different way to resolve our differences.
CHAPTER 92

Only Cub fans, mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. You can make an exception for Californians - they never know what time it is or whose time it isn't. Californians will try to paint colors on the sun. Blind ambition.

I'd like to say that only Shane would go on TV without his sanity, but we all know that never stopped anyone. Who will stop the crazy Shane man? Maybe I can arrange some kind of pay per view match between Sligo and Shane. I'm sure Sligo could handle him no matter what the choice of weapons or whatever the choice of insanity.

My choice of insanity is baseball. I choose the weapons of the game and if I play them sane I can make my name in a one thru nine frame. If I fail the fans can blame me and I'm in the hall of shame.

Shane won't show up here in Iowa. A blind fool thrashing away at the cornfields would get a lot of attention. They would put him away. He's in his own blind captivity and is a punishment unto himself. If he would only hurt himself and leave the rest of us alone. We don't want to feel his insane pain. Watching his show I still don't know what it feels like to be blind, but I know what it feels like to be blindsided.
CHAPTER 93

I'm back at Wrigley. I say it like I live here. I don't live here, I play here. I don't play during game, but I'm big during practice and warm-ups. The count is up to thirteen if you're counting the consecutive number of games I haven't appeared in since beginning my big league career. The Cubs have won all thirteen games, not that I can take any credit. While I was back in Iowa the big league squad only played .500 ball, most of that on the road which is where things don't go as well as they do in Chicago.

Sligo gets more attention than me walking around the park during games. He had a custom made Cubs jersey and cap made, except it has black where there used to be blue and he has his name stitched on the back of both in case you were wondering about who the fool was walking in circles.

I'm good luck. Until they see me play. The Sun-Times runs a piece on me with the headline, "LUCKY CHARM MICKEY O'REALLY". The article says that I'm the new Moonlight Graham. That's a baseball movie reference that either you get or you don't. If I explained it everything would be lost in the outfield and I don't want to talk about corn and Iowa anymore. I was hoping I got to play before they labeled me. I want to play here in Chicago. I know he is my uncle, but I wish Saint would leave. This team doesn't need saints and it doesn't need the ghost of Cub fans past haunting the streets of Wrigleyville. I had an uncle and now I have his geeks following me around like I'm going to lead them to the promised land. As Saint Sligo's fictional uncle Billy Bob once told him, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick them off with a hunting rifle." I'm afraid to ask Sligo where Uncle Billy Bob is now that we still don't need him, but I'm afraid he's out there, watching everything from them there hills. Maybe Shane is fictional Uncle Billy Bob. Or maybe Uncle Sligo has multiple personalities and he is acting out all of them in triple time. I'm just trying to play baseball. If all three of those crazies are in one head then I'm going to slap them silly, stooges style. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk
CHAPTER 94

The inevitable occurs. I'm used as a pinch hitter. We are thirteen innings into a home game with the Mississippi River Rats, the St. Louis Cardinals and there is no one else but me to pinch hit and I hit a home run to win the game. If Cub fans could vote for the hall of fame I'd be the only player in there with one at bat.

I'm a Cub. The fans love me. I'm going to quit now and become an announcer. My catch phrase, "Oh for the love of Cubs, what the hell just happened?" I don't want to walk down memory lane with Uncle Sligo, I'm living here and I don't want to hear about the summer of '69 and I don't need to hear the oldies, "Yesterday's Gone", "Up On The Roof", or Jack Brickhouse's Polka Favorites. Okay, I could hear "She's Too Fat For Me" one more time, but time has moved on and so has the beer truck. Keep up or fall behind.

So Sligo was here once with his soon to be and they were walking, yes they were talking, the way that lovers do, like the song says and it doesn't seem so long ago to him. Fortunes took him elsewhere and she wished him well on a ride to hell and bygones became long-gones by and by and time trampled on everything until everything mushed into a swamp field that looked like the place where it all began. Sligo always complains that they never play oldies like "The Happy Organ" by David Baby Cortez. I don't want to tell St., but they probably told Baby to keep his organ under wraps because he got too happy playing it all the time. Time doesn't translate, it doesn't imitate, it just in your face displaces.

Sligo has been working with a publisher about turning his website into a book and all of a seventh son of a gun, a cheapo paperback called "CUBBIEPHRENIA" starts appearing all over and around Wrigley. Sligo walks back and forth while hitting himself upon the shoulders, left, right, left, right with a large copy of the book and soon he has a group of loyal followers, some of who are probably capable of a homicidal act that includes the demise of my long lamented Uncle. This game is more serious than I thought.

When I see major league pitching I'm not sure about a God being here, but I know that evil exists and I pray that there is some god to take care of that. The umpires aren't much help when it comes to deciding good and evil when the ball is moving at a batter at 100 mph. Hell, at that speed the umps are ducking too. Pitchers bearing evil beware forthwith, the bat handler doth carry evil back at you.
CHAPTER 95

Into September we go. St. Louis, the city that should not exist in the eyes of many Cub fans, is still fouling the fresh Indian Summer air and continues to hold a two game division lead over us. There probably isn't a shot at a wild card move so we have to beat the Cardinals to make it into the playoffs.

So at this point you think I'm just going to wake up and find out that I'm dreaming about baseball and not sex like most normal people dream. No, I'm playing baseball in the real fields, but don't ask me about sex, that's a different story and I get a new chapter every time J.P. visits to show me what else she learned in college.

This is like the Crusades or some kind of other holy battle against a long time spirit crushing enemy that you must unleash a centuries old sequestered beast that can vanquish the banqueted. Or we could just outscore the other team before the end of the ninth inning. I've never unleashed a beast at least not in public, but I think we can outscore other teams more often then they do the same to us.

Chicago is an Indian word that roughly means stinking cabbage. The Indians have moved to Cleveland and the Braves have moved from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta. Some people say that using Indians as team mascots stinks and I'm not a big fan of Atlanta and their retarded tomahawk chop. It just looks stupid. Why doesn't Atlanta just go red, white and blue like the Yankees, I mean what is more American than 'Yankees' and the Braves could just drop the 's' off of the end of their name and become the Atlanta Brave as in the home of and then they wouldn't have to bleed the native Americans and could trade on the red, white and blue heritage. Brave, as in our fighting men and women. At least the Braves were named after real Indians and not a pair of socks.

St. Louis Cardinals. Named after a bird that's smarter than them and it comes in one color, bright red. I'm sure the bird species is embarrassed that these lowly river rats want to think that they have wings and they can fly out of their little sewer hole without strapping themselves onto the back of high flying Albie Pujos.

St. Louis Cardinals. See baseball manual chapters on how to defeat annoying opponents.

Things are building up. Things don't usually build down unless you're building an underground baseball stadium for reasons unknown except to moles. Things are building up in a dramatic sense is what I was trying to say before a discombobulated voice from the Architectural Digest broke into my express train of thoughts. Architects can build, but they can't build suspense unless they build a self collapsing structure. Next chapter please, what happened to baseball?

What happened to baseball? Sligo says people have been saying that since whenever baseball was invented. A pennant race also is a whenever invention to get your blood boiling kind of thing that the originators did not see in the scouting report.

What happened to baseball is a different many volumed book series. This train of thought is discontinued and will continue with a volume to be named later.
CHAPTER 96

Blindness is all around us. Organized, angry, wanting to kill everything is all around us everywhere. Shane is in the neighborhood. He hasn't actually done anything. He hasn't done anything that he couldn't help more by poking his eyes out and arresting himself in the name of some nameless law. I don't want to see the outcome of this pennant race if the Cubs don't win it all. As if there isn't enough pressure to succeed at this game.

CHAPTER 97

Oh no, I fall asleep and I dream again. This one has lots of sixties go-go girl dancers like the ones they show in the old grainy black and white music vids. Hullabaloo and Shindig. The go-go girls are going and going. I'm not sure this dream is about baseball. Oh no. This is my I am Elvis winning the sixties back from the Beatles dream. Maybe this is why I am tired instead of rested when I wake up some times. Elvis could beat the Beatles at baseball even if he is outnumbered. You can't rule out the home field advantage.

A masked pitcher stands on the mound. An aisle of sixties dancers frames the route to home plate. I've got to keep my eye on the ball. The pitcher mimes a pitch and I swing at an air ball and the dancers shade their eyes and pretend to watch the imaginary ball fly over the outfield wall. The dancers form a conga line behind me as I run around the bases. Everyone loves a home run hitter.
CHAPTER 98

I have to sit down and talk to Sligo and have one of those 'we have to sit down and talk kind of talks. We meet at the corner coffee shop.

We sit down.

"You're going to say that we have to talk aren't you?" Sligo asks.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I think we need to talk. You think I'm honing in on your life and that I'm going to ruin a good thing for you."

"I'm going to ask for a trade."

"You want a new team?"

"No, I want a new uncle. What do you think I could get for you?"

"A lonely goat-herder from Austria. But can he yodel? Ask yourself that."

Sligo begins to yodel. I pretend not to notice.

"We've got to talk."

"Not now, I'm yodeling."

"Stay away from me you goat humping freak."

I'll have to try a different approach. I leave without drinking my coffee.

J.P. and I have a talk and this one is good. More visits, more often and no yodeling. I'm trying to be normal. I might be the last normal man in the country. I've done what I can about my personal life, so I can concentrate on baseball. Sligo can have his sideshow and do what he can to entertain himself and the Cub fans who would wander the streets hoping to get hit on the head by a homerun rather than pay the admission price and actually get to see the game.

Sligo says that he thought he saw Shane/Eddie Wrecks hiding down a sidestreet near the corner of Sheffield and Waveland. He was with a couple of people who looked like they were imitating him, like loyal cult followers who worshipped their imperial leader. They all wore patches over their eyes, but they kept bumping into things, so every once in a while they would have to lift the patches so they could see where they were going. People have looked for his show on cable, but can't find it, maybe canceled or on a break.

It can't be true. Why would Shane, a walking insult to sanity and blind people, want to stalk me? Why does he do anything he does? He's insane. Insane people don't need a reason, anything they do makes sense to them.

He is a terrorist and he will fail like a terrorist. Terrorists are trying to blow up ideas along with the people that have ideas. You can't blow up an idea. People die, but the idea wins, terrorism loses. I told that to J.P. and she thought about it and asked, "Where did you hear that?", but she wouldn't believe it was my idea at first.

"You shouldn't be playing baseball if you're thinking this much, you could get hurt."

She always looks out for me, but what I need right now is an anti-terrorism team. She comforts me and does that thing that makes me sleep.
CHAPTER 99

Chicago is in lock down. Someone has stolen the vines from Wrigley. Not all of the vines. Just a section in right field. And Uncle Wrigley, Saint Sligo O'Shaunessey was found blindfolded, barely conscious and bound and wrapped to the Clark and Addison street sign with a still green healthy section of the stolen vines. Sligo will do anything for attention. No he didn't arrange this. Who would steal the vines from Wrigley? A lot of people would want to tie Sligo to a street sign, but not everyone would do it to send a message. Most people would do it because they're tired of listening to him. Only a crazy person would think of using the vines. The right field vines. Sligo always sat in the left field bleachers. He always said he came up with the phrase 'bleacher bums'. (That phrase was probably used before construction was finished on the brick house on Waveland.) The police had no immediate suspects, but were glad to inform the public that Captain Cubbie would quickly recover from any insult and injury provided during the onslaught of the assault.

At least they didn't blind him. No, he'd have to still watch Cub games. Was that their message? Make him watch what was going to happen?

Chicago caught the buzz. Maybe there is a code and a secret society living under the city with monk's robes and goats faces. No, those are just the White Sox fans. No, there is a different code. One that has to do with the secret Wrigley formula for chewing gum. No, that wasn't a secret, just find a sap and stick the gum in his mouth. The crime of Sligo's assault is not solved and the mystery is starting to get age creases on its face. Ugly.

I talk to Sligo and surprisingly he doesn't remember anything. He's just happy that he gets to keep the vine. He's probably looking for a cloning expert right now. I've had dreams, but never one this bad.

My game suffers for a day but no one notices since I don't get any game time, but that passes because the coach who has pitched batting practice for twenty years has tennis elbow so now they need me to throw batting practice. On this day in batting practice the Cubs led the major leagues in home runs. Dingers for everyone except the pitchers. I had to give them a little chin music less they forget the tune.

I look in the outfield and all the outfielders are looking through the vine to see if the stash of stuff they put in the vine is where they left it. I wouldn't look there. That vine probably holds stuff that Joe Pepitone has forgotten about.

Sligo doesn't slow down. The next day he is outside the outfield walls slapping himself with his silly book even though the Cubs aren't playing. I show up because I want to talk to Sligo, but the Sons of Sligo are taking too much of his time. I wish Albert Pujos was here to stare at them and make them go away. Sligo looks like he doesn't care, even Albie P. couldn't scare him now.

I'm watching, I'm learning and the Cubs are winning, yet I feel so empty. No, that isn't happening, it's just kind of thing you'd expect a writer of a book like this to say at a time like this when everything is happening in the right sequence just in time for a storybook ending. I'm surprisingly well adjusted for someone who is having to make so many adjustments in such a short period of time. I'm not in a little You Tube world. I'm in a bigger world where people are throwing things at me at high speeds.

This sport is so easy when you're not playing in the games that I could do what I do on roller skates. Baseball and roller derby? I think Sligo had that idea once. Sligo has lots of ideas. For someone who moved to the United States to become a bleacher bum, he can talk a very ambitious game and for someone who talks an ambitious game he does very little for so many for so much of the time.
CHAPTER 100

I had the dream to end all dreams of Cubs baseball. I hear brickbats on concrete. I see baseballs blazing out of the darkness glaring past my head like meteorites on an August dog day night. Three forms appear. I can smell them, but I can't make out the shapes. I hear an announcer, "Next batter, Sarge Mickey O'Really".

A demon goat rises out of the murky freakiness. His face shaded in blind dark hue. His eyes gleam like oversized diamonds in the sun.

"We are the goats of Wrigley past. You can never escape us. You will excel at baseball. The Wrigley faithful will see you as a star. Someday you will approach the unapproachable. You will shine in the sun. And when that moment comes your gifts will fail you."

The head of the goat heads turns and looks at a TV monitor. The video plays a highlight reel of my small years as a ballplayer.

"The city stands as one to watch you conquer. One by one they fall to their chairs and grasp their heads. You drop a fly ball you can catch with your eyes closed. A pitcher serves up a home run pitch and you hit a ground ball to the shortstop."

The monitor shows my mistakes. The crowd is in agony.

"Things that were simple to you seconds ago are now impossible. The goats of doom are upon you and you are powerless to repel them. The fans look at you with a look of shock that you have never before seen, they look as if to say, 'I'm slain, you too jackass?'".

Then the beast smiled at me and said, "Say that three times quickly in Latin". There was goat-bleating laughter and then they were gone. And I think they were repeating a phrase in Latin. Or they were ordering a pizza. It was a dream and they were talking real fast.

I woke up hungry and knew I was going to have pizza for lunch, no goat cheese.

I decide not to be frightened by the dream. I buy a large thin crust greek pizza with extra goat cheese and bring it to the locker room. Our star pitcher walks by and looks at the pizza. He picks up a slice and rubs it on his elbow. No one else touches the pizza.

He goes out and pitches a no hitter. After the game the players are fighting over the pizza so they can rub it over various parts of their bodies. I try to remember exactly what I ordered on the pizza, because they're going to be expecting more of the same tomorrow. Better to smell like a goat than to be a goat.
CHAPTER 101

So it ends. I'm an old man now and I look back and see young times and characters and the good days at Wrigley. I know you want to know how it all worked out, did the Cubs win the World Series and what else happened? I've got my scorecard ready and I want to tell you what happened like it just happened yesterday.

I had a good season in the majors with the Cubs for my first year even though I didn't have much real field time. J.P. and I were together for a couple of years and then we stopped thinking about reasons why we weren't going to work out and stopped seeing each other, but still have some of the same old, old Pedro friends and she's always going to do okay so I know that her leaving at the same time I was leaving doesn't make her life tragic or any less magic. Yes, she got into politics, but not as an elected person, but as an always in demand advisor to the important powers that wannabe in the driver's seat of the car of tomorrow's illusions. Something like that. J.P. spared me the, you are fool kind of a breakup where they try to make you feel stupid.

Okay, I'm not really an old man looking back. J.P. broke up with me, probably because she knew we never had a chance in hell even if it was a fun ride. If the girls always make you feel like a fool for falling for them does that mean they only think you're smart if you're gay? No, there's no point in being smart with women because the blood flow isn't going to your brain and if it is going to your brain it ain't working anyway and maybe then you're gay.

Do old men look back fondly at the old girlfriends? Sure as long they still look like they are in their twenties. Old men still think they look like they are twenty. The pretty young girls just haven't kept up.

Why does J.P. leaving make me feel like an old man looking back? Blood rushing through my head won't help me with this one.
CHAPTER 102

J.P. came back in a rush. Is she undecided or just messing with me? I'd like to think that she's just undecided, because if she is just messing with me then she is evil and playing for some other team. She leaves and she comes back. That's what she does best. I can't fall in love now. I have to focus on baseball even if I never play a game. I'll have lot's of time after the bigs to fall in love. If that's how it works.

Chicago is gangster even when it is nice. It is a city, a real city and where there's a city, it's like a movie where all the people are unknown and you don't know the good guys from the bad guys and you hear a song about strange days playing in the background. Unless people cheer for you for just showing up this could be a difficult place to move to, sightless and not seeing like Eddie Wrecks and his band of blind spunky monkeys. I'm lucky. I show up for work and people cheer for me to wear a jersey that has my name on the back and Chicago Cubs on the front. I should work my ass off to keep this happening. I'm here because of baseball and that is the only reason and I can't listen to my uncle and his crazy goat herder logic.

I thought J.P. is hot and I'm right, but now there is something like this city in a summer sweat and smile on its mile and the sweet sound of applause in my face that makes it hard for her to compete in this heat. She's not looking for a competition anyway, just a noncompetitive match would be good for her and I think by being here she thinks I'm putting her through the paces.

Back to baseball. The Cubs keep on winning. Like anyone in Chicago didn't know that by now.

They talk about the season being a hit like it is a summer blockbuster movie. What do normal people do during summer? When you play baseball you try to get to the World Series. It happens to everyone sooner or later right?

There is a whole cast and crew here of solid pitchers, hitters and fielders up and down the lineup all carrying good stats, but they only talk about one stat, the big W that goes with every win.

It is almost the end of the season and the Cubs have the most W's in the division even more than the Cardinals which is enough for Cub fans in most years, but not this year; with all the good play and good luck their only regret is that they can't beat the Cardinals in the World Series because the Cardinals won't be there.
CHAPTER 103

Sligo's followers decided to carry him. Two at a time, one on each leg, they lift him and parade him back and forth, as he calls it now, to and fro. The more he speaks the more his Irish comes out and he occasionally gives speeches like it was bad Shakespeare open mike night in a deserted college town pub.

"Here is for our fathers."

Cheers.

"And here is for the fathers of the fathers."

Cheers.

"And here is for four others and the mothers of the fathers."

The crowd is never satisfied. He rants until he loses his voice.

"The rabble is rebelling at Wrigley. Let's drink and unravel the vines one at a time."

He either meant grapevines for making wine or the ivy vines on the outfield wall. Either way, the crowd cheers and carries him into the nearest bar. No need for factual accuracy when you're listening to a drunken Irish baseball bard. The Cubs are winning, but who's counting?

J.P. calls and assures me that Sligo turning himself away from Wrigley is a selfless act with my welfare at the forefront of his insanity. Yes, all Sligo wants is a Cub win. Like all we have to do is say, 'Cubs win', put up a small white flag with a blue W painted bold in the center and repeat the same often enough so the Cubs will be in first place.

I forgot to mention that Sligo always calls them the Cubs, not the Cubbies. "Don't call them Cubbies. I hate the Cubbies." He says it sounds like the name of a team destined to lose. One night when he held vigil on Waveland Avenue during a game he started chanting, "don't call them Cubbies, don't call them Cubbies" and his followers responded to his call, "don't call them Cubbies, don't call them Cubbies". They said it like they meant it. At least they're not throwing bombs.

I don't tell Jasmine that I'm getting packages in the mail with bits of the ivy vine that was stripped from the outfield wall at Wrigley. They're either from terrorists or a horde of locusts with an attitude. I'm having a meeting with St. after I drop the packages off at the police station.
CHAPTER 104

"I have a plan," says St. Sligo.

"I was afraid of that."

"I'll take care of Eddie Wrecks."

"Brilliant Uncle, then we can blow ourselves, get it over with and be martyrs for the cause."

"Don't be a Cubbie."

"I can't get involved in something like this."

"You're right. Hit the delete button in your brain. Zip. Nothing. You never heard of this."

"Right, I've never heard of the dumbest plan on record, one that will be sure to get me killed."

Early in the day there had been reports of a bombing on the near North Side and although no one has taken credit for it I suspect it is Eddie Wrecks and the Blind Gang in action since the bomb damaged a sporting goods store that specializes in Cub paraphernalia.

Since he has gone blind Wrecks has also gone invisible. No one has seen him except for his occasional appearance on TV. He doesn't have much practice being blind, so he can't be very good at getting around without working eyeballs. He must not be Eddie Wrecks all the time. He must just wear his blind man gear when it is time for the show. He could be working with a hidden camera crew, so he can pretend it is all real. Maybe I should start wearing disguises, something that'll help me blend in with the crowd.
CHAPTER 105

We're into the late innings and all our hits are falling onto the outfield grass while the other teams line drives are finding our gloves. Hurry up and win. I can't wait for tomorrow's game to start. No, I'm not going to say let's play two. That phrase has been said and made its point, but it is time to move on into the win column. All I care about right now is the Cubs. I'm being paid to be obsessed about winning for the Cubs, but I think I would get there anyway just to bring it all home after over a hundred years of nothing. This is beyond the power of a curse. It is one of those places that makes kind people warn you not to go there, but you go there because they warned you not to and you have to see what is going on with all the badness.

CHAPTER 106

Why don't I just come right out and tell you that we're in the World Series. I suspect that you detected where this storytelling expedition was going to take you and like in any bad news sports type story the scruffy misfits have their day in the Wrigley sunshine. Not completely true. In the post season they play by night. It has been that way for decades. Sligo always took it as a sign of faith that the Wrigley guardians put the night lights in after the league decreed that playoff games were to be played at night. If they didn't put lights in that meant they had no intention of fielding a playoff worthy team. Who is putting on? Let me explain how we got to the World Series. We won more games than the other teams in our league. In the playoffs we won more games than the other teams. This is a trend that could lead to something good. Like the World Series. See how simple this game is when you have the better team.

Did I say World Series? Oh yeah let me say one more thing.

Yankees.

Yankees. Everyone has another name for them. You can start with Damn Yankees and end with words that insult their mothers and question the method by which they were brought into this world. They're kind of like the bigger, stronger, more talented older brother who beats your ass at every kind of sport you play, then wants you treat him like the lovable revered sibling who left wonderful childhood memories the way Santa Claus left presents.

The North Side of Chicago is now World Series Land. It doesn't look like anyone in the city is working anymore. They're all on a two week baseball festival vacation. Even Sligo has lightened his psychic burden, but he still won't walk through the gates of Wrigley. He lives in a bar called the Paddy's Day Parade. The owners came up with a place and a name for it so Irish people could celebrate their heritage year round instead of just one day out of the year. Now we're celebrating baseball everyday.
CHAPTER 107

THE LONG LOST ST. SLIGO CHRONICLES:

Tantum ergo makes your hair grow. A wise man said that to me once and I never knew what he was talking about. A lot of humor is lost in the translation of Latin and you can't really explain a joke in any language except Slaplander, the explanation being, a poke in the eye or a saw blade across your skull is so funny it hurts. The victory has

uplifted me. If I was one to fall in love I would, I, I can't finish that statement. That's what love does, it makes you forget what you are thinking, so you don't yell out – where were you a hundred years ago?

This winning is exhausting. I'll try writing later.
CHAPTER 108

I'm the team mascot. You might as well dress me up as a goat and parade me through the bleachers. I'll be a pinch hitter, a pinch runner, a back up fielder or a pitcher in a one sided game. I've got to keep my mind on game real time so I can be ready to make a game saving play whenever my team needs me to make one.

Time is a fleet that never stops sailing. The Cubs are a boat that never stops sinking. Sligo drinks from a vessel that keeps on chugging. I better stop talking like this or I'll have to come up with a metaphor for Lake Michigan and compare it to Wrigley Field or the other way around.

This is the part of the story where everybody is attacked by vampires and zombies and there is nothing left but blood and guts. I think I'll leave this part out since it will take away from the drama that is inherent in baseball and the World Series.

It's the World Series, but let's not talk about it. I can't say enough. No one can say enough. It is happening and no one wants to say anything. Who would take that chance?

Dizzy. There used to be a baseball player called Dizzy. He didn't play for the Cubs until his career and talent were finished, but he had the right name. These are dizzy days and dizzy nights. I'm moving too fast and everyone around me is moving too fast. Dizzy. Not so fast, but it can't help but be this fast. The last shall be first and the first shall be fast. Now after almost a hundred years the Cubs are achieving with amazing, blazing speed. Speed up and be dizzy.

This is not the bible or a holier than thou for even the holiest of holy sacred holy cows. Even Britain gave Hong Kong back to the Chinese after one hundred years. I'm not saying we should give the Cubs to the Chinese. They probably wouldn't want it or understand the gift and would think it was some sort of stupid American trick to undermine their economy. The one hundred years makes it sound full of importance like a story in the bible. If we win. A blessed holy baseball story.

The end of a song is near. J.P. says the story is getting weird, a good weird as long as I don't find out that Sligo is my real father and that my loving parents just brought me up as my loving parents without the genetic reality package of having genetically enabled me by themselves. It probably won't turn out that way, but these days you've got to be able to handle anything.

J.P. is coaching me on how to handle Yankee fans seeing that she knows so many of them and how they behave. She explains that Yankee fans don't hate the Cubs or anything. They look on it more like the Yankees versus some local softball team that won the right to play the Yankees in some bizarre TV promotion with the Cubs being the softball team that will show up and get beaten and will be expected to take their beating with a smile. After all they're playing the Yankees.
CHAPTER 109

Shane's World:

I must end the world before it ends me. One of us has got to go. If I destroy O'Really and the Cubs it will begin the chain reaction of events that will end with the end of all ends. It could even destroy a parallel universe. Now I know you're thinking that the world will end if the Cubs win the World Series, the world championship of baseball. That's not how it works. O'Really is the key. He must be destroyed. Once he goes the rest will go and the rest will disappear like a bottle of vodka at a Russian prayer meeting. Don't save the vodka. Drink the vodka. There is no point in saving the vodka.

I've made some contacts and met with some people who know about the things that can make things happen and blow up for me in a real big way.

I am a terrorist now, but I am always right about everything, so I have the right to blow up whatever or whoever I feel like blowing up. Most terrorists are just misguided lunatics. I know exactly what I am doing. I'll have to write them a guide book, "Mr. Shane's Guide For The Dead: How To Make The Most Of Your Dead Years". Is there terror in the afterlife? I'll answer that question and drive a stake through the heart in issues that keep the living awake at night.

Am I making a mistake? You made a mistake asking me that question. I don't make mistakes. If I ever did make a mistake it was not destroying Dada High School before they tried to destroy me, but now nothing can destroy me and my killing philosophy. Die and be happy. Ha! You can't! That's what makes me happy. Die!

We're not just playing against the Yankees, we're playing against history. History is stubborn if it doesn't want to change. Sometimes it likes itself just the way it is in the books. History doesn't want the Cubs to win. History likes a good story and the Cubs are a good story.

The Yankees have a very good team. They should, they paid for it. They still have to earn a win despite all their money. It isn't like the Cubs owners forgot to pay us, I'm just worried that history likes the Yankees; it's called their name often enough.

Okay, you're afraid of something. You're concern is that I've taken you this far along and then I'm going to tell you that no, it was all just a dream, the Cubs never did really make it to the World Series. You think I was just setting you up to be the punch line of the same old joke.
CHAPTER 110

Lon and Ron:

Ron: Looks like the Cubs have finally made it to that big Budweiser sign in the sky.

Lon: That's right Ron. A lot of beer goes a long way to get that big time bleacher belly.

Ron: The biblically ballyhooed bleacher belly.

Lon: How will that belly hold up against the big brother of baseball, the New York Yankees?

Ron: Will the belching barfly of baseball bombast give them a break?

Lon: I'll pour a brewski and read the future in the suds.

Ron: What do you see?

Lon: Budweiser.

Ron: Is that a sign?

Lon: No, that's a sign, on the roof of the building across the street.

* * *

I, Sligo, do hereby decree in this time and place that it is game time at Clark and Addison. Game one of the World Series between the Cubs and the Yankees.

Snakes preserve us. May the saints fall off the ancient green rock of Saint Patrick's Ireland and swim the holy waters of Lake Michigan to the North Side Shores of Chicago and carry sanctimonious victory to the downtrodden, depressed and detoxed in the tiny town of Wrigleyville. Besides, the Yankees suck. May the last viper in the land lash out and bite them on the ass.

The Cubs in six. That's all I'm going to say. If they can't do it in six, then it will take seven unless they have some luck and win in a four game sweep. I shouldn't say anymore on the subject. Still it would be cool to win in five, because it would mean we kicked their butts.

I'll sit outside the gates. So patiently I'll wait.
CHAPTER 102

Game one: Cubs win! History! Count the years, count the days, count the hours, minutes and seconds. Figure out how long it has been. Cubs win a game in the World Series.

Game two: Cubs win! I could get used to this World Series thing.

Game three: Welcome home Yankees, you're winning. At the end of nine we have one in the L column, so it is two games to one. Four more possible games. We need to win half of those.

Game four: Yankees.

Game five: Yankees. Still no playing time. The Post did a piece on me, wondering where all my good luck went. Say Goodbye to New York City.

Game six: Back to Chicago. All we need is a two game winning streak. All we need to do is beat the Yankees here in the place where Babe Ruth beat the Cubs so many years ago.

J.P. told me that I was going to play today. I don't know if that is good or bad for the Cubs. I don't know what makes her such an expert, but she is right. She didn't say I would play in the eighth inning.

In the eighth the game is tied and the Yankees are batting in the top of the inning. After two quick outs they get a cheap double, a walk, a wild pitch and end up with men on second and third.

Our pitcher holds his throwing arm like he is in pain. He is finished and the manager is not giving the bullpen a confident look. They are tired and they got lit up in game five. The next batter is the number eight hitter.

I'm in the bullpen warming up our big relief lefty. The pitching coach comes up and takes away my catcher's mitt and hands me a fielder's glove and gives me my instructions.

"You're going to throw an intentional walk. After that is the pitcher. They're going to pull him for a pinch hitter. You'll stay in until we see who the pinch hitter is."

I nod.

"Can you throw a walk?"

I nod.

"Don't trip over the baselines."

I look to the mound. The Manager and infielders all stare at me. I trot towards the infield. I wish I had practiced my run. I wish the coach hadn't made that crack about the baseline.

The manager stares in my eyes and x-rays my skull.

"You know what you're doing right? Nothing fancy. Just hit the target."

The manager pops the ball into my glove. Everyone clears out and leaves the pitching to me.

The catcher stands behind home plate and pounds his glove. It's a left handed batter. The catcher stands as far away from the batter as he can and extends his left hand out so the mitt is two feet outside of the righties batter's box.

I don't like the way the runner on third is looking at me. I check him and look back at the catcher. The catcher runs to the mound.

"Don't worry about him. He isn't Jackie Robinson."

The umpire is right behind the catcher.

"This ain't spring training. Start pitching or I'll send you back to the minors."

Back to positions. Back to pitching. Four high and away outside the strike zone. No problem. I throw a soft pitch and hit the target. The batter pretends he can hit the ball and fakes, then checks his swing. Ted Williams couldn't hit that pitch with a ten foot fungo.

At the pitch the runner on third charges ten feet down the line, but scurries back to third. They're trying to mess me up with little league tricks. Maybe we should try the hidden ball trick if they want to play that way.

Pitch two: The batter and the runner try the same lame bluffs they tried on the first pitch. They're trying to get me nervous enough to balk and let in the go ahead run.

The runner is far enough down the third base line that if the third baseman made a move to third we could try a pick off play. I look and the third baseman shakes his head. He's afraid I'll throw the ball into the stands. He calls time and runs to the mound. The home plate umpire is already on his way to break up the meeting.

"Just walk him. Don't be looking around." He heads back to third base.

The Yankees Manager runs out of the dugout and catches the ump before he gets back to home plate. He yells loud enough for me to hear.

"Are you sure this guy is clear with the commissioner's office? He looks like he got lost on the way to little league."

The ump makes a gesture and the Yankees manager heads back to the dugout.

Pitch three: Ball three. The catcher fires the ball back to me. The Yankee batter throws his bat down like I've walked him and runs to first. The catcher watches, then stares at the Yankee dugout. The third base runner makes his move for the plate. The catcher isn't watching. The runner has a shorter distance to the plate than I do, but I have to be faster than the old guy, so it is a foot race.

I have to lunge to tag him out as he dives head first towards the plate.

I get him. Three outs.

That wasn't supposed to happen, but I got the out and even the Manager congratulates me.

The Manager and coaches huddle, talking and looking over their shoulders at me.

The Yankees starting pitcher is still in the game.

The batting coach yells for me to get in the on deck circle. The Yankees know that the first batter is me or a pinch hitter so they're going to wait and see who is batting before they put in their relief pitcher.

The pitcher finishes his warm-ups. I look back at the Manager in the dugout. He mimes a short baseball swing, meaning I need to go up to the plate and take my swings.

He's taking a chance. This game could go into extra innings, so he is trying not to burn through the lineup.

The Yankees leave their starter in the game. They want to use his years of World Series experience to make me go away quietly.

If I just told you that I hit a home run that turned out to be a game winner you wouldn't believe me and maybe if you saw it in person you wouldn't believe me, so I don't know what I have to do to convince you that something of that magnitude could happen without J.P. making such a prediction.

Let me take you through it for dexterity sake. I guessed right on the first pitch. For most of the game the pitcher had been mixing and moving his pitches around the strike zone. Nothing at the same speed. Nothing with the same movement. Nothing in the same location. So I thought he would show contempt for my minor league ways and just try to send a fast ball past me even though he wasn't known for his heater.

I sent the slow motion fastball on a quick exit over the left field wall into the belly of the bleachers. Sligo, buy everyone a drink.

You think that is a happy ending. No, the story goes on and the worst of it is, after everything no one will remember that I hit a home run in the World Series.
CHAPTER 103

Blind Shane, Again

Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy. Mickey O'Really. The not soon enough departed. Say goodbye to the old ballgame. Wicked wonders, bathetic blunders, my world is good when I feel bad. I'm going solo and incognito.

My TV crew tried to turn me in. They came to the brilliant conclusion about my real intents and the seriousness therein of my modus operandi and that I wasn't merely a lunatic willing to set myself on fire just to get my face on TV.

They went to the FBI and turned in all the film they had and made a statement in an attempt to exonerate themselves in my freedom drama.

They even showed the scene when I purchased a bomb from a group of Irish radical nuns. One of the nuns looked familiar. I'd like to see the tape again, but the FBI is only releasing a picture of me, so now I have to wear a disguise.

I'm the Village People. Each day I dress up as a different one of the Village People. In the neighborhood I'm hiding in no one seems to notice. I even have drinks at a local bar called the Horny Cockatoo where a lot of tough guys in leather hang out. They either leave me alone or look at me and say, "So old", and snap their fingers at me.

I'll just sit here and drink quietly. I've got a plan and a strap on bomb.
CHAPTER 104

So I hit my home run and now it is the ninth inning and we have two outs on the Yankees. One more to go and we can decide the series in game seven.

Shane shows up. He's running onto the field dressed as a Yankee with what looks like a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back.

The crazy noise of the happy fans stops and all is quiet in Wrigley. He stops near second base and does a 360 degree turn to look at the crowd. He presses a button on a hand held device just before security can grab him.

Shane turns into a rocket man. He might have thought that he was buying a bomb, but what he was wearing that looked like a vacuum cleaner was a jet pack. He lights up the night sky as he flies higher than the height of Chicago's tallest buildings. The jet pack runs out of fuel and flares out and a parachute opens and catches a breeze that carries him towards Lake Michigan.

Whoever sold him his bomb was nice enough not to drop him out of the sky onto his sorry ass into the tripping lane on Lake Shore Drive.

Everyone is shocked. We weren't sure what to do, so the umps told us to go ahead and finish the game. We only need one more out and the next Yankee grounded out on the first pitch.

Enjoy the ride Mr. Shane. You can probably see Gary, Indiana from up there!

If there is a lesson here it is to never buy a bomb from a radical Irish nun, especially if one of the nuns has a face that reminds you of Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy. Sligo always told me that nuns have bad habits.

Sister Sligo wears sunglasses at night when selling bogus bombs to terrorists.
CHAPTER 105

The Final Game! Yankees must die! I'll drop a bomb on them myself. Bayonet charge at dawn. Must kill Yankee dogs, imperialist bastards from the east.

Something is wrong. We're winning by a score of thirteen to nothing. It is all seeming too easy. The fans are unusually quiet for a game seven of the World Series where they have an almost insurmountable lead. This doesn't happen often at Wrigley. No one is sure how to act.

Thirteen to nothing. Nothing unlucky about the number thirteen today. I'm still sitting on the bench with my back against the fence in the Cubs bullpen down the left field line.

The family is here and JP is with them and there is a rumor that Sligo is going to try to sneak in unnoticed. One of the announcers asked me during warm ups if I knew where the uncle was because no one had seen him in Wrigleyville being his usual repentant self.

I notice in warm ups that there is a strange looking nun in the left field bleachers. Yes strange enough to look like St. Sligo dressed as a nun. Every time I look over there the Sister holds a program over her face. I guess our holy lady of the night Saint Sligo O'Shaunessy is ashamed that he broke her vows to never visit the inside of Wrigley again until the Cubs won the World Series.

I know it is Saint, her holiness. She finished her third beer before the start of the game.

The game isn't even close, but I don't think I'll be off the bench and that is fine since we are going to win and the sooner we finish this, the sooner we have less of a chance of messing up the way everyone expects.

The fans haven't gone crazy yet. There could be a conga line from Wrigley to Rush Street before this is over and the Yankees are done.

I can hear the radios of the fans listening to Lon and Ron:

Lon: It looks like the Cubs are going to win the World Series Ron.

Ron: Shut up Lon. You shouldn't say that. It's like saying 'no hitter' during a no hitter.

Lon: This is not a no hitter. This is a shut out. You can say shut out during a shut out.

Ron: You're taking unnecessary chances with luck.

Lon: The Cubs are winning by thirteen. What could possibly go wrong?

Ron: Shut up Lon.

Lon: I can't shut up this is radio. So you think the Cubs are in trouble because they have a huge lead and there is no reason they should lose?

Ron: What could possibly go wrong Lon?

CHAPTER 106* * *

A camera crew spots Sligo and stalks him, but he sees them moving in on him and he has time to make an exit.

Sister Sligo is gone. The camera crew slinks after him. They find a nun's outfit under the stands, but no Sligo.

Outside on Waveland Avenue he meets her, the one he left with a promise so many years ago.

"The game isn't over," says Sligo.

"I know. I just wanted to see the look on your face when you heard the words."

"What words?"

"I do. Don't die. I'm not going to hold you to it."

"I made a promise."

"Then what are you waiting for? Have a little faith in your team."

"They're the Cubs. They'll break your heart again."

"Still a bum. You're probably broke."

"Nothing can break this bum. Did you want to get married here or in Vegas?"

"Vegas. Stadium weddings are so tacky. Or did you have your heart set on getting married at halftime?"

"That's my girl. Never did understand the game did you? Let's wait until the game is over."

"What, you think they're going to lose? They're ahead by two touchdowns."

"I can't argue with that."

"Play ball."

"Get your pencils and scorecards ready."

I heard later that Sligo and his bride to be were seen walking away from Wrigleyville before the end of the game.

Hearing the story makes me think if I've ever made a promise to JP. I don't think I have,but if I did I'm sure she'll bring it up at a time when I am least likely to want to hear about it. Besides, I don't know what is going to happen to us.
CHAPTER 107

You're probably wondering how the World Series turned out. You probably aren't one of those people who say they're just happy to be here. You want your team to win.

It wouldn't be fair of me to tell you the ending. The World Series is something you want to see and experience for yourself.

I know it is a baseball cliché to talk about next year, but that is all I can think of to say right now.

There is always next year.

