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 t
o 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?