"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.