by BB Sheehan
CUBBIEPHRENIA
BB Sheehan
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; car
eful 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.