“The famed mezzo Hazel Bouche will sing the national anthem,” announced Harris.
Hazel gave Homero a shameless grin as she paraded across the platform. His wife and ten spawn leaked to the press that, in response to reports of his misbehavior, they were boycotting the ceremony. Hazel Bouche announced that she wouldn’t sing for another twenty minutes since only then would the benefics Venus and Jupiter overcome the malefics, Mars and Saturn, indicating the time was propitious for an Aries, whose element is fire, to begin the outthrusting of will into the universe.
The crowd took this explanation well enough, but the delay worsened the sweaty stench. After Bouche belted out the national anthem ear-shatteringly, converting many right away to the zodiac, the governor announced that he wasn’t throwing in the towel, that he would continue to fight the latest statewide efforts to recall him for gross malfeasance. The baseball commissioner, who sat on the board of directors of a major chewing-tobacco firm, announced that because of recent resignations from the Baseball Writers’ Association, which elects players to the Hall of Fame, he would be submitting a list of replacements. It was rumored that he made all such decisions with a Ouija board.
Then began the speeches of the inductees. No one would have wished them longer. The first was an exercise in thanking, with the player’s agent at the top of the list. The next two spoke of American values and how their own careers epitomized all that was best about free agency in the land of the free.
While these speeches wore on, Barry Tarbox and his deputies moved stealthily through the crowd, asking young women whether they or anybody they knew had had sex with the Cardiff Giant.
At last it was time for Homero, who, we hoped, would enliven this leaden ritual. We weren’t disappointed. He stood at the podium, adjusted his genitals, and crossed himself. “I owe all this to Mary, mother of God, and to Mel Gibson. I personally discovered Him in the ravioli. Somebody else might have eaten that ravioli, but I’m always on the lookout for Mel Gibson in ravioli, and at the conclusion of this ceremony, you gotta visit the church on Elm Street. Tell the Lord that Tony ‘the Bat’ sent you. Got some problems with your digestive track or your liver or your dick? Ask the Lord to heal! Admission’s only fifty cents.”
A few in the audience, including the baseball commissioner, seemed uneasy at so large a dose of religion in a secular ceremony. Then something truly bizarre happened. As Homero spoke, other voices were heard over the loudspeaker, fading in and out, voicing over and under Homero’s own utterance. He looked puzzled but wasn’t about to yield the podium to a chorus of unseen speakers. Sheila, Esther, and I strained to make out these other voices. Sometimes they seemed to be speaking Italian, sometimes English, then what sounded like a parakeet speaking German. The words were not quite intelligible.
Then it struck me—we were hearing electronic voice phenomena, first investigated by the Latvian psychologist Konstantin Raudive, whose authoritative book on the subject, Breakthrough, was published in 1971. He asked whether these voices breaking through our electronic lines of communication were extraterrestrials, the dead, angels, or satanic spirits. Take your pick.
How do I know this? From a Discovery Channel special, of course. Many in the audience must have seen the same special because a wave of recognition swept through the sports center.
“Hey, Mom, is that you?” asked Homero of one of the doleful Italian voices. “Che cozz? Sit tight for a minute, let me get on with my speech.”
Sheila said, “It’s the Mugwort Plant Spirit telling us not to overrate baseball—a guy sport.”
Esther heard the voices differently. “It’s the Malakhim—messenger angels telling us to obey the 613 commandments.”
Others were sure they heard their own voices since they were already having out-of-body experiences and, in some cases, undergoing bilocation, an ingenious procedure that permitted a person to be in two different places at the same time. Other explanations were buzzed about. I overheard talk of alien choirs in space, astral bodies, psychokinesis, channeling, and poltergeists. Tarbox was convinced it was the Cardiff Giant.
But it was the born-again Christians who held greatest sway. As the discoverer of the Holy Ravioli and now God’s intermediary, Tony Homero was, for want of better, the Second Coming. Hundreds of the faithful swept toward the podium, thinking a few swatches from his garments might have the true grit of the Shroud of Turin. “Tony! Tony!” Within minutes Homero was stripped bare, pathetically holding his privates while the governor, the commissioner of baseball, and Harris Scalia looked on.
“Where’s my plaque?” Homero cried.
The baseball commissioner consulted his Ouija board and made a solemn pronouncement. “For the first time in the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame, an inductee will be deducted simultaneously with his induction. Mr. Homero, for triggering this travesty, I am withholding your plaque. You’re out of here!”
— Chapter Thirteen —
LOCKED IN
I got locked into the Baseball Hall of Fame after hours. I’d fallen asleep in the men’s room at closing. I was so battered, poisoned, and bitten since arriving in Cooperstown—and pumped so full of antibiotics, emetics, valium, and anti-inflammatories—that I wasn’t steady on my feet and was prone to narcosis.
Upon awakening and exiting the men’s room, I entered the antechamber to the Hall of Fame gallery, eerily lit only by small exit fixtures. To my left was the life-sized statue of Babe Ruth swinging. I paused and looked again, startled to see his broad squat features change into the grinning pig snout of Barry Tarbox. And that was no baseball bat—rather, an alien restraint net fluttered toward me as I tried to escape into the gallery, my body so heavily weighted I could barely move.
Inside the gallery, I heard Tarbox oinking after me as I struggled down the corridor amid the plaques. Was that Ted Williams at the far end? The statue moved, the belly became distended, and the form of Tony “the Bat” Homero strutted up the ramp toward the Bullpen Theatre.
I have a gentle nature, am a well-behaved Midwesterner, but the sight of Homero filled me with rage. Thinking to tear him apart, I ran in pursuit, passing by Robert Redford peering out from a billboard. This was all “only natural,” he said with cool. Only natural? It all seemed to me totally perverse. When I entered the Bullpen Theatre I saw Homero sink into the movie screen where he was featured in a short loop. He was hitting ball after ball out of the stadium, in the jerky manner of a mechanical wooden puppet, to the sound of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I would be spending eternity trapped in this loop if I didn’t quickly exit—so I ran to the second floor, passing through the gallery, “Pride and Passion.”
Yes, the museum was a repository of American culture. Here they were, the Negro Leagues. There I beheld the Birmingham Black Barons walking through the Colored Entrance. There stood Jackie Robinson, ready to break into the majors. And there was Willie Mays running, his glove extended for all eternity to make the greatest catch ever—off the bat of Cleveland’s Vic Wertz—and doing his inimitable pirouette. Good, I thought, Black players are getting their due.
But my eyes widened as Willie Mays metamorphosed into Hazel Bouche. She had baseballs for boobs and announced, “Black is beautiful. I’m not pitching till Neptune has passed out of the second house of Uranus.” Universal boos and pandemonium at Ebbets Field.
I feared she would set back Black liberation and feminism many years, so I pleaded. “Miss Bouche, please pitch—don’t do this to your brothers and your sisters!”
“Mind your own business, pork chops.”
I ran up another flight to the “Women in Baseball” gallery. “All American Girls,” read the legend. Here I felt safe for a time and gazed on a blown-up photograph of the Vassar College Resolutes of 1876. The nine women were solemn and resolute. One of them was uncannily familiar. I peered in the dim light and beheld Sheila Drake wearing a ravioli necklace. Her features were now more Native American than Irish. Instead of a mitt she held a papoose. Whose child is t
hat? I wondered—and was spooked to see that the features were distinctly Italian-American.
I mustered courage to speak to her, whispering, so that the eight others wouldn’t take umbrage. I wanted to declare my passion and to ask an overwhelming question, like How do you explain yourself to yourself? My words were all wrong. “You ask why I’m so obsessed with you. Not sure. You’re deficient in humor, have to say. Esther takes jokes about Kabbalah rather well—but you’re so solemn about those weirdo Plant Spirits. They got us in a lot of trouble. And you hate men, so why the devil are you having sex with Homero? Pardon the psychology, but is it masochistic mutilation or narcissistic self-indulgence? And that’s not all. There’s something weird going on with you and Ohnstad. And last, not least, your identity thing. Identity! Dammit, why not settle for one-fourth Huron?”
This interrogation seemed more and more banal as I klutzily covered one sentence over with another. I felt my blood pressure rising, my temples pulsing. Sheila looked at me sternly. Then she stepped effortlessly out of the photograph, handing her papoose to the pitcher, and headed toward the “Baseball Cards” gallery. She was buck naked and carried a sprig of daisies. “He loves me, he loves me not,” she chanted to the Daisy Plant Spirit. I watched her silently from behind. The spectacle of her jaunty butt, long auburn hair, and poison ivy blisters set off a craving.
I approached the “Baseball Cards” gallery and was disappointed that naked Sheila had morphed into fully clothed Esther. She was taking notes while she read the cards, singling out Hank Greenberg, Mordecai Brown, Marv Rotblatt, Joe Ginsberg, Bud Swartz, Al Rosen, and Micah Franklin. Concerning Mordecai Brown, I heard her exclaim, “Six consecutive seasons of twenty wins or more—six and twenty are sacred numbers! And he had only three fingers on his pitching hand. Three’s a sacred number! Jack, hi there. This explains why Mordecai Brown beat Christy Mathewson in nine consecutive games. Nine’s a sacred number, divisible by three.”
“Esther, you and I have had high adventures together, in and out of bed, but I was rather hoping you were your half-sister. I’m beginning to think I’m dreaming—and I’d like to play out a fuck fantasy with her. Been nursing it for many weeks, you know.”
Esther flung a fistful of baseball cards in my face and said, “Jack, your gematria just doesn’t add up. Okay, if you must, she went thataway.”
I headed toward the “Major League Locker Room,” where I saw the statue of a man with huge ears and no sign of Sheila, who shouldn’t have been hanging in a men’s locker room anyway. The man, Casey Stengel, whirled about and took on the features of Thor Ohnstad.
“I’m manager here,” said Ohnstad. “Are you looking for Sheila? I just saw her. She was looking for Homero, sweating big time.”
Ohnstad smirked. There was something about this man I did not like. His manner of interrogation, his Rotarian heartiness on top of sarcasm, his innuendoes about Sheila and Homero. This was a locker room and I feared he might take down his pants, so I kneed him in the nuts and ran to the staircase where the world’s largest baseball bat is mounted—eleven feet long and of considerable girth, circa 1936.
What I saw beneath it filled me with equal measures of dread and desire. Naked except for some wampum she wore about her neck, Sheila had mounted Homero and was taking her pleasure to tango music. I approached from behind and witnessed the intensity of her ride. Flanking them were Tabby and Harris holding cameras for reality television. Homero and Sheila caught sight of me and increased their tempo.
“Holy ravioli, how I like the way you move,” said Homero. “Keep it up, bellissima.”
Sheila kept it up, looking at me sympathetically. “Don’t worry, Jack. I can take him or leave him. This is meaningless. It’s not half as sexy as it looks.”
Reassured, I looked down at Homero but saw that he was now the Cardiff Giant. He smiled and spoke the first real words yet attributed to the giant, who must have been no mute golem after all. “Jack, maybe after I’ve finished you’d like to take a turn at the throttle?”
“Nothing doing!” I cried, as I whacked him with the 1936 bat and awakened wide-eyed to the exhortations of the morning janitor.
— Part Three —
TO THE OTHER SIDE
— Chapter Fourteen —
THE BENEFIT
Harris: “Tabby and Harris here again for your Sunday morning prune Danish. As you may have heard, there have just been three well-intended but botched assassinations in South America, a feminist coup in Iran, an earthquake in Florida, and the announcement by SETI that contact has been made with folks living on a planet in the Big Dipper. But let’s turn straightaway to what really concerns us: the lives of the celebs and the social calendar.”
Tabby: “Last night’s closing of the Glimmerglass Opera season was marred by cabbage hurled at the renowned diva, Hazel Bouche. Not to editorialize, but we find this in poor taste. Miss Bouche was within her rights to break off an aria in Don Carlo to explain that with Mercury the messenger now retrograde in Virgo and the New Moon recently in her solar sixth house, and because of the close association of aria with Aries, and considering the only colors for an Aries yesterday were grape and pale lilac—the costumer had proved clueless—it was for the good of the production that she cease projecting her elemental fire into the universe.”
Harris: “She asked her current boy toy, Tony ‘the Bat’ Homero, to take a bow. The audience threw more cabbage. But why, forevermore? Homero has, as you know, lingered in Cooperstown begging the baseball commissioner for a pardon after the Hall of Fame debacle. He sits daily at the stoop of the hall, pouting and asking ‘che cozz?’ of his bodyguards. Not to editorialize, but we hope the commissioner lets the poor putz into the Hall of Fame so he’ll clear out of town.”
Tabby: “This evening, the elite of Cooperstown will attend the annual benefit for the restoration of Hyde Hall. It’s being thrown, as usual, by the local benefactor Thor Ohnstad at the Busch Mansion. Ohnstad has just announced his candidacy for governor in the recall election.”
Tabby and Harris together: “Not to editorialize, but let’s hope he loses, for the good of the union.”
I accompanied Esther and Sheila to the benefit in Esther’s rental Mercedes. As usual, Ohnstad was right: The Busch Mansion was a mishmash of Colonial Revival and Queen Anne & Shingle, also a touch of American Arts & Crafts. Turrets, cupolas, dormers, deep striped awnings, oriel windows, a wraparound porch, and a terraced front lawn—all befitting this Midwestern parvenu and Gatsby redux. How dare Ohnstad call me “sport”? He hadn’t even read The Great Gatsby. Yes, this mansion embodied Ohnstad himself, a quirky fellow full of contradiction, a human pastiche.
In the spacious lawn and garden, gazeboes were scattered about, set off by antique statuary—nymphs, satyrs, and peeing cherubs. Here we beheld the top crust of Cooperstown. But Ohnstad had made some egalitarian gestures. Riffraff with no intention of donating to Hyde Hall could scarf down hors d’oeuvres. I spied a support group of ageing county-fair beauty queens binging on the pimento-and-horseradish cheese dip.
Sheila, Esther, and I had just begun tossing off New York State Goat White when up walked an unprepossessing man. Short, balding, with thick glasses, in his early forties, wearing a yarmulke and string tie, and carrying a fiddle, he pointed quizzically to Esther and me. “I’ve seen the two of you somewhere before . . .”
“The opera?” she suggested.
“No, no . . .” He paused, squinted, and exclaimed, “Yes, Sharon Springs! You were the ones I observed breaking into the Hadassah Arms. When you were arrested, I was stationed in the backseat of the other police car.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“We owe lots to you,” hissed Esther. “Like a night in jail.”
“Please do not take it personally. I did my duty. You had a mission, Dr. Federman, and used extreme means. I too am a Jew. I was on duty as neighborhood sentinel that evening. I too have a mission. I am financing the restoration of Sharon Springs. Mr. Ohnstad hopes I shall h
ave funds leftover for Hyde Hall.”
“Don’t give him a shekel,” said Esther, quickly impressed. “Save it for Sharon Springs. How’d you get interested?”
“My grandparents used to take the waters there.”
“So did mine. What’s your name?”
“Deronda. Daniel Deronda.”
“Hmmm, I know that from somewhere. Didn’t we see it in the Zohar, Jack?”
“I do not subscribe to Kabbalah, practicing mainstream cultural Judaism, but my grandparents did. They used to speak of the ‘minor metaphysics of the smile.’ I remain unclear as to what was meant by it.”
“I can tell you!” said Esther, warming to the very man who had given her a criminal record. “It’s a kabbalistic version of yin and yang. In the Talmud it is written that ‘the searching taste of your eyes is better than wine, and the smile of your teeth is better than milk.’” She smiled at Deronda with her teeth. “Rabbi Yohanan explained the passage—it means the whiteness of teeth offered to a friend is better than a nice glass of milk.”
“Ah,” said Deronda. “Thank you for the information.”
I knew when Esther was flirting. Deronda did not. He paused. “I have always thought it my duty to stay with the traditional teachings.”
Undeterred, Esther began an interrogation of dutiful Deronda rivaling Ohnstad in nosiness. Such is the prerogative of an analyst. Pretty soon Sheila and I, into our third glass of Goat White and looking on, knew more about this stranger than we knew about each other.
I’ll summarize: His surname derived from Ronda, the Spanish town from which the Sephardic Jews were evicted in 1492, some of them heading east to the Ottoman Empire. Daniel Deronda’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Salonika in 1910 and set up a ladies handbag shop on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side. With an immigrant’s industry and a willingness to cooperate with goyim, he prospered, married his accountant, and, twenty visits to Sharon Springs and sixty thousand handbags later, passed out of this existence, leaving his eldest son enough seed money to embark on a rapacious career in Manhattan real estate. The son’s methods included buying up buildings inhabited by Polish and Ukrainian widows in the East Village and Lower East Side, waiting for them to die when he wasn’t able to evict, then raising the rent. Bonding with his grandfather, Deronda was now making amends for the sins of his deceased father, putting the ill-gained family wealth into good works and restoring the community that offered his grandparents their only respite from a life of honest toil, thrift, and calculation.
The Cardiff Giant Page 8
