The Antichrist of Kokomo County

by David Skinner

  Great, I thought. Enthusiasm. Excitement. Running. So it begins.

  “Your son’s got raw talent,” Hanzy said. Thank God he only said that to me. The wife would have screamed bloody murder.

  Finally, the recess bell rang. Time to pack it in. “I told Michael we’d throw some more tomorrow,” Hanzy said.

  “One more,” Sparky pleaded. “Just one more.”

  “Okay, Michael, but this is it,” Hanzy said, again marveling at the ebullience bursting from my son, something he had never seen from him before. And being something of a sucker for the joie de vivre of children anyway, he let this previously half-comatose numbskull-cum-effervescent youngster trump his better judgment. He proceeded to throw the ball a lot harder and farther than he had before, with the idea there would be no way Sparky would catch it, giving him something to shoot for—egads, a goal.

  And Sparky tried his damnedest to catch the ball. He hauled ass after it, I was told, and much faster than Hanzy would have thought a pudgy old man-child would have been capable of. As Hanzy told it, Sparky got close enough to leap up after the ball, barely miss it, and come down hard in a divot in the field.

  A marvelous, magnificent, miraculous divot that just so happened to blow out Sparky’s left knee. ACL. MCL. To smithereens.

  As my father would say: Puh-raaaze Jee-hee-zus!

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Horvath, I’m so sorry,” Hanzy said. “I’ll pay whatever it takes to make sure his leg gets fixed. It’s all my fault. This was so careless of me.” Babbling on and on.

  At last, I had the son of a bitch by the balls. I could do anything to him. Scream anything, threaten anything, and he would shrivel, collapse, beg.

  What a wonderful power to have!

  I knew with the wife and me at our most paranoid, our most nutcasey, we could have Hanzy fired, sued to the last dime, and probably even beaten up. A few of the parents had caught wind of what had happened and were furious. Knowing how fragile our son was, they said it was reckless and irresponsible. George Crunk, the husband of Diane and a fellow parent of an Elmo Lincoln child, dropped by and told me he’d always had a funny feeling about Mr. Hanzy, and if I wanted to know, well, he knew where he lived.

  That was all he was going to say. He knew where he lived. Then George Crunk punched his hand. “The putz!” he said.

  *

  Which is all the more proof of my greatness that I did the Christian thing. It was one of those days when I felt compelled to be what I professed. It was one of those days where it felt like it was true.

  By the way, for you snarky anti-religious types out there, this does not mean I had Hanzy burned at the stake, put on the rack or through Strappado, fitted with Spanish Boots, hung from a locust tree, or shut in an Iron Maiden. I did not have him cast down in the village square and stoned by the masses. I did not tell George Crunk to “take care of it.”

  What I did was tell Hanzy not to sweat it. No joke. I let him off the hook. I said stuff like Sparky’s knee blowing out happens. It’s life. No biggie. He’ll be fine. We’ll have to be more careful in the future but live and learn, yaddity-bladdity.

  Hanzy, his voice already fragile, let out a girlish sob of relief. The school board had launched an investigation into his conduct, and he knew if I didn’t say otherwise, he was going to get cashiered. He would never be allowed to teach anywhere else in Kokomo County, and being a teacher in Kokomo County meant everything in the world to him.

  I know, what a putz. An adorable putz, but still.

  That said, I still had his balls. Forgiveness had somehow made my grip stronger. Hanzy now felt obligated to continue pestering me for mercy after I’d already bestowed it, and beyond that compelled to follow whatever I said he must do for further expiation to the letter—and entirely because I had shown him Christian mercy to such an admirable degree.

  Perhaps Jesus was on to something with this.

  And so, with such power and might over another human being, I made sure there would be no other activities involving Sparky and baseball. I also hinted that it would be nice if Sparky would be allowed to continue on to the third grade in light of his improving homework scores (the wife and I had answered a handful more questions right than wrong on the last few assignments, boosting Sparky to the edge of the passing line in a couple of subjects), and Hanzy eagerly responded he would count homework for more than tests (Sparky had failed every one so far, which is about what you would expect when your parents do all your homework for you while you’re mainlining chocolate syrup and running full speed into walls), and that that should get it done.

  And it did. Sparky’s report card came back that May with straight Satisfactory minuses across the board. Just good enough to move on, but not anything that would be remembered or celebrated.

  Mediocrity. Anonymity. Insignificance.

  Perfect.

  9

  Chalk up another one for the Great Horvath: I’m in the elevator and with the boy. All the way inside and waiting for the doors to close. This feels good. Almost as if something of import has been accomplished.

  Maybe it has.

  Like everything else around here, the elevator is named after one of the many branches from the apparently quite fructiferous Fenwick family tree. It is posted on a plaque to the right of the buttons.

  The Gladys Marie Fenwick Memorial Elevator.

  I’m not sure what Gladys Marie Fenwick did to deserve an elevator other than stop breathing, but she’s got one.

  Wait, I do know why. There’s a plaque underneath the other plaque.

  It reads:

  This elevator is dedicated to the memory of

  Gladys Marie Fenwick

  daughter of Lawrence P. and Lois Esther Fenwick, in honor of her courageous battle with renal cancer.

  May every passenger in this elevator remember the soul’s blissful flight back to its Creator with every ascension made, and with every descent, the painful separation from their loved ones on earth.

  God Bless.

  What would an elevator be without music, right? And considering this is a memorial elevator and not your run-of-the-mill sort, you would think the music would lean toward the transcendent. Mozart’s Requiem. Brahms’s Requiem. Anybody’s requiem. Something solemn and majestic to accompany one’s thoughts as they alight on the concept of the soul’s flight to Eternity. A fairly obvious thing to do, I would think, but that’s not what’s playing here.

  No, we’re getting, “Joy to the World.”

  Still fitting you say? Still works because, from a Christian point of view, the celebration of the birth of Christ ultimately results in the redemption of humanity, thereby creating the possibility for Gladys Marie Fenwick’s soul to take its blessed flight to Paradise instead of consignment to the fiery depths of Hell? Perhaps in a roundabout way you’d be correct, except what is playing is not the Christmas hymn. It’s the classic pop song by Three Dog Night. You know, the one with the chorus that ends like this:

  Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea

  Joy to you and me.

  10

  Back to the past. Back to Sparky and baseball.

  Despite his crippling injury, the boy’s interest in the sport did not wane. From time to time, I would catch him changing the channel from stupefying Japanese cartoons to Yankees games when he thought nobody was looking. Whenever I went out to rent a movie, Sparky begged that I bring back The Natural, while at dinnertime he would entertain us with reenactments from great moments in Yankees history via greasy tater tots and mozzarella sticks.

  The wife’s untouched salad and hateful gaze in my direction said it all: this was my fault, and I had better do something to fix it and damn soon.

  But what could I do? I dwelled on the problem for days and did not like what I saw. A shredded knee and the usual distractive devices had not killed the boy’s passion. Then there was t
he most worrying aspect: his affinity for the best team in the history of the world.

  And it hit me. He’d only just started to like baseball, and the Yankees were the only team he’d seen so far. If I could somehow turn this affection, so early in its inception, to another team, a perennially unsuccessful, inept one, then wouldn’t that neutralize the situation at worst, and at best, turn it to our advantage?

  Giddy with my sensational idea, I ran to the wife, who, as the situation had turned more grim, had responded by hiding for whole days in soapy baths.

  “This is what you came up with?” she asked from within a puff of suds. “Make him like a bad team? Even if that somehow worked, he’d still like baseball.”

  “It’s the only way, honey,” I said.

  “Why can’t we figure out a way to get him back on those stupid cartoons, or . . . or playing with mud?”

  “Because his world has opened up and he has evolved,” I explained. “The rules have changed.”

  “Well, you’d better be right or it’s your ass,” she said.

  “Hon, if I’m wrong,” I said, “it’ll be all our asses.”

  Now, there are a number of organizations throughout Major League Baseball that can fit comfortably under the wide umbrella of “unsuccessful” and “inept.”

  The Milwaukee Brewers for one. A god-awful organization defined by horrendous players, dipshit management, a history replete with failure, and a future that holds little in the way of change.

  So, good choice, yes?

  Actually, no.

  While everything above is true, I could tell you from my own experience of watching the Brewers play that they weren’t what I was looking for. Sure, they played bad baseball and lost a ton of games: 106 out of 162 possible the year I studied them, good for last place in their division and one of the worst records in baseball.

  But, again, isn’t that good stuff?

  Again, no.

  See, the problem was, even with all the useful traits their organization exhibited, they were missing something. Something that would keep a fan coming back to watch, hope, pray, no matter how dreadful the team was. All the home games I watched the Brewers play that summer were to a mostly empty park. Summed up, they were not just bad, they were boring.

  I found the same issue with a number of other god-awful teams with almost no hope for the future and a past their meager fan base would just as soon forget (and many times had): the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the San Diego Padres, the Detroit Tigers. All bad, but all missing that special something.

  Looking back now, the choice should have been clear from the beginning. I certainly took the long way to the right answer, but that has been something of my M.O. in regards to almost everything. The good news is I get there eventually.

  After eliminating the aforementioned teams in addition to those that consistently met with success, I finally came across two organizations that didn’t just enjoy massive, rabid fan bases, but were also, at the time (2002), renowned for the kind of pervasive failure that can rip a person’s guts out. Two teams infamous for fans that see their passion as unbearable, like an affliction, a disease, an addiction, and for whatever irrational reason, their own meaningless lives as irrevocably entwined.

  Who am I talking about? Even if you’re not much of a baseball fan, you should already know.

  The Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

  11

  At the time of my research, both teams were still mired in the longest droughts of futility any sport had ever heard of.

  The Red Sox—who have since won two World Series championships (2004, 2007)—had at the time gone eighty-four years since their last title. Do the math and you’ll find that’s right around the last year of the First World War.

  The Chicago Cubs, not to be outdone, had gone since 1908 since their last taste of glory, taking us back to the days when Roosevelt was president—TR, not FDR.

  I could go through all the advances in technology, all the seismic historical events that occurred, even tell you how many billions of people have come and gone along the way, but I won’t.

  I’ll give you a hint, though: a lot of stuff has happened.

  Both the Cubs and Red Sox have fans that live and die with the fortunes of their teams, fortunes that, at the time of my analysis, had reliably ended in agony for generations.

  Up until everything changed for them, Red Sox fans were morbidly fatalistic. One of their ex-pitchers called them the most manic-depressive of fan bases, and you would have noticed when speaking to these fine, fine people that, before the miracle season of 2004, most had developed a substantial amount of loathing for their team. At times it even seemed they hated the Red Sox as much, if not more, than they loved them.

  Much has been said and written to this effect, from semi-literate fans to opportunistic sportswriters looking to cash in on the suffering of a tribe obsessed with a team they have no control over, whose exploits, win or lose, don’t have any real effect on their lives and in the big picture mean absolutely nothing.

  These people all portray things along the same lines: tragedy. Greek tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy. Romeo and Juliet, Rigoletto, Madame Bovary, Death of a Salesman, the Oedipus Cycle. Or pick recent or ancient history that went sideways. In the course of my study, I came across one Red Sox fan who compared the team’s fortunes to the quagmire that was the Vietnam War. Another compared it to the Palestinian effort to win independence. Another to the volcano that took out Pompeii.

  Direct quote from this perspective-free individual: “Only with us it’s worse, because the volcano happens again every year, and we get burned all over again every year.”

  The Cubs too, like the Red Sox, have had an avalanche of stories, articles, and books written about their cursed history—but don’t think tragedy here. Think farce.

  Chaplin’s The Little Tramp. Buster Keaton. The Three Stooges. Or maybe something more literary, like Candide; and much like the titular character of Voltaire’s seminal work, Cubs fans maintain their ridiculous hope in a better tomorrow against an Everest of evidence that screams at them to do otherwise. Change Best of all Possible Worlds to Wait ’Til Next Year in the slogan department and the transfer is nearly seamless.

  Not that this means Cubs fans are nothing more than cockeyed Liebnizian optimists, taking every fresh loss in unflappable stride. They can bitch up a storm with the best of them, just not with the same terrifying rage as Red Sox fans.

  For whatever reason, Cubs fans’ bellyaching can’t help but come across as frivolous, and no matter how hard those around them may want to genuinely sympathize, the best a whiny Cubs fan can ever do is arouse amused pity.

  So it must have been simple for me, right? Pick the team with the fans that have fused their identities with the fortunes of their team but without all the spleen, without all the determination that, come hell or high water, they would get it right someday.

  Pick the team with the fans who accept their fate, who take unceasing disappointment without a fight, who perceive defeat as immovable a part of life as death.

  Pick the team that has as its celebrity attendants, lesser actors and entertainers. Like James Belushi (who is and will always be the Lesser Belushi). Like Joe Mantegna, a recognizable presence maybe, but not the kind of actor you go to a movie to see. Even the pinnacle of Cubs fan celebrities, John Cusack and Bill Murray, portray characters many would call loveable losers, which just so happens to be the best-known nickname for these same Cubs.

  Pinnacle Red Sox celebrity fans? Steven Tyler, Robert Redford, Stephen King. All royalty in their chosen professions.

  Around town, I saw Cubs hats on people’s heads more than any other team—and who were these people? Blockheads, Gremios. People whose needs and wants are simple, who expect little out of life and of themselves, and get precisely that.

  Don’t get me wrong here, I’m no
t saying one’s headwear has everything to do with it (you see a lot of Yankees hats on janitors, too), but it’s a question of attitude and outlook, and after seeing all these ordinary schmucks and their insane devotion to what these blue hats with the big red C’s stood for, I knew that if there was a baseball team out there that would be a boon to the wife’s and my determination to ensure our son’s mediocrity—lest civilization crumble and evil reign—that baseball team had to be the Chicago Cubs.

  So yes, as a matter of fact, the decision was, in retrospect, a very easy one.

  12

  My meticulous research at an end, the momentous decision made, the baseball season of 2003, I saturated my son in all things Cubs.

  I made sure he was in front of the television for every game. No cookies, no chips, no half-and-half, no mind-numbing Japanese cartoons. I wanted him to have whatever ability to concentrate he possessed to be focused solely on Incompetence Incarnate.

  Sparky didn’t take to it right away. After a few innings of his first Cubs game he asked if the Yankees were on. He also refused to wear the Cubs hat I bought him, neither did he wear the Cubs jersey I gave him—the uniform of a player I will call Particularly Undistinguished Bench Guy. The plan behind this was that if Sparky found a player on the Cubs he could really like, he would then start to really like the team.

  Cast-iron logic on my part.

  However, it proved difficult to convince my son to emotionally invest in a bad player, as, strange as it may sound, even my boy loves a winner. Resisting my best effort (which consisted of me pointing out the Particularly Undistinguished Bench Guy on television during those fleeting seconds when the camera panned across the dugout and saying, “Look Sparky, there he is! He’s not playing! Isn’t that great?”), Sparky refused to glom onto said player and thus to the idea of an equally undistinguished future.

  But take heart. I kept at it. I am unyielding.

  I tried other undistinguished players. I bought Sparky a jersey for the Cubs’ Terrible Third Baseman (who would, incidentally, become a strong contributor to the Red Sox’s drought-ending championship a year later), and when that didn’t work, I gave Disappointing Nondescript Backup Catcher a try. I tried one player after another until finally, closing my eyes and aimlessly pointing at names on the roster, my fickle, fateful finger landed on Six-Fingered Second Rate Middle Reliever.