The Death of Baseball Read online

  The Death of Baseball

  * * *

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  FICTION

  Jerusalem Ablaze: Stories of Love and Other Obsessions

  The Death of Baseball

  * * *

  A Novel

  * * *

  Orlando Ortega-Medina

  Cloud Lodge Books

  London

  First published in paperback and eBook in 2019

  by Cloud Lodge Books (CLB)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Copyright © Orlando Ortega-Medina 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  PB ISBN 978-1-9995873-5-2

  eBook ISBN 978-1-9995873-6-9

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cloud Lodge Books Ltd (CLB)

  51 Holland Street, London W8 7JB

  cloudlodgebooks.com

  Dedicated to my father, for whom baseball never died.

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Norma Jean Redux (1962)

  Clyde (1973)

  Raphael (1970)

  Ralph (1973)

  Marilyn and Jimmy (1982)

  Kimitake (1982 – 1983)

  * * *

  Glossary

  Then Mara the Evil One, wishing to provoke fear, horror, and terror in Sister Cala, approached her and said, “What is it you don't approve of, Sister?”

  “I don't approve of birth, friend.”

  “Why don't you approve of birth? One who is born enjoys a life of sensual pleasures. Who therefore has persuaded you: ‘Sister, don't approve of birth’?”

  Sister Cala replied, “One who is born suffers a life of bondage, flagellation, and unceasing agony. And one who is born must die. That is why I do not approve of birth.”

  —Cala Sutta (Saṃyutta Nikāya 5.6)

  NORMA JEAN REDUX

  1962

  I left this world in the early hours of August 5, 1962, having given up on my mad life. The universe immediately recycled me back into the body of a baby boy, just as he shot out of his mother’s womb in a rush of blood and mucus into a hospital birthing room in Pasadena—a mere twenty miles from the Brentwood home where my nude, lifeless body lay sprawled boobs-up on my bed, empty bottles of Nembutal and chloral hydrate strewn on the floor. I was not to be let off so easily.

  All things are recycled.

  My unusual [re]birth was not lost on the attending midwife, who let out a tympanum-splitting scream and—dangling me by my little ankles at arm’s length—begged her supervising nurse to finish the job. When later questioned about her strange behaviour, the tremulous midwife reported that I’d stared at her “with open, knowing eyes” and that this had scared the living shit out of her. I understand from my momma that she stopped by our house at some point to apologise for her rudeness, but was never able to look at me directly.

  I swear to you, I remember that midwife’s crazy scream, like the shriek of a banshee, heralding the death of a Caomhánach. It’s one of my earliest new memories. I also remember the glare of the fluorescent light glinting off the corner of the supervising nurse’s cat-eye glasses as she sponged me clean in a stainless steel bassinet, her bloodshot blue eyes magnified to the size of golf balls by her refractor-like lenses.

  Another distinct early new memory is of a mobile composed of little red sponge cherries rotating above my head as I lay in the hospital’s nursery crib.

  But the single most important memory I carry from the day of my rebirth is sensory—a black and overwhelming sadness followed by a sudden, disorienting cacophony of sound and colour, as I boomeranged from death back into life.

  CLYDE

  1973

  Chapter 1

  Koneko jumps on my bed and wakes me. Silly kitty. I pull her close and kiss her furry white head.

  “Hello, Kiki, you big snowball,” I whisper, hugging her warm body against my chest. “I have a baseball game in the morning and need to sleep, remember?” I bury my nose in her fur and kiss her again.

  I love my Kiki so much, and she loves me. She used to be my brother Hiro’s kitty before he went crazy and died. But then she became mine, which is just as well since I take way better care of her than Hiro ever did.

  Now that I’m wide awake, I hear the TV in the living room. I snatch up my alarm clock. It’s almost midnight, nearly my birthday! What are they still doing awake at this time?

  Koneko hops off the bed, coaxes open the door with her paw, and creeps out of the room. I pull the big fluffy pillow over my head, and then the blanket. But I can still hear the TV. And it’s driving me crazy.

  After forever, I pull on my fuzzy blue slippers and pad down the long hallway to the living room, illuminated by the glow of the TV. I peek inside. Nobody is in there. Just the people on the TV—a pretty blonde lady in a white summer dress and an old cowboy-hatted man with a pointy moustache.

  The lady’s dress looks like it’s covered in big polka dots. I inch-worm up to the TV to get a better look just as the lady bends over. Her bum takes up the whole screen for a second, shaking from side to side. That’s when I realise the polka dots are actually little black-and-white cherries, stems and all, and I laugh out loud.

  “What are you doing, Ku-rai-do?” my momma asks from the doorway in Japanese. In my head, I hear her say: “What are you doing, Clyde?” She does her best, my poor momma. It’s not that she’s stupid. She’s just never learned how to speak English very well. The important thing is we understand each other a hundred per cent. She scoots up next to me and takes me in her arms. “It’s so late. You should be in bed.” She kisses me on the head and pulls aside a lock of hair that has fallen across my face.

  “Who’s that lady, Momma?” I ask in English, wriggling out of her embrace and moving closer to the TV. I watch as the blonde lady pushes Mr Moustachio to the ground and bounces away from him.

  “That’s Marilyn,” she says, struggling with the pronunciation of the name. “She was a famous movie star back when I first came to this country.”

  “Marilyn…” I savour each beautiful syllable. “She’s so pretty, Momma.”

  Momma opens her eyes wide. “Prettier than your momma?”

  “No way! You’re the prettiest momma in the whole wide world!” I say, because that’s the truth.

  Momma laughs and covers me in big, wet kisses while I sneak another peek at the blonde lady. All the men on the TV are smiling at her, buying her drinks, and trying to get her to pay attention to them.

  “Marilyn,” I say again, so I won’t forget her name. I’m stupid about remembering things sometimes.

  “Her real name was Norma Jean Baker,” Momma says after a bit. “But she changed her name to Marilyn Monroe when she became famous.”

  Momma switches off the TV, picks me up, and sits me on our threadbare sofa. Koneko comes from out of nowhere and crawls into my lap, nudging her head against my belly.

  “I want to meet her,” I say, rubbing Koneko behind her ear.

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just can’t.” Momma loo
ks really sad when she says that, like whenever she talks about Hiro. So I promise myself I won’t ask her about Marilyn anymore.

  “Now you go back to your room before your father gets home and sees you in here at this God-awful hour.”

  “But I’m not sleepy anymore, Momma. Besides,”—I look at the grandfather clock, which says it’s past midnight— “it’s already my birthday! I’m eleven now. Aren’t you going to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me?”

  Momma blinks at me for a moment and checks her watch, then she smiles and pats my leg.

  “Wait here, baby,” she says. “I’ll be right back.”

  She runs out of the living room, and Koneko hops off my lap and follows her.

  I switch the TV back on, and I’m surprised to see Marilyn holding a rope with a bucking horse on the other end. And the men that were with her in the bar are jumping up and down yelling at the horse and trying to take the rope away from her.

  Just as I scoot closer to the TV, I hear Momma clearing her throat behind me. I whip around and see her coming into the room carrying a pink-and-white birthday cake with a bunch of lit candles on it.

  “Surprise, baby. I was going to wait until tomorrow for this. But since you’re up and it’s already your birthday…”

  She nods at the sofa, and I sit on it. Then she kneels in front of me still holding the birthday cake and starts to sing all breathy like:

  “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, Mister Birthday Boy… Happy birthday to you!”

  My heart does a bunch of cartwheels, and I say, “Thank you, Momma.”

  “Make a wish and blow out the candles, baby. Then you can have some cake and milk before you go back to bed.”

  I take a deep breath and blow out the candles while wishing for something I know will never happen: that my father will stop drinking and that he’ll love Momma again like he used to before I was born.

  Momma watches me eat some of my birthday cake, running her fingers through my hair every once in a while. Then we watch the rest of the Marilyn movie together all snuggled up on the sofa. It gets a little boring toward the end, and we doze off asleep.

  Suddenly there’s a loud pounding at the front door. Momma’s head snaps up, and her face goes all tight and funny.

  “Open up this fucking door, Tomoko,” I hear my father yell. “I can’t find my keys.”

  Momma runs to the sash window, pulls it open, and sticks out her head. “Be quiet, Yoshi! I’ll be right there.”

  She runs across the room and tries to pick me up, but I’m too heavy for her.

  “Please, baby,” she says right into my ear, almost making me deaf. “You need to go to your room now. Do it for Momma.”

  “Tomoko, you goddamn slut,” my father screams. “Open this door now, or I’ll break it down.”

  He kicks the front door super hard, and the house shakes; Momma puts her hands up to her face and starts to cry, and that’s when I get proper scared.

  As I rush out of the room, I plough straight into Koneko, who is running away from the door-kicking noise, and step hard on her back. She screeches, and I fall flat in the dark hallway just as my father kicks open the door and staggers into the foyer, stinking of whiskey. He hasn’t seen me yet. But there’s no way I’ll be able to make it back to my bedroom without him noticing. So I roll back to the living room and hurry to my hiding place behind the sofa. Momma is crying in a corner and my poor baby Koneko is dragging herself around the room, whimpering and leaving a trail of bloody cat poop.

  After what seems like a million years, my father’s face appears in the doorway.

  “What’s going on here?” He looks at my crying momma and then at broken Koneko, who isn’t moving anymore.

  “There was an accident, Yoshi,” Momma says through her tears. “The neko got hurt. That’s why I couldn’t come to the door right away.”

  My father squints at Koneko until his eyes are just a pair of slits, and he snatches her by the tail. “This cat’s dead!”

  He stares like an idiot at the poopy mess Koneko made and at Koneko, dangling upside down in his hand. Then he sways like he’s about to fall over. “This was Hiro’s cat, Tomoko.”

  “It was an accident, Yoshi,” Momma mumbles, bubbles of snot coming out her nose. “Please, put him down.”

  “I can’t believe this,” he croaks, tears streaming down his face. “You kill everything you touch.”

  I jump out from behind the sofa. “Stop saying those horrible things to Momma!”

  “What the hell?” He blinks at me and wipes his face on the sleeve of his dirty work shirt. “What are you doing in here?”

  “It’s your fault! You scared Koneko with your kicking and screaming, and then I accidentally crashed into her. It’s your big fat fault, like everything else. I wish you were dead! I wish you were dead!”

  He drops Koneko and grabs me by the hair, dragging me to the mirror. “Look at yourself, you pathetic little bastard. You’ve wet yourself.”

  I shut my eyes because I don’t want to see that I peed my jammies. I don’t even remember when it happened. But now I can feel it, all cold and clammy against my legs.

  “Look at yourself!” he screams.

  I close my eyes even more tightly and struggle to get away from him. But he’s holding my hair really hard.

  “Stop it, Yoshi!” Momma lunges forward and tries to pull him off me, but my father pushes her away with his free hand, and she falls against the cabinet where my Little League trophies are displayed, knocking them to the floor.

  For an instant, his grip on me loosens enough for me to squirm away. I run to help Momma, who’s picking up my trophies, and she pulls me behind her.

  My father shakes his head, blinks like a thousand times, and stares at us. Tears are pouring out of his eyes. But not like when someone’s crying. More like when you get soap in your eye. He sways again, almost falling over, and steadies himself against the bookcase. “You’re pathetic,” he says with a croaky voice. “You weren’t supposed to be here.”

  Momma holds out her hand at him the way crossing guards do when they want cars to stop. “He was having trouble sleeping, Yoshi. But he’s going to bed now.”

  “He has a game tomorrow, for Christ’s sake,” he says, wiping his face with his sleeve. “It’s almost one in the morning.”

  “Don’t worry about the game,” I say, stepping out from behind Momma. “I’m the best hitter they’ve got.”

  “That’s thanks to me,” he says. “If I hadn’t signed you up you’d still be playing with Barbie dolls.”

  “Go to bed, baby,” Momma whispers.

  “But, Momma… Koneko—” I try to look at my little Kiki, but I can’t. My body gets all shaky and I start to cry.

  “Don’t worry about the neko, baby. Push it out of your mind. I’ll take care of everything. Just go, please.”

  My father collapses against the doorjamb and waves a hand in our direction. “Yeah, you do that. Go to bed. Go to fucking bed. I’m going to bed, too.”

  “It’s my birthday,” I scream, as I move to the door. “I’m eleven years old today.”

  “Don’t remind me,” he says. “Biggest mistake of my life, aside from marrying little Miss Too-Good there.”

  He staggers to the sofa and drops into it. His head smacks against the wooden armrest, and he blacks out. (Between you and me, I love the sound of his fat head going smack against that armrest, the louder, the better. I hope he cracks it open one day, like Humpty Dumpty, so nobody can ever put him back together again.)

  I run out of the room as fast as my feet can take me, change into clean jammies, and jump into bed before any more bad stuff can happen, pushing it all out of my mind the way Momma said to do.

  Chapter 2

  The next thing I know the sun is streaming through the holes in my tattered drapes and stabbing me in the eyes. It reminds me of my crazy brother, who hurt himself with a piece of glass before I was born. And that makes my stomach hurt r
eally bad, especially since I’m sleeping in his old room. So I shove that out of my mind and grab the alarm clock, which didn’t go off. It’s already eight in the morning! I need to get moving since our game starts at ten.

  I slide out of bed and listen at the door. The house is quiet, which I’m not sure is a good thing or a bad thing. So I crack open the door slowly, tip-toe down the hallway to the living room, and peek inside. Everything’s tidy like nothing bad ever happened—no trophies on the floor, no poopy mess, no broken neko, and nobody on the sofa.

  Padding back down the hallway, I listen at the door to Momma’s bedroom and recognise the hiccupy-snory sounds my father makes when he’s totally passed out. Then I hear the sound of our old juicer screeching.

  I find Momma in our bright yellow kitchen, juicing oranges and making blueberry-banana pancakes. Her back is turned to me, so I watch her for a bit. She’s wearing the light blue strapless summer dress that I like, with a nice string of pearls her rich parents sent her from Japan for her birthday. Her long black hair is pulled into a ponytail with a pretty blue ribbon that matches her dress.

  “Hi, Momma.”

  Momma turns and flashes a lovely smile that shows all her teeth. I love my momma to bits. Best of all, she’s prettier and way more stylish than all the other moms.

  “Happy birthday, baby!”

  “Thank you, Momma. Are those pancakes for me?” (Of course, I know they’re for me. It just gives me a warm feeling to ask.)

  “They’re for my special birthday boy. I made the ones you like and filled them with plenty of fresh blueberries.” She puts the plate on the table and sets a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice next to it. “Come sit with Momma.”

  “Aren’t you going to eat anything?” I ask after a while.

  “I already ate,” she says, with a funny smile that tells me she’s fibbing.

  “What did you eat?”