" Not only has his throat been cut literally from ear to ear practically excising his head from his neck, not only was the rip strong and deep enough to sever the carotid, the jugular and the trachea- we" re talking someone with heavy-duty power!- but I put his age at something over a hundred, maybe a hundred and two, a hundred and ten, maybe a hundred fifty, there" s no way of judging something like this, I" ve never seen anything like it in all my years; but I have to tell you that this one-hundred- and-two-year-old corpse, this old man lying here all blue and empty, this old man...is pregnant."
Dear Old Doc Death had hair growing out of his ears. He had a gimp on his starboard side. He did tend to drool and spit a mite when he was deep in conversation or silent communication with (I supposed) the spirits of the departed. But he was an award-winning sawbones. He could smell decay before the milk went sour, before the rot started to manifest itself. If he said this headless horseman was over a hundred years old, I might wrinkle my brow- and have to lave myself with vitamin E moisturizer later that night- but I" d make book he was dead on. Not a good choice of phrase, dead on. Right. I" d bet he was right. Correct.
" What" re we talking here, Doc, some kind of artificial insemination?"
He shook his head. " No, not that easy." He breathed heavily, as if he didn" t want to move forward with the story. But I caught a whiff of dinner- breath, anyway. Then he spoke very softly, sort of motioning me in closer. Fettucine Alfredo. " Look, Francine, I" ve been at this forever. But with all I" ve seen, all I" ve known of the variety of the human condition...never anything like this. The man has two complete sets of internal organs. Two hearts. Two livers, kidneys, alimentary ca.n.a.ls, sixteen sinuses, two complete nervous systems- interlocked and twisting around each other like some insane roller coasters- and one of those sets is female, and the other is male. What we have here is- "
"Hermaphrodite?"
" No, G.o.ddamit!" He actually snapped at me. " Not some freak of nature, not some flunked transvestism exercise. What I" m describing to you, Francine, is two complete bodies jammed neatly and working well into one carca.s.s. And the woman in there is about three months" gone with child. I" d say it would have been a perfectly normal- but how am I to know, really- a perfectly normal little girl. Now, all three of them are dead."
We talked for a lot longer. It never got any clearer. It never got any easier to believe. If it had come from anyone but Dear Old Doc Death, I" d" ve had the teller of the tale wrapped in the big Band-Aid. But who could doubt a man with that much moss corning out of his earholes?
One of the supermodels was Hypatia. Like Iman or Paulina or Vendela. One name. Maybe before the advent of blusher she was something additional, something Polish or Trinidadian, but to eyes that rested on glossy pages of fashion magazines, she was one name. Hypatia.
Candor: I wanted to kill her. No one of the same s.e.x is supposed to look that good after wallowing in an alley, on her knees, in the rain and garbage, amid blood and failure.
" Care to tell me about it?"
She stared back at me across a vast, windy emptiness. I sighed softly. Just once, lord, I thought, just once give me Edna St. Vincent Millay to interrogate, and not Betty Boop.
" I don" t know what you mean," she said. Gently. I almost believed she didn" t have a clue.
" Well, how about this for a place to begin: you are a pretty famous celebrity, make many hundreds of thousands of dollars just to smile at a camera for a few hours, and you" re wearing a Halston suit I" d price at maybe six-five or seven thousand dollars. And you were on Skid Row, outside the Midnight Mission- where the name Donna Karan has never been spoken- kneeling in a pool of blood spilled by an old, old man, and you" re crying as if you" d lost your one great love."
" I did."
The other two were equally as helpful. Camilla DelFerro was brave, but barely coherent. She was so wacked, she kept mixing her genders, sometimes calling him " her." Angie Rose just kept bawling. They were no help. They just kept claiming they" d loved the old guy, that they couldn" t go on without him, and that if they could be permitted, if it wasn" t an inconvenience, they would all three like to be buried with him. Dead or alive, our option. Wacked; we" re talking whacked here.
And they mentioned, in pa.s.sing, the green light.
Don" t ask.
When I turned in my prelim, the Boss gave me one of his looks. Not the one that suggests you" re about to be recycled, or the one that says it" s all over for you...the one that says if I had a single wish, it would be that you hadn" t put these pages in front of me. He sighed, shoved back his chair, and took off his gla.s.ses, rubbing those two red spots on the wings of his nose where the frames pinched. " No one saw anything else? No one with a grudge, a score to settle, a fight over a bottle of wine, a pedestrian p.i.s.sed off the old guy tried to brace him for loose change?"
I spread my hands. " You" ve got it there, all of it. The women are of no earthly help, They just keep saying they loved him, and that they can" t live without him. In fact, we" ve got two of them on suicide watch. They might just not want to live without him. Boss, I" m at a total loss on this one."
He shoved back from the desk, slid down the chair till his upper weight was resting on his coccyx, and stared at me.
"What?"
He waggled his head, as if to say nothing, nothing at all. He reached out an enormous catcher" s mitt of a hand and tore a little square off his notepad, wadded it, and began to chew it. Never understood that: kids in home-room with spit-wads, office workers with their minds elsewhere, people chewing paper. Never could figure that out.
" So, if it" s nothing, Boss, why d" you keep staring at me like I just fell off the moon or something?"
" When was the last time you got laid, Jacobs?"
I was truly and genuinely shocked. The man was twice, maybe three or four times my age; he walked with a bad limp from having taken an off-duty slug delivered by a kid messing with a 7-Eleven; he was married, with great-grandchildren stacked in egg-crates; and he was Eastern Orthodox Catholic; and he bit his nails. And he chewed paper. I was truly, even genuinely, shocked.
" Hey, don" t we have enough c.r.a.p flying loose in this house without me having to haul your tired old a.s.s up on s.e.xual hare-a.s.sment?"
" You wish." He spat soggy paper into the waste basket. " So? Gimme a date, I" ll settle for a ballpark figure. Round it off to the nearest decade."
I didn" t think this was amusing. " I live the way I like."
" You live like s.h.i.t."
I could feel the heat in my cheeks. " I don" t have to- "
" No; you don" t. But I" ve watched you for a long time, Francine. I knew your step-father, and I knew Andy..."
" Leave Andy out of it. What" s done is done."
" Whatever. Andy" s gone, a long time now he" s been gone, and I don" t see you moving along. You live like an old lady, not even with the cat thing; and one of these days they" ll find your desiccated corpse stinking up the building you live in, and they" ll bust open the door, and there you" ll be, all leathery and oozing parts, in rooms filled with old Sunday newspaper sections, like those two creepy brothers..."
" The Collyer Brothers."
" Yeah. The Collyer Brothers."
" I don" t think that" ll happen."
" Right. And I never thought we" d elect some half-a.s.sed actor for President."
" Clinton wasn" t an actor."
" Tell that to Bob Dole."
It was wearing thin. I wanted out of there. For some reason all this sidebar c.r.a.p had wearied me more than I could say. I felt like s.h.i.t again, the way I" d felt before dinner. " Are you done beating up on me?" He shook his head slowly, wearily.
" Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow we" ll start allover." I thanked him, and I went home. Tomorrow, we" ll start allover. Right at the level of glistening black alleys. I felt like s.h.i.t.
I was dead asleep, dreaming about black birds circling a garbage- filled alley. The phone made that phlegm-ugly electronic sound its designers thought was rea.s.suring to the human spirit, and I grabbed it on the third. " Yeah?" I wasn" t as charming as I might otherwise have been. The voice on the other end was Razzia down at the house. " The three women...them models...?"
" Yeah, what about them?"
" They" re gone."
" So big deal. They were material witnesses, that" s all. We know where to find" em."
" No, you don" t understand. They" re really gone. As in "vanished." Poof! Green light...and gone."
I sat up, turned on the bed lamp. " Green light?"
" Urey had "em in tow, he was takin" "em down the front steps, and there was this green light, and Urey" s standin" there with his d.i.c.k in his mitt." He coughed nervously. " In a manner" a speakin" ."
I was silent.
" So, uh, Lootenant, they" re, uh, like no longer wit" us."
" I got it. They" re gone. Poof."
I hung up on him, and I went back to sleep. Not immediately, but I managed. Why not. There was a big knife with a tag on it, in a brown bag, waiting for me; and some blood simples I already knew; there were three supermodels drunk with love who now had vanished in front of everyone" s eyes; and we still had an old dead man with his head hanging by a thread.
The Boss had no right to talk to me like that.I didn" t collect old newspapers. I had a subscription to Time. And the J. Crew catalogue.
And it was that night, in dreams, that the one real love of my life came to me.
As I lay there, turning and whispering to myself, a woman in her very early forties, tired as h.e.l.l but quite proud of herself, only eleven years on the force and already a Lieutenant of Homicide, virtually unheard-of, I dreamed the dream of true love.
She appeared in a green light. I understood that...it was part of the dream, from the things the b.u.m Richard had said, that the women had said. In a green light, she appeared, and she spoke to me, and she made me understand how beautiful I really was. She a.s.sured me that Angie Rose and Hypatia and Camilla had told her how lovely I was, and how lonely I was, and how scared I was...and we made love.
If there is an end to it all, I have seen it; I have been there, and I can go softly, sweetly. The one true love of my life appeared to me, like a G.o.ddess, and I was fulfilled. The water was cool and clear and I drank deeply.
I realized, as I had not even suspected, that I was tired. I was exhausted from serving time in my own life. And she asked me if I wanted to go away with her, to a place where the winds were cinnamon-scented, where we would revel in each other" s adoration till the last ticking moment of eternity.
I said: take me away.
And she did. We went away from there, from that sweaty bedroom in the three-room apartment, before dawn of the next day when I had to go back to death and gristle and puzzles that could only be solved by apprehending monsters. And we went away, yes, we did.
I am very old now. Soon I will no doubt close my eyes in a sleep even more profound than the one in which I lay when she came to release me from a life that was barely worth living. I have been in this cinnamon- scented place for a very long time. I suppose time is herniated in this venue, otherwise she would not have been able to live as long as she did, nor would she have been able to move forward and backward with such alacrity and ease. Nor would the twisted eugenics that formed her have borne such elegant fruit.
I could have sustained any indignity. The other women, the deterioration of our love, the going-away and the coming back, knowing that she...or he, sometimes...had lived whole lives in other times and other lands. With other women. With other men.
But what I could not bear was knowing the child was not mine. I gave her the best eternity of my life, yet she carried that d.a.m.ned thing inside her with more love than ever she had shown me. As it grew, as it became the inevitable love-object, I withered.
Let her travel with them, whatever love-objects she could satisfy, with whatever was in that dirty paper bag, and let them wail if they choose...but from this dream neither he nor she will ever rise. I am in the green light now, with the machete. It may rain, but I won" t be there to see it.
Not this time.
Man On Spikes What follows is the original text of a piece Harlan did for The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review; the eviscerated version that appeared under the heading " A Slave to the Majors" ; and an insightfully blistering letter to the editor from the Author that tells us more about Harlan than a hundred critical studies.
MAN ON SPIKES by Eliot Asinof Southern Illinois University Press (288 pp. / $14.95 / 27 May 98) Reviewed by HARLAN ELLISON Comparing Golgotha to a pitcher" s mound will seem heretical only to those who have not read MAN ON SPIKES, either in its original presentation in 1953 (when its revealed truths. .h.i.t the American Consciousness like a highway sizzler down the third-base line) or in its newly-released paperback reprint. But Eliot Asinof- author of the legendary EIGHT MEN OUT- the book on the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal-made it agonizingly clear to anyone who thinks Mr. Lincoln freed all the slaves, that from the earliest days of Major League Baseball, till 1965, when a rookie was signed to a farm team, he might as well have spreadeagled himself on the mound, then crossed his legs, and waited for them to drive in the spikes. For a pittance they bought" em, and forever they owned" em.
Dazzling in its cosmic naivete is the American public" s wide-eyed capacity for unquestioningly subscribing to Common Knowledge and urban mythology, belief in which can only be called, with charity, adoration for steaming cow-pats. Not the least of these boneheaded beliefs is the fable that the Commissioner of Baseball has any clout. Yet another is that ballplayers don" t deserve the gigantic sums of money they" re paid. There sits the echt-Homer Simpson, wracked from a hard day" s labors in the steel mill, unable to meet his bills, knowing the HMO will turn down his latest appeal, dining yet again on fillet of Spam, and he" s watching the game while the baby wails, and here" s some six-million-dollar-a- season OH whiffing three with the bases loaded in the bomb-bay half of the ninth. And he uses language his mommy would have used a bar of Fels-Naptha to mitigate, and he rails at the unfairness of the universe that gives the guy with the Casey Syndrome more money than a decent blue-collar wage-slave can earn in a lifetime. Jeez, he says, through clenched teeth, these dumb sumbishes got the world by the shorts!
Echt-Homer has not read MAN ON SPIKES.
Eleven years before major league players had finally had it up to here and, through blood and opprobrium, formed " the first legitimate union in team sports, seventeen years before the first successful player strike, twenty- one years before the union established free agency rights for major league players, and thirty-nine years before the club owners revealed publicly their belief that a baseball commissioner served no useful purpose," Eliot Asinof" s MAN ON SPIKES loudly blew the whistle on Major League indentured servitude. Pulled the covers on how men" s lives were bought and sold and traded, their youth wasted, their talents unused, their hearts broken.
Today, even today, especially today- for your benefit, echt-Homer, you great brainless lump of meanspirited envy- this novel wrenches at the complacency of the myth about America" s Favorite Sport. It is the life of Mike Kutner, a spry and savvy little centerfielder who is spotted during a high school ballgame by a scout for the farm teams that serve as blood conduits for Chicago, up there in what starry-eyed teen sluggers call the Bigs. " Going up" is what it" s all about. Going up to the Big Game.
Mike (who is patterned as homage to Asinof" s college pal, Mickey Rutner, whose one-line stats ironically appear on the same page in many baseball encyclopedia with the Brobdingnagian record of Babe Ruth) gets suckered into signing away his life, to play ball for a Mississippi cla.s.s D farm club, in exchange for two thousand dollars, which his coal miner father will use to payoff the mortgage. It was the 1930s, it was Austin, Kentucky.
Naturally, Mike gets screwed out of the two grand, winding up with a chumpchange two hundred and fifty bucks, because the petty politics involving the washed-up manager and the fading scout and the greedy Chicago club owner do not permit a moment of honesty or human compa.s.sion. And that" s the way it goes, through twenty years of beating out the bunts and crashing into the centerfield wall and riding buses all night long to make a double-header the next day, till Mike Kutner becomes, truly, a man on spikes, a man who could step into the on-deck circle if Jesus needed a replacement up there on Calvary.
And the remarkable thing about this novel, apart from the absolutely eye-opening revelations about what it was like to be a major league bond- slave, is that not once does Asinof tell the story through Mike" s eyes. Each chapter is the POV of The Father, The Manager, The Reporter, The Negro, The Commissioner, The Wife, and all the others whose needs and demands and secret agendas proscribe the paths down which Mike Kutner will eke out the small tragedy that is his life.
From time to time Asinof overflows into bathos- this was, after all, written in the mid-" 50s- but only for a moment, and then he" s back with lean, smooth writing that captures a time and a way of life that we gullible aficionados would never have believed obtained. And every" once in a while in this splendid popular cla.s.sic, we get something so true, and so jarring, that we perceive Asinof" s insight and craft have obscured the sheer goodness of the writing. Here, listen to this, for example: This is a rumination by The Old Ballplayer, on a h.e.l.lishly hot day, when the crowd is ragging on him: (p. 68) For all the years he had played professional baseball, for as far back as he could remember he hated the loud ones in the crowds who had watched him those thousands of innings. He hated them for their fickleness, their blaring derision, their hooting and squawking, the s.a.d.i.s.tic way they kicked at the guy who was down: He hated the phony effort at what they called sportsmanship, the brief moment of applause that supposedly justified the hours of razzing they had really come to revel in. It was as if the ballplayers were not playing a game they could watch and enjoy, but were caricatures representing objects of love and hate, were either heroes or villains.
Like the glovework of a Cal Ripkin, Jr., that looks easy till you try it and fall on your can, the writing of Eliot Asinof is looking so easy, you don" t realize he has conveyed an entire milieu in the life-story of a very ordinary man with one special talent and an all-consuming love for a sport, until you discover that you" re having trouble reading the page because of the mist in your eyes and the tension in your chest.
If all the echt-Homers I" ve wanted to pummel for their ignorant a.s.saults on ballplayers getting decent wages could read (human speech is not their natural tongue), I would force-feed them this modem cla.s.sic. As a beer chaser.
HARLAN ELLISON is the author or editor of 74 books. His latest is SLIPPAGE (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). He was in the cheap seats at Cleveland" s Lakefront Stadium on the night when the legendary Leroy " Satchel" Paige first pitched in the Majors.
A Slave to the Majors Eliot Asinof" s 1955 baseball novel blew the whistle on players" indentured servitude MAN ON SPIKES.
By Eliot Asinof Southern Illinois University Press; 276 pages; $14.95 Reviewed by Harlan Ellison Comparing Golgotha to a pitcher" s mound will seem heretical only to those who have not read " Man on Spikes:" either in its original presentation in 1955 (when its truths. .h.i.t the American consciousness like a sizzler down the third-base line) or in its newly released paperback reprint.
In it Eliot Asinof, author of the legendary " Eight Men Out" - the book on the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal- makes it agonizingly clear to anyone who thinks Mr. Lincoln freed all the slaves that, from the earliest days of major league baseball till 196), a rookie signed to a farm team might as well have spread-eagled himself on the mound, crossed his legs and waited for them to drive in the spikes. For a pittance they bought "em, and forever they owned "em.
Asinof" s " Man on Spikes" loudly blew the whistle on major league indentured servitude- how men" s lives were bought and sold and traded, their youths wasted, their talents unused, their hearts broken. Today, even today, especially today, this novel wrenches at the complacency of the myth about America" s favorite sport. It tells the life of Mike Kutner, a spry and savvy little center-fielder who is spotted during a high school ball game by a scout for the farm teams that serve as blood conduits for Chicago, up there in what starry-eyed teen sluggers call " the Bigs."
Mike (patterned after Asinof" s college pal Mickey Rutner, whose one-line stats ironically appear on the same page in many baseball encyclopedias with the Brobdingnagian records of Babe Ruth) gets suckered into signing away his life to play ball for a Cla.s.s D farm club in Mississippi. For this he is promised $2,000, which his coal miner father wants to payoff the mortgage.
Naturally Mike gets screwed out of the two grand, winding up with a chump-change 250 bucks because the petty politics involving the washed-up manager and the fading scout and the greedy Chicago club owner do not permit a moment of honesty or human compa.s.sion. And that" s the way it goes, through 20 years of beating out the bunts and crashing into the center-field wall and riding buses all night long to make a double-header the next day, till Mike Kutner becomes, truly, a man on spikes, a man who could step into the on-deck circle if Jesus needed a replacement up there on Calvary.
And the remarkable thing about this novel, apart from the absolutely eye-opening revelations about what it was like to be a major league bond-slave, is that not once does Asinof tell the story through Mike" s eyes. Each chapter brings us a point of view from "The Father:" "The Manager," "The Reporter:" "The Commissioner," "The Wife" and all the others whose needs and demands and secret agendas proscribe the paths down which Mike Kutner will eke out the small tragedy that is his life.
Men"s lives were bought and sold and traded, their youths wasted, theirhearts broken. Even today this novel wrenches at the complacency of the mythabout America"s favorite sport.
From time to time Asinof overflows into bathos- this was, after all, written in the mid-" 50s- but only for a moment. Then he" s back with lean, smooth writing that captures a time and a way of life that we gullible aficionados would never have believed prevailed. And every once in a while we get something so true, and so jarring, that Asinof" s insight threatens to obscure the sheer goodness of the writing. Here, listen to this rumination by The Old Ballplayer on a h.e.l.lishly hot day when the crowd is ragging on him: " For all the years he had played profession- al baseball, for as far back as he could remember, he hated the loud ones in the crowds who had watched him those thousands of innings. He hated them for their fickleness, their blaring derision, their hooting and squawking, the s.a.d.i.s.tic way they kicked at the guy who was down. He hated the phony effort at what they called sportsmanship, the brief moment of applause that supposedly justified the hours of razzing they had really come to revel in."
Like the glove work of Cal Ripken Jr., which looks easy till you try it and fall on your can, the writing of Eliot Asinof looks so easy that you don" t realize he has conveyed an entire milieu in the life story of a very ordinary man with one special talent and an all-consuming love for his sport. Then you discover that you" re having trouble reading the page because of the mist in your eyes and the tension in your chest. 8 The author or editor of 74 books, most recently " Slippage" (Houghton Mifflin), Harlan Ellison was in the cheap seals at Cleveland" s Lakefront Stadium on the night the legendary Leroy " Satchel" Paige first pitched in the majors.
29 June 98
Mr. David KipenEditor, Book Review SectionThe San Francisco Chronicle 901 MissionSan Francisco, California94105 Sir:
I don"t mind if you think I"m a hayseed a.s.shole; but I do resent itwhen you talk to me as if I were a hayseed a.s.shole. Your telephonecall is insulting. Do not presume to find for yourself a rat-hole ofrationalization through which you can scuttle. You broke your promise.Simply that, nothing less. We had a contract between us; and the termswere simple and clear: For my part-since you wanted the benefits (however real or imagined,great or small) of my name in your pages-I would undertake to writeyou book reviews of t.i.tles on which we both agreed. Since you knew Ireceive, as a matter of course, fees far in excess of the paltry andlaughable amounts the Chronicle pays to the dubs and hacks who grindout the back-of-the book reviews, I told you I"d write it on spec--which I do for no one-and I would leave it to your good offices to payme "favored nations" top of the fees. I would write the first onewithout any commitment on your, or the Chronicle"s, part. There wasonly one condition.
ONE condition.