
Everyone was antsy, sitting on the front porch, the kids picking at the chipped paint with the toes of their sneakers. Casey glanced sharply at his wife, and she got the message, told the kids to walk the dog one more time, which they did.
They sat on the porch and waited, Casey cradling his baseball glove. The limo was scheduled to arrive at six. Dolan strolled past the row of attached houses as if by chance. He greeted them with a wave and invited himself up the stairs as if anyone wanted to talk to him.
“Ready for the big night?” He had a big grin on his face.
“Who are you?” Casey asked him. “Ed Norton?”
“Only if you’re Ralph Kramden,” Dolan said. Then he walked away, but not before remarking, “Good luck, misanthrope.”
They had gone to high school together and had remained in the neighborhood together, unlike most everyone else.
The Bronx.
Bedford Park.
Philip Neri parish.
Dolan lived around the corner in one of the Victorians on the tree-lined avenue. He knew Casey’s real name was Ralph.
Ralph Casey.
Everyone except his mother called Ralph Casey “Casey,” everyone, even his wife.
Casey had made it clear to her that he didn’t want anyone to know about tonight. “Let them find out for themselves,” he told Alice.
(Yes, Ralph and Alice.
Har har hardy har har.
Now shut up!
Just kidding.
Jackie Gleason.
The Honeymooners.
Casey used to love it when he was young.
Ralph and Alice.
Norton and Trixie.
The simplicity.
The hopes.
The hopes dashed every single time.
Dreams deferred.
Loveable losers.
Every single night.
It was all so very funny, even if so very sad.)
“Everyone will be watching anyway,” Casey told Alice. “There’s no need to spread it around.”
But Dolan had found out.
Through his wife Eileen.
Through Alice.
Casey went over to the Dolan’s house himself.
“Keep a lid on it, Ollie,” he told him. No one called Dolan “Ollie.”
Except Ralph.
I mean Casey.
Dolan was obliging, said he understood, but Casey wondered how many people Dolan had already told.
Dolan often stepped into the bars after he got off the bus on his way home from work.
He worked downtown.
Manhattan.
Financial district.
World Trade Center.
A trader on the floor.
He took the express bus to work.
Dolan hated it, the tension, the anxiety, the puking in the stalls during breaks, the sweat, the anger, the constant competition.
But not the money. He did not hate the money. The money was great. He loved the money.
Who wouldn’t?
Dolan was always giving Casey financial advice.
“You should invest.”
“Invest what?”
“Whatever you’ve got.”
“I’ve got nothing.”
Casey was a high-school teacher.
English.
Language Arts.
Literature.
Public high school.
JFK.
Right in the Bronx.
Across town in Kingsbridge.
Casey took the local bus to work although sometimes he walked home if he was in a sudden mood and the air was sweet from the cookie factory on Broadway.
Dolan’s advice was always the same.
“Think about your family,” he said.
“Savings accounts don’t cut it,” he said.
“At least get some mutual funds,” he said.
“Just think about your family,” he said, “without you.”
Casey listened, but never acted.
Stock market.
Mutual funds.
Life insurance.
Financial security.
There had been tens of billions of human beings in the history of the world.
Billions and billions all dead and gone.
99.99 percent of those billions had never even heard of the stock market, mutual funds, life insurance.
Financial security?
Most of the humans from history were dead by the time they were adults.
If they were child-bearing women, they were dead before that.
If they were children, before that.
Security.
Security?
Ha!
Casey’s father had been a high-school teacher just like Casey.
Or Casey just like him.
But Catholic school.
Diocesan.
Cardinal Hayes.
Down at the bottom of the Grand Concourse, below Yankee Stadium.
A religion teacher.
Before that, he had spent two years in the seminary.
Till he met Casey’s mom while fulfilling his summer parish duties at Peter & Paul.
He died at sixty-one.
A prime number.
For a prime man.
Still in his prime when he died.
Still teaching.
Still...doing what men do.
Puttering, tinkering, eating, drinking, shaving, sleeping, praying....
Walking home from the D train one day, having helped a man he knew from the neighborhood, one of his pals from the old-man bars, lug an old couch up the old stairs of an old walk-up apartment, he died.
Heart attack.
Just like Uncle Ralph.
Little Ralph Casey had heard the story many times. Uncle Ralph, Casey’s namesake, his father’s favorite uncle, the youngest, the bachelor, the war veteran, WW II, the fireman, after helping Casey’s father carry a couch up the staircase to his new apartment, sat down, and died, right before his eyes. Uncle Ralph was only 38.
You would have thought Casey’s dad would have known better not to carry any couches up any staircases.
Ever.
It was as if it were fated.
Casey’s mother was left penniless.
She moved in with her Ralph and Alice and the kids. It was only a few blocks from the apartment where she had lived with her husband for thirty-five years. She was now living in the dining room, which they had turned into a bedroom. She was in there at this very moment in the story, watching TV, her shows.
The Six O’clock News.
Jeopardy.
Wheel of Fortune.
As a nightcap, The Honeymooners.
She would watch the World Series game tonight, too, while she was falling asleep.
His dear old mother, who was bipolar, manic depressive, lithium in the 1970s and 80s, then Depakote because the lithium had ruined her kidneys. Now dialysis was her primary activity in life, three times a week, 8 am shift. Casey would kiss her goodbye in the morning before she went off to dialysis and he went off to work.
“Think about your family,” Dolan said.
Casey did think about his family, but not Dolan’s way.
Casey’s old man taught him how to think about a family, and about everything else. When he was a kid and his mom would have one of her episodes, as they called them, and the police cars would show up and take her away, Casey’s dad was always present to her. He’d visit her every day at Bronx State or Rockland State or if they were lucky and there was an open bed, St. Vincent’s in Westchester, and after the weeks or months it took until the doctors at the hospital said her blood levels were steady again, he would bring her home again. Then they would go back to being a regular family again.
As a man, Casey had come to understand that his father could have done otherwise.
Casey’s old man had never given him advice.
Casey’s old man had lived a life, and Casey thought it was a life worth imitating.
As for Dolan, he would die to be in Casey’s current predicament, not the predicament of Casey’s family. Dolan had a family of his own in the big Victorian on the avenue without any mothers who were transported three times a week via ambulette service or whose pills needed to be watched and counted if you wanted to keep her out of her high heels and Durty Nelly’s or the Jolly Tinker.
Not that predicament, I mean the predicament we’re getting into, reader, the one not yet explained.
It amazed Casey how this predicament had come to pass.
It was absurd really.
Ridiculous really.
Silly really.
It was so absurd, it seemed wired, like a contraption, wired together in such a way that it worked, like fate.
Casey began to daydream.
He could maybe start a school, the school he had always dreamed of starting, maybe one
of those new charter schools opening everywhere across the country, the ones Giuliani was always talking about.
South Bronx.
Immigrant kids.
Project kids.
Bronx kids.
His school.
His methods.
His plans.
It was alluring.
Like temptation.
Because what were the chances he would succeed? With the predicament, that is.
Dolan, on the other hand, saw it as a chance, an opportunity, a lucky break, the predicament, that is.
“Who’s not tempted by money?” Dolan asked. “What matters is what you do with it.”
“A school in the South Bronx?” Dolan asked.
“How’s that temptation?” Dolan asked.
“How’s that not worth the temptation?” Dolan asked.
Serendipity.
Ever hear of that, Ollie?
You can’t buy that, Ollie.
All those years in the classroom, Casey liked to let things happen.
He didn’t stick to the lesson plans.
Didn’t teach to the lesson plans.
Didn’t trust in the lesson plans.
He taught for the surprise.
Life was surprise.
Not a contraption.
Life was unexpected.
Phenomena.
Appear.
Out of thin air.
But the predicament had come out of thin air. It was weird, and it was wired, too, in a weird way. It was very well wired in its own weird way.
Which made it a predicament.
Ralph was caught between wired and weird.
The limousine pulled up to the house at six o’clock promptly, black and stretched as long as several cars, well-polished, the chauffeur well-dressed. Casey and Alice and the kids all came down the steps, down the steps they all came, the kids and Alice and Casey. Then they were transported to Yankee Stadium.
Why?
Casey had been chosen randomly from among millions of entries for the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge©.
Absurd, right?
Ridiculous, right?
Silly, right?
Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
Even in fiction.
(Whoops.
Sorry, but this all seems so preposterous.
But it’s not.
It’s serious.
No kidding.)
When Casey first read the letter, he thought it was a joke.
(This was 1996.)
Who wouldn’t?
He had never heard of the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge© and never would have filled out a form to participate in the first place.
He showed the letter to Alice. She knew nothing about it.
They called the number in the letterhead.
It was legit.
The entry forms had been attached to the All-Star Game ballots (these were the days when you filled out your ballots by hand, between innings, punching holes in the ballot card with a car key or pencil, then placing them in the cardboard ballot boxes stationed at the exits of the stadium).
Casey and Alice put two and two together. It wasn’t that hard.
They had season tickets, a partial season plan anyway, for weekend afternoon home games, mostly Sundays, but some Saturdays, too. The whole family would go, the four of them, while Casey’s mother stayed home and waited for them to get home. Or if Alice begged off, a friend like Dolan would come.
Casey’s kids, his son and his daughter, his boy and his girl, would ask for a little sharpened scorecard pencil or their keys, and they would punch out their selections in dozens of All Star ballots during the games. Casey and Alice paid little attention. They’d lend them their keys or hand them some sharpened pencils, which Casey kept in a bag with his scorebook, and watch the game, glancing now and then to see that the kids still had them, the keys, hadn’t dropped them, or bent them, or chucked them off the grandstand, or poked each other’s eyes out with the pencils.
Their seats were upstairs in the grandstand, Section 4, last row, almost directly, but not quite, behind home plate. Some people, like Dolan, called them nosebleed seats, mocked their distance from the field, mocked their distance from the field boxes, mocked their distance from the fans who had the money not to sit upstairs in the nosebleed seats.
Section 4 in the grandstand was where Ralph had always sat with his dad when he was growing up, a Bronx boy, born and raised. One time, Ralph’s birthday, June 24th, 1973, it was Ball Day, the Yankees in a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers, the field so green, the sky so blue, the stands so thick with fans, a block of granite building standing outside the stadium, the gigantic monument above the outfield wall (the Bronx County Courthouse, but to the boy Ralph, simply a monument, like the ones in center field next to the flag pole in center field, the monuments to Ruth, Gehrig, Miller Huggins, but this one, the building, a monument in his mind to that birthday in June always and ever after). The Yankees swept both games that day, and the rag-tag crowd in the blue wooden grandstand seats—dads and moms and kids, ushers in red caps and jackets, old men smoking cigars—danced around, and up and down, and all along the grandstand aisles and stairs, raucous with joy. Afterwards, Ralph and his dad exited through the gate behind third base and strolled across the outfield grass, past the monuments in center field, through the bullpen and then out onto 161st Street, but not before he glanced back up at the grandstand, his new white ball stamped with the Yankees logo sticky in his palm. From his innocent boyhood perspective, it was the greatest day of his life.
As for the predicament, late spring, early summer, 1996, Michael and Angela (okay, there you go, the names of his kids, which the Casey’s normally didn’t reveal to strangers) had used little scorecard pencils, they both now confessed, to fill out the reverse side of who knows how many All Star ballots, the side with the entry form for the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge©, all with Ralph Casey and Alice Casey because the instructions said participants had to be Over 18.
And then, believe it or not, because it was not believable, one of those cards with Ralph Casey’s name on it had been selected somehow by -----Hot Dogs©.
And that year, the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge© was to take place in the American League ballpark.
And that year, the American League’s New York Yankees, the Bronx’s New York Yankees, the Casey’s New York Yankees, advanced to the World Series for the first time since Casey had been a teenager.
The Challenge was a gimmick, a marketing ploy intended to plant -----Hot Dogs© into the psyches of America, as if America had never heard of -----Hot Dogs©, so that if America needed to make a choice sometime in the near future between -----Hot Dogs© and -----Hot Dogs©, America would choose the World Series Challenge© hot dogs. The consumption of America’s hot dogs lay in the balance.
When they first met with him, the representatives from -----Hot Dogs© told Casey that the World Series Challenge© was the opportunity of a lifetime, as if Casey’s life itself was not the opportunity of a lifetime, as if the only opportunity worth anything was the chance to win one million dollars.
What?
One million dollars?
Yes, one million dollars.
How?
Throw a strike.
Stand on the mound, sixty feet six inches away, and throw one pitch over home plate for a perfect strike. That’s it.
That’s it?
That’s it.
That was the predicament.
The limousine turned off the Grand Concourse onto 161st Street. Casey saw Yankee Stadium looming at the bottom of the hill, the stadium where he had spent so much time as a boy with his father. They ate peanut-butter sandwiches, packed by his mother, and as time went on, his dad taught him to keep score in a scorebook as if the outcome of each game depended on their attention to detail, the secret code of scorekeeping, the lines and boxes, the numbers and letters, the dots, marks, and dashes.
Still, the game on the field would inevitably surprise them. Weird would upset their code. A stolen base, a stolen hit, a wild throw, a wild pitch, a dribbler, a blooper, a pick-off, a ground-rule double, a suicide squeeze, and the code could not adequately express what had actually just happened on the field. At such times, Ralph and his dad would give up, ditch the code, and scribble something like the comments he found in his dad’s old scorebooks after his dad passed away: “Stick Michael. Hidden ball trick! Magic!” or “Chicken Stanley. Home run! Holy hat!” or “El Tiante flings glove into crowd. Ball and all! Loco!”
But like his dad before him, Casey was not just a scorekeeper. Like his dad before him, Casey had played high-school baseball. His position was shortstop, but he also pitched in relief. As an adult, he kept his arm in shape coaching the kids’ Little League teams, pitching batting practice for hours on end. He knew he could throw a baseball right down the pipe for a strike. He had done it so many times before.
After they confirmed the validity of the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge©, Casey began spending afternoons tossing baseballs against the wall behind DeWitt Clinton High School, his alma mater, just as he did years before. He challenged himself, staying until he tossed fifty strikes in a row, just as he did as a teenager, starting all over again if he missed the box on the wall even once.
And it wasn’t all that hard. He locked in, and it would happen, fifty in a row. Speed didn’t matter, just accuracy, control, like Catfish Hunter, the first million-dollar pitcher.
“Catfish is a control pitcher,” his dad used to say. “He doesn’t have to throw hard, just accurately, with precision.”
There was a sixth sense to throwing a baseball with precision. You focused on a target. You hit it. It was a mystery, a kind of wizardry.
Weird.
Catfish Hunter was a wizard.
But it took practice to master the weirdness.
Control.
Catfish Hunter controlled the weirdness, a perfect game in 1968, five World Series championships, the Hall of Fame.
(All before Catfish Hunter lost control, completely, and died at the age of 53, of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, of Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, the disease where you lose control, of everything, your muscles, your movements, your desires. Catfish Hunter, the control pitcher, lost all control, just like Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse, the Pride of the Yankees.
Weird?
Too weird.)
And now it was Casey’s chance to control the baseball.
One million dollars.
The dream.
The school.
And whatever else he and Alice desired.
Alice had desires that a New York City public high-school salary did not always meet.
He knew he could do it.
He could do it for Alice, he could do it for the kids, he could do it for the family, whatever that meant, because he was not really convinced anything needed to be done that he was not already doing—for them or for anyone else.
Still, it was one million dollars.
But the crowd, fifty-five thousand strong, could alter his doing it.
Casey knew this, too.
He remembered a game at DeWitt Clinton, junior varsity, his parents and grandmother had come to see him play, just three people among a few dozen other family members and friends, but those three people had come just for him.
The first groundball to shortstop passed under his glove and straight through his legs.
Butterflies.
The butterflies would be the challenge, not the sixty feet six inches from the mound to home plate.
The challenge wasn’t throwing the strike. -----Hot Dogs© understood that. The challenge was controlling the fact that so many people were watching, watching you.
In Casey’s mind, the difference between professional athletes and everyone else was their control.
Control the ball.
Control the crowd.
Control the fear.
Control.
Or not.
-----Hot Dogs© trusted their money was safe.
Inside the Stadium, Casey and Alice and Michael and Angela stepped onto the field. Players were stretching out and tossing baseballs around, warming up. The New York Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. Photographers were snapping cameras. The blue seats of the stadium were more than mottled with spectators, vibrant swathes of faces and coats and hats. The murmuring of the crowd was more an expanding hum. The atmosphere affected Alice and Michael and Angela. Casey could see it. No more talking, no more joking, no more being themselves, they had lost control of being themselves. They were awestruck.
The -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge© would take place just before the national anthem.
Casey stepped onto the mound.
Alone.
He stared up at the gigantic blue swerve of the grandstand and the bank of lights, and he felt dizzy. He felt his fear. All those trips to Yankee Stadium, hundreds, but never had Casey stood on the Stadium’s mound where Catfish once stood, the champion of control. The closest he had ever come was a game in high school, a non-league game against All Hallows, a Catholic school near the Stadium. They played on an eroded ballfield in Macombs Dam Park, a place they called Pigeon Field, right next to Yankee Stadium, so close to the stadium that on early Saturday mornings when JV games started, the grandstand cast its shadow straight across the entire field.
This was not a JV game. Hallows had a pitcher they claimed was the best in the borough. They may have been right. He was smothering DeWitt Clinton. Late in the game, the coach moved Casey from shortstop to pitcher, the mound chewed into divots from the Hallows kid’s cleats.
Casey held his own, kept the score at 3-0, until DeWitt Clinton’s last at bat.
The inning began with two quick outs. Strikeouts. Then Casey came up.
The Hallows kid threw a slider that looked as if it was coming straight at Casey, but at the last second, snapped away and across the plate. Not since Little League had Casey bailed from the batter’s box. He had never seen such a slider.
Quickly, it was an 0-2 count. All Hallows was one strike away from the win. The DeWitt Clinton bats and balls and batting helmets were already bagged up, the players already lined up in the dugout, ready to shake hands with All Hallows. The sun sank beyond the Harlem River into Manhattan. The Hallows kid stamped his heel into the mound.
An idea formed in Casey’s mind.
Suddenly.
The Hallows kid kicked and hurled the baseball.
And Casey bunted.
You do not bunt in that situation, you just don’t, for all kinds of reasons.
But Casey did.
The ball dribbled towards third base.
Casey dashed to first.
Safe.
The Hallows kid glared at Casey, shaking his head with disdain. Then he homed in on the next batter.
A quick strike.
Another sudden idea.
The Hallows kid threw his next pitch.
And Casey stole second base.
You do not steal second in that situation, you just don’t.
The Hallows kid did not even turn around to look at Casey behind him, standing on second base, but threw the next pitch as if Casey did not exist.
So Casey stole third.
Casey began clapping his hands together, sporadically, while the Hallows kid tried to concentrate.
The Hallows kid missed the plate four times in a row, four straight balls, and the batter walked to first.
First and third.
The Hallows kid was spooked.
Casey had spooked him.
DeWitt Clinton knew it.
All Hallows knew it.
The DeWitt Clinton bags were untied, turned upside down, and the bats and helmets were shaken out, rattling against each other as they fell to the dirt in a clamor.
DeWitt Clinton began clapping their hands, and their bats soon finished off what Casey had started.
Afterwards, the coach put his arm around Casey. “You’re a pisser,” he said. He was smiling, perhaps more than Casey had ever seen him smile. “You’ve got a mind all your own, kid.”
But that was Pigeon Field.
Casey now stood on the Yankee Stadium mound and was given three balls to warm up, each stamped with the World Series logo, a globe of the world marked with the stitches of a baseball. Three practice pitches, that was all. The TV crew surrounded him. The light on the camera was off. When it turned red, he was told, he would be live on the air, and it would be time for him to throw his one single pitch.
Good luck.
Casey threw three warm-up strikes.
He was amazed—and not.
A player walked over to him. Of course, Casey recognized him; any fan would recognize him.
“Go for it, bro,” the player said. Then he winked and added, “The Mighty Casey.”
Casey was surprised he knew his name and surprised at the joke about the poem. Someone from -----Hot Dogs© must have told him Casey’s name. Still, it excited Casey to be on joking terms with the old pro.
Game time approached. The crowd was beginning to thrum. A big target with the logo of the -----Hot Dogs©-World Series Challenge© was set behind home plate. It was the same as the World Series logo, but the globe of the world was formed by a circle of hot dogs. Casey shifted the image into his mind, pressed it into his consciousness, digested it, made it his own.
Wizardry.
He turned and waved to Alice and Michael and Angela, who stood behind him, still quiet,
still not themselves, but still present, and that was enough.
Casey felt good, under control. He felt as he often did in the classroom, when he was on, when the wit was there, his and theirs, the lesson plans gone, dismissed, the ideas rising up from the magnetic energy between them, teacher and students, the energy pulling them forward like the moon does the tide. The crowd was not frightening him in the way he had feared.
It was the opposite.
It reminded him, too, of his wedding day, the vows before the family members and friends assembled in the church, the tide of the moment pulling him forward into his life with Alice.
Casey focused on the round circle of hot dogs.
Absurd, he thought.
Ridiculous, he thought.
Silly, he thought.
Aiming for hot dogs.
He thought of Ralph Kramden on the silly game-show episode, the $99000 Dollar Answer, Ralph Kramden so sure of himself, cocky, as only Jackie Gleason could make him be cocky. Alice says she’d be happy with $600, but Ralph says he is going to win the $99000. He is sure of it. The category is popular music. He rents a piano and has Norton play hundreds and hundreds of songs till the wee hours of the morning for days on end. Then the first question from the host on the night of the show comes: “Who is the composer of ‘Swanee River’?” Ralph Kramden is dumbfounded. He has no clue. Jackie Gleason audibilizes his confusion: Humma na humma na humma na. The live studio audience watching in 1956 bursts out laughing. Ralph and his mom and dad watching at home, no matter what the year, burst out laughing. The humor is timeless. The host says to someone offstage, “Can we have a few bars of ‘Swanee River’?” It’s the song Norton has played over and over again in the episode, his warm-up song. At one point, Ralph loses his patience after hearing the warm-up song one too many times, and Norton pleads with Ralph, “A pitcher warms up before he pitches a ballgame. I gotta warm up that way before I play the piano.” But Ralph never asks Norton the name of his silly song, and when he can’t answer the host’s very first question, about Norton’s very own warm-up song, he is forced off the stage, crestfallen, not having answered a single question correctly.
To the boy Ralph, our Ralph, the first time he saw that episode, the irony was more painful than funny. He really thought Ralph Kramden was going to win. He had been fully captivated by the prospect. His disappointment that first time was real, but with time, as he saw that episode and all the other episodes again and again, his understanding no longer innocent, it had become simply funny, Ralph Kramden hoping for the impossible, the same as every other episode, Ralph Kramden being Ralph Kramden, his failures unfailingly funny.
Now Ralph, our Ralph, stands on the mound, calm within himself. He aligns the round target behind home plate with the image in his mind. Then he squeezes it into his fingertips. He is ready.
He is wired.
He recites a brief silent prayer.
The new white ball is sticky in his palm, so he scoops some dirt from the mound and rubs it into the leather cover.
His eyes are drawn to the grandstand, up into section 4, the nosebleed seats, the last row still empty, his row of seats, tugging him, pulling him, backwards and forwards from the past.
He knows this is a moment he will never forget.
A question arises in his mind, suddenly, out of nowhere, out of somewhere: Could he hit the last row on the fly?
Ralph recognizes the question.
He once pondered it about Catfish Hunter.
The light on the camera turns red.
Cradling his glove, he rocks himself into his wind-up and hurls the ball.
Into the life that is his.
Paul Stapleton’s fiction has appeared in Aethlon, Ruminate, storySouth, and elsewhere, and he won a Pushcart Prize (XXXVII) for his story “The Fall of Punicea,” which was nominated by the editors of J Journal. He currently teaches English in a public HBCU in North Carolina.
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