Cubbiephrenia

By BB Sheehan

CUBBIEPHRENIA, is about a boy’s journey from the baseball sandlots on the cliffs of San Pedro to the vine covered park of Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Mickey O’Really fears his life is just a fantasy camp made up of stuff that will never be real. His bleacher bum uncle, St. Sligo, is his wizard/mentor on the superstition addled path that leads to the big leagues. Teacher-turned-lunatic Mr. Shane stalks Mickey and aims to put an end to his hardball dreams. In his quest to win the World Series Mickey finds out that you can be hurt the most by those that are supposed to help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BB Sheehan
• Release date: Aug 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465981950

Book preview

CHAPTER 2

Mr. Shane is crazy. No one goofs off in his English class because it isn’t worth the trouble. He looks like he spends most of his time shopping for automatic weapons. There is a rumor that he killed a kid when he taught at Dada Middle School down the hill.

Another rumor is that Mr. Shane is writing a book about life as a teacher at Dada High School. You’d think he’d tell a story about something interesting, but I guess you do stuff like that when you’re crazy. He’s always trying to get into our business, stealing notes (confiscating!) and eavesdropping on all the juicy gossip. We fight back by dropping a bunch of pervy notes on the floor like, See Mr. Shane naked at www.mrshaneisaperv.com. He jots down notes all class. Something sad about the man, his master plan is an also ran.

What kind of story can he tell anyway that hasn’t been told before? He wants us to understand Shakespeare then he says all the characters are crazy and it is all sound and fury in a tale told by an idiot.

To quote Shakespeare, In, out quickie candle. Life’s a brief virgin, then you’re screwed. Jasmine Pepper told me that and I’ve got to believe that she knows what she is talking about. She said she read all of Shakespeare when she was recovering from a car accident at the age of thirteen. She seems to know things about people that they don’t know about themselves. She says I’m smart for a jock. She likes baseball, but she’d never sleep with a ballplayer, since it would be such a cliché. I haven’t been around long enough to know what a cliché is, you have to see everything two or three times at least, but she has had a long time to watch and see things when she was getting well. I have to watch Jasmine Pepper and make sure her sense of humor doesn’t punk me in the wrong places.

So one day we steal Mr. Shane’s journal. We stage a fight in the hallway and Shane Man runs to the rescue and comes back to find his notebook gone.

Mr. Shane doesn’t know at first that his writings are gone, but he knows something has happened in the room. We’re quiet so long a fossil could form in the air. He walks around the room and eyeballs each and every student carefully. He doesn’t determine anything the first time around, and then he repeats his behavior again so everyone notices. Most people ignore Mr. S. and he acts like that is a good thing, but now he is studying everyone and even the students who couldn’t pick him out of a police line-up are looking at el maestro loco. You know something don’t you kid, he says. His eyes accuse me. If you think you can get a baseball scholarship without my recommendation you are wrong. I know a thing or two about the old ballgame. If it is about something old he knows about it. He doesn’t know where his notebook is and I’m the last person that is going to set him straight.

Huh, I manage with my best dumb jock reply.

I’m thinking at this point that there will be no more Mr. Shane to deal with once I graduate.

CHAPTER 2

In my other life I play baseball and play chauffeur for my drunken uncle St. Sligo O’Shaunessy when he’s had too much too drink which is too much of the time. I’m not really sure if he is on Mom or Dad’s side of the family since neither of them wants to climb into the family tree with Uncle. He’s from Chicago where he was a Catholic and a Cub fan. He always says that like it means something, I was a Catholic and a Cub fan. When he says that, he could be on either side, in keeping with the family tradition of not making sense when we talk.

I asked him once why he left Chicago and the Cubs and moved here. Drunk as he was, without bothering to open his eyes he said, I was arrested for extrapolating in public. I’m not sure what you’re doing when you are extrapolating, but I can assure I’ve never done it in public or in my room. He doesn’t smell, but he looks like he has a heavy stink cloud above his head. I think he is a Cub fan more than a Catholic. He always talks about the Cubs and never goes to church. I’m sure the reason my parents have pawned him off on me is a lesson, one of the endless, pointless lessons that they as parental units feel they must give to me before the Great Governmental Department of Parental Impeachment files charges against them, in public, with full media scrutiny. You don’t want to end up like poor old Uncle Saint Sligo. Go to church.

Some scouts have noticed that I always seem to be where the ball is hit when it is hit in my direction and therefore catchable. Anybody could do it if they watched enough and they knew what to look for when the bat connects with the pitch.

In the first inning you test out the pitcher. Or the pitcher tests you. The sooner your team passes this test the better. If you’re thinking of scoring with your girlfriend at this point you should quit the game. Maybe call into the radio station, This one goes out to Lou and Rachel. You know I’d give the whole thing up for you

I don’t want to talk about just baseball. The story is all mixed up in time, so I’ll try to give the time and the dates for those of you keeping score at home. St. Sligo is a baseball expert. The world is full of them. He talks about players nobody else talks about like Ed Bouchee who played first base for the Cubs before being traded to the Mets in the early sixties. He knows this because he didn’t work a lot and spent a lot of his time at Wrigley or bars near Wrigley watching the Cubs on WGN and listening to a drunken announcer named Jack Brickhouse who did the drunken play-by-play before Harry Carey took over the job.

The story Saint tells over and over, so many times that I can complete the sentences is about opening day in 1969. I thought the Cubs won the World Series that day and so did everyone else. Backup catcher Gene Oliver said that summer that he would jump off the John Hancock Building if the Cubs didn’t win the pennant. I waited a couple of months after the season ended, but he never jumped.

CHAPTER 3

The city high school baseball tournament is going on this week. Our team, the Breakers, made the final sixteen mostly because we have Lloyd Fleming pitching for our team. He’s practically married to a rich girl from a private school on the other side of the peninsula. She heard he’s going to be a star and sign a multimillion dollar contract when he decides to go pro. He doesn’t talk to us much anymore. Too big league.

Most of the guys I hang with play on my summer league team, The Catalina Kids and we get girls that are less than rich although I’ve never met one who is really poor. Jenna follows our crowd and is maybe too Catholic for me in a good way in that even though she may want it I’d still feel like a deviant trying to get it, not that I want her to be a sex pig or a let’s make a deal girl like my last girl friend, but she does have sacred issues that I can see myself violating.

I’m not going to compare baseball to making it with a girl. You know that story before you tell it; games have been played and girls have been made; first base, second base, rounding third and heading for home and he scores standing up! Mr. Shane doesn’t want anyone to use exclamation points when they write, since he sees it as the same as shouting and if we wrote correctly we wouldn’t have to shout. Mr. Shane yells at us all the time, so take this you crazy Nazi!!!! Mr. Shane is getting crazier everyday. Sometimes in class he’ll just write in his journal and ignore everyone like we were in some alternate universe and he couldn’t contact us on any wavelength. So sit down and shut up Mr. Shane you stupid monkey punker!!!!

St. Sligo fancies himself to be a writer also. I’m sure somewhere buried in a bureau of dirty socks is a Cubs chronicle; pages of beer-soaked-ink staining the virgin pages of the vanilla, once blank, now soiled, empty reams of parchment. That’s how I’d write if I was trying to impress Jasmine Pepper, but I wouldn’t write because I couldn’t write well enough to impress her in a way she needs to be impressed.

St. Sligo is put in commission of a crime, the act of obtaining liquor for us in the underage drinking zone. We give him money for a bottle of scotch and two cases of cold ones. He gets the scotch and we get the cold ones. The teammates and crew go to the beach and party and he stays in the car. I knew the chauffeuring thing would work out.

CHAPTER 4

And now some of today’s lineup; not all of them are baseball players. At the beach and drinking too fast:

THE GUYS

SQUIRREL A.

Always grabbing his nuts. Utility fielder. Will be lucky to work for a utility company. Can’t hit. Can’t spell his name. Loves to chase foul balls hit over the cliff.

MILTON HESTON

Claims he is related to the guy that played Ben Hur. Plays baseball like an accountant. Not a bad pitcher although he doesn’t scare any batters. Stares at Stacked in his spare time.

SAM STREAKS MANE

Streaks, not for winning or losing or running around naked, but for the racing stripes he imprints on the bottom of his underwear.

THE GIRLS

KATIE FORTUNE (FORTUNE COOKIE)

Have sex with her and she’ll tell you your future. She sees children on the pregnant horizon.

JASMINE PEPPER

Too smart to be pretty, too pretty to be smart.

JAMEY STACHT

Not insulted to be called STACKED. Proud of her breasts. Would walk around topless if it weren’t illegal.

LANA GRAMORA

She gives me less, even when she posed as my girlfriend. With Lana all the boys want more-a, more-a, more-a. She’s probably nice if you ever got to know her, more-a.

CHAPTER 4

So some floating thoughts and blazing wisdom from a beach day in May:

Sometimes you can tell from the way a guy stands that he is going to lose – Saint Sligo O’Shaunessy.

The sound of pencil sharpeners drives me to visions of terrorism and assassination – Mr. Shane.

How many quarters are there in a baseball game? – Gina Gramora.

It depends on who is throwing spare change at you - Baseball gods.

It is difficult to be original is such an old game – J.P.

Cookie works in the attendance office and fixes the computer so that it would show that we were in school even though we were beachside. We’re at the beach, drinking in an illegal fashion when we should be in class. This is better than the party on the beach beer commercials except for a couple of guys who got into a fight, which is something they never show in a commercial; a drunken brawl with two guys going berserk for no better reason than their brains are boiling in booze in the hot spring sun.

Saint Sligo stayed in the car to drink from his bottle and read the rant of Mr. Shane: "All that is wrong with the world you can find in the thoughts of a teenager.

They are the Mongol Hordes, the Huns, the morally shunned. They are Bolshevik terrorists intending to overthrow sanity in the minds of all protectors of intelligence. The mind is a minefield in which I tread.

They have nicknamed me Smelly Shane and they have scrawled those words on the desks, doors, floors and walls. Smelly Shane is a _________; fill in the blank with horrible expletive paired with a depraved title. Smelly Shane is a freaking, goat humping sex maniac.

The school system rewards this behavior. Why don’t they just put up a sign,

DADA HIGH SCHOOL WELCOMES THE FUTURE FELONS CLUB OF AMERICA. These kids are so stupid that they think they are smart. Fascinated by shiny objects and things that make loud noises, I treat them like sleepwalkers; careful not to startle them or their chewing gum might fall out of their mouth and stick to the floor.

Rumor has it that they have to commit a crime to join their club. The principal blames me. O’Really is behind them. He is the mastermind to this plot. I have a plan for him."

CHAPTER 5* * * * *

There’s the cliché, no pain, no gain, that coaches like to say when they’re treating you like a dog who just put a piss signature on the new living room carpet. There is pain involved in getting caught ditching. Pain because Coach Paul made a deal with the Dean about my punishment. Part one, the punishment starts at 6:00 a.m. Part two, I’m outside my house wearing running shoes and sweats. Part three, Coach Paul was parked outside my