More Stories from the Twilight Zone (56 page)

Hogan plants his two thick legs into the dust like mighty oaks ready to be driven deep into the earth. Then he gazes out like a calm eagle toward the pitcher's mound. See the smile flicker on his lips. A part of the man. A clue. A hint. A suggestion of his preeminence. He's the best. Nobody touches him. Nobody comes close. The probing gray eyes scan the outfield, then the three runners on base. Those eyes. They, too, bespeak the quality. He has the best eyesight in the National League. But the smile never touches them. The smile is simply the unspoken awareness that Hogan has no peers. He must play in this league because there's none better. In Heaven, maybe.

Against Cobb and Ruth and Gherig—the Ghost Greats who have preceded him. Maybe up there with the Big Umpire looking on, he might ultimately play a game with equals. But for the moment he must content himself with being the giant among the pygmies. He must play the Wagnerian symphony in a concert hall full of harmonicas and combs with toilet paper. The smile carries with it a small pity. The young left-hander facing him keeps wetting his lips with his tongue. The infield moves way back onto the grass. Nine enemies with nine constricted throats and eighteen perspiring palms—because that's Hogan at bat.

Hogan's mind is an express train on tracks, zooming past the landscape and taking note of everything. Hear his thoughts. Listen to the smooth meshing gears of a mind singular in what it can encompass and assimilate in flashing fragments of moments. Listen to Hogan think:

Pity them—the Dodgers. Pity them. Without Koufax they are a rabble. They are three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae without Leonidas; they are the Continentals at Valley Forge without Washington;
they are the Union at Vicksburg without Grant. Pity them, I must. They are shattered and demoralized and bankrupt before I lift my bat. Look at Parker at First. Much too close to the bag. I can pull to the right and leave him naked. And there is Willie Davis in center—way out on the track. He knows I have power. A decent lad, full of humility, with a modicum of talent. But he's an opponent nevertheless—frail, as they all are—but still the opposition. So I can bloop it over Second and let it drop a hundred feet in front of him. It's no trick, really. Not when I know how I'll be pitched to. The left-hander is the new kid out of Spokane. He knows of my awesome control of the bat and he can do nothing but fastball me. So I already know how I'm to be pitched to. There is Hunt playing too far back. I can drag it along Third and leave him with a ham omelet all over his face while I squeeze the run in. There are so many possibilities. And all of them relatively simple. I feel a sadness sweeping over me. God, I wish there were opponents left. Men of mettle, worthy of combat—deserving of competition.

The smile flickers and fades. The bat hovers higher over his shoulder. All that can be heard in the vast stadium is the wheezing, fluctuating breath of the nervous left-hander on the mound as he quickly checks the three runners on the base paths and prepares to face his Armageddon. It's hopeless and he knows it's hopeless. That is Hogan there. Invincibility stares at him from Home Plate. A wave of panic washes over him, carrying away what little vestige remains of strength and talent. That's Hogan at the Plate. Hogan who bats .480. Hogan who steals bases with frightening ease. Hogan who pulls a ball left or right with precision that is almost mystical. Hogan whose power is so legendary that whole teams seem to collapse when he picks up a bat. Hogan. It is an unspoken battle cry that sweeps silently across Shea Stadium where fifty thousand human beings know with certainty that more history is being made in front of their eyes. Hogan will bring back the pennant to New York for the first time in over a decade. He can outthink and outplay any man in the sport.

Hogan, Hogan, Hogan. God loves the boroughs, else why was Hogan born?

 

The platinum orb of moon stares down, from its sky perch on Shea Stadium, and the figure of Albert Patrick Hogan standing at Home Plate. The stillness is unearthly. The vast multitiered place of battle is also a place of sound—but where is the roar of the crowd? Where is the screaming, raw excitement of fifty thousand faithful? Suddenly there is a whisper of noise. But only an errant wind. Another sound—this the distant throaty roar of Pratt-Whitney engines from an aircraft heading toward Kennedy Airport miles away, and the occasional rise and fall of traffic hum on the parkway that runs past Shea Stadium. The New York Mets are playing at St. Louis that night, the Los Angeles Dodgers have an off day and they're out on the West Coast. There is no one in Shea Stadium
except
Albert Patrick Hogan. Other men—those lesser men—are at home and hearth. But Hogan, Hogan is no dreamless suburbanite. Hogan is no plodding, dull, faceless component of the times. Hogan has verve and imagination. Hogan has dreams. He rises to his full five feet six inches, hitches up his little potbelly, swings at an invisible ball thrown by an invisible left-hander, then watches with his piggish, myopic little oyster eyes a nonexistent trajectory of an imaginary white pellet disappearing over the center field fence. Now Albert Patrick Hogan starts to run around the base paths, ears cocked to the phantom screams of the phantom crowd calling his name. He rounds Third, breathing heavily—ancient Schlitz beer sloshing around inside the flab-covered recesses of his fifty-eight-year-old insides, then continues to chug toward Home Plate. He tips his cap to these invisible wraiths who scream his name, thanking him in roaring tribute for having belted one for God and Country, the City of New York and the Beloved Mets. He is not Albert Patrick Hogan,
a fifty-eight-year-old schlep who sells hot dogs at Shea Stadium. He is Hogan. The mighty Hogan. The incomparable Hogan.

“Hogan, Hogan, Hogan.” The soundless voices scream out from evanescent throats—and Hogan wears a humble and gentle smile.

“Hogan—schmuck! You're some kind of a friggin' nut—you know that? A nut! How many times I gotta tell you that you ain't allowed in here when the team's not playin'? How many times, schmuck, huh?” The voice is that of Bull Walsh, one of the stadium guards who wears a badge and has no imagination and is one of the lesser men. He shines his flashlight through the wire mesh of the screen behind Home Plate and has just finished watching Hogan point toward the center field fence—the spot where he would park the pitch. He has then watched him run around the base paths like some ungainly farm animal with a hernia.

“Schmuck,” Walsh calls out again. “Off the field. You hear me? I mean, off the field—like now!”

The grandeur dissolves. The crowd noises fade off into the night. The cheering multitude disappears and becomes fifty thousand empty seats. The billion-candle-powered incandescent lights over the field go black. There is only the moon and Albert Patrick Hogan—sparse, bony shoulders slumped as he turns disconsolately to the dream-killer with the badge. The ecstasy departs with the batting average, the eagle eyes and the humble smile of the Adonis forced by circumstance to leave Mount Olympus and pit his mammoth strengths against tiny mortal man.

The real Hogan now stands up. This is “Fats” Hogan—the nickname he has collected with the rest of the flotsam of his life. He is a heavy-breathing, spindle-shanked, florid-faced little man who sells hot dogs up and down the aisles of the Third Base bleacher side of Shea Stadium. He has been doing this since they built the place, and before that at the Polo Grounds—thirty years
in all. Thirty years of pushing knobby knees and dead-flat feet up and down the concrete steps, the big metal box riding hard on his protruding gut, the leather strap rubbing angry indentations into the back of his lobster-red sunburned neck: a Humpty Dumpty gnome, visible but never seen. He's omniscient. He blends with the green infield, the white shirts, whatever the color of the sky. He's an accoutrement. Like a men's room sign or a seat number.

“Get your Honey-Gee red hots on a Spaulding roll,” he calls out, while his perpetually bent back protests in concert with the rest of his tired limbs. Thirty years for Hogan. A million tons of ground meat shoved into gelatin coverings; thousands of gallons of mustard, tons of onions; a small fortune in change passed down to the beckoning, hungry faithful—always at the far end of the row, while the equally faithful, but less hungry citizenry pass down the Honey-Gee red hot on the Spaulding roll with grudging, but silent, impatience, anxious for Hogan to leave, anxious to get back to the ball game—unwilling participants of the ritual; the dollar bill passed right to left, the hot dog passed left to right, the change passed left to right—down the steps goes “Fats” Hogan, the steam curling up around his red face, watering his little eyes, sticking small shafts of queasiness into body and mind that thirty years ago began retching at the smell, the sight, the flavor of Honey-Gee red hots on Spaulding rolls.

Off-night at Shea for the Metz. Off-life for Albert Patrick Hogan, who is the sole manufacturer, distributor, and also consumer of illusions. He walks with them up and down the concrete steps. He carries them into the grimy little bar on Ninety-eighth Street where he goes after each game. He fondles them on the lumpy mattress in his little room a block from the bar.

He's a sloppily formed, overaged Walter Mitty, dreaming the dreams of the desperate, because man does not live on rancid beer and frankfurter steam alone.

He suffers Bill Walsh's touch and allows himself to be escorted
back up the concrete steps to the first tier and then down the long cavernous corridor toward an exit. When they get to the parking lot, Walsh studies him for a moment.

“Lemme ask you somethin', Fats. You sick? Is that it? Is that why you alla time play games like this? I mean, all that crap you were doin', pointin' to center field and swingin' away like you had a bat—and then runnin' around the base paths like that. You sick?”

Albert Patrick Hogan wears a distant smile. He shakes his head. Explain his dream to Bull Walsh? In Lithuanian, he could try. In Mandarin. In geometric symbols. It would all be the same. Walsh could never understand.

“Ain't you ever had any hopes?” Hogan asks him in a sad voice. “Ain't you ever aspired? Why do you suppose people read books?”

Walsh stares at him, uncomprehending. Walsh does not read books.

“When I go down on that field,” Hogan says patiently, “it's like a mental constitutional.”

Bull Walsh stares at him. He has the rational, ordered, file-cabinet mind of a simple citizen with one job, one point of view and one set of criteria that differentiates between sane men and nuts. “Constitutional” is the name of some big mother of a ship that used to be at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Beyond that, there is no “constitutional” in his language. He raises one bushy, County Mayo eyebrow and sticks out a bulbous middle finger to top the small area above Hogan's spread-out stomach.

“Lemme give you a piece of advice, Fats,” Walsh says, tapping with the finger like a ruler on a blackboard, accentuating each word. “One of these nights there's gonna be, like, an ambulance around here. And a coupla guys with white coats. They're gonna take a look at you playin' the part of the number-one nutsy out there and are gonna stick you in a rubber room at the Bin—and Mayor Lindsay won't be able to get you out with a court order.”

The wan smile on the face of Hogan—a little touch of the
dream returns. He looks superior. “Walsh,” he says. “You give me advice—I give you advice. Go take a flying fig at the September moon!”

He swipes away Walsh's finger, turns and walks across the vast, empty parking lot toward a 1950 Dodge sedan that he owns and curses and cajoles and sometimes makes run. He climbs in behind the wheel, ripping his sleeve on the broken window handle, and starts the engine. The dream hovers over him. He smiles at the thousands who surround the car. It's a Rolls-Royce given him a month before at a gigantic ceremony at New York City Hall. Senator Javits presented him with the keys.

As if in a fog, he drives to his tiny, cramped room. And then, on that hot night, lying in his ovenlike room, he applies baby oil on the painful knobs on the back of his neck and looks across the yellow, cracked dresser mirror and studies himself. And after a bit, he does not see the piggish little face or the oyster eyes or the rising hump of his back or the distorted stomach or the yellowed teeth. Then he is not Hogan. He is something else again . . . He is . . .

He is . . . the best. He is the “Babe”—moon-faced with the giant shoulders on toothpick legs. . . .

 

 

 

David Black
is an award-winning journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and producer. His novel
Like Father
was named a notable book of the year by
The New York Times
and listed as one of the seven best novels of the year by
The Washington Post. The King of Fifth Avenue
was named a notable book of the year by
The New York Times, New York
magazine, and the Associated Press. He divides his time between upstate New York and Manhattan.

 

Douglas Brode
is a novelist, screenwriter, playwright, film historian, and multiaward-winning working-journalist. He teaches courses in popular culture and modern media at the Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. The most recent of his more than thirty books on film and television is
Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone: The Official 50th Anniversary Tribute
, coauthored with Carol Serling.

 

Loren L. Coleman
is the author of twenty-six novels, with short fiction work appearing in many Tekno Books anthologies. He began watching
The Twilight Zone
(in syndication) as young as five years old, which may explain a lot about his life. Today,
when not locking himself away in a small room to invent worlds and create people from the mysterious ether of his imagination, he coaches youth sports, manages Catalyst Game Labs (a pen-and-paper game company), and occasionally sets out in search of the perfect martini. His personal Web site can be found at
www.lorenlcoleman.com
.