The Great American Novel (3 page)

Surprising, given the impact of the fart on the life of the American boy, how little you still hear about it; from all appearances it is still something they'd rather skip over in
The Canterbury Tales
at Valhalla High. On the other hand, that may be a blessing in disguise; this way at least no moneyman or politician has gotten it into his head yet to cash in on its nostalgic appeal. Because when that happens, you can kiss the fart goodbye. They will cheapen and degrade it until it is on a level with Mom's apple pie and our flag. Mark my words: as soon as some scoundrel discovers there is a profit to be made off of the American kid's love of the fart, they will be selling artificial farts in balloons at the circus. And you can just imagine what they'll smell like too. Like
everything
artificial.

Yes, fans, as the proverb has it, verily there is nothing like a case of fecal impaction to make an old man wax poetic about the fart. Forgive the sentimental meandering.

And specially, from every shires ende

Of AMERICA to COOPERSTOWN they wende

The holy BASEBALL HEROES for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were SIX.
*

For the ambulatory among my fellow geriatrics here our annual trip to Cooperstown is something very like the kind of pilgrimage Chaucer must have been writing about. I won't go into the cast of characters, as he does, except to say that as I understand it, his “nine and twenty” were not so knowledgeable in matters of religion as you might at first expect pilgrims to be who are off to worship at a holy shrine. Well, so too for the six and ten it was my misfortune to be cooped up with on the road to Cooperstown, and then all afternoon long at the Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. Ninety-nine per cent of their baseball “memories,” ninety-nine per cent of the anecdotes and stories they recollect and repeat are pure hogwash, tiny morsels of the truth so coated over with discredited legend and senile malarkey, so impacted, you might say, in the turds of time, as to rival the tales out of ancient mythology. What the aged can do with the past is enough to make your hairs stand on end. But then look at the delusions that ordinary people have about the day before yesterday.

Of course, in the way of old men—correction: in the way of all men—they more or less swallow one another's biggest lies whole and save their caviling for the tiniest picayune points. How they love to nitpick over nonsense and cavil over crap all the while those brains of theirs, resembling nothing so much as pickles by this time, soak on in their brine of fantasy and fabrication. No wonder Hitler was such a hit. Why, he might still be at it, if only he'd had the sense to ply his trade in the Land of Opportunity. These are three homo sapiens, descendants of Diogenes, seeking the Truth: “I tell you, there was so a Ernie Cooper, what pitched four innings in one game for the Cincinnatis in 1905. Give up seven hits. Seen it myself.” “Afraid you are thinking of Jesse Cooper of the White Sox. And the year was 1911. And he pitched himself something more than four innings.” “You boys are both wrong. Cooper's name was Bock. And he come from right around these parts too.” “Boggs? Boggs is the feller what pitched one year for the Bees. Lefty Boggs!” Yes, Boggs was a Bee, all right, but the Cooper they are talking about happened to be named Baker. Only know what they say when I tell them as much? “Who asked you? Keep your brainstorms for your ‘book'! We are talking fact not fiction!” “But you're the ones who've got it wrong,” I say. “Oh sure,
we
got it wrong! Ho-ho-ho! That's a good one! Get out of here, Shakespeare! Go write the Great American Novel, you crazy old coot!”

Well, fans, I suppose there are those who called Geoffrey Chaucer (
and
William Shakespeare, with whom I share initials) a crazy coot, and immoral, and so on down the line. Tell them what they do not wish to hear, tell them that they have got it wrong, and the first thing out of their mouths, “You're off your nut!” Understanding this as I do should make me calm and philosophical, I know. Wise, sagacious, and so forth. Only it doesn't work that way, especially when they do what they did to me ten days ago at Cooperstown.

*   *   *

First off, as everyone knows, the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown was founded on a falsehood. No more than little George Washington said to his father, “Dad, it is I, etc.,” did Major Abner Doubleday invent the game of baseball on that sacred spot. The only thing Major Doubleday started was the Civil War, when he answered the Confederate Beauregard by firing the first shot from Fort Sumter. Yet, to this day, shout such “heresy” in the bleachers at a Sunday doubleheader, and not only will three out of four patrons call you crazy, but some self-styled authority on the subject (probably a Dad with his Boy—I know the type) will threaten your life for saying something so awful in front of innocent kids.

My quarrel with Cooperstown, however, is over nothing so inconsequential as who invented the game and where. I only draw attention to the longevity of this lie to reveal how without conscience even the highest authorities are when it comes to perpetuating a comforting, mindless myth everyone has grown used to, and how reluctant the ordinary believer, or fan, is to surrender one. When both the rulers and the subjects of the Holy Baseball Empire can sanctify a blatant falsehood with something supposedly so hallowed as a “Hall of Fame,” there is no reason to be astonished (I try to tell myself) at the colossal crime against the truth that has been perpetrated by America's powers-that-be ever since 1946. I am speaking of what no one in this country dares even to mention any longer. I am speaking of a chapter of our past that has been torn from the record books without so much as a peep of protest,
except by me.
I am speaking of a rewriting of our history as heinous as any ordered by a tyrant dictator abroad. Not thousand-year-old history either, but something that only came to an end
twenty-odd years ago.
Yes, I am speaking of the annihilation of the Patriot League. Not merely wiped out of business,
but willfully erased from the national memory.
Ask a Little Leaguer, as I did only this past summer. When I approached, he was swinging a little bat in the on-deck circle, ironically enough, resembling no one so much as Bob Yamm of the Kakoola Reapers (d.). “How many big leagues are there, sonny?” I asked. “Two,” he said, “the National and the American.” “And how many did there used to be?” “Two.” “Are you sure of that now?” “Positive.” “What about the Patriot League?” “No such thing.” “Oh no? Never heard of the Tri-City Tycoons? Never heard of the Ruppert Mundys?” “Nope.” “You never heard of Kakoola, Aceldama, Asylum?” “What are those?” “Cities, boy! Those were big league towns!” “Who played for 'em, Mister?” he asked, stepping away from me and edging toward the bench. “Luke Gofannon played for them. Two thousand two hundred and forty-two games he played for them. Never heard his name?” Here a man took me by the arm, simultaneously saying to the boy, “He means Luke Appling, Billy, who played for the White Sox.” “Who are you?” I asked, as if I didn't know. “I'm his Dad.” “Well, then, tell him the truth. Raise the boy on the truth! You know it as well as I do. I do not mean Luke Appling and I do not mean Luke ‘Hot Potato' Hamlin. I mean Luke Gofannon of the Ruppert Mundys!” And what does the Dad do? He puts a finger to his temple to indicate to this little brainwashed American tyke (one of tens of millions!) that
I
am the one that is cracked. Is it any wonder that I raised my cane?

*   *   *

You can look in vain in the papers of Friday, January 22, 1971, for a mention of the vote I cast the previous day at the annual balloting for baseball's Hall of Fame. But the fact of the matter is that I handed it personally to Mr. Bowie Kuhn, so-called Commissioner of Baseball, and he assured me that it would be tabulated along with the rest by the secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers' Association of America. WELL, MR. BOWIE KUHN IS A LIAR AND THE HALL OF FAME SHOULD BE NAMED THE HALL OF SHAME.

Of course, the plainclothesgoon they hire especially to keep an eye on me during these annual election day visits greeted our contingent at the Museum door pretending to want to do no more than make us gentlemen at home. “
Well,
if it isn't the senior citizens from over Valhalla way. Welcome, boys.”

Oh yes, we are treated like royalty at Cooperstown! How they love “the elderly” when they behave like
boys! Choir
-boys. So long as the only questions we ask have to do with Bock Baker and Lefty Boggs, everything is, as they say over there, “hunky-dory.”

“Greetings, Smitty. Remember me?”

“I remember everything,” I said.

“How you feeling this year?”

“The same.”

“Well,” he asked of the pilgrims in my party, “who you boys rooting for?”

“Kiner!”

“Keller!”

“Berra!”

“Wynn!”

“How about you, Mr. Smith?”

“Gofannon.”

“Uh-huh,” said he, without blinking an eye. “What did he bat again lifetime? I seem to have forgotten since you told me last year.”

“Batted .372. Five points more than Cobb. You know that as well as I do. Two thousand two hundred and forty-two regular season games and twenty-seven more in the World Series. Three thousand one hundred and eighty hits. Four hundred and ninety home runs. Sixty-three in 1928. Just go down where you have buried the Patriot League records and you can look it up.”

“Don't mind Shakespeare,” chortled one of my choirboy companions, “he was born that way. Figment lodged in his imagination. Too deep to operate.”

Haw-haw all around.

Here the p.c. goon starts to humor me again. He sure does pride himself on his finesse with crackpots. He wonders if perhaps—oh, ain't that considerate, that perhaps—if
peutêtre
I am confusing Luke Gofannon of the—what team is that again?

“The Ruppert Mundys.”

—Of the Ruppert Mundys with Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees. As I can see from the plaque just down the way a hundred feet, the great first-sacker is already a member of the Hall of Fame and has been since his retirement in 1939.

“Look,” says I, “we went through this song-and-dance last time round. I know Gofannon from Gehrig, and I know Gofannon from Gehringer, and I know Gofannon from Goose Goslin, too. What I want to know is just why do you people persist in this? Why must you bury the truth about the history of this game—
of this country?
Have you no honor? Have you no conscience? Can you just take the past and flush it away, like so much shit?”

“Is this,” asked those two droopy tits known as our nurse, “is this being ‘a good boy,' Smitty? Didn't you promise this year you'd mind your manners, if we let you come along?
Didn't you?
” Meanwhile, she and the bus driver had spun me around on my cane, so that I was no longer addressing the goon, but the glove worn by Neal Ball when he made his unassisted triple play in 1909.

“Hands off, you lousy smiling slit.”

“Here here, old-timer,” said the pimply little genius who drives our bus, “is that any way to talk to a lady?”

“To some ladies it is the
only
way to talk! That is the way half the Hall of Famers whose kissers you see hanging up in bronze here talked to ladies, you upstate ignoramus! Hands off of me!”

“Smitty,” said the slit, still smiling, “why don't you act your age?”

“And what the hell does that mean?”

“You know what it means. That you can't always have what you want.”

“Suppose what I want is for them to admit THE TRUTH!”

“Well, what may seem like the truth to you,” said the seventeen-year-old bus driver and part-time philosopher, “may not, of course, seem like the truth to the other fella, you know.”

“THEN THE OTHER FELLOW IS WRONG, IDIOT!”

“Smitty,” said the slit, who last year they gave an award and a special dinner for being the best at Valhalla at handling tantrums and rages, “what difference does it make anyway? Suppose they
don't
know it's the truth. Well, they're the ones who are missing out, not you. Actually, you ought to think of yourself as fortunate and take pride in the fact that where others are mistaken, you are correct. If I were you, I wouldn't be angry with them; I would feel
sorry
for them.”

“Well, you ain't me! Besides, they know the truth as well as I do. They are only pretending not to.”

“But, Smitty,
why?
Now you can be a reasonable and intelligent man, at least when you want to. Why would they want to do a thing like that?”

“Because the truth to them has no meaning! The real human past has no importance! They distort and falsify to suit themselves! They feed the American public fairy tales and lies! Out of arrogance! Out of shame! Out of their terrible guilty conscience!”

“Now, now,” says the slit, “you don't really think people are like that, do you? How can you, with your wonderful love of baseball, say such things while standing here in the Hall of Fame?”

I would have told her—and anybody else who wants to know—if I had not at that moment seen coming toward me down the stairway from the Babe Ruth Wing, the Commissioner himself, Mr. Bowie Kuhn, and his entourage. Looking for all the world like the President of General Motors. And she asks me why they feed the people lies. Same reason General Motors does. The profit motive, Mr. Chairman! To fleece the public!

“Commissioner! Commissioner Kuhn!”

“Yes, sir,” he replies.

“No, no!” says the slit, but I free myself from her grasp by rapping her one on the bunions.

“How do you do, Commissioner. I would like to introduce myself, in case you have forgotten. I am Word Smith, used to write the ‘One Man's Opinion' column for the Finest Family Newspapers back in the days of the Patriot League.”