The Mighty Roman
The First and Only Most
Glorious Season
of
the Cal–Hairy Baseball League
Welcome
to this page of excerpts from The Mighty Roman, a novel about baseball
and the modern American man. This book, while fast and funny, delves into all
kinds of hot–button social issues—including, as in the excerpts
below, gay rights.
***
man–crush
in baseball
oh
so right to admire
such
power and grace!
~
Matt Marola, pitcher, San Carlos Coyotes
***
Roman's face twisted with anguish as he measured his next words.
“You know, Matt, it used to be fine to call a fag fag. You can’t even
call a fag fag anymore!” ~ Roman Meister, manager, San Carlos Coyotes
***
"This is a real-life novel, packed with personalities and
filled with beautiful language and true emotion. Huck's raft becomes a
team bus, and it is a ride worth taking." ~ Tony
Press, riverbabble.
Victory was ours! And we mobbed Rex in the
manner we had all seen countless times growing up, forming a throbbing human
circle around him and jumping wildly with arms linked as we whooped and
hollered along with the crowd. This, I thought, is true exultation, this is the
jubilation that non–believers like me miss out on when the Holy Rollers and
gospel choirs do their thing in church. Twenty young men stomped and screamed
and danced and whirled, and my arms clung tight to two pairs of strong
shoulders while two strong arms clung tight to me. They were someone's arms, no
one's: we were one joyous body.
But Roman stood aloof, with a feeble grin
weighed down by surprise, hurt, and loathing.
*********
*******
Readers say —
"I
will hold this story up against any contemporary fiction that I've read."
"Like
many great works of fiction, this tale works on more than one level. It ...
illustrates the cultural divide that has polarized our country as our hero
takes us on a humorous and personal journey of discovery."
"Jon
Sindell's voice is what makes this book."
"In
... The Mighty Roman, baseball is much more than just a sport."
"The
language of the book was the best part for me, it was often like poetry."
"Fun,
fear-inducing, poignant, it's a book that seamlessly merges the often disparate
worlds of parents (especially fathers) and sons, masculinity, race and racism,
life in all its glory and misery, both on and off the sports pages."
"Throw
in some off-field adventures, teenage romance, racism and homophobia, and you
are pulled into a baseball world that is present day and is pure summer fun
reading."
***********
The Mighty Roman is available in
paperback on Amazon, as
an ebook on Amazon, or as an ebook on Smashwords ...
or ask your local indie bookstore to order it for you.
***
The Mighty Roman: Chapter One
“My first day in pro ball,” the first
words in the journal given by Mr. Rogers, my soft-spoken, cardigan-wearing
dad. “That’s fine, then, Matt, forget about college. But do us a favor and write
what you see.”
So I wrote about life in the Cal Hairy
League. Not misty reminiscences of the sort Dad expected of his “English
scholar,” nor rhapsodic odes to “the national pastime,” a term which to me
seemed dated and sentimental: are you the national pastime
when football slams you in the TV ratings, when city ballfields are weeded over
and city dads don’t know how to play catch with their sons, and people on
streetcars don’t know who’s in the World Series? Or does it matter—maybe—that
you still dream of wet grass sticking to your arms after a game-saving catch at
the age of thirteen? Or if the snowy whiteness of a baseball in flight draws
swarms of dreams in its wake like a talisman? Or if elfin boys can bunt their
way on and steal round the bases trailing clouds of pixie dust while grunting
lummoxes throw the wanton ball into left? Or if whippet-thin teens can
send the ball flying in majestic arcs to the Outer Mongolias of unfenced fields
and reach home precisely one moment before the ball finds the mitt of
the armored catcher? Does it matter, maybe, if infield grit embedded in
knees as red and moist as the pulp of ripe plums is morbidly pleasing? Or if
transcendence grasps the impossible truth, as I did in twelfth grade, that
throwing the ball softer makes batters miss? The week after
experiencing that counterintuitive epiphany, I hurled sinkers like a wizard
shooting sparks from his staff and watched flailing fools corkscrewing
themselves into the ground as my dead-fish pitches dove beneath their bats. The
result: a no-hitter. The next week I cut practice—for the first time ever—to
skimboard at the beach. I was cut from the team. At home that night I cried
without shame, and when I met with my dad and Coach Loach the next day—Coach!
Loach!—I was reinstated for a pound of contrition.
My Cal Hairy season was the league’s only
season: 2008, Obama Summer. I had just graduated from San Francisco's elite
public high school, and the students were down with the hope and change
thing—but none of us idealistic grads hit the road for Big O. On the other
hand, as I word-sketched in my journal on the overnight bus to San Carlos, a
couple my age boarded in Santa Cruz en route to Nevada to canvass for Barack.
They slid into their seats and melded like cookie dough. After a while, she
turned to him with dreamy eyes. But he wouldn’t kiss her because he had a cold.
“If you have a cold,” she said, “I want a cold.” I envied the guy his
girlfriend’s pathetic devotion, for my just-concluded high school love affair
had been an essentially Platonic arrangement which my girlfriend and I had
chronicled like anthropologists: "Mating ritual, Day 397. The female,
impressed by the male pitcher-bird's cardinal plumage and overall fitness as he
struts on the mound, signals her desire by opening her chem book."
In Salinas, a man in his thirties boarded
with a Bible. He was spindly and his clothes were faded and torn, but his
eyes burned with zeal as he searched each passenger’s face while working up the
aisle. My fellow passengers either didn’t notice the man's gaze or averted
their eyes, but I held his gaze to prove to him—and myself—that I wasn’t
intimidated, just as I had taught myself, after three years of being clobbered
on the mound, not to be intimidated by glaring batters stronger and more
aggressive than me. His gaze broke under mine; he dropped down into his seat
and prayed; and I felt wizardly indeed.
Across the aisle from the man, a forlorn waif of seventeen balled
her legs up inside a peasant skirt and sneaked a wary glance at the man. He
opened his eyes at just the right moment and fixed the girl’s gaze like a frog
fast-snapping its tongue at a fly. A soft–spoken suggestion issued from his
lips. The girl nodded with caution. He slid into the seat next to hers and told
a tale on himself, its humor premised on his ineptitude with bus timetables.
She assured him that no one could read them, least of all her. He asked her
name. She answered. Her age. She replied. He asked where she had come from, and
where she was going. At last, inevitably, he asked for her story. A boy. A
seduction. And then a betrayal. She shuddered as if seized by a terrible chill.
“I understand," he assured her. “But remember, Jenny: Jesus
Christ loves you.”
“I want Bobby!” cried Jenny, then sobbed convulsively into
her arms. The man arose and studied her uncertainly before patting her shoulder
as if she might explode. She shrugged his hand off and kept her head down, so
the man laid a laminated card bearing scriptural verses on the seat next to
hers and withdrew. After a short interval of silent prayer he turned to me with
trepidation. "Little brother, have you heard
the good news?”
“That Obama just wrapped up the nomination?” I had little
experience in warding off missionaries, but thought that would work.
“Actually,” he chuckled, “I have something a bit more profound in
mind. So tell me, Slim, from whence do you hail?” San Francisco, I said, hoping
this would repel him. “San Francisco?” He mulled the matter over and frowned,
then smiled to assure me that all was not lost. I felt offended by the
implication that anything was lost, and asserted: “I’ve got lots of gay
friends.” This was but loosely true: though none of the out–gays in my school
was a personal friend—I had just two personal friends of any type, for I feared
groups, was absurdly reserved, and hated fast chatter—I had been named Gay For
A Day after swing–dancing with a gay guy during a courtyard demonstration when
out–of–state bigots picketed the campus.
The man nodded like a youth counselor listening with magnanimity
to a repugnant admission. As a pitcher, my killer instinct kicked in when I had
two strikes on the batter. I could tell I had this guy in a hole, so I threw a
high hard one: “And I’m totally against Prop 8 man, and I don’t care what any
book says," book a deliberate reduction of Bible. "You
should be allowed to marry whomever you please," using SAT grammar as an
additional weapon. The man set his jaw as if staring at an abomination straight
out of Leviticus; he turned away and prayed for my soul.
I listened to baseball fiction on the graduation iPod as we rolled
on south through the Central Valley darkness. The evangelist got off at a town
south of Fresno, walked across the lot, and boarded a bus heading back to
Salinas. “Midnight Rider,” the driver said. “Rides all night saving souls.”
A bit after dawn we reached Bakersfield. ...
**********
... Failing to notice
Roman's dismayed stare, he settled in to observe Rex's demonstration of yogic
stretches. Was someone watching me?
Could be—for we do
watch one another. In the locker room, nude, we are all Greek gods. We look at
each other, and we check ourselves out. The mirror in the anteroom of the
shower room, which reflected carved torsos from the waist up, was always in
use—and you had to wait long to look in that mirror, what with the sculpted
Dominican Alfredo Disculpe admiring himself as he drew his finger along his
smooth jawline, or the lithe M.C. patting talcum powder all over his body for
the third time that day, or our many weightlifters admiring their carved
physiques while pretending not to admire their carved physiques. Rex had
divined a three-second rule: stare at your bod for more than three seconds,
you're waaay vain, dude. My father was so modest a man that I had never even
seen him naked, and it was his mild voice that expressed disapproval as I gazed
at the lean young man in the mirror. My own voice insisted that I was studying
my physique not for pleasure or pride, nor to admire the orange–and–black
interlocking SF on my right arm just below my shoulder, nor the red rose with green
stem on my left arm—tats that had earned me the nickname Mat Tat on my high school
team—no, I told myself, I was gazing at my body for the purely respectable
purpose of assessing my build for baseball mechanics. Too thick in the pecs?
That could slow down my fastball. Too thin in the neck? That could lead to neck
strain. But I had ventured far beyond the border of Three–Second Land now, so I
checked behind myself in the mirror. Sure enough, there was Roman, studying me
with a kaleidoscopic blend of curiosity, alarm, and disgust. “Jesus, Matt, you are from San
Francisco.” He turned his repulsed expression from me and sulked haughtily off
as if I had betrayed him.
That night I wrote
a haiku which I secretly posted on the locker room mirror before the next game:
man crush in baseball
oh so right to admire
such power and grace!
Roman stabbed the
poem with a dart and left it impaled in the cork board, just as his namesakes
had crucified Spartacus and 6,000 other rebel slaves along the Appian Way as a
warning to all would would defy Rome. After the next game, Roman removed the
dart like a knife from a corpse and crumpled the haiku while looking around for
an involuntary facial confession. The ruse did not work, so he sniffed the
paper, wrinkled his nose in disgust, threw the wad down onto the floor, stomped
it with his shower shoe, and kicked it across the locker room floor.
Poor poem!
***
Thank
you for visiting, Reader!
The Mighty Roman is available in
paperback on Amazon, as
an ebook on Amazon, or as an ebook on Smashwords—or
ask your local indie bookstore to order it for you.
San
Francisco readers: autographed copies are available by arrangement. Write
jsind@sbcglobal.net to find out more, or to learn about readings and other
appearances.
Yours
in the love of baseball and lit,
Jon
Also read "Lawrence," a short story about a simple high school youth who stands up for animals and gays. A free ebook on Smashwords, soon to be a novel.
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