Shortstories by Douglas V. Gibbs

Baseball is a place where memory gathers...

Poet Donald Hall stated this in a film interview, and if you are anything like me, your fondest memories from growing up involves baseball in one shape or form.

Baseball has been around for over 200 years. Soldiers played it during the Civil War. It is played in parks and playgrounds, streets and alleys, lonely fields and farmer’s fields, prison yards and corporate picnics; baseball appeals to the young and the old. Baseball combines the importance of teamwork and the individual battle between a pitcher and a batter.

And baseball endures.

My earliest memories of baseball are my earliest memories, period. I can still remember the phone number of the apartment I lived in in Bellflower, California in the 1970’s when I was just a small boy playing my earliest years in Little League. I remember that phone number because it was written on my baseball glove in case I ever lost it. I carried that glove with me everywhere. The park I played ball in was only a block away. The Manager of my first team was a great teacher and made the game a lot of fun. It was then that I first fell in love with baseball.
I still have the baseball cards from those years, and my Mother still has that old mitt. Now it’s worn and cracked and the phone number on the mitt is now nothing more than an ink smudge. But in that glove are a lot of fond memories. That glove carried me out to right field my first year, over to left the following year, and to second base after that. It sat lonely on the bench while I was at bat, and that old glove performed equally well for me in the outfield and infield alike. My family moved away from the suburbs of Los Angeles, eventually, and I bought a new glove for my growing hand. But the new glove was never as soft and dependable as my first beloved glove.

I used to take that old leather glove to Dodger games back then. My aunt had season tickets down the first base line. I marveled at the batting skills of Steve Garvey and Ron Cey. I studied Dave Lopes’ techniques as he inched away from the first base bag until the pitcher committed his pitch to home, and then dashed to second for yet another stolen base. Don Sutton pitched mercilessly, striking out the best hitters in baseball. I had the opportunity to see Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, Johnny Bench, George Foster, and Tom Seaver play when the “Big Red Machine” came to town. The cross-town Angels added to the excitement with Nolan Ryan’s fastball and Grich’s defensive magic. Baseball was magical, and I made sure I watched every televised “Game of the Week.”

Then something peculiar happened. I grew up. I discovered the many wonderful things that life had to offer. The importance of baseball faded a little. I watched a handful of games, but baseball became less involved with my daily life, and my fondest memories faded like the ink on my first glove...for a while.

Then I returned to baseball, and baseball had endured. The battle between the owners and the players remained the same, and work stoppages had tarnished the shiny chrome of baseball’s image. Nonetheless, the game was still there. A new crop of superstars had emerged. Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn proved that there was still a few class acts out there. Ripken, McGwire, Sosa, and Barry Bonds showed that impossible records can still be broken, and broken again. The home run erupted once again as a lethal weapon, and George Brett proved that the Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony still brings tears to the eyes.

And the memories gather in a new millennium. Ichiro demonstrated that the long-ball isn’t the only lethal weapon in Baseball. Curt Schilling have showed that sometimes a new venue can create superstars, and Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez has shown us that New York can deflate superstars as well. Arizona and Anaheim reminded us that the big boys on the east coast can be dethroned every once in a while. The Red Sox and White Sox taught us to believe in miracles rather than curses.

Despite strikes, rumors of strikes, and the avoidance of strikes just before the deadline, my love for the game has endured. Baseball has endured. And baseball will always be important to me and my memories, because baseball is a place where memory gathers.

CONVICTIONS by Douglas V. Gibbs

Human nature seems so pitiful to me. Such is the devilish way of my kind. I furnish temptations, and people sway aimlessly along their paths of life chasing my magical bag of devious enticements. Humans are nothing more than freakish fools chasing ghostly visions of grandeur. When it all comes down to brass tacks, they are all nothing more than spirits trapped in shells composed of flesh in order to inhabit time. They absorb life until their pitiful bodies are filled to the rim, and then they die. People learn to walk as children, but stumble throughout life. It is normal to stumble. That is what makes them human. “Stumbling” is what makes my position as a principality so enjoyable.

Unfortunately, we don’t snare all of the souls that are available.A young man once hovered over the bed of his dying grandfather with a few genuine tears in his eyes. I say genuine because often humanity enjoys shedding tears for show, which the hypocrites of society expect sometimes.The old man in the bed could not see well enough to know that his grandson shed tears for him, and the oldster failed to utter anything to his grandchild aside from an occasional, phlegm-ridden, groan. The elder only lay in his bed motionless. For weeks on end his aged mind had drifted in and out of reality. All the young man could do for his grandfather was stroke his head and speak softly to him.

Grandpa was one of my greatest pieces of diabolic art. He was a biting old-timer. He expected more than he should, and became quite demanding when requests remained unfulfilled. In return for what he received from those around him, he gave as little as he could from both a physical and emotional standpoint.

As life progressed everything around him became a daily disappointment, tempered only by the fact that he was surrounded by loved ones that worried about him. This made him delightfully bitter.I was sure that upon death I would have his soul down here in the sulfur fires.

The caustic old fool dying in the bed reasoned that he had always been a sensible person. He thought, from his own point of view, that he gave freely like a good Samaritan to others less fortunate than himself. None the less, he found himself also believing those others were just horribly selfish for accepting his good deeds. He became vain, from that point, and I joyfully fed his delusions daily.

Then an unexpected development occurred. He suffered a stroke, which delighted myself and my fiendish friends to no end. The old man soon found that he could no longer care for himself. I was itching to bury the final dagger deep into his soul and welcome him to his fiery new home. Then, as he dwindled into a frail shell of a bitter old man, his family unselfishly cared for him.

He remained somewhat cantankerous, and I thoroughly enjoyed his statements that questioned the existence of God. As far as he was concerned, life leads to death, and death is only an end to a life that has done nothing more for him than prove to be difficult.

Fear of death, however, loomed over his soul. I nearly had him. It was his dastardly family that led to my loss of him. Thievery, I tell you, it was nothing more than crooked thievery.

They cared for him, tolerating his biting remarks, loving him unconditionally.

I was surely swindled out of that soul. It was unfair having to battle that whole family at once. And what’s worse, they prayed for him as well. It chilled my fires. The prayers unfairly disarmed my temptations and fiendish attacks on the old man.

Eventually, the inevitable happened, and the family could no longer provide the increasingly necessary medical assistance required. They admitted the old guy to the hospital. Hospice care became a peculiar prison for him. He had a room with a window, but he could no longer venture outside on his own. His meals became trays of this piece of meat and that mashed potato, which no longer satisfied his wavering hunger. He resorted to eating ice cream and pudding. His failing digestive system could not handle any other kind of sustenance.

Without the love of his family bombarding him on a constant basis, the old man began to grow bitter again. He felt alone. Abandoned. He wanted nothing more than to return to the house with the caring family. He longed to venture into that backyard with the buzzing bees and swaying pines simply to sit on the swinging bench and listen to the sounds of the rushing traffic from the nearby highway. He longed for normalcy. He began to slink back into my demonic clutch.How quickly and easily societal normalcy can be mistaken for true normalcy. Comfort often plays right into my hands. The victim, longing for that sheltered place in life where confrontation that merits change remains caged as it should be, becomes bitter, making my job even easier. I had him. I had him for myself. His hours became numbered, and I could feel his soul seeping back into the fires of Hades.

With the ease of simple prayers by Christians masquerading as feeding technicians and nurses, I began to lose my grip on his soul again. Simple prayers. That’s all it took to foul everything up again for me. It angered my fiendish temper mainly because without even realizing it, those simpletons, who should have been satisfied with just feeding the elderly patient his ice cream and pudding and checking his medicine levels, were watering those horrible seeds that the old man’s family had so carefully planted on his spirit.Death came to the fellow in the morning. He had all night before he died to think about the prayers, and the words of his family. But it was that final hour that did it. That is when I lost his soul to Him.

Then, to make matters worse, the young grandson hovered over his Grandfather’s bed, watching the body of the dead man as if hoping for a glimpse of life. The young man battled guilt for not arriving before the old man’s death. But the horrendous part is that he failed to curse his Maker for allowing the old man to pass without him by his side, as I had been devilishly hoping for him to do.Instead, the young man uttered a simple prayer.

Then, to my dismay, the grandson realized the truth. He realized the horrible truth that pulled his Grandfather from my fiery grip. The old man needed to be alone for his final breath. Those final moments were all that he required to finally cultivate his faith in God.

Then, the grandson laid his warm hands upon the dead man’s cold forehead. An utterance issued from the young man’s mouth. He was spewing horrid words that myself and my fiendish followers despise hearing. “Now you know the truth,” the young man said to his Grandfather. “Keep my seat warm in Heaven, and we’ll talk about everything when I get there.”

COMA by Douglas V. Gibbs

White. Shining arrogance pranced like ivory keys on a piano. Ebony dots paced the ceiling, gazing wonderingly at my spinning madness. Mocking my mental hurricane of fog and mist. I could not see them through my stormy eyes. Still, they watched me. Watching me on my back, strapped to four steel posts.

Where has my body landed?

Shadows mocked the white brilliance, leaning their grayness over my upturned face. Familiar forms, yet unknown. A face molded together. The face belonged to someone I remembered, but forgot.An orifice in the face opened, spitting ghosts of words.

My damaged brain sputtered. Cranial fog cleared momentarily. Chaos organized for a moment. Only a short moment.

Concentration relinquished a momentary solution. The voice was familiar because it belonged to my mother.Chaos returned. My disembodied limbs reached to embrace her. Tingling spiders marching down my arms held my arms captive. I remained still. Mother’s tears rolled down my cheeks.

An epileptic seizure captured my body. Darkness came. Life faded. Death twisted my insides, rolling through my body like the roar of an angry lion. Helicopter blades thumped. Sirens screamed. People placed their hands all over my naked body, holding me with needles and masks.

White. The ivory ceiling with ebony dots loomed overhead. Virgin sheets on my snowy bed contained my languid, quivering body. White walls with bright lights shining on a milky tile floor thundered around my personal prison of tubes and machines. Frosty garments on anti-septic attendants marched, shouting orders to each other as a needle plunged into my purple wrist.

The place radiated purity, but the bleeding heart of mother’s red blouse served as a focal point.

My eyes opened. Tears ran down her face. I stared curiously, unable to understand why she, or myself, resided in this white place of beeping machines.Numbness filled me. Another episode returned. My lips exploded. Ice cream lips tingled in unison. Eyes wandering backward, my vision became obstructed by fluttering needle-points. Everything was spinning. I closed my eyes. The spin increased.

Tumbling. Rolling. My body died in my dreams. I recalled pain invading my body. Skin peeled from my face like the rind of a rotten orange. Rolling along the highway. Pounding with each crash of crumbling metal. Crimson fluids fled from my being.I can’t catch my breath!

The white sanctity of the hospital returned. The nightmares abated.

I opened my mouth to ask questions slamming mercilessly against my skull. My tongue rolled around in my mouth untrained. My swollen lips forgot how to speak.

I managed a primitive grunt.

A man in a white coat ran to my side as mother screamed hysterically. He stabbed a needle of light into my eyes, prattling nonsensical verbiage all the while. Pure gibberish. He spoke only noise.

The terror of darkness returned. My eyes closed. Rolling nightmares of chaos imprisoned me. I jerked awake in my dreams. Numb pain.Memories rolling. Pounding. Cries of pain. The faces of men looking down at me while tossing around noise with their tongues.

The seizure passed. A new face stood over me. A familiar face. The loving gaze of my uncle.“He’s coming out of it,” said my uncle.Words. Wonderful words. The eloquent poetry of speech from my uncle’s lips embraced me like an old friend.

I murmured the first thing that came to mind. “Where am I?”

“In the hospital, son.”

Son?

“You’re not my dad.”

“No, I am not,” replied my uncle with a slight grin on his weathered face.

How absurd. Of course he is not my father.

“How did I get into the hospital?”

“Car accident,” said Uncle. “Doozie, too. You rolled that little car eight times down the highway. Got thrown down a slope, or something like that. They didn’t give you much of a chance, from what I hear. Ten minutes or so, says your dad. Ten minutes later and you’d be in a coffin right now, I reckon. Not too good. You were comatose, you know. Month and a half, or so. This is the first time you’ve acted sensible in months.”

Months?

“Is there anything that you want?” he asked out of common courtesy.

“Yes,” I said. “I want a hamburger.”

“You can’t eat food like that in this ward. They’ll take it away.”

“I don’t care. That’s what I want.”

Uncle grinned, hurried off, leaving me with my Auntie. I glared at her suspiciously.

She smiled, sort of halfway. Her hands, drying from age, lay peacefully on her lap. Tired eyes of deep blue studied me, moving slightly behind the time-ridden slits that housed them.

“Can I be unstrapped?” I asked.

She arose and vanished for a moment along the corridor, returning moments later with one of those men in the white coats. He grinned like he knew me, and unstrapped my bonds.

“No funny business,” he said. “You were taking swings at people when you were out of it.”

“I was?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Just remember, one swing, and the straps go back on. Don’t be pulling on any of the tubes, either.”

“No problem,” I responded.

Auntie sat back down and asked, “How do you feel?”

“Well,” I replied honestly, “I can’t feel half of my face or my legs. Pain is racking just about every other point in my body that isn’t numb. Despite being unstrapped, I feel like I can’t move a muscle, and I am starving for a hamburger.

”She nodded.

Uncle Bill returned, leaning over me with a box in his hand. A finger of his other hand stood vertically across his lips as he whispered conspiratorially, “Sshh, here’s that burger. Eat it under the sheet.”

My hands responded painfully, reaching eagerly for the box. Under the sheet I devoured the contraband.

I pulled my head out for air. A retired respirator loomed nearby.

“Uncle Bill?” I garbled with a mouthful of food.

“Yes?” he replied.

“Thanks. This is the best burger I’ve ever had!”