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Chapter 7: Hollywoodland
 By Jim Caple |
Previously at 24 College Avenue: State College junior Josh Williams and his girl friend from Prague, Magdalena, have taken summer jobs with “America in an SUV,’’ leading tour groups to some of the country’s most important historic and cultural sites. Josh was briefly arrested at Wrigley Field for accidentally hitting The Asterisk, the controversial slugger closing in on the all-time home run record, in the head with a baseball. Then in Las Vegas, Magdalena gambled away the tour’s money stash. She and Josh have one hope to recover the money – if Josh wins the best he placed on what game The Asterisk will break the home run record. The Asterisk was recently hurt in a collision with the paparazzi following him, including Steve Hamilton, who is i nterning with the New York Journal-American, and has followed the player to Los Angeles. . . . Meanwhile, Jenn Robbins, the State College Red Devil mascot, has a summer gig as Woody the Checkered Owl for the minor league Lumberview Timber Barons. She has learned that general manager Gray Sharbor is obsessed with The Asterisk and fears he might be out to kill the slugger. She has bigger immediate worries though -- after enduring a summer of abuse from fans and having a player hit her with a bat, Jenn had a spectacular nut-out on the field. . . .
Josh set down his beer, pulled the five betting slips from his wallet and studied them for about the 72nd time since he put his money down at the casino. And for the 72nd time, Magdalena asked him what they needed The Asterisk to do so they could win their bets.
“We need him to hit three home runs tonight.’’
“Three? That is not so many, yes?’’ Her question had become a ritual. Rituals were necessary in matters that involved luck and hope. And desperation
“Well, yes and no,’’ Josh told her. He spoke patiently, for his was part of the ritual. Magdalena would ask and he would explain and somehow it would help make it happen. “The Asterisk has hit three in a game several times but not for a couple years. And he’s been slumping ever since, well, ever since that game in Wrigley.’’
“But is possible? We have chance, yes?’’
“Yes. There is a chance.’’
A pretty damn slim chance, though Josh did not speak this. If they were to recoup the group’s lost stash of money, they needed The Asterisk to hit three home runs and break the record tonight, the night he had bet on before learning that Magdalena had gambled away the bank. But focusing on the negative could only damage whatever karma might exist.
Josh put the betting slips back in his wallet and looked around the historic Los Angeles stadium for the first time. He had eagerly anticipated this game when the trip began – the tickets had been purchased well in advance by the “America in an SUV’’ company – but he had barely paid attention when the group walked into the stadium. Now, as he looked around, he saw that the rest of the ballpark was just about full but their section in the right field bleachers was nearly empty. Apart from Josh, Magdalena and the tour group, about the only fans in the section were a handsome man and woman in their mid-30s and a dozen or more children of various ages and races surrounding them.
“It is Wal-Mart!’’ Magdalena shouted suddenly, her voice excited for the first time since the disastrous visit to the casino.
Josh didn’t understand. Why would Magdalena be so excited about a chain of stores she hated as the symbol of spreading American corporate greed? And why was there a Wal-Mart in a stadium, anyway? He looked down where she was pointing, to the couple with all the children. And then he understood.
Wal-Mart was the most beautiful celebrity couple in the world, their faces on several magazine covers every week. As is the fashion, the media merged their first names – his, Wallace, and hers, Martina – into the inevitable and very awkward moniker: Wal-Mart. Neither had ever starred a particularly good movie or one that made much money but they were so breathtakingly good looking that they could name their price when it came to a movie role. Not that either had made many movies recently. Worn out from the Hollywood life style and in search of deeper meaning to their lives, the two had traveled the world, visiting Tibet, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, shining need attention on humanitarian aid efforts and adopting children like passport stamps. They had brought home three children from Darfur alone.
“You must get their autograph,’’ Magdalena said. “I love Wal-Mart! Very big in Prague!’’
“Are you kidding? I can’t just go up to them.’
“Please!!!’’ Magdalena pleaded, and her voice was so needy that a feeling of tenderness overwhelmed Josh. She had been so distraught since Vegas but here was a chance to cheer her up., if only briefly
“All right,’’ he said, kissing her lightly. “I’ll have them sign our scorecard.’’
Josh walked down the steps toward the outfield fence where Wal-Mart stood with their children. “Excuse me,’’ he said. “But aren’t you . . .”
“Yes,’’ Wallace replied. “And so is she. And these are our children. Starlight, Lhasa, Kilimanjaro, Sahara, Kampala, Zagreb, Sofia, Ambrosia, Uhluru, Skamakoway, Betelgeuse, Jalamabad and Dwayne.’’ He paused and turned to his wife for help. “Did I forget anyone?’’
“Hepburn and Tracy.’’
“Damn. I always forget them.’’
Martina put her finger to her lips, quieting her husband, reminding him how sensitive children can be to the slightest comment. Wallace cringed slightly at his comment, hoping neither child had heard him say he had forgotten them.
“So,’’ Josh said. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in Afghanistan or the Sudan or someplace like that?’’
“Nah, we love traveling but we can only take so much of that before we need to come back and get our baseball fix.’’
“We’re huge baseball fans,’’ Martina said with a smile that made Josh feel like he would dissolve into pixie dust. “That’s how Wallace and I met, at a World Series game. The studio publicity department sat us next to each other so the cameras would keep showing us and hype the new movies we had coming out.’’
Wallace beamed at the memory. “I fell for her the minute I saw she knew how to keep score.’’
“My father taught me how while we listened to games on the radio,’’ Martina said. “I cut out the boxscores each morning and pasted them into a notebook. A boxscore is the most precise, beautiful distillation of information in the world, don’t you think? Those little lines of agate are like poetry. Joyce Kilmer wrote that he thought he would never see anything as lovely as a tree. Well, I’ll never read anything more lovely than 9 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 0 BB, 20 K. Anyway, we’re trying to pass that love onto our kids. It isn’t easy, because they grew up in other countries so they don’t understand baseball’s rules.’’
Josh nodded sympathetically. “I know. My girl friend is from Prague. She always asks how it can be a strike if the batter doesn’t swing. And why it’s called a no-hitter if they hit the ball. And she always tells me how wonderful soccer is.’’
“God, I hate soccer,’’ Wallace said.
“I know, sweetie, I know. But we must be open-minded. Now that good our friend is playing over here.’’
“You mean standing on the sideline with a broken foot.’’
“Whatever.’’ Martina turned back to Josh. “Anyway, we figured that maybe one way to get them hooked was if they caught a home run ball. Have you ever caught one?’’
Josh nodded, recalling painfully what happened when he caught The Asterisk’s 752nd home run in Chicago and was repeatedly attacked by drunken fans until he threw the ball onto the field, accidentally hitting the slugger in the head when he had returned to the outfield the next inning.
“Then you know how precious that feeling is,’’ Martina said. “How you feel . . . I don’t know, connected to greatness somehow.’’
“I caught a home run ball once,’’ Wallace said. “Barehanded. Didn’t even feel the sting in my hand because all I could think of was this pearl I was holding in my hand. I got it signed after the game.’’
“He keeps it between our Golden Globe awards,’’ Martina said.
Wallace gestured to the empty seats around them. “We bought out this whole section for the entire series so that each of our precious children would have a chance to catch a home run and fall in love with the game like we did. Whatever tickets had already been sold, we tracked down the fans and bought them from them. We couldn’t get ahold of everyone though. You must be with the one big group we missed. Too bad. We would have paid you a lot of money for the tickets.’’
Josh winced. Maybe he could have sold their tickets for enough money to cover Magdalena’s losses. Then again, if they had sold them before the tour group reached Vegas, that would have just been more money for Magdalena to lose.
“But you’re here now and we’re here and everyone is happy,’’ Martina said. “But if a home run comes our way, could you let the children catch it? It would mean so much to them.’’
“Yeah, sure,’’ Josh said, nodding. “Unless The Asterisk hits the big 756th tonight. Then it’s every man for himself.’’
Wallace laughed. “I don’t think that’s going to happen tonight.’’
“Yeah, well, I know the odds are against him, but you never know in baseball. The Asterisk could hit three home runs. He’s done it before.’’
Wal-Mart exchanged looks.
“Didn’t you hear?’’ Martina said. “The Asterisk is still hurt from that accident with the paparazzi. They just scratched him from the lineup.’’
# # #
Steve double-checked his camera’s digital display. Sure enough. That was Josh in the right field bleachers having a conversation with Wal-Mart. Steve shook his head in amusement. The guy certainly got around in his misadventures. One day Josh was being arrested in Chicago for throwing a baseball at The Asterisk, the next his girl friend was gambling away his tour group’s money in Las Vegas, and now he was hanging with the two most famous celebrities in the world.
He text-messaged Josh, instructing him to get Wal-Mart to look his way. Steve’s bosses at the Journal-American would be delighted with a good shot of the beautiful couple, considering it a good bonus to his assignment following The Asterisk as the slugger neared the home run record.
At the moment, The Asterisk was in the trainers room receiving treatment for the knee he injured when Steve’s motorbike hit his SUV outside the New York strip club. Still photographers weren’t allowed inside the clubhouse, which seemed like an odd policy given that video cameras were welcome. Not that it mattered much to Steve. He preferred to be outside shooting batting practice and scanning the stands for girls than standing around in the clubhouse with the reporters.
Standing around is pretty much what the reporters were forced to do for hours a day. As soon as the clubhouse opened to the media three and a half hours before game time, the reporters rushed in for what they termed “baby-sitting.’’ This amounted to standing around in the clubhouse talking among themselves while keeping an eye on The Asterisk’s locker. The slugger rarely said anything to reporters beyond “Get out of my way’’ or “Leave me alone’’ but every once in awhile, say twice a month, he would be in a mood to talk and unleash a stunning quantity of opinion and observations. Some of it was funny, some of it was outrageous, much of it was controversial but it was always interesting. A reporter on The Asterisk beat missed one of these sessions at the risk of getting scooped. When you’re assigned to cover one guy and one guy only, you sure as hell don’t want to miss it when he says something newsworthy. The problem was you never knew when these sessions would take place, which is just how The Asterisk wanted it. If he had to put up with an often unfriendly media horde hounding him every day, he was going to make sure they had to put up with him as well. It was his one way of controlling the reporters. He liked some writers but even with these, as soon as they appeared to get too comfortable, he would lower the boom on them just so they knew who was in charge.
Covering him was a bit like defusing a bomb.
Despite his portrayal in the media as a steroid-enhanced ogre, The Asterisk wasn’t a bad guy. He was, however, strange, paranoid and incredibly self-absorbed. It wasn’t so much that he was purposely rude to people as he was so caught up in his own life that he didn’t notice others. He also was such a creature of routine – he stored his bats in a humidor, weighed them with a postal scale before each game (rejecting those that were a fraction of an ounce off), ate only wild Alaskan salmon (no Atlantic or farm-raised) on game days and only range-free chicken on off-days – that anything that threatened his routine was viewed as an attack. Thus, he considered reporters as the enemy when they pestered him with questions before batting practice while he preferred to be preparing for the game by listening to movie soundtracks at ear-shattering decibels and giving himself an eye test (he was so obsessed with his vision that he never watched TV on screens smaller than 42 inches out of fear of eye strain, and movies in dark theaters were absolutely out).
In short, the reporters were a constant source of tension.
But as long as the clubhouse was open the reporters had to stand vigil just in case The Asterisk spoke. Never had so many reporters devoted so many hours for so little words of copy. Some days they didn't even bother asking him a question, simply assuming from his weeks of “Get out of my way’’ that he wasn’t going to talk that day either. This amused The Asterisk and made him wonder if the reporters assigned to the White House were any different. He doubted it.
So Steve was content to be in the photographer’s well and not dealing with that circus. After he took several dozen shots of Wal-Mart, he returned to searching the stands with his 400mm lens for hot chicks among the fans. He had just gotten a great shot of a girl in an Asterisk jersey – why is it, he wondered, that guys in replica jerseys looked like slobs while girls looked incredibly hot? – when he saw her: The woman he had seen briefly in the airport security line on his flight to Los Angeles.
She was standing by herself in section 121, She had a baseball cap pulled down tightly to cover her blonde hair and obscure her face, but Steve had taken enough photographs of the cheerleaders at basketball and football games that he recognized her instantly/
It was Lacey V. Murrow-Bridge, the missing cheerleader whose mysterious disappearance from Band Camp at Devil Lake had captured the nation’s attention and launched a thousand milk cartons.
# # #
In the days before MyWeb and nearly instantaneous, universal spread of videos via the site, Jenn probably would have been quietly fired for her outrageous actions on the field. But within hours of the game, multiple videos of Jenn’s nut-out were already on the web, and by the following afternoon, more than 500,000 people had seen her tear off her Owl costume, dance on the field, steal all three bases and then chop down the foul pole with an axe. This not only saved her job – the cold, calculating wood products corporation that owned the Timber Barons was shrewd enough to anticipate the blowback that would result if it fired the suddenly famous (and popular) mascot – it turned her into a celebrity overnight.
Both the early morning and the late-night talk shows battled for her appearance. Jenn, never one for early risings, chose to go the late-night route and was thrilled to be flown first-class to Los Angeles for the taping. She would have enjoyed the experience a lot more, however, had the team allowed her to appear without her costume. Instead, she not only was required to keep the headpiece on at all times, she wasn’t allowed to speak either. This was due to the bizarre policy that showing her face and talking would ruin the illusion for children who might think she was really a large owl. As if any child watching TV at midnight believed that owls were actually five and a half feet tall, walked around on their legs and wore giant baseball jerseys. The company’s lawyers also refused to let her be identified as anything other than Woody the Checkered Owl of the Lumberview Timber Barons. This was so the company could replace her easily should she be foolish enough to ask for a raise.
The restrictions made for an awkward interview. The host asked yes/no questions and Jenn nodded or shook her head accordingly.
“Is it hard meeting other owls when you’re on the endangered species list?’’
Jenn nodded/
“Is it true you’re dating the Chicken?’’
Jenn shook her head.
“What about the Rally Monkey?’’
Jenn shook her head.
After five minutes of such hilarity the host thanked her for visiting, and then cut to a videotape of him asking random people on the street whether Canada should be the 51st state. (Three said yes, two said no, and four thought it already was a state.)
Jenn left the studio and got into a limo that took her to the stadium so she could throw out the ceremonial first pitch before that night’s game. This posed a considerable challenge because her owl costume was so restrictive she couldn’t make a throwing motion with her arm/wing. She simply stood on the mound with the ball in her hand/wing until the catcher came jogging out to take it from her.
The team gave her a seat between the dugout and the photographers well on the first base line. She was pleasantly surprised to see Steve taking pictures, though she vaguely remembered that he was interning with a New York newspaper.
“You here for The Asterisk?’’ she asked him as the team took the field for the start of the game.
“Yeah,’’ Steve replied. He leaned over to Jenn and whispered. “But I’ve got a bigger story right now. Don’t tell anyone but Lacey V. Murrow-Bridge is here.’’
“You mean she’s alive?’’ Jenn asked with relief. “I’m not gonna lie to you -- I thought for sure she was dead and buried in the woods. Thank God she’s all right.’’ Jenn began searching the stands behind her. “Where is she?’’
“In a box seat behind third base,’’ Steve said. He didn’t point, out of fear that his competitors might see the cheerleader. “Look just to the left of the base. About four rows from the field. See her?’’
“No. What’s she wearing.’’
“A Los Angeles cap and a blue t-shirt.’’
Jenn looked but she still couldn’t spot the cheerleader. She did recognize one person, however, and she felt a chill run down her spine.
Sitting a few rows from the dugout was Gray Sharbor. And the general manager was staring directly at The Asterisk.
Next: Play Ball!
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