Alright, here we go

Disclaimer: Remember, this contest is about writing 50,000 words in a month, and when you're focusing on quantity, the quality of the writing suffers. That's why they invented rewriting. Anyway, this is just setting up the main character and the setting. It is the very beginning of the first chapter and will probably end up vastly different after the rewrite. Word count after Day 1: 2130.

In the Big Inning

In the beginning, God created a cornfield in Iowa. Oh, it was a beautiful sight, a verdant patch of the glorious fruits of the Earth, fuel for that precious gift we call life. Those fruits were never harvested, however, for a guy named Ray mowed the fields down and built a playground for dead baseball players.

Casey O’Hagan loved that movie, made it a part of his religious thoughts, let it take over his imagination. Could he spend his afterlife in that cornfield playing baseball with the likes of Shoeless Joe, Roberto Clemente, and Josh Gibson? How could that not be Heaven? He envisioned Gibson sneaking out of the corn after watching the white boys play ball, and Shoeless Joe would call him over and say, “Hey Josh, suit up, we need you.” Then Babe Ruth would come to the plate, turn to Gibson, and say, “Sorry you never got to play in the Majors, Gibby. Man, you had one sweet swing.” And Josh replies, “Thanks man, but I have no regrets. I get to play ball with you guys for eternity. Not much more you can ask for.” “No, there ain’t nothing in the world I’d rather have,” Ruth replies.

Even with the horrors of Jim Crow, an idea Casey couldn’t fathom in his post-civil rights movement existence, baseball was ahead of the rest of the country in desegregating. Too late for Josh, though. Josh Gibson, the home run king of the world, died at age 36 just three months before integration. The “Black Babe Ruth” had an estimated nine hundred fifty homers in his career, at least 82 more than the next highest total, hit by Sadaharu Oh, the Japanese legend, who had 153 more dingers than Babe Ruth.

The clock on Casey’s office wall scolded him for daydreaming. There was work to be done – documents, spreadsheets, files, email correspondence, deadlines, and disheveled stacks of papers he cared nothing for, but he was a slave to a consumer driven world, one that became more expensive with each screaming tick of that devilish clock. He stood up, nearly tripped over a pile of books he’d never read, pulled the clock from the wall, and stuffed it into a drawer, which only muffled the ticking. He pretended not to hear it.

He looked around his office, the place where he spent one third of his life. It was a relative prison cell, only with a lunch hour and two weeks of paid freedom a year. He kept the office dark, with only a small table lamp and a desk light to give some sense of illumination to the room. A window would be nice, but he’d probably spend all day staring out it, daydreaming about baseball and beer and life. No, it was better to not be aware of beautiful days, to languish in the dark corner office, brooding and sulking about the misfortunes of labor and cursing Eve for eating the apple.

For comfort, he decorated his darkness with all things baseball – a cap for when he decided to spontaneously go to a game after work, a yellow baseball with a smiley face on it – a gift from his ex-girlfriend Anne, a Reds sundae helmet, a program from the last season when his team narrowly missed the playoffs, and a small poster of his favorite player – Ryan Freel, a guy who embodied the soul of the game.

The Cincinnati Reds, Casey’s team, had started it all, professionals when yankee meant a person living in Northeast United States. His team had won five World Series without a 200 million dollar payroll, including in 1990 when the team didn’t even have one superstar, let alone nine. Forget North Korea or Iran – the true axis of evil was George Steinbrenner, Joe Torre, and Alex Rodriguez.

He’d had enough of reality, of wars and politicians and human nature. He’d always been a big baseball fan, but he’d never immersed himself in it quite like he had since he’d been discharged from the Army. Baseball was his escape, medicine for his injured soul.

Five o’clock hit and then passed, yet he continued to stare at the document on his screen, the bad parts highlighted in bright pink, like flamingos and Pepto Bismal. Suddenly he shut his computer down and fled the office. Downstairs in the hotel next to his office was a bar that he frequented, a smoky lounge, cliché, either too quiet or too loud. Quiet today, good. CNN’s talking heads spit obnoxious words out the television in the corner, but none of the bar’s patrons was talking about trivialities, so it was bearable. During the season, baseball comes up on that screen, and Casey often watched the Reds there on road trips. Madison’s it was called. Must have been the owner’s name or something.

He looked around with scrutiny, noticing the scratches in the wooden tables and chairs for the first time. It gave the ritzy hotel a bit of character and originality, as most things around it seemed plastic and phony. He pretended not to notice the pictures of the televised war in the corner, and though he could look away, his ears didn’t have that option. Funny how you can turn off the other four senses, but your ears are always open, and no amount of la la las can completely drown out sound. The noises were what he remembered most about the war – the explosions, the ringing gunfire in the distance, the cries of fresh widows and orphans, the chilling sound of a dying body struggling for its last breath…Baseball! I hope the Reds can get a good shortstop next year, one with some range and some power. That clown we had this season has no business in a Major League uniform.

Breaking news turned all eight of the room’s eyes to the television screen. Cynicism captured Casey’s attention – was this real news or more sensationalism? Another child abducted? Another celebrity drunk driving? Another Osama videotape? Nope, real news – an Israeli raid on Ramallah, Hamas fights back with rockets, ten dead Israelis, twenty dead Palestinians. Is it really news? It seems routine these days. The word “news” is like “new.” Israelis and Arabs going at each other isn’t new. Neither are IEDs killing American soldiers or Iran threatening to wipe Israel from the map or American troops in foreign countries or Shiites blowing up Sunni mosques…Baseball!

Another Sam, please. Hard to believe baseball players used to fight in wars just like regular folks. Ted Williams was a hero. God knows what his numbers could have been like had he not missed five seasons, a Marine in both World War II and Korea. Today’s prima donnas can’t be bothered to carry their own luggage, let alone fight for their country. Williams was supposed to be a real asshole – was he like that before he went to war?

Casey turned his attention to the darkness looming outside the window, the dreadful result of the death of another season. He thought about how the suicide rate was up in the winter months – the absence of light is depressing, for sure. It made the off season all the worse. The cold, too, slinking through the pores to the bones, suffocating the soul. The chill was there outside the window next to the dark, waiting for Casey with the gift of another depressing evening, alone with his thoughts of baseball and his memories of the sounds of Hell.

As he walked to the small apartment he rented in the Over the Rhine district, he took in the fantastic architecture of the city. Cincinnati is a small town, not even in the category of a metropolis. To say 3 million people live in the Greater Cincy area was population spin, a marketing ploy and nothing more. The city seems to be perpetually stuck in the 1950s, he thought, with annual KKK rallies, a creationist museum, and a view that naked art is pornography. Whereas most cities across the US have witnessed urban renewal, downtown Cincinnati is a ghost town after dark. And darkness descends too early in winter months.

Casey’s great grandfather had moved to Cincy from New York to escape the plethora of “Irish need not apply” signs that peppered the Big Apple’s storefront windows, and that fact never left Casey, especially when he witnessed daily bouts of racism in the Queen City. At least, Casey blamed his cynicism – which bordered on misanthropy – on his great grandfather’s experiences, which were related to him by his grandfather, a man who passed his bitterness onto his son.

Trees shivered in November and then froze until February spring brought them back from the dead. Life was like the trees then, empty and shivering and ugly. This would be Casey’s second winter without Anne, a woman who had been his life for most of nine years, the woman who was supposed to be his wife, but no, baseball had gotten in the way of that. Actually, it was the war that changed him and destroyed the relationship, but they both blamed baseball because it allowed them to avoid reality.

It was a February spring when they met, that period of warmth that tricks you into thinking spring has arrived, only to punish you with icy misery a week later. Casey wondered if it was a uniquely Midwestern thing or if all of the world that suffered the misfortunes of winter was tortured with it.

They were juniors that year, sharing in the boredom of the worst class ever. When they signed up for the class, it was supposed to be the best class ever, but the cool professor had decided to quit and move to New Mexico to start a career in landscape photography. Apparently he had a spiritual calling to the area, a sentiment not incomprehensible to one who has visited the Mesaland. Unfortunately, his calling came two weeks before the semester began, and the school was forced to settle for the first replacement it could find. Tony Steinhoff was a PhD newby who had the personality of a dead giraffe, not exactly the type to grab attention for such a dry subject as the history of social thought.

Casey had a habit of making sarcastic and occasionally witty remarks when warranted to whomever was near him. Anne was sitting next to him when he made a remark about how Locke and Hobbes should be shoved down politician’s throats. It wasn’t meant to be funny; in fact, it wasn’t at all funny, but for some reason, Anne burst out laughing in the middle of class. Tony asked what was funny, she repeated it, and the whole class laughed, either because they found Anne’s humor in it or because they didn’t want to appear that they didn’t get it.

She asked Casey if he wanted to go for a beer after class, and he accepted, not telling her that he had a constitutional law class at that time. She was cute in a unique way. She wore no makeup, didn’t need to, and she didn’t dress like a slut, which is what most college girls did these days, and that’s what he liked about her – she was real. He hated phoniness in a person more than anything. Indeed, his first email address had been hcaulfield@netscape.com.

They didn’t have to use any of that phony small talk when they drank their beers at Mac and Joes, a dive bar on campus with sticky floors and pitchers of Guinness. Casey would give anything to have that dump again. And Anne.

Oh, she was angry when he told her he was joining the Army. It was beneath him she said before listening to the rest. They could live in Monterey, California, he said. He could pay back student loans, he said. He would get a $50,000 signing bonus, he said. Oh, she said.

They hadn’t even talked about living together after graduation, but she moved out to Monterey with him. He proposed to her when he got to his permanent duty station. She said yes. Two weeks later, he received orders to Iraq.

He was there for a year before he returned and was sent back six months later. The strain on their relationship was enough to make them both realize it was over, but they held on another year after his third tour. He got a job in Cincinnati, she reluctantly tagged along, he bought season tickets with his bonus money, she grew tired of going to games every night. It was the silence between them that made her stop going rather than a dislike for the game. He started drinking, he blew his money, he could only get a partial plan the next season, and she left him, blaming baseball.