Memoirs of Ahab Cloud, Volume 1

Certainly the noxious mixture of over-the-counter ephedrine, deli coffee, and the mystical writings of St. John of the Cross had not a little to do with Ahab Cloud’s latest personal imperative: you must give yourself to God. And so it was. Since scrawling the command on a napkin in the Moonlight Inn, Ahab had not eaten, and had barely slept.

Any minute now, he thought, striding reverently toward the baseball field behind Whisper’s one and only elementary school. I’m close.

Ahab was on the third day of his first true fast and he fully expected his personal mystical vision to arrive at any moment, thus setting the course for his new life. He would begin again, then, with purpose. He would put an end to the fucking around he was famous for.

He thought about St. John of the Cross and smiled. St. John with the bald dome, the mountain-piercing mind, the savage grip on the cross. Ahab with the hair in his eyes, a mind that couldn’t pierce swiss cheese, the savage grip on an almost genetic predisposition for failure. They were in cahoots. “I too have gone out unseen,” Ahab half-mumbled, “my house being now all stilled. . . with no other light or guide.” Ahab set himself down on the bleachers behind home plate, and waited.

He was attached and attracted to baseball diamonds in general because of their symmetry. No matter how life varied, the baseball diamond stood still, a perfect geometrical configuration within which any number of minor miracles might occur. And as the first baseman for the 1983 – 1986 Whisper Cardinals, Ahab had personally been involved in many on this particular field.

It didn’t take much for his half starved and sleepless brain to transport him to better days. He felt the bat in his hands. Louisville Slugger, 33 ounces, perfect grip, Big Roger Jankowski on the mound, the score tied at two, two outs, in the last inning of the little league championships: the setting of every kid’s dreams. Ahab didn’t jack one out of the park—Kid Holiday, as he was called then, wasn’t a power hitter but what was known as a seeing-eye hitter. This meant he could always find a way to get the bat on the ball. If the pitch was over his head, in the dirt, slow, wobbling, a greaser, a spinner, a curler—it didn’t matter. Ahab struck out once that year.

And here’s the pitch, a high, hard one, rolling in slow and soft in the Kid’s wide eyes. He pulled the bat over his shoulder—more of a chop than a swing—and the tinny bing of aluminum on hardball set the field in motion. The big Pollack reacted, but the Kid’s hit roped through his arms like they were field goal posts, giving Frankie Firkin, who was all legs, just the time he needed to tap dance across home plate with the winning run contained in his body in much the same way the Lord is said to be contained in the blessed Eucharist. Ahab rounded first base and headed for an endless summer. Country Cone, the team’s sponsor, gave him free ice cream for a month. In return he ate every ice cream sandwich they had in the enormous walk-in freezer and didn’t gain a pound.

Just then a quiet roar lifted Ahab from his backward dream. Was it. . . Could it be? He raised his head slightly, squinted his eyes, and surveyed the field. He didn’t notice the scattered coke cans, the dirty napkins, the auto section of the Whisper Times. He didn’t notice the garbage can that hadn’t been emptied, or the busted catcher’s mitt flung behind the backstop. What, exactly, he noticed is hard to pinpoint. At the top of the hill, leading down to the field, a million shafts of light seemed to shoot toward Ahab. Either that, or the whole world was bursting into dandelions, bells, wild stars, the whole show. All the mystical texts that Ahab had been reading, all of Blake, Rumi, St. Theresa of Avilla, clicked and melded. Phrases, dashes, moments of insight, the very places he had read certain passages, the favored snacks: spellbound, hanging, birthed. The large wave of light, the thousand, thousand radiating shafts of color, the Hallelujah chorus. He prepared, knowing only that his mind would be pierced with a knowledge that would prove transformative, too big for the man he was before this wonderful bequest.

Or so he thought, mumbling as he was, the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, memorized specifically for the occasion: "Moreover, something is or seems. . . That touches me with mystic gleams. . ."

This probably made Ms. Heinrech nervous. In fact, it is possible to be quite specific about the matter—she was scared shitless at the sight of Ahab, but she couldn’t show it.

“Sir!” she shrieked, assuming instant authority. “You will leave these grounds immediately. . . or be taken by force to the nearest police stations!” This was certainly no angel, no mystic courier. This was. . . an old woman who had obviously forgotten how to apply makeup. Ahab noted too much darkness under the eyes, a flaking orangeness about the cheeks, lips like rattlesnake skins, hair like. . .

“Sir, it’s playtime. You simply cannot sit here! You must not!” A crowd of schoolchildren gathered behind Ms. Heinrich, Whisper Elementary’s commitment to the past. A fetching little girl stepped forward. She was wearing a white, summery dress, and for some odd reason, a tiara. “Are you a bum?”

Ahab was confused. He looked at the crowd through one eye, like a drunk trying to slide a dollar into a cigarette machine. “Bum?” His voice sounded alien to him. All mystical inclinations had left his body. He could only think of the advice of his friend, Wilson P. Gourmet, doled out, for sure, during an extended happy hour at the Moonlight Inn. According to Wilson, there was only one way to deal with situations that seemed excessively frightful or potentially hazardous—RUN!

Ahab leapt from his seat and burst down the third base line, touched the bag with his right foot, then shot left. He was halfway up the hill when one of the children shouted, “GET HIM!” Ms. Heinrich blew her whistle frantically as the children broke for Ahab, who turned just in time to see a crowd of children nearly upon him, and a blue-haired lady slamming down her clipboard. He hurled himself over the fence, knocking his ribs and tearing his pants. This was one of the greatest moments in many of those children’s lives—for the rest of their lives. A spontaneous chorus erupted, as if to mark the occasion: I see London, I see France, I see the buh-hum’s underpants.

It was true. The entire third grade class at Whisper Elementary could most definitely see Ahab’s underpants. He picked himself up off the ground and, while holding things together as best he could, hobbled away from the children and their maniacal glee.

He would not give himself to God, Ahab thought. Not today. After a few repairs, he would give himself, instead, to Molly Molony, the waitress at the Sun Up Diner, and a Western with a double side of bacon.

Relevant Quotes from Nat. West

Yet, despite his appearance, he was really a very complicated young man with a whole set of personalities, one inside the other like a nest of Chinese boxes. (22)

The dwarf hunched his shoulders as though he were going to pull a gun or throw a punch. (30)

If you threw yourself on her it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. (34)

Love is like a vending machine, eh? Not bad? (40)

He was like one of Picasso’s great sterile athletes, who brood hopelessly on pink sand, staring at veined marble waves. (56)

Homer’s feelings were so intense that his head bobbed stiffly on his neck like that of a toy Chinese dragon. (59)

But whether he was happy or not it is hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither. (67)

She was taut and vibrant. She was as shiny as a new spoon. (73)

To hold them [his hands] still, he clasped them together. Their fingers twined like a tangle of thighs in miniature. (84)

But in Homer’s case it would be like dropping a spark in a barn full of hay. (84)

His thoughts frightened him and he bolted into the house, hoping to leave them behind like a hat. (84)

The sensation he felt was like that he got from holding an egg in his hand. Not that she was fragile or even seemed fragile. It wasn’t that. It was her completeness, her egg-like self-sufficiency, that made him want to crush her. (91-92)

The only explanation for this contrast is that she is enjoying the release that wild flight gives in much the same way that a game bird must when, after hiding for several tense minutes, it bursts from cover in complete, unthinking panic. (93)

He looked like the interlocutor in a minstrel show. (118)

That was because her beauty was structural like a tree’s, not a quality of her mind or heart. (120)

He shouted at her like a Y.M.C.A. lecturer on sex hygiene. (120)

He fooled himself into believing this with an image, as though a man were a piece of iron to be heated and then straightened with hammers blows. (133)

The sun is a joke. (192)

She was like a cork. (186)

Were all prophets of doom and destruction such happy men?