IT'S ABOUT MUSAMA


BABES' GHOST


Zeus would tolerate no nonsense from any gods this game as he had the first few thousand after they discovered this thing playing itself out on Gaea's earth promising each and everyone of them that he would do a Prometheus on the miscreant who dared break his concentration but instead of one vulture eating his or her replenished liver once a day he - The Supreme Ruler who had beaned his father the mighty Cronus when he wasn't looking - would have Edgar Allan Poe's twenty-four hook-nosed birds eating a new liver every long tortuous hour.
He was so intent watching this contest between a young lefty who had a father like he who declared war on all sixteen year old males approaching manhood against a pitcher who was also destined to be ranked among the gods of the game - named Walter Johnson.
Even though Zeus agreed with Poseidon that the nickname Red Sox had no real meaning wishing instead they had taken the name Yankees, he nevertheless was going for the Beantowners for the sole reason their cocky youngster called "Babe" had captured his liking with all the moxie he displayed on and off the field.


"No bull! I don't want anyone playing with the pentagon guy's brain making him forget what's a strike and what's a ball. And Hermes I don't want you tripping runners because you bet against their team nor Athena, my aegis carrier, giving managers the idea to run and hit with the bases loaded like you did to Popeye!"


With no fooling around, the game was indeed a classic as Zeus watched closely the contest going on between pitcher and batter. He jumped excitedly whenever a high and tight fast ball was thrown knowing the next pitch, almost for sure, was going to be a curve that often had a batter falling backward out of his little box and sometimes out of his spikes.
He could see much of himself in this Babe; in the boy that would father the man he would become. His feats would follow him all the way to the house he would build in The Bronx where he would eat thirty hot-dogs while washing them down with ten golden beers speckled with partially chewed materials and then go out onto the field to hit prodigious home runs way over where his tomb stone would one day stand.


The game ended with only one run being scored, due to the "dead ball" , with the Babe hitting the sac-fly for the win.


Zeus hoped strongly that the earthlings would not make earth a dead ball and when he found out the Beantowners had sent his Babe to New York - he became an anti Boston fanatic vowing the Red Sox would never again win another world serious. It was Zeus who encouraged a bald man for the Cardinals to scamper home from first after lulling the defense into thinking such a thing could not be done. It was he who fashioned the great stretch drives between the Yankees and Red Sox and delighted when the Yankees beat them out and it was he who struck in the last half of the ninth inning when the Red Sox had all but defeated the Mets. He convinced the Boston manager not to put in an uninjured reserve first baseman for defensive purposes who just happened to have good use of both legs and it was he who had the two outs made and the third batter have two strikes on him before allowing him to hit a pop up with eyes to fall unmolested just beyond two outstretched gloves; made a base on balls happen by having the pitcher lose his control and an umpire forget what constituted a strike zone; a wild pitch that he made slip out of sweaty fingers to advance the runners into scoring position and then allowed the polluted sky to fall by having a little snaky grounder - that looked so harmless - slither its way through the legs of the first base man, who found it difficult to bend, and make its way to shallow right field just far enough to score the tying and winning runs!


Zeus didn't even have to show up the next day for the seventh game for the hex was sure to remain for he was the Zeus man and would never forget what "they" had done to The Babe .... END






Jerry Vilhotti graduated from the only college that won the NIT and NCAA basketball tournaments in the same year but more importantly than that - Jonas Salk who helped rid some of the world of polio graduated from the same NYC school. That I'm even more proud! I've been fortunate to have stories accepted by Dream International, Puck &Pluck, Hob Nob and many other literary magazines. I live in a simpler place in time among the Litchfield Hills with a beautiful wife who treats me well (often I wonder why) and we both helped in bringing into the world three sort of nice kids who I hope will be as lucky as I was in finding the partner I did long ago and far away just like the song!





DEVIOUS WAYS
By Jerry Vilhotti




"That park with winds that we call Aeolian Arrows falls on all heads but this green monster is a travesty!" yelled Zeus referring to the ballpark that invented the little league home run years before the high pressured league was begun for little children.
Indeed, the Boston Red Sox fig-limb carriers would have the most shots at the shortened fence over the duration of six months.


Zeus always went for the visiting team since he was still seething that the "Tea Drowners" had traded his favorite limb carrier the great Babe Thunderbolt.


One dazzling piece of revenge he displayed on them was the day he had Bucky hit a home run over the green monster to win the game and send the Yankees to the world Serious.


Zeus was fully aware that the jinx god "We Got It Made" was about to do his opposite maneuver to aid him for most if not all of the poor masochistic Beantown fans watching with contempt thought the game was all over and in their hip pockets with their wallets.


"But what about all those other parks that cheat too?" Euphrosyne said displeased that many good fans had been saddened by the big blast - not to mention all those ballplayers who had cried in disbelieve and anguish seeing their victory snatched by the jaws of defeat.


"Cheat? What do you mean, cheat?" Nike said feeling a little threatened that she was having to do with instilling in these particular humans the idea that any means to victory was justified. Oh, how she loved the deviousness of it all!


"Yes, I remember one day at the house that Thunderbolt built and all I was doing was betting on bunts - that is when the skill was still doable - whether the ball would stay fair or go foul and only after losing to Ares constantly with me always betting the ball would go foul but instead I noticed after eight rounds the first and third base lines had been banked up giving the Yankees a big advantage because they had three excellent bunters who ran like me!" Hermes said.


"There is something to that. Did you know some teams tell their ground crew people not to cut the infield grass so giving their wing-footed runners that little extra time to beat out grounders?" Poseidon said making all the Greek gods in their box seats high in the sky turn their attention to him.


"And what about teams who have mostly, I think they call them "single-hitters, and make their fences nearly out of sight so creating spacious areas in which their balls may fall safely and at the same time frustrate their opponents' four hundred and fifty foot drives to be caught on warning tracks?" Thalia said excitedly.


"Hey dudo, what about those teams loaded with sinister-handed pull hitters? They all have right field fences not much further than three hundred feet away!" Hephaestus said firing out his words in all directions.


"Hey who said life had to be fair? Who said that thing playing itself out on what once was virgin forest has to be fair too? It's only a game for Zeus sake!" Nike said afraid that if all these little hills were subtracted making for level playing fields for all would definitely affect her victories. Her precious sacred victories. ....


(C) copyright 2001 by Jerry Vilhotti. All rights reserved.




One Crazy Thing
By Jerry Vilhotti



One boring summer afternoon somewhere in the vicinity of heaven atop a great mountain
bored with the game of telling what the clouds resembled which was going on since the Persian Sun god was invented, one of the gods sniffing the aromas of hot-dogs, mustard, roasted peanuts and beer wafting up to them noticed beneath her feet a swath of Gaea's terrain was covered with a bunch of mere mortals running helter-skelter in uncoordinated movements with some going in an odd shaped circle while others were chasing a little white object that had been vaulted on its way by one giant of a man whose stature would give a New York team its nickname of "Giants" named Conners a future Hall of Famer with a wind beaten limb of a fig tree whose sole intent was to beat the little thing to death when not missing it. She shouted to all the others to see what she had discovered.


"Look at them jumping up and down and all about!" Athena Brighteyes said pointing vigorously.


"It's not war for no blood is being shed by the gallons.


Why not?" Ares said becoming fascinated by the clusters of mortals on the periphery doing brawls between the styrofoamcupholders and the waxpapermunchers but the gods would add many more twists and churns to this thing to make fanatics of the thing flabbergast at all the inexplicable things that could occur while the two sides were engaging each other in various ways.


"Oh Father Thunderbolt! Oh Thundercloud, why must he bring blood into everything?" the goddess of love questioned as her son began shooting arrows into some of those who were peering over the roof of the cave making them fall in love with all the sitting pretty women wearing large white brimmed hats.


"It's something like rounder," Hermes said recalling how some of the lesser gods had tried to introduce that entertainment to mortals coated in blue dye.


"It looks so crazy though! I go for the ones off the field hurling obscenities at the moundmortal," Prometheus said referring to those milling about inside a cave.


"Well I go for that one, that one, that one and that one dressed in blue playing footsie with the white line," Athena said pointing to the protector of the area a distance before the left and center pastures, the guardian of the right pasture, the mortal standing in a box a few feet away from the third sack doing weird movements engulfing nearly his whole body with his wild hand movements.


"But I go against that one out there!" she said and blew the ball out of the protector of the first sack's large misshapen hand. She hunched her shoulders in a feminine way as she giggled and clapped her hands softly. She thought she might enjoy this thing called ...







HOLY WINDS

By Jerry Vilhotti



Situated near a bay, across from an island where the souls of prisoners like the "BirdMan" once howled, beneath steep hills that plunged toward waters that were to become grave fields for seals and dolphins, in a deep depression that daily wrestled with air currents of great magnitudes of velocity - stood a ballpark where the game of baseball was played, by a team that left The Big Apple for the lure of more money on the west coast, from April to sometimes October.


During home stands the park was almost always filled to capacity by fanatics - despite threats of earthquakes - who watched the doings with children-like wonderment; never once realizing the stadium was home to the Greek god Aeolus, who was surrounded by lesser gods holding candle sticks up to his greatness, who delighted in making this "pastime" so anxious for many ballplayers and their watchers.


When he decided, he could make a pop up hover over second base for a couple of seconds before propelling the little white sphere against a fence to ricochet into an unsuspecting uniformed person's neck who was minding the pastures.


"I bet twenty drachmas this one will be caught by the short stopper mortal," said Hermes.


"And I'll wager it won't even be caught!" Zeus said.


"I say the protector of the first sack will!" screamed Athena.


"You're both on!" Hermes said putting down the gold as he looked down intently from their mountain perch.


They were entitled to have their fun for weren't they - the Greeks - the first to begin endowing humanity with dignity?


At the very beginning of the sound of the ball hitting a part of a fashioned tree trunk called a "bat" the thing appeared to be going out of the park so high and far it was smashed but then it began to come down to the protector of the second sack who had returned from a long journey to mid right field pasture and situated himself near the bag where he suspected the ball would land and just as he was about to pluck the ball out of Aeolus' mouth, it took another vehement bounce in the winds to allude the "big hand" completely and fall gently onto a patch of brown earth.


While all the Greek gods continued to watch this thing they discovered some time ago and delighted in manipulating the mortals below - paying them back for having the Dark Ages with all its ignorance eat away at their proud souls casting giant shadows upon it ignoring what the Greeks and Romans had worked so hard to sculpt - like having the blue-uniformed mortal behind the pentagon forget where the "steek" or "baw" zones were and all the other tics inherent in the actions, Aeolus kept on blowing out his lungs giving all the movements even more dimensions than the anonymous inventor of the game ever imagined.


"This is even better than watching little league home runs going over the green monster!" shouted Zeus.


After a half hour of this amusement, the gods began to watch the fans in the stands who kept blinking rapidly while shivering realizing that this was just the start of the first half of the first inning of the big inning ....




AEOLUS


Custodian of the four winds. A minor deity, he is the son of a king called Hippotes, and lived on one of the rocky Lipara islands, close to Sicily. In the caves on this island were imprisoned the winds, and Aeolos, directed by the higher gods, let out these winds as soft breezes, gales, or whatever the higher gods wished. Being visited by the Greek hero Odysseus, Aeolos received him favorably, and on the hero's departure presented Odysseus with a bag containing all the adverse winds, so that his friend might reach Ithaca with a fair wind. Odysseus did as Aeolos bid, but in sight of his homeland, having been untroubled by foul weather, he fell asleep and his men, curious, opened the bag, thus releasing all the fierce winds, which blew their ship far off course (Odyssey X, 2; Vigil I, 52).
AEOLUS






MORTALS PLAY

By Jerry Vilhotti



The jinx gods began watching "the thing" and began weaving their mysterious doings upon it: they were able to make all those losing to truly believe everything was lost and those winning to feel totally sure it was indeed over and to compulsively pack their tree limbs in large canvas bags ... the final out to be, "they" made hit a three bagger - after blowing his foul ball out of a large deformed hand and - made the next club-mortal trot down the first bag line giggling as he pointed at the mound-mortal whose control was made to vanish allowing his four vehement throws become "baws" and then convinced the full of tics mortal standing on his hill to groove one which was quickly hoisted over the scoreboard for a pentagon-run ....


Some of the other gods felt heaps of pity and some compassion for the mound-mortal who was standing with his head drooped thinking back to the batter on whom he had two strikes on before allowing him to hit a non-waste pitch for the triple.


Out from the cave came a chubby mortal with a gut that manifested the effects of a million bottles of beer - who began yelling at the blue uniformed mortal that one day all of them would be replaced by machines - and then he finally reached the hill and took the white thing away from the mound-mortal and sent him away; not allowing him to play anymore.


Pegasus was losing heavily on the contest of guessing whether the white pellet was going to be a "steek" or a "baw"; not realizing Ares was playing with the shouterouter's mind - making him forget where the strike zone was on every other pitch.


Pegasus suspected finally something was going Sicilian when Ares shouted why all the screaming watchers were not attacking the judge - like most mortals did in war.


At this very point was when Pegasus talked Zeus's brother Poseiden into flooding the field with water so washing all bets away to the ocean.


This was done but Zeus became so incensed that he began to bite the back of his hand to little purple indentations which resembled spike marks on a ground.


Nike screamed she had won fair and square and refused to give back her winnings and left for another mountain.
The uniformed mortals were all ready picking up their gear and shaking their heads in bewilderment for even the lights had died.


Feeling pity for them, Artemis produced a full moon to brighten patches of darkness.


"We shall do this again!" Zeus declared.


"Yes! Yes! Again and again and again-" Athena said but before she could go on for another twenty minutes, Zeus placed his hand over her mouth - making all the jinx gods laugh.


All the Greek gods agreed with the great Thunderbolt as they sat with clenched fists trying to think of more ways to make this crazy thing even more interesting and even more unpredictable as the jinx gods winked at one another and nodded vehemently behind the Greek gods' backs .... END



WHAT THE JINX GODS WROUGHT

A Tonepoem by Jerry Vilhotti



One Jinx god named "That'll Never Happen" waited for the moundmortal to begin his very meticulous stretch which took him many seconds to perform so careful he was not to make a mistake and after his two peeks at the standee on first sack, he was about to throw toward the clubmortal - when "TNH" did his vehement baseball like "tap" on his backside which made the moundperson not pause fully before releasing the little white pellet and this did get the pentagon judge to should out "Balk!"


At the completion of his Elvis Presley move the thrower did manage to release the ball toward the pentagon which the clubmortal promptly hit up into the air only to fall into a large grotesque hand the shape of a sharks jaws.


The judge between third and second sacks was calling the batter out while another in shallow right pasture was awarding the club-person first sack. The other judge who was playing footsie with the long white line confessed that he didn't know what the hell happened.


All this confusion was created by a Jinx god called "It's Always Perfect" a.k.a. as IAP.


The commissioner of "The thing once called rounders in a land where people painted their bodies blue creating the concept of castes was in a box seat being visited inside his brain by a vain Jinx god named "Ain't I Great".


His ruling when asked for input was so: the batter was allowed to go to first; however, if he had hit the ball safely, he could have chosen to keep the hit or go to the showers.


When the protesting manager with a gut hanging down to his ankles attesting to his having drunk nearly a million bottles of beer on minor league buses when a younger man said he thought the play should have been dead at the instant the balk was called and the runner should have been awarded second base.


He was promptly thrown out of the activities by the pentagon judge influenced by advice given to him by the Jinx god named by his parents: " It's Only Fair".


The commissioner excused himself and went for a few Babe beers and splendid Splinter hot dogs while the thing renamed baseball continued to play itself out.


Sitting above the Greek gods who said they had discovered the strange movements one boring afternoon as they were playing the game of naming what a cloud resembled were such other noteworthy Jinx gods such as: "We're the Greatest", "It's not about Money", "Trust Me", "Don't Worry bout It" and "You Think I would Lie" promised each other that they would come again and again to this thing to add their seasoning to it - if for no other reason than to bug the Greek gods who bragged that they had taken from the jaws of unpredictability - a world of logic and understanding.

(C) Jerry Vilhotti 2001.





GREAT BALLS OF FIRE

Helios was determined to teach all the colorful uniformed mere mortals who used him as an excuse a big lesson. Damn, he was even being blamed for errant throws to "middlemen" ,a k a relaymen, and once a secondpillowman
swore a ball went through his legs because of the glare coming off an escapee's bloody Cobsword spikes who was fleeing away from firstpillow.

Nonchalantly, he directed his chariot, pulled by two majestic white horses, named Fair and Just, to behind a white fluffy cloud.

Some of the other gods pleaded with Zeus that this petty revenge of Helios was going to affect this fine "thing" they discovered some time back
for after all were not the Greeks the first people to play games when they created the Olympic Doings? They never mentioned to the evil-tempered one about their playful tampering that was also changing the complexion of the
thing while attempting to win on their bets that ranged from tripping a clumsy runner who was about to dent the pentagon, forcing a ball out of a large grotesque hand to go over a fence for a Homer or having an old decrepit manager named "The Perfesser, who secretly wanted to keep the whole thing white like the little sphere and all-American with nice sounding last names - not like the funny ones that were entering this thing borrowed from
the English that they called "Blimey Rounders", be called a great manager though he had players - like three bender downer sphere catchers - on his bench who could have started with any other team in either league and make
the old funny talking geezer go to sleep inside the cave that looked out at the helter skelter action going on in pastures that once belonged to others but Zeus declined saying what was fair was fair was fair was fair; sounding
like the wealthy teams reaping in billions of profits while attempting to throw out of their "cosa nostra" the "riff-raff" teams that were losing money as the owners continued to pay exorbitant salaries to hitters who never bothered to learn the art of hitting to the opposite field only averaging a two thirty batting figure just being successful less than three out of ten times to garner a hit and tic-filled moundpersons with earned run averages of above eight that made the denting of the plate happen in
bunches. These players made ten times more money than all the fans put together who came all season long while the powers that be unwittingly made it unaffordable for many families (like kids and parents) to attend what with all the high prices of eats, drinks and sundry other little glittering enticements for childrens' eyes not to mention older fanatics who remained young at heart - at a stadium often built with tax payer money at very little cost to the cigar puffing owners.

Everyone knew that when the word fair was being repeated it meant the opposite was about to occur.
The gods grimaced making sure Zeus, the beaner of his father Cronus, did not see them.
When a clubperson hit the little white sphere high up into the sky, Helios was prepared to seize the opportunity ready to urge his horses forward and in an instant he was deep inside the eyes of a whining blasphemer who began a ducking afraid he was about to get mortally injured.
All toll, Helios did his feat several times charging out in all his righteousness; dressed in a garment of gold gleaming with ivory and sparkling with flashing jewels in changing brilliance - to gouge eyes with searing glare forcing the protectors of the pastures to despair at the impending certainty of the sphere becoming a hit.
Once Helios had a judge in dark clothing, which attracted his heat making the poor person sweat profusely, say he lost the "steek zone" because of the sun. After the five sided thing was dented out of shape, the game
was called due to brightness.
All this made for sunglasses to be invented to the dismay of some of the Greek gods but they knew they wouldn't always work. In truth, it was not hard for them to invade a mind and make it forget to take the strange
looking things out when guarding pastures and ground between pillows of barley and rye.
It was even suggested these blindings made most games be played at night! At least that's what the owners began to say and they insisted it wasn't about making more money. It wasn't about more money! It wasn't
about more money! END

(C) Jerry Vilhotti 2001