"When You're a God..."

"Good Evenin, Mitch. How's she going today?" Monk O'Bannion greeted one of his Happy Hour regulars from behind the bar as the slender,jet-black haired sporting goods salesman came through the door. By the time Mitch found himself an empty barstool, Monk would have a couple bottles of beer placed in front of him.

"I'm surviving, Monk," Mitch answered after pausing a moment to pour part of his first beer into the glass that he held in his left hand and
sloped toward the bottle. Monk didn't acknowledge the response. He'd already turned to serve Vance Bolton, a heavy equipment operator, greeting him with the same standard "How's she goin?" query. MONK'S MENAGERIE was a popular spot in the late afternoon in the nineteen-eighties; a good place to unwind a bit after a full-day's work.

"Monk," was short for "Monkey," bartender
O'Bannion's nickname from back when he pitched for the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in 1938-39. No one in this generation of Happy Hour regulars knew him by any other name. In fact, Vance Bolton suggested once that "Monkey" was the old bartenders baptised name because he was
born "as goddamned ugly as a chimp."

The big-eared, ape-faced, white haired bartender never denied it. "If I'd reached the majors," he once admitted wryly, "I would've replaced Don Mossi as the pitcher in the All-Ugly Hall of Fame." Yeah, compared to Monk, Yogi Berra was Clark Gable to Warren Spahn's Charlton Heston.

Old Monk's failure to reach the major leagues didn't sour him on baseball or leave him a bitter, defeated man. On the contrary, he had over the years turned the MENAGERIE into a shrine to the game. It was as if he was reaching back toward the Spring of his youth when he had been the happiest he'd been in his lifeand trying to recapture it,
chasing after it like a youngster pursuing the bright orange fascination of a Monarch butterfly.

There was a trophy case against the west wall of the seating area. Besides the obligatory collection of bar league softball and bowling
trophies, it housed the mementos of Monk's short-lived pitching career. Those relics commanded as much veneration as the bones of a Saint in a
European cathedral. There was Monk's glove, his old Miller uniform, a game-used bat autographed by Harmon Killebrew, a baseball autographed by Bob Feller, a picture of Monk shaking hands with a young Hubert Humphrey, and a ball signed by Ted Williams, as well as a picture of that Boston diety, inscribed "Sorry about that, Monk...Ted
Williams."

The Williams memorabilia demanded center stage in the display case. The MENAGERIE'S increasing collection of trophies could encroach upon the
space alloted to Monk's items, the Feller ball or the Killebrew bat, but God help the barmaid whose placement of a new plaque or trophy obscured the Williams mementos.

Even "the Hump" could be shoved aside. "I'm no goddamned hippie," Monk would say, "but I lost a lot of respect for old Hubert when I saw him
hugging Mayor Daley at the podium in Chicago in 68 while his cops were out there beating the shit out of the kids who were protesting the war. Those kids had every right to be out there demonstrating. I know a sellout when I see one, and the Hump, he sold out that day, major
league."

When Monk talked of Ted Williams, though, he spoke in reverential terms. Mitch knew the litany, which always went something like this....

"Yeah," Monk would begin, "I faced him during batting practice when he came up with the Millers. It was during an intra-squad game. Our team was leading 5-2 in the bottom of the ninth, but the bases were loaded,so our manager, Donny Bush, called me in from the bullpen. This young kid came up to pinch-hit for Lemmy Lemasters. Lemmy was slick with a glove, but he couldn't hit worth a shit. He never made it to the big leagues either. Anyway, I'd seen this Williams kid hit in the batting cage a few times, and he looked pretty good, but I figured I had experience going for me, you know."

Old Monk would always smile as he would recollect the scene in his mind before he'd begin to recount it.

"Well anyway," Monk would continue,"I worked the count to two and two on this kid. I figured that I had a pitch to play with, so I threw him a change-up. It was a FINE pitch. I had a helluva change at that time, you know. That Williams kid, he got around on it and that goddamned ball shot from his bat like a lightning bolt. He must have driven it
over five hundred feet."

About this time in his soliloquy old Monk would pause and shake his head, still marvelling at the titanic power of the blast.

"That was it for my baseball career," he would shrug. Our manager figured that anyone who would serve up a mammoth shot like that wasn't major league material. I was cut from the team the next day."

Here it would come, Mitch thought. He'd heard old Monk recite his devotions often enough to be able to recite them by heart as well. Monk's soliloquy would now degenerate to hero-worship.

"Yeah," Monk would say. "Ted Williams took me out of the ballpark. Literally. I'm not bitter though. It took the best in the game to get the best of me. He took 521 major leaguers over the fence as well, so I can't feel too bad."

About this time Monk would lean back against the beer cooler and get a reflective, worshipful look on homely face.

"He was the greatest hitter ever," Monk would say firmly. "The God of the game. You've got to realize that he lost five of his best years to
the service. When he went off to fight in World War II he had just won the Triple Crown. When he got called to Korea he'd just finished a year in which he batted .388 and hit 38 home runs. Figure five lost years would equal 200 more homers and at least a thousand more hits. And that's not even figuring in the designated hitter rule, which wasn't around when he played. With those kind of stats no one should deny that he was the greatest hitter who ever played the game. God, he was
magnificent!"

Mitch could never understand Monk's attitude. If Williams had denied him a chance to fufill his dream, he would have nursed an implaccable hatred for the man. Monk's idolization of Williams reminded Mitch of the faith of a Latin American peasant, a peon who would always attribute his social standing, poverty and even natural disasters that affected him to "God's Will," but whom you'd still see on Sundays kneeling in rapt devotion in church.

Yeah, if by this time Monk hadn't been interrupted by a customer, he would finish up with a flourish.

"I saw Ted at a banquet twenty years later," he would say. "When I introduced myself, that Sonuvabitch remembered the stadium, the count
and even the pitch that he'd hit off me. God, it was almost supernatural."

Yes, Mitch mused. If Monk O'Bannion worshipped anyone, it was the batter that knocked him out of baseball. He shrugged. Some guys were just tough to figure out.

Mitch waited for a lull in Monk's activity. Finally, as the old manmleaned back against the cooler to relax a bit, Mitch saw his opening.

"Hey Monk. Did you hear who was voted into the Hall of Fame today?"

Monk turned and grunted. "Yeah, I heard. I wouldn't have voted for him, though."

"Why not?" asked Vance Bolton, looking at the bartender quizzically. "Shouldn't winning over 300 games give a guy almost an automatic entry?"

"I met him once," Monk growled as he drew a draft for another customer. "He's an arrogant
asshole."

"Where'd you meet him?" wondered Mitch.

"One of the guys that I used to hunt with lined him up to do a charity gig down in Dubuque." Monk paused to ransack through his memory a bit. "It was the Kiwanis Club or something like that."

"Yeah," Vance demanded. "So why does that make him an asshole?"

"From what I heard later," Monk explained as he bent down to get a bottle of that "non-alcoholic crap" from one of the floor coolers, "he'd spent the day huntin pheasant and boozin. Time he got to the banquet he was half-shitfaced. He wouldn't even take the time to sign autographs. Not even for the kids. He said that he was 'too goddamned
tired.'"

"So," Mitch said, goading him a bit. "Your hero Teddy Ballgame wasn't much when it came to fan relations either."

The bartender glared at Mitch as though he's just uttered a blasphemy. "That's a load of crap," he retorted. "Some reporters will write anything just to file a story. Ted was just so focused on the game, that's all."

"Did Williams sign autographs?" Vance Bolton
asked."

"I remember reading," Monk said, "where once after a loss to the Yankees the Sox were pissed off. They wanted nothing more than to put New York City and its asshole fans behind them. There was a young boy, though, waiting by the team bus with his autograph book. Most of the ballplayers had shoved their way past him and onto the bus, but Ted, he noticed the discouraged look on the kid's face. He grabbed the autograph book and stormed onto the bus with it. After he got all of his
teammates to sign it, he leaned out of the door of the bus and tossed the book to the astonished young boy, dismissing him with a curt "here you go kid, now beat it."

"What the hell does that prove?" asked a guy near the end of the bar, "other than that he's a jerk, too."

"You don't know nothin about baseball," Monk growled, dismissing the man contemptuously. "At least he got the kid some autographs."

"I heard that he wouldn't even tip his hat to the fans after his final game," Mitch volunteered.

Monk looked over at the life-sized cardboard icon of his hero that occupied part of the wall next to the jukebox. "He shouldn't have been expected to," he finally responded. "It was enough of an honor for us just to have been able to watch him play the game."

"Yeah, I hear what you're saying," Vance Bolton said sarcastically, holding his beer bottle sideways to signal that he needed a refill.
"When you can hit over .400 and whallop over 500 home runs you can get away with being an asshole."

"You don't understand anything," the old bartender bellowed defensively. "Trying to talk baseball with you guys is like trying to talk politics with that row of liquor bottles along the mirror there."
Monk paused to catch his breath as his memories drifted back to the Miller's home field, then to Fenway, then to the House that Ruth built.

"You had to have seen him play," Monk finally said. It was like watching a God when he'd stride up to the plate."

"An arrogant God, then" Mitch reminded him smugly, feeling that he'd gotten the better of the
argument.

"Well," Monk finally said softly, as his gaze moved from the bantering guys who were trying to get his goat to the trophy case where Ted's
personal message to him was enshrined. "When you're a God, you've got the right to be arrogant."