by Julián Martinez
With a baseball bat propping the porch door open, that dog just runs back and forth! Of course I’ve been hoping for Girls Galore to be ours tonight but haven’t gotten a text from my Mexican flesh connect, Arturo the Vulture. We call him that ‘cause, well, just look at him— the books it looks like he carries on his back, invisibly in my mind, is a golden opportunity for nicknamage.
I prepare statements for a PR company that gets into hot water a lot. We do bad PR, we do PR for bad companies. Et Cetera Et Cetera is our name. I didn’t come up with it.
I did, however, motivate my boss to not step down by threatening to kill him at a Knicks-Bulls game. I’ll tell you more once the dog leaves. He takes these things very personally— you can already see it in his tail, how it stopped wagging. That’s ‘cause he knows he’s the subject of our talking. Poor Piper. Knows not why the big blue world is so harsh, never will, but it really affects the guy. Anyway, my boss came here after the game when I pretended to put emphasis on my threats but accidentally actually, which got mixed together with what he said he’d been wanting to do with me. So that drunkenly involved slathering peanut butter on my boss’s balls, followed by smacking my own dog in the balls to get him to bite my boss’s off.
Now my boss won’t leave the company because I’ve got too much against him and won’t let him, which is how I operate from the shadows. Jealousy’s a hell of a drug, my friend, and your coworkers will always be jealous of the relationships you once had with your superiors. Still have. Just from the outside, in my case.
Speaking of outside, there he goes! I guess I meant to stop talking but got carried away. Hope he comes back. I miss him like hell every time he runs away. But he comes back! Probably ‘cause he turns a streetcorner and runs into Arturo’s brutal face. Remember that dog that went, “Obama! Obama!” on the news? My dog Piper, he points his snout up and howls, “Arturo! Arturo! Arturo!”
-
With a baseball bat up your ass, you can’t say much more than, “thank you GOD!” and most times barely that.
-
With a baseball bat he’d beat the life out of his dogs, went the report on the news. He was wearing an Obama mask. He’d come home from the body shop on his lunch break.
-
With a baseball bat that belonged to Bud Smith, I drive to Jersey in search of Bud Smith. The writer who shares a name with the player. He has a massive book deal, I don’t. He got his break in the world of construction. I haven’t, how my stepfather hoped. My mother packed me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for my road trip out East. She wished she could come with but she has to work all week. I haven’t told her I’d gotten fired. I’ve been wired all layoff long on caffeine, amphetamines, and these things called Dog Treats. I feel like I’m in a Bud Smith story.
-
I’m lit like Bic and forgot to say with a baseball bat so with a baseball bat I hit my head with a loud THDUNK and stick my tongue out as my eyes cross START OVER
With a baseball bat behind the guy at the register, I stare at these Bics, inconspicuous as I can be, and consider how fast I should pull my gun on him. Picturing the red running down the shoulders of his purple polo, brown hair falling down, then the body after. Reaching over and grabbing whatever cash will fit in my grip. I’m staring at the assortment of bubblegums. Someone’s revving up a motorcycle and revving and revving and revving and not taking off. The moon is a tangerine that speaks the language of vampires. The killer of vampires alights it, which is to say that language contains the nothingness that dooms us all. I am holding up the line instead of the store, demanding with my gun, in the most confident voice I’ve ever spoken, to get everyone to empty their pockets. I’ve got a skullful of baseball bat. I’m watching this from above. I am the moon, watching the tangerine of night’s fluorescence bathe these vampires in nothingness.
-
WITH A BASEBALL BAT PEANUT BUTTER JELLY PEANUT BUTTER JELLY PEANUT BUTTER JELLY WITH A BASEBALL BAT PEANUT BUTTER JELLY PEANUT BUTTER JELLY
-
With a baseball bat I pose in the bedroom mirror. Biceps out, abs out. Bat behind my neck. It’s not as comfortable as the models make it look. I present my bad behavior— the vanity of aimless days— to my dog, Piper. Piper pants at my feet. My pants are also at my feet. She has peanut butter on her lips. I am blowing kisses to my reflection’s lips, swollen purple, wounded with discharge. I’m a bad motherfucker. I’m a motherfucking devil on Earth and I’m so so so so sad. Yesterday I wore a banana suit to an audition for a commercial and got beat in the street for it. Today I wear my enemy’s flesh. Tomorrow I mean. Today I wear nothing but my fantasies.
-
With a baseball bat-sized blunt I send off my best bud to college. We’re on his parents’ back porch, night sky purplish like a portent and it’s fucking with me, but this blunt is bullying me so that’s likely why. It’s asking for my lunch money, it’s so fat and scary. We’ve barely smoked a sixth of it and I’m higher than a seventeen-year-old has any right to be. We hold it with two pairs of hands. Have no other capacity than for lying on the couch in unbearable silence and I haven’t seen him in years since or gotten a chance to apologize to him or for him to apologize to me for all the shit we did to each other’s hearts and souls when cruelty and silence were how we learned adulthood should be found. This really happens. It’s a shitty night. The sky really is a purple-black denseness every time I remember.
-
With a baseball bat at your cleats, you sprint for first base, then second, then third. Home! Everyone is screaming your name, to get you to chill and stop. It was a ball call. You didn’t even hit. You didn’t even swing. You didn’t even wipe the peanut butter from your fingers when you jumped from the stands onto the field and got running. You weren’t the one who tripped on the bat after you barrelled into Cardinals player Bud Smith. Bud, he’s still on the ground. It’s not looking good for him but you are running and dancing mid-run like the man in a banana suit you are. You’re almost home. Bud’s up and backing away.
-
With a baseball bat covered in his closet, Mr. Lozeng (“Legs”) has taken control of the American pastime. This wooden bat is a rune of universal soul that controls the lifeforce of the sport. In the hands of the righteous and integrous, it bestows goodwill upon the green world. In the hands of Legs Lozeng… just wait. We haven’t seen what happens yet. We’re in the closet, too. Legs’ mom put us here many, many years ago. We, the box of toys, tried to turn his heart from a wormed, pitiful thing into a healthier version of itself. It was very clear when we started our stewardship of his childhood innocence. He would either turn out to be the Second Coming or the Antichrist. The Big Guy, He had us in a huddle like a baseball team ‘cause He treats all of life like a sports metaphor. You ever see Bull Durham? Susan Sarandon in that movie, closest approximation. To what God is actually like. He talks just like that. Anyway, He told us it was on us to heal the toxins His son’s heart had been fed in the foulest home a child can grow up in. Alcohol. Drug abuse. Prostitution. Petty crime. Not-so-pretty crime. You name it. It was our task— oh fuck here comes the kid. Fuck! Oh FUCK! GOD, HE’S GOT CRACK ON HIS BREATH AGAIN! FUCK! HE’S BEAUTIFUL! HE HAS THE VOICE OF AN ANGEL! HE’S JUST CRACKED THE UNIVERSAL BASEBALL BAT IN HALF LIKE A TOOTHPICK! IT’S BLEEDING LIKE A BODY!! HE’S LAUGHING LIKE THE VOID IN HIS SOUL IS FOREVER FILLED!!!!
-
With a baseball bat I’m banging hard against the glass back door to Zac Smith’s home. CRACKED it! Somebody’s screaming, dogs are barking, I’m getting so close. I’m watching from above with God and the Devil who whisper spells I can’t make out. Can’t feel the glass in my arms and groin and mouth as I storm inside, slipping, trudging through it in the kitchen where plastic dinos and worms and butterflies grin. I’m barking, coughing blood, hearing dogs in hiding somewhere. Listening now, God or the Devil bring me to my feet but don’t let me leave this kitchen. Frames of a family everywhere. I must sacrifice them, loved ones of someone I admire, to the God and Devil I am. An open-faced peanut butter jelly on the counter sits translucent pink in window light. Footsteps above, sirens and barking now. I bark back. The void inside is as big as outer space. The baseball bat is on the floor with the grinning faces of toys. The shards of glass grin like they’re starring in their own TV movie. The Sun is grinning like Teletubbies. God and the Devil tell me something’s wrong— Bud Smith, they meant! Not Zac. But this will be fine. My bleeding wounds grin and tremble like it’s a dance we’re doing, the kitchen’s dancing like one happy family as my soul grins its way out of me and dances along with God and the Devil and the circling void we all belong to is dancing around and within and I’m grinning ‘cause the blood in my mouth’s tasting like that sweet time between morning and afternoon child’s play.
****
Julián Martinez (he/him) is the son of Mexican and Cuban immigrants and is from Waukegan, IL. His work has appeared in HAD, hex literary, X-RAY and elsewhere. His debut collection of short fiction will be published next year by Future Tense Books.