I Would Rather Be Me

(June 2020)

I admit I wonder if I got the wrong Charlie Cooper. I probably missed. The odds, after all of me grabbing the right one, the one who rightfully belongs here on this universe are 11-to-1 against, and that’s assuming that the “real” Charlie Cooper was actually in the lab. I have to assume he was in there, though. Don-o was the divining rod that opened this particular gate. He was keyed to one of the Charlie Coopers who had been here, anyway, and he took us right to the center of a Charlie Cooper hive.

Still, those are slim odds, no matter how you cut it.

And the fact is that they’re going to send this guy to prison for a long time, all because I grabbed him by the collar while he was sniveling his time away. Of course, the alternative was to be in the room when the bomb went off in the other universe. On the whole, I’m not sure which Charlie Cooper I would rather be.

None, I guess.

In the final study Charlie Cooper was just a flunky for people a lot more powerful than he was. Maybe that’s fun for awhile, but I can’t see that the end game ever really works out well for folks who live like that. I would rather be DK, with his steady job and his bad leg, or Yuni with his new job as a baseball teacher in a school up in the Toyama prefecture. Or I would rather be Don-o down in Mexico, drinking tequila and watching the game as it’s played on hard-packed dirt by kids wearing cut-off pants and baseball shoes with half the cleats missing.

Or I guess I would rather be me–ass that I am.

Or, make that “Recovering Ass.”

Messing up with Mezzy was my fault. I own it. But the game of life is for the resilient, and as long as you got fans, you got game.

I’m thinking of all this because I received a package in the mail today.

It came in the form of a brown box that was addressed from Yuni and left on my porch by the delivery guy.

When I opened it, I found a bobble-head doll of Sadatake Sato in that god-awful Lupin Cliff Hanger uniform of yellow and pink and red, Sato’s big #40 painted in red on its back.

I set it down on my cruddy little coffee table in front of the television set where I’m going to watch my Warriors play later tonight. Little Sadatake’s head quivered on the stiff little spring that was his neck.

There was something else in there, too– a slip of something lodged against the side of the box.

I fish it out and see it’s a picture.

DK, and Yuni on one side of the table, leaning over toward Don-o and me on the other side, our arms looped casually around each other’s shoulders and our mouths open with big beer-y smiles.

I see Yuni’s written something on the backside of the picture, too, but this time it’s in Kanji, done in that stiff and precise form that speaks of concentration. I pull my phone out of my pocket and scan the scrawled lines.

“Casey and Don-o may save PEBA, but together we save baseball.”

I lean the photo against Sadatake Sato’s bat.

It looks good there.