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06.14.2002
Sosa. Death of my hope,
ice on my spine. My hate, my hell. So-sssssa: hissing between
my teeth like a serpent, rounding like a jeer, hissing again
and finally the blunt exhalation after a punch in the stomach.
So. Sa.
He was Sam, just Sam,
with the White Sox, weighing two hundred pounds and Dominican-thin.
He is Sammy in pinstripes. He was Samuel at stickball. But in
my nightmares he is always Sosa.
Did he have a precursor?
Oh yes, yes he did. As a matter of fact, there might have been
no Sosa at all had there not been, in Oakland greens and bay-borne
blues and dingy Sox grays, a steroid-stuffed gorilla the children
all called Canseco, his origins on some communistic island
not too far away from the flowery coast. And when? Dare I recall
the 1980s, when needles spat their bruting juices, in those summers
when boys became men and men became apes? You can always count
on a drug addict for a fancy home run trot.
Ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, exhibit number one is who the Cubs fans, the moronic,
drunken, cell-phone-addled yahoos cheered for. Look at this heap
of shit.
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