the ghost boy is dead, long live the ghost boy
toward a theory of "cody" "bellinger", nlds hero, possible zombie, fool,
Even when I lived in another time and universe (Western Massachusetts) I watched baseball on TV, and I saw Cody Bellinger. Tall and skinny loping around with inexplicably deep smile line creases for such a very young man. Handsome in an unfussy way, clean lines and dark curls, a face for newsreels, grinning greasy. Something about the allegedly twenty one year old rookie in 2017 tickled the wormy brown apple bruise in the back of my brain that makes me buy books about dead presidents and war. His was a face that had seen the meaty dark of a coal mine, I knew, pounded rail spikes across a younger America, chased a rat through the mud in France somewhere, fearing neither death nor trench foot. This was obvious. It was cold out already back east. I watched all those fateful World Series games, rooting for the Dodgers with the exuberant, lackadaisical fervor of a little child, in love when they were in front of my eyes but forgetting easily after, and Halloween was coming, and I made a little joke for myself about the unquiet dead, giggling in Dodger blue and eye black. Last night, in Los Angeles, one million lifetimes later, when I watched Cody Bellinger lace a go-ahead single to right centerfield and take off to first base with his tongue lolling out free and infuriating, perfect, I screamed and squeezed my varied jumpy limbs around and against my girlfriend’s and I dribbled some Modelo on my jeans and then without having to decide to, fingers operating of their own accord, put “GHOST KING” in the group chat.
Cody Bellinger was so bad this season it has perhaps eclipsed how bad he was in 2018, but he wasn’t good then either, and I wrote a poem about it for a party my friend threw for herself where everyone had homework and the homework was to stand up and tell everybody else about something, which, being awfully annoying, we did all like a lot. I wrote a poem about Cody Bellinger, about how I thought he might be a trapped soul living over and over again and not learning anything, and, also, chauvinistically musing that perhaps the glut of Rookie of the Year pussy he was presumably adrift in had ruined him, that he’d been over-sucked and now sucked. That someone from The Athletic did not swoop immediately into that birthday gathering in Silver Lake and beg for the gift that is buying my services is, indeed, an immense shock. Roughly two thirds of the people I know in this city I met that night, introduced myself to by saying in many handwritten words that the cute young Dodger was dead and had died many times. As has become my habit on earth, I’d overcommitted to a game I made up as idle amusement and now instead it was a mythos, a doctrine, and I alone left to take the bibles door to door, or small house party full of mostly disinterested queers to small house party of mostly disinterested queers. Believing one-time MVP, many time backbreaking strikeout swinger Cody Bellinger to be some merrily doomed being beyond man’s commonly accepted understanding of life and death was a joke and now it’s my most important work, the theory I will wrestle with all my days, the scholarly diversion which thankfully assuages my annual deranged impulse to go get a graduate degree in history.
All of this is to say, no, of course the Cody Bellinger who was so painfully, grotesquely bad all year, who broke a couple bones by accident when simply moving around and looked just absolutely puzzled at the plate, who yet, even still, nonetheless, managed to break Giants’ fans hearts last night with a timely little bleeder of a hit last, is not just some kid from Arizona. Don’t be stupid. There’s something far more nefarious afoot, and it brings me only the most incandescent pleasure to tell you—and also literally anybody I meet anywhere regardless of the context I do not care no shame can dull the lure of the ungodly power which compels me—all about it.
Technically, right now, per some fraudulent government paperwork or what have you, Cody Bellinger is a twenty six year old Cancer sun whose dad was a bit player on three World Series teams back during the original run of television drama Felicity starring Keri Russell. Cody has a brother and a sister and a very tan mother whom I fear. He has a beautiful, unwieldy swing, violent and fragile at once. He had very long hair all season and then shaved it off in September, which I am sure was an immensely impactful day in the life of that teenage girl who leapt on the field while her mom was peeing and was ultimately tackled to the ground by security guards all in order to hug him. It was a tough day in mine, at least, as the buzzcut makes him look 40% like Jake Gyllenhaal in the new movie where he plays a rogue cop working as a 911 operator because of bad behavior maybe and also I think mainly he is getting divorced, and 60% like a Tinder date who would drink all my roommate’s Trulys then steal my phone charger on the way out the door in the morning, and that’s not safe for me.
Cody Bellinger doesn’t know what Seinfeld is. Even in aggressively turtle-safe LA they give him a straw at Starbucks because it is so obvious he could not manage a sipping lid. He is an ice cream enthusiast who once gained weight on purpose by drinking a gallon of milk a day, a meal plan so incredibly disgusting only a ghost whose stomach is a theoretical thing not of a real blood and tissue could possibly survive it. Somehow, this man has been allowed to procreate and will soon have legal rights over what may or may not be a human child. Further, I have seen on the Dodger Stadium jumbotron evidence that he does not have a confident grasp on which fruits are which. He does very lackluster sponcon with Chipotle and for allergy nasal spray. Last postseason, when Bellinger made an outstanding leaping catch to rob fellow SoCal wunderkind Fernando Tatis Jr. of a critical home run in what would become the decisive game in the Dodgers’ NLDS sweep of the Padres, then proceeded to return to the dugout and sit peaceably thinking about very clearly nothing at all, the weirder (best) corners of baseball Twitter lit up with jokes about how the sun dried slugger is, I mean, definitely stoned.
It is not my desire to dispute or discredit this reading; what I offer is a modest corrective, an opportunity wherein we all might expand our minds out toward the boundless and thought-free size of a one grade A himbo Cody Bellinger’s and then ask, well, really, what makes the experience of being a whiff of fuzzy sentience bouncing, fresh-born over and over, through centuries of the American experiment in coltish boy bodies all that different, vibes-wise, from eating a weed gummy and going directly to the moon? Is the ghost not the stoner of the supernatural taxonomy chart, woozy and unreliable, fading in and out? Would the side effects of being a shapeless spark unstuck in time, tied only ever so loosely to a corporeal form not, in fact, resemble those of ripping a blunt in traffic on the way to the game? Yeah, could be he’s merely a space cadet, but it could also be that he’s just scarcely alive, coming in and out like long distance radio. I elect to believe that Cody Bellinger is some sort of aged spectral menace regenerated most recently in 1995 and having an amazing time with cannabis delivery and free internet porn, who plays professional baseball almost by mistake, having landed in a body that can do it and a time when we don’t need as many chimney sweeps. I elect to do so because it is fun and because of how his face and body look, and the way he behaves, and additionally because of his old timey swing. This is called praxis and also literature. There is a jealousy that’s part lust which humans know sometimes and mine gnaws at me over Cody Bellinger, so gifted and untroubled, so wonderfully dumb. When I see him I want what he has, even the Postmates t-shirts, even the cracked ribs, even though that doesn’t make sense. When I witness a feat of great athleticism I am prone to get a bit wolfish, to want, and, then, I do stare at the guys that skateboard outside Gelson’s who laugh at each other and seem not afraid to fall. In Cody, splayed grinning across second base after a slide, leaping to slam his shoulder against a friend’s, twisting into the dirt like a corkscrew as a he waves his bat around, there is a freedom and looseness of body that is both not of this mortal coil, and a most essential, organic piece of it. As simple and magical as when the sun rises again. No more or less miraculous than the rain. Lovely, horrible, improbable, easy, the ghost king glides along for all to see. Or, anyway, there’s this bit from the actually excellent grandfather of every other little bitch who wants to talk about baseball while staring directly at their own belly button, Roger Angell, in a spring training essay from 1962. Needless to say, he put it best.
The Dodgers survived this battle with their Northern foe and will advance in no small part because of the chump who hit .165 on the season. In a postgame interview, a beer soaked Bellinger praised Giants starter Logan Webb for the impressive feat of having “shoved it up our butts twice”. May we all come to know such profound smoothness of mind, if not in this life, then in those lives to come, amen.
Girl, I wondered where you went! As a Giants fan who watched the two best teams in baseball battle it out only to have dreams crushed by a check swing called for an out? Can’t argue with the Dodgers and excellent decisions on Dave Roberts’ part. Go Dodgers and Godspeed.