Have Glove, Will Travel_ Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond - Bill Lee [97]
Bet you can hear that table hush even from where you’re sitting. Every eye turned my way. They looked at me as though Alice’s Mad Hatter had just joined the party, but you know what? No one objected to the plan.
“What sort of ceremony do you have in mind?” someone asked.
“Viking funeral. We get a boat, build a pyre, and put Ted on it with two virgins. Light the whole thing up and push it out to sea.”
Some of Ted’s friends later privately told me they would lend whatever assistance they could—cash, transportation, men, ordnance, anything—if I carried out my scheme. I should have gone for it that evening, when anger put my judgment on hold. As the Scottsdale trip drew closer, doubts intruded. This recurring nightmare haunted me:
My sons back out of the trip, leaving me alone with Ted in the Pathfinder, the only car driving down the Lost Highway. It is midnight. Heavy clouds cover the moon, and workmen have removed all the street lamps. The landscape appears desolate. No billboards, houses, rest stops, or gas stations.
I quit smoking months ago, but the ride makes me so nervous I chew on a wad of Nicoderm patches. No help there. I reach for the stale pack of Camels jammed in the rear of the glove compartment. Suddenly Ted’s parade-ground voice booms from that chrome container on the seat next to mine: “Put those butts down and show some goddamned willpower . . . Let up on the clutch, you cannot drive scared . . . Change the radio station, no one wants to hear that rock and roll shit . . . And get off this highway, there’s a quicker way through the mountains . . . Don’t pussy around with that pedal, floor the son of a bitch . . . Now we’re making time, am I right, am I right, am I right!”
You know it would go on that way for the rest of the trip. Think Ted was the kind of guy who would let a little thing like death alter the habits of a lifetime? After pondering it, I decided against attempting the Alcor caper. Hated to disappoint Ted’s friends, but let’s face it: if heaven exists our bodies are merely temporary shells. We cast them off at death before traveling on to a higher plane. I may be rationalizing here, but we can comfort ourselves knowing that Ted is off fly casting with Babe Ruth and Richard Nixon on some river in the Great Beyond. And that the Big Dog spends his nights—if they have nights up there—chasing Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield around a baseball-shaped waterbed. He is probably enjoying himself too much to care whether the body and head that used to be him are stuck in a deep freeze.
Okay, let’s turn this around to play devil’s advocate. Suppose nothing exists after death but the void. Which means even the void doesn’t exist. Bonus. Now Ted isn’t worried about anything. Alcor could sell his remains as Fudgsicles for all he’s concerned.
Of course, the company would make many of us happy by simply ending this silly exercise. Call me a skeptic, but it seems absurd that anyone could believe cryogenics will ever revive Ted. The science just does not add up. Once you deprive the brain of blood and oxygen for only a few minutes, the cells permanently die. To reanimate a coherent, functioning Teddy Ballgame, the doctors would have to undo the stroke that killed him, clean out the blocked arteries, reverse years of organ degeneration, stimulate new cell growth, reintroduce emotional memory, and implant new mitochondria to turn back the aging process.
I ain’t holding my breath.
Come to think of it, neither is Ted.
Let’s go wacky for a moment and imagine that Alcor can revive my friend’s corpse. Now the cryogenicists are treading in unknown territory. Not one of them can guarantee that Ted’s essence—his soul, if you will, that wonderfully profane and exuberant personality that made him him—would return to it. Stay with me here. Let’s suppose he has already reincarnated. Why would he wait? Ted returns to this existence as