Hannity and I cautiously entered Old Tiger Stadium. “I stashed a body in here a few years ago,” Hannity murmured, “I want to see if it’s still here.” Reasonable enough, I thought. Lord knows I had found my share of Hannity’s corpses, the majority scrotum-less, in my time as his assistant, so this was nothing new. Hannity had a habit of stashing bodies around the office and city as an alcoholic might a bottle of Greenfinch, one in the John, one under the bed.
“Who was it?”
“I wanna say Tim Allen, but I can’t be sure. I can’t remember for shit lately.”
“I think he’s still alive.”
Hannity seemed quietly disgusted. “It was probably just some hooker. I like to pull a knife after I get my nut, you know?”
“Sure.”
“Either way, I think I left a twenty in their pocket. Some janitor happened upon us so I had to bail.”
“You left her clothed, that doesn’t sound like you,” I remarked.
“Her?” He gave me a wily look.
I paused. “Him then?”
“Naw… I was in a big she-male faze at that time. The Ox got me hooked, that weird fucker. He’s from Florida, I don’t know what you’d expect from those sick bastards, just a bunch of queers, Jews, drug addicts and pedophiles, and more often than not, all at once.”
“Yeah, Miami’s fucked up. I took Colmes down there to dry out before you killed him. That placed fucked with his head. It’s too hot down there, it makes people lazy and stupid as dogs.”
“Fuck. Dogs are better than Cubans. At least you can train a dog not too piss himself. Shit!”
“Yeah…”
Hannity paused. “Murdoch, what was that?”
“What was what?”
“That ‘Yeah” seemed a little half-hearted to me.”
“What? Come on, I hate Cuban’s! You know me, Hannity.”
“Fucker.” He tinked me with a quick flick of the wrist, causing me to recoil in pain. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve got some jungle fever.”
We came to a fork in the hallway. “Where too, Hannity?”
Hannity thought for a moment. “Deep Murdoch. In the bowels… My bowels.” Naturally, we took the RIGHT hallway, which led us further down, into the cold black stadium. Creaks and groans could be heard all around us, some human, some not. “This fucking place is alive, Murdoch. You hear that shit? How many fuckers have died in this metal tomb? How many rapes? How many coat-hanger abortions? I can personally attest to seven of each. No, eight. This place is haunted. I can feel it in my balls, and my balls don’t lie. They never have, not in 43 years.”
Hannity’s grave talk was starting too unsettle me. What were we doing out here? I remembered the funeral, but decided to say nothing. What’s a funeral anyway? Before we left Kubla-Han, Hannity insisted on doing a ceremonial blood letting ritual to cleanse the place, and us, of any negative energy or demons we may have picked up in the past years. He chugged a Coors Light, then ripped the can in half and slit my wrist long-ways, with one smart jab. It hurt like a cocksucker and I felt instantly woozy. “We’ve got the bad blood Murdoch. The coffin blood. This whole fucked up world does. This is the first step…” I nodded and as I collapsed, Hannity grabbed my wallet, then I went black. I came too in the basement of Hannity’s suburban McMansion. He had crudely sewn up the cut with steel wool, which look infected, yellow and pussy. “You’re a man now Murdoch.”
“Why, cause you slit my wrist in order to steal my wallet?”
“What? Oh, right. No, that’s not it. No, it’s ‘cause the Ox paid some retarded dude to rape you.”
I rolled my eyes, but as I tried to sit up, I realized Hannity wasn’t kidding. I was brutally sore. “By the way, Murdoch. You probably have AIDS, you might wanna check that out.” I nodded solemnly.
The Tiger’s had abandoned the turn-of-the-century stadium nearly eight years ago in favor of a cheap plastic, advertisement with a small patch of overly fertilized, genetically modified “grass-substitute” in the middle, in the form of a baseball stadium. The hired geeks who designed the corporate eyesore made every effort to mathematically plot its idiosyncratic and “vintage” look and in the process fucked all the life out of it. Integrity like Tiger Stadium has comes through age and neglect, it comes from blood and vomit, dead fetuses and murder/suicides, it comes from trough urinals.
The last sanctioned event in the old Tiger Stadium, sporting or otherwise, was the Detroit Marathon which Colonel J. Olsen “won” by means of radical chemotherapy and armed coercion. Since then the stadium had been used sporadically by Detroit’s criminal underground for illegal retard fighting and orgies. In Detroit, the retard-fight/orgy season unofficially ends October 31, which means the stadium had been empty and unused for at least two months. Bums, roaches, rats and queers were all walked it’s cold steel hallways now days.
“Where should we start?”
“Let’s hit the locker rooms first.”
On the way down into the steel cage, past the exposed rusty girders, Hannity told me of his first time to Tiger Stadium. It was 1984, naturally. Hannity and Cavuto cut off work early to watch the game. They got wasted on $10 Miller light’s and Cavuto, “pushed some fat nigger” off the second deck and into “Kaline’s Corner,” killing him. This was still during batting practice. The two were on the lam for over a month, holed up in the Hotel Yorba for the most part, smoking crack with Cavuto’s dealer at the time, Fatsy Pope, a renowned Detroit drug dealer and pornographer.
Hannity and I were now in the deepest recesses of Old Tiger Stadium. “This place smells like an Spleen,” Hannity observed, “Believe me, I know.” It was an ancient smell of dried bones and old metal, wet rust. “I better not have just hallucinated this shit, or I’ll cut our dicks off Murdoch… Man, I wish I was a cock and this hallway was a pussy or a woman’s asshole.” I nodded knowingly. We descended deeper until we were in total blackness, save the light of Hannity’s cigarettes. We were making our way along by touch alone. Things were getting desperate, Hannity’s nasal breathing was becoming unbearable for me. Then, hope. We drew nearer and nearer a faint light and saw a dark figure dressed in a grocery sack who stood before the door silently.
“Sir!” Hannity yelled. “We come in peace.”
The figure turned. It was some disheveled bum. Hannity continued, “I killed hooker a few years back and stashed the body somewhere down here. You seen anything like that? Like a rotten corpse type thing.”
“Hooker, huh? Sure, but what you askn’ for got a heavy price.” He stated gravely.
“Fine.” Hannity turned to me, easily with in listening distance of the man. ‘Once we get that twenty, shank this guy in the balls and let’s get the piss out of here.”
I looked at the bum, “You got that?”
He nodded and we continued into the locker room. It was brightly lit, with torches and candles, the remnants of Olsen’s victory party still strewn about, a used condom here, a bloodied coat hanger there. “This your house, old-timer,” Hannity asked, but received no response. Our casual bemusement quickly turned to horror, however, when we noticed the roach and rat infestation. Hannity stepped on one fat rat nearly killing it. He had the beast trapped under his foot and he picked it up by the scruff of the neck, examining it curiously. “Damn Murdoch, this things soft as a twat.” He petted it lovingly. “That’s what Rice’s pussy feels like.” He held it out to me. “Go on.” I declined and Hannity angrily flung it at me, “You know what your problem is Murdoch, you think your shit don’t stink.”
I watched as the rat limped into the lockers. “Hey, Murdoch.” Hannity had followed the rat over and now stood in front of the lockers. “I wonder if fucking Alan Trammel’s jersey’s still in here!” Hannity opened the locker and found something, pulled it out and put it on. ‘Hey Murdoch, look at me, I’m fucking Chet Lemon!” I cringed. “That’s great Hannity, except that’s not a jersey, that’s the skin from a man’s torso.” Hannity froze in horror, realizing I was, indeed, right. Nipples and all. Then he shrugged, “Well, it fits. It ‘flattens’ my chest also, which is nice.” If he didn’t have problem with it then neither did I. I just wondered what Al Sharpton’s response would be?
Finally we came to a weird looking alter with skulls drenched in wax…
