1996 BBBA REDUX 1: THE METS, WANDA T--WTF??

BBBA 96: a book literally
bursting at the seams...

Here in the present, in the relapsarian world of abbreviated newspeak, we can rightly ask: WTF was going on with these folk, anyway? "Fiddling with Bud Selig, while Flushing Meadow burns." Indeed. It was the winter of 1996, and no one knew how bad things would really get, until GWB and the neos (neo-sabermetricians, that is...) glommed onto center stage, wedding post-imperalism with the swagger of Wall Street.

In simpler yet more surreal times, once upon a literary digression, there was Wanda Tinasky, ostensible alter ego of Thomas Pynchon, and there was a team essay in BBBA '96. The two freight trains, running in opposite directions, happened to be on the same track.

It was all one continuous, seamlessly disintegrated Dark Age; no Hesiodic myth for these initiates, they held dross dear, held it right to their bosom, found it execrable, and blessed its pointed little head anyway.

Wanda--not!!

It was shadow history, drawn to truth by an elaborate counterfeit. The so-called "lost letters" of Wanda (clearly not the chick shown here, whose face, like Pynchon's himself, was always kept out of view...) were the fabrications of a feckless fabulist, prior to inventing an even more id-like doppelganger.

But truth is obscure, and prefers to remain hidden in a miasma of manic interludes that modern pharmaturgy has made all-too-mechanically reproducible; and the last of these cultists seem to have been swallowed up, and vanished, taking their theories of upheaval to ever more unfathomable realms.

If only Wanda, or the one claiming to be her, had known what was coming: the stylistic plagiarism might have been Ernest Hemingway instead...

And there was the game I loved, the game of threes and nines, being torn up like some Tenderloin trick gone wrong, swallowed whole by a neo-colonialist "gentry": blood was in the air, coarsing through the veins of some Ueber-monster who spread infection whenever he drew breath...

Guess Wanda didn't think too highly of Peter Ueberroth, but consider the alternatives. As a disgruntled but ever hopeful Met fan, however, (s)he'd strayed far from home, only to sneak back into town under everybody's nose like a winter rose...

Now I'm just an old woman who lives not too far from the shadows in Flushing, you could figure out where I live if you know how to read them, if you know geometry. And on any given day or night, you could even find me once again in the ballpark, back with my Mets, the ones who have returned to innocence...

Jason, Paul and Bill: the sound of a thousand
toilets in forlorn Flushing Meadow...

Of course, Wanda knew that those days at Shea would be numbered, but some kind of heroic frenzy had taken hold of her in '96, leading her to a series of prophetic "excited utterances" that burst forth like a friendly witness doing the thing that friendly witnesses do: namely, name names.

...the vivacious, vibrant, virtual, velvety names these kids have got (or have been given, as if part of a greater design): O-cho-a, Al-fon-zo, A-ce-ve-do; the Norse-like Isringhausen and the sulphurous Pulsipher; the brawn of Brogna; the gum-chewing law firm of Hundley, Kent, and Everett; the exploratory zeal of Vizcaino; the uncommonly common Bobby J. Jones. From the farm there's Wilson and Payton and Byrd, and someday Arnold Gooch. That last one makes me want to return to church, for that name is so divinely bad that I find it an irresistible object of worship, like Jesus or Mohammed or Ahura Mazda; all hail the great Gooch, apple-cheeked child of a virgin birth.

"Someday" never came for
Arnold Gooch...

Wanda's wacky, woozy affection for the Mets' star-crossed youth movement was quaint even before it was ghost-written, and (s)he could not have known that few--very few--of the pseudo-sacred names (s)he'd intoned would be members of the 2000 team that brought the Mets back into the World Series. In fact, only three of the players (s)he mentions in that 1996 rhapsody--Edgardo Alfonzo, Bobby Jones, and Jay Payton--were on the Mets' roster when they became the latest lambs slaughtered to their cross-town rivals.

Of course, few of the BBBA readers knew who Wanda was (or wasn't), and we'd probably have been better off keeping it that way. Thomas Pynchon would recover from his writer's block even before the Mets would rebound, and the ballclub would give Flushing Meadow the same type of bum's rush that even an erudite bag lady like Wanda would find overly antiseptic and unnecessarily cruel.

Which only leaves one question: whatever happened to Arnold Gooch??