Piedmont baseball shoots down Pilots

(NOTE: This story appeared the Piedmont Post on 9 April 2008)

Piedmont jumped out in front of St. Joseph (9-4) in the first inning and hung on for an 8-4 win at the College of Alameda last Wednesday. The Highlanders improve to 4-2 in the Bay Shore Athletic League, 10-4 overall. They are second in the BSAL behind undefeated St. Mary's.

Senior Jordan Remer was a double short of the cycle and drove in three runs in a 3-3 hitting performance. He also pitched two perfect innings in relief of starting pitcher Bryce Chu. Remer walked one batter and struck out six to preserve the win. He ranks second in the BSAL in total strikeouts with 56 in 28 innings of work.

Against a lineup loaded with the league leaders in batting average, Chu pitched out of trouble in every inning, but only allowed four hits and gave up only one earned run. His 1.313 ERA is second in the league behind St. Mary's' Matt Flemer. The win over St. Joseph gives him five wins on the season, second most in the BSAL.

Piedmont held the league's top three hitters, all batting over .475, to a single hit each.

Junior Alex Steady, recently recovered from a hamstring injury sustained in the early part of the season, was put in the lead-off position against the Pilots. He reached base three times and scored twice.

Remer's triple after an eight-pitch at bat in the top of the first scored Steady to draw first blood.

Bradsby, who batted 2-3, started the second with a triple, but the Highlanders couldn't bring him in to score.

Steady's lead-off single jumpstarted a three-run third inning in which Piedmont sent eight batters to the plate. Steady stole second, and Remer moved him to third with a single. With runners on the corners and Remer given the sign to steal, Chu hit into a fielder's choice. Steady scored, Remer beat the throw to second, and Chu was safe at first. Senior Alexander Menke then doubled to drive Remer around to score, and Bradsby followed with a sacrifice fly to score Chu.

Patience pays dividends

The St. Joseph pitcher entered the game with a perfect winning percentage, 7-0. He was throwing off-speed stuff all day, and the Piedmont coaching staff instructed their players to draw as many pitches from him as they could. By the end of the third, he had thrown 70-plus pitches.

According to assistant coach Dave
DiFabio, senior Kyle Bonacum smashed a foul ball over the right field fence that easily cleared 400 feet. His lead-off hit in the fourth was somewhat less audacious. He hit a slow roller to first base that trundled Buckner-like through the first baseman's legs.

"We were saying on the bench, 'we have to make that hurt,'" said DiFabio.

Remer stepped up to the plate knowing he had to keep his weight back, that he had to be on the lookout for breaking balls, and that he was going to hit the ball as hard as he could.

"And that's what I did," he said.

Remer crushed the first pitch he saw an estimated 390 feet over the fence in right-center for his second homerun of the season, giving the Highlanders a 6-0 lead.

Piedmont added a run in the fifth when Steady walked to drive in a run with the bases loaded.

The Pilots scored two runs in both the fourth and fifth innings, but Remer emphatically shut the door on them in the seventh and eighth.

Looking ahead

The Highlanders play John Swett (6-7 overall) in Crockett this afternoon. The Indians lost 12-0 to St. Joseph in March.

Remer, who leads Piedmont with a .367 batting average and 13 RBI's, hopes his team can swing the bats with a little more urgency in their next handful of games.

"We were solid on defense during the first half of the season, and if we had been stronger on offense at times, we could be undefeated. I think the games we lost were because of a lack of timely hitting," he said.

How It Will Crash

(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2005 edition of the Onion River Review)

His hair is being blown by the wind and he has what some might call "a real head of hair," golden, soft, conditioned several times during each of two daily showers, about shoulder length, layered, leonine, blowing in the wind like a field of majestic American-Heartland wheat, and his cleft-chin, jaws clenched, smile broad, cutting through the wind, big black sunglasses impenetrably dark and glossed with a reflective coating that reflects only the sun's rays in a top-down convertible in Des Moines, driving down roads the television audience can't even distinguish from the roads in their own hometowns, and so they may, momentarily, wonder where they were during the day before learning that, yes, in fact this did occur in Des Moines, and before learning this they wonder if they may have been driving down a road parallel to the road he was driving down, the great green wave that billows from the back seat of his top-down convertible composed of so many verdant leaves, and all the leaves have a face imprinted upon them, the face of a man whose devotion to and espousal of the American DIY philosophy has probably been the single greatest and consistent catalyst for what we now call the "American Dream." And so there are "Benjamin's" flying out of the back of this car, the man at once pulling more of the same currency from the pockets of his ebony suit-coat, and, perhaps more worrying to some safety-first-type television viewers, taking both hands off the wheel, opening up the glove-box while still propelling down the road, near-misses thanks to the alert maneuvers of other motorists and the athletic diving and fast-twitch self-preservation responses of pedestrians, ignoring stop lights and getting away with it, the glove-box loaded with hun's, and he pulls them out and puts them in his mouth and somewhat ravenously gnashes at them, and then he spits them out at parked cars and balls up a wad of them and throws them at some kids waiting for a bus on the side of the road, and when people see this broadcast on one of several cable news channels—because they all manage to get a hold of the same clip—the audience echoes the sentiments voiced by all the talking heads on all the stations, something to the effect of "God damn, I wish I was there," the talking heads saying only this much and of course berating the man for his lack of concern for the safety of others, they and the television audience unaware of this man's motivations as he dispenses hundred dollar bills from a well-aerated American-made vehicle on a well-paved homogenous American highway in a well-organized homogenous American town. Because how could everybody know the rather complex reasons behind the expansive generosity of this man, that four days earlier he had pledged to forgo his psych-meds for the foreseeable future, he just didn't need them anymore, he explained to himself; that he, a former childhood actor whose appearance in a highly successful and well-received oatmeal commercial was judged by his the parents of his fellow childhood actors to be the performance of the year in a nationally syndicated cereal/grains spot in 1985; that he, the man in the open-air convertible whose acting talent had failed to mature, had instead earned an advanced computer sciences degree from the U. of Michigan and had programmed, released, and sold a wildly-successful social-networking website, Smallworld.com, for midgets/dwarves/little-people, for a number in the higher triple digits; that his meds were administered to control irrational behavior of the same variety (pulling out all his hair and pasting it on a dozen (he being an incredibly hirsute individual…) hairless cats he adopted from the local humane society; adhering sticky-notes (…and also having a definite "thing" for adhesives) upon which he had written his credit card number on all the windshields of all the cars parked at Kinnick Stadium on a game day when the Hawkeyes were playing the Buckeyes (result: 21-42, some very displeased creditors appealed to successfully by a very pricey lawyer, and the reestablished solvency of his fortune)), that just yesterday he had liquidated his stock-options, his 401k, various CD's, and his savings and credit accounts, maxed out platinum, black and gold credit cards, requesting that all the funds be dispensed in brand-new $100 bills, that he had then purchased this shiny top-down convertible, a really snazzy new jet-black designer suit-coat, reflective UVA/B blocking sunglasses, a box of mint flavored condoms and, perhaps too predictably, a metric ounce of superbly potent cocaine, that he expended all the cocaine over night and utilized, selfishly, all the condoms, and had also during the course of this epic binge polished off three liter-sized bottles of a popular cola beverage, a six pack of tall-boys, a liter of American whiskey, a box of saltines, a gallon of cookies 'n cream ice cream, two bags of chips as well as two large and rapidly delivered extra-pepperoni pizzas, then tossed two full-size travel suitcases filled with his now portable financial assets into the back seat of the new car, and proceeded, pantsless, to a local all-hours diner where he continued to eat one plate of steak and eggs, one of a tall-stack of flapjacks, a plate of hashbrowns, two hot-fudge sundaes, and consumed four pots of coffee, went back out to his car, emptied the contents of the suitcases into the back seat, tossed the now empty suitcases at a passing cross-continental semi-truck, violently and vociferously hurling compliments at everybody he passed or encountered ("Has anybody ever told you how god-damn fucking beautiful you are?" this to a little girl in the restaurant; "You, sir, cooked those cock-sucking eggs to perfection!" this, inexplicably, to an elderly lady pulling out of the parking lot), and peeled smoking European-imported radial rubber up the on-ramp, onto the freeway, the wind in his hair like the fingers of a loving woman, like a mother, feeling free from chemical dependency as well as any sense of hypocrisy, a verdant and expensive contrail of magnanimous generosity flitting behind him. How could you or the television news personalities know all of this; he is just an image on a screen, "a crazy man" who is now pulling off the freeway—and you can see this on the newscast, a disembodied voice narrating—and now careens down another anonymous American street, people running after him, grabbing spastically at the flapping bills, hands stuck out of moving vehicles he is passing in a delirious haze with a smile and a bloody nose, hollow-eyed and knuckles white on the steering wheel, hands now clutching the face of Benjamin Franklin emblazoned on perhaps the most singular piece of currency in the world. He's flying through red lights barely avoiding collision, performing the actions earlier noted (bill-chewing, using innocent children for target practice), swerving manically into and out of oncoming traffic, the trail of bills now getting thinner, and he lets go of the steering wheel, pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and manages to stand erect in the moving vehicle, and then holds the wallet up in the air with both hands above his head like an offering, eyes heavenward, muttering incomprehensible probably profane prayers lost in the wind and unheard by the helicopter whirling over the scene to capture the spectacle for the television audience, the wallet's contents spilling out behind him. He laughs boisterously between inchoate mutterings, bearing a grin shared only by those similarly enthused, intoxicated and afflicted, the grin of the ecstatically ignorant of their own mortality, as the car veers wildly to the right, slams into and bounds over the curb, he thrown headfirst from the car, it crashing into the glass-façade of a mom & pop soul-food restaurant giving Ma such a fright as she dips the po'boys into the Fryolator that she experiences an acute cardiac arrhythmia and falls bodily into the hot oil, and outside the restaurant, right next to the still intact door of The Southern Bell, you can, if you look very closely at the footage (which is of course now available for review online), see her, red hair in pony-tails, white-shirt almost brown and wholly tattered, jeans down around her ankles, about five or six years old, missing both upper lateral incisors, and, one would surmise, somewhat similarly maladjusted, squatting over a tin bucket with a mop handle protruding from it, peeing in a gentle stream, magnificently oblivious to the shattered glass sparkling in the humid and endless Iowan summer sun, the disconsolate caterwauling of a widower, the thrum of the car's engine and the whir and spin of its wheels, all these sounds drowned out for her by the reverberant and mesmerizing ping of her fluids against the bottom of the bucket, and the man lay in the parking lot, a ruddy puddle collecting beneath his head, still smiling, penniless and breathless.

The House of Everyday Magic

(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2006 edition of the Onion River Review)

"Magnanimous"

There is a building around here that people call "The House of Everyday Magic." It has twelve floors and four apartments on each floor. Two of the apartments are now vacant. The landlady, a first generation Russian immigrant named Anastasia Kukov, has taken out adds in the local papers to have them filled. Rent is cheap around here. Ms. Kukov, who has never married and who loves the hot smell that comes from the vent of the laundry room, chooses her tenants carefully. She wants only dreamers to live in her rooms.

On Thursdays, Ms. Ekaterina Mostovoi joins Ms. Kukov in her kitchen to drink coffee and talk about Russian tennis players. They are also learning to play the American boardgame "Risk."

At night, alone, Ms. Kukov likes to turn the lights off and paint on the canvas in her living room w/ her eyes closed. She smears her hands all over the painting when she gets tired. In the morning, when the sun is up, she dances w/ the canvas from the night before, hugging it close. "There are so many colors around," she says, standing in the bright sun-beams coming through her kitchen window. "So many colors together. So bright."

"Frozen Dreams"

On the 11^th floor, in apartment B, there is a boy named Paco who lives alone. Nobody knows where his parents are. He pays his rent on the third Tuesday of every month. When he does, he shouts through the door, "Hello, Ms. Zukov! You are a very pretty woman!" He slips a check under her door and runs up the stairs like he's being chased by dogs, a nirvanic smile on his face, "You are very, very pretty!" shouting as he runs. Ms. Zukov, sitting at her kitchen table, smiles and blushes, sipping from her cup of beige coffee, plotting to invade Brazil.

Paco freezes his dreams in ice-cube trays. He places his nocturnal reveries, represented by figures cut from construction paper, fishes, and exclamation points, and clouds, he places these in the dry bottoms of empty ice cube trays then covers them with water. When he takes them out of the freezer the next morning, the cubes are filled with stories, resplendent with images from Paco's dreams.

Look in this one. Can you see Paco on riding a whale? He's got a cowboy hat on! And there, do you see on the horizon? Paco's grandmother dancing on her rocking chair with a commandant, the chair rocking on an upside down skiff! Oh, no! She knocked the commandant off with one of the oars! Paco kisses the whale and waves at grandma. And here's another one, where Paco is walking along the limb of a tree, trying to grab at the leaves which are all photographs and rustle in the strong wind that threatens to blow them away. As he reaches to grab one with the tips of his fingers he can see his parents smiling out from the picture, and then, suddenly, the wind picks up, and all the leaves are blown away.

Hurry up; drink your water, Paco. The ice cubes are melting, the dreams are fading.

"A Story About Oranges"

The hallway on the 6^th floor of the House of Everyday Magic curiously appears to be longer than the building itself could possibly be wide enough to contain. Housing inspectors have taken meticulous measurements of the hallway and are always confronted with the dilemma it is a full twelve feet longer than the building, and so floor number six should, for all intents and purposes, jut out above Coventry Street on the north-side and Hudson Street on the south, a phenomenally impossible salient.

"You can't stop it being what it is," Ms. Kukov told Inspector Juho Eloranta, himself an immigrant from Finland, "With all your observations and second-guessing, and what do you know now?" Juho, holding his hat, a crushed, plaid fedora, in one hand, could only respond by scratching his furrowed brow and pursing his lips which made his big shaggy mustache rub against his nose, and in a herky-jerk spasm he sneezed into his hat. He looked despondently at Miss Kukov, who gave him a sympathetic little pout and a sideways tilt of the head, then they both laughed and she escorted Juho down to the front door as a gracious hostess always does, and she was ever graceful.

The walls of the hallway are decorated with paintings of Technicolor ducks w/ bright white smiles! They may be laughing at a joke one of them told; ducks are of course the stand-up comedians of the animal kingdom.

There are words scratched on the post of the stairwell's railing: "because," and "& Yet," and "maybe tomorrow," and "like our pure personalities."

There is always the scent of oranges on floor number 6 because Miss Julia Festival of 6C keeps several orange trees in her largely empty studio apartment. Her bed, nothing more than a mattress on the ground, is piled so high w/ comforters of motley hues and patterns that at its tallest point it reaches Julia's belly-button. Sifting through the covers for a sleeper is like looking through a deck of cards for the joker. The bed lay below a sunny window on the right, and across from it, on a desk she was given by her grandmother, sit dozens of tin cans, the labels peeling and worn, all filled w/ quality soil, all w/ their own tender young orange shoots, delicate like feathers. In the middle of the room, stand three mature and fruit-laden orange trees, growing right out of the wooden floor. "Take one," Julia will say, "Grab an orange. They're always in season up here on the 6^th floor. It's on account of the fine weather."

Julia, a soft, waif of a girl in her young twenties, pale like cirrus clouds, w/ stringy brown hair, has eyes like polished emeralds, and is dieing. She is dieing because one bright summer day, while on vacation on a remote Micronesian island, she witnessed a full solar eclipse while being held close by the loveliest woman she had ever met. After the event, they had silly, fun sex on a beach and then fell asleep. When they woke up, under quicksilver skies glowing w/ the full spread of a galaxy of stars above, they went skinny-dipping in the ocean. A riptide pulled her friend out to sea from where she never returned.

The island's undermanned rescue crew was unable to retrieve her body.

Julia's plane was not scheduled to leave for three more days. She languished. She grieved. She composed an elegy that she read to the sea that was holding her dearest.

Understandably distraught, Julia sought the advice of a local medicine man, who told her that the belly of the sea was a warm place. This failed to console her. He gave her what he claimed was a philter of magnificent strength, a blessed concoction distilled from coconut pulp (and other unmentionables) to which Julia had a fierce allergic reaction which almost instantaneously reduced the size of her heart by half, and still now causes her heart to shrink. Today it is the size of a plum.

Miss Kukov, stirred by Julia's story, gladly welcomed her into the House of Everyday Magic and she moved in about a month after the incident on the island. She began cultivating orange trees soon after. She purchased the seeds from a toothless Chinese man whose tan skin was brown like paper-bags. He manned a booth in the Sunday open air market in Chinatown. "Make you happy," was all he could say, and he kept repeating it to Julia as she walked by, "Make you happy. Make you happy." She grew the seeds and planted the saplings in the cracks b/n the planks of the wooden floor.

If you open one, if you do take an orange—and Julia will insist that you do—you'll see that they are in fact blood oranges and you'll know that because of the vermillion tears that leak out. However, you will probably first see that the pulp of the fruit is a twinklingly radiant mix of silvers, blues, and greys.

"Delicious, aren't they?" Julia asks and smiles so big it hurts you inside like a punch. The leaves on the trees shake from a stiff breeze coming through the window and it sounds like breaking surf.

Former Highlanders baller turns “Semi-Pro”

(NOTE: This article appeared in the Piedmont Post on 26 March 2008.)

Peter Cornell, a Piedmont native and Highlanders basketball center back in the early 90's, has never given up his dream of making it to the big leagues. Since finishing up his college ball at Loyola-Marymount in 1998, Cornell has done his time in minor and foreign leagues. The quintessential journeyman, he played ball for Partizan Belgrade in Yugoslavia, the Honka Playboys in Finland, the North Charleston Lowgators in South Carolina, the Fukuoka Red Falcons in Japan and many other international and domestic teams. It has taken years of effort and countless frequent flier miles, but Cornell has finally made it. In 2007 he landed a supporting role with the Flint Tropics, playing alongside such stars as André Benjamin, Woody Harrelson and Will Ferrell. That's right, Cornell has made the big leagues on the silver screen.

In "Semi-Pro," the new Will Ferrell movie, Cornell plays the role of Vakidis, a laconic and bewildered but athletic giant from a "weird country called Lithuania." Vakidis is a peripheral character, and Cornell has only a couple of speaking parts in the film, each of them limited to three words, the extent of Vakidis' English vocabulary: "Yes. Right on."

The pivotal moment for Vakidis is when he sinks a game-winning basket for the Tropics that costs the penny-pinching Tropic's player/GM Jackie Moon – played by Ferrell – several thousand corndogs.

Without question, Cornell's first love is basketball. Being 6'11", determined and talented has helped him land roster spots with 27 different professional and semi-professional teams around the world, but he has appeared in almost twice as many television commercials, almost always as a basketball player, though he has moonlighted as "axe murderer" and "passenger." He appeared in commercials opposite such basketball greats as Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Duane Wade and Dick "It's awesome, baby" Vitale. Doing commercials helped supplement Cornell's income, and gave him the financial support to continue pursuing his basketball career.

Cornell even has an Internet Movie Database entry. He has an agent in LA, and a publicist in West Hollywood. His physique is athletic, his age range is 24-34. He shared screen time with Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000) and L'il Bow Wow and Crispin Glover in Like Mike (2002). But when they were offered, movie roles always came around during the basketball season, and while the paycheck from movies and commercials was pretty healthy, Cornell didn't want to sideline his primary ambition.

Cornell spent the last four years playing in Australia, and after finishing the '06-'07 season with the West Sydney Razorbacks, he returned to the Northern Hemisphere and read for the part of Vakidis. He was offered the role and took it because it wouldn't interfere with basketball. He quickly found that filming a movie was no easy task.

"Honestly, it was one of the most difficult times in my life," said Cornell, speaking from his residence in Los Angeles. "We spent 17 hours a day, six days a week, for three months working on the movie. I had a bout of walking pneumonia I was so exhausted. It was very fun, but very tough at the same time."

To look the part of a Stahlinistic Lithuanian basketball player, Cornell wore a Caesar wig and a push-broom mustache. For inspiration, he used his own experience as an intercontinental athlete who was sometimes totally befuddled by a foreign culture. It also helped that Cornell is of Yugoslavian heritage, that he traveled there when he was younger, and actually played two seasons in Eastern Europe.

"I grew up with some bad-ass Serbians around me. They were very stoic, and they looked like they were ruling the world even though they didn't know what was going on, so I was definitely able to size-up that vibe."

During his first season in Japan, Cornell wasn't appointed a translator, and he was as lost in translation as Vakidis is in "Semi-Pro." To properly portray the character as he was instructed, all Cornell had to do was tune out and ignore what was going on around him. His experience had so prepared him for this that the director approached him after a couple days and complimented Cornell on his performance.

Since the release of "Semi-Pro," Cornell has coached Ferrell and other celebrities in the NBA Entertainment league. He also landed the role of George Mikan in the upcoming film "Sweetwater," about Nathaniel Clifton, the first African-American player signed to the NBA. He hopes to return to Japan this summer to play for the Hitachi Sunrockers, finish up his basketball career there and eventually transition into sports broadcasting. Cornell will also take film roles as they come, but he doesn't foresee that becoming the focus of his professional life: "I could be a good character actor, but it depends. Unless they start casting giants in regular dramas, there just aren't that many roles out there for me."