Hal was just finishing his Christmas Eve gruel, sitting with his kinky boots up in the luxury suite of his yacht, Golden Boy IV, when he heard the chains drag across the keel.
“Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, dropping his spoon. “Here?”
There was no denying it. He could hear the chains as they continued, dragging across the length of the hull and up the stairs of the multi-storied vessel. Then the door to the cabin burst open, and there in the doorway stood an awful, spectral figure.
Hal sighed.
“WTF, Dad? I just had the hinges on that regilded.”
George Steinbrenner shuffled across cabin and seated himself next to the AC, leaving a swath of puddles behind him. Hal’s nose turned up.
“And the carpet! Do you know much that cost?”
“As much as a third baseman who can’t hit his weight?”
“Fuck you, too, Dad. How’d even get up here, anyway? I figured if I was on the yacht, there’s be no way you could do your chain-dragging thing up from hell.”
“Oh, you’d be surprised, son. The devil and the deep blue sea are like that.”
George tries to hold his ghostly fingers close together. They go through each other.
“Oh, well. Actually, the swim was pretty refreshing. It gets a little…close down in hell, if you know what I mean.”
“Why are you here? Oh, wait, I know: you’ve come up to tell me everything I’m doing wrong running ‘your’ team.”
“Are you running it, son? I thought you left everything to that snotty little kid whose daddy used to sell me horseflesh.” George chuckles evilly. “Oh, how I loved to beat on that little jerk when things went wrong, just to see him squirm. ‘The playoffs are a crapshoot.’ Oh, that one made me laugh for days.”
“Brian Cashman is an invaluable asset to my ballclub, Dad.”
“Invaluable ass, you mean. He sits up there like a ventriloquist’s puppet and mouths everything you want him to say, while you run the team I built into the ground.”
“Oh, now you built the New York Yankees, Dad? And my team runs very well, thank you. Our profit margins put yours to shame.”
George stood up, shaking off some seaweed and indignantly pulling a mollusk out of his ear.
“It’s not about the money, son! How could you not have money? You inherited a goddamned fortune and the all-time greatest franchise in history, a veritable money machine! Aside from that ass in the White House, who could not make money with that—”
“Let’s not get into the inheritance bit, Dad!”snapped Hal, wobbling to a standing position in his thigh-high glitter boots with the six-inch heels. “You know as well as I do that we all inherited a fortune! The Steinbrenner money comes from a summer squall on Lake Erie—and nobody looked too closely at the hull of that boat when they dredged it up.”
George looked a little abashed, even with his baked-red face from the fires of hell.
“Yeah, well, shit happens. Boats sink sometimes. Look at the Edmund Fitzgerald.”
Hal sighed.
“Well, shall we say what we do every year, Dad? ‘See you in hell’?”
George Steinbrenner shook his head sadly as he shuffled his chains toward the door.
“No, son. You’re not going to hell.”
A gleam came into Hal’s eye.
“Heaven, then? I knew it—”
“Not heaven, either.” George shook his head. “You see, son, both heaven and hell are for those who believe deeply. Who try to do something or build something, or just take something as far as it will go, for better or worse. Me? I’m right at home in hell, with all the bunco artists and the double-dealers, and the grifters and the hustlers. The sore losers, who don’t see why they have to lose at all.”
He started back down the gold-plated steps to the hull, still rambling on.
“The other place? Well, they have all their saints, who are just as single-minded in their own way. Or all the good folk who just love people and things for what they are. Not you, son. No, son, no heaven and no hell for you—no place that’s ever too hot or too cold. You’re headed for some kind of purgatory, where you can just sit about forever and pile up coins—the golden, shining symbols of things, instead of what those things really are.”
He waved a briny hand in farewell.
“Hope you never get tired of it. Because it's forever.”
And with that: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! From the whole family (Grandad the kid on the left, with the big head.).
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