Me and Ted's Head

The Internet has been buzzing about my recent face-to-face with Ted Williams's head. I think I'm ready to talk about it now.

As you know, it came during my big 115th birthday bash last Saturday. That party was a doozy, let me tell you. It's taken me a few days to process everything that happened and everyone who was there. I mean, Curt Cobayne sang me happy birthday, and I have no idea who that dude is! In fact, I could barely understand that he was even saying happy birthday because it sounded like he had marbles in his mouth. Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington played a gig, too. They got a kick watching that Cobayne guy doing all his antics. I mean, when he finished singing Happy Birthday, he did a goddam stage dive!

All the usual suspects were there, like Claire and Lou and some other Yankee teammates. Mickey Mantle was there, but Roger Maris knows not to show his face. He knows why. We also had some of my buddies from back in the day.

I was gonna say the highlight of the evening was chatting with Ted's head, but I'm not gonna lie -- it was spooky. For me the highlight was actually eating my cake. I had a double-decker triple chocolate doozy. Everybody else had some bullshit carrot cake that Claire ordered.

But what you really wanna know about is Ted's head. As you know, when he died, his idiot son announced that Ted had wanted his head to be cryogenically frozen so that some day it could be brought back to life. His daughter cried bullshit and fought it tooth and nail until finally a judge agreed with the boy. So now Ted's head exists forever out here all on its own. Here's a good story that explains it all.

So there I am at my party, yukking it up with Jack Dempsey and Babe Didrikson, trying to figure out how I could get Babe alone because who wouldn't want to do it with somebody with the same name as you, when this severed head floats up over to us. We all jumped up about 6 inches each when it said, "Hey Babe. You been avoiding me?"

Babe and Jack got the hell out of there and it was just me and Ted's head.

"Yeah, I have," I said. "You wanna know why? Because you're a fucking severed head!"

Ted thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "Nobody ever had the guts to tell me that to my face," he said, laughing. Then he immediately segwayed into a big diatribe about how he hated the music, the food, the cake, and the guests.

I said, Why'd you come at all, you douche. He said, "Because the one thing I wanted most out of life was that when I walked down the street, people would say 'There goes the greatest party-planner who ever lived.'"

I laughed but Ted looked serious. Then all of a sudden, some young guy with a napkin came up and wiped Ted's mouth.

"Babe, meet my son John Henry. He did this to me, so now he owes me big time. He gets me shit and cleans me up."

I shook John Henry's hand. Yikes, what a wussy handshake.

"Time for us to go, John Henry," Ted said. And with that, he was gone.

I went back to the party, thinking one thing: Happy fucking birthday to me.