Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  “This is ridiculous,” Abby said. She stared at the window. She was hunched forward and grimacing with sour, pained exhaustion. Her right boob was connected to the breast pump’s suction cup.

  “I know,” I said. “Life is so pointless and absurd on a certain level.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. I mean we have to fix it.” She unhooked the breast pump and went down to our little storage cell in the basement of the building to look for something to put on the window to warn the birds.

  I stayed by the window with Jack, hoping not to witness any additional bird collisions. I looked into the room at the breast pump contraption, which had by now accrued the aura of torture. We’d been sent home from the hospital after Jack’s birth with several bottles of formula and the instructions to supplement with it as needed, which we would learn much later was shitty advice. Abby was fighting against the consequences of this advice, namely a decreasing milk supply. The dull thudding rhythm of the pump had come to signify the relentless demands of motherhood. Abby never had a break—she was always working.

  She reappeared upstairs with some butterfly stickers she’d found in a box of supplies from her job. For many years, up until taking maternity leave, she’d worked as a case manager and then a therapist at a residential treatment facility for teenage wards of the state, girls who had been legally severed from their parents or guardians during childhoods marked by severe poverty, abuse, and neglect. They had difficulty getting through a day without harming themselves or someone else. The facility had a tiny, perpetually endangered budget. Sputtering state funds allowed for the purchase of low-grade encased meats and mushy generic white bread, and billion-dollar private corporations occasionally donated a few barrels of caramel popcorn or upper grandstand tickets to a Cubs game. But in general if you wanted, say, butterfly stickers to use in a group therapy session with teenage girls who had been bound in a closet or burned with cigarettes or whored out for crack, you had to buy the stickers yourself. My wife put four of these stickers on our big picture window.

  Abby was always solving problems like this. I had a much more passive approach to life. Though this approach had reached a symbolic crystallization during my season as the backup to the backup forwards on the 1987–88 Johnson Badgers, it had first taken hold much earlier, in junior high, when I’d been a member of the Galloping Ghosts. At a certain point in each game, sometimes even as early as the pregame layup line, something would give way. My body kept moving, making motions, but my will had surrendered. My lifelong identity in action was forged. There weren’t enough of us to allow me to man the role I was destined for, that of the benchwarmer. As a benchwarmer, I can dream. I can hold onto some glowing core of holiness, or pretend I’m doing so, or call it practice, or call it faith. But in action I only know one way. The Other is bigger than I am. We both reach for the ball, but I let the Other wrestle it away. I watch the Other go, watch the deficit on the scoreboard increase.

  Defunct

  I want to wander forever among the defunct. An entity defunct, devoid of funct, has had its funct removed or disabled. It no ­longer functions. Its purpose is gone. The Dayton Triangles, the Duluth Eskimos, the Oorang Indians. Pulled free from losing. Useless, beautiful.

  Abby’s butterfly stickers did the trick. The bird collisions abated. I continued to worry about our mortgage, but when the sun would shine through the window in the afternoons a rectangle of light would form on the facing wall, slowly rising, butterflies afloat within. The wall where the butterflies appeared was above some carpeted stairs leading down to the lower level of the condo. After many years of living in apartments, I liked having stairs. I liked butterflies afloat in rising rectangles of light. But I couldn’t afford the stairs, the butterflies. My home in the world had been secured erroneously, and in that home I was a fraud.

  “Joshua, don’t buy a home,” my father had told me. He’d said this over the phone a few months before Jack arrived. It was just after Abby and I had decided to buy the home. Since retiring he’d devoted his life to watching old movies, slowly walking several miles to purchase organic apples, and squinting at dense offerings from the bleak oracle of World Systems Theory. The latter, as I understand it through our conversations, makes the strong, intellectually rigorous case that the current transnational hegemony is not only inhumane but flawed, unsustainable, bound for inevitable collapse.

  Things collapse all the time. There is no end to the marvel of defunct teams, but even better is to ponder the defunct leagues. The WFL, the WHA, the AFL, the NASL. The Mayflower Conference. The greatest of these defunct collectives is the original incarnation of the American Basketball Association (ABA), which lasted from 1967 to 1976, from the summer of love to the Bicentennial, from the year I was conceived to the year I created Dr. J in my own imagination, aided by photos and a written story here or there—no television sightings, just myths and legends.

  “The capitalist system is not designed to enable caring or to strengthen human bonds,” my father told me, “but to generate profits for nonhuman entities beyond the control of any individual, even the few in positions of relatively massive power.”

  “I know,” I said. I was talking to him by cell phone during my half-hour lunch break from my job at a corporation.

  “These corporations,” Dad said, disgustedly, “devour everything. People, nature. All for profit. The end result of a system based on the idea of endless gain—”

  His hearing aid began to squeak.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  I was standing in the large atrium of the building where I work, staring out the window at a parking lot, a highway. I was thinking about Dr. J.

  “The signs of collapse are everywhere,” he said.

  I love pondering the last season, bills going unpaid, debris falling, debt accruing, lights going off, Dr. J still glorious, soaring amid his peerless enactment of the term that would later disperse into two separate synonyms and become defunct in its original meaning, living on only as a corporate sales-force cliché, worse than defunct: the slam dunk. That word was once the center of my fandom and fantasies and dream world, the thing I would most want to do, flight and mastery and certainty and force at my fingertips, like the version of Dr. J haloed in the aura of defunct, a red, white, and blue ball in his huge hand, held high over his head like a bolt of American lightning in the hand of a god.

  “Whole nations going bankrupt, the so-called natural disasters of global climate change, wars over scarcity,” my father said.

  “Everyone is losing,” I said.

  There was a basketball hoop at the far edge of the parking lot, below the highway. The short Filipino guys from Systems were playing two on two. I’d had interactions with a couple of them. One sat across from me at a muted project-ending celebration at TGI Fridays and, when the awkward table conversation flagged, showed us photos of his children on his iPad. Another helped me locate some lost material in an electronic database. Some months after the game of parking lot two-on-two, one of these two Filipinos—I’m unclear on which, never firmly affixing names to faces—would have his position eliminated in a corporate reorganization. I’ve always learned of these layoffs by e-mail, which makes it particularly easy to imagine my own name among those who’d been reorganized into erasure. Just another name on a list.

  “There’s no ‘upswing’ coming,” my dad said. The hearing aid chirped. I inhaled.

  “Everyone—” I began. The device in my dad’s ear interrupted, whining.

  “Hm?” my dad said. “Hold on.”

  He tinkered with the hearing aid for a while. I imagined its malfunctioning sounds formed a code, a message to decipher. I imagined some deliverance of certainty, father to son. As fantasies go, it didn’t have much pull, so I thought some more about Dr. J. After the ABA folded, Dr. J would star for many more years in the NBA, but the story of his days in the NBA was of a gradual, graceful descent, a coming back to e
arth. This is everyone’s story with varying levels of grace, but a version of Dr. J, blessed by defunct, continues to soar, immune to gravity. His afro is enormous and his Converses never touch the ground. Thinking of that Dr. J, I imagined myself into the parking lot basketball game. There I was, altering a tech-savvy Austronesian’s tentative fade-away, grabbing the carom, dribbling out to the top of the key, eyeing the basket. There I was, driving the lane, getting a step of daylight, leaping, rising.

  Desperation Heave

  In my second season as a Galloping Ghost, in eighth grade, our ranks thinned and the losses continued. There were desultory attempts at improvement. One evening at practice we all put on goggles designed to improve our dribbling skills. The goggles were lensless and had flat shelves jutting out from the bottom of the frames. The shelves were to prevent you from seeing the ball as you dribbled it. We all tried dribbling blindly this way. The balls went everywhere.

  That evening the undefeated varsity had a game, and we could hear the pregame festivities over the PA system speakers in the junior high gym. I knew from seeing an earlier game in the team’s prolonged winning streak that the songs we heard over the speakers—the Cars’ “Let’s Go” and Devo’s “Whip It”—accompanied the team’s layup line, all the players still in dark blue warm-up suits, bouncing in synch and with style through the rudimentary drill, each leaping high to lay the ball off the glass and through, one made basket after another and another, a ritual purification of triumph and purpose.

  When “Whip It” ended, the varsity introductions began, the names of the starters coming over the speaker and into our empty gym. Cheering followed each name, more cheering as the list of names progressed, suggesting a hierarchy of caring, of winning, of worth. The hierarchy bottomed out somewhere obscure, far from any cheering, in some aimless enduring capitulation, and it peaked with the names of the undefeated.

  The PA clicked off after the last starter was named, the undefeated varsity’s most talented player, Schubach, and we were left to the sound of our own blind dribbling. That final utterance from the world of winning lingered in my mind. Schubach was the opposite of whatever was happening to us. He had darting quickness but was so smooth and rhythmic and balanced that he made all the other central Vermont teenagers laboring up and down the court during varsity games seem graceless as cattle. His best move, a right-to-left crossover dribble into a midrange pull-up jumper, was sudden, buoyant, flawless. I imitated it all the time, mostly when I was home alone, shooting baskets in my driveway, and there the imitation always calmed me. Puberty was taking over my body, riddling it with tics and stutters and hesitancies, making it feel unnatural, like it wasn’t my own. I only felt like myself when I was Schubach.

  I attempted an imitation of Schubach’s crossover while wearing my dribbling goggles and drilled the ball off my sneaker. As I went to retrieve the ball I yanked down the goggles and looked around to find that everyone had done the same. Lensless blinder eyewear dangled from everyone’s necks like strange tribal jewelry, and our practice had devolved, as always, into desperation heaves. Everyone was near half-court and counting down and heaving and making a loud buzzer sound while the ball was in flight. Balls slammed the backboard or missed everything altogether. I forgot about Schubach and moved toward half-court.

  “Three, two, one—eeeeeeennnnnhhhh!” Thump. Again and again we heaved, as if such a shot could ever be made, or if it could ever matter. As it turned out, I would never be called upon to attempt such a shot. Any team lousy enough to allow me playing time would never be close enough to winning at the end of games for last-second desperation. But I kept practicing the desperation heave long after the tics and hesitancies of junior high, kept imagining the desperation heave and imagining its transformation into some other term from some other encyclopedia altogether, the game winner, the buzzer beater, the miracle.

  The miracle. It had happened, just not the way I ever imagined it would. Here he was, in my arms. It was Labor Day, and I had the day off. We’d decided to cook out, which means that we’d decided to enact our periodic ritual of me trying to get the coals lit in our tiny grill until I was undone by the attempt, swearing and furious, and Abby took over. As she crouched over the grill and got the flames going, I sat in a canvas chair on our minuscule sunless heavily mortgaged deck and held Jack. He was about five weeks old, a timeframe I was mostly aware of because it was one week shy of when Abby’s maternity leave was scheduled to end. Abby stood up out of her crouch and pulled our other canvas chair next to Jack and me and sat down. Jack started wriggling in my arms, and Abby reached over and grabbed him and put him on her boob. My frustration over my inability to light the coals started to dissipate. I realized we were sitting in the chairs we’d dragged to the beach the day before Jack was born.

  “Cooking out is so stupid,” I said. “I’m done with it.”

  “You always say that,” Abby said.

  “Why not just cook on the stove inside and bring your plate outside if you want to sit outside? Or a sandwich? What’s wrong with a sandwich? All this caveman fire stuff. I mean, I just don’t get the wh—”

  “I’m not going back to work,” Abby said.

  Some coals in the grill settled, sending up a burst of sparks.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay, okay. Good.”

  We’d talked before about what was going to happen at the end of Abby’s maternity leave but always quickly abandoned the discussion. Either option seemed to point toward desperation. Before Jack was born I imagined he’d be something along the lines of an animate throw pillow. I’d work from home a couple of days a week and would be able to “keep an eye on him” as I worked, and the other days of the week we’d just piece something together. I’d quickly learned that taking care of a baby was so demanding as to be virtually beyond our capabilities, and that was with Abby staying home all the time and working around the clock as the primary caretaker. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like with her gone at her job five days a week. I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like without her income, with only me making money.

  “I just can’t see being back there,” Abby said. Her work had always been different from mine. I could go days, sometimes weeks, at my job scanning for typos without even really noticing I was there. Meanwhile, every day Abby was getting cursed at, threatened, clung to. The teenagers who lived at the treatment facility where she worked were in a kind of desperation wholly beyond anything I’d ever known, and year after year Abby threw everything she had into helping them, first as a case manager and then, after she earned a master’s degree at night and on weekends, as a therapist. She’d been punched in the face, kneed in the gut, spat on, laughed at, thrown into a wall. She’d been clung to and loved.

  “I can’t see being there,” she said, “instead of here.”

  Jack was in her arms, sucking away. The fingers of his right hand were spread out on her boob like those of a guide hand on a jump shot. His eyes were closed. He had barely more than a shadow of hair on his head. He was wearing a white onesie with little fire trucks all over it. His pudgy legs stuck out the bottom.

  “Good,” I said again. I almost added, We’ll manage. But I anticipated that Abby would answer that with How? So we just sat there watching the flames taper off in our little grill. The word lingered in my mind anyway: How?

  That question stuck with me beyond our summer-ending cookout, aiming me back toward that old scenario: half court, time running out. Now there was no ball. It was just me. Mortgage payments, eroding savings, and me. I heaved myself not into learning the financial skills by which I might help my family but in desperation into the same kinds of odd digressive investigations that had long comprised my piecemeal religion. I seemed to need this, to need getting lost in learning inanities. I learned that it’s hard to find anything about Schubach on the Internet. I learned that Steve Balboni, baseball’s prototypical lumbering top-heavy brute, somehow tripled in his f
irst major league at bat. I learned that Sneeze Achiu went from the margins of pro football to a pro wrestling career. I learned that his signature move was called a sonnenberg. This term is defunct, no longer in use, but I’m fucking holding onto its meaning. Sonnenberg. You heave yourself headlong into midair.

  E

  Ehlo, Craig

  Craig Ehlo heaves himself headlong into midair. He’s just gotten the ball back on a frantic give and go. At the crest of his leap he flips the ball at the hoop and then collapses to the floor as the ball nestles through the net. A timeout is called, stopping the clock. Ehlo struggles back to his feet, clearly attempting to keep weight off his injured right ankle. Despite the injury, he has scored fifteen points in the fourth quarter, eight in the last two minutes alone. Because of his efforts, his Cleveland Cavaliers now lead the Chicago Bulls by one point in the deciding game of their 1989 playoff series. There are only three seconds left to play. On the telecast of the game color commentator Hubie Brown testifies that the hobbled Ehlo has played the game of his life.

  I hit pause. I’d been watching all this on my laptop on the couch while holding Jack in my lap and lightly touching the downy shading of hair on his head. He was about a month and a half old. I’d initially turned on the computer to find videos of the natural world to show to my citified son, specifically the rippling, echoing call of a wood thrush, a beautiful sound from my childhood in the country, but he’d shown no interest or even any sign that he could fix his gaze on anything. There were several other things I could and should have been attending to around the house, but instead of doing any of them I’d shifted from the half-assed stab at connecting my infant to ageless beauty to my default mode of existence, that of the fan. It gets tiresome to always be defending against ruin. Sometimes you want to just watch old footage of transfiguring reversals. On the screen Craig Ehlo was frozen in the midst of limping up-court with his team in the lead. The video was poised to climax in the next moment of play in arguably the most emblematic image of victory ever recorded, but sometimes, if you’re me, you want to hit pause and imagine the loser as the hero. I leaned down and kissed Jack’s head, his downy whispering of hair. My wife stomped upstairs. I looked over. She was glaring, furious.