by Josh Wilker
“My whole life is this baby! I’ve never worked harder in my life!”
“You’re always just washing the dishes,” Abby managed to say.
“Wow!” I said.
Then I felt drowsy. It has always been this way—as long as we’ve been together, whenever I get into an argument with Abby I have an overwhelming urge to go to sleep, as if I suffer from an acute conflict-avoidance disorder that manifests as narcolepsy. I nodded off for a second, dreamed I was on a bus, the sweet one-way bus to nowhere, beside me Calvin Schiraldi now cradling, for reasons unclear, an acoustic guitar. He thumbed the low E string and monkeyed with the tuning, making the note yo-yo. I came to and resumed yelling.
“Wow, I sound so horrible! I mean, god, dishes? What a monster!”
That was about it for the bitter exchange. But I continued screaming, albeit silently. My wife was weeping and my son was wailing, and I was glaring at the floor and screaming my innocence to an invisible jury. Dishes are such an asshole all of the sudden? Dishes are strip clubs and meth binges? The only sounds that actually came out of me were some loud breaths whistling through my nose. Meanwhile my overwhelmed, weeping wife continued trying to comfort the crying baby. I didn’t know what to do about that situation, so I moved to another room, the kitchen, and noticed more dirty dishes that I hadn’t seen before. There’s no end to them. I started doing them.
There is no end to anything when a newborn arrives, and the core source of the endlessness is the newborn, but that core is terrifying, unpredictable, fraught with the strong possibility, the certainty, even, of endless failure and mistakes. Whenever I waded into that core, I found I didn’t know what to do or that I did it poorly, which made me avoid it. However, as my wife had noticed, every time a dish was dirtied I treated the cleaning of it as urgently as I would the disposal of a live grenade. It was one thing I knew how to do. I also knew the proper approach for playing zone defense, punting a football, fielding a grounder. I knew how to keep score in tennis and execute a crisp chest pass. I knew what constituted intentional grounding. I knew Mark Olberding from Mark Landsberger, Mosi Tatupu from Manu Tuiasosopo, Eddie Yost from Eddie Joost. On and on. What I knew could fill a book, but none of the knowledge, a lifetime in the making, seemed to be of any use.
F
Fidrych, Mark, Unsuccessful Comeback Of
See Pawtucket.
Flitcroft, Maurice
See Hoppy, Gerald
Fold
On the last day of the 2011 major league baseball regular season we took Jack to his two-month checkup, where he got two shots, one in each leg. I held him as the needle went in. I had my Red Sox cap on, the 1970s Fred Lynn model with the blue bill and red crown. I was hoping that after the checkup I’d be able to punch out from fatherhood and be nothing but a fan, rooting for the same vicarious feeling of power and worth I’d been rooting for my whole sidelined life. But when we got home Jack’s legs began to swell, and he started wailing. We couldn’t find any way to help him. He was crying so hard he started choking.
“What do we do?” Abby said. I had no idea, felt paralyzed. Then I was wrenching at a folded stroller, unable to figure out how to open it.
“Fucking useless!” I roared at my hands, my life. I wanted to punch myself unconscious.
“Just—here,” my wife said, disgusted. She shoved me aside, opened the stroller one-handed, and belted Jack in. We set out toward CVS for some baby Tylenol. After a block or so of the stroller rolling over bumps in the sidewalk, Jack’s screaming tapered off to little grunts and groans. I noticed my fists were clenched. Some may dream of one day drifting in a gondola down a canal in Venice; I dream of one day beating the living shit out of my stupid face. I let my fists open. I took my eyes off of Jack and looked around as we continued walking. Our neighborhood seemed a little ragged, half-abandoned. A poster kept appearing on barred basement windows: “WE CALL POLICE.” A flier kept appearing on telephone poles announcing a candlelight vigil for a teenaged shooting victim named Dajuan.
When we got to the store Abby went in while I kept feeding the bumps up into Jack’s body by pushing the stroller back and forth over a patch of cracked sidewalk. Jack’s face was still pinched and unhappy, but he was quiet. My shoulders were tense, as if I’d been bracing myself to fend off some kind of attack. An El train rolled by overhead. I exhaled. I tried to relax my shoulders. Baseball came back into my mind. The Red Sox had squandered an enormous September playoff lead but, on the last day of the season, remained just barely alive. Maybe fandom is a way to waste a life; maybe it’s a way to handle uncontainable worries and hopes.
“One game left,” I murmured down to my son, “and we still have a chance. Win today, slink into the playoffs, maybe get on a roll, who knows?”
My awareness of my wife steaming toward us interrupted this monologue. She looked angry. Some young loiterers were slouching near the store entrance, staring at her, commenting. All of them were dressed like Dajuan, the dead kid in the telephone pole flier—baggy jeans, basketball jerseys, baseball caps askew. My shoulders tensed.
“Fuck you!” Abby shouted back at them without breaking stride. I fell in step beside her, pushing the stroller.
“What’d they say to you?” I said.
“Whatever,” she said.
I’d like to think I stopped moving for a second, pondering a confrontation, but I didn’t even break stride, so deep into my thin bones is the instinct for capitulation. I tried entertaining some violent fantasies, but it was difficult for me to come up with realistic scenarios in which I was able to run up toward the harassing loiterers and cause them all grave pain. I decided I’d have to rely on a lot of surprise groin kicks, as many as I could fit in before their superior strength, fighting skills, and generalized rage at the world ramped up and left me fractured and bleeding on the sidewalk. Really what I needed, I reasoned while pushing my struggling infant home, was a large, powerful weapon, not a gun but some kind of industrial-strength many-barreled taser capable of subduing with agonizing force several members of a gang of hardened catcallers, but even thusly armed in my daydream I saw myself somehow fumbling my grip on the weapon and having it used against me in horrible ways.
Finally I surrendered to that old standby of my life and of the impotent and powerless everywhere: the impossible fantasy of having superstrength. Oh, they would laugh and heckle as the pale ectomorph approached in his 1970s replica Red Sox cap and thick glasses and drab middle-aged garments, but then wham and ca-crush and b-doouuzzzh, bodies flying everywhere, jaws cracking, eye sockets caving in. Oh, the weeping and begging. Oh, my fearsome strength.
We got home and fed Jack the Tylenol, which helped a little. He had a rough evening, but not quite as bad as the afternoon had been, and finally he settled into a shallow sleep. I put the thin chain on the front door, as if that could ever do anything. I found the game on TV. The Red Sox brought a lead into the ninth inning. The closer, Jonathan Papelbon, was called in to hold the lead. He got two outs then surrendered one hit, then another, then another, and the worst September fold in history was complete.
You get older, you put things in perspective, learn what truly means something and what doesn’t. Maybe you even mellow a little when your team wins it all not once but twice, or when your wife gives birth to a beautiful baby. But a small part of you or, if you’re me, a large part of you is always the boy choking with rage over collapse. The last hit fell in front of Carl Crawford, a highly paid free agent acquisition who had played poorly all year. I believed he could have dived headfirst in an attempt to get the ball, and instead he did a cushy butt slide and was unable to make the catch. He sort of tried, but he didn’t try as if everything in the entire world depended on him catching it, as if catching the ball could protect my wife and child. He didn’t heave himself into midair. He didn’t sonnenberg.
I wanted to boo, but booing wasn’t enough. I found a recent Carl C
rawford baseball card and ripped it to shreds. (A sickening thought occurred to me much later, which I want to but won’t edit from this account: one reason I shredded Carl Crawford might be that he is the same color as the loiterers who harassed my wife.) I held the shreds in my hands, still unsatisfied. Still powerless. The image of Jack’s swollen legs in my mind. Jack crying so hard he started choking. Our neighborhood riddled with harassing loiterers, dilapidated buildings, “WE CALL POLICE” posters, candlelight vigils. How am I going to protect anything in this new life? How am I going to keep anything from folding? In my hands a baseball card ripped to shreds. I wanted to do something with the pieces, rain them down over everything.
Oh, my fearsome strength.
I used our printer to scan an image of the debris, then uploaded it to my blog.
Take heed, all foes.
Fumble
A few days after I mangled Carl Crawford, my third parent, Tom, came to visit along with his wife, Susanne. Years earlier I’d started calling him my stepfather even though he and my mom had never married and had eventually split. He’d helped raise me through the years when my mom and dad were separated. Every summer he’d been the one to carry me upstairs to my bed, a loft bed he’d built for me, when I fell asleep on the long drive home from our yearly trip to see a Red Sox game at Fenway.
Tom was very gentle with Jack. One afternoon during his visit he took Jack from me as I was trying to dance him to sleep. He danced in a slow rhythm, unlike my own, which always had at the very least a hint of an urgent punk tempo, a desperation. In Tom’s arms Jack softened. His eyelids grew heavy. We were downstairs by the stereo. “Madame George” was playing, with its slow, dragging baseline, the hypnotic strings, Van Morrison’s aching warble fluttering and spiraling like a thrush song at dusk. I motioned for Tom to carry Jack up the stairs, and he did so, walking slowly, with care. One minute you’re the boy asleep in a father’s arms, and the next you’re walking up the stairs behind him as he cradles your sleeping son.
I pointed Tom toward the swing in the bedroom that Jack had recently started napping in. More often than not when I put Jack down into that swing I’d fumble the handoff, and Jack would come back awake. This would always bother me, often even infuriate me, my own ineptitude in that moment, my fumbling causing Jack’s eyes to snap open, as if in the great scheme of things such a thing could matter. Tom put Jack down into the swing slowly, with care. Van Morrison’s voice wafted up from downstairs. The love that loves to love. The arms that carried me upstairs sleeping in my Red Sox souvenir batting helmet, the baby I lay down to sleep, this touch traveling from Tom to me to Jack. That’s what I don’t want to fumble.
G
Garbage Time
In late October I stayed home with Jack while Abby went out. He was close to three months old. I hadn’t been alone with him much, just once before, and that time Abby had been at a café right around the corner. This time I drove her a few neighborhoods south to meet her friend Caroline. Jack fell asleep on the drive back. I carried him inside in the car seat and set him down on the living room floor. He kept sleeping for a while. I sat on the couch with my hands on my knees and watched him, afraid to do anything else.
The benchwarmer has only one hope of existing in, rather than just outside the margins of, a game. Meaning must be removed. There must be a beating in progress so lopsided and so late in its life that the entry of the benchwarmer into the contest will have no way of affecting the final result. Strictly speaking, the existence of garbage time is, as the name suggests, reliant on the element of a sporting event being timed. You might see the term used to refer to the later innings of a baseball game in which one team is beating another by a huge margin, but it wouldn’t be a precise usage, as there is no clock in use, so the vital element of garbage time—the ticking away of seconds that have been stripped of all meaning—is not in play. The term doesn’t quite fit in football or hockey, either, because each of those timed sports carry at all times, even during blowouts, an intensity resting on the keen awareness of all involved that at any moment play can result in emergency medical personnel rushing toward a body gone horribly still. Soccer also has trouble maximizing the potential richness of garbage time because scoring a goal is generally so difficult that even in a lopsided rout it will be acknowledged as an achievement of at least some note. In pure garbage time there should be no notable achievements, nothing to get excited about or even to remember. Garbage time must not in any way matter, and so it finds its truest home in basketball, which is, perhaps not coincidentally, the game I played the longest. Benches are emptied, benchwarmers arise, shots are hoisted, flung. Nothing matters, nobody cares. Most fans head for the exits. I never do. I sit there with my hands on my knees and watch, not wanting it to end.
Eventually my son’s eyelids started to flutter. He grimaced and grunted, jerking his body against the cushiony interior of the car seat. Then there they were, those clear blue eyes, looking at me.
“Hi baby,” I said. I glanced up at the clock. A long time to go before my wife was back in charge. Moments alone with my infant son: pure delight bullied by a border of panic.
Glass Joe
I decided the best thing to do was to take him for a walk. Put things in motion. But the stroller was in the folded-up position. I’d been able once or twice to luck into opening it before, but generally it had been a task Abby had to complete. This time I made an effort to figure it out rationally, but within seconds my pulse was quickening, my thoughts racing. As always in situations like this, rather than focusing strictly on the task at hand, I instead did the absolute opposite: breathing shallowly and thinking about my whole life and all its ineffectual tendencies.
You’re supposed to want to work your way up through a hierarchy of challenges, overcoming them, winning. I started to realize during college that I was at odds with this line of thinking. It wasn’t anything that happened at college that prompted this realization but more the simple fact that college was the last buffer before “real life” was to begin. I intuited without ever allowing myself to directly think about it that upon entry into that real life I was going to eat shit. I had no plan, no desire to scale any hierarchies, no sense even of what the hierarchies about to crush me might be, just that something was going to crush me, and I wasn’t going to put up much of a fight.
Soon enough the situation with the stroller had escalated into a helpless thrashing characterized externally by jerky, brutish motions and internally by a self-pitying helpless rage. In short I had abandoned my attempt to methodically overcome a challenge, and I—not the infant—was hurtling toward a tantrum, a fugue swelling on the rhythm of can’t. I can’t do this, why can’t I do this, why can’t I ever do anything?
At my college there was a boxing video game in the snack bar. I was so bad at video games that I generally avoided them, but something drew me to the boxing game. I could never do any better than knocking out the first guy, the patsy named Glass Joe, before getting quickly knocked out and eliminated by the second guy. I got to know Glass Joe pretty well. I even let him hit me sometimes and toyed with the idea of letting him beat me, but in the end I could never resist responding to his puny but persistent jabs by knocking him out. Really what I wanted was for him to lower his gloves. I’d lower mine. I’d drift toward his cartoonish realm and he’d drift toward the supposedly realer world whose edges I blunted with bong hits, and we’d meet somewhere in the middle and hit the road like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and the invisible hierarchies tyrannizing our lives would collapse in the heat of our road-going bebopping ecstasies, two holy fools free of time, the two quarters I’d slid through the coin slot lasting us forever. But of course he never lowered his gloves, and so I beat him, which was always merely a prelude to my own beating, my avatar’s arms flailing impotently as the guy just one up from Glass Joe thrashed me, several increasingly tougher fighters above him, the whole world minus Glass Joe unbeatable.
It made me angry to be so helpless. Stabbing the buttons on a video game. Wrenching at the levers and wheels and legs of a stroller.
“I can’t do this why can’t I do this why can’t I ever do anything?” I roared.
The infant beside me had by this point added his own piercing cry to my tantrum, but he calmed down first, sensing perhaps that without Mommy on the scene, with just this taller, stupider, scarier Mommy filling in, he was going to have to take care of himself. You’d think seeing this would have dampened my own raging, but my mind kept jackhammering can’t.
Finally I bashed myself in the head with a two-handed blow. The impact made me stagger backward from the stroller, blinking. This kind of assault was not unprecedented. Whenever the unbeatable hierarchy of life was smothering me, sparking a helpless rage, I punched myself in the head. I was trying to stop. I had even promised my wife that I would stop forever, and I lied to her that I had. It was my secret pathetic addiction. I was my own Glass Joe.
Goalby, Bob
For some moments before Bob Goalby was declared the outright winner of the 1968 Masters golf tournament, it appeared that he was tied for the lead with Roberto De Vicenzo and that the two would play an eighteen-hole playoff round the following day. But then it was discovered that De Vicenzo’s playing partner for the day, Tommy Aaron, had entered the wrong score on the seventeenth hole, penciling in a four instead of a three. De Vicenzo neglected to notice the mistake before signing off on his scorecard, and by rule the higher score, though inaccurate, was posted as De Vicenzo’s official result. Goalby was given the championship. Though Goalby had been a highly skilled professional golfer for many years and had played the tournament of his life, he was degraded in the public conception as someone who had backed into a beautiful thing. Messages came his way: You don’t deserve this.
Years ago, when I was thirty-five, Abby and I moved away from New York City to stay with her parents in Racine, Wisconsin, and look for work in Chicago. I had few marketable skills. I could load a box onto a truck, stand behind a cash register, check a bag, push a broom. To some extent I could also stare at a page and notice mistakes. Months passed. I ate American cheese slices from Abby’s parents’ gleaming refrigerator and drove around aimlessly, staring out at bowling alleys, Burger Kings, Green Bay Packer lawnware. Why are you here?
