by Josh Wilker
At some point I started killing afternoons at a driving range. I bought bucket after bucket and drove yellow balls out into a stubbly field. My ability to drive yellow balls out into a stubbly field improved. Most days I was the only one there. Once, a mom was there with her little boy.
“Someday you’ll be able to hit the ball as far as the man,” she told him.
I thought: Man?
Every so often in Racine I played actual golf with Abby’s dad, and I never saw any progress in the awful level of my game in the context of an actual golf course. There are skills, and then there are skills. Mine seemed to be entirely hypothetical, that whole passage in Racine hypothetical, a bubble of garbage time, nothing to do, nowhere I was needed. Eventually I got a call from a publishing company in the Chicago suburbs that needed a part-time proofreader. I was shown a cubicle and given some pages. I started staring at text looking for mistakes. Years went by. Without ever planning to do so, I stuck with the company like a barnacle. Most weekdays have been a Xerox of that first day. But some kind of wandering is still inside me, some mostly beaten wildness. My mind wanders at work, and I miss mistakes. They slip through. I know it’s happening all the time. I worry someday they’ll be discovered.
I was thinking about all this as I sat in the park along the lake with my son. Slowed by the aftereffects of punching myself in the head, dizziness, shame, I had finally gotten the stroller open. I’d walked my son toward the park, feeling like I always did after these self-assaults: dully stunned, awful, calm. I didn’t seem to have the skills needed for the simplest afternoon alone with my son, and yet here I was with him anyway. I took Jack out of the stroller and pointed up at some branches, some brittle leaves.
“Tree,” I said. “Sky.”
I carried him to the edge of the grassy area of the park and pointed at the sandy beach. Gentle waves flowed in from a lake that stretched forever. It was a beautiful late October day, my son at the center, an unimaginable love. My head still throbbed, a repetitive message always coming my way. Why are you here? You don’t deserve this.
Goat
The Dallas Cowboys had a chance to pull into a tie with the Pittsburgh Steelers in the third quarter of Super Bowl XII. Quarterback Roger Staubach fired a strike into the end zone to a wide open reserve tight end named Jackie Smith. Smith, who would one day be elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, had been a standout for several years in obscurity with the St. Louis Cardinals. Before the season he had been ready to call it a career, but the Cowboys, the reigning NFL champs, had talked him out of retirement. The prospect of finally winning it all lured him back to the field. He did not catch a single pass all season, but then there he was, where everyone who has ever so much as tossed a football back and forth in the yard dreams of being: in the end zone, in the Super Bowl, all alone. Staubach’s pass ricocheted off his chest. The Steelers seized on the mistake and rolled to a touchdown on their next drive. The Cowboys rallied late but couldn’t recover, and the loss landed on Jackie Smith. He was the guy you never want to be. He was the goat.
The video from the fateful moment shows Smith jerking his body backward in disgust, a quick motion, as if he’s being jolted by electricity, but a photograph taken at that instant strips from the intended receiver all traces of animation. It’ll come up at the top of the images page if you ever search for Jackie Smith. He’s a rigor mortis plank, upended, cleats in the air, shoulders and silver helmet just touching the turf, arms locked to his sides. He looks not as if he has dropped a pass but as if he himself has been dropped. One theory of life is that we were thrown from heaven. We had wings but no more, and now we’re falling.
I was eleven at the time of that Super Bowl, and I was a Cowboys fan. It’s probably no accident that around that time I started forging a path of avoidance. I never wanted to be responsible for anything. It seemed a horrible thing to be the goat, to be responsible for a team’s loss, a sacrificial receptacle for all disappointment and pain. The deeper I got into sports, into life, the more I tended toward the margins, as if sensing that this was my only way of avoiding the destiny of the goat. I wasn’t conscious in my pursuance of the margins, but I ended up there anyway, and if there’s a reason for this, beyond my limitations as an athlete, it would be that I was terrified of becoming a goat. I hoped to never become anything good or bad.
I stood on the beach holding my son as little waves rolled toward us. Strings of diamonds kept forming and dissolving on the surface of the water. As Jack’s blue eyes looked past me to the sky, his eyelids started to droop. When they closed altogether, when the tops and bottoms of his brittle, shining eyelashes meshed, I felt it like a soft fastening click in the center of my chest. The deeper calm of his sleeping body was a weight in my arms that I’d always been missing. In a few minutes I’d start moving toward home so Jack and I could go pick up Abby from her afternoon away from us. Not that long after that, in the great scheme of things, I’d be here, now, retracing those earliest weeks. Here, now, Jack is no longer a baby. Those days are already gone. But I can still feel the small bundle I once held to my chest, the ghost of a touchdown.
I had wings.
God
See Norwood, Scott
Volume 2:
4–6 Months
H
Harold
Where is the pitchback I had as a kid, that mesh bouncy thing with the aluminum frame that was supposed to be my friend to play catch with but that was never much fun and eventually crumpled to backyard rust? Where are the braces that were supposed to straighten my teeth but only wrenched the childhood smile from my face? Where are the dribble goggles my team, the Ghosts, used once in junior high basketball practice and never again? Where is the Leaper, that screeching plastic and metal rack, gleaming and medieval, peddled to the varsity basketball coach at my high school that was supposed to give us all the ability to sky for rebounds and windmill dunks but only made our shoulder sweat mingle and our knees ache? Where are all the contraptions and props all over the world, everything ever used in an impossible attempt to shackle or shunt or splint or redeem the inevitable expansion of doubt?
You’d think I was asking this all rhetorically, that there’s no way to know where any of it has gone, that it’s all scattered uncataloged in storage units and attics and landfills all across the world. But there’s a specific kind of exhaustion that brings everything back, tangled. Two in the morning and the baby wailing, defeated equipment everywhere—bottles, pacifiers, jumpers, parenting books, strollers, Velcro swaddle wraps, clutter exponential, hallucinatory, my metal braces cutting the inside of my mouth again, my dribble goggles impeding my vision, a customary adolescent semirod tenting my underwear. I rose from bed and tripped on a pitchback. I was late for my required Leaper thrusts.
I stumbled onward and took the baby from my wife, who had been up all night. I tried to calm him. I rocked him and bobbed.
“Shh, shh, shh,” I hissed into his ear, as one of the parenting books instructed. The white noise was supposed to be soothing. It didn’t work, and within a few minutes I ran out of the moisture in my mouth necessary to make this hushing sound. I emitted something like the thin buzz of a dying windowsill fly. Jack kept crying. Abby took him back. This had been going on for nearly four months, long enough for it to seem it would go on forever.
I lay down and, despite the suffering and failure bristling in the room, drifted off again, my body one more piece of faulty equipment on our harried bedding, scrambled in with dislodged fitted sheets, baby clothes, rattles, teethers, mobiles, a shake weight, a grip strengthener, a novelty putting practice cup festooned with a Caddyshack gopher. At some point I rolled onto the sharp fingers of a one-armed mannequin. It was Harold, the piece of unorthodox remedial athletic ware that minor league instructors in the Los Angeles Dodgers chain assigned twenty years earlier as a batter’s box inhabitant to a struggling number-one draft pick: Bene, Bill. Harold still had the must
ache Bene had drawn on him with a marker as well as several contusions from pitches that had gotten away from the guttering prospect, but he also now had marker stubble all over his face, as if Bene, or someone, had wanted to depict some sort of erosion of grooming habits. His left arm was missing.
I got up out of this mess and moved again toward Abby and Jack.
“Let me take the baby,” I said.
“Just go sleep on the futon downstairs,” she said grimly. “This is how he is now.”
I took Jack from her anyway and rocked him to sleep, but he was wide awake and unhappy again within a few minutes. Abby got up with him. I lay there, guilty, drifting off occasionally only to be stabbed by a mannequin arm.
Just before five I got up, fed the cats, and ate breakfast. By then Jack was up again, and I went in and took over the jiggling from Abby. He went to sleep but was up again just minutes after I’d left the bedroom. I went toward the wailing again. That word: again. Again, again, again—the squawking hinge at the center of parenthood. Abby was getting Jack back to sleep again.
“Maybe you go lie down on the futon and get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll stay with him.”
“This is what I do now.”
“But it doesn’t have to be that way right now,” I said.
Abby said something I couldn’t quite catch beneath Jack’s cries, but I knew it had the loaded word “writing” in it. I was always droning on about writing, about how the baby made it so that I never had enough time to write. This was nothing new—I’d always found some way to complain about my writing throughout all the years we’d spent together. Beyond that, I’d always subconsciously woven those complaints into a passive, oblique critique of our relationship. The arrival of the baby had intensified the pressure I funneled into our marriage, ratcheting up that corrosive notion that our life together could be validated in my mind on a certain crucial level only if I suddenly transformed myself into a celebrated Dostoyevskean whirlwind of visionary creativity. Abby had always been supportive of my writing, but who in the world could withstand years of constant whiny dissatisfaction on the subject, especially if I continued to freight that word with all my hopes and dreams even as our son was wailing?
“What did you say?” I shouted over Jack.
“Writing,” Abby shouted. “Shouldn’t you be writing?”
In an ideal world, one in which I forged a measured, compassionate path through life guided entirely by love, I would have ignored the way I heard her say that word, with sarcasm-italics, ignored the sting of that perception, or misperception. I would have focused on the baby’s happiness, on my wife’s happiness. Perhaps later, during a moment of relative peace, the baby asleep, I would have brought up with Abby the subject of my writing as it affected our marriage and tried to work through the swamp of desires surrounding writing that had seeped into our life together and flooded it slowly and thoroughly with a sludgy unidentified muck. But who can ever act with such reserve and love and resolve, especially with a baby wailing?
Instead I took Abby’s question about my writing as a shot, a bit of mockery. I took it as if she knew the truth about me, which was that since the baby had arrived any possible writing time was as often as not given over to beating off to photos of Kim Kardashian’s ass spilling over the overmatched fabric of a tiny bikini. Like all who are full of shit, I was in constant fear that someone would point out that I was full of shit.
“I am balancing everything,” I said. “You don’t have to tell me to write.”
“If that’s what you’re getting out of this conversation, you’re excused,” Abby said.
I remained stuck on this for hours. You’re excused?
“What a thing to say to a guy going in there to try to help,” I complained later while staring at the ceiling. I was downstairs, near my desk, but instead of writing, I was lying on the futon. My hand was down my pants, lazily, just in case things ended up going that way. I was also prepared to race from the futon to my writing desk to furiously imitate a frenzy of literary productiveness if I heard footsteps on the stairs. My eyelids were heavy, my grasp of the strike zone shot.
“She gets mad at me when I try to help,” I said aloud. If anyone had been leaning down and peering in through the basement window, it would have seemed I was speaking to no one. “She gets mad at me when I don’t. What am I supposed to do?”
Harold had no reply. He had fallen beside me into a collapsed pitchback, his one arm tangled in the slackened netting. We stared up at a ceiling of gray sky, clouds upon clouds. I had a customary adolescent semirod tenting my underwear. I used my tongue to poke loose a spongy crumb from my braces. SpaghettiO meatball.
Hitless
See Velez, Eugenio.
Hoppy, Gerald
See Jolly, James Beau
Hubris
I bought a Butterball turkey to cook for Thanksgiving. It was Jack’s first big holiday. He was a week shy of four months old. In the past Abby and I had traveled to see my parents at Thanksgiving, our one visit a year. Because Abby had a fear of flying ever since a plane she was on dropped like a brick for several seconds of blinding terror, whenever we made our one visit to my parents we drove. But Jack was becoming increasingly miserable in the car seat. A thirteen-minute drive was hell; a thirteen-hour drive was unfathomable. For weeks leading up to Thanksgiving I’d avoided making a decision on where we’d go for the day. I’d always tried to avoid decisions, hoping that in doing so I’d also avoid any consequences. Finally I’d called my mom to tell her we wouldn’t be able to make the drive.
“Oh,” she’d said. That sound, a brittle oval of heartbreak, lingered in my chest. It was still with me days later on Thanksgiving morning, though I tried to ignore it. Avoid decisions, avoid heartbreak. Find something meaningless.
“Holy shit, check it out,” I said to Abby. I brandished the Butterball turkey, still in its mesh and plastic wrapping. Abby was nursing Jack by the window, watching for her parents to arrive. It would be my first time hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. Perhaps this was also a consequence I was trying to avoid acknowledging. What good could ever come from being at the center of any story? Better to stay on the sidelines.
“There’s a toll-free number on this turkey,” I said.
“Oh yeah?” Abby said.
“Yeah, can you believe that?”
It amused me to consider this. The Butterball turkey was idiot-proof, it seemed to me. You throw the thing in the oven, and then a few hours later the built-in thermometer pops out, and then you take the thing out of the oven. To say I was confident that I would be able to handle this without placing a call to a corporate help center would not quite be accurate. It was beyond confidence. You’ll see this in sports just before the worst, most humiliating collapses. There’s an assumption that things have reached such a level of certainty that they can only go one way.
“Where can we get champagne this time of night?” I’d asked some friends in 1986 when Calvin Schiraldi was one strike away from clinching a Red Sox World Series victory.
“What moron,” I said several years later on the morning of my son’s first Thanksgiving, “would ever have to get on the horn to 1-800-BUTTERBALL?”
“Hello?” I said, panicked, a few hours after that. “Is this 1-800-BUTTERBALL?”
Human White Flag
Sometimes the fans of a team enjoying success will identify the player buried deepest on the roster as a human victory cigar, enacting a ritual with linguistic roots in the crowing displays of the NBA’s greatest and most obnoxious winner, Red Auerbach, who lit up actual cigars in the waning moments of his team’s conquests. In this mutation of the Celtics boss’s malodorous swaggering, the mere presence of the head benchwarmer in the action becomes a signal for cackling celebration among fans, who cheer the little-used human for demonstrating how superfluous he is and how his superfluity on the court demonstrates the certainty o
f a win.
I started thinking about being a human cigar while I was shooting free throws at the hoop in the parking lot of the corporate complex where I work. It was the week after Thanksgiving, when a 1–800-BUTTERBALL operator had been able to confirm that I hadn’t poisoned my family by feeding them a turkey that had cooked for hours with a plastic bag of giblets still inside it. My last year in organized sports had occurred over twenty years earlier, when I’d been the backup to the backup forwards on an all-Caucasian northern Vermont NAIA college basketball team that started a melancholy six-foot-four Grateful Dead fan at center and lost unceasingly. I spent a lot of time throughout the 1987–88 Mayflower Conference season practicing free throws. This was an illogical choice, of course: any coach put in charge of my solitary practice hours would’ve had me frantically chugging steroids or at least learning how to draw offensive fouls in case the other guys didn’t want to. But free throws were easier and in principle sounded like a noble thing for a basketball player to work on. And, besides, the coach didn’t tell me what to practice.
All the practice that year, all the hours, all the thousands of free throws, everything fed into no more and no fewer than two official in-game free throws, my entire official foul line experience for the year, my last in a uniform. The two free throws didn’t matter; I wouldn’t have been on the court if they had. The game had been lost long before I’d gotten the call to go in. In this sense I was the opposite of a human victory cigar. I was the human white flag, I guess, although a good white-flag waving sets a standard of grace and honor not altogether applicable to my situation. Naturally, in this near-empty gym there was no one making noise about my arrival on the court. And yet, after I was fouled on a play, I sank my first free throw, and it seemed to me that there was cheering.
