Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  “Wonderful,” he said. “All our troubles are now at an end.”

  It was my last foray into public juggling. Soon after that I also made my last appearance as a uniformed athlete. What is immune to the motion leading to these endings, to all endings? Sooner or later everything is separated from everything. When I was very young my father was separated from the rest of us, becoming a stranger to me, a guy in thick glasses who visited sometimes and seemed unusually clumsy. Surely one reason I’d plunged into sports was to avoid becoming like him, a klutz, as if that’s what caused him to get separated. But there’s no avoiding separation. Eventually Tom and Mom separated from one another too, and some years after that my brother and I, who clung to one another deep into our twenties, stopped sharing an apartment and then gradually stopped talking with one another as much, moving into other phases of our lives. Eventually even stranger things started happening, reconfigurations, my mother and father coming back together as aging housemates, moving close to my brother and his family, and I found myself far away from this new core and from Tom too, unable, with the new baby, who couldn’t bear so much as ten minutes in a car seat, to visit for Thanksgiving. Now Christmas was approaching, the thirty-third anniversary of getting the Complete Klutz gift from my grandmother, and I was standing near the infant son I kept almost dropping. I found myself holding three tennis balls, needing to juggle.

  So I juggled. It was the same as always, nothing special. But after a few tosses I noticed that my son, who had been gnawing on the corner of a cloth book, was watching me. The book slid quietly to the floor. Jack was smiling.

  “Hey there,” I said. “Hey, sweet baby.”

  I kept juggling, turning to him.

  Juggling for my family for the first time, for Tom as he made tortillas, for my brother when he got home from basketball practice, for Mom after her day as a paste-up artist at the local newspaper, for my dad on one of his brief Greyhound bus visits, for my grandmother who’d gotten me the Klutz book—that was the feeling at the center of juggling, the connection at the center of my life. I could feel it again. I’d been juggling so long that I didn’t have to look directly at what I was juggling. I could do it by feel. I could watch Jack’s blue eyes follow the rising and falling arcs of the tennis balls. I could feel in my fingertips the faint pulsing buoyancy of his smile.

  L

  Laugher

  Most words used to identify pronounced single-game defeats carry connotations of domination and woe. The losers are routed, whipped, thrashed. But there’s something beautiful about losing. Hallelujah for the exception in this subcategory of the lexicon of failure, the laugher, the loss so sprawling that all meaning and intensity dissolve, one team scoring with the rhythmic constancy of a conga line, the other staggering unevenly in no particular direction. Every day with the baby was a laugher, lopsided, too much, and one blurred into the next until life itself was a one big laugher. Whatever I once assumed to center my being—gone in the fog of the laugher. Memory goes screwy. I can’t pull from the laugher any one specific moment when Jack first figured out how to change his imitation of laughter, that smiling unbroken “uuuh” sound, into laughter itself. One day it was just there, as if it always had been, a pealing staccato report of voice and breath and joy, a ringing, and it was instantly so central to my life that it’s no wonder I didn’t notice its arrival. When do you first notice your own heartbeat?

  Legend Without a Ring, the

  Near the end of Dan Marino’s record-shattering career, my friend Ramblin’ Pete got a pair of free tickets to see the Jets play the Dolphins in the Meadowlands. It was late in the season, and both teams had been eliminated. A couple who lived down the hall from Pete’s parents had season tickets, and in those years it became something of a yearly tradition come late November and December for these Jets tickets to become so unappealing not only to the season ticket holders themselves but, even at the marked-down price of nothing, to everyone in their family, all their friends, all their neighbors, the doorman, the pizza guy, anyone, everyone, that they fell to Pete, the last stop on the flowchart before the incinerator, and although Pete was an outgoing fellow with a wealth of friends, it seemed to always turn out that I was the only person in his life willing to accompany him to such a game.

  To get there we had to take a bus from Port Authority. On the bus to the game against the Dolphins a man wearing a notable piece of headgear bellowed again and again, “Danny Marino, baby, the legend without a ring! Danny Marino, baby, the legend without a ring!”

  What bothers me is that I can’t quite remember the specifics of his headgear. It was either a dreadlock wig or a multicolored many-pointed bell-tipped jester hat or some combination of both. For a long time I had these details fixed in my mind, but I seem to be losing my grasp on the past. All I remember now, for sure, is that the man kept up his refrain for the entire ride, his voice a dragging, boozy foghorn.

  Danny Marino, baby, the legend without a ring!

  Of the game I remember nothing. But nowadays, online, you can search for and find impersonal traces of everything you’ve ever touched. I would have guessed that this game would have been in Dan Marino’s final season, when it was certain he would be leaving the sport without a Super Bowl title, but that year, 1999, I wasn’t living in New York, nor was I the year before, and the year before that, 1997, the Jets had their first winning season in nine years, which makes it impossible for the tickets to have fallen to Pete and me. It must have been the last game of 1996, on December 22, the final game in the worst season the Jets ever had, before or since.

  According to a box score available online, Dan Marino had 262 passing yards and three touchdowns that day, helping the Dolphins end their season at a keenly pointless 8–8. Afterward, just before the bus driver pulled the door shut to start what seemed would be a morosely quiet ride back to Port Authority, the fan in the distinctive headgear boarded, still jingling, still bellowing the same thing over and over, the chant slightly slower now, his voice hoarse, as if he had not stopped booming his enigmatic assertion the entire game.

  Danny Marino, baby, the legend without a ring.

  We found it impossible to tell whether he was saying this triumphantly, in celebration of Dan Marino, or mockingly, as if to puncture his enduring glory. You would tend to think it was the latter, but there was something else about the chant: there was some kind of joy in it. How else could you keep repeating such a thing all through a bus ride to a game no one really wanted to attend and all the way through such a game and onto the bus ride home? Would he ever stop chanting his chant? Is he still chanting it yet in some monastery for holy fanatics, the bells on the ends of his jester cap or dreadlocks jingling with each syllable? You would assume that there had to be love in the chant, perhaps for Dan Marino and his spectacular but stingingly incomplete career, perhaps for the incompleteness itself, the feeling of not quite getting that final salving victory that makes everything all right forever.

  Several years later, to the day, December 22, I was at the wheel while my baby wailed in a car seat in back. My wife was beside him.

  “What do we do?” she said. She was on the verge of crying. We hadn’t made it to my family’s house for Thanksgiving, but Abby’s family was closer, only an hour and a half away, so we were headed there for Christmas. Cars full of other families speeded all around us on an icy highway. I hated driving, had always hated driving.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” I said.

  The baby cried so hard that he started choking for breath. My wife unbuckled her seatbelt to climb over the top of his car seat to breastfeed him. It was the only way to make any progress with Jack in the car, but if we got in an accident, Abby would fly through the windshield. I’m not meant for this, I was thinking. After a lifetime of losing, I’m not meant to be at the wheel. I should be a passenger, benumbed. A bus from the Meadowlands, a jingling psalm, life in all its p
ain and sweetness undone.

  Lochhead, Harry

  When I was thirty-three I went to a party with my girlfriend. It was around five years after the Dan Marino game. We’d been together for a few months, about as long as I’d ever lasted with anyone. We’d gone to parties before that one, but they’d all been cramped, forgettable beer scrums. This party was in a loft with high ceilings, a big dance floor. If we’d danced together before, I don’t remember it. I liked the way she danced, something in her shoulders, a lightness and softness in the way she moved them to the beat. I liked the way she smiled up at me as we danced. Up to that point the message of my lifetime win-loss record had long seemed clear to me. But then that smile. She wasn’t intending anything in particular with it, but something about it was different from any way I’d been looked at before.

  It’d be nice to say that we drifted on air from that party and have been floating together through life ever since, but things don’t work that way. I don’t know how they work. On the cab ride home there was some kind of drunken flare-up, a fight. I can’t remember the particulars, and even if I did, it wouldn’t help me understand how things work. It’s odd to write an encyclopedia when you do not know anything, but that’s not quite true. I do know stuff, just not anything important.

  One thing I can recite with authority—and I do this aloud sometimes, like a prayer, to keep at bay the feeling that I’m losing my grasp of any facts at all—is the winning team in each World Series going back to 1946, and then going back farther than that I can probably get about nine out of every ten winners correct to 1903, the first World Series, at which point baseball history starts to resemble, in its fogginess, my own past.

  I do know a little about the 1899 Cleveland Spiders. At the beginning of that year Frank Robison, who owned both the Cleveland and the St. Louis franchises in the National League, transferred all the capable Cleveland players to St. Louis. Every part of the Cleveland roster was gutted, but nowhere so deeply as at shortstop. The longtime starter, Ed McKean, was sent to St. Louis, as was his young heir apparent, future Hall of Famer Bobby Wallace. Just before the season began, the team still needed a body to anchor the infield, so they signed a minor league shortstop from California named Harry Lochhead.

  Lochhead went on to lead the team in games played with 148 and errors with 81. He seldom reached base and had no power, tendencies that produced a team low .540 OPS. He’s been referred to as the worst player on the worst team of all time. Although this is unfair, given that he and not any of his fellow Misfits or Exiles, as the Spiders were also known that year, manned the most crucial defensive position on the field, the sheer quantity of Lochhead’s negative contributions—his mangling of grounders, his wild throws, the ubiquity of his uselessness with a bat—argue in favor of him as the team’s epitome, the best representative of the team that lost more games in a season than any team in any sport ever has.

  In all, the Spiders amassed 134 defeats against just 20 wins, finishing the season 84 games out of first place and 35 games behind the league’s next-worst team, a putrid Washington club that managed a .355 winning percentage despite the benefit of 14 games against the Spiders. At a certain point the Spiders stopped playing home games, just like their football cousins in benchmark failure, the Dayton Triangles, losing and exile somehow interlocked, and after the season the franchise was erased. Many of the players who had filled out the roster for the Spiders never appeared in another major league game. Harry Lochhead, proving he really wasn’t the worst of the worst, managed to get into 10 more games in the renegade American League in 1901, but that was it for him, and he was out of the majors by age twenty-five. He died just eight years later, at thirty-three, a month after getting overexposure from wandering lost in a desert.

  When I was thirty-three I went to a party with my girlfriend. On the way home there was some kind of a fight. I wanted to get back to the good feeling of the party. Back at my apartment, the fight over but still simmering, I went to hug her. She tried to shove me away.

  “You shouldn’t be with me,” she said. “I’m a fucking mess.” She started crying.

  There must have been a moment just before Harry Lochhead got lost in the desert. He could have turned one way and still been okay. Instead, he turned the other way, and that was it. Throughout my life up until that moment, whenever I had been given a chance to turn one way or the other, I’d always turned in the direction of my losing lifetime record, toward isolation, exile. Maybe I didn’t want to do that anymore. Maybe I was drawn to fucking messes. Maybe her smile as we’d danced at the party in the loft with the high ceilings had knocked me loose from all my asterisks.

  “I love you,” I said. Neither of us had said this before to each other.

  You get used to being covered with asterisks, all those little burrs digging into your skin, linking you to every diminishment. You imagine that a moment free of them would sing. But it’s more like losing a popup in the sun. You stagger, blinking, bracing for the impact of a new error. You open your arms and hope.

  “I love you too,” Abby said.

  It’s blinding, the brightness. You’re lost in an unsortable expanse.

  Lose

  Jack’s first Christmas Eve, he fell asleep early. He never did this. My wife and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We were in Wisconsin, having survived the icy drive up from Chicago. We sat in a bed in her parents’ guest room. Jack was in a swing in the corner that made a faint clicking noise as it swayed. The white noise machine hummed, and sleet ticked on the roof and windowsills. A window facing the street had frosted over. Every once in a while the headlights of a car lit up the ice.

  One Christmas Eve when I was a kid the windshield of our VW camper froze over like that. The defroster had broken. We were driving through the dark, and every once in a while the headlights of a car lit up the ice. I sat in back with my brother. Up front, in the passenger seat, Mom pressed one end of a tube taken from a vacuum cleaner against a floor heating vent and held the other end up to the driver’s side of the windshield. The heat through the tube had opened a tiny circle in the ice. Tom peered through this circle and steered. No one spoke. Everyone watched the tiny circle. To lose it would be to all fly off together into nothing. We couldn’t afford to lose it.

  I don’t remember whether I was scared. I probably was, but if so, that feeling dropped out of the memory pretty quickly. Throughout my adult life memories of that tiny circle in the ice brought back only a sense of togetherness and care and adventure. For a long time I assumed that such feelings were behind me, that I’d lost them, that my own life was in some crucial way frozen over, that I’d lost that tiny opening. For a long time I couldn’t tell whether I was flying off into nothing or not moving at all.

  But then here I was, part of a new family, huddled in Abby’s parents’ guest room, watching headlights light up the ice. The fleeting shadows they created made it seem as if the room itself was swaying along with my gently swaying son in his swing. I reached over and squeezed my wife’s hand. I was intending only to make some kind of a gesture to communicate my gratitude for being with her, cocooned in this moment, this careful new life, but touching her in any way has a certain inevitable effect. A part of my anatomy becomes that most annoying type of benchwarmer, one who does not know to be cool, detached from the action, but instead is constantly engorged with peppy schoolboy enthusiasm, leaping up at any provocation to show a readiness to sprint into the action.

  “Well,” I said, “here we are.”

  Even if my wife didn’t notice the bulge in my sweatpants, it was obvious what I was getting at, as I was always getting at it. It had been a billion years since it had gotten any results.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Abby said. But then she said the words all men long to hear.

  “All right, we might as well get this over with at some point.”

  Throughout my life, whenever I’ve been afforded the rare cha
nce to have sex with another human being, my starving urgency hinders any sensitivity and tenderness. Most of the time sex with me is not altogether unlike having a duffel bag full of hockey equipment fall on you. However, on this night, thinking of all the weeks my wife had to limp around with her holiest of holies wrapped in gauze, I moved slowly, carefully. This went on for many, many seconds. Afterward I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling as if through a tiny opening in the iced-over world to heaven, or, you know, as if I’d just gotten laid.

  “How was it?” I said. My wife said the words all men long to hear.

  “Well, it got a little less excruciating as it went on.”

  I wrote the line in my notebook the next morning. It had made me laugh, and I didn’t want to lose it. More generally I didn’t want to lose. I didn’t want to lose this feeling, which, yes, very much resembled the afterglow of sex but went beyond that to include the relief and safety and connection afforded by looking through a clear circle in an iced-over windshield and still seeing open road. I thought I’d lost it a long time ago, but it was coming back to me now, my wife and son sleeping nearby, all of us in a careful new life together. I’d woken very early, just as I’d done every Christmas morning as a kid. Back then I’d spend the predawn hours working through the contents of my stocking, a long white sweat sock, which had been magically filled during the night with little toys and small chocolate footballs and chocolate coins. Eventually I’d reduce the candy to crumpled tinfoil husks, and all the spinners and spark makers and miniature pinball machines would be played out or broken, and the sweat sock would be just another sweat sock. Then I would wait for the moment I waited for all year every year: I’d wait for my family to wake.

  I waited for my family to wake now. My notebook was still open on my lap. Fueled by that most volatile of substances, happiness, I got a Big Idea. The key identifier of a Big Idea is that it manages to crowd out all memories of the nothing to which all previous Big Ideas amounted. I would write a book—no, a book-length psalm—about the 1976 AL Rookie of the Year and fleeting cultural icon Mark “the Bird” Fidrych. I would free myself, I decided, hyperventilating, from my tiresome directionless encyclopedic sorting and instead write a crisp, linear fable of pure joy. I started mapping it out furiously. “To my son,” I imagined writing on the dedication page. The book about the Bird, his one season of ebullient glory, would be my way of passing along to Jack the happiness of being alive, a happiness his arrival had passed along to me. The book would burst with sunlight. It would sell! I’d written books before, but they’d all been complicated hesitating whimpers. This would be a thundering gleeful yawp, and the lemmings would fall all over one another to buy copies at such an explosive rate that traditional talk shows and monetized hipster podcasts alike would begin rabidly clamoring for the blessing of my presence.