Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  Murphy

  The alphabetic sprawl of all major leaguers through history includes forty-one Murphys. One is known only as “Murphy,” no other name, first or last. Murphy played one major league game, on August 16, 1884. That day, for the Boston Reds, Murphy had four plate appearances and reached base once, by a walk. At catcher, Murphy made two errors, perhaps prompting a switch to left field, where no balls were hit his way. He is my favorite character in my favorite narrative, the one I first started to study back in childhood.

  The first baseball encyclopedia in my life didn’t actually venture in detail back far enough in time to include Murphy in its story of the game, so it wasn’t until my twenties that I discovered Murphy. It was when I was living with my brother, Ian, in the apartment that trembled when trucks rolled by on the nearby BQE. Ian was working as an editor at a company that produced an encyclopedia that included all major leaguers, even those from before 1900. I was leafing through it one day, losing myself in my favorite story, which never exhausted itself or settled into any lasting solidity. I came upon Murphy. Murphy was not alphabetically the opposite of Aaron, Hank, but for me he was the opposite of all that greatness and order in the world. He was anyone, no one.

  In a few hours I’d go to my job on the evening shift at a liquor store. It was one of those nameless days. The short entry for Murphy made me happy: his marginality, his brevity, his errors. After the discovery I got on with my day: shower, subway ride, ring up some liquor sales, lock the gates, subway ride home. I wanted to be a writer, and the idea I had for my life at that time was that before each day at the liquor store I’d work diligently in the service of that dream. Some days took the shape of that intention, but more often I sat around in my underwear eating toast and engaging in what most people would classify as wasting time. But is it a complete waste of time if on one of those days you discover Murphy? I got this feeling every once in a while back then—sometimes when I thought I was in love, sometimes when a particular song had a hold on me—that there was something so beautiful in the world that it made me want to shout, this desire like a collapsing star in my throat, obliterating all the words I might ever be able to say. The fucking wonder. Murphy was nobody, Murphy was here.

  Jack’s arrival in my life ended any possibility of sitting around for hours eating toast, but I still managed to find ways to waste time. One day in late January, the morning that Jack turned a half-year old, I started researching Joe Charboneau, 1980 American League Rookie of the Year, whose rapid demise was made official with a 1981 demotion to the minors after grounding out while pinch-hitting for Jerry Dybzinski, who, a couple of years later, became the goat of the 1983 American League Championship Series by failing to advance a runner on a crucial bunt attempt, instead reaching on a fielder’s choice, and then ending his team’s rally altogether by running to a base that was already occupied (see Pulling a John Anderson). I don’t know why I’m drawn to Murphy, and to Charboneau, and to Dybzinski, but on the morning my son turned six months old I found myself not planning some kind of a celebration of the milestone or attending to any number of responsibilities and problems emanating from my new life as a father but instead sifting through the Google newspaper archives to research Game Four of the 1983 American League Championship Series, the Dybzinski game, and I couldn’t help but roam even farther from that already pointless roaming, veering off of an article on Dyb­zinski’s mistakes to read other articles in the old newspaper. That pull—away from what I’m supposed to be doing, to something else, to everything else, to what I imagine I might be missing—is the defining aspect of my life: to digress, squander, dick around, wander, waste, disappear, go missing. I ended up reading an article about the Atlanta Braves, who used to be the Milwaukee Braves, who used to be the Boston Braves, who for one season shared a city with the short-lived Boston Reds, who for one game employed a man known only as Murphy. In the article Atlanta Braves manager Joe Torre voiced regret about not speaking to Phil Niekro directly when the Braves released the aging knuckleballer. In the article the word “something” was misspelled.

  “With all that’s gone on and all that’s been said, I felt uncomfortable calling him, but I knew it was somnething I had to do,” Torre said, according to the AP report.

  I got that feeling, that private irrepressible wonder. I wanted to shout. Somnething. It’s the kind of error that doesn’t get missed anymore due to SpellCheck, the automated tool embedded in word processing programs that instantly displays a squiggly line below any misspelling (so long as the misspelling is not also a word). I see it underneath mistakes onscreen but feel it everywhere. A squiggly line seems to run beneath everything, a constant tremor of uncertainty, fixes needed. How could it ever be any other way? Human life begins to form when one microscopic sperm cell among hundreds of millions (or billions and billions, counting all the platoons sent day after day for decades on suicide missions to socks, tissues, shower drains, etc.) slips through a virtually impenetrable series of impediments, an exception to the rule so outlandish as to be a definitive mistake, something miraculously missed. All my life a series of misfires and missing and disappearing and then this: my inexplicable somnething, my son.

  Volume 3:

  7–11 Months

  N

  New England Patriots

  See Asterisk.

  New York Mets, 1993

  See Young, Anthony

  Next Ryan Leaf, the

  A used Dodge Intrepid looms over my life with Abby. It first materialized years ago, just after we’d moved out of New York City and were staying at her parents’ place in Racine while looking for work in Chicago (see Goalby, Bob). We needed a car. Neither of us knew anything about cars. Neither of us knew anything about what our new life together was going to be like. We were grasping at an idea that the used Dodge Intrepid was some kind of an encapsulation of what we thought our new life had to be. It was dark blue and clean and big and seemed sturdy. It was bland, apparently capable, midwestern, a regular American car for a regular American life.

  Neither of us ever got comfortable with it. Abby, a fan of the space program of the 1960s, that high point in American capability, put a NASA sticker on the bumper. A few weeks later, while I was driving back to Racine from a writing conference in Vermont, the car broke down. The transmission was shot. The replacement transmission pawned off on me by smiling mechanic-shop criminals in upstate New York where the car had stopped working turned out to be another lemon and conked out a few weeks later. At that point, after thousands of dollars of our savings had vanished down a dark blue hole, Abby’s father stepped in and insisted on helping by buying his daughter a new car, a small black Ford Focus.

  This car lasted for years, steady and reliable, but it was always a faint, nagging reminder to me that I couldn’t quite manage a regular American life on my own. A relative to this nagging reminder was the memory of the Dodge Intrepid, a dark blue cloud that appeared above us whenever Abby and I were on the brink of a big joint decision. I don’t think Abby shared my sense of guilt and inadequacy over the Ford Focus, but our Dodge Intrepid visions of decision dread were so in synch as to be a defining characteristic of our life together.

  “Is this going to be another Dodge Intrepid?” we would ask, though eventually we didn’t even need to ask it. We both knew it was there, hovering above our hesitant choices: a big dark blue mistake. We tried to avoid these decisions, preferring a life in which we existed in our adjacent personal decision-making solitudes, but every once in a while we had to make a large joint decision, and it always felt like we were stepping off into nothing. If all our decisions worked out, we might have been able to bury the memory of the Dodge Intrepid, but every once in a while we leaped into nothing and didn’t glide or take wing but instead just crashed down hard to earth, like when we signed a lease on an apartment that turned out to be one headache after another, one screaming match with the landlord after another, all through our year
there and beyond, into months of a nasty legal battle to reclaim our security deposit.

  The problem was not that it had been difficult—when is life not difficult?—but that we had thought upon making the decision that it would be a good one, that we would by some dumb luck be making the right choice, that we would be happy. The problem is that we made the choice together, so when it went bad it reflected on some deficiency in our relationship, some inability to identify a bad decision, some inability to function as a viable unit, a team.

  A few months before Jack was born I tested the commute from my job to the location of the condo we would end up buying. It took a long time, but as it wasn’t much longer than my already absurd commute, I decided it was okay. I wanted it to be okay. To extend the fantasy of okay-ness, I got off the train and walked to the condo and looked in through the bay windows at an empty dinner table. It gleamed like the very ideal of a table in the light from a stained-glass ceiling fixture. I texted my wife as I walked back to the train.

  “This could work,” I thumb-keyed.

  We’d hardly ever eaten dinner at a table. Our norm was to face the TV, plates in our laps. This had gone on for years. One of my few developed thoughts about parenthood before actually becoming a parent was that I wanted this to change if we had a kid. That vision of the dining room table through the bay window—how can I put it?—it was like seeing a way to the happiness you always dreamed of.

  It was like seeing Ryan Leaf before there was ever such a thing as “the next Ryan Leaf,” before Ryan Leaf failed so profoundly to live up to the astronomical expectations surrounding him—this failure underscored constantly by the contrasting ascendency of his one-time rival, Peyton Manning—that he became the definitive benchmark of bad decisions, the cloud of doubt hanging over every hope. Before all that, in 1998, Ryan Leaf seemed to have everything you would ever want in a quarterback. The other quarterback slated to go with the first or second pick in that year’s draft, Peyton Manning, had mastery of almost as many quarterbacking tools as Ryan Leaf, but Manning wasn’t quite as big or as strong—after high school Leaf had nearly decided to spend his college career as a linebacker—and, by reputation at least, Manning couldn’t throw quite as far or as hard as Leaf. Manning was believed to be the more cerebral of the two quarterbacks, but Leaf had indicated a keen athletic mind of his own by running a pro-style offense brilliantly throughout his college career. The initial recommendation of the scouts of the Indianapolis Colts, the team with the first pick, was to select Ryan Leaf.

  The team set up one-on-one meetings with both prospects. Manning showed up with a pen and a yellow legal pad to take ravenous notes and turned the interview around, pelting his interlocutors with questions of his own about the Colts’ system and the role they imagined him having in it. Leaf, later explaining that he was undergoing a medical procedure, did not show up at all nor did he contact anyone with the Colts to say that he wasn’t going to be showing up.

  It’s easy enough in retrospect to point to the two meetings—­one quarterback attending in the most active and present way imaginable and the other utterly absent—as a clear indicator of what was to come: Manning embarking on what would be, according to his record-obliterating numbers, the most productive career ever at the most crucial, demanding, celebrated, and scrutinized position in any American team sport, and Leaf managing to appear in only twenty-five NFL games over four harried, miserable seasons, leaving behind nothing but burned bridges, acrimony, mockery. But even after Leaf’s no-show meeting with the Colts the general consensus was still that both players were virtually inseparable in terms of who was most clearly destined for long-term success. It was easy to believe that choosing either one of the two prospects would be a good decision.

  Both quarterbacks struggled in their first year. In the first and only head-to-head meeting between the two, Leaf and Manning were almost mirror images of one another in quarterbacking performance, both going 12-for-23 with an interception, Leaf claiming a slight edge in total yardage, 160 to 137, while Manning held the edge in touchdown passes, with one to Leaf’s zero. Neither had an especially memorable or positive performance that day. But Manning kept showing up. Leaf, not so much. By the end of the season Leaf’s teammates seemed to have developed a loathing for him. They were relieved when their team, the San Diego Chargers, acquired two aging journeymen at quarterback the following year and were maybe even a little happy to hear of Leaf’s subsequent season-ending injury. He missed his entire second season and started just nine games (eight of them losses) in his third season, after which the Chargers released him. He bounced around to three more teams and managed to start three more games, all with the Dallas Cowboys, all losses, before retiring at the age of twenty-six. He’d had some injuries during his brief career, but he didn’t seem to be suffering from any debilitating physical setback at the time of his retirement. He was simply sick of showing up. In his retirement this desire to not show up seemed to expand to include everything. Like his predecessor in colossal disappointment, Tony Mandarich, Ryan Leaf developed an addiction to painkillers. This addiction led to trouble with the law that was rooted variously in having the painkillers (possession of illegal substances) or not having them and trying to get them (burglary charges). In early 2013, just a couple of weeks before Peyton Manning was named the NFL Comeback Player of the Year by making an astounding recovery from a career-threatening neck injury, Leaf was moved from a Montana drug rehab facility to a Montana state prison for violating his treatment plan and threatening a rehab facility staff member.

  “When I was taking the pills, I didn’t have to deal with my feelings of being a failure,” Leaf said, according to an article written for Playboy by John Cagney Nash, who was for a while Leaf’s cellmate in prison. Leaf described to Nash his addiction: “I just sat in my lake house all alone. I’d be there for weeks, and I loved it. But it was so unhealthy. I got high and watched TV and slept. I just liked it. I didn’t feel anything. I just lay around, loving it. Anyone who tried to stop me, I was just, ‘Fuck you, let me go feel good.’”

  I’ve always circled around a desire that I find reflected in Ryan Leaf’s world-canceling mantra, the desire to disappear from all responsibilities, to not have to do a single fucking thing. It intensified, this circling, with Jack’s arrival. Almost every day I would understand that I was stupidly lucky, luckier than I’d ever dreamed I could be, to have such love in my life as what I had for Jack and Abby. I wouldn’t trade my life for the life of Peyton Manning or any other person on earth. But there were also certain moments when I wanted to trade with Ryan Leaf. Not incarcerated Ryan Leaf or struggling NFL malcontent Ryan Leaf or even college superstar Ryan Leaf, but lake house Ryan Leaf, numb and gone, fuck-you-let-me-go-feel-good Ryan Leaf, the next Ryan Leaf, yes, please let me be the next Ryan Leaf. I didn’t mention Ryan Leaf by name in these moments. Instead, I would find satisfaction in imagining myself gone, removed instantly from my tangled life to some place of pure irrelevance, a lake house, say, where I would be so alone and undisturbed that I might as well not be there either, a ghost in a featureless afterlife, reclining in a La-Z-Boy by a big window looking out on a flat blue infinity.

  I imagined these departures when we were having a rough day, all three of us. Jack was crying, my wife was letting out her “uuuuggghhh” sound, and I was—what?—wanting to be removed, wanting to take up residence in Ryan Leaf’s lake house. It wasn’t the sheer exhaustion of such moments that was doing it, though that was a contributing factor. It was that I was in this inescapable web, lashed together with someone, my wife, who did not in those moments seem to love me or like me but instead who seemed to find me, along with everything else, intolerable, a feeling that manifests in ways indistinguishable from loathing, and so I loathed her right back, this woman I loved, loathed her as much as I’ve ever loathed anything, and the impossible tangle of this situation, as if the three of us were on a lifeboat a million miles from any shore, no one for us
but us, a trio of suffering and wailing and loathing, suggested that there was no way out except in my narcotic fantasies of absolute vanishing.

  This is not anywhere near the whole truth, and I can’t give a single concrete detail from when these moments of loathing gave way to my pathetic vanishing prayers because by that point I’d moved beyond the ability to notice anything except whatever illusion of escape I could paint on a brick wall and then ram myself into, reveling in the pain of that ludicrous contact.

  I do remember the moment I realized my wife and I, at least for the duration of that moment, hated one another’s guts. It was a quieter moment, not a middle of the night sleepless horror when everyone was going out of their minds screaming and stomping and panicking and blaming but rather something closer to the very dream I had of domestic bliss. Before we’d bought the unaffordable condo I’d stood outside it and looked at the front window and imagined the three of us sitting in there at a table, aglow, together. And then there we were one night, the three of us, sitting at a table, aglow. By then the mortgage payments and astronomical condo association fees had been corroding our savings for long enough for everything to start to seem shadowed by the memory of the used Dodge Intrepid. That night’s leathery, disagreeable meat—I don’t remember which variety or in what matter I butchered its preparation—coalesced itself, somewhere in my upper chest, into a small belch. Evidently the smell of it wafted across the table to Abby, because she groaned with disgust that was brought to the level of profundity by her exhaustion. This burp thoroughly nauseated her—who can blame her? I hated myself. Dinner continued. I took a bite of a carrot. I felt my wife’s eyes on me. I understood that she hated the loud sound of my chewing. I chewed on, hating her for hating it.