Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  “He’s not going to remember it,” I said out loud. But when I looked up from the onscreen images to Abby she was crying. She closed the laptop. White noise hissed through the monitor.

  All the way down to Hartford Nick never remarked on the whistle around my neck. He had his own problems. At the show he stood with me for a few songs, bottom-lipping his mustache, dancing in brief lurching bursts like he was clearing space under the boards, barking encouragement at the band at slightly mistimed moments. Finally he stalked off to go find the Wharf Rats, a Deadhead-based twelve-step support group. I watched the second set alone. I’d been to a few shows before, but this would end up being my last. With that band there was always a verging on the dream of continuous flowing life, no solid form but pure play. At shows I’d been to before I’d tried to dissolve into that dream, assaulting my brain chemistry with psychedelics and in­ebriates in attempts to slip right out of my name.

  By the time of Jack’s birth evidence of a direct medical benefit of circumcision was looking increasingly dubious, especially when weighed against the simple, unequivocal fact that the procedure removed a part of a baby’s body. If this is done as part of an entire life of connected religious rituals, there’s meaning in it. Was there any meaning in it for me? Religion wasn’t a part of my life, and I wasn’t going to impose it on Jack’s life, and if the religious aspect of the body part removal means nothing to you, why make that call? I didn’t have the courage to so much as consider these questions until long after a call had been made. A call had been made? I made a call by failing to make a call. I did it because the other call seemed the more strident decision. The other call, to leave the baby alone, seemed in that moment too much like blowing the whistle, like calling everything to a halt. So I swallowed the whistle.

  In Hartford, sober, I realized my most beloved band was just another act, cranking out songs, a certain cozy sloppiness alluding to the dream of pure flowing play but like a domesticated version of it, the panther tamed into a grizzled, asthmatic lap cat. But like a lap cat, they could get to you. When the band performed “Looks Like Rain” the pealing crescendos of guitar notes at the end almost made me cry. In the ensuing arena roar I brought the whistle to my lips. I wanted time to stop. But I just breathed into it with the halting shallowness of someone not quite able to weep. The little ball inside the whistle twitched slightly.

  Except: I’m lying. Not about all or even most of it—I’m just lying that there was a whistle. I was an intramural ref, the worst ref the world has ever known, but there was no whistle around my neck on the drive down to Hartford, no whistle around my neck at the concert. I don’t know what happened to the whistle. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I could never blow my whistle, but some part of me wishes I’d had it with me in that moment. Maybe I want to imagine something specific, something to make the memory endure: that in one instant in a packed, darkened arena, I found the strength to blow the whistle. I want to imagine that life isn’t just one long unstoppable diminishment, that there might be some way to bring everything safely to a halt.

  Whoop-De-Damn-Do

  After the concert Nick stood outside the Hartford Civic Center with his arms outspread. In the context of the ragged postconcert bazaar roiling around him, some people hawking tie-dyed T-shirts or bracelets or peyote or burritos, others searching for these and other things or for a ticket to the next night’s show, it was unclear whether Nick was a buyer or a seller. Most gave the large melancholy man with a mustache and outstretched arms a wide berth. But once in a while someone got curious.

  “What are you doing?” one girl asked. She was wearing a long, dust-colored granny dress and looked both startled and exhausted, as if firemen had just pulled her from her bed. She was dragging behind her a cardboard sign that said, “ONE.”

  “Giving out free hugs, man,” Nick boomed. The girl flinched a little and kept walking, as if she had forgotten she had asked Nick a question. Nick swiveled to watch her pass him by and then pivoted back around to face forward, his arms still spread out wide, waiting.

  I stood far enough off to the side to discourage any idea that the free hug giver and I were associated. I even fixed a small smirk on my face. For several years from that point forward my life would follow the general parameters of that kind of distancing. I didn’t want to be discovered foolishly caring about anything. This ironic stance reached its peak a few years later in my late twenties, when I decided to stop wearing the cap of the team I actually loved, the Red Sox, and started wearing a white New Jersey Nets cap.

  At that time the Nets, after briefly showing some promise, were in the midst of a collapse. The central figure in both the rise and the fall was Derrick Coleman, a big, quick player with a fluid, intuitive feel for the game and an almost complete disinterest in applying his sublime artistry. His cavalier apathy was laid bare during the Nets’ collapse, when he was asked to comment on fellow team leader Kenny Anderson’s failure to show up at practice.

  “Whoop-de-damn-do,” Coleman said.

  I seized on the phrase like a mantra. How sweet to imagine giving up on everything, nothing to win, nothing to lose, nothing to want, nowhere to go: whoop-de-damn-do. By then everything had slipped into air quotes, half-sarcastic, never begun. Deep down, below my New Jersey Nets cap, my ironic smirk, I was waiting. But for what?

  Outside my last Dead show, as I smirked nearby, Nick kept standing tall with his arms outspread, waiting. Occasionally he again was asked what he was doing. Some laughed at his answer, some said “right on” without breaking stride, but a couple of people shambled into his big free embrace. It didn’t seem to help him much. When I think of my last season in organized sports, my last season before edging smirk-first out into the adult world, I think of Nick, and when I think of Nick I think of a teammate who stood apart from the rest of us because he was already an adult, a guy who needed something so bad it pained him, and he hadn’t figured out how to ask for it, or even what it was, but none of this was stopping him from trying.

  Winnipeg

  I have seen the worst bums of my generation battered, rag-armed, longing for the white towel of capitulation, the hook, the whistle, the buzzer, starving in the middle of the ring for balance, wobbly on the mound, hobbled in the backfield, dunked on, stripped, steamrolled, cooked, dragging themselves back out for another round, another inning, another twenty-minute period, who got bashed in the face, blurred into fog, blamed for our sins, filled full of holes.

  I’m with you in Winnipeg, Doug Soetaert, where you retreated after a November 1981 road loss in Minnesota so abject it could serve as the universal unit of measure for defeat, the Soetaert, all defeats measured in Soetaerts and fractions of Soetaerts. I’m with you in Winnipeg, Doug Soetaert, where the season before the Jets set a league record for futility by going thirty straight games without a win and won only nine games the entire season, 9–57–14, a .200 winning percentage. I’m with you in Winnipeg, where in the new young season things seemed to be going much better until this night in Minnesota. I’m with you in Winnipeg, where in a few years the team will leave Winnipeg altogether, moving to another city south of the border, the franchise not defunct but the name, Winnipeg, no longer attached. I’m with you in Winnipeg when, years after that, another Winnipeg team will be born but one with no attachment to the previous one, a ghost of what was always lingering over what is. I’m with you in Winnipeg to feel that loss, fifteen goals in one game, a 15–2 defeat, not the worst loss in NHL history, not the most goals ever allowed by a team in NHL history, but the most ever put past one goalie, because your team wouldn’t give you the mercy of pulling you, and so I’m with you, Doug Soetaert, as the shots keep whistling past you and you stay in the face of it for the duration, all fifteen goals, your armor and equipment no help, and so you might as well be naked, and in my dreams you walk all the way from Winnipeg with the wind whistling through fifteen puck-holes in your body to find us on
our little beach in early July, my nearly one-year-old son and me, Lake Michigan deemed that day too polluted to touch, but the breeze light and warm and all loss reduced, a distant howl, footnote of a howl, silly, a laugh.

  “Thock,” I said.

  But Jack had heard this one before and only smiled. No hysterics. Sometimes it’s not about not knowing where the next shot will be coming from. It’s not about Winnipeg or the ghost of Winnipeg. It’s not about being riddled with holes. The holes dissolve, maybe not altogether gone but miniaturized, superscript, mistakable for stars. Holy, holy, holy. Holy my boy, holy right now, holy this moment, the lone riddled goalie.

  Woods, Tiger

  See Asterisk.

  Wrong Town

  One evening in mid-July, a couple of weeks before Jack’s first birthday, Abby and I went walking around our neighborhood with Jack. He was nestled in a carrier on my wife’s chest. We’d gone on a walk the evening before, after hours of the baby raging and wailing with teething pain, and on the walk he had eventually let his head fall onto Abby’s chest and slept. We were hoping for a repeat, but we walked and walked and walked and he kept staring out wide-eyed at the darkening world. He was hungry for it. Fireflies kept appearing in brief shin-high arcs in our path, as if part of some mysterious sanctification. That’s one thought I had. The other was that I didn’t remember fireflies flying so low, which struck me as a harbinger of some horrific environmental calamity to come. Somewhere the world had gone wrong. Either interpretation of the fireflies seemed to suggest a world beyond my control, holiness and disaster the same.

  “I just prayed,” Michael Jordan said. He was explaining winning.

  “If I’d had a rubber band, I would have pulled it back,” Fred Brown said. He was explaining losing.

  The explanations involved two movements of a single basketball, the two movements occurring within a few seconds of one another in the spring of 1982. The first movement was propelled by the jump-shot release of Michael Jordan, a teenaged freshman on the North Carolina basketball team. The ball arced up and then down through the net to give Jordan’s team a one-point lead over Georgetown in the waning seconds of the 1982 NCAA championship game. The basketball then found its way into the hands of Georgetown point guard Fred Brown, who advanced it over the half-court line, faked a pass to Sleepy Floyd, and then made a pass to what he thought would be teammate Eric Smith but instead was North Carolina forward James Worthy. Wrong town, Fred Brown. Worthy streaked the other way with the ball, the title.

  There’s something about Fred Brown’s mistake that strikes me as tender. Errant passes are usually the product of a bad decision, too much ambition, a bad read on the possibilities at hand, a slim blind spot, but this one is just so nakedly wrong it makes me want to put Fred Brown in a baby carrier and walk him through the firefly streets until he lays his head on my chest and sleeps. I think it’s because they’re so close, Brown and Worthy. It was the first NCAA championship game I’d ever watched, and I remember watching the entire thing without really breathing, a stupendous game until its regrettable end, which in my memory was composed of the bad pass traveling from the top of the key to the far right wing, but in truth—you can see this on an extremely grainy video on YouTube—the two players were much closer. The ball traveled a few feet, hardly more than a hand-off. It almost seems cruel of Worthy not to hand the ball back, cruel that a ref doesn’t blow the whistle and restart the play, cruel that there isn’t a rubber band connected to the ball for just such occasions. But that’s not how it works.

  We walked up and down the streets near our house until it was altogether dark out. My son still wouldn’t fall asleep. He kept squirming.

  “What are we doing wrong?” I said.

  “Please,” my wife said, beyond exhausted. I gazed at my surroundings miserably. This is the wrong town, I thought. Always this thought. Always the wish to pull life backward with a rubber band, not let it go with a prayer. The wrongs multiply. Wrong house, wrong neighborhood, wrong town, wrong life. That’s always been the pattern. As I worked my way through that escalating litany of abnegation Jack squirmed again, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I unbuckled the carrier and lowered him down to the sidewalk.

  “What are you doing?” Abby said.

  “He doesn’t want to be here,” I said, meaning the carrier. Jack wobbled a little as he stood, holding onto my hand. He was in his bare feet. It was a warm night, and we’d taken him outside in nothing but a cloth diaper. He started moving forward. I held his hand lightly at first, but then I let go as he walked on his own through the arcing tracer lights of the low, sickened fireflies. His diaper was a tiger design, orange with black stripes. His pudgy legs were slightly bowed. His hair had finally started to grow, and it was blond and hinting toward curls. The crystallization of an uncertainty ghosting me through the years, a suspicion beyond that I was in the wrong house or the wrong town or the wrong neighborhood, that the very life I was living was the wrong one: gone. Any life without this boy moving forward through a strange, blinking river of light would be the wrong one.

  X

  XFL

  At the turn of the millennium a new league formed in a frenzy, franchises arising, arenas leased, logos created, uniforms produced, ad campaigns launched, scantily clad cheerleaders amassed and deployed, bombastic proclamations thundering. Within months it rose from nothing, lurched through one season, and fell back to nothing. The XFL existed only during the spring of 2001, the rapidity of its demise combining with its notoriety to make it the most unsuccessful attempt to establish a sports league that has ever been mounted. The league’s opening garnered attention from its promotional bluster and its partnership with a major network, NBC, but as the season rolled on virtually all fan support vanished. A late-season XFL night game on NBC in March earned a 1.6 rating, tying a 1997 ABC News special on drug policy as the lowest-rated primetime network program in the history of television. Other renegade leagues, the Federal League, the AHL, the AFL, the WFL, the ABA, the USFL, had risen and fell, but they usually started out with a murmur and endured for at least a few seasons. The XFL began with the piercing cry of a newborn and then was gone by the end of the year.

  A year is nothing. For example, the most significant year of my life seemed to end just moments after it started, accompanied by a frenzy, invites sent out, balloons ordered, napkins, paper plates, and plastic cutlery purchased, gluten-free nonallergenic cupcakes baked. A wading pool arrived with Abby’s parents, but it was the wrong size. I was instructed to buy a new one on my trip to the party store to pick up the balloons. This was on the morning of the party. I was racing around, an amplified version of myself in this new life, which is to say I was covered in flop sweat and anxious and worried and with some other bright element involved, hope or happiness or some other term belonging to an entirely different encyclopedia. Jack was one.

  I remember the morning of Jack’s party, going to the store to get the balloons, but my memory of the party itself is a blur. Our place filled with parents and small children. The proceedings spilled out into the concrete slab behind our building where we put the wading pool. At a certain point Jack got overwhelmed and started crying. Abby put him in a carrier on her chest, and the three of us left the party to walk our one-year-old around the block. We did this a few times, circling and circling, the sounds of Jack’s party, the squeals of children, advancing and receding, advancing and receding, Jack’s eyelids growing heavy and finally falling shut.

  Everything goes around and around, advancing, receding. Pro football in its early years fed into pro wrestling in the form of the sonnenberg, as performed by erstwhile pro footballers Gus Sonnenberg and Sneeze Achiu. Sneeze Achiu went on to help launch the career of Gorgeous George, the godfather of the outsized personalities of the modern wrestling era, which reached its apex under the stewardship of Vince McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation and World Wrestling Entertainment, and in 2001
Vince McMahon channeled the ghost of Sneeze Achiu’s sonnenberg back to football by launching the XFL, which he envisioned as a football league that would incorporate some of the bombast and theatrics of pro wrestling.

  My memory of Jack’s whole first year is a blur, more or less, which is perhaps in part why I’ve found it necessary to cram the entire ordered history of all sporting defeat into this year: it gives me purchase. I don’t want it to be a blur. I need the language of sports, the vocabulary I’ve spoken in my whole life, so I can hold on to every single moment. You have to put words to your world one way or another or let it slip away.

  The X in XFL was officially designated as standing for nothing, no word. Initially the plan was to have it stand for “Xtreme,” which would have appropriately lowered the English language just a tiny notch more, but it turned out another league had already formed with the same name. So the X was just an X. That league, that year, sound and fury signifying nothing. What can anything mean in this fleeting noise?

  I remember struggling the morning of the party to get everything from the party store into the car, worrying that I’d lose my grip on the balloons. They were in a giant bundle. I had to shove some in the backseat and some in the passenger seat. I drove home with a car clogged with spheres of bright color. For a long time I lived as if the only possible way to get through life was to act as if I were not quite here. It’s easier to simply X out the days on the calendar. But then, one day, the present arrives, the day you had circled a year before: you’re driving in a car full of balloons. The car itself could rise up off the ground with all the combined helium. For all I know for sure that’s exactly what happened—I floated a few miles through the clouds and alit and walked through my front door with a huge bushel of birthday balloons. From here on out I’ll arrive at places without ever really remembering exactly how I got there. I’ll look back at the calendar and see a bunch of days with Xs through them. What does X stand for? What does it mean? For once, though it’s as hard as ever to sort, I know it means something.