Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  Why, of all the players that ever came to me, was Andy Messersmith taped to the post of my loft bed? I’m not sure. I know Andy Messersmith was the first baseball player I remember seeing in action on television. It was right after we’d moved to Vermont, while we were still living in another family’s house in Randolph Center. Andy Messersmith was on the screen, pitching. There was something else about him, something I didn’t quite understand. He had a claim to being the first free agent. I didn’t really understand what this meant, but it seemed significant that he was the first of something in the actual world and the first of something in my world. I guess I wanted to hold on to that feeling of those very first days collecting cards, those very first days learning the history of baseball, those very first days of being in a new place where we didn’t know anyone and it was just me and my brother against the world.

  Topps 1977 #89: Butch Hobson

  I needed to believe my brother was flawless. For a long time, this was easy. I was the one who had problems in the world. I was smaller than him, weaker than him. I had night terrors. I was scared of everything. I was colorblind. I had barely any sense of smell.

  After a while, it also came out that I couldn’t really see. I was riding in the VW Camper with Mom. We drove by a big field. There were a bunch of cows lying around off in the distance.

  “Look at those friggin’ cows,” I said.

  “Oh my god, what did you say?” my mother said.

  “I don’t know. What? Friggin’?”

  “Those are hay bales.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Really?”

  “I’m terrible,” my mom said, crumpling. “I’m a horrible mother! How long have you been having problems seeing?”

  “I see everything,” I said.

  We went to an eye doctor a couple days later.

  “When you’re in class, do you have problems viewing the blackboard?” the doctor said.

  “I don’t know.” I thought about my class, all the beanbag chairs scattered around, everybody wandering. “We don’t really have a blackboard.”

  “He means are things blurry,” my mom said to me.

  “Things are the same as always,” I said.

  “Hey, four-eyes fag,” an older kid said a week or so later.

  My brother hit two home runs in little league that year, our last year together on our little league team. One home run meant you were flawless. Two meant O My God. The second of his home runs made it all the way to the trees beyond the chain-link outfield fence. We all poured out of the dugout and were standing by the plate yelling as he jogged around third. Everything was crystal clear because now I had glasses. I couldn’t believe this was how everyone always saw things. The white chalk lines. The green blades of grass. The top of the chain-link outfield fence ringing with sunlight. The O My God trees beyond. My big brother laughing, coming home.

  That summer, 1978, it looked like our favorite major league team was flawless. We went to our one Red Sox game of the year and maybe because they were way in front in first place or maybe because I had glasses, or maybe both, everything sparkled with perfection.

  Also, it was helmet day. Every kid got a helmet, and my brother was just barely still young enough. Having a shiny Red Sox batting helmet made everything even shinier and even more perfect despite the weird fight that had happened on the drive down. When Yaz came to bat I shouted Yaz a million times until my throat was sore.

  “Yaz! Yaz! Yaz! Come on, Yaz!”

  “Can you please shut up a little,” Ian said.

  He was in a bad mood because he had a hangover. And mad at me because I had passed on the news to Mom out loud, on the drive down, that he had a hangover. I thought a hangover was skin hanging off your finger and didn’t understand why the word made my mother look at my brother like she was going to cry.

  Our team got beat up pretty badly, and some of the seats down low opened up. I couldn’t believe how close we got, me and my brother. I couldn’t believe no one told us we had to leave. I couldn’t believe how brightly the batting helmet shined on the head of the player in the on-deck circle, Butch Hobson. I’d never been closer to a god. Ian’s helmet shined the same way. I took mine off and looked at it and it shined just as bright, then I put it back on and was about to yell to Butch Hobson but it was like my throat was clogged with light. He leaned on his bat and watched the game, as if it was no big deal that they were losing the game, this one game. And it was true. They still had a huge lead in the division. They were flawless. For example: Butch Hobson, who had driven in 112 runs the year before, hit ninth in the order.

  Later, as the summer wore on, the flaws would begin to show, starting with Butch Hobson’s arm. Because of things you couldn’t see coming apart inside him, he started to lose control of his throws to first. Some of them sailed into the seats where my brother and I had sat. You needed real helmets to sit there, not just the cheap plastic jobs we had gotten at the gate. The errors piled up. The division lead shrank. Both of our helmets lost their shine and I dropped mine and it cracked. Mom and Tom found some pot in the little desk by my brother’s bed.

  “Why do you have this?” Tom said.

  “You’re sneaking through my stuff now?” Ian yelled.

  “That’s not what we’re talking about here, man!” Tom yelled.

  “You smoke pot all the time, man!” Ian yelled. I went to the backyard and clamped my hands over my ears.

  But I didn’t know any of that on Helmet Day. On the way home, Ian put his new helmet over his face and went to sleep. Mom nodded off, too, her head bobbing with bumps. Only Tom and I were still awake. I discovered I could change the appearance of the headlights of the cars coming toward us by taking my new glasses off. With my glasses on, they were all just headlights, but when I went back to my true way of seeing, the headlights separated into spheres made up of many smaller lights. They reminded me of dried-out dandelion bulbs, the kind you make wishes with, but the seeds were points of light. I imagined I could make my deepest wish. What would it be? I thought about Yaz. Come on, Yaz! I thought about winning. I thought about me and my brother jumping around together, champions at last. I looked over at him dozing on the seat beside me. I wanted to stay awake. Champions at last. But as I watched the dandelion headlights floating toward us, my glasses in my hands, I started to breathe deeper and slower, and finally with one last waking wishing breath, all the seeds of light scattered.

  1978 Topps #500: George Foster

  I remember the precise moment I found this card in a new pack. I had just bought the pack and was walking home. I was by the spot on Route 14 where an abandoned general store with an Esso sign and dust-covered windows faced, across the road, an empty metal trailer that had once been a restaurant called Chez René. Usually I was able to delay gratification for a while, carrying my standard purchase of two packs of cards all the way home before opening them, but on this day I needed that painkilling hit just a little bit quicker and slid my finger under the plastic flaps, breaking the infinitesimally thin coat of glue and releasing the scent of the gum.

  I shattered the shard of gum with my teeth as I leafed through the new cards. I spotted the N.L. ALL STAR shield first, then read the name that I recognized from following its awe-inspiring march through the previous season’s statistics pages in the newspapers. The broken-pieces phase of the gum gave way to the soft and cohesive sugary phase, and I heightened the moment, which would soon give way to the texture-of-a-pencil-eraser/flavor-of-spit-and-disappointment phase, by flipping the George Foster card over to affirm that the legend told by the newspaper statistics was true. After all, nothing was an inarguable fact until I saw it on a baseball card, and here it was: George Foster had hit 52 home runs during the 1977 season, the most any player had hit in my entire lifetime.

  In 1978, the 50 home run plateau was mythic. Only ancient guys from the black-and-white world preceding the epoch of the cardboard gods had ever reached that Olympian height. But now George Foster had done it, and as sugar
coursed through my body I held in my hands that very same George Foster, or at least a little sliver of George Foster that had fallen like a red and brown and white leaf all the way from the forests of heaven to the rundown valley of East Randolph, Vermont. I paused for a moment, then hurried home before anyone could fuck with me.

  Topps 1978 #147: Lee Mazzilli

  One day a year, during our visit to see our father, my brother and I would take a break from everything that really mattered and become Mets fans. They were easy to love, in part because there was nothing for us to lose by doing so, since we didn’t live and die with them, and in part because everything about the team seemed to be a lovable and paradoxical mixture of spectacular and incompetent: first baseman Willie Montanez making incredible scoops of wild throws that were already several seconds too late; catcher John Stearns forming a brick wall at home plate in hopes of impeding the runner as the relay throw sailed into the dugout; Bruce Boisclair lacing a double to right and getting thrown out easily trying to stretch it into a triple. Even the lingering vestiges of the Mets’ glory days seemed affected by the glittering ineptitude: Jerry Koosman dashingly windmilling and firing his way to a 3-15 record, Ed Kranepool clouting pinch-hit drives to the warning track.

  By 1978 centerfielder Lee Mazzilli was becoming the star of the show. Mazzilli was good at just about everything. He could draw walks, hit for a decent average, smack 15 or so home runs and steal 15 or so bases a year, and cover a lot of ground in the outfield. You could almost say that he was faultless, a characterization that he seemed inclined to emphasize by custom-tailoring his uniforms and maintaining his archetypical feathered haircut with the level of care usually only given to invaluable cultural relics, which in a way is what it was. By 1978 my brother and I were mesmerized by feathered haircuts, and seeing such a glorious example of the new bulletproofcool style on a baseball player was particularly enthralling. I can see him yet, king of my once-a-year-beloved Mets, his cap flying free to reveal his immaculate Scott Baio locks as he sprints across the brown Queens grass in his impeccable uniform to dive stylishly for a line drive that touches down yards away from his outstretched glove.

  The morning of our Mets game in the late summer of 1978, I was eating cereal how I always ate it, without any milk and definitely without any of the cut-up bananas my father and brother had in their bowls. I was humming the home team’s theme song and wondering about it.

  “Are you going to be taking algebra this year?” my father asked my brother.

  “We started learning some at the end of last year,” my brother said, “but it was baby stuff.”

  “It’s very im—” my father said. I started singing.

  “Meet the Mets, greet the Mets, step right up and beat the Mets,” I sang. I really thought these were the words.

  “Why do the Mets say to everyone to come and beat them?” I said. I was reading the sports page, and I was about to tell my brother the Mets’ putrid record as soon as I was done with my next bite of Cheerios when I noticed that my dad was glaring at my cereal bowl.

  For whatever reason, seeing me eat cereal without any milk was the last straw for my dad. I can only guess what else was on the overloaded back of the proverbial camel whose back was about to be broken by my next unsoggy bite, but it may have been a compendium of all the ways I wasn’t quite right. Here is an almost certainly incomplete list: 1) I daydreamed too much. 2) I didn’t know which way to look when we crossed streets while walking around the city. 3) I didn’t remember to look any way sometimes, lost in my own thoughts as my dad and brother talked about things I didn’t understand or care about. 4) I had had a middle-of-the-night screaming bout of night terrors when we’d visited my dad’s brother’s family in New Jersey. 5) On another night that led to an even worse morning than the one that followed the night terrors, I’d wet the foam mattress I slept on in my dad’s apartment. 6) I was, according to my dad, a “mama’s boy.” (Many years later, I would understand he was probably cringing at the echo in me of his own younger self.) 7) The only thing I knew about was baseball, which was silly and devoid of worth. 8) Worst of all, my picky, idiotic eating habits. Chiefly: I didn’t eat fruit! 9) And now this! Milk-less cereal!

  Even though I sensed that something not too great was about to happen, I went ahead and took my bite of cereal, still trying to think only about the Mets.

  “Gah!” my father barked. “You don’t do anything right!”

  My brother jumped to my defense.

  “No, he just likes it better when it’s crunchy,” he said.

  “Oh my god,” my father said, already mortified by his brief eruption. His head was in his hands. I wish I could say I was sitting there toughly. But yet another way in which I was not flawless was that I often burst into tears. My dad began apologizing in a devastated way that I found overbearing and confusing.

  “Please forgive me,” he kept saying. “Do you forgive me?”

  I didn’t understand what he meant. Forgive? But I wanted him to stop smothering me with the question with his big sad breathing face inches from mine, so finally I nodded, and he went back to more or less leaving me alone.

  If you listed the things my father hated the most in this life, you’d come up with many of the things that made up a day at Shea Stadium. Subway rides, sports, crowds, the deafening roar of jet planes: It was all there. He spent most of the game glaring at the New York Times and clamping his hands over his ears for the constant procession of La Guardia arrivals and departures.

  Meanwhile, as the customary beating the Mets were sustaining passed the halfway point, I started focusing on the dozens and dozens of empty seats below us, much nearer to the field. We could see Lenny Randle and Steve “Stevie Wonder” Henderson up close. We could say something to Lee Mazzilli and he’d hear us.

  My father wasn’t crazy about moving down, but finally he agreed, and for a second we were right there, just like we’d been at the Red Sox game earlier in the summer. But before we’d even breathed out once, a man in a blue windbreaker tapped my father on the shoulder.

  “No one’s even sitting here,” my father whined.

  “Sorry, chief,” the man said. That’s my clearest memory of all those games at Shea in the 1970s: staring at my father’s back as we climbed farther and farther away from the action to where we belonged.

  Topps 1978 #655: Lyman Bostock

  One night in September 1978, late, Ian and I were home alone and I asked him about the universe. I remember when it was because of Lyman Bostock. Ian had his light on and was reading. I was up high, in my loft bed.

  “What’s at the edge of it?” I said.

  “The universe is expanding,” he said.

  “Expanding? But where? Into what?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain to you.”

  Sometimes cards had to be changed in a hurry to reflect offseason transactions. I imagine that such changes now can be effected digitally, seamlessly, leaving no trace of any previous worlds. But when I was a kid, these changes were done with an endearing crudeness that always allowed ample evidence that the past could not ever be fully erased. For example, in Lyman Bostock’s 1978 card, Bostock is presented as an Angel, but the garish coloring along his neckline suggests makeup applied by a tipsy floozy more than uniform piping, and his helmet more closely resembles frosting on a personalized supermarket cake than a decal on hard plastic. He is certainly no Angel, not fully, not yet.

  The universe didn’t make sense. If something was expanding, then there had to be something it was expanding into. There couldn’t just be nothing. I stared at the ceiling that was only a couple feet from my head. There was a little hole up there, directly above my head, and it was my theory that the hole had been made by rats who lived up above our room in a crawl space and every once in a while dug away at the ceiling with their claws when no one was looking, like prisoners chipping away at their cell wall. Maybe one day they’d claw all the way through and fall on me and bite me and I’d get the Plague. A
ll the kids of the town would visit me, wearing surgical masks, and they’d give me presents as I shivered and coughed and said brave things. I’d have my baseball cards at my bedside. One day near the end when it was difficult to speak I’d croak to my weeping mother that she should give all my cards to my brother when the time came.

  “What are you talking about?” she’d blubber. “You are gonna be just fine!”

  “Hey, Ian,” I said now.

  He flipped the page of his book, ignoring me.

  “Hey, Ian, what happens when you die?”

  When I had gotten Lyman Bostock’s doctored 1978 card I knew him solely as a name near the top of the list of batting averages printed in the Sunday sports section. I studied those averages religiously, as religiously as I’ve ever studied anything. I loved the exactness of them. I loved that there was a hierarchy, an order, Singleton and Brett near the top, Kingman and Belanger near the bottom, and I loved even more that occasionally certain previously unknown players moved into the upper echelon of that hierarchy, sometimes creeping up the list past the sturdy .280 Amos Otis types, sometimes materializing out of nowhere, as Bob Watson would do for the Red Sox in 1979 upon amassing the minimum number of at bats. I don’t know which route Lyman Bostock first took, because I don’t remember a time before Lyman Bostock was among the batting average leaders, and yet I also do recall thinking of him as a new guy, a youngster storming the rarefied realm lorded over benevolently by his wondrous Twins teammate Rod Carew. In general, I thought about him this way: Lyman Bostock was rising, each year a little higher. His move to the Angels in 1978 provided a temporary hiccup in his career’s rising motion, but within that first year with his new team there was a microcosm of his career, a smaller rising, his batting average going up and up after a bad April.