by Josh Wilker
At some point during that season I started cutting out the batting average list from the Sunday paper and taping it to the post of my loft bed, below the 1975 Victory Leaders card featuring Andy Messersmith. Each time I taped a new version of the list to the post, I looked for Lyman Bostock and was happy to see him rising, a little higher each week.
Ian didn’t answer when I asked him what happens when you die. I stared some more at the ceiling and thought about the rats falling through and the Plague and my tragic death. Everyone weeping. Maybe they’d bury my cards with me, bawling about how much I loved them. Or maybe my cards would be covered with the Plague and they’d have to be destroyed. Or maybe they’d have to burn me and the cards. What would be left? A car approached that sounded sort of like our VW Camper, Mom and Tom returning, but it didn’t stop. I started to really think about the whole thing, and not in a fun way.
“How can it be?” I asked out loud. “We’re here and then forever we’re gone.”
“Look, just don’t worry about it,” my brother said.
“One minute suddenly nothing and that’s it,” I said, my voice rising.
“It’s not going to happen for a long time.”
“But it’s going to happen!”
“Think about something else.”
“Oh man oh man. It’s going to happen,” I said, starting to panic. “Omanomanoman.”
I climbed down the ladder of the loft bed, past my Victory Leaders card and the latest Sunday averages, and went and sat on the stairs and gripped my stomach with both hands, rocking back and forth, overpowered by the idea that someday I would not exist.
Earlier that day, we had learned about Lyman Bostock. He’d been riding in the backseat of a car and had been shot and killed by a man aiming for someone else.
“Hey, Josh,” Ian said. I didn’t turn around. He was standing behind me at the top of the stairs. I heard pages riffling.
“Oh man, oh no,” I muttered.
“Hey, Josh. Who is the all-time career leader in triples?”
“Oh man. I don’t know. Oh god.”
But then I told him. Sam Crawford.
“Ding!”
More sound of pages riffling.
“Now, all right, now who’s the all-time single season leader in doubles? Wow, that’s a lot of doubles,” Ian added.
And I told him. Earl Webb. And he kept on asking questions with answers that I knew.
Eventually, I was able to get up off the stairs and go back into our room and climb my loft bed ladder past the list featuring, near the top, Lyman Bostock’s name and his average. I lay down and looked at the ceiling. Four hundredths of a point shy of .300 forever.
“Hey, Ian,” I said. “Can you ask me a couple more?”
Topps 1979 #500: Ron Guidry
Late in the 1978 season, my brother, whose nickname was Brillo, tried to get a feathered haircut like Lee Mazzilli. Somehow, the town’s feathered haircut maestro, a young barber named Woody, was able to wrench my brother’s tightly coiled curls into something that looked like what the cool kids in school had on their heads, but it lasted for only one day before puffing back out into a half-Jew-fro. My brother was angered by this, which was no surprise. My brother angrily simmered more and more. I mostly associated it with the Red Sox’ ongoing collapse, which at one point caused my brother to rip his beloved copy of Spock Must Die into shreds.
Mom and Tom must have identified the anger as coming from a different source. One day a book showed up on my brother’s bed called The Big Book of Teenage Answers, with a note that said “Love, Mom and Tom.” I saw it first, before Ian got home. The book was written by a Bionic Woman-looking woman and a guy who looked like Steve Garvey but with cooler hair, like Lee Mazzilli’s. There was a photograph of them on the back. They were both smiling with large white teeth and leaning their tan arms on curly ten-speed handlebars. I flipped through the book. A drawing of a naked woman had holes in parts of her skin to show what was inside her body. I looked at it for a while. Then I flipped around some more and stopped on a section called Ejaculation:You will one day begin rubbing your penis. It will grow larger and become firm. It will begin to feel so good that you will be unable to stop. It is a feeling of uncontrollable pleasure like you have never felt before. This feeling will increase until, eventually, it climaxes with the spurting of a white milky substance from the tip of your penis. This is called ejaculation.
After this has happened, feelings of fatigue and shame will then overtake you. But there is nothing wrong with what you have done. A study has shown that 95% of all males experiment with this deed, known as masturbation. It is natural. But it is good to have a cup handy to catch the semen that issues from your penis! It can get messy!
I went downstairs and got the cup I usually used for chocolate milk and brought it back upstairs, then I climbed into my loft bed and gave it a try and found I was apparently flawed in a whole new way because nothing happened except the shame part, a little. I tried to put the book back on my brother’s bed exactly the way I’d found it.
That night, my brother and I were both lying in bed. We hadn’t been talking as much as we used to. What was there to talk about? The Red Sox were choking worse than any team ever had. What else was there between us anymore? But sometimes my brother needed to tell me a story as much as I needed to hear him tell it.
“Me and Dean just walked out of school yesterday,” he said. I knew who Dean was. He had a flawless feathered haircut. And one other thing!
“You crushed your second home run off of Dean!” I said.
“That was a billion years ago,” Ian said.
“Wait, you left school during school?” I said.
“We went to his house and he gives me this glass of water. He’s like, ‘Hey, here’s some water, chug a lug.’ But it was vodka.”
I knew not to say anything. But I was thinking, How could someone just walk right out of school? Weren’t there any rules at all?
“We got so fucked up,” my brother said.
Fucked up? I thought. I couldn’t imagine what that meant. The next time I was alone, I checked The Big Book of Teenage Answers, but I couldn’t find anything. What the hell was going on?
It was all falling apart, but there was still one last chance it could come back together. The day after the 1978 season was supposed to be over, we were let out of school early. All over New England it was the same. A half-day. A holiday. One game. A 14-game lead gone, but still one last chance to win. Amazing that I still believed: We had Mike Torrez; they had Ron Guidry.
How can I explain Ron Guidry?
At that time, I was afraid to bicycle past a Doberman pinscher who was, according to the neighbor kid who owned him, so fierce that he often chewed through his chain and went on bloodthirsty rampages. I was afraid of that dog. I was afraid of bullies. I was afraid of girls. After reading The Big Book of Teenage Answers I was afraid that something was horribly wrong with my penis. I was afraid of ending up in a situation where I would be forced to eat fruit, which repulsed me. I was afraid of our basement. I was afraid of the three-note Duracell ditty that ended with the sectioned battery slamming together. I was afraid of nuclear bombs. You could be sitting there on the floor of your room, sorting your newest baseball cards into their respective teams, and it could all vanish in one bright flash. I was afraid of everything ending. I was afraid of death. I was afraid most of all of my night terrors.
In light of all those fears, I can’t really say that I was afraid of Ron Guidry. I mean, I wasn’t afraid Ron Guidry was going to leap out from behind a snowbank and bash me with a rock. I wasn’t afraid Ron Guidry was going to force me to touch my tongue to a frozen metal pole. I wasn’t afraid Ron Guidry was going to burn our house down. And yet, when I hold this 1979 Ron Guidry card in my hand, more than thirty years after 1978, when he went 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA—numbers so astounding they seem inhuman, merciless, obsidian, obscene—to lead the 100-win Yankees past my team, the 99-win Red Sox, it’s as if I
’m holding a small box made of thin, fragile glass, a scorpion inside.
Topps 1975 # 299: Bucky Dent
But to digress for a moment for something completely unrelated to that one-game playoff between the Yankees and the Red Sox in 1978, here’s the tragic figure of Bucky Dent, the mildly promising, light-hitting young Chicago White Sox shortstop who after being named to the Topps All-Star Rookie Team in 1975 was killed in a horrific wood-chipper accident.
Some are of the opinion that this accident is a myth, and that Bucky Dent actually went on to play for several more years in the American League, and that in one notable instance he even distinguished himself as the power-hitting hero of a certain one-game playoff, that he strode to the plate in the seventh inning of that contest with two men on and his team, the Yankees, down two runs and, after fouling a pitch from Red Sox starter Mike Torrez off his foot and delaying the game for several minutes as trainers tended to the bruise, finally got back into the batter’s box, now armed with a dubious new bat that teammate Mickey Rivers had, like a cardsharp producing a new deck from a hidden pocket just before going for the kill, suspiciously rushed into Bucky Dent’s hands, and with this new bat Bucky Dent swung with the entirety of his scrawny might at Torrez’s next offering and managed with the help of God, if you believe in God and in the idea that God has the time and inclination to micromanage wind patterns, lifted the ball just barely over the Green Monster for what stands, in this version of reality (which carries as an appendix the notion that Bucky Dent’s resultant fame allowed him to be featured in a beefcake pinup poster favored by adoring brace-faced prepubescent girls from Riverdale to Smithtown), as arguably the most famous blow ever struck in the entire storied rivalry of the Yankees and Red Sox.
All of this is preposterous, akin to the crackpot notion that the moon landings were staged on a lot in Burbank or that all Jews got a memo on September 11 to avoid downtown Manhattan. A legendary home run? Please. Beyond the contradictory indicators of Bucky Dent’s slight frame and complete lack of power-hitting skills—factors which could, it is true, have been compensated for by a perfect storm of: 1) a nice fat pitch across the center of the plate; 2) an unlikely but not impossible instance of optimally solid contact; 3) the closest left-field wall in major league baseball; 4) a powerful wind gust lifting up toward heaven and out toward the Massachusetts Turnpike; and 5) possibly some cork—consider that this is the only Bucky Dent card in my entire collection, and if he had indeed played beyond this year the only way to explain his absence from my collection would be to say that I assiduously removed and destroyed any later Bucky Dent cards, as if for some reason the very sight of them caused me revulsion. But why on earth would anyone waste time doing something like that?
Clearly, the stronger Bucky Dent theory is the one in which Bucky Dent was tragically chopped into pieces, then minced into bits, then pureed into a mush of flesh and feathered hair and eye black by a ravenous, extremely efficient wood chipper before he was ever able to make any significant impact on baseball history or on the innocence of, say, a ten-year-old Red Sox fan in East Randolph, Vermont, on October 2, 1978.
3rd PACK
HALO
Topps 1978 #670: Jim Rice
In the bottom of the ninth on October 2, 1978, the Red Sox had the tying run on second and the winning run on first and only one out and Jim Rice coming up. Jim Rice had already had one of the best years of all time. In fact, he’d crushed more pitches in one season than anyone in decades, as evidenced by his 406 total bases, the most in the majors since Stan Musial’s 429 in 1948. All he had to do was crush one more. But he got a little under a Goose Gossage heater and flied out to right. The runner on second, Rick Burleson, moved to third. Ninety feet away. One chance left.
Yaz.
By this point my brother and I were both standing, crowding the television as if it were the faltering fire in an igloo.
“Come on, Yaz,” Ian said.
“Come on, Yaz, please,” I said.
It was a long winter. I continued to check the mailbox for a reply to my 1976 letter to Yaz, even when I had to trudge through waist-high snow to do it. I continued to see Yankees third baseman Graig Nettles in foul territory, the ball in his glove, both arms upraised.
In the spring I went on a school trip to Boston. We were outside the cramped Fenway Park player parking area, and I saw Jim Rice get out of a car. I pressed my face against the chain-link fence that separated us. He was no more than twenty feet away.
“Jim Ed!” I shouted.
He turned toward me. I was too shocked to say anything. After all my years of worship, I couldn’t believe a god could hear me, that a god could look me straight in the eye. Moreover, I sensed that there was in Jim Rice’s quick, almost flinching, squint-eyed glance toward the caller of his name a suggestion that he was haunted by a nervous, even paranoid unease with the world around him. This may have contributed to my silence as well, the possibility that Jim Rice not only was able to hear us mortals but was mortal himself. I could not think of a single thing to say. Words had been uninvented. I gulped air. Jim Rice turned away.
Life got more complicated after that. The school trip to Boston occurred during my last days of elementary school. It had been decided that even though I was only the equivalent of a fifth grader, it was time for me to leave the hippie-invented class with no grades. After several years in a classroom where everyone was free to be whatever they wanted to be, I had become a sarcastic know-it-all, undercutting most attempts by the teacher to lead the class in any constructive direction by voicing such brilliant remarks as “Great idea, teach,” and “Oh boy, we’ve never done that a million times before.” It was too much. I was told that in the fall I would no longer be welcome in the class and instead would have to jump into seventh grade, junior high, that different kind of school altogether, a giant building where my brother had started to change, to grow taller and tougher and quieter and further away from me.
On the ride home from Boston to Vermont, I sat with two other boys and three girls in the roofed back of a pickup truck and refused to participate in a game of Truth or Dare that mostly amounted to taking turns kissing. I could not kiss a girl. I don’t know why I was so terrified, but I was. (In fact, it would be many long years before, with the help of grain alcohol, I kissed a girl, a bleary coed majoring in hotel and hospitality management.) The amazing thing was that my terror at being kissed actually drove the three girls in the back of the truck crazy. By the time we were almost home all three of them were feeding off one another on the subject of me like I was the latest disposable fad, like Shaun Cassidy or Pop Rocks or the “invisible dog” leash.
“Go with me, Josh,” one of them said. I didn’t understand this request. Go?
“No, go with me!” another one pleaded.
“Go with all of us,” the third one squealed.
This third one was the prettiest, and she would lose interest by the next day. The second prettiest would move back to her solemn all-consuming infatuation with George Harrison within a week. The third, a burly, freckled, pug-nosed girl, kept after me the longest, cornering me periodically like she was going to steal my lunch money, but even she got tired of my stammering deer-in-the-headlights routine, finally saying, “What is wrong with you?” and storming away. I was relieved at first, but then I missed her; I’d never be popular again. That night in the back of the truck, returning from Boston, was, for me, like when some minor league call-up has a game, one game, when he slugs the ball all over the yard like Jim Rice. Except as it was happening all I wanted was for it to end.
“Please go with us, Josh!” all three girls said, crowding me. “Please, please, please!”
Go? I kept screaming to myself. Go where?
Topps 1979 #310: Thurman Munson
I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want anything to change. I didn’t want time to move. But it moved. Summer came. I tried to stop time the best way I knew how, with baseball cards.
This 1979 Th
urman Munson card is one of the cards that came to me that year. By that time, finding a Yankee in a pack of cards had long been like finding a mold-blackened orange in your trick-or-treat bag. I valued the never realized (nor even approached) goal of completing the year’s collection too much to throw the offending cardboard in the garbage, as I would the orange, but I tried to get the Yankees cards away from the others as soon as possible and out of sight so I could engage in my time-dissolving card-aided daydreams without the sharp sliver of festering resentment in my nostrils.
