by Josh Wilker
Some of the cards were less offensive than others, the mushroom-cloud hair of Oscar Gamble, the innocuousness of Roy White, the hilarious storytelling ability of the author of The Bronx Zoo, Sparky Lyle, and the mere name of Mickey Klutts among the few effective truce-making offerings from the world of my enemies. On the other hand, some Yankees were capable of tainting the whole pack, including perennial asshole-of-the-year Reggie Jackson, simian brawl-instigator Lou Piniella, the bat-corking duo of maimer of Bill Lee’s shoulder Graig Nettles and sucker puncher Mickey Rivers, and a certain weak-hitting pretty-boy shortstop who may or may not have been slowly, oh-so-painfully killed in a wood-chipper accident.
I counted Thurman Munson in that latter group. Yankees captain, leader of the bullies, picker of fights with Carlton Fisk. And here he was again, befouling my pack with his little squinting smile. This smile was probably interpreted by me as connoting that the Yankees had just won another title. Since I’d been living and dying with baseball, the Yankees had won a pennant in 1976, a World Series in 1977, and another World Series in 1978. And when I tried to escape the seemingly endless ongoing tyranny in the present by diving into the baseball encyclopedia, I saw more of the same, stretching back as far as the eye could bear to see.
Fucking Yankees, I thought.
In early August of 1979 we took our yearly bus trip to see our dad. It was unusually crowded, so I couldn’t sit with my brother and had to take a seat with a short, mustachioed guy in his early twenties. We started talking and he told me he was a Yankees fan, and he reminded me a little of Thurman Munson, Yankees captain, leader of the bullies, picker of fights with Carlton Fisk. Despite that, I didn’t hate him, and he was friendly, and time flew as we talked about baseball through the first few hours of the ride, before the midtrip fifteen-minute break in Springfield, MA. During that break, everybody got off the bus. I don’t know where the guy sitting next to me went, but my brother and I wandered through the station and came upon a vending machine that we hadn’t noticed before on any of our previous stops in Springfield.
“Check. It. Out,” my brother said. In the plastic display slots were movie-theater-style boxes of candy. In one of the slots was the kind of box of plain M&Ms my father always presented to me when he arrived in Vermont for a visit, and in another slot was the box of peanut M&Ms he gave to my brother.
“I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed. It seemed an amazing discovery, but we both waited a second before pumping quarters into the machine. So this was the answer to the one good mystery of our dad. We had always marveled at how he could produce these boxes that we thought were sold only in movie theaters, but he got them right here, in a bus station. This bus station. Nothing to it. You put in a couple quarters and pulled a rod. Kerplunk.
I was back in my seat shoving fistfuls of the unmagical candy in my mouth when the guy with the mustache reboarded, looking glum. I swung my knees out to let him into his window seat. He lowered himself down. He looked like he had something terrible to tell me.
“Thurman Munson died,” he finally said. He went on to mention a plane crash, but I was already turning and rising to tell my brother, M&Ms clicking against the inside of smile-bared teeth. Relaying the news, my voice rang out like a recess bell. This wasn’t like Lyman Bostock. I’m not proud of it now, but the moment I heard that Thurman Munson no longer existed I got happy. The Yankees would never torture us again.
When I sat back down my seatmate was staring at me. I still had a smile on my face but the man’s sad, stunned glare cut all connection the smile had to anything inside me. I held the box of M&Ms out to him. He shook his head, then turned and looked out the window. The bus pulled out. I wolfed down the rest of the M&Ms before we were even back on the highway. The rest of the trip took a long time, the Munson fan staring silently out the window the whole way. I had nothing to do for hours but look at my empty box.
Topps 1980 #72: Fred Howard
A few days later, my brother somehow convinced my father to take us to a Ted Nugent concert at Madison Square Garden. I knew almost nothing about Ted Nugent, and Ian didn’t know much more than I did. I think he saw that he would be able to impress his vodka-chugging feathered-hair buddies back home if he could tell them that he had seen Nugent live.
I’d never been to a rock concert before. None of us had. It gave me a ball-shriveling inclination of how I would react if I was ever sent to war. When we got to our row, up in the highest, smokiest reaches of the arena, far from the empty stage, guys in mirrored aviator sunglasses sitting in the row behind us had their cowboy-booted feet hanging down over our seats. Though they reluctantly pulled their legs up to let us sit down, the menacing air lingered. My stomach hurt.
All around us there was a feeling like a battle was looming. This feeling crystallized with the appearance of a huge banner being paraded around by two shirtless longhaired guys to great deep roars from the crowd.
“Disco is dead but ROCK IS ROLLING!” the banner proclaimed. This seemed to spark the chant that rose up and boomed from seemingly everyone in the place but us.
“DISCO SUCKS! DISCO SUCKS!”
I looked at my brother, who was staring straight ahead, bug-eyed, seemingly as overwhelmed by everything as I was. He may also have been afraid that I’d start asking the questions that had begun to form in my head, questions that would reveal the both of us as impostors. But I kept my mouth shut, at first because I was scared of the ever-building noise, and then because I was stung by what started coming out of Ian’s mouth, a repetition of words in a hesitant mumble that no one could have heard but me.
“Disco sucks, disco sucks,” he mumbled in time to the thundering chant.
But hadn’t we Hustled in the living room to the unwarped copy of Saturday Night Fever that we’d finally got our hands on? Hadn’t we pooled our money for K-Tel’s Disco Dazzler? Hadn’t we had a World Series best-of-seven coin flip competition with a 2-3-2 home-and-away format and crowd noises and the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, all to see who would win the right to buy and to be the sole proud owner of Leif Garrett’s single “I Was Made for Dancin’”?
Disco sucking was all new to me, even though the most famous moment of this volatile and widespread cultural disparagement had occurred just a couple weeks earlier at, of all things, a baseball game. That night, in Chicago, the sky had rained flat black discs and lit M- 80s. By the late innings, the visiting Detroit Tigers outfielders were wearing batting helmets in the outfield. A vendor reported selling forty-nine cases of beer, more than double the number he’d sold on any single night in his many years on the job. Smoldering bongs were passed from hand to hand like change for a hot dog, giant glossy paper airplanes made of promotional posters featuring a sultry blonde model known only as Lorelei swooped and dove amid the hail of explosives and Frisbeed LPs and 45s, and inebriated throngs in the parking lot jumped up and down on cars and set fire to white-suited John Travolta dolls and searched for illegal entry into the slightly more focused mayhem inside the packed stadium. As game one of the scheduled doubleheader progressed, this search gained urgency, for between games a local 24-year-old disc jockey named Steve Dahl and the aforementioned Lorelei were going to detonate a mountain of disco records.
Almost immediately after this detonation, a stream and then a gushing wave of longhaired attendees flowed onto the playing field. The desire to get onto the field was strong, as reported by an anonymous contributor to a Disco Demolition Night web page on whitesoxinteractive. com:
“One doofus tried to go over the brick wall in centerfield by using our [Disco Sucks banner]. He asked us to hold it, which we did, and he proceeded to plummet 30 feet onto the field. The sign, made of a bed sheet, ripped immediately. I remember seeing him rolling around in pain and remember reading in the paper [the next day] that there were only some minor injuries such as fractured ankles and thought he was one of them.”
The revolution, the pointless, hysterical revolution, had come. Some lit bonfires in the outfield.
Some wheeled the batting cage around like it was a stalled car that needed a running start. Some performed hook slides and headfirst Pete Rose plunges into where the bases would have been if they hadn’t already been ripped from the ground and stuffed between giggling rib cages and the fabric of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith T-shirts. More than one person reported seeing couples fornicating, one of these reports asserting that this occurred in at least one instance in something of an orderly fashion, the participants feverishly attending to one another in stages corresponding to the general location of the bases. Cub Scout troops and the elderly watched from the stands.
Inside the home team’s clubhouse, as his teammates went through the motions of preparing for a second game that they had begun to correctly assume would never be played, Fred Howard, shown here in the only baseball card ever produced in his likeness, tried to wash off whatever residue had accrued during his stint as the losing pitcher of game one. Though he probably didn’t see it this way, he had done his part. As another contributor to the web page cited above recalled: “The Sox lost the first game to Detroit, which just seemed to aggravate and energize the crowd.” No one remembers Fred Howard, or even seems to have been aware of his existence, but the 1970s, that tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, may not have had its decade-punctuating Woodstock without his heroic failure.
At the Garden, music ceased to exist when the band took the stage and began to play. I could no longer like the music of the Bee Gees and A Taste of Honey and Chic, and had already kissed it all good-bye, but the roar-inspiring demolisher of disco was too loud in my first encounter with it for me to respond in any way beyond a terrified cringe. After a few minutes of this terror, my cringe became a general feeling of profound embarrassment. I was embarrassed of myself for being a little bespectacled disco-loving fairy, and embarrassed of my father, who in his blue button-down dress shirt and horn-rimmed glasses looked even more out of place than I did, especially after he began stuffing conspicuously large wads of cotton into his ears the moment we sat down. Also, paradoxically, and adding to my cringe, I felt terrible that we had dragged him here, to something that a bookish noise-hating mild-mannered Bach aficionado could not possibly have hated more.
After a few prolonged explosions that I knew were songs only because they began and ended, I told my dad I needed to go to the bathroom. He came with me. I wanted a break from the noise. It was brighter than day in the empty bathroom, and, relative to the concert, extremely quiet. The quiet intimidated me. I tried to take a leak but nothing came out. Then I zipped up, washed my hands, and stood in front of my dad, the two of us alone in there. I tried to apologize. But I was mumbling, and he still had cotton in his ears. He kept saying he couldn’t hear me and I kept saying I was sorry. I’ve always wondered if this was our defining moment. Finally he nodded, obviously faking that he had heard me. We went back to our seats.
The moment the band left the stage to the sound of gigantic human roaring, my father bolted from his seat and marched toward the exit, as strident and decisive a physical act as he’d ever performed. My brother and I had no choice but to follow, and I for one couldn’t wait to get out of there. But as we were leaving, there was the distinct feeling that something was off. No one else had left their seats, and in fact a few red-eyed grinning yahoos were still stumbling in through the turnstiles as we were heading out. I imagine my brother had the greatest suspicion that we were making some sort of a terrible blunder, but since he had never been to a concert before, he didn’t really know how they worked. More importantly, his skimpy knowledge about Ted Nugent left him without much clarity regarding the rock star’s identity.
“Which one was he?” I asked my brother as we crossed Seventh Avenue. About all I knew about him, from a picture Ian had showed me, was that he played guitar and sang. Even though we had been very far from the stage, I had noticed that this didn’t fit the description of anyone in the band we’d just seen. The two stars of the show were a guy with white pants and no shirt who sang but didn’t play guitar, and a guy in shorts and a little jacket who ran and slid and sprawled and duckwalked all over the stage playing guitar but never singing.
Ian didn’t answer. We rode a bus back downtown to Dad’s apartment. Cotton still bulged from his ears. Nobody said anything. The following day we found an ad from the previous Sunday’s newspaper and saw, listed below the much larger lurid signature of Ted Nugent, the letters “AC” and “DC” with a lightning bolt between them. We weren’t sure what this meant, but we walked over wordlessly to the Crazy Eddie’s on Sixth Avenue, Dad coming with us, and checked the A section of Rock. We found some albums with the lightning-bolt-split letters. My stomach twisted with my first glance of an album cover that showed a guy in shorts and a little jacket, bloodily impaled by a guitar, a shirtless man behind him mashing a microphone against his mouth. The sinking feeling increased when we saw a song title on another album that had words that we clearly remembered being repeatedly growled and screamed the night before, obviously not by Ted Nugent. Sin City.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” my brother said. His eyes darted around like everything hurt to look at. I thought he was going to break the album in half. On the cover the guy in shorts and jacket was being electrocuted. Finally Ian glared for a couple seconds at Dad, who was standing a few feet away, his glasses off, his squinting face about a millimeter from the small print on the back of a package of batteries.
Topps 1977 #317: Kurt Bevacqua
In 1979, I didn’t get any Carl Yastrzemski cards. It was my first Yazless year since 1976, when I’d sent him my plea for an autograph. I kept buying packs, hoping to find Yaz. I also kept hoping to find Yaz in the mail. I checked every day for a reply, as I’d been doing for years, even though I knew such a thing was by now impossible.
What happens when reasonable hoping turns to something else? A ritual, a tic, religion, addiction. I was someone who waited until what I was waiting for began to belong to some whole other world. I was someone who was no longer satisfied with just one or two packs. I was someone who needed to keep shoving more and more gum into my mouth.
Three years earlier, my first Yazless year, Topps had included a special card in its 1976 set that showed the winner of a 1975 bubble-blowing competition among major leaguers. I never got the card myself, but my brother did and showed it to me.
“Whoa,” I said.
“A bubble that big,” my brother said, “is impossible.”
The bubble was larger than the player’s head. The jaws of a set of calipers strained to their breaking point, measuring the fragile, magnificent orb.
“Kurt,” I read aloud, but then I stopped.
How did you even pronounce the last name of the one man who could do something no other human being could? The unusual collision of consonants near the end was beyond my still-growing reading abilities. I looked to my brother.
“Bevacqua,” he said.
“Bevacqua,” I whispered.
In 1979, I may or may not have noticed that Kurt Bevacqua seemed to have vanished. I didn’t get a Kurt Bevacqua card that year or the year before. The last time I’d seen Kurt Bevacqua was in 1977, in a card that showed him to be adrift in a blurry, ethereal netherworld, wearing, or appearing to wear, the doctored cap and uniform of an expansion team that had yet to officially exist and for whom he would never play a single game. Behind him, the lifeless, bulldozed plain of a landfill, or perhaps a dormant spring training complex stripped of all its accessories. No batting cages, no pitching machines, no stands, no bases. All in all, Kurt Bevacqua seemed to be in the process of passing through some sort of veil separating the Big Leagues from the Great Beyond. He didn’t seem pleased.
“What the fuck is going on?” he seemed to be saying.
The statistics on the back of Kurt Bevacqua’s 1977 card supported the notion that he was vanishing. In the just-concluded 1976 season, perhaps worn out from blowing world-record bubbles, he struggled for playing time with the last-place Mi
lwaukee Brewers, hitting .143 in an achingly paltry seven at bats. He was in his late twenties, too old to be a prospect (if he ever had been). As he rode the pine and watched his teammates rack up 95 losses, it must have at some point occurred to Bevacqua that he may not be long for the world he’d come to know. I imagine Kurt Bevacqua asking himself the inverse of the famous anthem of the big time, “New York, New York”: If I can’t make it here, how can I make it anywhere? Maybe a feeling of doom began to infiltrate the ever-wider spaces between at bats. Maybe a hazy sensation began to prevail. Maybe things that once seemed inarguably solid started to seem no sturdier than the flimsiest maybe. Maybe he sat on the bench trying to grip the handle of the primary tool of his trade and strange new doubts began to form.
My bat, thought Kurt Bevacqua, is turning to fucking mist.
One morning in early September 1979, I walked with my brother through a dense early morning fog, the whole world vanished except for us. I knew the way, because we were walking toward the elementary school near our house, the one I’d gone to for years. But I wouldn’t be going inside the school anymore. It was my first day of seventh grade, and we were walking to where the bus would pick us up and take us over the mountain to the sprawling concrete structure that included the junior high and high school. I was scared. I picked up a rock and threw it into the smoky whiteness. It must have landed in the grass of the pasture I knew was out there, but I didn’t hear anything.
“Hey,” I said to the pasture. “Hey!”
