Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  “Shut the fuck up,” Ian said. Then he said more softly, “I mean, shut up.”

  We were getting closer to the school but I still couldn’t see it.

  “Maybe the Red Sox can still come back,” I began, “if they get on a r—”

  “Quit dreaming,” Ian said.

  I knew he was right. For the first time since my Yazless year of 1976, the Red Sox weren’t even in the race. Everything had been reduced to individual records. Every man for himself.

  The familiar school building finally came into view, barely more substantial than the fog. We stopped at the edge of the parking lot and started waiting. I pulled a slip of paper from my pocket. It had my name on it and all my classes and the times they began and ended. My stomach began to hurt. I put the paper back in my pocket.

  “Maybe Rice or Lynn can still win the Triple Crown,” I said. They were both having great individual seasons.

  “Quit dreaming,” Ian said. He squinted into the fog in the direction the bus would be coming from. I thought about the one part of the 1979 season that still had meaning. Nobody could deny it.

  “Well, at least Yaz—” I said.

  “Can you please just maybe be quiet?” Ian said, and edged farther away from me.

  “Here it comes,” he added.

  I didn’t see anything, but I heard a deep grinding and groaning from the center of the fog. Then the huge flat face of the school bus appeared, its two eyes blazing.

  In 1976, my brother and I had gazed together at Kurt Bevacqua’s impossible feat, and together we had begun trying to approach him. For a while, his contest-winning deed could not possibly have loomed larger in our minds. It existed at the nexus of practically everything we loved most: baseball, sugary candy, the whole 1970s proliferation of crazes, most specifically the 1970s Guinness Book of World Records mania for transforming nonsensical trivialities into celebrated, numinous significance. Kurt Bevacqua and his otherworldly utterance in bubble gum anchored the glittering parade of freaks and fads and the just plain fantastic, taking the place of highest honor among such indelible figures as the man with the world’s longest fingernails, the man who pulled locomotives with his teeth, the man named Robert who was so tall he seemed doomed to unbearable loneliness, the other man named Robert who was so fat—even fatter than the fattest twins in the world, that famed cowboy-hatted, motorbike-puttering twosome—that when he died he had to be lifted from his house by crane and buried in a crate big enough to transport a grand piano.

  Kurt Bevacqua’s bubble was at first as unapproachable as any of the impossibilities made real in the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but as the years went on my brother and I got better and better at blowing bubbles, learning to whisper breaths with increasing subtlety into the fragile, pendulous globe that grew like a second featureless head from our own kissing lips. If either of us had a good bubble going, and the other was in another room in the house, the bubble blower would carefully make his way to the room where the other was and alert him to the possible Bevacqua-equaling extrusion with an urgent, if necessarily soft, moaning sound in the throat. The other would look up from the comic book or TV show he was absorbed in and honor the possibly earthshaking significance of the moment with an almost prayerful silence.

  We never quite got to Bevacqua, however, the bubble always popping just before immortality arrived, and my brother’s interest in such things gradually waned. By 1979, it had disappeared altogether, and I was left to pursue Bevacqua in solitude, understanding even as I did so that I was childish, uncool, an understanding that made the ritual feel even more solitary than it already was.

  I had to be in a certain exact place at a certain exact time. There was the schedule with my name on it and all my classes and the times they began and ended. There were bells to move everyone along. There was a locker with a combination I had to remember. There was no more wandering or lazing around making sarcastic remarks from a beanbag chair.

  Meanwhile, as the 1979 season drew toward a close, Carl Yastrzemski chased the most hallowed career benchmark for hitters: 3,000 hits. If he could do it, he would be in the record books forever, an immortal beyond all doubt. I checked the box scores. I listened to the games.

  “Come on, Yaz,” I was thinking.

  After looking earlier in the year like he was going to soar past the mark by midseason, Yaz fell into a prolonged slump that slowed his quest to an agonizing crawl.

  “Come on, Yaz.”

  I started getting homework. I ignored the assignments. I started getting numbers written in red pen at the tops of quizzes and tests. This is exactly what you are, the numbers said. You are nothing special, they said.

  “Come on, Yaz.”

  After finally scratching out his 2,999th safety, Yaz fell into a hitless trance. Planes circled overhead, trailing premature congratulatory banners. Cameras flashed all over the sold-out ballpark again and again, recording the continuing failures of an ashen-faced batter suddenly so rigid he seemed to be turning to stone.

  “I just wish it were over,” he told reporters.

  The longer Yaz’s increasingly inglorious pursuit of the record went on, the more I wanted him to achieve the immortal mark heroically, with a massive game-winning home run deep into the right-field stands, or somehow even out of the park altogether. It should shatter windows. It should stop traffic. It should make the whole world stagger and quake.

  A few weeks after Yaz finally got it over with, late in a lopsided meaningless game, by pulling an ordinary grounder just past the opposing second baseman’s glove, I got my first-ever report card. The grades were like the statistics of a player who is probably not going to be around much longer.

  My mom was called into school, and all my seventh-grade teachers sat in a circle of chairdesks around her and took turns describing my incompetence. I can see her at this meeting, slumping in her own chairdesk, staring at the linoleum, her arms crossed tight over her stomach. Both she and Tom had gotten regular jobs by then. To hear about me from my teachers, my mom had to take half a personal day from her new position writing and editing technical manuals.

  “He’s so withdrawn,” one of the teachers says.

  “He definitely gives the impression that he doesn’t want to be here,” says another.

  “It’s almost like he wants to disappear,” says another.

  One afternoon when Mom and Tom were still at work and my brother was at junior varsity basketball practice, I sat on my brother’s bed and opened my three last packs of 1979 cards. I shoved the gum from all three packs in my mouth and chewed for a while as I sorted through cards that included neither the latest member of the 3,000-hit club nor the 1975 Joe Garagiola/Bazooka Bubble Gum Blowing Champ. I blew a few preliminary bubbles, then stood and walked over to my side of the room and looked out the window at a driveway empty but for the rusted van at the far edge, surrounded by weeds, a chimney sticking out its roof. Then, slowly, gently, I blotted out my view with a bubble that in another time would have made my brother whisper, “Bevacqua.”

  Topps 1980 #573: Kent Tekulve

  That summer, I had come upon a term in Louis L’Amour’s novel Hondo that may have changed my life, although maybe my life was moving unstoppably in the direction of that term anyway. Hondo, this tan, unshaven, highcheekboned guy who slept on the hard ground under the stars and engaged in knife fights with bloodthirsty Apaches and occasionally swooped down from parched mesas to rescue beautiful defenseless women from the clutches of bad guys out on the most brutal fringes of the nineteenth-century American West, was characterized at one point in the narrative as a loner. I clearly remember what I thought upon reading this: When I grow up I want to be a loner. It seemed tough, mysterious, admirable, invulnerable. You’d occasionally ride into town for your grim, manly supplies, your oats and pemmican and lye soap and bullets, and people would look at you with awe, respect, even envy.

  Within a couple months of reading Hondo, while getting my first taste of junior high,
I started to understand the realistic dimensions of the life of a loner. I sat in the back of classrooms, saying little, my homework undone, looking forward mostly to the Fudgsicle I would eat at lunch. My circle of friends dwindled to a few thin, equally myopic acquaintances that I sat with at a mostly empty corner table of the cafeteria, taking turns flicking paper footballs through one another’s thumb-uprights. Outside of school, I leaned on baseball as much as I ever had, despite my brother’s increasing disinterest. I was a baseball-loving loner. I could not have been more primed for the arrival in my consciousness of relief ace Kent Tekulve.

  Kent Tekulve didn’t seem to have anything at all in common with his fellow Pirates, that loud and vibrant collective rolling toward the last and perhaps most emblematic World Championship of the whole hairy, careening decade. The tightly knit Pittsburgh club embraced the infectious disco hit “We Are Family” as their theme song, but in that family Kent Tekulve seemed to be the odd sullen cousin who sat in the far corner at weddings, ominously fiddling below the table with the open blade of his Swiss Army knife as the rest of his extended brood clogged the dance floor laughing. He was a gray crayon in a box of multicolored Crayolas, an undernourished pigeon in the vestibule of a birds of paradise exhibit, a narrow tray of oatmeal on a buffet line otherwise bursting with towering, flamboyant culinary delectations. While Tim Foli and Phil Garner turned double plays with the polished harmony of the barbershop quartet their old-time mustaches suggested they were a part of, and strapping sluggers Dave Parker and Willie Stargell worked together to bash in runs as if swinging John Henry sledgehammers in steel-driving rhythm, and everyone in the dugout laughed and strutted and slapped five like they’d just come offstage from a sweaty, glittering ass-shaking gig with George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars, Kent Tekulve lurked far away in the dank, shadowy bullpen, waiting to be summoned in those rare nervous moments when all the boisterous shouts of joy shrank to troubled murmurs. This is the fantasy of all real loners: that one day the world that has shunned them, and that they have shunned, will come to them desperate for help. And that they will then stride to the very center of the predicament and, despite their thick glasses and bulging Adam’s apple and mathematician wrists and ungainly, unmanly submarine delivery, earn widespread grateful weeping adoration for extinguishing the dire threat and saving the day.

  Topps 1981 #29: Darryl Dawkins

  My brother no longer cared as much as I did about the likes of Kent Tekulve or Kurt Bevacqua or baseball cards or baseball in general. When he’d first entered puberty he’d found a new sport, one that better suited him in terms of all the changes he was going through, primarily his rapidly elongating limbs but also—in the new favorite game’s quicker, more jagged rhythms, its intensity, its violence, its promise of flight—his mercurial moods. I liked shooting baskets with Ian on the hoop Tom had nailed to the garage, but I dreaded the moment when we would go from just fooling around to playing an actual game of one-on-one, Ian bowling me over for layups and blotting out the sky whenever I attempted to score. Nonetheless, the moment I got a chance to follow Ian into organized basketball, I did.

  My seventh-grade team played its first game in November 1979. I don’t remember the exact date, but it could have been November 4, the day 66 Americans were taken hostage in Iran. It could also have been a few days later, November 13, when Darryl Dawkins shattered a glass backboard with a dunk.

  In retrospect, the former date was certainly more significant, punctuating not only a bad year (which had already included Three Mile Island and Skylab) but an entire decade of unprecedented American impotence and defeat. But the Dawkins backboard-shattering dunk made much more of an impact on me, especially since he repeated the feat a couple weeks later. He was a rampaging monster who could not be stopped. My brother seemed to share my awe.

  “There aren’t going to be any backboards left,” I said. I was hovering near the edge of Ian’s side of the room, close enough to see that the newspaper spread out on his bed was open to a story about Dawkins.

  “The guy is nuts,” Ian said. “He says he’s from the planet Lovetron.”

  It had become a rarity that my brother and I would riff on something together. I was hesitant to say anything more about Dawkins for fear that I would blurt something stupid and childish and slam the door on the conversation before it even began. But I couldn’t help myself. Darryl Dawkins was just too much.

  “I hear he names all his dunks,” I said.

  “I know,” Ian said. He got up and I thought for a second that I had said something boring that everyone knows and that Ian was getting up to leave the room. But he went to a corner of the room near the door and dug out the little orange Nerf ball from under some laundry. He walked back in my direction, passed me, and dunked the ball through the plastic orange hoop near his bed.

  “The In Your Face Disgrace,” he said.

  The ball rolled to me. I picked it up and did my own dunk.

  “The Go-rilla,” I said. Ian grabbed the ball before it hit the floor.

  “The Look Out Belooooow,” he called, like he was yelling across a canyon. He used his right hand to slow-motion pile drive me into the cheap seats (I slow-motion fell down onto his bed) and then he slammed the ball through with his left.

  I was giggling as I rose from the bed. So was he. We both reached for the ball and clonked heads.

  “Gah!” I said, laughing.

  “Out the way, fool!” Ian said, then he picked up the ball and bounded all the way to the far side of the room and then bounded back, all in slow motion like it was a highlight. He pretended to dribble, rocking his shoulder hilariously like a Muppet strutting with a cane.

  “This one’s the Greyhound Bus,” he said, “because I’m going coast to coast!” He dunked it on the last word.

  I had to sit down I was laughing so hard. I looked at the article and tried to read aloud the name of Dawkins’s most famous dunk, the first one to shatter a backboard. For the record, Dawkins dubbed this cultural treasure (which referenced first his own nickname and then the last name of the big stiff guarding him) the Chocolate-Thunder Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham-Bam-I-Am Jam. But all I could get out was the word “Chocolate” before bursting into hysterics. My brother was laughing, too, so hard that he also had to crumple down onto his bed. This went on for a while, but eventually Ian ran out of laughs and started looking at the article again as I continued to convulse with giggly aftershocks.

  “Whew,” I said. “Heh.”

  “Bam,” Ian said, looking at a photo in the article of the magnificent wreckage, glass flying everywhere.

  “Shit, I want to dunk it so bad,” he added quietly.

  “Chomentowski can dunk, can’t he?” I asked. This was the budding star on the varsity team.

  “It’s because his hands are so big,” Ian said. “His deadfinger is lethal.”

  I already knew that the deadfinger was a famed invention of Chomentowski and the other varsity guys, and it was when you turned your ring finger into a whip dangling down from your fist and then whacked someone in the arm or neck or head, but my brother demonstrated on me again anyway.

  “Fuck!” I said.

  “I can touch the net,” I said, rubbing the deadfinger wound on my shoulder. This was true only because one of the nets in the junior high gym had started to unravel and a strand was hanging down.

  “I can touch the rim,” Ian bragged. “I can grab the rim, actually. I tomahawked a volleyball.”

  “Wow,” I said. Many years later, I might have been able to tell that he was beginning to cycle up and away from the truth. But then I believed everything he told me, especially if it contained the element of flight.

  “It was no big deal,” he said.

  “Did a lot of people see?” I said. “You must have been skying. Did you—”

  “Fuck, don’t wet your pants,” Ian said. He turned the page and started reading another article. “I already told
you, it was nothing.”

  My seventh-grade team lost its first game by a couple points, then lost its second game by a few points, its third game by several, and so on. We would lose every game that year.

  Many of the pummelings were punctuated by my glasses getting raked off my face. This would generally happen during struggles for a rebound that bore a resemblance to the battle captured on the lone Darryl Dawkins card in my collection, part of my exceedingly brief and desultory foray into collecting basketball cards that occurred a couple years after my basketball career began. In the Dawkins card scenario, I was spindly Kevin Grevey, awkwardly reaching for a ball far beyond my grasp while getting gratuitously drilled in the base of my spine by Doug Collins. I would be losing my glasses in the next moment, as one or both of the opposing team’s board-dominating behemoths semi-accidentally lowered their elbows into my face.

  After a few of these incidents my frames finally broke, and from then on each spectacles-related calamity entailed both of my lenses dislodging from the frames and skittering across the floor. The ref eventually blew his whistle and members of both teams got down on their knees to locate the frame and lenses for me, at which point I’d then go to the bench and wrap more adhesive tape around them while my coach, a much-beloved youth league icon named Mick, rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hand in the manner of someone with a migraine.

  My team was, as far as I could tell, Mick’s first-ever losing team, which made me ashamed. Worse, I started to suspect that I was bad luck, the reason any given team might lose. I’d watched Mick coach my brother’s good seventh- and eighth-grade teams, and I’d been on the losing end of several severe baseball diamond beatings by Mick’s dynastic little league squad, the Yankees. I had always wished that Mick could have been my little league coach, since it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold.