Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  Topps 1980 #450: George Brett

  I bought more cards in 1980 then I ever had or ever would. I read the box scores in 1980 closer than I ever had or ever would. I studied the Sunday averages more intently than I ever had or ever would, reading every name and number from the bottom of the list to the top, where George Brett was flying higher than anyone I’d ever seen.

  Brett had been rising higher and higher since I’d been paying attention, but in the summer of 1980 he reached yet another, unthinkable level. Ty Cobb hit .400. Rogers Hornsby hit .400. Nap Lajoie hit .400. Dead guys hit .400. Men from the age of color photography did not hit .400. And yet, here he was, alive and kicking: George Brett!

  That spring, a kid in my grade boasted to me that he’d lured two girls from our school into one of our town’s many gravel pits one night. He claimed they had both insisted on ripping off their shirts, at which point he discovered that the brown-haired girl’s nipples were brown while the blonde girl’s nipples were white, a notion that confused and excited me.

  Since my first failed try the day the book appeared on my brother’s bed, I had continued periodically trying and failing to follow the directions in The Big Book of Teenage Answers for producing ejaculate. The day I heard the gravel pit tale I went home and gave it another shot. I closed my eyes as I got going and envisioned myself in the gravel pit with the two girls standing in front of me in button-down shirts. I unbuttoned the brown-haired girl’s shirt first, because she was prettier, but it wasn’t until I was imagining putting my tongue to the salty white nipple of the somewhat homely blonde girl that a hot flush shot through my body and I produced, in a dribble, a rivulet of sticky substance that was not milky, as the book had said it would be, but clear.

  I had stopped bringing my chocolate milk cup up from the kitchen every time I attempted to be what the book said was an ordinary teenage boy (not that a cup would have been of much use), so I used a pillowcase to wipe up, then jammed it under my mattress, where it or one of its relatives would reside, wet or encrusted or both, for the remainder of my increasingly private life in that house.

  Over the summer I periodically put aside my cards and the Sunday averages to imagine myself in the gravel pit near our house, minding my own business, when a female would appear, approaching rapidly, as if she had something of great importance to tell me. Most often this female would be Cheryl Tiegs in her see-through fishnet bathing suit. Other popular gravel pit visitors were Lynda Carter decked out as Wonder Woman and carrying her truth lasso, Bailey and Jennifer from WKRP in Cincinnati, a teenaged cock-gobbling nymphomaniac from a Penthouse Forum letter that I’d somehow gotten my hands on who was described as having “tits like melons,” and a scratchy-voiced girl from my grade who had appeared at school one spring day wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt that could not conceal that she suddenly also had tits like melons. And once in a while I imagined myself hanging around the gravel pit, chucking rocks at the little gravel pit caves that tiny birds flew in and out of, when all of a sudden from around the corner, running, would appear the biggest-breasted woman of them all, coming for me.

  The year before, during the major league All-Star Game, George Brett had been voluptuously assaulted by this woman, Morganna the Kissing Bandit, a giant-chested blonde who periodically vaulted fences and ran across the field in the middle of major league games, her increasingly famous attributes cha-chonging wildly, to plant kisses on the faces of stars such as Pete Rose, Nolan Ryan, and Fred Lynn. George Brett, as far as I can figure, was the only man to have his work interrupted twice by the affectionate interloper.

  Morganna, whose measurements were 60-23-39, epitomized a key element of my entire unsavory fantasy life that went even deeper than my gnawing desire to make contact with a large naked boob or two: Somehow, someday, a woman would run right at me and smother me with an almost carnivorous affection without my having to do anything. The ache of puberty for me was the feeling that I existed at an impossible remove from any melon-baring deshirting, and my fantasies were as much about imagining the erasure of this infinite gap as they were about the brief guilt-laced physical euphoria they helped bring about. The image of Morganna galloping across a baseball field, of all places, to benevolently suffocate her prey with her uncontainable femininity is the Rosetta stone of all the fantasies from that summer of George Brett. In the scenarios I was the same as always, a kid whose life revolved around baseball, and then suddenly I’d be swept away by a version of sex no more complicated than a big warm wave. I wouldn’t need to know anything or do anything. I could simply, passively, blissfully surrender.

  After surrendering, it was back to the cards. I must have liked all the cards I got that summer, because I kept getting and getting, but I’m sure the cards in a pack that excited me the most were the ones with the word “ALL-STAR” emblazoned across the top, and of all those I can’t imagine any card would have pleased me more than the one featuring the god currently soaring above the legendary .400 barrier.

  Since the front of George Brett’s 1980 card showed him in a moment of almost foreboding contemplation, I didn’t spend much time gazing at it but instead flipped the card over immediately. The backs of the 1980 cards featured cartoons for the first time since 1977, and, even better, the cartoons referenced the player on the card instead of relating some random shred of baseball trivia. George Brett’s cartoon had a caption that surely snagged my attention: “George is one of 4 baseball-playing brothers.”

  I would have showed it to my own brother but he no longer collected cards, so I was on my own to study the numbers. Brett’s numbers for 1979 were thrilling: a .329 average and 42 doubles, 20 triples, and 23 home runs. Just looking at them was enough to get me thinking about Brett’s team, the Royals, who had been a force in the American League since my love of baseball had begun, a speedy, slashing battalion of attackers that cut the Red Sox to ribbons whenever they ventured into the Royals’ carpeted domain in Kansas City. As long as they weren’t revealing the Red Sox as plodding, one-dimensional lunkheads, I loved envisioning the Royals in action, a dynamo of base-stealing, triple-ripping sprinters with Brett at the center, coiled low in his mystical Charlie Lau crouch and smashing anything and everything you tried to throw past him for gap-bound bases-clearing screamers.

  That summer I had more time on my own than I’d ever had before, my brother off elsewhere whenever he could find a way, usually just using his thumb. Inside the house and out I made up solitaire baseball-based games involving whatever was at hand—a tennis ball, the ridges of the aluminum roof, a Nerf ball, a Wiffle Ball bat—and in those games I invented whole teams and leagues and narratives of unbearable suffering giving way to tearful limping indomitable triumph. Again and again I pitched to my knees with my arms raised like Bjorn Borg after finally fending off John McEnroe’s monumental challenge at Wimbledon.

  “Yes!” I cried out. Sometimes a tear or two actually streaked down my cheeks.

  Before I reached that climax, I always included a Royals-like team of gazelle-thin doubles bashers somewhere in my fictional baseball world. The Red Sox were my team, and Yaz the central figure in my prayers, but when it came to fantasy I never channeled myself into the sullen lumbering carcasses of the Red Sox. To do so would be to stay within my world, within the confines of the reedy changing body I needed more and more often to escape.

  Sometimes I asked my brother if I could go with him when he left the house. He said no again and again until I stopped asking. Then one day when I was kneeling on the floor of our room, looking at baseball cards, he tossed a Nerf ball at my head.

  “You know how to hitchhike?” he said.

  We walked through town and past the general store, not ducking in to buy any cards, and then we stopped at the corner, where a road branched off Route 14 and climbed up and out of our valley.

  “Step One: always bring along a basketball,” Ian said. “Then people know you’re an all-American boy going to shoot some wholesome baskets instead of a maniac on angel dust wh
o will knife them.”

  He didn’t say this until we’d already been standing there for quite a while.

  “What’s angel dust?” I asked. A little later I asked, “Do cars ever come?”

  “Step Two,” he said. “Give up all hope of ever getting a ride ever.” A minute or so later he added, “Because about two people live in this entire fucking valley.”

  A few minutes after that a car came down Route 14 and turned onto the road where we were standing. Ian cradled the basketball in his left arm and raised his right thumb up high. I stood behind him and kind of put my thumb up too. The car went on by.

  “It’s tougher with two people,” Ian muttered. I thought about how close we were to the general store. I had a dollar, enough to buy four packs and go on home and shove all the gum into my mouth at once. Another truck approached. A guy in mirrored sunglasses leaned out the passenger-side window, his mouth hanging open in a smile, his tan elbow hanging down.

  “Get a fucking car!” he yelled.

  The driver leaned on the horn, which played “Dixie,” like the General Lee.

  “Fuck you!” my brother yelled as the truck disappeared over the rise. Its engine made an angry sound as it started climbing the mountain up and out of our town, away from us, a pack of hornets moving on. When the sound disappeared altogether Ian bounced the basketball once on the concrete. Boing. It made me think of the sharp, stunted echoes you hear in an utterly empty room.

  “Step Three,” my brother said. “This place is a shithole.”

  Topps 1980 #580: Nolan Ryan

  In July my teammates and I and all the other little leaguers marched in the parade down Main Street in Randolph, dressed in our uniforms, walking past cheering people with flags in their fists. The parade ended at the little league field, where every year there was a town-wide chicken barbecue picnic that coincided with an All-Star Game pitting the best twelve-year-olds from our town against a team of players from some surrounding towns. I had been selected to play in the game that year, which made me feel like a superstar even though just about any twelve-year-old boy in our town who had played all four years of little league made the All-Star Team. I didn’t consider that at the time, however; instead, I focused on the dazzling word itself.

  All-Star.

  It emblazoned the best cards you could ever hope to find in a pack, and it called to mind the highlight of my and Ian’s summer, our one chance to see all the All-Stars at once, many of them for the first time, their previously unknown skills astonishing. The power and the squat, Thing-like physique of slugger Greg “the Bull” Luzinski in 1977. The diving forkball of reliever Bruce Sutter in 1978. The cannon arm of right fielder Dave Parker in 1979. Most of all I thought about how Ian had once been a July 4 All-Star, and how I’d proudly watched him during that game, and how I would now play in the same game.

  I didn’t start but got one at bat halfway through the game and popped up to shallow center. I played right field the following half-inning. A batter dumped a base hit in front of me, and instead of stopping at first he tried for second. Unlike my brother, I’d not bloomed into a strong-armed pitcher in my final little league season, but after all the hours playing catch with Ian I could at least throw it fairly straight, and after I fielded the ball on a bounce I chucked it to our shortstop in time for him to apply the tag. By that time, I had already begun periodically narrating my life in my mind as it happened, combining a daydreaming loner’s fuzzy disconnect with reality with an ever-growing treasury of sports terminology. Gunned was the not entirely accurate verb that immediately leapt to my narrating mind.

  I gunned him out, I thought. Just like Dewey Evans. Just like 1979 All-Star Game MVP Dave “Cobra” Parker. I pounded my glove as I walked back to my position, sneaking a peek at the crowd, searching for my brother, wondering if he’d seen me unleash my gun.

  Later, most of the people in town gathered in a field on the outskirts of Randolph and waited for night to fall. All of us went. Mom, Tom, Ian, me. I still had my uniform on, maybe because I knew when I took it off I’d never put it on again. Fireflies streaked in and around and above the clusters of people all over the darkening field, then bright explosions bloomed in the sky.

  In August my brother let me come with him one day. We hitchhiked up and out of our valley to Randolph Center, where we snuck onto the grounds of Lake Champagne, avoiding the two-dollar entrance fee. We played a couple games of air hockey in the empty rec room, then moseyed on down to the lake and swam out to the empty dock in the middle. We lay there and the sun beat down on us, drying our bodies. I drifted off to a perfect golden version of sleep, then woke to the sound of a splash.

  My brother was gone, but the wet ass-print of his cutoff jeans was still there on the wood of the dock, as was a trail of drops of water that must have fallen from the fringe of his cutoffs as he walked to the edge of the dock and jumped in. I got up and followed the trail of drops and didn’t see him anywhere. If I didn’t know the secret of the dock I would have thought it was magic or an awful tragedy. But I did know, so I jumped in and swam down under the dock to the secret air pocket underneath. My brother was there, floating in the muted light that filtered through the slats of the dock above.

  “Yo,” he said, his voice making a ripply echo.

  His legs looked short under the surface as he pumped them to stay afloat. Little kid legs. Closer to the surface, you could see that he was becoming an adult, a few curly hairs sprouting from his chest. I treaded water too, and the bicycling motion made me think of a dream I’d been having more and more. The dream always started with me standing in the driveway, near the basketball hoop, alone, as if everyone had gone away somewhere. Then I stepped up into the sky. It wasn’t like in comic books. No unfettered soaring. Instead, I climbed the sky, pedaling as if on an invisible bicycle and with some effort, like going up a hill, working at it, but also ecstatic, an ache of joy in my chest for remembering how simple it was, how simple it had always been, to fly up and away from my emptied house and all through the sky above our town.

  “Yo,” I said to hear the little echo. My heart was starting to beat harder because of all the kid-leg pedaling.

  “Yo!” Ian shouted. And I shouted “Yo!”

  We got quiet again. The empty dock above us bucked in a gust, as if connected to the thumping in my chest. My heart, the seesawing dock, the spliced giggling sunlight through the slats, the deep water below, the whole wide world and beyond. A pulse runs through everything, but we hardly ever know.

  As September loomed, I was back on my own, the sweet myth that summer might last forever disintegrating. I’d been buying cards for months already, the thrill of seeing the year’s new card style long gone.

  Any pack I could buy would be mostly doubles, guys I’d already picked up in previous packs, one monotonously recognizable personage after another, zombies in infielder crouches or with bats outstretched. Tedium, disappointment, the taste in my mouth back to what it was before I opened the pack, the stick of gum that came with the cards already a hard rubber pebble.

  To this too you add prayer. You do this because without it what else is there? You do this because there’s always a chance. You might just find, mixed in with all the doubles, a card like the one pictured above.

  I was twelve when I found it among all the repeating Thad Bosleys and Steve Muras. There was no bigger star than Nolan Ryan. He seemed to have superpowers. Other pitchers such as Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver won more games and Cy Young awards, but only Nolan Ryan had the power to crack open the hard lid of the late summer sky and let a little of the dreamworld come leaking in. He threw the ball fast, faster than anyone ever had, faster than anyone ever would. A twelve-year-old kid who had played his final season of little league and gone through one demoralizing year of junior high with another year about to begin could walk home from the store with this card in an unopened pack and back in his room he could open that pack and find this card and hold it in his hands and feel like he was touching a
little piece of lightning from another wider world.

  Topps 1981 #630: Steve Carlton

  Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly.

  In September the mountains all around us rippled with a slow glowing fire, leaves turning orange and yellow and red.

  In October, as Steve Carlton and the Phillies were beating an ailing George Brett and the Royals in the World Series, the leaves began to dry and fall. Brett had proved mortal after all, not only failing to hit.400 but at the most crucial moment of his career developing the ugliest malady I’d yet heard of, hemorrhoids, which as I understood it were painful bulging cysts of the asshole.

  In November, baseball gone for the year and, as it would turn out, my desire to buy large quantities of baseball cards gone forever, things got uglier still, a cold wind knifing through skeletal trees and across ground hard and wan as concrete. Late that month, we went to my grandparents’ house on Cape Cod for Thanksgiving. The day after the feast, since there wasn’t much else to do in November, a contingent of the extended family traveled to the mall in Hyannis. My brother and I went to a record store. At first we split up, flipping through albums at different places in the alphabet, but up in the A’s I found a new album by a band I thought we both liked. After we had realized we had been fools to like disco, we had switched to the unsucking Rock of this band, among others (including, prominently, AC/DC). I brought it to Ian.

  “Check it out,” I said. “Aerosmith’s latest. Night in the Ruts.”

  My brother half-looked, then snickered, shaking his head a little. He continued flicking through albums. I looked down at the cover.