Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  I still had night terrors every once in a while. One night when Ian was away at school and Mom was away somewhere, too, I went screaming through the house until I ended up near enough to Tom for him to reach out and take my hand.

  “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he said, holding on.

  Ian had once headed off my encroaching night terrors by reading to me from his Star Trek book, but once they started no one had ever gotten them to stop before they’d run their entire course to hoarse-voiced exhaustion. Not until the night Tom reached out and held my hand in a house that had never felt emptier.

  Bill Lee’s major league career came to an end in 1982 when his one-game walkout to protest the release of teammate Rodney Scott resulted in the Expos showing him the same door they showed Scott.

  Mom, Tom, and I took our only overnight trip ever as a three-some around then, a gray weekend visit to Montreal. I can only remember that there didn’t seem to be much to do. I bought an Expos cap. We wandered the streets, ate in a restaurant where you ordered in French, and sat around the hotel. The highlight of the trip was when we went to see a documentary, which as far as I know was never released in the U.S., about Bill Lee. Here he was in all his glory, talking about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes, cursing Don Zimmer for his beady-eyed, self-righteous, slow-witted devotion to traditional thinking, lauding meditation as a way to take a snapshot of your mind at any moment, and blaming the chronic back problems that besieged Americans on the fact that we, unlike the more enlightened Japanese, were slavishly devoted to the con game of chairs. With his bushy beard and his good-natured motormouth communist-inflected rantings, he seemed more than ever like one of Mom and Tom’s friends from the old days.

  The film made it seem as if Bill Lee might still live in Montreal, even though the team had given him the heave-ho. For the rest of the trip I wore my new Expos cap and kept my eyes peeled for him, hoping to see him so I could break the gathering silence by yelling his name.

  Topps 1978 #152: Ivan DeJesus

  I learned from my cards that some people are special. Some people aren’t. The sluggers, the All-Stars: They can swing for the fences. They are men, not sheep. They are never asked to follow. They are never asked to bunt.

  Early in our time in East Randolph, Mom and Tom fixed up the shed where Ian and I had found the magazine with the naked people in it. This shed was going to be a key part of their back-to-the-land dream. The sheep would live here. The sheep would give us food and clothing and maybe even goods in trade. Our first two sheep were named Virginia and Wool, and after they mated Wool got made into little white wax paper packages for our meat freezer. Other sheep followed, either coming out of Virginia covered in blood or in a truck, imported to impregnate Virginia, but the non-Virginia sheep proved to be more trouble than they were worth, often escaping through the electric fence that was always shorting out, resulting in tiresome and embarrassing sheep hunts through the town. Also, all the sheep except for Virginia were dumb and devoid of personality. After a while, in line with all the other elements of the back-to-the-land dream eventually dropping by the wayside, we kept just Virginia, and got nothing out of her beyond her modest lawn-mowing skills. Big bags of her shorn mane filled up our mud room, never getting processed into wool. But she was a great creature, a huge, bellowing, intelligent matriarch, and we loved her, and she at least knew us, and possibly even loved us back. You could go to the electric fence and if you cupped your hand like you had grain she would walk over, and she would stay even when you showed her your empty hand, and you could scratch her on the head, which she liked.

  Sometimes I think the last at bat of the back-to-the-land dream was when Virginia got so old and rickety that there was no way of justifying her continued presence in our lives, and so she was taken where all our other sheep had been taken, and she returned in white wax paper packages that stayed in the bottom of the meat freezer until the house was sold.

  Other times I like to believe the last at bat of that dream was when Tom strung a tightrope across the inside of our garage. It was that spring when I learned my brother would be going away. By then Tom had been working a regular full-time job for a few years. His life had come to resemble in some ways the very thing he and Mom had so desperately wanted to escape. Previous to meeting my mom, Tom had been unsure about whether to pursue a professional acting career or to venture further into the experimental theater and experimental living he’d been increasingly attracted to. When he fell in love with my mother and they began to dream together, he saw the back-to-the-land-dream as the answer to the question of what to do with his life. Embrace the role of a lifetime, your lifetime, the only one you’ll ever get.

  So what do you do when that role ossifies into something ordinary, the role of a follower, the role of someone being told to lay down a bunt?

  Tom’s response was to ignore the sign and swing for the fences. Despite a relative lack of experience in musicals, he got the lead role in the Randolph theater company’s production of Barnum. He would sing. He would dance. He would yank a tablecloth out from under dishes and cutlery. He would juggle. He would walk a tightrope.

  On the first performance of the three-night run, the show climaxed with Tom walking across the tightrope strung across the stage. We weren’t at that performance, however, and went the next night, when someone snapped a photo and he lost his balance halfway across. The production had prepared for this possibility and killed the lights as he faltered, keeping them off as he scurried backstage, then flicking them back on a couple seconds later when Tom reappeared on the platform at the far end of the tightrope, an arm raised in triumph.

  I have to hand it to Randolph, the closest thing I’ve got to a hometown. Tom got a bigger cheer than he would have if he hadn’t failed. I know this because I’d heard a smaller version of that cheer from the people of that town who helped make my time in little league such a beautiful oasis.

  “Good swing!” they would yell every time I tried with all my might and missed.

  My mother was always foremost among those adults cheering “Good swing.” If anyone in my family knew what it meant to try and keep trying, it was her. She had thrown herself into painting. She had thrown herself into inventing a new kind of family. She had thrown herself into living what had been envisioned as a joyous self-sufficient life in the country. She had thrown herself into creating and maintaining her own sign-painting business. She threw everything she had into each of the daring, ambitious tries. Swinging from her heels. Covered in paint. Covered in sawdust. Covered in dirt. On her knees working in the garden for hours. On her knees working on a sign for hours.

  When all those attempts had come and gone, I see her sitting at the kitchen table and staring blankly out the window. I eventually came to associate these semicatatonic states of hers with the word “depression.” I see her going to work every day to write and edit technical manuals, not what she’d envisioned when she’d written on a postcard “I’m flipping out with thoughts of THERE!” to Tom while he was in blacksmith school. I see her coming home every day from that job, the backseat covered in tear-soaked tissues. The layer of tissue wads would be particularly thick on days when she had seen her therapist.

  At the time, I hated this therapist, whom I blamed for making my mother sad. Now I understand it as yet another brave try by my mom. She always kept going, kept swinging, kept trying to figure it out, one way or another.

  I see her taking me, in that first year that my brother was gone, to see Allen Ginsberg play music at a hall in the state capital, Montpelier. Ginsberg the beatnik had inspired my mother in the early 1960s when she’d first moved to New York, fresh out of college, and had inspired her again later in the decade when he’d been a prominent figure in the hippie counterculture that seemed to my mother to be swinging for the fences. She wanted me to see this great man, this weird sprawling force of nature who would have rather gone insane, as he almost did early in his life, than give up this lone precious at bat called life and follow
orders to bunt.

  I was only fourteen, however, and though I would later come to revere Ginsberg almost as much as I would come to revere his friend Jack Kerouac, I was exactly the wrong age to stomach a bug-eyed wet-lipped strange-voiced middle-aged maniac with a sweating bald pate and wild Larry Fine tufts who sawed inexpertly on a variety of musical instruments and caterwauled atonal ditties that always, even if they were about secret CIA plots to assassinate justly elected foreign leaders, eventually circled around to how great it was to suck a teenaged cock.

  “Can I have the keys?” I said at intermission.

  I went out to the car and listened to a few innings of a Red Sox game on the radio. This was the 1982 team that I’d earlier expressed hope in when talking to Ian late at night on one of his visits home. But as I sat alone in the dark listening to them get thumped I understood that all the gleaming promise of the star-studded 1970s teams had vanished for real, along with the dispersal of most of the roster. What was left?

  “Come on, Yaz,” I said.

  The next spring, I was twice ordered to bunt in what turned out to be the final game of my baseball career. I was fourteen and on a bad Babe Ruth team that got worse as the season wore on. But we eventually found a team even worse than us, probably the same ragged collection of hippie teens that my brother almost no-hit the year before. We got a good lead early, yet when I came to bat our coach gave me the sign from the third-base coach’s box to lay down a bunt. I think he was trying to let me know that my opinion of myself as a baseball player, which I’d formed while doing pretty well in little league, was outdated. I was a scrub now, a bench guy. I wasn’t as happy to throw away my at bat as Ivan DeJesus appears to be, but I followed orders and laid down a good bunt. The coach never acknowledged it. By my next time up we were really pounding them. Everyone was having fun but me. I looked up the third-base line to the coach and he touched his belt again, the bunt sign. I couldn’t figure out if he was an idiot or if he was punishing me. Either way, I was through with baseball. I lashed a double, probably my first solid hit since little league. As I stood on second base I didn’t look at the coach. My whole body tingled from making perfect contact. My first and greatest dream life had ended.

  4th PACK

  YAZMOBILE

  Topps 1979 #376: Gorman Thomas

  Before this goes any further: What the fuck? Specifically, what the fuck are the Milwaukee Brewers doing in the National League? When I last looked, I mean really looked, back at the end of my childhood, that unbroken ladder of years seemingly aimed in the direction of the gods, there was no clearer representative of the American League than the Brewers. They never sent their keg-bellied hungover hurlers to the plate. They never hosted games below the ceiling of a retractable dome. They never allowed their simple brutish contests to be marred by the calculating timidity of sacrifice bunts. They had the beards and long greasy hair of motorcycle thugs and guzzled Miller High Life and gnawed bulging wads of tobacco and slugged long home runs or struck out swinging. They listened to Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams Jr. on their way to discharge shotguns at wildlife. They smashed into outfield fences and bought mescaline from hippies before pounding them with tire irons. Didn’t they? I mean, now that the Milwaukee Brewers are in something called the Central Division of the National League I don’t feel I can make confident assertions about anything. But I can at least say this: As much as any team was ever one guy, the Milwaukee Brewers in the late ’70s and early ’80s were Gorman Thomas. And Gorman Thomas did not ever show his grizzled, menacing face in the National League. Until October 1982, that is, and that was only because by then the Brewers had laid waste to all the American League teams in their path and the only thing left for them to conquer was the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League, which they probably would have done if the majority of the games in the 1982 World Series were played in an American League park and not upon the fake National League turf of Busch Stadium. After those four National League games, Gorman Thomas was never the same, and neither were the Brewers, and come to think of it, neither was I.

  Topps 1978 #450: Tom Seaver

  And what’s Tom Seaver doing in a Cincinnati Reds uniform? Tom Seaver was known as the Franchise, a nickname nodding to the fact that he was the New York Mets. He had always been the New York Mets. He would always be the New York Mets. And yet, here he is: Something else.

  As he glares out from under his new red cap, his approach appears unaltered: Give me the fucking ball and I’ll win. Still, no one is immune to the erosion of the unbroken ladder of years. After a few years in exile from the New York Mets, Tom Seaver seemed to be close to joining me among those who’d recently let go of playing baseball. In 1982, his final year with the Reds, he went 5 and 13 with a 5.50 ERA.

  What do you do when the unbroken ladder of years disappears?

  My mom came up to my room one night. It was the spring of 1983. She asked me if I thought I might want to try going away to school, as Ian had done.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Eventually, she drove me down to western Massachusetts to the boarding school my brother would be graduating from soon. A guy in the admissions office interviewed me. I had no extracurricular activities to tell him about, beyond my horrible basketball team. I didn’t like any subjects in school. Still, words somehow came out of my mouth when it was my turn to talk.

  “Good stuff, good stuff,” the interviewer kept saying.

  A few weeks later, my mom got word that they would be willing to get her started on another heavily loan-burdened tuition payment plan, similar to the one she was already on for my brother.

  “So what do you think?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know.”

  By then, Tom Seaver had been traded back to the Mets. It wasn’t exactly a triumphant return. All the Reds could get for the future Hall of Famer was Lloyd McClendon, Charlie Puleo, and a minor leaguer named Jason Felice. Reunited with the Mets, his struggles continued. One night early in Tom Seaver’s second go-round in New York, I stumbled into a return of my own. A couple buddies and I had gotten an older guy to buy us some rum. We were wondering where to drink it. I’d never gotten drunk before. We ended up, probably at my suggestion, at the little league dugout where I’d spent a lot of good moments, including my first and only minutes as a kid who had just made perfect contact and hit a home run.

  The brief, inexplicable triumph of that day struck me as unreachable the moment I sat down on the wooden bench, gripping, instead of a bat that had just been used to hit a home run, a liter bottle of rum-spiked Coke. As I looked out through the chicken wire at the field, I was surprised by the smallness of the diamond, by the closeness of the outfield fence, by how easy it would be to hit a home run. A sharp ache spread through my chest as I realized the impossibility of going back to that much simpler world. You can only go forward, never backward. I started drinking. The ache gradually gave way to one of the best feelings I’d ever felt. It began to really hit me when we left the dugout. We were running toward an older kid’s truck that had appeared in the nearby parking lot. My strides had a slow-motion buoyancy, as if gravity were loosening its grip. We piled into the back and rode around shitfaced and laughing under the stars for the rest of the night, the bumps in the road lifting us up into the air like we were unbuckled astronauts far beyond the earth’s pull.

  That fall, I went away to the boarding school in western Massachusetts. I spent the first weeks in a state of barely concealed terror. All the other students seemed impossibly sophisticated, way out of my league. One day I had been the sole inhabitant of a rural, socially retarded kingdom of daydreams, solitaire Strat-O-Matic baseball, and WKRP in Cincinnati-based masturbation, and the next day I was stiffly traversing a rolling green campus of solemn ivied buildings and sharp-witted upper-middle-class Izod-clad sophisticates in slightly muted Spandau Ballet haircuts who had long ago lost their virginity on the sunsplashed decks of Nantucket sailboats. Initially, my only way of dealing with the terr
or of the situation was to seize hold of my strong resemblance to my brother. You’re just like your brother, I was told repeatedly, often as a filler for the uncomfortable silences that surrounded me like a force field.

  I wasn’t crazy about being an echo, but being an echo was better than being nothing at all, especially if it was Ian’s echo. He had done well at the school, or so I thought, playing on the varsity basketball team, acing English papers, serving as an official Student Leader of his dorm. Years later, I found out he carried an ineffably deep loathing of the memory of himself at that school. During his two years there, he had forced his unruly collection of adolescent hurt, yearning, and anger inside the borders of a desperate impersonation of a well-adjusted, high-achieving paragon of old-money virtue. I was impersonating an impersonation.

  One bright and sunny Sunday a month or so after my arrival I slipped into the TV room on the first floor of my dorm. The TV room was for defectives, especially on a bright and sunny Sunday when you could be out talking and laughing in your polo shirt with a gaggle of beautiful girls in front of a leaf pile, your lacrosse stick perched on your shoulder. My other stints in the TV room thus far had been sad, shame-filled congregations with other dateless and misshapen fellows to watch Michael Jackson and Prince prance around on Friday Night Videos while the regular kids groped one another through L.L. Bean garments under the soft, English Literature-enhanced boarding-school stars. But on this particular Sunday I had no company at all. It was just me and the television.