Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  “Dewey . . . Dewey,” we rasped.

  That summer I returned to Cape Cod. My brother had gotten a summer job outside Boston, in Framingham, on a crew that ripped apart rooms with crowbars and sledgehammers. I made my way to Fenway more often that summer than I ever had or ever would, taking a quick bus ride in from Hyannis to meet up with Ian when he was free. He’d just completed his third year of college, but he wasn’t really very close to finishing. Soon he’d drop out and get a job driving a UPS truck.

  Before one game, we ducked into a souvenir store outside Fenway and Ian bought a closeout item, probably the cheapest thing in the store, a white painter’s cap with the word YAZ on the front and various career achievements listed on the sides. He put on the cap and we walked right up to the bleacher ticket window and bought our tickets and went into the game. We were no longer able to yell for the player honored on Ian’s two-dollar cap, but late in the game, with men on base, Dwight Evans strode to the plate. It was the summer of 1986 and the Red Sox had been winning. We’d been starting to wonder if there was anything beyond the usual early season mirage, but this wondering only verged on full-throated belief when Dewey crouched down into his stance amid the rising chant.

  “Dewey . . . Dewey,” we sang.

  I wanted to avoid another stint at the Shell station, so I got a job canvassing door to door for Greenpeace. I did okay my first day on the job, but later it was sorted out that part of the reason for the success was that I had inadvertently strayed from my prescribed route and horned in on the potential donors on another canvasser’s turf. This got sorted out as my supervisor drove me and the other canvasser back to the office. My supervisor eyed me in the rearview mirror.

  “You’re like some kind of an evil genius,” he said in a reedy, snickering voice. He was a thin blond guy a year or so older than me who went to Tufts, which I have ever since pictured as being populated largely by thin blond guys making cutting, ironic comments. On my second day, I made a little less money than I had on the first, and on the third day I made still less, and so on.

  I watched a lot of Red Sox games with my grandfather that summer. He wasn’t really that big of a sports guy, but he was willing to watch whatever made me happy, so long as it didn’t interfere with his late afternoon viewing of M*A*S*H.

  The television was in his room. I sat on his orthopedic bed and he sat on his La-Z-Boy, both of us using remote controls to lift and lower our torsos and legs until we were in suitable game-watching position. During lulls in the action my gaze sometimes drifted from the screen to the curling black-and-white snapshots under dusty glass on the wall behind the television. Sometimes I looked to my left at my grandmother’s bed, where she’d died. Sometimes I found myself staring at my grandfather’s purple-splotched hand as it lay flat on the La-Z-Boy armrest. His lungs were giving out, and he was connected by blue tubes to an oxygen machine that emitted a constant low-level hum from the next room.

  During one game, my grandfather suddenly maneuvered the La-Z-Boy into an alert 90-degree angle and began blowing air through a disconnected French horn mouthpiece. He had been the leader of a Dixieland band in his younger years, and more recently, until his lungs started giving out, he had played the French horn in a band of similar old guys who all dressed up in maroon uniforms and performed numbers such as “The Hokey Pokey” at a bandshell in nearby Chatham every Friday night. The sound produced by the mouthpiece was a meager, rangeless brapping.

  “I do this to keep my lips in shape,” he explained after he had been tooting away for several minutes. An unwelcome thought formed in my mind. In shape for what?

  The things he played on the mouthpiece were all indecipherable, with one exception. In a late inning the Red Sox got something cooking, and the old man took a deep breath and blew a monotone, spittle-thin version of the cavalry call—“Brapada brap pa braaa.”

  I didn’t like it. It was too corny and hopeful. Even though the Red Sox had been playing well that year, and even though I was starting to believe, I still preferred to approach each game armored with the protective conviction that my team would blow it, no matter what.

  “Brapada brap pa braaa,” my grandfather played again. He glanced at me and smiled, his frayed gray eyebrows rising.

  “Brapada brap pa braaa,” he played.

  “Charge,” I finally said.

  On days when it rained really hard Greenpeace canceled the canvassing. Those rainouts were among the greatest days this chronic life avoider has ever known. It’s been more than twenty years and I still can’t get over them. The job of knocking on door after door to cheerfully recite a scripted spiel about the encroaching environmental apocalypse and the need for monetary contributions made my stomach hurt, plus I was terrible at it. I came to love waking to the sound of rain. It meant the pressure was off.

  On what would be my last day at that job, I left my route after a couple hours of doors slamming in my face and wandered over to a Cumberland Farms. I bought a Coke and, to cheer myself up, a pack of baseball cards. I was leafing through the cards back at my pickup spot when the smirking blond guy from Tufts pulled up. He stared at my baseball cards.

  “A kid give those to you?” he asked.

  The next morning I found myself praying for a giant rainstorm so I could get stoned, make Steak-umms with melted American cheese, and watch television all day with my grandfather. But the sky was blue with no hope of rain, not a cloud anywhere. I felt like I might puke. I called the office. The blond guy answered.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I’m really, really sorry.”

  “Ha. Don’t be,” he said.

  I spent a few days as if they were rainouts, then rode my grandfather’s disintegrating bike down to the Shell station to see if they were hiring.

  That fucking summer. I think of the song “Sledgehammer” everywhere. Cars full of college girls in bikinis pulling into the station, that song blaring for a couple minutes, then fading as the girls disappeared. Later, back home, I cast myself in scenarios in which, instead of being profoundly oblivious to me as I washed the windshield, the girls in the front seat noticed me peeking down at the tops of their breasts and yanked me into the car to rip off my high cap and collared shirt and so on.

  And I think of my bike ride home at night from Greenpeace, before I quit. Halfway through the eight-mile trek, as I passed from the ocean side of the Cape to the bay side, the road turned from a long gradual uphill to a long gradual downhill, and the traffic thinned to almost nothing. I coasted through the dark, riding atop the white line on the shoulder of the road. Most nights I stopped and swam at a pond where my grandfather had done slow old-guy laps before his lungs gave out. I floated on my back, looking up at the stars, listening to the thump of my heart as if it were the heartbeat of the whole dark lake below and all the star-studded blackness above.

  My grandfather would be in bed by the time I got home, his main oxygen machine humming in the dining room, the clear plastic tube snaking under the shut door into his room. He always made sure there were beers in the fridge for me and frosted mugs in the freezer. Most nights I got home too late to catch the Red Sox game on the radio in my room, but once they were still playing when I got home, in extra innings, and they pulled out an incredible win after Angels third baseman Doug DeCinces botched what would have been a game-ending catch of an easy pop fly. They’d been doing well all year, but that game really got me going. My god, I thought, could 1986 really be the year? I allowed myself to envision my deepest wish coming true. Yaz wouldn’t be there, but Jim Ed still would be. Dewey still would be. And there’d be pandemonium in the streets, and confetti raining down, and me and my brother in the middle of it laughing and screaming.

  And I think of Dwight Evans slowly striding to the plate with the game reaching a crucial stage, me on my grandfather’s orthopedic bed, my grandfather safe and sound in his La-Z-Boy. The next summer he’d be in a nursing home. The summer after that he’d be gone. I think of Dewey working the co
unt to 3-1. I hear the chant of 33,000 people on the television. My grandfather joins in. The crowd noise blooms into a great wordless roar that covers the hum of the oxygen machine. My grandfather bobs a loose fist in time to the chant, the tip of his trumpet mouthpiece sticking out through two purple-splotched fingers. He turns to me, grinning, his eyebrows raised.

  “Dewey . . . Dewey,” he chants, and he won’t look away until I join him.

  Topps 1977 #521: Bob Grich

  Comic books and baseball cards, the primary pillars of the fantasy world in which I spent most of my childhood, come together in this 1977 Bobby Grich card, which has always reminded me of Marvel comics artist Jack “King” Kirby’s lantern-jawed, dimplechinned heroes, who often paused amid dire intergalactic battle to fill the entire comic frame with their chiseled heads and deliver clear-eyed pronouncements of urgent courageous purpose, just as Grich seems to be doing here. Most baseball cards imply that the next moment beyond the moment of the photo will be a few batting cage swings or a saunter to the outfield to shag some flies. But here it seems more likely that Grich—as soon as he is done uttering something along the lines of “He has gone mad with power and MUST BE STOPPED!”—will in the next rectangular frame chronicling his adventures leap high into the sky on superpowered legs to collide with a dark muscular otherworldly destroyer with dead eyes and ornate Aztec-inspired headgear.

  As far as I know, Grich never tangled with Galactus or Modok or the Red Skull; he did once scream at Earl Weaver for pinch hitting for him too often when he was a rookie, but no blows were thrown by either man. Mostly, Grich quietly went about his job, over the course of his career creating a body of work bettered by only a few second basemen in major league history. (Bill James, a longtime advocate of the underrated Grich’s estimable worth, ranked Grich as the twelfth best second baseman of all time.)

  This card heralded the beginning of Grich’s stay with the Angels. (Note the blotchy, doctored uniform piping, Topps scrambling to adjust for his free agency defection from the Orioles.) Interestingly, I have no memories of Grich besides this card until a moment at the very end of his Angels sojourn. The reason the latter moment, which came during the Angels’ 1986 American League championship series tilt with the Red Sox, stands out in my memory is that once again Bobby Grich seemed like a character who’d be at home in the pages of a superhero comic. I don’t recall exactly when the moment occurred, but it was either after the Angels’ third win, which put them up three games to one, or after the Angels took a commanding lead in the next game. The California sun was shining down, the home fans were screaming joyously, and Grich leapt into the air to give a seismic high five to a teammate, who in my memory was, fittingly, the Angel with a superhero’s bulging musculature, Brian Downing. Both Angels seemed larger than life, especially Grich, as if with a couple uncanny Hulk-like leaps he could bound all the way across the continent to New York to finally participate in a World Series.

  He shrank back down to human size soon enough, I guess. He became like the rest of us once again, who only ever fly in our dreams. I don’t remember noticing him as the Red Sox clawed back to beat the Angels and win their first pennant since 1975.

  Not that I was looking for him. I was too busy flying.

  Topps 1978 #473: Bill Buckner

  The little color television in the corner of the dorm room seemed to be emitting the kind of gamma rays that center superhero origin tales. The three young men with me in the room—Steve from Peterborough, NH; Tom from Marblehead, MA; and John from Norwich, VT—were all glowing, as if they would soon be able to shoot fire from their fingertips or stop bullets with their chests or topple a building with one punch. And I seemed to be levitating several inches off the ground. In a few seconds we’d all be invincible.

  We had a two-run lead in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series. The first two Mets batters had made outs. No one was on base. We needed to record just one more out for the deepest wish of our childhoods to come true. I started wondering how I was going to get to Boston for the parade, and if my brother would be able to meet me there.

  “Where can we get champagne this time of night?” I said, and Gary Carter stroked a sharp single to left.

  It’s easy to try to make sense of it all now. To soberly and magnanimously absolve everyone involved from blame. To claim I’d never assigned blame in the first place. To claim I never wished grave ill on John McNamara or built a lexicon of mockery around the sad failure face of Calvin Schiraldi or evaded the question of who was responsible for the ball skipping to the backstop and allowing the tying run to score, Bob Stanley or Rich Gedman, by simply throwing them both onto the noxious dump fire smoldering for years and years in my mind. To claim that because I had almost completely stopped believing the game could still be won by the time Mookie Wilson’s ground ball bounded toward Bill Buckner, and because I was not one of the idiots who harassed him and his family until he fled Boston for Idaho, or one of the idiots who years later held up a sign saying they forgave him, as if he had something to be forgiven for (Forgive us, Bill Buckner, the signs should have read), that I was somehow not complicit in the crushing weight of history that came down on Bill Buckner’s shoulders, obliterating the achievements of a career that included 2,715 hits and 1,208 RBI and a .289 lifetime batting average and an All-Star berth and a batting title and a division crown and a pennant and a moment just a few moments away from invincibility. To claim the thought of Bill Buckner never prompted a sharp ache to spread through my chest. To claim I wasn’t overwhelmed by a bitterness that severed a connection to the closest thing I had to a religion in such a way that the connection, though it would survive, would never be fully repaired.

  Steve from Peterborough, NH, swore and cried. Tom from Marblehead, MA, smashed empty beer bottles against the wall. John from Norwich, VT, climbed into his bed and curled into a fetal position, pulling his covers over his head. I just stood there looking down at a phlegm-colored institutional rug, a painful, skeletal grin on my face that I couldn’t get rid of, a corollary to the painful beating in my head: What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

  Topps 1975 #385: Dock Ellis

  I thought childhood was over. I thought I’d lost the touch of the gods. It was a cold late morning in January 1987. A friend handed me and a couple other friends each a tiny perforated cardboard square imprinted with a yin-yang symbol. We placed the cardboard onto our tongues.

  We were near a playground. As we started to feel something in our limbs, a giddy electric shivering, we got on some swings. Childhood returned, and not just the memory of childhood but the full feel of it, the narrow, deep glee of simply swinging.

  You can just get by from day to day or you can swing. Dock Ellis swung. He spoke up loud and clear when something bothered him. He wore hair curlers on the field during pregame warm-ups. According to the book Dock Ellis collaborated on with poet Donald Hall, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, he once announced before a game against the Reds (whom Ellis felt had established a psychological edge over Ellis’s Pirates), “We gonna get down. We gonna do the do. I’m going to hit these motherfuckers,” and then in the first inning he backed up his words by drilling the first three Reds batters before throwing six straight balls to Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, who had temporarily given up baseball for dodgeball. (At that point Ellis’s manager finally removed him from the game.) Off the field, he visited prisons and befriended and helped the inmates, laying the groundwork for a post-baseball career as a devoted and talented social worker. Even when he was near the very top of the game, he spilled over the sides of it. Early in his career, on an off day, Dock Ellis met up with a friend who had some tiny perforated squares of cardboard.

  I wanted to follow the footsteps of another character determined to spill over the sides of life, Sal Paradise. And just like the narrator of On the Road, I had an old boarding-school roommate who, by living in California, offered a suitably faraway point B. I rode a Greyhound bus all the wa
y, having no adventures to speak of, the vast land that was the star of my favorite book scrolling past the dirty bus window like stock footage in a dimly lit documentary.

  Once I got to California, I soon ran so low on money that I had to exist for a while on tortillas and cream cheese that I stole from a small grocery store. I got so desperate I applied for and, because they took anyone, got a job once again fundraising door to door for an environmental protection organization. I was worse than ever at it, and one day in Lompoc I hit a new low, unable to get a single penny from anyone. Near the end of my shift I knocked on a door and a thin guy with aviator glasses answered. I began reciting the official spiel in my customary hesitant monotone.

  “Hey, let me ask you something,” the guy said, cutting me off.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “How would you like to experience something a thousand times better than any acid trip?”

  I looked down at my clipboard, at my watch. I looked back up at the guy. I went inside and chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo with the guy and his Asian wife for a while, the three of us kneeling in their living room.

  “Wow, huh?” the guy said afterward. I assured him that he’d changed my life, even though I still felt the same. Before leaving his porch I tried to finish my spiel and get a contribution. He was leaning in his doorway. He waved a hand around like he was shooing a bug.