Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  “We’ve moved beyond all that,” he said. “Don’t you see?”

  A few days later I got a job at a gas station. I worked there for a month and a half and quit in time to spend my last couple weeks in California smoking pot, meditating on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, and reading books that in various ways affirmed that the whole wide world was an illusion.

  While the rest of his teammates and the team they would be playing slept, Dock Ellis, eyes wide open, marveled through the night and into the next day at the whole wide world far below.

  “I might have slept maybe an hour,” Dock Ellis recalled in Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball. “I got up maybe about nine or ten in the morning. Took another half tab.”

  As he regained the full altitude of his orbit, he realized that, in just a few hours, back down on earth, he was scheduled to pitch. No one had ever attempted to pitch a major league game while experiencing the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, but Dock Ellis ran toward life no matter what. He arrived at the ballpark with only enough time to watch the ball leap from his fingers a few times before the Star-Spangled Banner was played.

  My brother met me in California at the end of the summer. He was about to drop out of college for a while and work, but before donning the UPS browns he wanted to get a taste of the big wide world. To spill over the sides. He and his friend Dave had taken a meandering route west, and the plan was that the three of us would drive all the way back east together. By the time they picked me up they had built up a bond from all the miles, their in-jokes and references to road experiences making me feel like an outsider. I was hoping that on the drive east I’d become a full partner in the trip. Also, I hadn’t yet learned how to drive and was hoping (and dreading) that I’d get a chance to practice as we shot across the continent. I imagined that somehow on the long drive I’d free myself of all my limitations; somehow I’d no longer be myself but someone better.

  Before heading east, we detoured north for a two-day outdoor concert featuring Santana and the Grateful Dead. The line getting into the parking lot was never-ending, long enough for us to purchase three hits of acid from some guy, long enough for us to talk over how best to use our new acquisition, long enough for us to dismiss the rational choice of waiting until the next day so that we could take the hits just before the concert in favor of an alternative and more immediate time of liftoff, because at the present moment we were bored out of our skulls, inching along at a mile an hour if we were moving at all. So, still paralyzed in traffic, we just said What the fuck. Onto our tongues went the little squares of cardboard.

  A long night devoid of stories ensued. Dave had a particularly bad trip and kept saying that he was cold, so cold. Even after we finally escaped the clutches of the traffic jam, we spent a lot of the night in or very near the car. For an eternity I sat on the ground against the car, leaning against a tire, and stared at my pant leg, praying for it to reflect the light of dawn.

  Dock Ellis was wild that day. During the night he’d been listening to Jimi Hendrix, and maybe the snarling, snapped-power-line frenzy of Hendrix’s guitar was still ripping through him. Through the first five innings, he walked five batters and hit a sixth. But no one had scored, despite all the baserunners dancing around behind him like jackals. No one had made any solid contact, either. Through five: no hits. Through six: no hits.

  As the sun began to rise, my brother and I left Dave in the car, still shivering under all his clothes, and went to an open area and threw a Frisbee. Before you are born you are one with the universe, after you die you’re one again, but when you’re alive you’re like a piece of the whole that’s come loose and is falling. That’s how I felt for most of that acid trip. A chunk of flesh plunging through the dark. But when I played catch with my brother I no longer felt that way. There was just an old indestructible connection, the disc a bright shared pulse in the dawn.

  In the seventh, as Dock Ellis’s whole body thrummed like something connected to the apocalyptic heartbeat of the universe, a Padres pinch hitter stung one through the box, but second baseman Bill Mazeroski dove and made the catch, preserving the oval on the scoreboard below the letter H. In the eighth, as his pitches continued to snarl and sneer, Dock Ellis surrendered his eighth walk of the game but then got the next batter to ground out to the shortstop, ending the inning. In the ninth, all the colors of the rainbow huddled behind the muted tones of the gray, misty day like giggling guests at a surprise party, about to leap out and start screaming. Dock Ellis stood at the center of it all and realized that all he had to do, all he ever had to do, was play a simple game of catch.

  The car died before we even got out of California, on a long uphill part of the highway just outside Truckee, causing us to abandon our cross-country drive and fly home. When I got back to college I found that the ranks of my party buddies, which had been shrinking at the transient school since the end of my first semester, had dwindled to nothing. A few weeks in, telling myself I was aiding my writing by further exploring the inner reaches of my mind, I flew solo through a sheet of acid one hit at a time.

  During one trip I played pickup basketball and found it impossible to miss. I sank every shot I took, even ridiculous sprawling heaves meant to test the limits of my hot streak, which ultimately seemed not to be a hot streak at all but a temporary glimpse of who I really was, unencumbered by all the layers of failure and doubt and guilt.

  Most often I spent the trips staring at the wall or into some damp woods behind the house where I was renting a room. I was hoping for a vision, or for a return of that feeling of childhood I’d had during my first trip. That feeling never did return, however, and the closest thing I had to a vision was when I was wandering around campus and some faroff mountains briefly turned into a pair of dirty Converse All-Stars.

  Finally, I reached the end of the sheet, taking what would be my last hit of acid on Halloween 1987, at a Phish show at Goddard College. It was a bad trip—narrow, jittery, alienating, laced with the smell of my own burning synapses—and I spent most of it crashing around alone through limb-scraping brush in the dark woods behind the art building, where everyone was having a fantastic time dancing and laughing together, all the revelers wrapped in colorful costumes, the guitarist and bass player hopping up and down in jester hats, the drummer in a matronly dress. All I had on was my Josh Wilker suit—ripped jeans, T-shirt, army jacket, dirty Converse All-Stars, skin—and if I could have I probably would have taken it all off and set it on fire.

  Maybe I’m haunted by boundless possibilities. Maybe I always have been. My earliest years, the late 1960s and early 1970s, came in a time and place bubbling with the idea that anything was possible. The ecstatic visions of Jack Kerouac seemed less an elegiac psalm to an evaporating world than a prelude to a world yet to come. You could be whomever you wanted to be and each day was going to be a new transformation, the promising light of the present moment giving way to even brighter, warmer, wider light. In the early 1970s, you could, as Dock Ellis did late on the night before a day game against the Padres, take a hit of acid and be unbeatable, untouchable, unhittable. You could be the best possible version of yourself, all your lesser costumes burned clean away.

  Topps 1979 #359: Dan Spillner

  When I finished college, in 1990, there weren’t any major or minor league teams knocking down my door, so to speak. My BFA in creative writing was as useful, professionally speaking, as a degree in pointing at clouds and saying what they resembled. I had no skills, no connections, not even much ambition beyond a hazy collection of vague hallucinations about a future involving writing, some shattering moment of spiritual enlightenment, rooms full of people cheering for me, and fucking.

  I gave away my records and most of my books and threw away anything else I couldn’t carry on my back. Luckily, my baseball cards had been transferred a few years earlier to the storage facility. I like to think if I had them with me I would have held on to them as I prepared to blindly flee from the beginning of Life, but I was in
something of a panic of self-abnegation. Maybe I would have chucked them in a Dumpster. But maybe then I would have seen Dan Spillner smiling back at me through the Dumpster stench. Maybe, moved by some combination of his vaguely familiar name and bland mustache and friendly smile and neck acne, I would have climbed in after Dan Spillner and his cohorts and begun this rescue mission years earlier than I finally did.

  Instead, I took a trip to Europe, where I spent my little wad of savings as sparingly as possible. After a couple months I was broke, the two notebooks I’d filled still lacking any sort of lasting story. Besides a few stray conversations, my only human contact had been one drunken youth hostel breast grope in Scotland, near the end. I can’t even prove the trip happened, as there’s no visual record of it. I hadn’t brought a camera. I’d visited many places where cameras were always flashing, and after several weeks of solitary travel I began to wonder if my true self resided, if anywhere at all, solely in partial glimpses of myself in other people’s photographs. I was the blurry elbow of the stranger passing through.

  By the time Dan Spillner smiled for the camera in his 1979 card, he had managed to stick around long enough for the evidence of his minor league struggles to have disappeared. This was common. At a certain point, if you were able to hang on for a while in the majors, your minor league records, no longer needed to fill space, disappeared from the back of your card. Gone was any evidence of anonymity and strife, of any kind of a past that may have seemed to be leading nowhere. And who knew what the future held? As yet, for Dan Spillner, there had been no defining moment, no gleaming triumphant connection, no indestructible story. But there were still some years to come, and maybe they would engrave the name Dan Spillner in the books.

  The day after I returned from Europe, I got a temporary holiday-help job as a UPS driver assistant. I started chipping in on the rent with my brother for my mom’s railroad apartment on Second Avenue and Ninth Street in Manhattan, which he’d been living in alone since Mom had gone to France to work on her PhD. When the holidays ended I switched to loading trucks at the UPS warehouse on Tenth Avenue and Forty-second Street. My shift started in the middle of the night. My job was to grab packages coming down a long, groaning conveyer belt and sort them into one of four trucks parked behind me. Four others also worked the conveyer belt, each with four trucks to load. Five loaders facing us worked a second conveyer belt. A cheap boombox played “Everybody Dance Now” over and over. The loader to my right shadowboxed during the occasional lulls in packages coming down the line. I was the only white guy besides the harried supervisor, who rushed around in a short-sleeve button-down shirt and tie. The only thing we ever had that remotely resembled a conversation was when he noticed the Red Sox cap I’d worn to work.

  “Rico Petrocelli,” he barked, hurrying past. Then, over his shoulder, his voice mostly blotted by the conveyor belts, he seemed to say the name Carl Yastrzemski.

  As it turned out, the most notable moment in Dan Spillner’s long career as a reliever on perennial also-rans came in 1983. I’d watched it in the TV room of my boarding-school dorm. He’d been the blurry elbow of the stranger passing through, the journeyman with the bland mustache, the last man to ever face Carl Yastrzemski.

  It was tiring, monotonous work. The boxes turned my hands black and all my clothes gray. During the nightly ten-minute break, I sat in one of the trucks and read Dante, hell then purgatory then paradise as the months went by. At quitting time I walked home down the west side and cut across Twenty-ninth Street past towering early morning prostitutes, spent condoms strewn all over the sidewalk like kelp left behind by the receding tide. Near home I yanked a newspaper out of the trash and read it back at the apartment while eating generic three-for-a-dollar mac and cheese and drinking cans of beer, the blinds shut against the morning light.

  One day near the end of my walk home I stopped at a light and looked across Third Avenue and saw my brother standing there, staring back at me. He was on his way to his office job. A heavy duffel bag weighed him down. I had my newspaper from the garbage. We both started laughing. One minute you’re a kid and the next you’re chained all night long to a conveyor belt. And your brother, your hero, is lugging a duffel bag full of undone work back to an office where his biggest thrill in many months has been finding and correcting a misspelling of the proper noun Yastrzemski.

  Topps 1978 #36: Eddie Murray

  My brother worked steadily. He took after our father in that way. Every morning up and off to the grind, day after day, week after week. I shied away from joining him. I didn’t think I was competent enough to work a job that required skills beyond anonymous, temporary lifting and carrying. Also, after all my Kerouac worship and my childhood surrounded by adults (besides my father) doggedly trying to exist outside steady jobs, I feared that steadiness would lead me to a life without value. I’d be like a card in a new pack that you barely notice as you flip through searching for some kind of promise.

  Eddie Murray’s 1978 card had promise, evidenced by the gleaming ALL-STAR ROOKIE trophy in the bottom right corner. This trophy showed up on a few cards each year and then, in the coming seasons, depending on how the recipient of the trophy had fared, it would either stand as a rich silver harbinger of the good things that had come to pass or as a glum tin comment on the trophy winner’s failure to deliver on their potential. When you’re in your early twenties, life carries the burdensome imprint of that trophy. Will it come to mock you? Will you squander the promise of beginning?

  I quit the truck loader job and fled back to Vermont for a few weeks, staying at Tom’s condo, where I spent an inordinate amount of time putting golf balls across the wall-to-wall carpeting at table legs. In the evenings Tom came home from his steady job as a dealer rep for a company that sold tankless water heaters and barbecued on his deck as the two of us drank and looked at the man-made waterfall twenty feet away. He was glad to have me there.

  “How’s Jenny?” he sometimes asked, meaning my mom.

  When I wasn’t staging table-leg golf tournaments, I found time to write a young adult sports novel that, I later would come to understand, drew far too heavily on my childhood love of The White Shadow. As soon as I finished the thing, I returned to my brother, who had moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, making way for my mom, who had come back from France. On my first day there, I took a long walk from the apartment to the Brooklyn Heights promenade and stared across the East River at the Manhattan skyline, imagining that I would soon enough bring the city to its knees with my undying work about teenaged boys shooting baskets. I never did sell the book, but as I waited for it to sell I got what I figured would be a temporary job at a liquor store where my brother had worked while attending NYU.

  Eddie Murray won the Rookie of the Year award in 1977, but it should have gone to Mitchell Page, who nearly led the league in stolen bases while also easily besting Murray in the two most telling of the basic offensive production categories, on-base percentage (.407 to Murray’s .336) and slugging percentage (.521 to Murray’s .470). Which of the two young sluggers would rapidly decline with each succeeding year, banished from regular playing time by 1981, and which player would eventually join Hank Aaron and Willie Mays as only the third man to ever amass more than 3,000 hits and 500 home runs? When the 1978 cards came out, you couldn’t know the answer to that question. By the early 1990s, of course, as I took my first steps as an adult, Mitchell Page was long gone while steady Eddie Murray was still driving in his 90 to 100 runs a year, a perpetual standout always just shy of superstardom, seemingly immune to the ups and downs that threatened and confused and defined the lives of everyone this side of the Hall of Fame.

  My mom worked a temporary job in the print department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Going back to graduate school had been even harder than she’d imagined, but she had stuck with it, steady as a Hall of Famer, despite the mountains of reading and endless memorizing of facts and writing of papers and contending with ambitious, moneyed fellow students, most of
them young enough to have been her children.

  Her biggest ally along the way had been the same guy she’d separated from two decades before. She and Dad had never shown any antipathy for one another that I had seen and, beyond staying friends, had in fact, for reasons I never quite understood, never even bothered to get a divorce. When Mom moved to New York for graduate school they began to see more of one another, and Dad was so encouraging about her studies that when she finally completed her dissertation on Honoré Daumier she dedicated it to him.

  She was still working to complete that dissertation while she was employed at the Met, but after many years she was in the home stretch with her studies and working, albeit temporarily, at one of the greatest museums in the world. She was a worrier, though, and worried that she’d still somehow be unable to finish her dissertation and that she’d be unable to find work after her temporary job ended. She worried about Dad. She worried about Ian. She worried about me.

  “How’s Tom?” she sometimes asked.

  Everything seemed to have within it at least a hint of aftermath, and sometimes much more than a hint. My liquor store job was no exception. The store had once been successful, but since two large warehouse-style liquor stores had opened nearby business had waned. Sometimes people stuck their head in the door just to tell us that we were selling something for considerably more than one or the other of the warehouses. Sometimes, just for something to do, we took empty individual-sized boxes of Absolut and used them to cover up large gaps in our shelves. This practice of covering up the empty shelves increased as the years went by until eventually most of the store was empty boxes.