Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  “Wow, you guys really have a lot of Absolut,” a customer would sometimes observe.

  When I wasn’t filling empty spaces, I was filling empty time. Sometimes I’d read the baseball encyclopedia we kept in the back. Sometimes I’d glare out the window, sorting passing women into imaginary piles, fuckable and unfuckable. Sometimes I watched baseball games on the television behind the counter, both New York teams perpetually playing out the string, Charlie O’Brien grounding out to second, Steve Balboni staring into space, Eddie Murray padding his prodigious career RBI numbers with a sacrifice fly to plate Bill Pecota late in a 7-3 loss.

  I worked most shifts with a married adjunct philosophy professor named Dave. On Fridays, Dave took a twenty from the register and we bought Italian food from a restaurant around the corner and ate it in the back with a bottle of wine. Dave did most of the talking, and he also took care of the refilling of our chipped coffee cups. Once the bottle passed its halfway point, the conversation turned from sports to memory lane—to Dave’s memories, that is, or to be even more specific, to the difference between Dave’s girl-glutted past and my gnawingly lonely present. Dave spun great expansive tales of romantic adventure and seduction that always seemed to begin with him leaving the liquor store with a bottle of wine in his satchel and always seemed to end with him smoking a joint with some beautiful, sensuous she-beatnik on a rooftop below the gentle caress of the 3 a.m. night. I loved the stories, loved how he told them, loved feeling a little drunk at work on the free wine, loved the way the whole ritual seemed to beckon for a wider world than the one I was experiencing in most of my waking hours. Later, before we locked up the gates for the night, I dutifully tried to follow Dave’s lead, jamming a bottle of wine into my backpack next to the Dostoevsky and the Mead Wireless notebook filled with my feverish screeds. But my Friday nights, instead of ending on a rooftop with a girl, always ended while waiting with my brother in a stink cloud of bum urine for the F train to Brooklyn after last call.

  Ian and I went to games sometimes. Most of the time, baseball in the early 1990s seemed to me like the Merle Haggard song: “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad).” We spread ourselves across several seats in a half-empty stadium in the Bronx or in Queens and watched with detached bemusement as a fly ball conked Deion Sanders in the head or Vince Coleman pulled a hamstring or Scott Kamieniecki served up a few gopher balls or John Franco walked in the go-ahead run.

  Sometimes we still went to a game with more at stake than simply wanting to pleasantly kill an afternoon. My brother wore a Red Sox cap and I wore, more often than not, the painter’s cap with YAZ on the front that Ian had bought outside Fenway a few years earlier. One Memorial Day, thusly clad, we ventured to Yankee Stadium and watched from high above the left-field foul line as Red Sox pitcher Danny Darwin gradually surrendered most of a big early cushion, the stadium crowd getting louder and louder, nearing its transformation into the Beast. Finally Jeff Reardon was summoned from the bullpen in the bottom of the ninth, and Mel Hall ripped Reardon’s meaty offering high and deep. The shrinking white pill disappeared into the right-field stands like a catalytic tablet into a witch’s cauldron. The Beast erupted. Its closest tendril, a cackling blonde woman, pummeled the two of us, Ian on the shoulder and me on my Yaz-capped head, amid the thunderous noise as Mel Hall strutted from base to base.

  After Hall finally touched home plate, it took so long for my brother and me to get to the subway that I’m not entirely sure I’m not still there, insane, dreaming all subsequent events. We took a wrong turn upon exiting the stadium and had to circle the whole giant palace of horrors through an endless circling thicket of Yankees fans, the subway nowhere in sight. Ashen-faced, our Red Sox caps stuffed in our pockets, my brother and I said nothing, just trudged. I remember seeing one young sunburned and well-lubricated Red Sox fan flailing against the Beast.

  “Fuck Bucky Dent!” he kept shouting as he stumbled through the heckling throng. Veins stood out in his forehead and his voice cracked. “Bucky Dent sucks!”

  You poor crazy bastard, I remember thinking, not without some admiration. It was like watching someone try to start a fistfight with an oncoming train.

  My dad’s apartment was only a couple blocks from the store. He had retired and sometimes stopped by on his way to or from killing a few hours at the NYU library.

  “Here are some vitamins,” he said one day, shoving a container the approximate size of a watercooler across the counter to me.

  “Here’s a carbon monoxide protector,” he said another day. “It’s important that you and Ian have one of these in your apartment. You must read the instructions on how to use it correctly.”

  “OK,” I said, like he was telling me to brush my teeth.

  Sometimes I saw him on the weekends, too. It was a good part of those years, getting to know my father. Once we went out for dinner and after a bottle of wine I asked him about the day we had all moved away from him to go to Vermont.

  He stared down at the table for a long time, and I thought he wasn’t going to say anything.

  “That night,” he finally said. Then he shook his head and didn’t say any more.

  Eddie Murray bats right, according to the listings on the back of his rookie card. Eddie Murray bats left, according to the photo on the front. Eddie Murray stares at the viewer in this photo, many years away from becoming the career RBI leader among switch-hitters. Nothing has been settled. Nothing is known. The world is uncertain, riddled with mistakes. How do you proceed when you don’t want to proceed, when you want to stay a rookie forever?

  Most days I had nothing in particular to do until my shift started in the evening. Some days I’d write, some days try and fail, some days who the hell knows. Watch Charles in Charge, sleep, pace, beat off, worry, do a few push-ups, stare out the window at a sliver of sky. One of those days I spilled out of the building to go to work and a passerby peered at me and remarked, “Damn, look like you getting your ass kicked by life.”

  At the store, I had to learn to hide this ass-kicked-by-life face behind a more implacable mask. The door was open, and anyone could come in, and sometimes the people who came in were asking or begging or probing for a weakness to exploit or just plain looking to steal.

  “No,” I learned to say. But it only worked if you filled your whole body with the word.

  Behind the counter, we had a baseball bat hanging by the knob from two nails, Jeff Burroughs’s autograph engraved in the barrel. I took it off the nails and hefted it sometimes, whenever I felt the armor of the word “No” wearing thin. I no longer imagined, as I had when I was a kid hefting a bat, that I was smacking triples and doubles and home runs, but instead that I was cracking kneecaps and shattering ribs. The daydream’s backbeat: no, no, no.

  It’s one thing to be able to look back at the rookie card of a legend and appreciate the card’s faint aura of uncertainty. It’s another thing to be taking your first steps in adulthood without any sort of notion at all about where you’re going to end up. You begin to imagine your own possibilities as something you could hold in your hands, like a rookie card, so as to imagine tearing that card to pieces, as if by doing so you could rid yourself of the oppressive weight of possibly amounting to nothing instead of something.

  And even if there’s nothing to grab on to, nothing specific to tear into shreds, that won’t stop you from trying. In October 1992, for example, my brother and friends and I reacted to the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series by gouging Canada from the map of the world that hung on the wall in the back of our favorite bar, the International. It’s not that we hated Canada but that the Blue Jays winning the World Series had been unthinkable when we’d been kids, and if the unthinkable was now happening, it must mean that our childhoods were truly gone without a trace. But more than that it was just something to destroy, and something is better than nothing.

  By the following year, our disenchantment with the world had grown, and once again we transferred that disenchantment to baseball
. Baseball no longer held us like it once had, back when nobody knew if Mitchell Page or Eddie Murray would turn out to be the better player. We knew we were changing and that baseball was basically the same, but we couldn’t gouge at ourselves like we’d gouged at the map in the International, so we decided to Blame Baseball. And in 1993, my brother and I and two friends went to a game we dubbed—not without some awareness that we were full of shit (all four of us have attended many baseball games since then), but also not without some real vitriol—the Last Baseball Game Ever. We were all suffering through varying degrees of loneliness and either unemployed or lashed to repetitive menial jobs of one stripe or another. So why not at least pantomime the killing off of the last of the haunting, painful hopes of childhood? Why not declare that centerpiece of our younger years, baseball, forever null and void?

  We chose for the Last Baseball Game Ever the second-to-last Mets home game of that team’s disastrous 1993 season. The game turned out to be the longest and most uneventful game I’ve ever seen. Not even a single run was scored for sixteen innings, and while sixteen innings of scoreless ball might seem a likely home for one after another of pressure-packed clutch pitching performances, game-saving fielding gems, and fascinating managerial moves, it was in fact a game in which nothing whatsoever seemed to happen. Batters grounded softly to second and popped out to left field a lot, maybe. I’m not sure. But it went on and on.

  After the eighth inning, they closed the concession stands. Sobriety set in, coupled with gnawing hunger. The zeros kept growing across the digital scoreboard. I began to hope they would stretch on forever. This hope combined with our ever-increasing mobility throughout the stadium to make me feel as if a state of damp, cold, mediocre grace had descended upon us. At some point late within the regulation nine innings, we’d ventured down from our seats in the upper deck to tentatively test out the mostly empty sections in the loge boxes. Nobody said anything, the ushers apparently too deadened by the abject misery of the Mets’ season to even try for bribes anymore. And as the game edged into extra time we moved even closer, until by the twelfth or thirteenth inning we were mere rows from the home dugout on the third-base side.

  We were surrounded for the first time all night by other fans, and there was mixed into the hundred-loss malaise a feeling of giddy excitement—none of us belonged here, and yet, here we were! The people who usually sat in these seats were far, far away that night, at some event that mattered, and we finally had our chance to See What It Was Like.

  I realized at some point that the closest player to me as we sat in those seats was the Mets third baseman, well-traveled veteran Chico Walker, who in what seemed like another lifetime had been the young player dispatched to replace Carl Yastrzemski in left field on Yaz’s last day. Our proximity to the field and the relative quiet of the stadium introduced the rare opportunity to say something to a player on the field that he would hear. As I was trying to think of something Yaz-related to shout to Chico Walker—as if he could always be used as a cosmic conduit to Yaz—I noticed the identity of the one person in uniform even closer to me than Chico Walker. The Cardinals’ third-base coach shared the last name and physical description of a former player whom I like to believe, against the mounting evidence to the contrary, was long ago sliced into tiny bits in a wood-chipper accident. There he was, just standing there straight and tall, as if nothing had ever happened. I found myself half-standing out of my seat, the ache that had long ago settled in my chest flaring sharply up my throat and out into the air.

  “Bucky Dent, you ruined my life!” I yelled.

  The zeros kept spreading as if by mitosis across the scoreboard. We shifted over to an even sparser gathering of fans on the first-base side. It was at this point that the game really seemed headed toward infinity, and I stopped shivering in the damp fog as a calm came over me, as if I were about to drift into fatal hypothermal slumber.

  Unlike my brother and me, the two friends who had come along with us were full-blooded Mets fans, and so they couldn’t as easily embrace my vision of an everlasting game without a winner. Because of that, they eventually struck up a rendition of “Meet the Mets.”

  At first, just their two voices were singing the song, but then a third shaky voice that seemed to be coming from the thin, damp fog itself joined in. For a brief moment, there seemed to be no one connected to that other voice, but then this slight, gray-pallored guy in a dirty Atlanta Braves cap appeared on the fringes of our ragged congregation.

  He spent the remaining moments of the game in our company, a guy about our age with lank dirty hair down almost to his shoulders and an aura about him of either being someone who lived in his parents’ basement or, perhaps more likely, who had recently been evicted from his parents’ basement, leaving with a broken-zippered duffel bag containing a change of clothing and the tattered edition of the baseball encyclopedia from his childhood.

  In the weeks and months and years to follow, he appeared periodically on the fringes of our gatherings as if from nowhere. He always remembered us from the Last Baseball Game Ever and acted briefly like he was a familiar part of our group before wandering off. He materialized without exception on nights when the element of directionlessness in our lives seemed even more pervasive than usual. The last time I saw him was years ago, but I’m still not sure I won’t see him again. He briefly wandered into a bar on Second Avenue near Houston Street dressed in a replica of Michael Jordan’s short-lived number 45 Bulls jersey and matching Bulls shorts, vaguely acknowledged us, and then wandered back out into a night that was way too cold to be dressed in a remaindered basketball uniform.

  On the night of the Last Baseball Game Ever, he faded back into the ether from whence he came moments after the game finally ended in the bottom of the seventeenth inning, as if he could exist only while things were undecided, nothing but zeros on the board. Eddie Murray, the only player present who had appeared on one of my childhood baseball cards, started the rally with a leadoff single. After a sacrifice bunt and a Chico Walker popup, Murray loped around third and toward home on a Jeff Kent shot into the gap. But before he became the winning run, the only run, the Last Run of All Time, Eddie Murray tiptoed to a stop a step away from scoring. The on-deck hitter, Joe Orsulak, had to shove him across the plate.

  Topps 1977 #260: J. R. Richard

  I spent a lot of my twenties in the International. More often than not, my brother was there. We had a lot of good times there, and we had a lot of times where it seemed like we were waiting for something to happen. That door will swing open and my life will begin. I wanted it, dreaded it, feared it. The days went by, the weeks, the years. I worried that my brother and I were destined to live together forever, like Miss Emily and Miss Mamie, the desiccated spinster sisters from The Waltons. Since I’d left college, we’d already shared three apartments: the narrow railroad in Manhattan, a dump in Brooklyn that constantly trembled from the vibrations of the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and a railroad in Brooklyn where my brother slept in the living room and I crammed myself into a loft bed in a converted closet a few feet away, as close to my brother’s bed as I’d been as a kid. When we finally got home from last call at the International, dawn breaking, I’d fall unconscious below dim glow-in-the-dark stars left over from when previous tenants used the loft bed for a young child.

  J. R. Richard spent his early to mid-twenties trying to find the strike zone, and then suddenly it was like whatever he had been looking for found him, seized him, changed him. He began taking long, loping strides toward Cooperstown.

  He was 6’8”, threw blazingly hard, wore the dazzling colors of the distant, exciting, up and coming Astros, had a cool, mysterious name, and once he became a star he always seemed to be featured by Topps in one of their rare action shots, the photos making him seem even bigger and more electrifying than the increasingly impressive numbers on the back of his card suggested.

  Back in the heyday of J. R. Richard I sometimes passed entire afternoons wondering who cou
ld beat up whom in the Marvel superhero universe, and though I understood that the worlds of baseball and comics did not overlap, J. R. Richard (last name virtually identical to Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four) was an exception, and I thought of him as if he could be placed somewhere in the penultimate tier of the Marvel rankings, able to trade skyscraperrocking blows with the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Luke Cage: Power Man. And even the three top Marvel strongmen—the Thing, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk—though perhaps too powerful for J. R. Richard to hold off in a fistfight without the help of some lesser masked functionary such as Hawkeye or the Falcon, could not, if the situation were ever to arise, touch one of the lightning-bolt fastballs that sprang from J. R. Richard’s giant superpowered hand.

  My brother was even more mesmerized with J. R. Richard than I was and modeled his pitching motion on the one shown in this 1977 card: high bent-kneed leg kick, hands held tight to the chest, scowling eyes locked on the catcher’s target. He perfected the motion while hurling a tennis ball at the strike zone he’d duct-taped to our wooden garage door. The sound the ball made when hitting the door got louder as the years passed, my brother amid the seismic epicenter of his puberty seeming to get bigger by the day: 6’1”, 6’2”, 6’3”. By the time he had reached his full height of 6’4” and no longer played organized baseball and was openly longing to leave home for good, the scowling, bent-kneed windup and gunshot report of the garage door had become the primary elements in a ritual of imagined escape, each pitch a prayer for an impossible transformation from cornered teenager into the pure violent beauty of J. R. Richard throwing heat.