Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  Sometimes my brother didn’t show up at the International.

  “Where’s Ian?” I was asked.

  I never really knew. I tried throughout my twenties to make time stand still, the two of us side by side at home and at baseball games and on barstools. I tried not to feel anything if I could help it, but I felt the ache in my chest whenever he failed to show up. I rarely found out where he’d been or what he’d been doing on those nights, but one night, as he later told it, he was wandering around the city, getting angrier and angrier. Rich pricks everywhere. Hipsters, yuppies, predatory phonies. The whole city one big exclusionary enterprise, roped off by velvet to keep the likes of him out. He went into a Korean grocer and bought a persimmon, about the size and weight of a baseball. He continued his walk, hefting the fruit, continuing to stoke his rage, and when he came to a velvet-roped club not far from our dank, smoke-glutted lung, the International, he shouldered through the front door, yelled, “This is hell!” and hurled the persimmon with all his might and all his J. R. Richard inspired technique.

  We got into a drunken fracas at the International once. I don’t remember how it started, if I ever knew, just that the narrow bar was unusually crowded that night and Ian took umbrage at what he perceived to be the arrogant attitude of some random skinny cool guy and his friends, which unlike our own lonely gathering of mutterers included some girls. What I discovered is that while I generally go to great lengths to avoid confrontations, I won’t hesitate to jump into the middle of things to defend my brother. It turned out to be nothing more than a shoving match centering around Ian attempting to strangle his smirking adversary, but I think it still deserves to be noted because it was the only time in my life that I can remember jumping into action without first thinking about it. Soon the shoving cooled to a shouting match, which ended for me when a pretty woman in the other group referred with scorn to the theme-restaurant sweatshirt I was wearing.

  “Calm down, Hooters,” she said.

  The great majority of the time, however, nothing really happened. My brother and I and our friends generally loitered until last call at 4 a.m., the favorite part of the night occurring near that time, after we’d all released the burden of hoping that something would happen to change our lives. Some song on the jukebox would hit like Novocaine and it no longer mattered that life was sliding past like scenery in a cheap cartoon. In fact, it felt pretty fucking good. My brother once put words to the feeling: “Numberless nights at the International Bar began their stretch run thusly: It’s 3:52 a.m., I’ve got a headful of static from drinking cheap swill, and Peggy Lee starts teetering through ‘Is That All There Is?’ on the ol’ Wurlitzer. And through all those painful years, I was comforted each time; I’d feel a crooked, fallen smile take shape: ‘Yessir, that’s all what she wrote.’ Various harpies would leave me be and I’d relax into appreciation of what was. McKenna gesticulating wildly, maybe. Or ‘That Guy.’ Or just Rose behind the bar, humane and beautiful and flatly real. Who needs the transcendent greener grass when opening to What Is is so rewarding? (Of course, I’d forget that five seconds later, or at least by the next morning, and shoulder the misery again.)”

  My brother decided he was going to learn how to play the cello. He liked the melancholy sound of the instrument, so he rented one from a music store and signed up for lessons with a recent Juilliard grad, a young, stern Asian woman who was openly incredulous about his intentions. He wanted to use the cello to wrest some beauty from his life, but he rarely got around to taking the thing out of its case. Soon another entry was added into the endlessly rich lexicon of euphemisms for masturbation (e.g., Question: “Where’s your brother?” Answer: “He’s ‘practicing the cello.’”). Nonetheless, he lugged his albatross to and from work whenever he had a lesson, shoehorning himself and the obese case into the jammed F train at rush hour all the way from our neighborhood in Brooklyn to his job editing travel books on the Upper West Side. This went on for a couple months. One Sunday just before he finally admitted defeat, he roused himself from an “Is That All There Is?” hangover to practice his assigned homework, another lesson and its accompanying scolding from the Asian woman looming. The apartment looked, as usual, as if it had been ransacked. It may have been around the time when we had a rotting jack-o’-lantern with carved-out drunken Xs for eyes collapsing into itself next to a bottle of Jim Beam on our “dining room” table. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, wearing only his boxer shorts and a wife beater dotted with Ragu stains, my brother performed his first and last opus, a halting, truncated, off-key rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  My brother started seeing a woman, and almost immediately it became serious. Had I any sense of what was going on inside me, I would have understood that this development frightened me. I didn’t want to be left out or left behind. A few weeks into the relationship, his girlfriend, Kelsey, made a sweet and innocuous suggestion that he get a kitten.

  This has gone too far, I thought, as if he’d told me she’d convinced him to sell all his possessions and join the Hare Krishnas.

  “Don’t you think maybe she’s having too big an influence on you already?” I said. “I mean, don’t you think things are moving too fast?”

  I got angry when I learned that he immediately passed on to Kelsey my reservations. He was on another team now. I swallowed my hurt and anger and insecurity and let it all fester, all the while continuing to cling to my brother. I leaned on him emotionally and financially (in all the years we shared an apartment he always paid more of the rent) while groping for a way to stand on my own before I got left behind.

  In those years, I often fantasized about lucking into the creation of the perfect opening sentence of a novel. I’d be like J. R. Richard when the awesome power that had always been lurking inside him finally bloomed. I imagined the blazing mythic fastball of a sentence would have the power to crack a hole in the dam that was holding everything back. An entire book-length fictional world would then gush from the widening hole. By the time the 1990s were half over I had filled up a cello-high stack of notebooks with jagged scribbling, thousands of pages blackened and blued with self-lacerating complaints that the magical dam-breaking First Sentence had yet to come and deliver me from my life. On particularly frustrating days I Hulked it up a little, flying into nearsighted ectomorphic rages that metamorphosed me from a timid high-strung liquor store clerk into a rampaging beast with the gamma-ray-infused strength to rip Mead Wireless college-ruled notebooks into tiny terrified shreds.

  Besides waiting in vain for genius to strike, I also daydreamed, as did my brother and at least one of my friends, of escaping from the city. My brother’s vision included only the first step of his getaway: Driving without the slightest warning to anyone through the Holland Tunnel, never to return. A friend’s more detailed vision involved reversing the path taken by Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy: Instead of leaving a small, scorpion-infested Texas border town to come to New York City, my friend, a lifelong New Yorker, dreamed of leaving New York City for a small, scorpion-infested Texas border town, where he’d wash dishes in a diner, shack up with a divorced, embittered, chain-smoking waitress, and catch up on his reading. My own version of flight involved taking a map of the U.S., plunking my finger down on it randomly, and then taking a bus to that spot to get a job somewhere “sweeping up,” as the wistfully forlorn Bill Bixby managed to do at the beginning of every episode of The Incredible Hulk.

  I rarely left the city. There was no such thing as vacation time at the liquor store, but I occasionally took a few unpaid days off. In earlier years I’d hoped for adventures like those in On the Road, but things weren’t working out that way. A few years into my long stint selling liquor, and not long after my brother turned in his rented cello, I told my boss, Morty, that I needed a week to go out west. I met up with my fellow Kerouac-loving former roommate from boarding school, Bill, in Santa Barbara, and the two of us drove to Utah with a pair of mountain bikes on the roof of Bill’s car.

  We spent a c
ouple days camping and hiking in Zion National Park and then set out across the state, heading for the mountain-biking mecca of Moab. I had never actually mountain biked before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. After driving for hours across a desert, and with several more car-bound hours still ahead of us, we stopped at a rest area that turned out to be nothing more than a tin outhouse perched at the edge of a long, rocky ridge. There was not so much as a telephone there. After I took a leak, I came out of the outhouse and saw that Bill was unhitching his bike from the rack.

  “Let’s take a break from all the driving,” Bill said.

  “Sounds good to me,” I said. I didn’t yet know how to drive a car at that time and so Bill had been doing the whole job himself while I performed such vital tasks as unscrewing the cap on the water bottle and manning the volume on the tape player. For the past couple hours we’d fallen into a silence that in retrospect seems a little haunted to me, the unending barren wilderness outside the windows taking away our words. I still had a song stuck in my head from the tape that had been playing when we’d pulled in, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard singing Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho and Lefty.”

  Bill set out first on his bike and I followed behind as soon as I got his sister’s bike off the roof. Neither of us bothered to put on our helmets. The ridge was about fifteen feet wide, maybe narrower in parts. It appeared to be relatively flat. It wasn’t.

  By the time I began hurtling down the bumpy, deceptively steep incline, Bill had wrenched his own bike to a halt and was running toward me and shouting at me to try to do the same. I didn’t see him, and anyway it was too late. The handlebars had turned into a jackhammer. I was going too fast to think. Ten seconds into my mountain-biking career I flew off a cliff.

  You pray for something to come and change you. It will. In 1980, in the midst of his best season yet, J. R. Richard began noticing stiffness in his back, shoulder, and arm. He mentioned it to team trainers, and in June he began begging out of games early. Nobody could find anything wrong, but nobody was really looking very hard.

  J. R. Richard’s second-to-last start in the major leagues was in the 1980 All-Star Game. He deserved to start: He was by then the best pitcher in baseball. He threw two scoreless innings, striking out Carlton Fisk, Reggie Jackson, and Steve Stone. His last start was six days later: July 14, 1980. He sailed through the first three innings, giving up no runs and just one hit while striking out four, and in the bottom of the third, in his final major league at bat, he drilled a double off Phil Niekro. But with one out in the top of the fourth inning he walked off the mound and into the clubhouse, complaining of dizziness.

  A few days later, Richard gave it another try, but after playing catch with a teammate, he rested for a few minutes, then returned to the field to throw some more and collapsed with a near-fatal stroke. Emergency surgery saved his life. He tried a comeback. It didn’t go well. Not yet, he must have been thinking, even as minor leaguers were pounding his offerings all over the yard. It can’t be over yet.

  I hadn’t found love yet. I hadn’t written anything good yet. I hadn’t done anything to make Mom and Tom and Dad proud of me yet. I hadn’t stood with my brother at a Red Sox victory parade yet.

  With the rocky world about to vanish from beneath me, there was no room in my mind for a thought outside the tiny core of blank panic, a wordless distillation of all my unreached wishes.

  Not yet.

  My friend Bill estimates that I dropped twenty-five or thirty feet before hitting the steep embankment, then bounced and tumbled another hundred feet or so. When I stopped somersaulting I was in a forward-swaying seated position, a thin ribbon of blood pulsing in what seemed to be slow motion from my head out onto the scree, like how guys bled from mortal bullet wounds in Sam Peckinpah movies.

  No clouds in the sky. Some dry desert brush here and there. Bill seemed to arrive at my side almost instantly, more scared than anyone I’ve ever seen.

  “Holy shit, Josh! Holy fucking shit!”

  A couple had pulled into the rest area just before I’d flown over the cliff, and the woman drove off to find a telephone so she could call an ambulance while the man made his way down. I made small-talk with the man who’d come to my aid as he and Bill each took one of my arms and half-lifted, half-dragged me toward the highway. He was an air traffic controller. He and his wife were on their way to Colorado, where he was starting a new job.

  “Colorado’s beautiful,” I said.

  Bill and the air traffic controller set me on the ground by a shallow roadside ditch. As we waited for the ambulance I started to go into shock. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that I was going into shock. All I knew was that I was beginning to feel very cold on a warm sunny day, and my vision was going white and grainy, like a television tuned to a station losing its signal. I thought I might be dying.

  After his failed comeback, J. R. Richard’s sizable baseball earnings gradually dwindled closer and closer to zero, eroded by two divorce settlements and some bad business decisions, including an oil-well scam that cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars. Looking for a job, he approached the team whose cap he would have worn on a plaque in Cooperstown. They said they’d get back to him. The days went by. The weeks. The years.

  The paramedics strapped me to a gurney, carried me into the ambulance, and hooked me up to IVs. According to Bill, who tailed us the whole way, we went one hundred miles an hour for the forty miles to the closest hospital. Once there, I felt okay with Bill by my side as a kind nurse filled me with painkillers, removed rocks embedded in my knees, knuckles, and head, and then sewed up the larger gashes. But that quiet fear I’d felt when descending into shock returned when an orderly wheeled me away from Bill for head x-rays.

  I lay on the stretcher alone in a shadowy metallic room. My thoughts wandered. Maybe there was internal bleeding. Maybe a massive secret blood clot had formed and was just waiting for the right moment to fatally clog some vital artery. It happened all the time. One minute you’re tossing the ball around with a teammate and the next minute everything fades.

  Finally two x-ray technicians came in. I wanted them to talk to me, to talk me through it, but they were busy bitching.

  “He thinks his crap don’t stink,” one of them said.

  “I pulled enough overtime the last month,” the other said, seeming to talk past him. “I got what’s known as a life.”

  “And that big smile on his face all day?” the first one said. “Lord.”

  They never acknowledged me, even when they were inches away, repositioning the stretcher. It was a chilling little preview. The world will move along just fine after you’re gone. As they x-rayed me, a shred of “Pancho and Lefty” was still echoing around in what I considered at that moment to be my possibly hemorrhaging brain, the haunting part near the end of the song where a ghostly chorus joins in to help tell the doom-limned tale.

  All the federales say, they could have had him any day.

  Any day. That day. Broken neck, shattered skull, subject of a phone call to the next of kin. As it turned out, every inch of my body hurt and I was stitched up like Frankenstein and I could barely move, but I hadn’t broken a single bone, and the x-rays found nothing. I was free to limp out of the hospital, leaning on Bill. Everything glowed. We got a motel room. I called my mother in her apartment, my father in his apartment, Tom in his condo, my brother at the number we shared. I wanted to tell them I loved them. I wanted to gather them and tell them they were everything to me. I tried to write postcards to say it all but it hurt too much to hold a pen.

  We headed back toward California, but after several hours of driving we ran out of daylight on the outskirts of Las Vegas. We got a room at a Motel 6 near the strip and decided despite my condition that it would be ludicrous to pass through that city and not gamble a little. I loaded up on codeine and we made our way to Circus Circus.

  Inside the casino, I lowered my bandaged body down in front of a slot machine. Bill found a spot farther down the
row. Trapeze artists and tightrope walkers occupied the spaces high above all the flashing and chiming and the low-lit humans solemnly trying to be lucky. Once in a while you see how singular life is, how virtually impossible, how blessed and inane. “And yet we were always being found innocent for ridiculous reasons,” writes Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son. It was a spring night in 1995 in Vegas. I looked as if I’d fallen into a Dumpster-sized blender. I fed the machine and pulled the lever. J. R. Richard was in Houston, broke and homeless. After a few pulls, bells started ringing and coins began spilling onto my lap.

  1975 Topps #363: Carmen Fanzone

  My mother got a temporary job at a college art museum back in Vermont, within a fairly short drive of Tom’s condo. They had a lot of shared history, a lot of good memories. They decided to give it another try.

  A year or so into this second try, in the summer of 1995, my mother’s temporary job at the college art museum ended, and she spent most of the summer away from Tom, back down in New York, sleeping on the “guest mat” in my dad’s apartment and finishing her PhD thesis. She had paid the rent on her vacated apartment in the Vermont college town throughout the summer, however, so I invited myself to stay there for several weeks, thinking of it as a “writer’s retreat” and, more generally, as something to snap me awake from an adult life that to that point, my twenty-seventh year, hadn’t amounted to much. I had no specific idea about what I would do with the time, but I hoped—blindly, desperately—that when I got back to Vermont, back to the green mountains that had mothered all the many bright colors of my childhood, a novel of great genius would begin flooding out of me.