Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  It’s always lingering, that stick-figure star, waiting to attach itself to any name, any win, any moment of bliss, to twist itself into the skin of certainty and connect it to equivocating textual marginalia. It has most commonly happened after the fact, such as in the case when one of the most accomplished athletes ever, Lance Armstrong, was found to have been illegally doping his blood and had all seven of his Tour de France titles retroactively stripped, necessitating the affixing of asterisks to any encyclopedia’s mention of victories attached to his storybook name. But it can happen before the fact too, as in the case of the current holder of the record for career home runs, Barry Bonds. Because he was generally assumed to have used banned substances to enhance his already prodigious skills (and perhaps also because of the widespread perception that he was a surly asshole), Bonds, in the court of public opinion, had his name branded with an asterisk even before he dethroned Hank Aaron. This preemptive affixing of asterisks is becoming the norm, as if soon all transcendence will be suspect, all facts leaky, unsound, all pinnacles shadowed with doubt.

  Pushing against this blooming of asterisks is my compulsion to put words to the very first minutes of my son’s life. But I can’t find words except to say that in the very first minutes of his life I was seized with the belief that my love for him would burn all the shittiness of me clean away, leaving something pure. And it did—it does—but only for a moment. And then my failings return. It’s as if some part of me doesn’t want the life I’ve known to be wholly erased and replaced by something else altogether.

  I need an encyclopedia for all my failings, my memories and fantasies, my desires and repulsions, my appetites and revulsions, my incremental invisible diminishment. I need an encyclopedia to explain the moment when all my failings dissolved, leaving me defenseless. The baby in my arms jerked and reached and squalled. He was the only fact in the whole wide world. I was surprised by the life in him, the strength. I could barely hold him. We had a name picked out, but he was too new for it. In those first few minutes is what I will believe forever, despite myself. There were no words. There was nothing to which an asterisk could attach.

  B

  Benchwarmer

  We spent a couple of days in a recovery room. Abby had the bed, I had a chair, and the baby was in her arms or my arms or in a metal thing with wheels on it. Nobody slept much. There was a window, but it faced a brick wall, and we kept the blinds down most of the time anyway, so it was never really clear whether it was the middle of the night or noon or somewhere in between. At one point I wandered into the adjoining bathroom. The baby had fallen asleep in my arms. My plan was to hold him with one arm for a few seconds so I could take a leak, but I only got the one arm about an inch away from the baby before wrapping it back around him and pulling him tighter to my chest. I wasn’t ready for any fancy one-armed stuff.

  I stared down at the object of my two-armed hold. There were moments in those first couple of days when I believed I’d just marvel at him unblinkingly for the rest of my life, but there were other moments when it all seemed too much and I had to look away. In this particular instance I looked from the baby to the big mirror behind the sink. I’d avoided looking in that mirror to that point, as I’d wanted to steer clear of any additional visitations from the overwhelmed unshaven reliever at the center of the Red Sox’s 1986 World Series collapse. But it turned out that by this time, a day or so into my son’s life, these visions of Schiraldi were in remission. The mirror contained only its usual occupant.

  Caucasian, early forties, unruly receding hair, thick glasses, fairly tall. Not so tall as to suggest the high probability of a history as a college basketball player but tall enough nonetheless to have served as a backup to the backup forwards on the 1987–88 Johnson State College Badgers. Still generally as weakling-thin as during that season and all preceding losing seasons, but now with a minor yet irreducible thickness around the midsection. Gray-flecked Vandyke goatee grown in an attempt to cover the age-related disintegration of the jawline and to balance severe eyebrows and bulging eyes. In those bulging eyes: worry.

  Worry had been with me for a long time but now had sprung into full bloom, due to the other face visible in the reflection: pink, tiny, crinkled, so new that flecks of his mother’s blood still clung to the folds of his ears. The feeling of lightness in my arms was the source of the worry. Jack was his name. Jack. He weighed less than a shoebox of baseball cards. He weighed so little as to be almost weightless, filled with helium, the worry that a single instance of carelessness in what has been a careless, mistake-­riddled life would lead to this being slipping from my grasp, lifting up and out the window, and disappearing into the sky. How do you even hold something so fragile, light, loved?

  In the mirror, finally, was a reluctant adult, still clinging, even in his mid-forties, to an identity as a boy: I was wearing a T-shirt of the team I’d loved since childhood, the Boston Red Sox. I deliberately chose to pack the shirt in an overnight bag for the trip to the hospital. I wanted to have it on during the biggest moment of my life. The T-shirt celebrates a victorious season, 2004, the year I believed Calvin Schiraldi and everything was finally redeemed: World Champions!

  But the face above this T-shirt and above the sleeping baby was not of one redeemed or of a champion of any kind or even of one who vied for a championship and lost. It was the face of a benchwarmer, and not just of any benchwarmer but of the all-time single-season record holder for benchwarming. This distinction isn’t supported in the usual manner of sports records—by numerical data—but instead by the extent to which the record holder was able to extend himself into some ineffable qualitative remove from meaningful action. He was the last player off the bench on a pale, diminutive northern Vermont college team that started a melancholy six-foot-four Grateful Dead fan at center and lost unceasingly.

  This record-setting remove can be illustrated in terms of a Russian nesting doll of athletic inconsequentiality. Consider first the three divisions of descending levels of collegiate competition in the NCAA, soaring, balletic world-class athletes clashing in thronged arenas at the top of this ladder and earthbound chest-passing eighteenth-century French Lit majors toiling in half-empty rustic gymnasiums at the bottom; consider below that hierarchy altogether the NAIA, the indistinct off-brand national athletic association for college squads unequal to the mild, plodding rigors of life on the lowest rung of the NCAA’s three divisions; consider the shortest, weakest, whitest subcell in the NAIA, the Mayflower Conference, tucked away in the gentle, rolling mountains and pastures of northern New England; consider that in 1987–88, a few years before the conference ceased to exist altogether, disbanding, the worst team by far in the Mayflower Conference was the Johnson State College Badgers; consider, finally, the figure sitting at the very end of this team’s bench.

  For a moment, in the recovery room toilet area, this benchwarmer took possession of the mirror, glimmering into view in his entirety, the goatee gone, the thick glasses replaced by eye-reddening contact lenses, the World Champions T-shirt giving way to a sleeveless V-neck uniform top and shorts, white with green piping, and “JOHNSON” arcing in green block lettering above a partially obscured number.

  I was nineteen again, maybe twenty. I was on my feet as if my name had finally been called.

  Then it was over. It seemed briefly that the uniform number below the college’s name was obscured by a basketball, but that vision dissolved before it had fully formed, and I was once again holding my son. My glasses, my goatee, my World Champions T-shirt returned. The lines in my face returned. My expression was for the most part the same as it’d always been, but the presence of the baby had added something. It was the expression of a benchwarmer called into a game, the game he’d been avoiding and dreading all his life. There was something else too, contrasting and accentuating the apprehension. This capitulating marginal journeyman face, exhausted, dreadful, was also now inarguably alight.

  B
eautiful, terrible hope and joy. You may one day be handed these things like you’re being handed a ball. Like you’ve been called into a game.

  The tiny boy in my arms was beginning to stir. In a moment he’d be awake. What had I been called into? What was I doing here? I wasn’t ready, didn’t know the plays, didn’t have any moves. There was nothing between me and this beautiful boy.

  Bene, Bill

  “I fooled them for a while,” Bill Bene said.

  This was in the spring of 1988, just before the major league draft. Bene, a flame-throwing college pitching prospect at the center of a tornado of predraft hype, was admitting to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that his high school career, spent exclusively as an outfielder, had been iffy. He’d known the best he could ever do was bluff and hope.

  “I was never a very good hitter,” he said. “I guess I was meant to pitch.”

  I guess. Who knows what we are meant for? When I was a kid I used to fantasize about being discovered, delivered in an instant to what I was meant for. The fantasy started modestly, when my older brother was in little league. As I watched his games I imagined that a foul ball would bound my way, and I’d scoop it up and fire it back onto the field, wowing everyone with the strength and accuracy of my arm. As the years went on, the fantasy drifted ever farther from any reasonable version of reality, until eventually it involved a limousine pulling up at the edge of our driveway as I was throwing a tennis ball at the duct tape strike zone on the garage door. The backseat window would come down, revealing Carl Yastrzemski’s somber features creased into a smile.

  “Quite an arm, son,” he would say. He’d produce a major league contract, holding it out the window toward me. “It’s just what we need.”

  This is a deep American dream: to be discovered. To be told with certainty, beyond any guesswork, that at our core we are aglow, gifted, meant for great things.

  This is what happened to Bill Bene.

  See Bust.

  Blame

  The day we were allowed to leave the hospital with the baby I ran and got the car from the lot and pulled it to the front entrance, then I ran back up to the room and grabbed everything but the baby and my wife and lugged it down to the car, the weight of it and my own ability to do something I knew how to do—carry things—offering a brief, comforting respite of familiarity and competence. Then I ran up to the room again, empty-handed. I was sweating profusely, like a panicking reliever, the guy in the middle of a team’s unraveling. Schiraldi was one of these perspiration-glazed hurlers. They always seem lonely out there, and as if they were wishing they’d stayed on the bench, far from blame.

  “God, relax,” my wife said. Jack was in her arms.

  “I’m relaxed!” I screamed. Then, attempting nonchalance, I murmured, “I just don’t know, you know, about the whole situation with the car out there.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. Cars can sit outside for a second when they’re picking people up.”

  How does everyone know things like this?

  “I didn’t get much of a chance to get the air conditioner going,” I added. “It’ll be sweltering. Will he be okay? Do we have everything? Are they bringing you a wheelchair?”

  Abby had been ripped open pretty good. She had more stitches in her than I’d gotten when I’d fallen off a cliff on a mountain bike.

  “Let’s just go,” she said. But then the miniature senile nurse Dolly pushed a wheelchair into the room. Dolly wasn’t her real name but rather an Americanized shortening of the lengthy byzantine vowel cluster she’d been given at birth on a faraway tropical island centuries earlier.

  “Hokay evbody,” Dolly said. “Now we see.”

  She’d reappeared periodically throughout our stay in the recovery wing, usually deep into the night, her accented, choppy syntax scrambling her hospital-ordered directions into baffling nursery songs.

  “I’m not riding that thing down an elevator,” Abby said, indicating the wheelchair. My wife is generally fearless but is afraid of elevators, roughly the converse of my own relation to the world, in which I find elevators tolerable but everything else terrifying.

  “Time go now,” Dolly said. “Happy!”

  “I’m saying not in an elevator,” Abby said.

  The interaction continued for some time, Dolly seeming to insist on the wheelchair and elevator combination as the only way to get us to our car, my wife insisting otherwise.

  “Hokay little mama,” Dolly said finally. “We go just some way.”

  “I don’t know what’s happening here,” Abby said.

  “No elvate,” Dolly said.

  A somewhat ludicrous compromise seemed to have been reached.

  “I guess we’re just going to the stairs?” Abby wondered aloud as she rode down the hall in the wheelchair, pushed by Dolly.

  “No elvate,” Dolly mumbled, as if to herself.

  I walked alongside them with the baby. He stared with his blue eyes past me at the ceiling or who knows what. I supported his head, his tiny snappable neck. His swaddle had begun to unravel.

  “Jack,” I said to him. “Jack, Jack, Jack.”

  Jack, I don’t know how to fix your blanket. Jack, I don’t know what the protocol is with a car when picking up someone at the hospital. Jack, I don’t know how to do your car seat with all its tiny loops and clasps. Jack, my parking skills are at this point so riddled with crippling doubt that if we don’t get lucky enough to pull forward into a space in front of our building today you are going to grow up in the backseat of a car jerking back and forth enslaved by your father’s eternal failed attempt to parallel park. Jack, I am praying for miracles. Jack, if there is a problem, I will be to blame.

  “Hokay little family,” Dolly said. We had come to a stop by a thick fire door.

  Abby rose from the wheelchair. I pushed open the door with one hand while gripping Jack in his unraveling blanket with the other, and the three of us started toward the stairs. Everyone, everything seemed very fragile.

  “Can you please hold on to me?” I asked.

  Bonds, Barry

  See Asterisk.

  Boner

  I need definitions, illustrations, examples. I need to know at least a few things for certain. And what kind of certainty could possibly exist anymore? The All-Time Home Run King is no ­longer the All-Time Home Run King, but neither is anyone else. Cataloging winning is empty, pointless, and cataloging loss is impossible. Every season, in any given endeavor, produces one temporary champion and a multitude of losers, and this multitude expands with consideration of all the various endeavors, expands some more with consideration of all the seasons stretching far back into the past, and then expands yet again with consideration of all those who aspired in every season and in every endeavor to be a part of the action but who were too flawed to make the team, too flawed to even try. When imagining trying to gather all this, give shape to it, draw a sense of order from it, the mind boggles. But that’s not even the half of it. Imagine daydreams, fantasies. Imagine everyone who ever lived, all the hopes and prayers ever sent skyward, all the answering silences.

  All you can know is that your life will change. Fred Merkle was nineteen when it happened to him. He’d been a benchwarmer for the New York Giants that year, all through the 1908 season, a sidelined witness to a ferocious three-team pennant race involving the Giants, the Chicago Cubs, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Then, one day in late September, when the Cubs were visiting the Giants, Merkle made his only start of the year, subbing for Fred Tenney, who was sidelined with lumbago, a form of lower back pain. After going hitless in his first three plate appearances, the teenager came to bat in the bottom of the ninth inning with the game tied and two outs and the potential winning run on first.

  When I was that age, nineteen, I was serving as the most pronounced benchwarmer on the 1987–88 Johnson State College Badgers, as far from the action as
you could possibly be and still be considered an official uniformed athlete. I didn’t admit to myself that that was who I was, and yet in some subconscious way I not only accepted it but embraced it. I didn’t want to be part of the action. I didn’t want to be responsible. I didn’t want any pressure on my shoulders. Let it be up to someone else. This plea settled into my life like a seed into soil.

  By the time the baby arrived, decades later, the seed had grown into a trunk-like thickness at the center of my being, anchored by deep, gnarled roots. What a crater there would be if it were ever removed. I could feel the beginning of this wrenching excavation at the hospital, despite the near-constant presence of nurses, doctors, visitors. When we came home from the hospital there was no one but us.

  Or so it seemed at first. It’s a blur to me now, that beginning, as blurry as anything I’ve lived through. So anything I say about it is the opposite of the kind of reliable information encyclopedias are built on. I hadn’t slept much at the hospital, just an hour here or there while sitting in the chair in the corner. Eventually you start falling asleep on your feet for a second every so often. Something beyond normal reality slips into the room.

  “Oh, this lumbago is a dire botheration,” Fred Tenney groaned at one point. He was grimacing and limping in a pained hunch out of our living room and toward the hallway. He wore a dark, short-brimmed baseball cap and a spotless white uniform with an NY on the shoulder, but on his feet were my wife’s fluffy slippers.

  “What?” I said. The baby had materialized in my arms.

  “I said I have to go deal with my hoo ha,” my wife said, hobbling along in Fred Tenney’s place. “I’m fucking gushing blood into my sweatpants still. Okay?”