Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  I can’t keep demoralizing thoughts out of my head.

  I’ve lived a meandering life, awake only in stories, never forging any kind of direct, pragmatic connection to actual events, and my tendency for anxiety feeds into my literary dreaminess so that every possible setback seems not simply one problem to solve but rather an omen foreboding the inevitable unraveling of daily life into a tragedy, as if a clogged bathtub drain will lead, eventually, to me freezing to death on an ice chunk in Antarctica. More than once in my son’s first few weeks, whenever anything showed the slightest sign of devolving—a knob falling off a cabinet, the front door lock sticking, a car tire low on air—I found myself dwelling on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the horrifying masterwork in which the whole of human civilization as we know it is shown in smoldering irrevocable cinders, in a state of tragic fall, and a father and a son walk through it together, barely surviving.

  I can’t assemble rudimentary shelter, spearfish in a brook, fend off gangs of postapocalyptic marauders.

  I turn and have always turned to stories. With Jack’s birth I tried to channel this tendency into something productive, pragmatic—I attempted to read books about parenting. I only ever got a few pages into most everything before panicking but was able to focus a bit longer than that on a book claiming to offer a method for calming unhappy babies. The story in the book was that several methods must be mastered and executed perfectly or there will be a house full of suffering. I tried to bring the story of the book to life but kept getting the sense that I wasn’t quite doing it right.

  I can’t follow directions.

  My own son felt awkward in my hands. I kept reading and rereading the book, hoping that doing so would help me bridge the gap between the ideal story in its pages and the real fakery of my life. One morning, on my way to work, I tried to go over the book again on the bus but kept getting my attention coaxed away by two guys talking nearby, trading stories of things gone wrong to the point that litigation ensued.

  I can’t focus on anything.

  The story one of the men on the bus told involved a man with cancer in one eye who went in for surgery to get the eye removed, and the surgeon mistakenly removed the other eye. Later, at lunch, I thought about that story while reading an article my father sent to me that traced the roots of some riots in London to a sense of profound societal desperation, the riots a grab for power by the powerless. Eye cancer, shitty air conditioners, and the roots of riot. I didn’t get much work done after lunch, which eroded my already frayed sense of job security. I exited the building with the anxious sense that I was about to smack into something invisible. I’ll be stopped. This feeling followed me to the bus stop. When I boarded the bus I tried to cancel my unease along with the duration of the ride by falling asleep. The bus got more and more crowded, and then it seemed that we were headed somewhere where we wouldn’t be bothered, somewhere painless. The passenger at my side leaned so close I felt his unshaven cheek on my own.

  “Hey,” he murmured, and the bus began to speed, as if toward impact. I came to. I looked out the window. We hadn’t gotten very far, still short of the stop at the community college, which wasn’t even halfway. I stared at the white line on the shoulder of the road and thought about Schiraldi, Calvin Schiraldi, that look on his face as he stood on the mound in Game Six of the 1986 World Series with everything crumbling all around him. The moment too much. I thought about losing, about disintegration, about can’t. The origin in my body of that word.

  I can’t stop looking backward.

  It came to life inside me, that word, a few years before I’d ever heard of Schiraldi. I was on a junior high basketball team in a small town in the middle of Vermont, 1979 and 1980. We were so bad that, looking back on it, I’ve sometimes wondered, in the manner of a paranoid mental patient, whether the whole thing was some kind of social experiment, the world’s purest laboratory of losing. I don’t know the experiment’s hypothesis. I don’t know of any conclusions. I know we were edging out of childhood and we lost. Occasionally some philosophical reflection occurred.

  “The best is a knob job,” our point guard Eddie orated in the locker room one day. “Boys, knob jobs are what it’s all about.”

  I can’t recall whether we were reeling from or bracing for another beating. I remember Eddie propping his foot on a bench in the manner of a team captain—knee bent, forearm on thigh—as he kept repeating the term “knob job.”

  My bus ride home seemed to go on and on, as it always does if I can’t lose myself in a story. We rode past shopping centers and malls and Jiffy Lubes. Sometimes there were low dim homes at the fringe of the busy road, all of them looking like flawed repetitions. Some had American flags. They blinked in and out of sight in a homely, dragging rhythm. There’s a conjugated chant of affirmation at the heart of the myth of America—yes, I can; yes, you can; yes, we can. The triumph defining the American Dream can be realized, but it is based wholly on your unwavering belief.

  Eddie wore red, white, and blue sweatbands. He had feathered brown hair and was the oldest guy on the seventh grade team because he’d been left back a year. The rest of us sat on benches and stared up at Eddie. Our pale limbs jutted from our uniforms, fraying junior varsity hand-me-downs from various eras in the school’s history. Some shirts said “Randolph,” some said “Braintree-Randolph,” some said “Galloping Ghosts.”

  “Yeah, I’m telling you, knob jobs,” Eddie said. “Put it this way. If anyone ever asks about me, you tell them, ‘Eddie? Yeah, I know that guy. Fuckin’ lives for knob jobs.’

  “Look,” he concluded, pausing for effect, a pubescent Rockne, “you just got to get yourself a knob job.”

  He was gone the following year, along with some others, but we picked up Steve, who had been left back to repeat eighth grade. Steve played electric guitar and had feathered blond hair. I remember Steve propping his foot on a bench in the manner of a team captain—knee bent, forearm on thigh—as he talked about a girl who sat near me in social studies and dotted her i’s with hearts.

  “The best thing about her,” Steve orated, “is her cunt.”

  The bus pulled into the terminal, and I was discharged along with a few other end-of-the-liners. It was dark out, and I still had to ride a few miles on my bike to get home. My route went down Clark, a narrow avenue crammed with buses and speeding cars, drivers anxious to get home, out of the shittiness. I put on my helmet, the cheapest one they’d had at the sporting goods store. I turned on the little red blinking light below the seat. I prayed for the cars to not kill me. I prayed to pay attention. I started riding. My mind wandered backward.

  As a Galloping Ghost, I was baffled by knob jobs, cunts. I tried to focus on basketball, but this is hard when all you do is lose. The losses got more pronounced as time went on. A virus seemed to follow us all over central Vermont, afflicting our shots, our passes, our ability to look one another in the eye. Scoreboards loomed above the action as if victimized by partial stroke, one side tallying numbers in a rhythm like a pulse, the other side sickly, immobile. As the losses piled up, plaque began to accrue inside me around that core American word, can, changing it, distorting its shape, increasing its size, its weight, its stalactitic fragility, until finally a compound fracture occurred. Somewhere in that experiment, deep into the winter, deep into a loss, a rebound up for grabs, I felt this happen, a snap in my chest: can’t.

  A little over halfway through my ride through the darkness I turned left off of Clark and slipped onto quieter streets for a while. By then my heart rate had risen, so I glided through the dark awake, feeling the day leave me, feeling by its absence how much it had been smothering me, how I go through most of my waking hours just partially alive. Finally I rounded the last corner and got off my bike. The big picture window that birds kept slamming into was covered with a blind, but the lights glowed through. The glow of a newborn who can’t do anything, needs everything. I stopped walking my bike t
oward that glow and just stood there on the sidewalk in my cheap helmet, my heartbeat slowing to an old ache, the little red light below the bike seat pulsing. Anything, everything, anything, everything. Sometimes I can’t even move.

  Coleman, Derrick

  See Whoop-de-damn-do.

  D

  Dayton Triangles

  Throughout the first decade of the NFL, the 1920s, the Dayton Triangles endured despite sliding rapidly to the floodwater lowlands of the standings, endured despite drawing so few fans to home dates that they began playing all their games on the road, endured despite being surrounded by the constant vanishing of teams all around them in the league’s blurry larval beginnings, iffiness everywhere, the Evansville Crimson Giants, the Muncie Fliers, the Toledo Maroons, the Oorang Indians, the Louisville Colonels, the Duluth Eskimos, the Hammond Pros, the Detroit Heralds, the Detroit Tigers, the Detroit Panthers, the Detroit Wolverines, on and on and on the transformation of the living to the defunct, endured despite being worse than all the teams they outlasted, endured despite blooming into the worst outfit the league had seen and would see, among all the decades to come of armored bodies maiming one another no mismatch so brutally pure as the one enacted with shoddy minimal padding by the Dayton Triangles in their enduring passage, punished and winless for weeks, sometimes months, sometimes years.

  Finally the Triangles carried a long losing streak into the 1929 NFL season, having won no games in 1928 and just one game in 1927, continued losing without exception throughout 1929, and extended the losing streak into infinity when, at the end of the season, they were sold, moved, renamed. The resulting team was subsequently sold, moved, renamed, and the team after that was too, and so on. I’ve come upon claims that traces of the Triangles, many moves on, endure to this day in the Indianapolis Colts, but every time I try to follow the traces, my mind wanders and dissipates or the baby wakes and starts wailing and my mind constricts; either way the traces disappear. I have no reliable information to pass along on this matter.

  This is a terrible encyclopedia, a series of traces lost. Encyclopedias should provide the resolution of reliable explanations, but this one is not to be trusted. It’s rooted in the inexplicable.

  “Where did you come from, baby?” we asked Jack. We kept beaming down at him and asking him this. “Baby, where have you been?”

  His arrival intensified my pervasive sense of doubt, spotlighted my shortcomings, and made me wonder about the origin of doubt and shortcomings, but worse than all that, it also made me wonder about the origin of beauty. God damn it, the world is suffused with beauty! I’d always been aware of this beauty—sometimes it followed me down the street or murmured from the radio or leaked through the blinds—but I’d more or less been able to keep it at bay with Old Milwaukee tall boys and packages of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and television. But when Jack arrived beauty started crowding my throat, forcing me to somehow give voice to it, and the only songs I knew were benchwarmer songs. All I’d ever done is sing about sitting on the sidelines, witnessing loss. All I’d ever done is wander and digress, sifting through numbers and names, tripping on trivial detritus, gathering it up.

  I always figured all that wandering through lists and newspaper archives and almanacs and encyclopedias was just a way to kill time, but maybe I’d always been looking for something, somewhere in the batting averages and points-per-game averages and yards-per-carry averages, somewhere in all the transactions and recaps, somewhere in the endless unfolding of names and teams and facts. I wanted to unhitch time and linger, just a little, on all my negligible discoveries. I wanted the feeling that there was no end to this life, that the numbers and names just went on and on, one giving way to another and another until some kind of universal connection began to thrum. I wanted to linger on the only beauty I could possibly understand.

  All I can bring to fatherhood, to this new burden of beauty, is my sprawling trivial knowledge of the bench. All I can do—or all I ever want to do—is to keep on gathering. So I don’t know, really, what became of the Dayton Triangles, but I have gathered that near the end of their mysteriously long enduring, the Dayton Triangles employed a 150-pound running back and drop-kicker of Asian descent named Walter Tin Kit Achiu. His nickname was Sneeze Achiu.

  Sneeze Achiu?

  All these years of dicking around beyond the outskirts of meaningful history, and I’d never learned of Sneeze Achiu. How could this be?

  Maybe I hadn’t needed to know about him until I needed this encyclopedia, and I didn’t need this encyclopedia until I came up against not knowing how to be a father. When Jack was first born I didn’t know how to hold him, but within a week or so the awkwardness of holding him gave way to a feeling that holding him was the thing I’d been born to do, the feeling that made me whole. The problem was that this wholeness introduced a new gap and dread below it. The transfer of love and life from father to son, the transfer of something, of everything. How could this not be bungled? How could I not fuck him up? What was I supposed to do?

  The simplest answer, the truest—be present—was the hardest of all to implement. I’d always wanted to disappear into a refuge of sports facts and, more specifically, as life went on, into the kinds of facts that few could ever care about. I wanted to be at a distant remove, but I also wanted to find something distinctly, uniquely myself, something no one else could lay claim to. I wanted to find some buried treasure, and I wanted to bury myself, and paradoxically I also wanted to bring the treasure of my buried self back to the surface. What is the nature of this treasure? What is the point of Sneeze Achiu?

  All I can tell you is that when I learned of him, his preposterous name, his near-complete inconsequentiality that was hedged by his historical, albeit largely ignored, significance as the first Asian player in the NFL, it made me happy. I wanted to yelp out loud. The inexhaustible beauty of this stupid life, the ache! I wanted to run down the street with a megaphone and a banner, wander dewy heaths composing Wordsworthian odes, snort designer narcotics off Kim Kardashian’s ass. I wanted to smash an electric guitar in a sold-out arena, meditate straight-spined for decades in a cave, pull a locomotive with my teeth. I wanted to laugh and sob and build a cathedral.

  I want to tell my son about Sneeze Achiu.

  Dead Ball

  My mom came for a visit when Jack was two and half weeks old. The presence of a third adult made me realize how hard Abby and I were trying to keep absolutely still all the time, hoping this stillness would spirit our reluctant sleeper into unconsciousness and keep him there. My mom tiptoeing around in a touching attempt to follow our lead—and the way my shoulders seized up like a bear trap when she so much as stepped on a loose floorboard—opened my eyes to the bristling tension surrounding this attempt at absolute stillness. It was as if we’d somehow arrived at the notion that caring for a newborn was similar to hiding in an attic from the Nazis.

  Jack, surely absorbing this tension, continued to struggle through most of my mom’s visit, not sleeping much, wailing. Finally, on the last full day of her visit Mom and I took Jack out for a walk in a stroller. It was his first stroller ride. Mom pushed the stroller. Jack wasn’t crying. I let my shoulders relax. It felt to me like one of those brief moments in a game just after play has been ruled dead. A hand goes up, a whistle blows. Even though the game has been stopped, momentum carries the play forward, but the pressure of consequences, of causes and effects, has been removed. For a moment, no matter.

  In the stroller Jack looked up at me with his blue eyes. He sneezed, then sneezed again.

  “He always sneezes twice,” Mom said.

  I hadn’t noticed this as a tendency, but it was true. Achiu, Achiu. It was nice to have another set of loving eyes on the boy.

  “I wish you didn’t live so far away,” Mom added.

  I never know what to say to this. I didn’t say anything. We both just stared down at Jack, who blinked up at us and th
en turned to face the side of the stroller.

  Whoever is in possession of the ball at the moment of stoppage will follow through anyway, for practice, for pleasure. A motion without meaning. I hope heaven exists, and that it’s like this. Something outside winning and losing.

  On the last day of her visit I had to leave for work at around the same time Mom had to catch a train to the airport. I watched her walk away, the bag on her shoulder tipping her to the left, making her seem small and unsteady as she rounded the corner and was gone. I felt a snap in my chest.

  Mommy, I thought.

  Deficit

  Before Jack arrived we hadn’t known what life was going to look like with him. But we thought we’d need more solidity. Up to that point Abby and I had lived together in several rented apartments, and each situation had come to an abrupt end with a decision beyond our control, landlords selling the building to a developer or themselves converting the property into condos. We were always moving, scrambling, the strain of the moves leading inevitably to screaming matches and to the two of us pinned to a stairwell wall by furniture and weeping. We wanted to be in control. So, naturally, we plunged ourselves into six-figure debt.

  I was worrying about this deficit one afternoon. I was by the big picture window of the condo that was the cause of the deficit. Jack was in my arms. He was about a month old at this point. Abby sat in the easy chair nearby. She had the breast pump going. I’d gone to the window to try to get a hit of the hushed, glowing light I’d seen that one day after the storm during Jack’s first week (see Brister, Bubby), but I ended up thinking about the large check I sent every month to the mortgage company and about how the total number, the amount we owed, never seemed to budge. It was like hacking at an iceberg with a plastic spoon. Meanwhile the number in our savings account statement kept dwindling demonstrably. As I was holding Jack in my arms and these two troubling numbers in my head, another bird smashed into the window. Wham!