by Josh Wilker
“The cats are pissing outside the box now,” she announced. Then she burst into tears.
For years the two cats had been our babies, the most important element of our shared lives. Now they were something of an afterthought, and they’d started damaging our home, fouling the air. I’d been trying and failing to keep up a constant patrol for cat puke and cat shit, playing defense against what was becoming an unstoppable onslaught. The cats had become solely my responsibility. Abby was better at cleaning up after them and taking care of them, but how could she handle this now on top of the round-the-clock work of taking care of Jack?
As my wife wept over what seemed like the new norm in our life, problems against which there was no defense, Michael Jordan was moving left on the screen in front of me, getting a step on his defender, Craig Ehlo. The pause on the video had come undone. Jordan stops, leaps, shoots. Time expires. Jordan lands as his shot falls through the net.
In ad campaigns and retrospectives Jordan, the magnificent winner, then ascends. That famous clip of victory personified is from straight-on and focuses on Jordan’s fist-pumping rise. But on my screen now, a YouTube video of the last few minutes from the actual broadcast of the game, the camera angle is from the side, and you can’t see Jordan’s triumphant celebration. You see Craig Ehlo collapsing to the bottom of the frame, a capitulation in his chest, his arm flailing up like those of someone being flung overboard, and then he drops out the frame altogether.
Eighty-Six
For a while in the early 1990s I lived in a place so close to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that the floor shook. I shared the place with my brother, Ian. Every night I unrolled a narrow futon mattress on the gray wall-to-wall carpeting and lay there vibrating. Every morning our fat, aging cat, Annie, would come over and lie on my chest, waiting for me to get up and feed her. She’d been in my family since my childhood, a once scrawny black and white kitten darting around and hiding in a sunny house in the country now old and morbidly obese in an apartment laced with truck fumes. I was twenty-four, had nothing going on. It felt good to have her lying on my chest, to be pinned down by love, or at least its purring facsimile.
Our friend Ramblin’ Pete called her Eighty-Six. He always said the name to her in a sing-song, a parody of innocence, and then looked at us wide-eyed, only the faintest hint of a shit-eating grin on his face, and said, “What?” He claimed, groundlessly, that the name just came to him as fitting for her, a tribute to the secret agent number of Don Adams’s character in Get Smart, but of course that number could not have been more freighted with connotations of ball busting when uttered by a Mets fan such as Pete to two Red Sox fans.
I hated back then to even think about that year, and yet I was entirely complicit in its enduring hold on me. It’s easy to shrug it off now, but the way it had all unraveled in 1986 in the bottom of the tenth, Game Six, the moment too much, seemed for many years afterward to be linked directly and irrevocably to all my failings, to that ache in my chest: can’t. In the mirror, always: visions of Schiraldi. You’d think I would have let go of something that reflected so dimly on my life. And yet the alternative to barely being able to look in the mirror, to wincing at the mention of mere numbers, was unthinkable. I could cease being a fan, cease caring about things that didn’t have any direct connection to me. But what would this leave me with? I’d be a man floating nowhere on a trembling mattress. I needed the feeling of Eighty-Six on my chest.
At some point that year, before Ian and I engaged with the landlord in a threat-laden shouting match and had to move, Eighty-Six started puking and shitting all over the wall-to-wall carpeting. We took her to the vet. He gave her steroids. It slowed things down for a while, but eventually she was shitting and puking again everywhere. One day I screamed at her for shitting on the floor.
“Stop fucking stop fucking stop!” I screamed.
She scuttled under the couch, frightened, and steered clear of me for the rest of the day. The next morning she didn’t come and lie on my chest. Ian and I had to flush her out from under the couch. It took a while. She was scared of me. I wanted to maim myself, be gone. She finally nudged enough of herself out into the open that we could grab her and stuff her in a cat carrier. At the vet we were told there wasn’t much else to do. I held her down. The doctor prepared a needle. My brother petted her on the head with just his thumb. She was purring.
I’d been in seventh grade, working on a report on lions. It was spring, just after my first winless season as a Ghost. A friend of my parents, Ehrlich, came to the door with a black and white kitten in his arms. He was trying to give her away. Nobody else was at home.
“She’s real cute,” Ehrlich said. He held her out to me. “What do you say?”
“Okay,” I said. I took the kitten, held her to my chest. She purred. She purred all the way to the end. When it was done my brother and I walked out onto Carroll Street. Bright sunshine blared down. Ian held the empty cat carrier against his stomach, like he’d just fielded a punt. I wanted to block for him. I was never a physical player in any sport, always shying from contact, but at that moment I wanted to throw my body away, clear some kind of path.
I thought about that day years later. I was standing in the bright sunshine empty-handed, just as I had been years earlier on Carroll Street. The day had been a wreck, cat puke on the carpet, cat piss outside the box, Abby first angry, then in tears, Jack wriggling in my arms more and more until he lost it altogether and started wailing, my stomach in knots. At that point I’d taken him out for a walk in the stroller, and he’d eventually fallen asleep. I was sitting on a bench at a playground with the stroller beside me. There was a teenaged kid bombing around on a bike that was too small for him. The sign at the playground included among its prohibitions both the riding of the bike and the presence of kids over twelve, but what is a sign going to do? He kept coming within a few feet of the stroller. I felt something gathering in me. I wanted the kid to get too close. I wanted to leap up and block him. Enough with the invisibilities. I wanted a tangible threat. But the kid rode off, out of the park. The feeling remained. I wanted to provide protection.
Empty Seats
Ian and I were in the living room of the cat-befouled condo I couldn’t afford, drinking beer and watching a baseball game with the sound muted. He and Dad had arrived earlier to see the baby after driving several hundred miles. Dad was tired and had gone to bed. Abby was in our bedroom just off the living room, trying to nurse Jack to sleep.
“So. How’s it going?” my brother said.
Versions of this question had come my way since the baby arrived. Sometimes I had the urge to tell someone something deeper than the usual platitudes, but I couldn’t articulate what this might be even to myself, and it changed constantly anyway. One minute I’d be feeling like the luckiest man to ever draw breath, and the next I’d be thirsting for death’s sweet release. In between those two extremes was a sprawling, garbled encyclopedia.
“Great. But I don’t know,” I said. “It’s great. I mean, fuck.”
I stared at the game. I took a drink of beer.
“I hear you,” Ian said.
As much as it had been anything, my life for decades had been a conversation with my brother, in one way or another, from when we were kids on up through our twenties living together in a series of narrow, truck-fumed apartments in Brooklyn. Even after that conversation started to trail off as we edged into separate lives, my life was still defined by it, by its murmurs and silences. And what had we ever talked about besides sports?
Years earlier we’d stood with an empty cat carrier on Carroll Street in Brooklyn in the bright sunshine. Nothing to say, nowhere we were needed. We ended up riding the subway to the Bronx, got tickets in the nosebleeds. Back then, the early 1990s, hallelujah: the Yankees sucked. Nothing but empty seats all around. We spread out, hung our legs over the row in front of us, sipped watery beer, watched the uniformed bodies
far below loiter and sprint. Empty seats are considered a lesion, a product of losing, an illustration of uselessness, but in those days they could transform a burden to a blessing. Nothing to say, nowhere we were needed.
Was that the time we saw a lazy fly ball conk Deion Sanders in the head? I wanted to ask my brother about it now, but I had too many other things crowding my throat. Ian and my father would stay through the following day and drive home early the day after that, my brother needed back there, with kids of his own. That first evening of the visit would be my one chance to tell him how it was going, to connect my new life with the life I’d always known.
On the TV screen some guy called for a new ball. The game was a blowout. The camera panned the crowd, such as it was. Empty seats everywhere. The vision calmed me, as if my brother was putting his hand on my shoulder. I took a drink of my beer. My brother took a drink too, then put the bottle down on the table beside him.
“Welp,” he began. He put his hands on the armrests and eyed the clock.
“That,” I said. I pointed at the screen. “That’s the place.”
The camera was lingering on a man surrounded by emptiness. He wore a cap of a team not involved in the game he was watching and had gone slack with an almost holy disinterest. Ian settled back into his chair, reclaimed his bottle.
“Ah yes,” my brother said. “Amen.”
Error
There’s one photo of my father holding my son. It’s from the last morning of the visit, just before he and my brother started driving back home.
“Everyone always makes sure the old man is sitting down first before they hand him a baby,” Dad said sardonically. He was sitting on our couch, Jack in his thin arms. Eighty-six years old and zero years old, give or take a few weeks. In the photo they look at one another, eyesight dissolving, eyesight just taking hold, a fogged connection. Both with Mona Lisa smiles.
“Call me One-Eye Lou,” Dad had said during the visit, explaining the current state of cataract encroachment.
“My son is seeing now,” I’d written in my journal a few days earlier. It was like when I first heard his heartbeat through a jelly-covered monitor. Where there was once nothing, now there was a tiny urgent insistence, a hungering for life, fragile and pure. How do I protect this? I can’t commit any errors, but errors are as inevitable as breathing, as cataracts.
The night before, on my suggestion, we’d ordered Indian delivery. Dad was unfamiliar with the menu choices and didn’t like what he ordered, some greenish lumpy liquid from the vegetarian section. It sat there on the table in front of him. I felt bad. I always feel bad for something, though often I can’t name what it is. At some point he started criticizing modern music, specifically “the rap.” He presented a mocking imitation.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” he rasped while thrusting his thin left arm to the beat. The arm knocked against his plate and his food spilled into his lap.
I don’t remember much else about the visit. I only remember the flub with the Indian food because I happened to scrawl down a description of it in my notebook a day or two after my brother and father left. My memory, more and more, is an invention, a creation, like I’m marking plays in a scorecard for a game I never saw, only felt. Hits, runs, errors. Especially errors. I always feel bad, like I’ve made an error, and I don’t quite know what it is.
You can’t always know where you will go wrong. Sometimes you can’t even know, looking backward, where you went wrong. Identifying an error won’t explain anything with any finality anyway. An error is a fiction at the heart of fandom. It offers a fantasy of clarity, of being able to measure loss in specific units. But take even the most famous of all errors, the ground ball that bounded up the first base line in the tenth inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series. Even if the ball had been fielded cleanly instead of skirting through Bill Buckner’s rickety wickets, there’s no guarantee that the slow-footed relief pitcher intending to cover the bag, pear-shaped Bob Stanley, would have beaten speedster Mookie Wilson to first. And, as a World Series game will do, Game Six had by this time acquired a kind of cosmic momentum—the Sox were falling apart. The measurable significance of Buckner’s error is blurred by its entanglement with the string of inept plays and dubious decisions leading up to it: one pitch from Stanley bounding past catcher Rich Gedman to the backstop, allowing the tying run to score; other, earlier pitches, straight and meaty, authored by Calvin Schiraldi, stroked into the outfield for base hits; the choice on the part of manager John McNamara to keep the customary late-inning first base replacement, Dave Stapleton, on the bench. Impossible to pinpoint where it all went wrong.
I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong or where I will go wrong. I know in my son’s seeing eyes there is the lightness of new unfettered life, the possibility of rebirth, of me being able to see a new world through his eyes. All my life I’d been trying to go numb, trying not to see, and now the world is naked and brand new and tender and vulnerable and loved beyond all words in my thin clumsy arms. How do you hold on?
I hugged my father good-bye the morning he and my brother drove home. I could feel his bones through his sweater.
Entropy
Pick a night, any night. For hours a tag-team two-on-one endures, a prolonged version of the last phase of a battle royal, the kind of spectacle Sneeze Achiu found himself in throughout his wrestling career and from which he often emerged, after unleashing a series of spectacular, crippling sonnenbergs, triumphant. But this particular triangulation is unscripted, morose, chaotic, and the conquering behemoth at its center is invisible: the sleepless misery of a baby. And the tag-team duo opposing this behemoth, buckling, staggering, thrown, wed some years earlier in a windowless room in a Marriott, a husband and wife now turning on one another, accusing, glaring, cursing, reeling, getting tangled in the ropes, groping for props, weaponry, multicolored gimmickry, parenting books, folding chairs, holds, moves, the atomic drop, the brain-buster, the wheelbarrow bulldog, anything, everything. A white noise machine churns out an inexhaustible excoriation—booooooooooooo—barely diminishing the echoes of a tiny human wailing, all night long and now beyond, into the gray light, daybreak no blessing. I will not let you go unless you bless me. This was the vow of Jacob at daybreak in the middle of the first human contest. He was in a wrestling match he couldn’t win, had already incurred a painful, incapacitating leg injury, but he held on. Winning doesn’t exist. You hold on.
Ex-
You get thrown. You get traded, demoted, waived. It’s inevitable. You get tagged with that diminishing prefix, ex-. Out of, not, former. This is the way things are now. Everything is separating from everything else, connections fraying, disintegrating, relations defined by the difference between the present disconnections and the past relationships. Everyone used to belong somewhere else.
The disenchantment with this epidemic of continuous separation finds a focus in sports, specifically in the anger and revulsion that things aren’t like they used to be, by which it is meant that nothing and no one ever stays the same. From a fan’s perspective there’s little chance to form a bond with anyone. Fans root for laundry, as in the conceit attributed to Jerry Seinfeld, though that’s putting a buffer of harmless absurdity on the situation; in truth we’re rooting for commercial and consumer logos, for the human window dressing of large corporations. We’re rooting for, and paying for, connection to a manufactured wholeness in a disconnected world.
And meanwhile we’re all separating from our youth, ex-players moving toward a permanent bench. I can feel the prefix like a hook in my flesh. It’s always dragging me back toward what I thought I once was, back to some golden age, my childhood, a sense of connection with life in all its glowing light and warmth and rippling sunrise thrush-song wideness.
And then there’s the future, narrowing, darkened with statistics. What guarantee is there that someone—especially one prone to disappearing—will avoid the probability of havin
g the word ex- attached to the word husband?
You get traded, demoted, waived. It’s inevitable. You fuck up. One morning after a long night Jack started crying in the kitchen. We’d been at this for nearly two months by this point and still had no idea what to do. Abby took him into his room. I kept doing the dishes. When I was finished I walked, reluctantly, toward the strangulated bursts of wailing. The unhappy baby squirmed on the changing table, the mobile above him revolving, plinking out the “lullaby, go to sleep” song. Winnie the Pooh characters bobbed and spun.
“How’s it going?” I asked. There was a pause.
“Great,” Abby said, not looking at me.
“You mad about something?” I said. Another pause.
Marriage begins with vows tagged by an invisible asterisk (*the majority of marriages end in the simultaneous dual creation of the prefix ex-), then endures, always asterisked, always tentative, as a series of loaded pauses. Pauses and the fantasy of replays. As if you could go to YouTube, say, and pull Craig Ehlo back into the frame, pull him up off the floor, pull back time to the previous possession, when Craig Ehlo scored the go-ahead basket on a frantic give-and-go, Craig Ehlo the hero. As if you could then press pause.
“You seem mad about something,” I said. Pause. Abby inhaled, glaring at the wall. The pause button is faulty; it never sticks when you need it to.
“I feel like I’m doing all this alone,” Abby blurted then began to sob.
Stung, I started shouting.