Benchwarmer

by Josh Wilker

  What bothered me most was that this was it. For the rest of our lives here we were. I was going to be sitting across from someone, belching in her face, and she was going to remain over there, having her face belched into. What was the alternative? Head for the hills?

  Heading for the hills attracted me on the level of a fantasy. And yet the hell of this situation wasn’t in the loathing but in the loving. My wife and I had grown into one being. Our son was not the agent in this fusing but the final fastener. All three of us were one being. All families are this way, more or less, and sometimes the families have to separate. If this were to happen to me, as it did to the family I grew up in, I would not be able to take it. It would be unbearable to be separated from my son and my wife. Then again, if I had to, I’d eventually be able to bear it. Humans can bear just about anything. But even in the worst moments I couldn’t bear the thought of it. Even in the moments of the greatest loathing, I didn’t dream of freedom but something less complicated: nonexistence, blameless death. Or, if I had the luxury of more complicated fantastical thinking, of going back into the past. The next Ryan Leaf, or the Ryan Leaf from a long way back, when Ryan Leaf himself was the next Ryan Leaf.

  Sometimes I imagined that I never left the cabin I lived in for a year when I was in my early thirties. It was the loneliest and in many ways most miserable year of my life, and yet sometimes I found myself wishing I’d never left there. I could still be there harming no one but myself, living out my days, numbing myself to life instead of feeling it.

  I didn’t have to show up for anything that year. I didn’t have anyone looking for me. I didn’t have to be anywhere. I didn’t have to be “here.” This was the horror of that year, but when I thought back to that year the pain was lifted from the memory. I just saw myself in the woods, floating above all bonds but still alive. I didn’t want to die. I simply wanted to have never ventured back into the world.

  No Mas

  See Quitter.

  Norwood, Scott

  In February, when Jack was a little over a half-year old, Abby’s parents came down from Racine bearing enough beer and junk food to subdue an elephant, and I ate and drank myself into a stupor while the Super Bowl blared. I don’t remember any of it. Probably at some point I pointed out Wes Welker to Jack because of the similarity of his last name to ours. But I don’t even remember the game’s turning point, when Welker, renowned for his reliable hands, dropped a catchable pass. It was late in the game, and the Patriots were clinging to a two-point lead. Shortly after the ball fell incomplete the Patriots had to punt, and the Giants rolled to a winning touchdown. So I gather. I pored over the details recently in much the same way I pored over the notebook I kept throughout Jack’s first year. I’ve written in notebooks throughout my life, trying to catch hold of life as it passes, but the one from Jack’s first year is the spottiest I’ve ever produced, an extended, barely legible scribble veering from self-pity to feverish Big Ideas and back to self-pity. I should have paid more attention, watched the ball all the way into my fingers.

  “When it comes to the biggest moment of my life and I don’t come up with it, it’s discouraging,” Welker said after his Super Bowl mistake. “That is one I’ll have to live with.”

  I don’t remember very much about that first year. But my inability to remember Super Bowls predates that more general amnesia. I rarely remember anything about the biggest game in America. In fact, I only clearly remember two moments from any of the Super Bowls I’ve ever watched. One was Jackie Smith dropping a pass in the end zone during the second Cowboys–Steelers Super Bowl in the 1970s (see goat), and the other was the moment just before placekicker Scott Norwood attempted to win a Super Bowl for the Buffalo Bills against the New York Giants. I don’t remember the kick itself, though I’ve seen repeated replays of it famously missing wide right, cementing the final score at New York 20, Buffalo 19. But I remember the moment just before the kick, when the camera fixed on several New York Giants players down on one knee and with their heads bowed and eyes clenched shut, praying.

  Please, God, keep us from feeling your loss.

  O

  Obscurity

  Dictionaries persist in defining obscurity only as something uncertain, in darkness, unknown, but the language of spectator sports, my native tongue, has added vague geographical connotations. I think of it as a kind of habitat, or whatever you’d call a word like estuary or gulch. I see faltering streetlights, a shuttered downtown, a Pizza Hut by the highway. Empty bleachers. Athletes toiling. The last part is the most important, as obscurity will never be used in sports contexts without being accompanied by toiling. Obscurity is one of the main—if not the only—places that athletes can toil. It is also usually a place or state of being from which the athletes have just made a tentative escape. The following 2001 USA Today headline provides a typical example of the usage in question:

  “After Toiling in Obscurity, Qualifiers Get Open Chance”

  The article briefly profiles several golf club pros and bush league tour players who managed to gain entry into one of the biggest sporting events in the world, the US Open. One player, Tim Petrovic, recalls driving golf balls out into a swamp from the parking lot of a Pizza Hut where he was employed. Another, George Frake II, is described only as a “New Jersey club pro” who likes the Grateful Dead but is quoted saying something that supports the notion of obscurity as a vague geographical entity, a place defined by its contrast to the bright lights and glory of a Major.

  “I definitely feel out of my element,” Frake says. “This is beyond a dream.”

  This is how new fatherhood felt to me. I was out of my element, beyond a dream. I’d been toiling for many years in obscurity and was now in a different place. Obscurity has to do with remaining to some crucial extent unseen, and the minute Jack first fixed his blue eyes on me I was thus unmasked, in a new place of joy and terror. Toiling in obscurity is usually presented as the negative image of the current blessed geography, but there’s beauty in obscurity too. There it doesn’t really matter if you fail.

  I’d first started dreaming about this place as a child, seeing it in the names of minor league towns on the backs of the baseball cards of journeymen. I imagined a life adrift. Tidewater, Lodi, Osh Kosh, Pawtucket. It appealed to me, obscurity as a revolving carousel dodge from the grim specificity of winning and losing, of adulthood. As I edged out of childhood I gravitated toward obscuring the world with drugs. I liked the feeling of not knowing where I was, that floating inebriated numbness, consequences removed. During the latter, singed-brain stages of a long acid trip at the second to last Grateful Dead show I ever attended (perhaps in the company of George Frake II), I gravitated to the fringes of the crowd. I was starting to come back to myself and didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be where I was or anywhere else. A barefooted woman in a peasant dress spotted me sitting off to the side as she hurried back to the concert. She shouted something at me over her shoulder with a kind of loud, bullying cheer, a cartoonish all-caps accusation. It’s stayed with me.

  “WHY ARE YOU HIDING?” she shouted.

  Then she was gone. It was as if the remark had daggered toward me out of thin air, a message from some presiding universal authority, the carrier of this message—a cheerful woman bound for communal celebration, for happiness, community, laughter, love—appearing momentarily only as a representation of all I was missing. As with every criticism that’s come my way, I saw in her rhetorical question an inarguable truth. I was, without good reason, hiding. Always! This did not cause me to stop hiding or even figure out why I was hiding. I simply continued hiding with a greater awareness that I was doing so. I preferred obscurity.

  A week or so after Wes Welker didn’t come up with the ball in the biggest moment in his life Jack started running a high fever. Since his birth almost seven months earlier he hadn’t been sick. There’d been the time his legs had swollen up after getting shots at the doc
tor (see fold), but no sickness. I was always afraid of him getting sick, and now here it was. My wife Googled symptoms. I Googled directions to the pediatrician. We’d been there before, but I always had trouble remembering the proper approach at one key point when the two-lane street veered into two separate streets. Stay left or right? I always fucked it up. I stared at the map on the screen, our route, wanting to burn it into my brain, these roads, this route, my place in the world, so that when the time came I wouldn’t make a mistake. Jack’s blue eyes were on me. Now I needed to know exactly where I was.

  Offside

  One triviality among billions in question on the Internet, that perpetually expanding argument at our fingertips, lists and lists careening to infinity, truth implacable, mythic, flawed, is the notion that French soccer great Zinedine Zidane was never called offside. The appeal of the claim, always with its supporters in any of the chat rooms where the subject arises—zealous romantics battling caustic belittling empiricists—is that it seems to speak to a superhuman sense of control and of place, the ideal of always knowing exactly where you are in relation to everyone else. The nature of the violation and the notion that someone could be in such profound possession of himself and his surroundings as to avoid it is the key part of this fantasy. Avoidance of any other kind of infraction wouldn’t be quite the same. Consider Wilt Chamberlain’s feat of never fouling out of an NBA game. Coupled with Chamberlain’s astonishing scoring and rebounding records, the statistic presents a portrait of an athlete with such tremendous strength and agility that he never had to strain off balance or flail wildly to impose his gargantuan individuality on the game. But to never be called offside, to never get out in front of the play—a claim based not only in Zidane being called offside so rarely that the instances are difficult to find or substantiate but also in a sense of a greater chaotic world beyond the limits of the individual, the action hurtling up and down the field being a spontaneous creation of nearly two dozen men—this is something else altogether. To think that one of these men, and not just any of the men but the most assertive and important player on the field in any game he ever played in, would never step outside the rhythm around him: almost unthinkable, sublime. The idea of a master at home in the dynamic infinite flux of all, never offside, verifies the myth of life as we wish it could be lived: the individual glowing within a golden, flowing web (see Zidane, Zinedine).

  But life as it is actually lived is another story. There’s a German word that can be used to capably describe it: abseits. It means aloofly, separately, distantly; secluded, solitary, isolated, cut off from other people. It is also the German word for offside. A player gets ahead of the ball, out ahead of the play, aloof, alone. This is wrong: your solitary actions are hereby disallowed. They do not matter. Everything must be done within the web of all of us; nothing done alone can matter.

  Sometimes I found myself wishing we could have raised our baby within a community, like in days of old. Ah, the days of old. Extended family nearby, neighbors a synonym for friends, elders not herded into grim institutions away from the workforce but kept close at hand for their warmth and wisdom. In days of old the experts in healing were part of the community too, woven into the web from which one was never abseits. Now there’s really none of that, or there wasn’t for Abby and me. How could it be otherwise? My whole life had been a reaching for the dream of some cushiony obscurity, aloof, alone, a place where errors don’t really matter. When Jack started running his high fever there was just Abby and me and the perpetual expansion of arguments at our fingertips. There was no end to the information on the Internet that seemed to relate to Jack’s symptoms, his fever and suffering, but none of it carried with it any certainty. It could be nothing to worry about or it could be something terrible.

  We decided to drive him to the pediatrician. This is what you do with a baby. He is sick? Take him to the doctor. We did this pretty quickly after it was clear that Jack was sick, but at first we did look for a while on the Internet. You want to have some answers. You also don’t want to take the baby out of the home, out of the last tiny shred of warm community left. This was the main part of our reluctance. Had we lived in a different time, a doctor would have come to us. But those days are over. You take the baby to the institution, its machinations.

  Not long ago I was talking with my wife about that time.

  “He got better eventually,” I said. “And if we’d done absolutely nothing at all . . . ”

  “Right,” Abby said, “he would have been fine. Minus all the . . . ”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I don’t even want to fucking think about it,” Abby said.

  I didn’t either, but images of the machinations scrolled. The blood-drawing, the X-ray-machine manacles. Zidane would have known not to make the choice that led to those things.

  “He would have gotten better on his own,” Abby said.

  Jack did get better. It was all a false alarm. It’s easy in hindsight to wish we’d never left the house in the first place. Zidane would have known what to do, but how could I? Jack seemed so fragile, so close to being nothing at all, that any indication of inexplicable suffering on his part made me want to rush him to professionals. I wanted to be out from under the burden of making the right choice, the burden of having to be perfect, like Zidane.

  OFP

  Recently I was watching a documentary about Bo Jackson, and when the story was told of a spectacular game-saving throw he made, I started to cry. I was at work, on my lunch break, crammed as much as possible into a corner of the lower-level corporate atrium, squinting at the film on my phone, eating a salami sandwich, bawling. That Bo Jackson could do something like that, something no one thought was possible, it caught on something inside me, some buried gratitude for beauty. No one believed it could happen. The catcher on the Royals, Bob Boone, the very same guy who had featured in the Pete Rose catch (see juggling), was among those beginning to walk off the field under the assumption that the game was over. Boone noticed that the impossible laser throw was sailing toward him from the farthest limits of the field. When Boone made the sweep tag on the runner, Harold Reynolds, the game saved, something gave way inside me, made me weep.

  This was the day after my wife and I talked about when Jack had gotten really sick. I didn’t want to think about that time, wanted to keep it buried, but it kept rising up. When my half-hour lunch break was over I turned off the movie about Bo Jackson and swabbed my face with a crumpled Kleenex. There were a few minutes left in the movie. He had just incurred a terrible hip dislocation that would end his football career and reduce his remaining moments in baseball to a hobbled aftermath. I walked to my cubicle thinking about how things can go wrong.

  Jack was quiet through most of the drive to the pediatrician, and then he started vomiting. At the doctor’s office they pricked his finger for a blood sample, and some high numbers in the reading prompted the doctor to order more tests at the labs in the hospital across the street. There two technicians tried and failed to get any blood from Jack’s veins. They opened wounds on both arms and both hands. He screamed and cried until he had no tears.

  “He’s dehydrated,” a technician said.

  We used a plastic bottle cap to tip water at his contorted mouth. The technicians tried again to get blood. I held his feet. One technician held his arms. He screamed. My wife bent over him and tried to calm him by nursing him.

  “Mommy’s here, Mommy’s here,” she said. Finally one of his tiny veins opened.

  “Hallelujah!” a technician whooped. Dark blood drained through a tube from his arm and into a container. Jack kept screaming.

  The X-ray was not as prolonged or as awful, but the image may stay with me longer: my baby, still no more than a few pounds of flesh and soft bone, strapped into a Hannibal Lecter restraint, his arms pinned in an upraised position next to his reddened, scream-creased face, the technicians scurrying out of the dim room as t
he machine hummed and Jack howled and Abby’s raw voice kept reaching and falling short of comfort, “Mommy’s here, Mommy’s here, Mommy’s here.”

  There was some relief at the end of that night, a nurse from radiology who was herself a mother of small children finding us afterward and telling us that the preliminary reading of the X-ray was negative. This seems to be an element of medical crises, these little notes of mercy, people taking an extra step around the monetized, litigation-fending machinery of hospitals to give a kind word. We thanked her. We drove home, still not knowing what was wrong with our baby. I noticed the moon, huge and full and low over the buildings of our neighborhood. It was February. Concrete and metal edges poked up everywhere through a ragged, glowing blanket of snow.

  Jack continued to struggle with the high fever. It went on for days. Each day would include a period in which he seemed to be getting better. His fever would come down, and he’d stop writhing and crying and he’d smile a little, even laugh. The weather got nicer. One of the days we took him out behind our building, into the parking lot that looked onto an alley, and we basked for a few minutes in the sun. There was a dripping sound of water from the snow melting on the roof. I pointed to the alley.

  “That’s where we’ll play catch someday,” I said.

  It was a corny thing to say, especially as it amounted to a statement made aloud to myself, but after seeing my baby wailing with his arms strapped to his head, I needed to see something else, a future, the two of us throwing a baseball back and forth in a garbage-strewn alley. The sunny period didn’t last. Within an hour or so Jack was wailing again.