by Josh Wilker
That night, in the vestibule of my condo building, carrying a huge receptacle of cat litter and bags full of seltzer and towering oatmeal canisters and a bulk-sized toilet paper cube the size of a golf cart and various other bags and, while trying to work my keys free, I dropped one of the bags, the one with the eggs. There was the split-second oh shit in between dropping and impact, but this widened out when the reassembly of my burden allowed me the chance to notice a piece of paper taped to the vestibule wall.
SECURITY ALERT—It has been brought to management’s attention that there was a suspicious person in the common areas and a unit had an intruder come in through a screened window into the living room a few weeks ago. Tenant was home and surprised the intruder who then ran off.
There was a bit more info on the paper: no one was hurt, be sure to keep your doors locked, call police and inform management upon noticing any suspicious individuals, be vigilant, careful, aware, etc. I added it all to everything else I was carrying.
I managed to get everything through the front door. Jack was on the couch with Abby, and when he saw me he squealed with delight. You will never again simply walk in your front door. You will walk in, and sometimes, no matter what, you’ll feel like you’re carrying nothing at all.
Snodgrass, Fred
A little after Jack turned ten months old I got an e-mail from my friend Dave, a philosophy professor I used to work with at a liquor store. I knew without opening it that the e-mail was a funeral notice. The subject line read, “Morty.”
I used some credit card points to return to New York for a memorial gathering. There were photos of Morty on the wall. Morty out in front of his store, arms crossed over his chest, the bald, fearless seventy-year-old World War II combat vet. Morty at the back of the store, behind his desk, the retail-business survivor, gnawing ferociously on his pipe and pounding on an adding machine. Morty yelling, Morty screaming, Morty cackling with laughter. Morty standing beside his friend Larry, Eighth Street behind them, both of them with chins upraised, unbeatable.
The best photo was a simple close-up of the man. Everyone at the gathering gravitated toward it, had a moment with it. The photo showed just his bald head, his face, his eyes. Beneath all the toughness, the Yiddish insults and obscenities, the screaming, there was always something utterly gentle and watchful in his eyes. This came through in the picture. Morty was there when you most needed him. He took care of us.
“Be good to yourself, Joshua,” he would say to me. “If you won’t be good to yourself, Joshua, who else will?”
Most of the people at the gathering were ex-clerks like me, hired in our twenties, now all middle aged. Morty’s silver-haired friend Larry came too. The two of them used to sit in the back of the store together every day. When he saw the close-up of Morty he said, “I miss you, you old fuck,” and began to cry.
A little later Larry asked me about my father, who lived around the corner from the liquor store and used to stop by sometimes. My father and Morty were about the same age.
“Still kicking,” I told Larry. “Walks a few miles every day to read Marxist tomes at a Whole Foods café.” Larry wasn’t listening to these details. He was in that state of keen, grieving awareness that we only ever access once in a while: you’re either alive or you’re not.
“Hamish,” Larry said quietly. “Very hamish, your father.” I made a mental note to look up the word when I got back home. Later I talked to the philosophy professor, Dave, about parenting. I remember when his first kid was born. He’d come into the liquor store and told us that he’d written a poem about his newborn’s perfection. I’d last seen that boy when he was three. I was at Dave’s house watching a Knicks playoff game. It didn’t seem very long ago, but Dave’s son was now in college.
“Get the goddamn ball to Ewing!” Dave had roared.
“Daddy, you’re scaring me,” his toddler whimpered. Not long after that Dave’s wife popped out two more boys, twins. He’d lived through everything I ever had and far beyond.
“You shouldn’t complain so much,” he told me at Morty’s memorial, remarking on some recent writing of mine about having a baby around. “This is the easy part.”
“Oh yeah?” I said.
“Just wait until the teenager gets there,” Dave said.
You don’t remember what it was like, I thought. I kept gnawing on that thought like a canker sore for the rest of the night and into the next day as I raced from the airport straight to an event sponsored by a Chicago breastfeeding group. Abby gave a speech there, and after it was over we took some helium balloons home. For days we had balloons floating around. At some point I remembered to look up the word Larry had used to describe my father, hamish. It wasn’t in the dictionary, but I found it online. Yiddish for warm and loving. I called up my father and told him about Morty’s memorial. I told my mother too, and my brother and Tom. Everyone was still alive. My Facebook avatar is a photo from the day I got back home from Morty’s memorial. I have Jack in one arm and a rainbow bouquet of helium balloons in the other. This is the easy part. When will my hands ever be so full?
The point of all this is not that Fred Snodgrass allowed a fly ball to slip through his hands in the bottom of the tenth inning in the deciding game of the 1912 World Series. His Giants led by a run, three outs away. After the error Clyde Engle, who’d hit the fly ball, stood on second base, but the Giants still had the lead. Snodgrass then made a spectacular catch of a long drive by Harry Hooper. This is what everyone who has ever made a mistake could ever hope for—instant redemption. If life were fair, Snodgrass’s ledger would have been instantly cleared, one ball he should have caught but didn’t canceled out by the ball he shouldn’t have caught but did. The Giants continued to bumble, however (see boner), and eventually surrendered two runs and the World Series championship. Snodgrass’s great catch was forgotten; his mistake lingered.
“Hardly a day in my life, hardly an hour, that in some manner or other the dropping of that fly doesn’t come up, even after thirty years,” Snodgrass said in 1940.
The point is that one day you’ll be empty-handed. It’s not that you missed it. It’s that you can’t get it back.
Soetaert
See Winnipeg.
S___ B___ Incident, the
In June, when Jack was about ten and a half months old, we took him to his first baseball game. But first we went to a chiropractor near Wrigley Field. Jack was getting treatment to realign his spine. The chiropractor believed that his inability to endure even a few minutes in a car seat without wailing as well as the periodic weeklong stretches when this wailing invaded our bedroom, riddling the hours between midnight and dawn, was due to his spine being wrenched around during his pharmaceutically induced birth. When the chiropractor had first explained this to me a couple of weeks earlier, using the word trauma, I’d had to bite my lip to keep from crying, and then I handed over my credit card to purchase an expensive yearly plan. You spend your whole life recovering.
We got to Wrigley in the third inning. Maybe because I was overtired—we were in the middle of one of the stretches when Jack wasn’t sleeping at night—I almost started crying again when we went through the turnstile. I managed to hold it together, but I still had a swelling feeling in my chest as I carried Jack through the concourse under the stands. Life is full of trauma, but here we were, healing, moving together toward the sunlight. I was carrying my son toward his first glimpse of a major league baseball field, carrying him toward that magical moment when the green glowing field first comes into view. But who can ever tell the trauma from the healing? The moment we stepped out into the sunlight the sound of the crowd whomped into Jack and he started wailing. That sound, the crowd, all those voices forging into one huge eyeless roar—it’s horrible. You get used to it, but a baby knows the truth.
Eventually we managed to calm Jack down and took our seats. A grade-school-aged girl in a T-shirt that said Swee
tasaurus took a picture of us with our camera, the little happy family at the game. By then the Mets had taken a lead on a Daniel Murphy home run. I made a mental note of it and wrote it down in my journal the next day so that someday I could tell Jack. I envisioned him looking up Daniel Murphy in an encyclopedia and finding him nestled in with all the other Murphys, forty-one in all, including the one known only as Murphy. I saw Jack finding the kind of fandom I’d found, a healing and a hiding, a mostly solitary wandering to weird little joys.
Daniel Murphy homered again a little later, as did his teammates Ike Davis and Scott Hairston, the latter connecting for a grand slam. Jack missed all this, instead gnawing on a carrot and eyeballing Sweetasaurus and her friend, Candy Makes Me Happy. I spent the whole time worried we’d be hit by a foul ball screaming into the stands. It was a remote possibility but one that I was fixated on anyway—I always imagine the worst. The Mets just kept scoring and scoring. By the time a beer vendor yelled near Jack’s ear and made him inconsolably wail, signaling the end of our visit, the Mets led 16–1. They tacked on another run by the time we got home. At the time of the loss the Cubs were sporting an atrocious record, on pace to have the worst record of their history. It was, in that sense, the worst beating in the worst season the Cubs had ever had. The team improved slightly as the season went on to avoid a franchise-worst campaign, but it doesn’t change the particulars of the moment. Jack’s first baseball game and my first as a dad was by certain quantifiable parameters the lowest point in the lowest season in the most failure-saturated franchise in baseball, if not all sports.
This is a subjective distinction, though, and the much more generally acknowledged low point of the Cubs, Jack’s home team, was some years earlier, on October 14, 2003, which brings us, finally, to the specific subject matter of this entry in the encyclopedia of failure.
It is an unfortunate fact that encyclopedias are never complete. There’s no way I could have included all relevant subject matter in an encyclopedia of failure. This is a shame because choices need to be made, and I don’t know how to make choices. Still, I have somehow lived a life. Choices have been made in it. At one point, for example, I became a Red Sox fan. I don’t recall this as a choice. My brother had decided he was a Red Sox fan, and what he did, I did.
Becoming a father has forced me into the position, an uncomfortable one for a benchwarmer, of making conscious choices. Nearly every moment you have to choose, and typically there’s not much time to think about your choice. You try to prepare, to rehearse your choices, such as when I was at Jack’s first game and trying to keep myself ready for a foul ball. But what about the moment it comes hurtling toward you? It’s always different from whatever you imagined, so it’s always a surprise. I’ve never been able to get so much as a hand on a foul ball, but I’m sure if I were near enough to make an attempt, it would be for me like it is with almost everyone else: I’d try to catch it, but, my hands too stiff, too tense, I’d fail. Someone else would get it off a bounce or grab it off the floor. Still, I imagine myself choosing to stay relaxed, making a smooth grab, and furthermore choosing to be valiant after my catch, handing the ball to a nearby boy, who once was anonymous in these fantasies of a perfect choice but who is no longer so since the arrival of my son: I’d make the catch and hand the ball to Jack.
This entry concerns a fan, probably the most reviled fan in the history of my son’s home team. I have chosen not to name this fan even though you probably know who he is. I choose not to add to the weight coming down on this person, who made a split-second choice that anyone else would have made. I believe anonymity is what he wants, considering that he has nobly declined all opportunities, financially remunerative and otherwise, to comment on his part in Cubs history. No one can speak for him, but the following seems to me to be the only message he hopes the world will hear: you go to a game, a ball is coming toward you, you reach out your hands.
This fan’s story unfolded during the eighth inning of the sixth game of the 2003 National League Championship Series. The Cubs had a three-run lead over the Florida Marlins in the game and a 3–2 lead in the series. They were five outs away from advancing to the World Series, which they hadn’t appeared in for fifty-eight years and hadn’t won for ninety-five. A runner was on second, and Marlin batter Luis Castillo lofted a fly ball down the left-field line. Cubs left-fielder Moises Alou pursued the ball, one hand reaching into the stands to glove it. Before he could get to it, though, the foul ball hit the hands of one of several fans reaching out for it, bouncing harmlessly away and keeping Luis Castillo alive. Alou, convinced he could have made the catch, had a tantrum, spiking his glove on the grass and briefly, angrily berating the fan. Given new life, Castillo drew a walk. The next batter singled, plating one run, and the batter after that reached on an error by the Cubs shortstop, Alex Gonzalez, which loaded the bases. The Cubs’ rattled ace, Mark Prior, surrendered a double that tied the score, and he was replaced by a reliever, Kyle Farnsworth, who allowed four more runs to cross, at which point a third pitcher in the inning was summoned, Mike Remlinger, who yielded the eighth run of the inning, capping a complete implosion, the team that had been five outs away from victory pitching and fielding as if palsied.
Someone had to be to blame. One thing I can tell you with complete authority after a life of fandom is that the feeling of blame is intimate, personal. Blaming a stranger for your woe is the sickly beating heart at the center of all rituals of fandom. It’s a way of transferring some unbearable burden from yourself. Usually this blame is leveled at an athlete, but something is always lost in the transfer when this happens because the athletes are on the other side of the wall, almost another species altogether. But a fellow fan? He’s you. To be able to blame him is to isolate everything about you you’d want to remove.
So debris rained down on this fan. Chants rained down.
“Asshole! Asshole!” everyone roared. The telecast trained its cameras on the seated, staring fan, who deviated from a shell-shocked stillness only to wipe away thrown beer from his cheek as if it were tears. The activity of angry bodies around him bristled and roiled. Eventually a phalanx of security guards arrived in the seats to remove him from the game for his own safety. Footage of the part of this removal that involved this fan being hurried like an assassination target through the concourse—the very same concourse where I would, moving in the opposite direction, years later carry my baby toward his first glimpse of a major league game, my heart swelling with notions of the green glowing field, baseball a lyrical emerald vision, fathers playing catch with sons, all the pompous arcadian bullshit I’ve ever embraced—is sickening, humanity at its worst.
“We’re gonna kill you,” one anonymous voice calls out.
“Put a twelve-gauge in his mouth and pull the trigger,” another calls.
Not including the name of the target of these vows in this encyclopedia, wishing for him the same anonymity that has been afforded to those who would in that moment have had him murdered, is nothing but impotent ceremony. But what power do we ever have anyway? What choices do we have? I would have made the same choice as all involved. If I had been the fan, I would have reached for the ball. If I had been the left-fielder, I would have had an incendiary tantrum. And I’ve spent a whole lifetime chanting, booing. Asshole, asshole. I’ve rained debris. I’ve hated and blamed. I’ve felt the losses of my team in my bones, felt them closing my throat, twisting my spine. The mob is not sickening because it’s something obscene outside of me but because it’s within me. Jack’s life—his trauma, his healing—is ultimately beyond the power of my choices, beyond my control. But sons often follow their fathers. Why would I want him to follow me into this? Why would I carry him straight into such obliterating need?
Volume 4:
11 Months–
T
Tainted
None of this happened. How could it? It’s a pressurized mixture of memory and fandom, symbiotic fictions in flu
x with each passing feeling, each new need. Some names have been changed, others haven’t. I want to be truthful, as if I’m staring into the blue eyes of my son and telling him what I know of the world, its victories and defeats, its mysteries and solidities, its facts, but if even facts aren’t beyond the possibility of becoming tainted by forgetfulness and bias, what hope is there for objective truth in the phantasms of fandom and memory?
My first memory is of chasing after my brother, in Willingboro, New Jersey. It is an unusually early memory: we moved away from that town when I was two. Before we moved, a car hit my brother and broke both his legs. I witnessed it, so I’m told, but I don’t remember it. I’ve never associated that first memory of running after him down the sidewalk with him getting hit by a car, but it’s possible it happened that day, that the memory ended with the accident, and that the accident was too much for me to retain, that I had to rid myself of it, my conscious life beginning in a drastic revision.
This would provide an alternative explanation as to why there’s an implacable feeling of longing in the memory. I’d always thought it was because I wanted to catch up with my brother so I could play with him. Maybe it’s because I want, in retrospect, to stop him, to save him, to save myself too, erasing that memory before it had to be partially erased by the imperfect, compromising sorting of the conscious and subconscious, some measure of the event existing as an asterisk behind all memories to come: my beloved everything brother, four years old, slammed to the ground, motionless, coming back to life only to wail in immeasurable and terrifying pain, the two-year-old watching powerless.