by Josh Wilker
My mother had become an artist by 1973, a pretty young woman with long brown hair and a rainbow spattering of bright paint on her sneakers and jeans and shirt and sometimes even on the lenses of her glasses. She worked on her paintings, big hyperreal Pop Art portraits of her friends and family, all the time, every day, and her major-chord love songs eventually covered most of the walls of our house in New Jersey. My favorite was the one of me and my brother, the two of us watching TV. We’re both in our pajamas, rapt looks on our faces, sitting very close together. In fact, I’m leaning into him, my shoulder touching his arm. In the painting, we’re still a year or two away from discovering baseball cards, but all the elements are in place: my need to be close to my brother, our shared instinctual desire to find some kind of pop-culture escape, our fascination at what seemed to be both a simpler and more magical artificial world beyond the intimate snarl of affection and silences in our three-parent home.
“It wasn’t easy in that house,” Tom told me years later. “I’d feel bad even touching your mom on the arm if your dad was around.”
By 1973, Tom’s beard and hair had grown into something worthy of a man who had been shipwrecked on an unmarked island for a decade. He had been a professional actor in New York and in traveling companies all over the country, and he embraced with customary zeal his new role as a part of the family’s unusual experiment. He also worked part-time as a sculptor’s helper for a local art-minded pharmaceutical industry billionaire, plus he and my mom made candles and sold them in a little gift shop near our house. Once they took the candles into Manhattan and tried to sell them on the street, but cops fined them for not having a permit. Cops often hassled Tom at that time. I picture him after coming home from yet another brusque, invasive frisking by hippie-loathing members of the New Jersey State Police, he and mom laying in bed and whispering their wishes about going somewhere far away from the concrete jungle, the malignant suburbs, somewhere where they could really be free.
I’m sure there were also plenty of neighbors who gave Mom and Tom the stink eye for their looks or our abnormal family situation or both. The saddest story my mom ever told me was about the time she tried to take my brother to his classmate’s birthday party a couple houses down, only to be told by the boy’s mother, through a latched screen door, that it just wasn’t possible to invite everyone.
“Gotta draw the line somewhere,” the woman explained. From inside the house came the sounds of the party, floating through the screen to my mom and my brother.
If I’d been older when he’d begun living with us, I probably would have resented Tom’s presence, but to me having a mom and a dad and a Tom was normal. It’s all I knew. Plus, he was young and energetic and fun, willing and able to play with me in an unselfconscious, roughhouse way that my shy, reserved father, who was nearly twice Tom’s age at that time, was not.
I have trouble picturing my father in my sketchy memories of those days. He was gone a lot, away earning the family’s only steady income at his research job in the city or holed up in the guest room that had become his room when Tom moved in. I remember he had a mustache because I recall he liked to kiss me on the cheek. I didn’t like it.
“Baby fat,” he’d say teasingly, pinching the other cheek, the one he hadn’t kissed.
“I’m five!” I’d yell, scowling, angry that he didn’t even know I was no longer a baby. I wriggled away from him, still rubbing his bristly kiss off the other side of my face. I see this scenario occurring on the couch in our living room, my dad just home from work. He has on brown slacks and a white button-down shirt and a tie. A normal American in any other time and place, but the oddball in our world. The television is on. George of the Jungle. Ultraman. I stare at the screen, breathing through my mouth. My brother’s on the couch, too. Eventually, my father sighs, rises from the couch, and trudges up the stairs to his little room, shutting the door.
One night, my brother and I are watching TV in the front room when men and women in ski masks burst through the front door. It’s Tom’s birthday. Much later, I’ll understand that the whole thing is a gag, that Tom and Mom’s hippie friends were inspired by the ongoing Patty Hearst saga to “liberate” the birthday boy.
“We’ve come to free you from society’s shackles!” one of the kidnappers yells in Tom’s face as they seize him. Tom struggles and giggles as he’s dragged from our house. Mom follows, an accomplice, a tight smile on her face like someone on a roller coaster about to crest its first peak. I can’t tell if what’s happening is bad or good.
Who can tell me?
I look to my brother.
“Hey, Ian,” I say.
He stares at the television. Lost in Space. The flickering light from the screen makes his face seem to change. He’s sad. He’s mad. He knows things I don’t know.
“Hey, Ian. Ian,” I say.
Topps 1975 #407: Herb Washington
Once, when I was in my twenties, I ran into an acquaintance on the F train, a guy I’ll call Wendell, whom I knew from pickup games of Ultimate Frisbee in Prospect Park. We were on the train for a long time, long enough for me to decide for some reason to start filling the conversational gaps with details of my upbringing. I mentioned the three-parent experiment. I mentioned that as that experiment was crumbling, the dream of a new experiment was born, to live a completely self-sufficient life way out in the country. Mom and Tom yearned to live closer to nature, to leave the toxic concrete suburbs behind, to leave complications behind, to get back to the land. I mentioned that a key component of this dream was Tom going away to blacksmith school so that he could learn a trade that, in most people’s minds, was as obsolete as powdered wigs and muskets. Wendell, clad in a suit, returning home from his well-paying job, had worn an expression of amused surprise throughout my dissertation, but when I got to the blacksmith thing he burst out laughing.
“My god,” he said. “What were they thinking?”
“I know, I know,” I said, because I will almost always agree with anyone about anything. But after Wendell and I parted ways—he lived in a nicer neighborhood—I began what would turn out to be a lifelong habit of imagining myself responding with fierce eloquence to his mocking rhetorical dismissal of my family’s unusual choices.
“Look,” I would begin, “things were different back then.”
Look, it was a time to Try New Things. Not all of those things worked. But even in the mistakes, or maybe especially in the mistakes, the cockeyed grandeur of the 1970s comes through.
For example, in 1974, when Mom and Tom were making their final preparations to make what they envisioned to be a move far away from civilization and all its conventional ways, the World Champion Oakland A’s added a man to their roster with no discernible familiarity with baseball and invented for him the brand-new role of designated pinch runner.
Herb Washington was and would always remain the only pure designated pinch runner in the history of baseball. Though the A’s also used other players primarily as pinch runners during the mid’ 70s, Washington was the only specialist to never once bat or take the field as a defender and so was the only player ever to have “Pinch Run.” as his listed position on the front of a baseball card.
A’s owner Charles O. Finley, a wealthy, blustering, delusional mad-man or visionary who in some ways epitomized the sublime and ridiculous era I have been trying my whole life to fully understand, envisioned Washington, a former college sprinter, as yet another advantage for the formidable Oakland squad. But instead of being a fortification of the already high-powered engine that had carried the A’s to league supremacy throughout the early- to mid-1970s, Washington ended up being the most superfluous (hence greatest) hood ornament on the biggest, baddest, Blue Moon Odomest Cadillac in the league.
As recounted on the back of his 1975 card, Washington entered 91 games in 1974, his first season in the majors. He stole 28 bases and was caught stealing 16 times. That is not a good ratio and in fact would be identified by present-day baseball number-cru
nchers as counterproductive, Washington’s jittery, unpolished improvisations on the basepaths killing too many possible rallies to justify the occasional extra base. He lasted only until May of the following year, adding two more stolen bases and one more caught stealing to his all-time record.
When I was a kid I did not scrutinize the stolen-base-to-caught-stealing ratio but was instead mesmerized that these statistics were included at all, for at that time and throughout the 1970s stolen bases were not among the statistics on any other card. I also completely believed the overheated back-of-the-card space-filling prose created by a nameless Topps functionary who wrote, among other things, that Washington was “personally responsible for winning 9 games for the A’s in 1974.”
My guess is that in a couple of these nine games, Washington merely trotted across the plate in front of a home run by one of the actual baseball players on the team, that in a few more of the nine games he scored after a series of events not of his own doing that would have led just as easily to a score by the actual baseball player he replaced, and that the game or two where his speed actually seemed to provide the winning edge were more than canceled out by his inexperienced baserunning gaffes in other games and by his taking the place on the roster of someone who could, say, field a ground ball or dump a pinch-hit single into right field once in a while. Then again, his mere presence may have inflicted psychological damage on other teams. By carrying a guy on their roster who could not hit, pitch, or field, the A’s were in essence declaring to their opponents that they could kick their asses with one hand tied behind their back.
Also, and perhaps more significantly, the inclusion of Herb Washington served as a message from the A’s to all the suit-wearing, sober-minded Wendells of the world that they were brave enough to try something new. Whether the useless innovation of Herb Washington signaled the apotheosis of the A’s dynasty or foretold the team’s impending descent at champion-sprinter speed into abject late-1970s suffering is beside the point. The point is that life is not to be methodically considered and solved like a math equation. Life, fucking Wendell, is to be sprinted toward and bungled beyond recognition.
Topps 1978 #726: Wilbur Wood
I won’t say I haven’t also wondered in the course of my life what the hell my parents were thinking. Even during my earliest years of consciousness, when I generally understood the experimentation of the adults in my family as simply the way life was, I instinctively began to reach for things that had clear rules and distinct lines between what was good and what was bad.
In fact, one of the things that would draw me into the world of the cardboard gods as much as anything else was its clean, well-defined system of statistical landmarks. You knew where you stood with the numbers on the back of a baseball player’s card. If a guy hit 30 home runs and drove in 100 runs, he was a star slugger. If another guy turned in a sub-3.00 ERA, he was a top pitcher. It was as simple as that, no gray areas, no confusion.
For starting pitchers, it was all about wins. If you won 20 games, you were an ace. Conversely, if you lost 20 games, you were kind of a rag arm, a luckless mushballer (though probably not utterly incompetent; after all, your team must have seen reason to keep running you out there to take all those beatings).
These seemingly mutually exclusive starting pitcher landmarks would be well-known to me by the time I started inspecting the baffling statistics on the back of Wilbur Wood’s card. In a five-year span, the aging knuckleballer with the nineteenth-century name won 20 games four times, but he also lost 20 games twice, 19 games once, and 17 games once. The most confusing year of all was one of the years when all three of my parents lived in the same house, 1973, when Wilbur Wood won 24 games and lost 20.
I could never figure out if Wilbur Wood was bad or good, but eventually I came to see him as being, in both name and deed, some kind of throwback to the rugged, spike-gashing dawn of major league baseball, when hurlers started both ends of a doubleheader and then came on in relief the next day at dusk despite massive corn liquor hangovers to strand the go-ahead and winning runs in scoring position. Wilbur Wood was beyond Old School. He was Old Testament. He was the last vestige of a time when men named Mordecai and Smokey Joe and Grover strode as giants upon the land, their won-lost records both gleaming and gory, good and bad entangled.
When Wilbur Wood hung it up, it left no one to stop the meek five-inning starters and one-out lefty bullpen specialists from inheriting the earth.
Topps 1975 #511: Texas Rangers Checklist
Though my brother and I were at the center of the adults’ vision of a new life in the country—they wanted us to grow up wild and free, bounding barefoot through meadows, uncorrupted—we paid as little attention to it as possible. Instead, as it turned out, we paid attention to baseball. I’d never cared about baseball before, but in our first spring in Vermont, in 1975, my brother started playing little league and collecting baseball cards and following the regional team, the Red Sox. And what he did, I did.
This imitative way of being was something that would in many ways define my life, my imitations often going beyond mimicry to become a kind of inward orthodoxy that seized on one or another of the various pursuits of my brother as if they were the exploits of a visionary, each detail worthy of the impassioned scrutiny of a solitary monk. I understand my connection to baseball in this way. My brother liked baseball a lot. He was a better player than I would ever be, bigger and stronger, even able eventually to throw a good curveball. But I don’t think he grabbed hold of its details as fiercely as I did, something I noticed early on when he tried to argue that Rogers Hornsby, and not Ty Cobb, held the record for highest lifetime batting average. It was the first time in my life that I knew more than my brother about anything, and possibly also my first experience with irony, given that I’d so passionately studied the baseball encyclopedia my uncle Conrad had recently given my brother for Christmas because I believed such study would bring me closer to my brother.
That first year in Vermont, we house-sat in a town called Randolph Center for a family spending a year as Christian missionaries in Korea. Randolph Center had many big white houses with immaculate lawns, a college with brand-new tennis courts, and a big pond called Lake Champagne with a sun-drenched wooden dock in the middle of it and a building nearby with pinball machines and air hockey tables. Very near our house, there was a small ski hill with a rope lift. In the summer, hang gliders launched themselves from the top of the hill like bright-colored ponderous birds that seemed somehow simultaneously prehistoric and futuristic.
Kids were friendly in Randolph Center, a few of them coming by to basically welcome my brother and me aboard. One of these kids was a farm boy named Buster who would go on to become the primary baseball news oracle for the nationwide sports information monopoly and who even as a preadolescent had contagious enthusiasm for baseball, baseball history, and at that time most especially baseball cards. By the time we met him, or, to put it more accurately, were swept up in his tornado of baseball mania, his baseball card collection was already the stuff of legend—the rumor was that he kept the collection in a trunk that he’d buried somewhere on the grounds of the Wiffle Ball stadium he’d built on his family’s lawn to resemble a miniature Fenway Park. When asked about this he would bark laughter, then give answers as elusive as his unhittable Wiffle Ball pitches.
My brother and I had bought stray packs of cards before, but under our friend’s influence we began buying packs whenever possible at the general store in town called Floyd’s, which was owned by Mr. Floyd, a chipper Vermonter with a Santa Claus build and a gray-flecked flattop buzz cut. We began bringing those packs home and opening them and marking the new names received on a checklist and sorting those cards into teams and casting names already received into a reservoir for flipping and trading, the doubles pile. There were rules and unknowns, satisfactions and needs, waves of getting and undertows of wanting. The riddling pull of love. We began to collect.
We plunged into it so fiercely in
that first full year away from our father that I got closer to getting every player for a single team than I ever would again. From Bibby, Jim, to Tovar, Cesar, I slowly but steadily accrued every last member of the 1975 Texas Rangers except one: Topps card number 412. Hands, Bill/P.
My brother owned Bill Hands. I can’t remember clearly, but he may have even had doubles. However, it was not at all customary to simply hand over surplus cards. I understood this and was in a strange way even glad about it. The game had rules, and rules helped create a world with meaning. He proposed to trade me Bill Hands for my one and only 1975 Carl Yastrzemski. I was tempted, but even at age seven I knew that if I made such a deal I’d feel as if I’d been punched in the stomach for months afterward. By then I had fallen in love with the Boston Red Sox, and I knew that the center of the team was the ancient living legend known as Yaz. So I held tight to my Yaz card and decided to take my chances with the random gatherings within each new pack of cards.
I began to pray. I’d never prayed before. Every time I opened a pack of cards, I prefaced the opening with a silent plea for Bill Hands. His persisting failure to arrive threaded a new feeling through the revelation of each freshly opened pack, through the bright colors and sunshine, and the nobility of the names, and the exactitude of the numbers, and the sweetness of the gum, and all the other pleasures of getting. Below all that, faintly: an ache, an absence, an unfillable box.
Topps 1975 #634: Cy Acosta