Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  The off-balance layout was apparent in Ed Brinkman’s card, which further lessened the feeling of distance between the viewer and the realm of major league baseball by presenting a figure who seemed to have called in sick to his job as an instructor of remedial math and driver’s ed at the vocational high school to sneak onto the grounds of the Detroit Tigers training complex. The distance lessened further still with the discovery that this nearsighted ectomorph turned out not to be an impostor at all but a starting major league shortstop; moreover, he had been a starting major league shortstop for well over a decade. He even had his own crudely personalized bat—“BRINK”—which he presumably used in the just-concluded season to launch 14 home runs, his career high.

  The total effect of Ed Brinkman’s card, and of many of the cards that year, was to present for me a world that seemed flawed enough to allow even me to be a part of it, but that also was capable of the fluid dream-magic of make-believe. I could stand in the middle of my little BB-riddled room alone and hold Ed Brinkman brand new in my hands, and believe Ed Brinkman wasn’t that far away from being pelted with wild cucumbers, and believe he was right beside me, and follow him from our new low valley all the way to the majors.

  Topps 1976 #628: John D’Acquisto

  I started having nightmares, except they weren’t nightmares, but we didn’t know what else to call them. Years later, still trying to understand this inexplicable part of my childhood, I discovered that the accepted term for these episodes was “night terrors.” I recognized the physiological and observable elements related to the term: jackhammer heartbeat, shortness of breath, the young subject running and thrashing and screaming as if unable to escape a vision of bottomless horror. But the book that described the phenomenon claimed that children who experience night terrors are not even aware of them as they happen; they are in a kind of sleepwalking trance and don’t remember them the next day. Neither claim was true.

  I woke in the dark, the whole house quiet, and things looked wrong, out of proportion, or as if there were no such thing as proportion, a baseball and a wall and a shoe all simultaneously gigantic and microscopically small. I got out of bed and it got worse. Jackhammer heartbeat, shortness of breath. Floor, door, staircase, stairs—everything seemed to have shed its name.

  And I remembered all this the next day, my throat still hoarse from screaming. I remembered how everything had looked wrong and how this fed into a spiraling fear that there was no way back to the normal world, that the terror would be endless. I remembered the expression—fright, worry, exhaustion, helplessness—on Mom’s face and Tom’s face and Ian’s face, no one able to stop what was happening. And beyond merely remembering, I felt it all flickering at the edges of the daylight world, the name of every object a thin, slipping rag above a kind of awful infinity.

  On days like that, I went to my cards with more need than usual. I held them and read them aloud, the numbers, the names. Everything seemed a little foggy on those days, one name bleeding over its borders into the next. This was especially true if I happened to venture, as if drawn to an implacable feeling of melancholic absence and aftermath, into my dreary collection of San Francisco Giants.

  I had never seen the San Francisco Giants on television. They never surfaced in Sports Illustrated or anywhere near the top of the most distant of all divisions, the National League West. In the All-Star Game their yearly lone representative was no more noticeable than the half-second blip in the corner of the screen made by a white-shirted extra fleeing ruin in a disaster film. They seemed to me in those years, which were just after their iconic superstar Willie Mays had departed, to be not so much a team as a state of being, or somehow a lack of a state of being. A mystery. A mist.

  Gary Lucas was Gary Lavelle. Garry Maddox was Gary Matthews. When Garry Maddox was traded to the Phillies, leaving the blurring haze of San Francisco to become a distinct personality (the Minister of Defense), Gary Thomasson and Gary Alexander drifted into the ever-expanding Gary-laced void.

  But it wasn’t just the Gar(r)ys. I confused Ray Sadecki with Mike Sadek, Mike Ivie with Mike Lum, Jim Barr with Steve Barr and Doug Bair (and, later, Steve Farr), and for reasons that I can’t explain I thought of Von Joshua as the fourth Alou. The fog of the mid- to late-’70s San Francisco Giants would also come to encompass blur-rings of identities across the years, Bob Knepper merging into Bob Kipper, Tim Foli merging into Tom Foley, Ed Halicki merging into Mike Bielecki who merged into Bob Milacki.

  At the center of the fog was John D’Acquisto, who in my earliest years among night terrors and gods was one and the same with John Montefusco. As I got older I slowly came to understand the difference between John D’Acquisto and John Montefusco, but I was only able to absorb this information (which allowed me to identify several colorful individual facets of the latter figure, such as that he had won a Rookie of the Year award, had pitched a no-hitter, and was known far and wide as the Count of Montefusco) after John D’Acquisto was removed from the Giants in a trade to the Cardinals for, among others, Dave Rader, whom I then began to confuse with Doug Rader.

  Trying to grab at the diaphanous handholds of names could only take me so far. When the day after a nightmare came to an end I went to bed tired and frightened, wondering if I’d make it through the night without waking up and seeing once again that everything was actually something else. It was dark and I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to keep saying names.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, Ian.”

  Topps 1976 #256: Rowland Office

  In Randolph Center, any additions to my baseball card collection had been discussed, or at least had the potential to be discussed, in a small but palpable community of Randolph Center baseball card collectors that included me, my brother, Buster, Buster’s good-natured friend George (who didn’t allow his good nature to keep him from swindling me, a mere toddler, practically, out of my 1974 Hank Aaron “Home Run Champion” card), and sometimes even some other kids from the town. In East Randolph, collecting baseball cards became something far more solitary, but even when I was looking at my cards by myself, I was on some level imagining that at some point I would share my thoughts and discoveries with my brother.

  And though my brother would increasingly recoil from the idea that we comprised a two-boy community unto ourselves—an idea I was more than willing to embrace—in those early years in East Randolph he was often as interested in playing with me and sharing with me as I was with him. Mom and Tom worked very hard to make the bedroom my brother and I shared livable by tearing out the BB-RIDDLED walls and putting up new ones, but my brother and I claimed the room as our own by laughing our asses off at baseball cards.

  The 1976 Rowland Office card that came into our lives in our first spring in the house, after a long, cold winter, did as much as any card to achieve this goal. Something about it caused both of us to erupt, sprawling on the floor, cards scattered all around us, loose and in rubber-banded stacks. And this didn’t just happen the first time we saw the card. We’d be sorting new cards into our teams, and one of us would hold up our version of this Rowland Office card for the other to see. The holder of the card would have his lips clamped shut, trying not to laugh until the other looked up to see.

  Looking at the card now, I honestly don’t know what caused us to roll around on our bedroom floor laughing until we cried. The name is cartoonish, the face unusually long and thin, the lips pursed as if a sour remark is about to be uttered about the stench of a teammate’s flatulence. I mean, I guess he’s kind of funny looking. But now, weighed down by all my years, I also see a young guy, much younger than I am now, trying to stick in the majors, trying to hold on to what is probably the only thing he knows how to do really well. I find myself focusing on his eyes, which seem alert and unsure, like those of a deer ready to bolt at any sign of trouble. I see a human where once I only saw a ridiculous god, a god who had and still has few peers in my imagined personal pantheon. He was the god of laughing fits, returning year after year to
sacrifice himself in our brotherly rituals.

  Topps 1977 #5: 1976 Victory Leaders

  On July 28, 1976, Randy Jones went 10 innings in a 2-1 victory to push his dazzling record to 18 wins and 4 losses. After a rocky start to his career that included an 8-22 season, Jones had broken through in 1975 with 20 wins, and in 1976 he looked to be heading to superstardom. Sports Illustrated even featured him on their cover, wondering if he could become the first National Leaguer since Dizzy Dean to win 30 games.

  By then I had finished my first year in a new class invented by the hippie parents scattered through the area. There were no grades, in both senses of the word: Kids of all ages were together in one room, and hierarchical assessment of academic achievement had been abolished. The idea was that we were free to learn what we wanted to learn, however we wanted to learn it, that every little boy and girl would find a way to burst into bloom. I learned about Indian tribes and feelings and how to say words in Russian and I wrote stories and plays and even an imitation of a television show using a cardboard box with an opening in the front that displayed a paper scroll filled with my tale in bright crayon about a bionic flea. Sometimes as I was walking to school I broke into a run.

  There was a brief moment in time when it seemed the answer to everything was Yes. Anyone could burst into bloom. You didn’t have to be among the few and chosen. Randy Jones—junk-ball-tossing Randy Jones, pale-skinned bozo-haired Randy Jones, thin-lipped dough-faced Randy Jones, Randy Jones in his Padres fast-food uniform, surrounded by feckless Padres teammates and empty seats and the blissfully indifferent blue of a Padres sky—was every bit as good as Jim Palmer.

  Our classroom was located in the East Randolph elementary school, and kids from the regular classes made fun of us. The general gist of the taunting was that we were retarded. One day as I was leaving the general store with a pack of cards a couple kids my age from a regular class fell in behind me. One of them, Muskrat, started making marching sounds in time to my steps.

  “Hu-lef, hu-lef, hu-lef rah lef.”

  “Hey, doofus,” the second one, Denny, said. “How many hours in a day?”

  “Hey, yeah,” Muskrat said. “How many days in a week?”

  “He doesn’t know. They don’t know shit.”

  “Hey, how do you spell dog? How do you spell cat?”

  “Why is your hair so curly and long?” Denny said. “You must be a woman.”

  “Why are you a woman?” Muskrat said.

  Sometimes a pack of cards couldn’t do much for you. Sometimes it was full of nothing but guys you already had and checklists and highlights and league leaders. Sometimes when you got home and opened it you wished that you had picked a different pack from the box in the store. But what else was there to do? Dump the doubles onto the doubles pile, glare at the checklists, and try to learn something—you were always free to learn something—from the drab highlights and leaders.

  Later in 1976, the magic dissipated for Randy Jones. He didn’t get close to 30 wins and never finished another season with more wins than losses. Meanwhile, Jim Palmer, shown in the 1976 Victory Leaders card without headgear for no apparent reason other than to display that his flowing blow-dried hair is spectacularly superior to Jones’s cap-crushed rusted Brillo, continued tanly vying for Cy Young awards, breezing into the playoffs, and posing for lucrative underwear ads. To this day, I find myself wishing what Randy Jones seems to be wishing—that he could somehow cross over from his photo to the golden realm of the AL Victory Leader and kick Jim Palmer in his Jockey-shorted nuts.

  Topps 1976 #122 Mike Cosgrove

  In a 1975 card that I had gotten just a few months earlier than the 1976 card shown here, a much younger looking Mike Cosgrove had oozed easy confidence, his body communicating looseness and ease, the natural balanced grace of a lefty. He stared directly at the viewer, a trace of a small, confident smile on his unblemished face, his hair straight and blond like a sun-drenched surf bum’s. The back of the card contained the story of his quick rise through the minors, including the season he fanned 231 batters in 172 innings. After that he began splitting time between the minors and the majors, finally spending the majority of a season in the big leagues during the final campaign listed, 1974. Below the line for that year is a statement of praise and hope: “Mike became lefty ace of Astros’ bullpen in 1974 & may be starter in 1975.”

  But just one year later, Mike Cosgrove no longer looks directly at the viewer. He’s no longer young. The bill of his cap is misshapen, as if it has been mangled by bullies or forgotten in the rain. He wears badges of desperation indigenous to his awkward, searching decade: a perm, a dust-thin mustache. Behind him, simultaneously claustrophobic and vast, loom the unmistakable high stands of a major league stadium. He has made it; there is no joy. On the back of his card, all traces of his minor league successes have been expunged, leaving only the thin gruel of a big league mop-up man destined to vanish from the game altogether before next season’s set of baseball cards hits the stores.

  A friend of Mom and Tom’s from New Jersey came to visit, a woman who brought her two daughters along. She’d just gotten a divorce. She and her ex-husband had been among the people who’d put ski masks on and kidnapped Tom on his birthday. Throughout the visit, she cried a lot and played side one of The Band over and over until I wanted to murder whoever was responsible for “Rag, Mama, Rag.”

  “It’s so beautiful up here,” she said to my mom.

  “It’s not like we thought,” Mom said. “It’s really hard.”

  “You’re so lucky,” the woman said.

  “I don’t paint anymore,” Mom said.

  The woman slept on the couch with the television on and her daughters slept in our room. They were the same ages as Ian and me but seemed older and wiser. Ian played Truth or Dare with them. I didn’t want to play. It scared me. I pretended to go to sleep.

  “How come he won’t play?” the younger girl said.

  “He’s a baby,” Ian said.

  The days started getting shorter. I had gone through the whole summer of 1976 and hadn’t gotten a Carl Yastrzemski card. I decided to write him a letter. I told him the Red Sox were my favorite team and he was my favorite player, then I asked him for his autograph.

  I sealed and stamped the letter and took it out to our aluminum mailbox, flipping up the red metal flag to signal the mailman. Later in the day, when I saw that the flag was back down, evidence that the mailman had made his daily visit in the four-wheel-drive Subaru required for rural Vermont postal delivery, gravity loosened its hold just a little. My letter was on its way to Yaz!

  In a certain way my real life began that day, my life in the world. Up to that point I had never wanted anything beyond what was close at hand, beyond my family, my home, my town. I began waiting for something more. The leaves started dying. Everything was going from before to after.

  Instead of an encouraging personalized line of text below the numbers on the back of Mike Cosgrove’s 1976 card, as there had been the year before, there is this non-sequitur: “At the turn of the century the Chicago Cubs were known as the Colts.” In the photo on the front of the card, it’s tempting to think the scattered figures in the distance are heckling the man in the extreme foreground, that scorn from strangers could be the cause of the complicated expression on Mike Cosgrove’s face. But they are just as likely to be talking about how the Cubs used to be known as the Colts as they are to be talking about, let alone bothering to mock, Mike Cosgrove. They really have nothing to do with the likes of Mike Cosgrove. The vague repulsion or sour apprehension rippling his pasty features is his alone, the light from the dirty neon of the pawnshop within.

  Topps 1978 #437: Bo McLaughlin

  Everybody was going from before to after. Everybody had a look on their face like they’d just caught a whiff of a nearby landfill. Everybody was ambivalent about the length of their hair. Everybody was aging in regrettable ways. Everybody dabbled in jogging and chanting and cocaine. Everybody went back and fo
rth from having a regular job to laying on rusty lawn furniture all afternoon unemployed. Everybody bought their children faulty mood rings and overly cheerful sex education handbooks. Everybody began wondering how to file for divorce. Everybody was a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. Everybody wore rainbow colors and succumbed to depression. Everybody was kung fu fighting. Everybody was Bo McLaughlin.

  Topps 1976 #150: Steve Garvey

  Everybody except Steve Garvey.

  In 1975, Sports Illustrated featured a picture of Steve Garvey on the cover. In just a couple weeks, Saigon would fall, closing the book on America’s disastrous military involvement in Vietnam and seeming to clinch the 1970s as a decade immune to American heroics. The year before, as the American president was being forced from office for criminally subverting democracy, the handsome, clean-cut, future Sports Illustrated cover subject became the first baseball player voted on to the All-Star Team as a write-in candidate. Democracy was dead? Long live democracy!

  “Steve Garvey: Proud to be a hero,” the cover caption read.