Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  I don’t know what he did beyond that. There were never any signs that he had a social life. During each of the yearly visits Ian and I made to see him in New York, there would always come a moment when he’d stare at us across the table of a Bun-N-Burger or Chock Full o’ Nuts.

  “How’s your mom?” he would ask.

  On some level I understood he was waiting for her, like an aging veteran who’d been demoted to the minors, hoping in spite of his ballooning ERA and diminishing innings for the call from the big club once again.

  Once, not so long ago, I got him talking about those years. What got him through? We were out at a restaurant, a bottle of wine on the table, almost gone. He stared past me, a Lindbladian wince rippling momentarily across his features. He shook his head and his expression flattened.

  “I absorbed myself in my work,” he said.

  I absorbed myself in my cards. I absorbed myself in the sameness of them, even as the sameness began to show signs that it was an illusion.

  By the time I got my penultimate Paul Lindblad card, in 1977, the clean-cut pitcher was still pictured in an Oakland A’s uniform, left behind in the green and gold by most of his championship-winning teammates. The expression on his face in that card suggests that he senses the end in Oakland is coming for him too. By the time the card came out, Paul Lindblad had been sold to the Texas Rangers.

  And the next year, finally, Paul Lindblad was in a new uniform, far away from his normal team, far away from championships. Worst of all, he now had a mustache. The only remaining constant, his expression of melancholy confusion, was no longer the humorous center of comforting sameness but a jittery undertone revealing everything to be a temporary disguise.

  Right around that time, funding was rescinded for the research project my father had absorbed himself in for several years. In such a world where the very ground can be pulled from beneath you, where your team can be taken away, where your family can be taken away, where the job that absorbs you can be lost, certain personal choices turn out to be all you really have left. They are the only things you can control. And yet, they are pointless, absurd. To grow a mustache or not to grow a mustache, that is the question. The implied answer—What’s the difference?—lingers on the horizon like some kind of soundless cosmic tornado with the power to level your world.

  Topps 1977 #418: White Sox Team Card

  I was walking to the general store one day to buy more baseball cards, and a girl who lived in a house on the way came out onto her lawn as I was passing by. Her name was Donna and she was a couple years older than me. It was a quiet summer day—the buzz of insects, my sneakers scuffling along in the gravel. That’s about it. I must have been wearing my green little league cap, which I wore all the time.

  “Hey,” Donna said. “Only faggots wear green on Thursday.”

  Embarrassment. It was like a contagious disease in the 1970s. Call it the Age of Embarrassment. Everything was unfathomable, bulging, lopsided, upside down. The first president of the decade was revealed to be a paranoid criminal and had to quit, disgraced. He was replaced by a guy known for being ineffectual and tripping over things. The replacement lost his reelection bid to a peanut farmer who revealed more than anyone wanted to know in an interview in Playboy, admitting he had “lust in his heart.” Later, in a nationally televised speech, the embarrassingly frank president described America’s “erosion of confidence”; in his estimation the whole country by the end of the 1970s was demoralized and ashamed, as if it were somehow channeling from sea to shining sea the cringe-shouldered stoop of a reedy-voiced chronic teenage masturbator.

  One reason I loved being in little league as much as I’ve ever loved being a part of anything was that there were uniforms. At the little league game, you knew what you were supposed to wear. Outside of little league, there were all these secret rules. You wear the wrong thing and you might be a faggot.

  Not that I knew what a faggot was. But I knew it wasn’t good. It sounded weak and broken, something to be spit on and kicked into the woods. Because I didn’t know what it was made it even worse, actually, adding to the general unease about the unknown rules of the world. I had this problem with other words, too. Whore, for example. There was one tough kid in the town, Mike, the son of the owner of the general store, who expressed his frequent loss of temper by calling whoever was pissing him off a whore, which I imagined to be a creature similar to a horse but meaner, a little stunted, scarred, vaguely carnivorous. Pussy was another of my problem words. During one walk to the store for cards, some kids surrounded me and asked me if I knew what a pussy was.

  “A kitty?” I said.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” they said.

  “All right, pudlips,” one of them finally said, “go run back home now.”

  “Yeah, go back and play with yourself,” another one said.

  “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” they said. I didn’t understand what was so funny about playing with myself. When my brother wouldn’t play with me I made up little solitary games all the time. Was there something wrong with this, too?

  I became a fan of Harriet the Spy around then. I loved the idea that the mysterious world could be rationally plumbed for clues by a kid, that an actual understandable story could be pried from its generally unfathomable depths. I went out one afternoon as if I were taking my usual walk to the general store to buy baseball cards, but in fact I had equipped myself with some of the tools used by Harriet. I had a notebook and pencil to write down clues, and I’d hung a flashlight and a magnifying glass from my belt. My plan was to walk around until I saw something happening inside one of the houses in the town, then I was going to creep up to a window and look in, and a whole mesmerizing adventure would ensue. But I walked up and down the road peeking in windows and couldn’t see anything going on anywhere, just one man with gray hair sitting at a table eating cold ravioli from a can. Eventually, I started pretending I was on the trail of something instead of walking up and down the road for no reason. I switched on my flashlight and tried to shine it on the roadside gravel, but it was too bright to really see the beam.

  “Hey, faggot,” a kid said. It was the older brother of the kid who said whore. He was standing on the other side of the road from me. “Why you using a flashlight with the sun friggin’ shining?”

  By my calculations my brother probably started to edge into puberty in 1976, right around the time the photo on the 1977 White Sox team card was taken. Perhaps he got his first pubic hair on August 8, 1976, when White Sox players plied their trade in front of their competitors, the media, and 15,997 paying customers while dressed in wide-collared shirts and shorts. Until the time when a major league baseball team takes the field wearing flowery sleeveless summer dresses and heels, it will stand as the single most embarrassing uniform-related moment in baseball history.

  This is really saying something, especially considering the other uniforms of the decade. There were the technicolor dreamsuits of the Astros, the brown and yellow McDonald’s-cashier garb of the Padres, and the Indians’ underrated all-red migraine producers. But none of them could match the White Sox’ giant collars and knee-pants for sheer zeitgeist-embracing embarrassment.

  I can see now that embarrassment permanently burrowed down deep into my blood during those years, even though I tried to avoid contracting it by trying not to break any unknown rules. The safest way to do this was to be invisible. I could be invisible by staying at home and “playing with myself,” which at that time still meant making up imaginary games inside the house and out in our yard. If I had to venture into the world, I was usually able to will myself into invisibility. But I knew that complete invisibility was impossible, so I tried to avoid breaking any unknown rules by looking to my brother. How he dressed, how he walked, how he talked, how he acted: I aped his every move.

  Ironically, I was mimicking a boy whose own levels of personal shame were surely higher in the 1970s than mine, since he fully entered puberty during those years. Not least among his list
of embarrassments was that he had to so often resort to passing the time with his embarrassing little brother.

  In our room, I kept calling his name, holding up new baseball cards to show him. Sometimes he’d look up from his book, see the card, and smile. Sometimes he’d ignore me.

  Once, I wanted him to look up and see this card. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I needed to show him the White Sox. The giant collars. The Mickey-Mouse-ears effect of the cap-crushed Afro of the incredible Oscar Gamble in the back row. The bare knees of the White Sox players near the front. The sheer hilarity of it all. I kept calling his name, aware that I was allowing an annoying whine to seep into my voice, and he finally responded, peering up from his book with a scornful, disgusted squint, as if he were looking at a faggot.

  Topps 1975 #293: Dick Sharon

  My father didn’t know how to throw a baseball. Sometimes this struck me as an awful affliction, which spared him of any blame but made me fear that, since I shared his blood, I might wake up one day and be suddenly just as bad. Other times the all-important fact that he couldn’t throw a baseball seemed to me to be his fault.

  How could he let this happen to him? I thought. It made me angry.

  My brother often checked out large library books about World War II and left them lying around open to photos of concentration camp corpse mounds. He also bought a lot of comics set in World War II: Sgt. Rock, Sgt. Fury and His Howlin’ Commandos, Weird War Tales. Every so often the Jews would make an appearance in the panels as background for the tales of heroic American triumph, and they’d be emaciated and hollow-eyed, penned up in filthy cells or jammed like cattle into train cars or lined up meekly for the gas chamber. That’s what the Jews were, as far as I knew. Thin gray prison-clothed victims.

  How could they let this happen to them? I wondered. It made me angry. I thought about the Jewish blood inside me, courtesy of my dad.

  He visited us every couple of months. He would arrive quietly, late on a Friday, and leave quietly on a Sunday, and be quiet all the way through, a guy you’d barely even notice. His repetitive nondescript appearances were like those of the journeyman nobodies who showed up again and again in packs of cards. Doubles, we called them, even though the worst of them showed up far more than twice, eventually impressing themselves in our brains despite their apparent lack of worth, eventually gaining the power to drain the feeling of hope straight out of a pack. The king of all doubles for me was Dick Sharon, who appeared again and again and again in 1975, my first year of collecting, my first year living apart from my father, as if he were trying to tell me something, and then never returned in any later years. I held on to all those Dick Sharons as I held on to every single card that came to me, as if someday even the most useless cards might reveal a hidden value.

  Like the strip of bubble gum that always accompanied another addition to the Dick Sharon collection, large boxes of M&Ms always arrived when my father arrived, peanut for my brother and plain for me. I’d never seen the boxes outside a movie theater, so they lent an air of magic to my father that he did not otherwise possess.

  “Promise to brush your teeth afterward?” he asked before handing over the boxes.

  “OK,” we told him. We knew he didn’t have any power over what we were supposed to do.

  When I think of those visits, I think of him standing at the doorway of our room, looking in at us, at our sports posters, at the floor covered with baseball cards. I think of him not being able to think of anything to say. I think of him standing at the edge of the yard, watching us play catch. If my brother and I talked at all while playing catch, we talked about baseball, conversations my father could not have understood.

  My father’s father was a tailor from a shtetl in central Europe, where baseball didn’t exist. The tailor wed an innkeeper’s daughter in an arranged marriage, had three kids, the first dying in infancy, then fled to America to avoid conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army. He lived alone in the strange new country for several years, working in Manhattan sweatshops. He couldn’t speak the language. At some point he sustained a serious head injury. He was hit in the head during a labor struggle, either assaulted by union goons or company goons. It was a long time ago and subsequently seldom mentioned with any detail by anyone in my father’s family. The one certainty is that by the time my grandmother and Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen rejoined him in America, my grandfather was not well. He worked sporadically if at all and was profoundly withdrawn from the rest of the family, a looming, largely silent presence in the middle of a series of cramped Lower East Side tenement apartments. The living spaces became more crowded with the arrival of two more children: my uncle Dave and the baby of the family, my father.

  My father remembers very few times in which his father spoke to him. One night when my father was thirteen his father came into the room where he and my uncle Joe slept and asked him in Yiddish how he was doing in school. My father was so surprised that he couldn’t respond. Not long after that, my grandfather was found floating in the East River. My father remembers what my grandma kept repeating, angrily, after the police came to deliver the news.

  “He did it. He did it. He finally did it.”

  But all I knew when I was a kid was that my dad couldn’t throw a baseball, that he couldn’t do anything athletic. He couldn’t even run, as far as I could see. The most he would do was walk, slowly, with his hands clasped behind him like he was in one of the museums he dragged my brother and me to when we visited him. He loved to take walks and talk quietly and reverently about what he saw as the beautiful natural world all around.

  “It’s so peaceful here,” he told me once. “Such beauty.”

  “East Randolph?” I said.

  We were walking to the general store so I could buy more baseball cards. When we went inside, I pretended he was just some stranger who’d happened to come in the door right after me. I wasn’t connected to him. I wasn’t Jewish.

  By the time my father met and married a shiksa, my mom, he had become completely irreligious. There were no traces of Jewish life in my upbringing, and even if my father had lived with us I don’t think it would have been different. There were no traces of Jewish life in his tiny apartment in Manhattan, either, though I subconsciously came to think of everything in the apartment as Jewish, from the relative lack of furniture to his keeping his small black-and-white television in the closet, rarely watching it, to his crude cinder-block and board bookcases, to the yellowing Ellis Island photos in the hollow of a cinder block of his mother and father, to the persistent smell of garlic, to the giant jar of wheat germ in the refrigerator.

  Occasionally my father would take my brother and me to see his mother, our grandma, and it was like venturing to the very source of the garlicky strangeness and unfamiliarity that permeated everything in my father’s apartment, like going to the very heart of Jewness. I was frightened of her. She had a strange accent and was tiny and hunched and impossibly old. My father, perhaps wary of revealing to my brother and me that he was a good deal older than my mother, had always tried to evade our questions about his age by saying he was “a googol” (which he explained was a number far larger than a billion). It was one of those slippery pieces of childhood info that you neither fully believe nor disbelieve. But if he was a googol, his mother, the stooped woman who constantly forced mysterious and complicated Old World food on me, must have been as old as the stars.

  “Eat! Eat!” she implored. The bowl of homemade soup in her ancient veined hands roiled with thick gray noodles and gristle. I clamped my lips tight and shook my head no. No, no, no.

  When I was around her I wanted to go home. Back to my saltines and Chips Ahoys. Back to television sitcoms and baseball. Back to my painless solitary hours in my room. Back to the Nerf-soft confines of my daydreams. Back to the cardboard gods.

  I had no idea that the one god who made the most visits to me, appearing again and again as a double during 1975, as if trying to tell me something, also had a Jewish father.
I only learned that Dick Sharon and I were alike in that way years later. As far as I knew there were not, nor ever had been, Jewish baseball players. I knew from studying the baseball encyclopedia who Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg were, but I didn’t know they were Jewish. From what I’d seen from my father, Jews couldn’t throw a baseball and were also generally uncoordinated and pale. You’d hear them from time to time slipping and falling in the bathtub. They drove cars slowly and jerkily, their citified shoulders tensed. They listened to classical music and wore thick glasses and button-down shirts and ties. They had jobs with titles so long they were impossible to understand.

  They were certainly not the dashing figure in the Tigers uniform that visited me again and again in 1975. Dick Sharon’s chiseled jaw, his drooping Marlboro Man ‘stache, his steely gaze and swaggering body language and smile: They all exude dashing athletic aptitude and confidence. On the back of the card, Sharon is described as a “sure-handed flyhawk.” I doubt I understood what this meant, but it probably sounded to me like something that could have been used to describe one of Sgt. Rock’s brave men of Easy Company or one of Sgt. Fury’s colorful Howlin’ Commandos. I focused my twisted attention on imagined heroes battling for victory and glory. In these imaginings the Jews were barely there at all, just figures in the background, weak and capitulatory. I tried to believe I had nothing to do with them.