Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  How could they let this happen to them? I still wondered sometimes, unable to get them out of my mind. Why didn’t they fight back?

  I’ve learned some things since then. I learned that my father’s oldest brother, Joe, joined the Navy soon after Pearl Harbor and saw heavy combat in the South Pacific. I learned my father’s other brother, Dave, joined the Navy too, as soon as he was old enough, and when my father was old enough he also joined. There is a picture from that time of my grandma with my father and my uncle Joe, both home on leave. My uncle looks Dick Sharon-dashing in his tailored sailor uniform, while my daydreaming scholar father, barely out of his teens, looks in his baggy ill-fitting standard-issue sailor uniform like he is moments away from stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk. In between them stands my grandma, low and thick, indestructible. She had raised the family by herself, her husband unable to contribute even before he wound up floating in the East River. I can’t begin to imagine what it was like to experience the hardships she had to go through, somehow soldiering on with love. Fighting back.

  As for my dad, the war ended before he saw combat, but he tells a story about a camp boxing match in which he was pitted against the largest man on the base. He suspects that anti-Semitism was behind the obvious mismatch, the matchmakers hoping to enjoy a nice quick Kike beating. He never saw the first punch. One moment he was standing there and the next moment he was on the ground. He got up. Soon he was on the ground again. He got up. Then he was staring at the lights above the ring again. He got up. Down again. He got up. Someone finally stepped in and ended the match because my father would not stop fighting.

  One evening not that long ago, I got my father talking some more about his father. As is often the case in these instances of me learning about my father’s past, a mostly empty bottle of wine was on the table between us.

  “He liked to visit different synagogues,” my father said. One day my grandfather took my father to a synagogue that he had heard was beautiful. I was stunned by this. I’d never imagined that my grandfather, who had only ever existed in my mind as a distant, silent, frightening absence, could be drawn to beauty. Even more amazing was that he might want to share, and be capable of sharing, this beauty with his son.

  “I remember the way the light was streaming in through the windows,” my father told me softly. “The whole room was flooded with it . . .” His voice trailed off. He was thinking, remembering, carefully choosing what to pass on to me. I leaned close. I saw a little boy holding his father’s hand, bathed in light.

  Topps 1980 #445: Mark Fidrych

  Since we got only three channels in East Randolph—ABC, CBS, and the punishingly boring PBS—the NBC network always had an air of mystery and excitement to me. Once every several months it briefly flickered into something other than a swarm of hornets in a snowstorm, the most prolonged instance of this when my brother and I, praying throughout like mediums trying to sustain contact with the dead, were able to understand most of the proceedings in an extremely fuzzy broadcast of Super Bowl XIII. But Quark, Land of the Lost, Chico and the Man, and the rest of NBC’s lineup existed as magical but almost completely indecipherable whispers from another dimension, one that I assumed was better than my own.

  Because we didn’t get NBC, which televised the Game of the Week every Saturday, I saw even less baseball than I otherwise might have. Sometimes I was able to catch This Week in Baseball on Sunday, but I could never get a handle on when it was going to air. I believe that the first time I ever heard of Mark Fidrych was on one of those lucky Sundays when I happened upon TWIB. A glimpse of him was like a glimpse of everything I thought I was missing. All the shows I could never see. All the cards I’d never get. All the channels that would never come in. Here it all was, suddenly coming into focus in one magnetic figure.

  Soon after the TWIB feature, I was lucky enough to witness Fidrych spreading his wings in real time, by virtue of a now-famous Monday Night Baseball game in Detroit between the Tigers and the New York Yankees. I can’t write well enough to capture the beauty of his performance that night. I know that whenever I see it now, replayed in part or in full amid a television sports landscape glutted with every televised game you could ever want, I can’t help laughing. And at the end, when he waves to the adoring crowd showering down their grateful love in roaring waves, I can’t help crying, either.

  In 1976, the year Mark Fidrych became the all-time single-season leader in joy, my mother decided to start a business. The pure version of the back-to-the-land scenario had been that we would grow most of our food in a garden and raise sheep for meat and wool, and Tom would help get us whatever else we needed by making money or getting things in trade by being a blacksmith. But the blacksmith thing hadn’t worked out, and our garden forever remained a stubborn, miserly provider, and our sheep herd was rarely able to expand beyond its usual population of one: Virginia, the fat, friendly ewe who was more like a family pet than the vital cog of a livestock operation. We needed to buy food like everyone else. So, slowly, the adults in my house entered the so-called real world.

  This is what everyone has to do, right? You can’t be a child forever. You have to slice that part of yourself away and put on a uniform of some sort, whether it’s official or unofficial, and punch that clock. Is there a way to do this and still hang on to a wider sense of the world?

  My mother believed so. She painted on a rectangular board a more colorful, warmly cartoonish version of our house and of the road, Route 14, winding past it. Above the portrait she painted “Studio 14.” She and Tom hung the sign outside, announcing to the world that we were now in business. Looking at the sign, the bright colors, the cartoonish simplicity and warmth, it was difficult to tell what kind of business it was, or even that it was a business at all.

  Many of the stories about Mark Fidrych focused on his antics—how he often bounded over to a teammate to slap him on the back after a good play, how he got down on his knees like a gardener to groom the mound, and, most notably, how he talked to the ball as if it were a friendly little creature capable of listening to and carrying out his gentle instructions. But he wasn’t just a curiosity, a novelty. He kicked ass. He worked fast and threw everything hard, at the knees, and he couldn’t ever really be touched. That Monday night game against the Yankees, he dominated the team that would eventually win the American League pennant. Afterward, Yankees captain Thurman Munson would grumble that the rookie pitcher was a showboat. But Munson was just slow to get what everyone would eventually come to understand—even the gruff Munson, who became friendly with the Bird when they formed the starting battery in the 1976 All-Star Game: Mark Fidrych simply couldn’t hide his love for the game.

  Hey, you don’t have to hide your love away! You don’t have to be dour. You don’t have to pretend you don’t care.

  In saying all this, Mark Fidrych forever became for me everything good from the decade of my childhood. He’s the Pet Rock, the mood ring, the CB radio. He’s the Six Million Dollar Man battling Sasquatch, Kool-Aid smashing through a wall, Fat Albert and the Gang banging on trashcans. He’s SpaghettiOs and Oreos and Quik. He’s a pack of smiling yahoos spilling out of a customized van in a cloud of smoke, Foghat blaring. He’s Doug Henning and the Banana Splits and Dynamite magazine. He’s Alfred E. Neuman. He’s that moment when you start laughing and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to stop.

  One day I was out in the driveway, throwing a tennis ball at the strike zone my brother had duct-taped to the garage door. A man walked by the house and asked about the Studio 14 sign in the yard.

  “Is that like Studio 54?” he said.

  Though I didn’t understand what he was talking about, his question may have been the first contact I made with that quintessential product of the 1970s, disco.

  Not long after that, my brother, my mom, and I were walking around the streets of a nearby town that actually had more than just one general store. We saw a copy of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in a store window. We went into t
he store and my mother asked for the record, but the only copy left was the one in the window. She convinced the store owner to sell us that one.

  It was an unusual purchase. Previously, both my brother and I had begun to own our own records, a consumerist action that would eventually eclipse even that of owning baseball cards. But this time we were all in it together. When we got home, we went to the living room to hear the record for the first time, together. But the record had been damaged by sitting in sun in the store window. The needle bounded rapidly across the warped surface. There was no music, just a few truncated, pulsing yelps.

  For a short while, the colors from my mother’s paintbrushes began sprouting up in various places in and around our town. She made big, vibrant signs for a food co-op and a restaurant and a thrift store. She made smaller, less flashy signs for an office complex and a tiny law school.

  The man who ran the law school became a repeat customer, but he would always neglect to pay for a sign until he’d badgered my mother into starting a new sign. After a while, my mother began avoiding his calls. I suppose the situation called for action on my mother’s part that was squarely in that dour realm of business. No action was taken, besides the instruction to me that if I answered the phone and it was the law school guy, I had to tell him that she wasn’t home.

  This may not have been the beginning of the end of the sign-painting business, but it was at least concurrent to the beginning of the end. Spreading colors all over central Vermont was one thing. Collecting from deadbeats, telling deadbeats no: that was something else entirely.

  In the picture on my 1980 Mark Fidrych card, the Bird attempts to simultaneously hide and caress a baseball in his hands as if cradling a terminally ill pet in a veterinary waiting room. He is four years and several trips to the disabled list removed from whispering brilliance into a baseball. The marginalia on the back of this card clings desperately to that year like a profoundly lonely middle-aged man still masturbating to the image of a beautiful woman he somehow lucked into a brief fling with the summer after college ended. Fidrych’s Rookie of the Year award for 1976 is mentioned, as is his 2 innings pitched in the 1976 All-Star Game, and the space-filling cartoon along the left-hand border features a baseball player, generic except for the curly Fid-fro billowing out from under the hat, holding a giant trophy entitled “1976 MAJOR LEAGUE MAN OF THE YEAR,” an award I’ve never heard of. The statistics alone are left to tell about the other years: in 1977 he pitched in only 11 games; the next year he pitched in only 3; and in 1979, the last season listed on the back of this card, Fidrych pitched his fewest innings yet, just 15, losing 3 games, winning none, and getting battered for 17 runs, all earned. In this 1980 card, he seems to have literally signed his name as “Mush.”

  What do you do when the thing you value most slips out of reach? I remember a sign my mother made for a small recording studio, near the end, after it was clear that the sign business was going to fail. She took a long time on the sign, using many drawings to plan it out, then painstakingly transferring her design to a thick slab of wood that Tom cut into a circle. Tom also sandblasted the design Mom had created of a sun with a wise-looking, calmly joyful face in the middle of the circle so that the sun became three-dimensional. Mom painted the sun with gold-leaf paint, and when the sign was finally finished it glowed. I loved it. A photo of it appeared among a bunch of signs with an honorable mention designation in a sign-painting magazine my mother subscribed to for a while. Some years later, someone stole it, part of a larger gradual disappearance of my mother’s bright signs from the world.

  What do you do when the thing you value most starts slipping out of reach? There’s a YouTube video of Mark Fidrych pitching in a minor league game long after his summer of joy. He was far removed from being the most famous athlete in the country, the Rolling Stone cover boy, far removed from having electric stuff, far removed in every way from being an elite athlete (when he records the final out he stumbles to the ground like a rec league player who’s downed a six of Strohs during the game). But he knows how sweet it is to be in the game, to be on a team, and to be on a team lucky enough to win that day. He doesn’t shrug off the victory as if a minor league win is somehow below him. He is happy and, since happiness only exists when shared, he immediately shares that happiness with his teammates, bounding into the scrum of minor league nobodies. He was always this way, even at the height of his fame. We did it, he always seemed to be saying, thanking as many people as he could, not merely slapping backs and palms but reaching out to everyone and hanging on.

  Topps 1976 #199: N.L. Victory Leaders

  One night Mom and Tom went out, leaving my brother in charge. The phone in the kitchen rang. I got out of the hammock in the living room and went to the kitchen. I answered like I was J.J. Walker.

  “Chello,” I said.

  “We’re gonna come and get you,” a low voice whispered. Click. A few seconds later the phone rang again.

  “Gonna mess. You. Up.” Click.

  I called to my brother, who was watching The Incredible Hulk. When the phone rang again we got close and held the phone so both of us could hear.

  “We know you’re all alone,” the voice said. “Gonna kill you.”

  “Hey, you listen—” my brother said, but the line was already dead.

  “What are we gonna do?” I said. I looked out the window, into the dark. You couldn’t see anything but the low branches of the front yard tree waving in the wind like a maniac.

  My brother yanked a meat cleaver out of a drawer. He stalked around the house with it and checked that all the windows and doors were locked. He turned the sound on the television down. He came back to the kitchen and sat ramrod straight on a chair near the phone and stared out the window into the darkness, the handle of the meat cleaver in one of his fists, the blade sticking up straight like he was holding a flag at a parade. I sat a few feet away at the bottom of the stairs, holding my aching stomach with both arms. You could still sort of hear the Hulk throwing guys around and then the piano when it was time for David Banner to sadly move on again but mostly the only sound was wind rattling the branches of the trees. Every once in a while a car approached, the headlights attached to a volume knob of pain in my stomach.

  “I hope they fucking try,” my brother said.

  Another night I woke up halfway and could feel things starting to go bad. It always started the same way, my night terrors, with me coming half-awake and sensing that things were wrong and getting worse by the second. My brother was still up, reading, even though it was late, which meant that Mom and Tom weren’t back from another evening out. I called my brother’s name.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  I climbed down the ladder of the loft bed Tom had built for me, past the Nerf hoop Tom had screwed to left post, past the speakers he’d mounted that played my Kiss records, past the Victory Leaders card—my only card that showed Andy Messersmith—that I’d taped to the right post. My breathing was getting more rapid and shallower. My heart was starting to race. I could feel it all about to start, and once it started it wouldn’t stop.

  “Hey,” my brother said. He sat up in bed, pulling the covers along with him. He had a book in his lap.

  “How about a little Kirk and Spock?” he said. Before waiting for an answer he started reading. It was one of his Star Trek novels by James Blish. I held on to the ladder to my loft bed for a while as he read. I recognized the characters. The story was unfamiliar, but after a while I started to get interested. There were two Spocks. One was real. One was just a mistake. I went and sat in the space my brother had cleared beside him on his bed. He kept reading until my eyelids grew heavy. I got up and climbed my loft bed ladder past the Victory Leaders featuring Andy Messersmith. Ian started reading to himself again. I was sleepy but still scared, the OK world a trembling curtain that could lift at any moment to show me the awful infinity.

  “Hey, Ian,” I said.

  In the fall, on Sundays, we watched the Dall
as Cowboys games they showed on CBS, which because we couldn’t get NBC were the only games available to us besides the other CBS standby, the morose, colorless Joe Pisarcik-led New York Giants. After the Cowboys games we went outside and threw a football around. My brother was Roger Staubach and I was Tony “Thrill” Hill. When it was my turn to be Roger Staubach, my brother was Drew Pearson.

  “I’ll be Preston Pearson now,” I said after a Drew Pearson score by my brother. Preston was a backup but sometimes came in and made tough, gutsy, backup-guy plays.

  “Whatever,” Ian said. “Who even cares? This is baby stuff.”

  “I’ll do a buttonhook and then shake it and bake it the rest of the way,” I said, pointing vaguely to where I’d be making my route.

  “Whoopee,” Ian droned. Just before I hiked him the ball he added, “Preston Pearson isn’t Drew Pearson’s brother, you know. He’s not anything.”

  “I know that,” I said, but I didn’t and was disappointed. I had loved the idea that two brothers could be on the same team. My shotgun hike didn’t even reach him, then I tripped a little when I started running. Ian’s pass was too hard and bounced off my chest.

  “Flag on the play?” I asked, rubbing where the ball hit.

  “I am fucking bored!” my brother yelled up at the gray sky. I knew what was next.

  “Go down there,” Ian said, pointing. I picked up the ball and walked it to the far end zone, which was just the grass in front of the electric fence that kept the sheep in. Ian moved as far away from me as he possibly could and still be on our property. His back was to the road. I punted the ball as hard as I could but it only got about halfway to him. He ran toward it and picked it up just before it would have stopped rolling. I ran toward him, since I was supposed to try to tackle him now. When we came together I grabbed at him and he shoved me to the ground and went on to score. He spiked the ball and it bounced crazily through the electric fence and into the sheep meadow. I walked toward the road as my brother carefully stepped over the electric fence to retrieve the ball. It was getting darker. He kicked the ball all the way to me and it punched me in the ribs on the way to the grass. I picked it up and started running. Halfway down the yard, I tried to do a Tony Dorsett juke but my brother grabbed me and flung me down, ripping the ball out of my hands. I watched him run away from me for another touchdown.