Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  Mick was revered as a great teacher of sports, especially baseball. His little league team was always getting the jump on everybody else, having preseason training camps inside gymnasiums during those never-ending weeks in Vermont when the calendar says spring but snow and freezing rain keep pounding down. Mick was dedicated, even umpiring all the games his team wasn’t playing in, which probably also allowed him to probe for weaknesses among the opposition. Contrary to the clichéd image of the dominant, red-faced, win-at-all-costs little league dictator, Mick was actually quite soft-spoken and mild, though he also was able to carry an air of authority about him. I was far from the only kid who wasn’t on his team who wished he was.

  But the real key to his success, at least in the commonly held view, which mixed admiration with envy, was that unlike other little league managers who just picked names out of a hat when it came time to draft new nine-year-olds every year, Mick “scouted.” I was never exactly sure what this scouting entailed, but I envisioned Mick pulling up to playgrounds, his car idling as he looked out from beneath his cool big league flip-down sunglasses in hopes of spotting some natural talent. I’d often wished that I’d been one of his finds.

  Yes, much later, long after I’d moved away from that town, Mick was imprisoned for molesting one of his little league players. He had been victimizing children for many years, all the way back to my time. In fact, when I was in seventh grade there was a rumor that a kid on my terrible basketball team, let’s call him Wayne, had claimed that while on a camping trip with Mick he’d been woken in the middle of the night by the sensation of the coach’s mouth on his dick.

  “No way,” I said to this nauseating rumor.

  “Wayne’s a liar!” said another kid hearing the rumor for the first time.

  “Wayne is so full of shit his eyes are brown,” another kid agreed.

  The whole thing was just impossible. Mick was the best!

  Mick never asked me to come on one of his camping trips, a stroke of good fortune that I attribute to my ineptitude. He was drawn to good athletes. Wayne was a good athlete. And the one time Mick did do something to me that felt odd was late in that winless seventh-grade season, right after I’d stumbled into an impersonation of a good athlete and sunk two shots in a row. Mick subbed for me after my second basket and sat down next to me as play resumed. He was beaming.

  “You’re doing great, Josh, just excellent,” he said, which felt good. I wasn’t exactly amassing a giant stockpile of praise elsewhere in my life. As Mick spoke he let his hand fall on my bare leg. He kept it there after he’d finished talking. While watching the action on the court, he gave my thigh two long, ardent squeezes.

  Not that I knew the word ardent at that time. In fact, I couldn’t have put any words at all to that moment. Darryl Dawkins had a name for each and every one of his world-rocking dunks. I didn’t have a name for anything. I didn’t take any more shots that game, and when I got home the only thing I told anyone was that we lost.

  1980 Topps #697 David Clyde

  Earlier that season, before I knew for sure that we were never going to win, my team got off to a shaky but not utterly hopeless start in an opponent’s cold, near-empty gym. It was a Saturday morning. For some reason Mick wasn’t there to coach us that day. Maybe his eighth-grade team, a much more successful squad, had a game somewhere else. The young guy who filled in for him, Duncan, was in his early twenties. Like the young man pictured on this baseball card, Duncan had a sparse mustache and a dazed, faintly melancholy air. As he stared out at the action, he kept gumming his mustache with his lower lip, as if to keep making sure it hadn’t evaporated. If he was anything like I would be when I got to be that age, he had taken up residence in the tenuous shadowlands of maybe. Maybe everything will be OK. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe what’s gone can return.

  Maybe in this baseball card a painted backdrop of a fake blue sky was wheeled in to cover the mildewed bricks of a windowless room deep within the Cleveland Indians’ spring training barracks. Maybe this room was where the oft-disabled former number one draft pick David Clyde preferred to endure his daylight hours. Maybe the backdrop belonged to a photographer who, until his struggling business began cracking under the weight of unwholesome rumors that included the word statutory, made his living creating disquietingly impassioned portraits of high school seniors. Maybe the photographer had fled to Arizona with a U-Haul full of his yearbook-picture backdrops to start anew, and to avoid temptation he had steered clear altogether of wistful teenagers, instead picking up freelance work involving the negligible subjects that the pensioned, fully vested Topps photographers preferred to avoid.

  When he was young, David Clyde, nationwide high school sensation, had been the opposite of a subject to avoid. He had been a sure thing, literally unbeatable, 18-0 his senior year, his left arm like something out of an old Greek myth, golden, invincible, blessed by the gods. The media swarmed. The scouts came running. But then for many years he knew little but disappointment, pain, unstoppable descent. Maybe he knew at the time this photo was taken that it was over, that he had already pitched his last major league game. Maybe on the other hand he was thinking that maybe everything would be OK. Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe what’s gone can return.

  Maybe after the shoot he and the photographer gravitated toward one another, as those reduced to maybes sometimes do. Maybe they went for beers and shots at the topless joint out by the abandoned A&W on the frontage road. Maybe they knew enough to stay silent throughout, neither asking the other any questions about the past.

  Early in the second quarter, just after the teams switched baskets, Duncan called a timeout. We huddled around him. He lower-lipped his mustache while looking over our heads and up at the scoreboard.

  “Things are starting to get away from us,” he said. “But look. We’ve still got a shot, maybe.” When he lowered his gaze from the scoreboard, his eyes happened to fall on me, and they stayed on me as he said, “But we’ve got to make something happen right now.”

  I understood he would have looked at someone else if he’d known anything about our team, but it still made me feel good that he addressed his words to me. I stared back at him and nodded. The buzzer sounded. A thought occurred to me as I retook the court. It made my whole body tingle.

  Maybe we can win.

  The ref handed my teammate Chris the ball and Chris slapped it with his right hand, a signal to the rest of us to start milling around, pretending we had set plays. In a rare burst of on-court assertiveness, I cut hard to my left, breaking free of the listless scrum of bodies near the center jump circle. I caught the inbounds pass in stride and started dribbling toward the wide-open hoop. I had not yet scored the first basket of my career in organized ball, so as I dribbled a kind of joy bubbled up through my rib cage and into my throat.

  Previous to that moment there had only been an aimless Saturday morning murmur of voices in the gym. Suddenly the murmur spiked, went weird. I’d never heard the sound before and hope to never hear it again: A generalized, ingrown gasp, like a note from a choir on a record played backward. I pressed onward, dribbling, still preposterously open, ignoring.

  I stopped just inside the foul line and hoisted the side-holstered push shot that all kids use before they get the hang of a real jump shot. Improbably, the basketball grazed the inside of the rim and nestled through the net. The strange sound that had risen up all around me ceased. I turned, smiling, expecting to see my teammates smiling back. Jesus, the look on their faces. The look on Duncan’s face. My own smile congealed. The players on the other team stared one more beat, still stunned, then started spasming with laughter. Eventually the scoreboard operator, also laughing, added the tally to the swelling number beneath the word HOME.

  Topps 1980 #169: Luis Gomez

  Is life a battle between good and evil or an inconsequential rest stop between oblivions? Consider Luis Gomez, the expansion team bench-warmer, waiting slack-armed for his turn in the batting cage, where he will like
ly have only enough time to practice bunting before a Blue Jay regular commands him to step aside. As he waits for this truncated, ignominious turn, two blurry figures hover above his narrow shoulders, each figure perfectly positioned to whisper into an ear. But what could these indistinct spirits possibly have to say to Luis Gomez? In his eight-year major league career, the utility infielder batted .210 with a .261 on-base percentage and a .239 slugging percentage. He never hit a home run. He stole 6 bases but was thrown out trying to steal 22 times. Once he was called on to pitch in a bullpen-savaging blowout. He gave up three runs in one inning. In his final game he batted eighth in the order, just above the pitcher’s spot, for a lineup that was one-hit by Mario Soto. The last of Gomez’s fruitless at bats was a pop-up that whimpered to extinction in the glove of the opposing shortstop. He stands here somewhere in the middle of that featureless career, waiting for a couple weak swings in the cage, and the two entities hovering near his ears seem incapable of making themselves understood. They will only mutter as they fade, the two voices indistinguishable from one another, no guidance, no angel and devil, no choice between paths, no paths at all, or maybe infinite paths, all of them leading to dissolution.

  Topps 1976 #550: Hank Aaron

  As I understand it, the term mint is used in the hobby of baseball card collecting to describe cards that have been utterly sheltered from life and its inevitable slide toward deterioration. There are other gradations below this topmost designation, but I doubt if there is a label far enough removed from mint to describe the select group of cards, my favorites, that I touched more than I touched anything else in my life. My incessant childhood pawings pushed these cards beyond the limits of the language of commerce, dulling and creasing their surfaces, corroding their edges, blunting their corners. In a monetary sense, these beloved cards have been nullified. Reduced to nothing. Handled too much, clung to too tightly. The absolute opposite of mint.

  These were the cards that I kept going back to. I searched for them in their rubber-band-wrapped team, needing to touch them again and again. I needed to see, and say, the hallowed names. I needed to read and further internalize the rows upon rows of hallowed numbers in tiny type. I needed to know there is greatness in the world. There are things that won’t be forgotten.

  I sensed at times that I was an infinitesimally small speck, inconsequential and frail in an unfathomably large expanse of space and time. The universe went on forever and time stretched forward and backward forever and I was an almost-nothing within it. All my cards pushed back against this almost-nothing. They were something. The final card, from 1976, of Hank Aaron, the Home Run King, was the very pinnacle of this feeling, this something. Four years after I found it in a pack, I had begun to lose my grasp on the gods. That year, 1980, would be my last full year of collecting baseball cards. But I continued to cling to Hank Aaron with all my ruinous might.

  I looked forward to little league that year more than ever. It was my last year of eligibility. It was the most important part of my life.

  A few weeks before the season started, my father gave me a diary for my twelfth birthday. The hard cover had been made to look like denim, and there were a couple of gnomes on it. In fact, it was called a Gnome Gnotebook. I thought it was stupid and babyish. Gnomes? I wanted to ask my dad if he thought I was an infant.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said.

  “You must write something every day,” he said. “The creative life is the most worthwhile existence available.”

  “OK,” I said, exactly as if I were agreeing to brush my teeth after eating a box of M&Ms. I didn’t touch the thing for weeks, until the evening after the first practice of my last season in little league. I had recently read Sparky Lyle’s hilarious book, The Bronx Zoo, which had been written in the style of a diary, and I’ve always thought that my life as a would-be writer began with me hoping that the moment I put pencil to page I’d find myself involved in uproarious locker-room cake-sitting hijinks and riveting controversies and a white-knuckled all-important struggle for a pennant. And that was and always would be a big part of it, that desire to somehow make my thin, meandering life as meaningful as something in a book. And another big part of it was having a father, and an entire family, that believed that writing something every day was worthwhile. But I think I also started writing for the same reason that the Hudson River School of painters of the nineteenth century started creating giant romantic canvases depicting untrammeled American wilderness at the very moment that wilderness was beginning to disappear.

  I don’t know the exact words I used to describe that season, because several years later, in a fit of frustration, I hurled the gnomes and all my other writing notebooks into a Dumpster. But I think my first sentence went as follows: “I couldn’t lay my glove let alone my bat on anything today.”

  Sometimes I wish I still had that Gnome Gnotebook, but it probably couldn’t tell me much I don’t already know. I know I didn’t come close to writing daily updates throughout the season, my entries tailing off the moment I realized that writing about life didn’t suddenly and automatically make it more interesting. I know the first time I ripped the Gnotebook in half was later, the following year, when for the first time I tried and failed to untangle my thoughts about a girl. I know when my junior high basketball team, bolstered by the addition of an older, bigger kid who’d been left back, finally broke through and won a game, barely, halfway through eighth grade, I cut off a small lock of my hair and taped it to a page.

  My brother, who loved Hank Aaron even more than I did, had a poster above his bed of the moment when Hank Aaron became the career major league leader in home runs. The poster showed the whole field. If I remember it correctly, the pitcher, Al Downing, was still following through, as was Hank Aaron, and the other players on the field were craning their heads to follow the path of the ball. The most memorable feature of the poster was the small white circle superimposed on the photograph to highlight the location of the ball. Without it, you wouldn’t notice the pale blur in the sky above the outfield. You wouldn’t notice the most amazing thing of all time. Sometimes you need to see the halo.

  In that last little league season of mine, the usually dominant team helmed by my seventh grade basketball coach, Mick, was suddenly awful. Mick’s Yankees had won the league title the first three years I’d been in little league, while my team, the Mets, had gone 9-6, 6-9, and 6-9, two of the losses in each of those years horrific blowouts at the hands of Mick’s crack squad. There was no mercy rule then, so they beat the shit out of us until it got too dark to see, final scores usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 37-2.

  But in my fourth and final year, another 6-9 trudge for the Mets, Mick’s team was terrible, though somehow even this got framed in professional-seeming terms, the Yankees “rebuilding” instead of just sucking. I guess Mick’s scouting had temporarily failed him. Who knows, maybe he had tried to break certain habits for a while, vowing to stay away from playgrounds. All I know, or need to know, is that we finally got our chance, for once, to kick their fucking ass. There was a moment in that ass-kicking that needs a halo.

  The first person I wanted to tell was my brother. When I got home from the game I went to find him. He was lying on his bed, reading one of his science fiction books, the Hank Aaron poster on the wall above him.

  “I did it,” I said. I was still in my uniform. I had my glove on, and I pounded it with my fist.

  “Hey!” I said. My brother looked up.

  “I did it! Against the Yankees. I smacked a fucking homer!”

  Ian’s eyes widened.

  You?

  It wasn’t the reaction I was looking for.

  “An inside-the-parker?” Ian asked.

  “No, a real one,” I said. “Gone.”

  “Wow,” Ian said. “That’s great.”

  He went back to reading. I walked to my side of the room and started unbuttoning my uniform. But then I stopped. I didn’t want to take it off. I rebuttoned the top buttons and kn
eeled down and pulled out my baseball cards. There was one in particular I wanted to see, yet again, the one with more home runs on the back of it than any baseball card had ever had.

  Since I was not as big or as good as my brother, and since I was so obviously flawed, and since I wore glasses (nobody who hit home runs wore glasses), I had always assumed that hitting a home run was beyond my reach. Though I was an okay hitter for average, I’d never even hit a ball off the fence. But my at bat against the Yankees provided the perfect storm—a straight medium-fast pitch right down the middle from a talented but undeveloped nine-year-old, Mike LaRocque, a good swing by me, perfect contact, and then about an inch clearance both over the chain-link left-field fence and to the right of the short metal foul pole. The more mythic little league heroes pounded their homers into the river a hundred feet beyond the center-field fence, but so what? If I knew anything from my baseball cards, it was that a home run was a home run.

  I didn’t really understand what had happened until I saw the infield ump circling his finger in the air. I staggered around the bases with a huge dumb grin on my face, and at home plate all my teammates mobbed me.

  If I could take one moment from my life and save it from erosion and degradation, from the diminishing repetition of need, I’d choose that at bat. I’d start the memory as I was walking toward the batter’s box and end it with me stomping on home plate as my teammates laughed and screamed and pummeled me. In other words, if I had a halo, I’d use it to mint those angelic seconds when I was Henry Louis Aaron.