Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  “Night, night, night in the ruuuts,” I sang, inventing a title track. Ian glanced at me and then moved down a couple rows. He pulled an album out and looked at the back of it. I got a glimpse of the front, which looked ugly. Down near the bottom was what looked like a shred of paper in a kidnapper’s demand note. One of the words in the shred was “Sex.”

  “Hey, what is—” I said.

  “Fuck off, huh?” Ian said. “Please?”

  Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly. As I looked to my brother to let me know which was which, my brother had begun to look to guys a year or two older than him, the members of the varsity basketball team, who had just embarked on a legendary season that would bring them all the way to the state championship game. (Ian was still on the junior varsity squad, which traveled with the varsity to all their games.) The varsity featured two brothers, the Cones, who had family in California, information that was used to explain the cutting-edge music they introduced to their teammates and that defined the clique based around the team. I assumed my flawless brother was a central figure in this clique, but since then I have come to understand differently.

  “Sometimes I still wish I could, just once, dunk on fucking Chomentowski,” Ian said years later, a hungry, pained look on his face as he named the varsity star.

  They called my brother “Head Case,” a nickname hung on him by the varsity coach, a mole-faced martinet whose voice was always hoarse from screaming. My brother was big and athletically gifted, a potential varsity star, but he had mental lapses and bursts of dubious on-court improvisation that, because they veered from the lockstep dictates of the coach’s 1950s-era “Holy Cross” offense, appeared selfish (especially since they were usually ineffective), and probably the coach believed that if he harangued and browbeat my brother enough he’d eventually become the brainless pick-setting lummox in the pivot that the coach’s antiquated vision of basketball required. The varsity guys ran with the Head Case nickname for different reasons, not really caring if the younger player developed, since they were already winning every game they played. They saw that there was something about my brother that didn’t quite fit. Maybe they noticed his growing desperation to escape the town, their town. Maybe they noticed, as I never could, that at times he could be a bullshitter.

  I think of the day he went to the Cones’ house with his Tony Alva skateboard. The Cones had built a skateboarding ramp, and I suspect that my brother, a subscriber to Skateboarder magazine, had told them on more than one occasion that he was something of a demon on a skateboard. I don’t know how I know this except maybe that my brother was unusually quiet when he came home from their house, but my feeling has always been that when he got to the Cones’ place he had to reveal that he had been blowing hot air all along. Maybe up until the moment he got to the top of the ramp he had believed, had needed to believe, that he would naturally be able to perform the acrobatic feats he’d seen guys doing in the photos in Skateboarder magazine. But while the Cones rolled up and down the ramp with lidded-eye ease, snickering, Head Case fell flat on his big-mouth face, his expensive spotless board flying out from under him.

  The Cones and the rest of the varsity had that snickering gazing-down-from-on-high attitude in general, and it and the notoriety they got for being such a successful team brought them into conflict with the nonathletes of the school, particularly those who still had shoulder-length hair and found beauty in the unironic grandeur of Arena Rock. Music defined the borderlines of this conflict, which occasionally boiled over into fistfights. If you were with the jocks, as my brother wanted to be, you better know what ruled and what rotted. You better know to snort at Night in the Ruts. And you better know your shit backward and forward about the new jagged sound the Cones were bringing back from the sophisticated distance.

  I gave my brother space in the record store, but I kept checking on his location. Eventually I looked up and didn’t see him. Had he bolted without saying anything? I was about to step out of the store to look for him out there when he emerged from a hidden corner in the back and walked past me without even a glance.

  “Hey,” I said. “Hey, Ian.”

  He left the store and started walking even faster. I followed and called his name again. I kept saying his name; he kept walking. I was a few paces behind him but I started slowing down. It was like watching a train pull away, or like my voice had been removed. Like my brother didn’t know me. A man in a light-colored suit jacket passed me, moving briskly. I watched him clap my brother on the shoulder.

  The two of them went back into the store and disappeared behind a door in the back. I followed them as far as I could and peered through a small window in the door. I could see my brother sitting in a metal chair, staring down at his knee, a cassette of Elvis Costello’s Get Happy on the table in front of him. There was a rack of posters near the door on my side and I hid my face in there, pretending to look at a Ted Nugent poster. I was crying because my brother was a stranger.

  My mother was paged on the mall intercom. She and Tom appeared. They let Mom in through the door in the back, and several minutes later she reemerged with Ian. The four of us walked through the mall toward the exit, Mom and Tom in front, me and Ian in back.

  I started to whisper a question to Ian, but before I got any further than “Why” he knocked the wind out of me with a backhand punch to the stomach.

  The varsity team won all their games until the Division II championship game at the big auditorium in Barre, when they got beat by a team—so the general thinking in my town went—that was unfairly advantaged because they “recruited,” a thinly veiled reference to the presence on the opposition of a couple of black guys. The 20-1 Randolph Galloping Ghosts of 1980-81 had a celebratory party nonetheless, and my brother went to it. I’ve heard that if either of a pair of identical twins gets hurt, the other twin will feel the pain. Nothing like this ever happened with me and my un-identical, un-twin brother, but the night of that party as I sat at home I was overwhelmed with dread for my brother. I knew something was going wrong. And though he didn’t tell me about that night for years, I eventually learned that he had drunkenly dozed off at some point only to be woken by some kind of a prank played on him by the varsity guys, I forget what, maybe something as simple as them pouring a glass of water on his head. He flew into a rage and kicked in the driver’s-side window of the car that belonged to the team’s star, Chomentowski. I can see their faces, a mix of shock and scorn.

  “What the fuck, Head Case,” one of them said, the tone conveying an unequivocal message. You will never belong.

  We were teammates that spring, my brother and I, for one last season, together on one of the town’s two Babe Ruth league teams. I was worse, relatively speaking, than I’d ever been in little league, and my brother, who had been a pitching ace, had been reduced to being an emergency starter. He had one notable moment, nearly pitching a no-hitter, but the game was against a coed team of thin, easily distractible hippie youths, and anyway he lost the no-hit bid in the last inning when one of the longhaired boys or girls stopped daydreaming long enough to loop a single just in front of the late-breaking mediocrity logging a couple pity innings in left field. I picked up the cheap hit on one bounce, already starting to replay the moment in my mind, already starting to believe I could have done more. I tossed it back in the general direction of the infield, unable to look at the tall boy on the mound.

  Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly. It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I guess. I bought a few packs of cards that year, 1981. That’s it. I thought then and I think now that the cards from that strike-marred season were the ugliest of any that have ever come to me.

  And I count this Steve Carlton card as the worst of the bunch, the ugliest card I own. It hasn’t gotten any prettier since it first came into my hands, either, especially when the beady-eyed recluse pictured in the card was quoted in a 1994 article by Pat Jordan as claiming that world events were heavily influenced by “12 Jewish bank
ers meeting in Switzerland” and that the AIDS virus was created “to get rid of gays and blacks.”

  I’m sure the moment I discovered the card its ugliness undermined any excitement at finding an All-Star in the pack. Centering the ugliness is the bright red blob mushing down one of history’s more ill-advised perms while also shadowing the sharp, avian features of the subject’s ashen face, his smile strangely off-putting, verging on an acidic grimace, his neck wrinkled, the top of his chest appearing clammy, clinging to the chafing polyester of the cheap candy-striped uniform, the blur of gray behind him less like sky than hardened Kaopectate, the drab block lettering along the top of the border sucking the joy out of the All-Star distinction it proclaims, the yellow block lettering of the player’s name along the bottom turning what could have been a moment of gleeful recognition of a superstar into a yellow-green unease.

  The bulbous, crudely rendered cap icon on the lower left, a leaden image made even less appealing by the joyless block lettering jamming the crown, helps drag the overall impression of the card into that of a senseless dumping ground. Worse, the baseball icon in the lower right—a litigious blight on the cards that season, 1981, when Topps by court order relinquished its benign monopoly—signals that everything, even baseball cards, is part of a fight, a grab for power, that the noise and clutter of the real world had invaded the realm of my gods.

  “I’m finally getting out of here,” my brother said. We were lying in our beds. The lights had been off for a while. My eyes had adjusted. The wind was blowing the trees around outside.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m going away to another school in September. A boarding school.”

  Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly. I stared at the little rat-claw scar just above me in the ceiling.

  “Adios, shithole,” Ian said.

  Topps 1975 #274: Vicente Romo

  No one can ever know what’s going to happen from one day to the next. Vicente Romo was an effective relief pitcher for some time—as the back of this card puts it in the customary caveman syntax of baseball card prose, Romo was “one of club’s top firemen”—before being suddenly released by the Padres back in 1975. One minute you could be horsing around during one in a seemingly endless succession of yearly Topps photo shoots, playing air piano or putting a hex on the opposition or leeringly blocking a ball girl from exiting the field, and the next minute you could be packing up your locker.

  When Romo was released, he had a perfectly even record: 31-31. He wasn’t great. He wasn’t terrible. He’d just completed a 5-5 season, proving that he had mastered this kind of reliable albeit somewhat dubious consistency. Nonetheless, after his release from the Padres he didn’t latch on with another major league club in 1975. Perhaps word had gotten around that his best days were behind him. After all, he was thirty-one years old, no longer young enough to be counted among the developing guys who might suddenly blossom into something better than what they were. He didn’t play in the majors in 1976, either, or in 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, or 1981.

  But in 1982, the first spring after my brother went away, Vicente Romo returned. The incredible, improbable comeback of a man who had been out of the majors for exactly as long as he’d been in the majors was only slightly overshadowed by Romo finishing the season with an underwhelming 1-2 record. He vanished from whence he came when the season ended and did not reappear on a major league roster in the next year, or the one after that, or the one after that, and so on. But even to this day some part of me continues to believe that Vicente Romo will return once again to even his record and prove that anything that’s gone might someday return.

  Topps 1980 #97: Bill Lee

  Ian came back once in a while on school breaks and sometimes we lay in our beds with the lights off, talking. His going away had softened the tension, the thwarted, unfocused desire to escape that had surrounded him in the years leading up to his departure. He did most of the talking as we lay there, telling me about guys in his dorm, guys on his basketball team, guys on campus who pulled hilarious legendary stunts. I learned the names of all these strangers and built them all into larger-than-life figures, my brother’s world always my world of myth. It’s been two and a half decades and I could still tell you the first and last names of dozens of his classmates and make an accurate estimation of the scoring averages of the starting five players on his basketball team in both his junior and senior years, and rank in approximate order of desirability the girls he most desperately wanted to declothe, even though I never had personal contact with any of these people.

  In those late-night conversations, my life didn’t really come up. What could I say? My basketball team continued to suck, and that was about all I had going. When the conversation seemed to be thinning out toward nothing, I leaned on the subject that had formed the center of the language of two boys with one voice.

  “This could be the year,” I said one night. It was early in the 1982 season, and the Red Sox had been hanging around near the top of the division. “If Eckersley can keep it together, they might do it.”

  “I haven’t really had time to notice,” Ian said. “But who the hell’s their catcher now? This sophomore dweeb in my dorm had the game on in the TV room and a guy comes up to bat about the size of a fire hydrant. He had no chance to get a hit.”

  “Muggsy Allenson,” I said glumly.

  “No Fisk, no Burleson, no Lynn. I don’t know,” he said.

  “If Ojeda does what he did last year,” I said, but I didn’t finish the thought. “They better do something quick if they want to get Yaz a title before he hangs it up.”

  I started imagining it, the parade, old Yaz riding past, waving to us as we wept. I got tears in my eyes.

  “No Carbo, no Tiant, no Hobson,” Ian said. “And what about Bill Lee? Is he even anywhere anymore?”

  The house felt empty without Ian. In truth, it had already begun to feel empty even before that, as everyone was living more and more within their own individual orbit. In the early years in that house, Mom and Tom had thrown parties, big ones and small ones, inviting all their hippie friends from the food co-op. By 1982 these parties had become a thing of the past. Mom and Tom both had regular 9-to-5 jobs and came home tired.

  One warm spring day the three of us drove to a lake and rented a canoe. I sat in the middle without a paddle, Mom sat in front, and Tom sat in back. They were good at keeping the canoe straight. Nobody said much. After a while I drew in a breath and opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t want to hear my own voice wrecking the gentle sounds of the paddles in the water. The question stayed on my tongue.

  Where are we going?

  No hippie ever played major league baseball. Bill Lee probably came the closest, but he was really more an eccentric libertarian iconoclast than a member of any explicit or implicit movement. Still, I was drawn to him. Some of the things he said and did reminded me of the adults at the parties Mom and Tom used to have. He appeared in a magazine wearing a space suit and a Red Sox propeller beanie. He ranted about the stupidity of the establishment. He caught pop flies behind his back.

  I was drawn to Bill Lee because he was the closest thing in the majors to the kind of adult that I was around, and also because, unlike most Red Sox hurlers, he had been pretty good at beating the Yankees. Keenly aware of this, Yankees teammates Mickey Rivers and Graig Nettles had (so I choose to believe) conspired during a 1976 bench-clearing brawl to ambush Lee and rip his pitching arm out of its shoulder socket. He struggled with arm troubles the next couple of years, and in December 1978 the Red Sox, with the strong recommendation of manager Don Zimmer, a narrow-minded baseball lifer who hated and was hated by the nonconformist lefty, shipped Lee to the Expos for Stan Papi, who proceeded to hit a Stan Papiesque .188 for the Red Sox while Lee turned in a classic “fuck you, Red Sox” year, going 16-10 with a 3.04 ERA.

  By 1982, I had toyed more than once with the idea of following Bill Lee to the Expos. I liked to fantasize in many ways about shu
cking my identity, and one of those fantasies involved leaving the Red Sox behind. After their 1978 collapse, everything about them seemed weighed down with a faint but inescapable aura of dread. Even when they clung to an early season division lead, as they did in 1979 and 1982, there was this feeling that they’d find a way to surrender it, which they did, and in such a pronounced way as to reveal that they hadn’t ever really had much of a chance. They’d let most of the stars of my childhood get away, and the guys who remained just got older and slower and more prone to hit into double plays or groove fat 3-1 fastballs that opposing batters crushed into the center-field bleachers. After some of the more painful losses, I imagined announcing my defection by sending a second letter to Yaz.

  Dear Yaz,

  Not that you will ever write back or even read this probably but I’ve thought it over and I decided I have had it. I am going to become a Montreal Expos fan.

  Sincerely,

  Josh Wilker

  P.S. Forget about sending me an autograph (unless you really feel like it).

  The Expos played almost exactly as close to my house as the Red Sox did, yet I had never been to an Expos game, nor knew anyone who ever had, and no one in my entire town or anywhere in Vermont or anywhere that I had ever been appeared to be an Expos fan. Nobody cared about them, while my current team made everyone want to jump off bridges three times a week. That was the primary allure of the fantasy of abandoning my team for the Expos. It could never really hurt if I never really cared.