Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  In this one instance, I didn’t care what anyone thought. I had to watch television on this particular Sunday, for it was October 2, 1983. It was Carl Yastrzemski’s last game.

  Come on, Yaz. I was able to say this to myself at first, but as the game went on and he kept failing to homer, my little prayer began to sneak out of my mouth. By Yaz’s last at bat I was pleading out loud to the television, my cracking voice slapping off the concrete TV room walls. He settled into his familiar stance, twirling his bat forward and leaning toward the mound slightly, as if trying to hear the pitcher’s internal monologue. The TV thinned the crowd noise to a hollow buzz, but I could still tell that they were all shouting the same syllable as me, everyone wasting the last of their voices on that yawing, fizzling, incantatory sound.

  “Come on, Yaz!” I hollered. “Come on, Yaz!”

  The Red Sox wouldn’t be going to the playoffs that year. Not even close. Yaz would be leaving without a World Series win. Yaz would be leaving. This was it.

  The pitcher was a journeyman with a bland mustache. He had trouble finding the strike zone with his first three pitches. Yaz, not wanting to end it all with a walk, ultimately had to lunge at a high fastball. He popped out to the second baseman. Before the following half-inning began, he took his position in left in front of the Green Monster, and then Chico Walker ran out to replace him. As Yaz jogged toward the dugout, the crowd rose and cheered him one last time, but I just sat there trying not to look like a dweeb in the TV room crying.

  I fell behind in all my classes, especially trigonometry. Numbers had once been the haven of certainty in my life. Ladders of numbers. Numbers that swelled and waned like the tide, numbers that gleamed, numbers that wheezed, clownish, laughable numbers, awe-inspiring numbers, numbers that seemed to tell stories much clearer than anything else in the world. 3,000 hits—like Yaz had gotten. 400 home runs—like Yaz had gotten. 200 strikeouts, every season—like Tom Seaver had gotten every year from the year I was born up until he showed up on a card as a Cincinnati Red. 300 wins—like Tom Seaver looked like he might fall short of as he faltered through his second stint with the Mets. These were numbers I understood.

  As my first year at boarding school was ending, Tom Seaver left the New York Mets again, this time latching on with the Chicago White Sox, where he had to wear a jersey with wide horizontal stripes that made him look kind of old and kind of fat. Despite appearing (as most of the White Sox did) as if he’d be more at home lofting high-arcing softball pitches with one hand while gripping a sixteen-ounce can of Old Style with the other, he turned things around in Chicago and began stomping rather than limping toward 300 wins. He would steamroll past 300, the number no match for the relentless man.

  As for me: One afternoon in the spring of my junior year at boarding school, I took one look at the impenetrable questions on my trigonometry final exam, then spent the remainder of the test period filling a blue examination booklet with an apology to my teacher. It may as well have been my suicide note to the world of numbers. Afterward, a senior drove up over the border, into Vermont, where the drinking age was still eighteen, and bought so many bottles of booze that when he got back we spread them out on a kid’s bed and took a picture of them. So many bottles you couldn’t even count them all. The giddiness was palpable. We were about to blast all the numbers clean out of our heads.

  Topps 1980 #218: Jose Morales

  I started kindergarten the same year José Morales reached the major leagues, 1973, and continued to attend school every year of his quietly competent, useful career as a right-handed bat for hire. But not long after his final at bat in 1984, I got busted at boarding school for staggering around drunk at a dance, and the following spring, while still on probation, I got caught smoking bong hits in my dorm room. A committee of faculty and students held something called a “judicial” to decide if I should be expelled.

  I brought along my friend Matt as a character witness. We arrived early and were standing outside in the dark, waiting to get called into the hearing, when a hulking, pock-faced Middle Eastern student I sort of knew shambled out of the shadows. It was a strange time for a student to be walking around without a care in the world. Probably it was “study hours,” when you’re supposed to be quietly studying in your room or quietly studying in the library, with no movement from one to the other allowed. Movement did sometimes occur, but sneakily.

  “What the fuck are you two shitheads doing here?” he bellowed. He had an accent that made “the” and “shitheads” sound like “thee” and “sheetheads.” I cringed, rabbitlike, at the volume of his voice. He lit a cigarette, carelessly flaunting another rule, and I explained to him in a grave murmur that I was about to go into a hearing that would decide my future.

  “They gonna decide your future?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know. I guess.”

  He took a long drag, then exhaled, eyeing me the whole time.

  “Listen to me,” he finally said, his voice booming. “You must fucking do as I say. You must go in there. You must go in there and tell them. To suck! Your fucking! Dick!”

  I should have taken his advice. Most of the proceeding entailed a red-faced math teacher berating me for being an embarrassment to the school.

  “My friends like me,” I replied at one point, lamely, as if my relationship with the small group of guys I smoked pot with was going to contribute to the greater glory of the institution. I think I also noted that I’d briefly had a radio show on the campus station.

  A couple days later I was summoned to see the campus dean. She told me I was expelled. I stood up to leave.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she exclaimed incredulously. “I’m not done with you. Sit down.”

  I sat down. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d told her to suck my fucking dick.

  I came home for what would turn out to be the last time. Mom and Tom had decided to go their separate ways. Mom wanted to go to graduate school for art history in New York City, and Tom wanted to stay in Vermont. I don’t really know any more details. Soon the house would be sold and all its less essential but not completely disposable contents, such as my baseball card collection, would be packed into a storage unit.

  I’d been kicked out with very little time left in my senior year, and after an unsuccessful and humiliating trip with my mom to the local high school to beg for admittance in time to graduate with the local seniors, the only thing that remained for me in Vermont was to wait for the next administration of the General Educational Development (GED) exam in the state capital.

  One day while waiting around for the test I smoked the last of some hash oil I’d bought at boarding school and had a stunningly vivid hallucination of my brother and me as the longhaired hippie toddlers we’d been, laughing and running in slow motion through a meadow of sun-drenched shin-high grass. I sat there holding my hash pipe and wept. I missed my brother. I missed sharing not only the world we lived in but the world we’d created together, the other world that came to us a pack at a time, fifteen colored rectangles to a pack.

  The GED test took place in the courthouse building in Montpelier. There was only one other test taker, a sixteen-year-old kid hoping to join the air force. He chewed on his lip while we waited to get under way.

  “Shit, you think there’s gonna be algebra on this fucker?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I don’t remember if there was algebra, but the test turned out to be pretty easy. I finished while the air force kid was still laboring away. I went out and stood on the steps of the courthouse, waiting for my mom to pick me up and pretending not to notice the guy on the other side of the steps who was pretending not to notice me.

  His name was Mike, and he was the son of the man who owned the general store in East Randolph where I had bought all my baseball cards. He was the kid in elementary school who had peppered his speech with the word “whore.” We’d been friends, sort of, in grade school, but I hadn’t spoken to him in
years. The silence between us had grown out of the general silence of victimhood that gradually engulfed all the members of our terrible seventh and eighth grade basketball teams as the losses continued to mount. By ninth grade, Mike had had enough of basketball. I kept playing and losing. We took different classes. Mike probably spent his Friday nights getting wasted and fornicating in cars while I was still home watching The Incredible Hulk. If I hadn’t gone away to boarding school for my junior and senior years, I probably would have finally had some contact with him again, either buying shitty brown pot from him or handing him the dribbling spout of a beer keg at a cold, drizzly party in the woods. By the time I took my GED test, Mike had become a fat, glowering man smoking a cigarette outside a courthouse. I’d heard that he’d been arrested for some drug charge, and probably his presence at the courthouse had something to do with that. I stared down for what seemed like hours at the boarding-school in-joke phrases I’d scrawled with a magic marker all over my Converse All-Stars. Finally my mom pulled up.

  Her expression was still the weary stone face she’d worn when she’d picked me up from boarding school the day of my expulsion. On the way home on that earlier day, I’d broken the first of many long, painful silences by saying, as if we were characters in an overwrought melodrama, “I’ll make you proud someday, Mom!”

  My mom, who would be saddled for years to come with the large loan she’d taken out to send me to the school, let my bombastic vow hang in the air for a while before replying in a flat monotone, “That’s not the point.” I’d backed off any further pronouncements in the following weeks, but the moment after the GED test seemed to demand at least a stab at ceremonial verbiage. I thought about the test itself, and then about the lip-gnawing air force kid who was probably still flailing away at “the fucker.”

  “Well, looks like I’m gonna be the valedictorian of my class,” I said. My mom wasn’t exactly in a mirthful mood, but she did later pass on the line to her friend Barbara, and Barbara filled our home for the last time with the sound of whooping, happy laughter.

  I went to spend the summer at my grandfather’s house on Cape Cod. I didn’t bring my cards with me, but if I had I’m sure I would have eventually started leafing through them during those first long, empty days of my first borderless summer. I might have come upon José Morales’s 1980 card and seen evidence of his desirable usefulness everywhere. Judging from his picture, he was confident and pleasant and relaxed, a calming, positive presence in a clubhouse. He raked like a first baseman, as shown by his .291 career batting average after seven years in the league, but he could also serve his team by manning the most specialized and difficult position on the field, catcher. And, as the back of the card text pointed out, he was that rare player who could sit on the bench all game long until needed, then come into the action cold and produce: “Established major league record with 25 pinch-Hits for Montreal Expos during the 1976 season.”

  I was the opposite of José Morales. I didn’t know how to do anything. Eventually, my grandfather got me a job at a nearby Shell station. The night before my first day, I spent the lulls in the action of a Red Sox game on TV trying to flatten out a Shell cap with a crown that seemed unusually high. But every time I pushed down, it popped back up. I sat on it for a while, then went into the bathroom to see if it looked any different on my head, but it seemed even higher than before. Under the brim, my face looked grim and old.

  I was also required to wear a collared shirt very similar to the one poking out from under José Morales’s jersey in his 1980 card. I don’t know what José Morales did during his first borderless summer of 1985, beyond the unbroken ladder of years, but I pumped gas, shoved dirt around windshields with a squeegee, and, upon request, opened hoods and searched for dipsticks, sometimes actually finding them and not having to lie that I had checked the oil. I made change. I waited for the day to end.

  Sometimes people saw my high Shell cap and collared José Morales shirt and assumed I was competent, that I could help them address problems with their cars. I didn’t know anything about cars. Other motorists swerved into the station and asked me for directions. I didn’t know how to get anywhere. To be useful, I would have needed someone screeching to a halt by the pumps and demanding to know the name of the current owner of the single-season major league record for pinch hits.

  Topps 1977 #25: Dwight Evans

  The Shell station required my services only through the busy season. In September, I had to move on. For the first time in my conscious life, my name wasn’t on any roll-call sheet. I wasn’t expected anywhere. I couldn’t go back to East Randolph because the house had been sold. Mom had moved to New York, renting a room in a middle-aged woman’s apartment on Twenty-third Street. Tom had moved into a condo in Montpelier. Dad still had his studio on Eleventh Street, and my brother lived in an NYU dorm room a few blocks away from him.

  I reacted to the scattering of my family by reaching in the direction of my increasingly distant gods. My aunt and uncle lived in Boston and offered to let me stay in their guest room, so I spent the first blank autumn of my life closer to the Red Sox than I’d ever been.

  I went to a couple games at Fenway by myself before the 1985 season ended with the Red Sox’ record at 81-81, perfectly nowhere. They seemed impossibly far from being a team that might one day win it all. Almost everyone from my childhood was gone, and none of their replacements could match them, save for a young but strangely leaden and methodical producer of singles and Green Monster doubles, Wade Boggs. With Boggs getting on base all the time in front of him, Jim Rice still found a way to drive in more than a hundred runs that season, but he had begun to hit into an alarmingly high number of double plays. Other than Rice and reliever Bob Stanley, who had somewhat unfairly become the pear-shaped, sad-faced figurehead of the Red Sox’ persistent habit of coughing up leads, the only other holdover from the old days was right fielder Dwight Evans, who that year would win his fifth Gold Glove in a row and eighth overall. With Rice fading and Boggs’s robotic excellence inspiring in the hometown crowd only admiration and respect, not love, Dwight Evans coaxed the deepest roars from me and everyone else in the half-filled stands.

  In his late-blooming prime Evans did everything with a majestic calm, the absolute opposite of how I felt that fall with nowhere to go but Fenway. The way he loped out to his position in right field. The way he warmed up his famous arm by throwing laser beams out of a sleepy, feline half-windup to some bullpen lackey armed with the added protection of a catcher’s mitt. The way he slowly strode to the plate, letting the pitcher stew in the rising sound of the crowd. The way he then coiled himself down into his disciple-of-Hriniak stance, different from the stance he had shown in the 1977 card I’d gotten years before, the newer stance a back-slanting crouch, weight on his right foot, left foot bent and extended with toe just touching the dirt, bat back and nearly horizontal and loose-gripped and slowly pulsing in measured counterpoint to the larger, louder thrumming chant of his nickname, Dewey, on all our tongues.

  I worked part-time at an ice-cream parlor for a couple months, until one day the manager tried to get me to hand out fliers in the store mascot costume, a (Chocolate) Moose suit. I refused, so he just sent me out as myself. It was the middle of November, baseball as gone as the leaves, and as I held out slips of paper to passersby ignoring me I was struck by the feeling that there was barely anything even holding me to the sidewalk. I eventually dumped the fliers into a trash can and just walked around for a while, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that at any moment I might start skittering down the street like an empty pack of cigarettes caught in a gust. A couple days later I quit and took a bus toward the heaviest concentration of my family, Manhattan. I stayed for a few weeks at my dad’s apartment, sleeping on a spare foam mat that collided at its foot with the foot of the “master” foam mat. In the mornings I’d pretend to sleep as Dad stepped over me to get up and get ready for work. Sometimes I’d meet my mom at a diner for lunch, an oddly formal, grown-up me
eting, a knapsack full of art textbooks on her side of the booth, a newspaper I’d fished from the trash on mine. At night I saw my brother, who lived in an NYU dorm just a short walk away from my father’s apartment. We got stoned as he and his roommate took turns putting on bass-heavy dub records turned up so loud we wouldn’t have been able to speak even if we’d wanted to. The unbroken ladder of years was gone, as was the sense that Ian was climbing a couple rungs higher than me, in a direction that he understood. Now we were both just adrift. What was there to say? Better to dissolve together into the deep, warm throb of a Robbie Shakespeare bass line as if it were the echo of the heartbeat of something benevolent and immense.

  Eventually I left his dimly lit room and stumbled back to Dad’s place, where he would already be asleep, all the lights off. His apartment had only one room with a door, the bathroom, and since I often came home too high to sleep, I spent most of my late nights there sitting on the shut lid of the toilet, reading On the Road for the first time, slowly, ecstatically, my shining face inches from my father’s toenail clippers and rusty can of Barbasol. I wanted my life to be like the one in that book—exciting, adventurous, everything hallowed—but I had no idea how to make it happen.

  In January, desperate to retreat from the shapelessness of life beyond school, I got into a small state college situated on top of a mountain in northern Vermont. Halfway through my first semester, my friend John and I reanointed our reggae-laced afternoon pot smoking as a round of special Season Opener bong hits and were coughing and red-eyed with the radio tuned through static to WDEV, the Red Sox radio affiliate in Vermont, as Dwight Evans got the 1986 season started with a bang by leading off the first inning with a home run.