Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  A creeping panic began when I got my first glimpse of the tight, sullen face staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. It was a small, hot apartment with a low ceiling and no view and a clock that went tick tick tick. I didn’t have any means of escaping myself. I didn’t know anyone in the town. I didn’t own a car, or even know how to drive one.

  Every day, I walked to the nearby college library, where I read old issues of Sports Illustrated in between attempts to write in my notebook that invariably ended with me either knifing deep gashes in the pages with my pen or scrawling dire threats against myself. Back at the apartment, I watched reruns of Home Improvement, perhaps the worst sitcom ever made, to help cross the chasm of the late afternoon. With evening in sight, I started drinking and ate gigantic mounds of generic macaroni and cheese with sliced-up generic hot dogs.

  At night I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, dreading the next day’s blank page. Sometimes I was able to sink into a torpor vaguely resembling sleep by jerking off to memories of the sex I’d had with an ex-girlfriend just before leaving the city. As the summer wore on, I began to build that cursory encounter into something monumental, almost religious, one bright shard shining in a polluted sea of gray. In sheer desperation, I began to convince myself I was falling in love.

  My mom came up to visit two or three times. On one of these visits I went with her and Tom to a lake for one of their canoeing outings. They canoed a lot, much more than they ever had in their first go-round. There was a lack of conversation during the car ride to the lake. By that point my mom may have gotten the news that she had another temporary job waiting for her in the fall, at a college museum in Ohio. I can’t remember. I also can’t remember if I’d yet started to have conversations with Tom in which he confided to me that he was struggling with the idea of continuing a relationship with Mom if she moved that far away. Either way, the silence during the drive seemed heavy to me, as if things were about to fall apart.

  But once we got to the lake, and put the canoe in the water, and got in, and shoved away from shore—the very moment we shoved off—the burden dissolved. For the first time all summer, I felt okay. I sat in the middle of the boat without a paddle, Mom was up front, and Tom was in the back. They had once built a whole life together, had created a home, had raised two boys. Little wonder they were like two parts of a whole in a canoe. As we crossed the lake I felt blessed, for the first time in a long time, as if we were afloat in one of those rare safe pockets in life, the diminishing gray future and the unreachable primary brightness of the past gone, dissolved into a pale blue stillness. Nobody spoke, as if the moment was so fragile it would break under the weight of any sounds beyond those faint clacks and burbles marking our movement across the reflection of the sky.

  Near the end of the summer, my mom came up to start gathering things for the move to Ohio. It seemed a particularly uncertain moment for both of us, for everyone. The “novel” that I’d hoped would change my life was nothing more than a notebook that looked as if it had been mauled by a pit bull with ink on his fangs. My mother was edging into more of an unknown than she had in many years, perhaps ever, going off alone to a part of the country far away from where she had spent her whole life. Nothing had been resolved between her and Tom as far as what would happen between them when she moved away, but from what happened next I can be sure that my mother was counting on the relationship, that quiet, bittersweet canoe ride, to continue.

  What happened next was Tom broke up with my mom. As I understand it, they had tried once before, during the mid-1980s, to keep things going while living in two separate places, and it hadn’t worked. Tom didn’t want to try that again.

  For a long time, one of the longest nights of my life, I lay in the dark on a cot outside my mother’s bedroom in the apartment that had already established itself as the location of my most abject failure. I couldn’t help overhearing my mother’s side of the phone calls. All night long and into the sickly first light of a new day, that rotary dial sound: Zick. Zicka. Zickaaaa. Zick. Sometimes the phone calls ended with a slam. Sometimes they ended as if the phone fell from a dead hand. The worst was when the phone was put down with tenderness, as if tenderness could coax something gone to return. As for the sounds that were made by the human voice in between the beginnings and the endings of those phone calls: I’m not going to say a goddamn thing.

  The next day, we went to the storage facility a few miles away from our old house. My weeping mother held the steering wheel in one hand and a damp wad of tissues in the other. The storage facility, a converted barn, gray and lopsided, eventually came into view.

  The dark interior of our storage cell was clogged with the last of the residue of our Back to the Land dream. Broken homemade furniture, rusty garden tools, garbage bags full of faded tie-dyed scarves and silk-screened T-shirts, dust-covered cross-country skis, disintegrating books about gurus and canning and sociology and New Games, warped records by the Beatles and the Firesign Theater, the rolled-up canvases of all my mother’s giant bright paintings, Tom’s old blacksmith tools. Box after box of the things that carried us only so far.

  The box that contained my baseball cards was among that detritus. I opened one flap and the brightness of the cards inside stung me. I carried the box out of the room, the flap still open, the faces of baseball players staring up at me. Outside, we had been making two piles: a small pile to go to Ohio and a much larger one for the dump. I understood that my box of cards belonged in neither pile. But I wasn’t ready to look at the cards, either. Those bright colors. Those faces. Those names. I closed the flap with one hand so that my box of cards was just a box again, but then I held it to my chest for a while, delaying my return to the dark room where my mother was sneezing and crying.

  I carried the box with me to Ohio, where I helped my mom get settled. Eventually she stopped breaking into tears every few minutes and I got on a bus headed back east. I waved to my mom from the Greyhound window, the box of cards on my lap, where it stayed through the whole ride. I still hadn’t been able to look through them, but I opened the flap a couple times and felt a terrible pull that seemed too much for me to handle.

  When I got off the bus in New York, I went to the liquor store and begged the owner, Morty, for my job back. It turned out there was an opening for me as big as a canyon. I would start pulling long shifts six days a week and living in the apartment owned by Morty above the store.

  With that position secured, I stomped off to my ex-girlfriend, the one I’d had sex with just before leaving for Vermont, and begged for her to take me back, too. As with the job, I’d been the one to break things off. Neither the job nor the relationship had seemed to be right, then, but after my miserable summer I was convinced that what I needed was the life of a Regular Joe. I needed to behead my ridiculous aspirations. I needed a job. I needed a girl. The options I had recently abandoned seemed to be my only options, so I pursued them with a tenacity that I have seldom displayed before or since. My ex-girlfriend was particularly skeptical of my turnaround, but I kept pleading, promising her that I was a Whole New Guy, until she finally relented.

  While I was taking a week or so to set up my new life as a person without any problems, I was staying at the apartment I’d shared with my brother for several years. The day before I left to move to the apartment above the liquor store, I finally got the courage to pull open both flaps of the box I’d found in the storage facility.

  My brother was in the room with me when I started rooting around in the box. Since I had collected cards because of him, my cards were really our cards. This was our coauthored youth, right here, one card at a time. But somehow the cards that had been the center of my earliest waking years remained estranged, even as I held them up one by one in my hands.

  I didn’t understand it then, but I still had more fucking up to do before the gods would finally speak to me again. My return to the liquor store wouldn’t work out, nor would the revived relationship with the ex-girlfriend, nor would any of
the jobs or relationships to follow for year after year after year. When my job at the liquor store ended, I moved back in with my brother, the untended weeds of our lives continuing to tangle even as the same estrangement infecting my baseball cards seeped into our brotherhood.

  Maybe I knew that things wouldn’t work out at the liquor store, that since I wasn’t bleeding internally the invisible Siamese connection to my brother hadn’t truly been severed, that I’d eventually return to a corner of his apartment, a corner of his life. But it seemed at the time that I was finally striking out on my own, finally leaving the past behind. I wanted to find some glowing, definitive, triumphant piece of it as I sat with my brother and pulled baseball cards from the box I’d found in the storage facility. But nothing was happening. Many of the faces seemed unfamiliar. It was all just cardboard.

  A certain stunted suspense began to preside. It was a more concentrated version of the definitive mood of our disappointing adult lives to that point. Night after night, week after week, year after year, and now, in miniature, card after card, the question arose.

  Would nothing ever happen to us?

  Eventually I pulled Carmen Fanzone from the pile. I felt something in my chest, like the flicking of a latch. When I showed the card to my brother, we both erupted, laughing until tears started leaking from our eyes. It was the kind of laughter that kept multiplying, finding new detonations in and around the very idea of Carmen Fanzone. The melancholy deadpan. The gag-store mustache. The comedy-sketch name. But it was more than all that, more even than the Rowland Office laughter of brotherly laughing fits. The laughter was that type that hits you just a few times in your life, seismic laughter, sprung from the fault lines of the questions you can’t answer.

  What happened to our childhood? Who are these impostors? How could the onetime center of our lives offer up such an absurd unknown?

  My brother was the first to be able to speak.

  He said, “There was never no goddamn Carmen Fanzone!”

  Topps 1981 #221: Bob Davis

  Some time after I moved back from the apartment over the liquor store into yet another apartment with my brother, he and I and another friend, Pete, drove upstate for a court date. On an earlier trip, Pete had gotten arrested for being the point man in our absurd drunken scheme to steal a poster from a movie theater lobby. The poster featured an ape wearing glasses and playing chess. Pete was apprehended by blond, tan, gum-chewing teenagers in national movie theater chain golf shirts. They held him until the cops arrived.

  On our return trip for the court date we passed Yankee Stadium. This was during the era when the Yankees won the World Series every year. We all felt like there was no place in that city for conquered misfits like us, two Red Sox fans and a Mets fan.

  Fuck you, Yankee Stadium, we said, our middle fingers high.

  On the drive home after the court hearing, at which Pete was lectured by an incredulous ninety-year-old judge and charged with criminal mischief, we were tired and silently drifting into our own orbits, bracing for the indignities of the days and weeks to come. No one said anything for a long time. I remember that the song on the radio was that insipid virus of a ditty, “Walking on the Sun,” a clear sign that we had ceased giving a shit. Let whatever comes, come. My brother was at the wheel, driving the used car he’d bought with advance money for a travel book he would never complete. We crossed over the Macombs Dam Bridge, Yankee Stadium behind us.

  I remember you scumbags, Yankee Stadium must have said, squinting down at us.

  If memory serves, there’s a somewhat unusually placed traffic light at the end of the Macombs Dam Bridge. Or maybe it isn’t normally there and Yankee Stadium put it there just for that moment. Anyway, it changed from yellow to red. My brother’s mind was elsewhere. A car barreled straight at us, eyes wide in the faces of its passengers. Brakes squealed, then came the surprisingly soft sound of crunching metal.

  Amazingly, no one in either car was hurt in the head-on collision. But after my brother nursed his convulsing vehicle to the shoulder, where a battalion of muscular young Bronx residents from the other car commenced screaming at him, I watched my brother age before my eyes. His posture sagged. His face went gray. He was barely getting by as it was. He had let his insurance payments lapse. He was getting screamed at. His car, which he needed to complete the travel book he had been contracted to write, was clearly now no more than a few heartbeats away from flatlining. Pete and I looked on, Pete freshly saddled with the criminal mischief charge, me with the sad feeling that came from watching my older brother, whom I’d always idolized, standing there in the middle of it all like a pitcher with nothing left and no help on the way, a mop-up man who has to stay in the box and take a beating as the boos rain down.

  I applied for a job as an adjunct professor at the college I’d attended as an undergrad. I didn’t have any teaching experience, but the recommendation of two of my old writing teachers helped me get the job anyway. Or maybe they just needed a body. I was given two classes, Basic Writing and College Writing. The pay was meager, but that had never held me back before.

  Terror crested four times a week in the firing-squad minutes directly preceding every meeting of my two classes. Each flare-up of terror gave way to a kind of public seizure that gripped me for ninety minutes before casting me back to my solitude sweaty and stunned, my voice raw, as if I had spent the entire hazy interval sobbing. The students gone, I sat at the head of the empty class until my legs stopped trembling. I usually felt ashamed about one or another of the things that had tumbled from my mouth during the ill-planned lesson.

  Most of the other adjuncts at my college also seemed to be just passing through. There were a couple of longtimers, but they had fit their adjunct duties into a sturdy arsenal of chisel-jawed remunerative pursuits, one guy teaching a couple of classes when he wasn’t leading tours through the Amazon rainforest and selling photographs to National Geographic, another guy maintaining his on-campus reputation as a ruthless grammarian between professional jazz trumpeting engagements. Most of the others seemed to view the low-paying, no-insurance, no-security job as a stepping-stone to something better. I may have entertained that thought, too, early on, but in the same blurry, hypothetical way that I daydreamed about someday winning a National Book Award or owning a house or ceremonially passing my baseball cards down to a son. It soon became apparent that the job was merely another in my long line of crumbling ledges to cling to by my fingertips.

  That year I finally got my driver’s license, and in the summer I drove to Ohio, where my mom was still living and where my father had moved, too. At first he had gotten an apartment of his own a few blocks away from her, but by the time I got there he had moved into the guest room in her little house.

  “All those years he looked out for me,” my mom told me one night. “Now I’m going to look out for him.”

  In August I returned to Vermont, and just before classes and my ledge-clinging resumed I moved into a cabin in the woods. The cabin had no electricity, no running water, a small woodstove for heat, and a big plastic lime-coated barrel for my excrement. I needed somewhere, anywhere, to live, and so My Year in the Woods began as much out of desperation as out of a desire to follow in the heroic footsteps of Thoreau. But the idea did appeal to me. Maybe in solitude I’d be able to penetrate the essence of All Things. Maybe when that fucking tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, I’d be there to hear it.

  My friend Charles sent me off to my year of solitary purity with a gag gift of a battery-powered television about the size of two decks of cards. I went through a lot of batteries that year. Another vice I cultivated at the cabin grew out of another gift from Charles, a small orange plastic propeller toy. You use both your hands to spin the stem of the propeller and it flies through the air for fifteen or twenty feet. It’s the type of thing you might try a couple times before moving on with your life, but during my year in the woods I created a golflike game that involved trying to hit a serie
s of trees around the cabin with the flying propeller in the fewest “strokes” possible. Then, reverting to a practice that had devoured huge tracts of empty time in my childhood, I populated the game with an ever-growing catalog of intricately conceived imaginary personalities revered by millions of imaginary fans for their prowess in the hallowed, physically taxing, mentally punishing, spiritually grueling sport of Twirly Propeller.

  Instead of completing the novel I’d been hoping to finish (about a directionless liquor store clerk), or taking assiduous egoless note of the natural phenomena all around me, or resolving to pretzel my stiff, inflexible body into a straight-spined lotus position and chant sutras until the top of my head split open to guzzle nirvana, I enacted Twirly Propeller tournament after Twirly Propeller tournament, each a harrowing marathon with several elimination rounds that gradually built to the breathless white-knuckle tension of the Championship Match. It’s all gone now, but throughout my year in the woods I kept in my head the entire history of Twirly Propeller, all the single-match, yearly, and lifetime records, all the famous rises and falls, all the improbable limping heroic Comebacks from Complete Oblivion.

  But sometimes I just sat and listened to the woods. And I loved coming back to the cabin on a clear night when the moonlight was shining down on the birch trees. And I loved being able to drive a little ways and see Tom at the house he and his new wife, Susanne, had bought, a beautiful place halfway up a mountain, the dream of a stable life in the country finally come true. And I loved one day that spring, sitting on the porch of the cabin, sun melting the last of the snow, a fat biography of Elvis Presley on my lap, but me so glad to be alive I couldn’t read. And every once in a while I was able to put a few words together in my notebook that tugged at something inside me, something below the ache that had long ago settled in my chest.