Cardboard Gods

by Josh Wilker

  The deepest tugging sensation grew slowly, as if sprouting from a planted seed, out of a practice I started halfway through the year to stave off insanity. I began selecting a baseball card from my collection at random and laying it on the table by the door, where I would then look at it for a few days in the morning light and the dusk light and the light of a guttering kerosene lamp and the light of loneliness and the light of being a brother and the light of being a son and the light of being a failure and the light of a guy who was running out of money and the light of a guy who kept forging on through the snow and the mud and even the painfully tender first sounds of spring.

  Thoreau did not spend his year in the woods staring at baseball cards, but I wasn’t Thoreau. I was someone who had leaned on my cards throughout childhood and who had since childhood felt an ache in my chest as if something was missing. After a few days, I tried to put down a few words in my notebook about the card that I’d randomly pulled from my collection and placed on the table. Words didn’t surge forth as in my long-held dream of a Kerouackian volcano of creation. But I could tell that something was there, a faint but perceptible tugging.

  Bob Davis’s 1981 card was one of the most haunting of my random selections. Maybe it’s because Bob Davis’s expression seems like that of a man who’s trying to remain cheerful in spite of the tiny constant ringing noise that’s made his sanity into a thin, fraying, tightly stretched rubber band. Or maybe it’s because of the clammy gray catacomblike background, such a stark contrast to the overwhelmingly predominant baseball card backdrop of blue sky as to suggest something about Bob Davis’s extremely peripheral, ogrelike isolation on the far fringes of major league baseball. Or maybe it’s because of the discovery I made that Bob Davis, clinging for dear life to the thin pleasure of a tobacco wad, shares my birthday. As a kid, I hadn’t noticed that any god shared my birthday. Probably Bob Davis had been too anonymous to draw me into a close inspection of his card, especially in 1981, when baseball cards were ceasing to be the center of my life and my life was proceeding without a center. Maybe he’d been in the last pack I ever bought as a kid, a gray particle on a screen showing a TV station that had fallen almost completely into static. Probably I hadn’t looked past his anxious grin on the front or his .198 lifetime average on the back before tossing him into my box of cards with the others, only to find years later that even this ignored obscurity on the expansionary fringes of my neglected heaven had some significant connection to me, that even the least of a great forgotten beyond was capable of answering a prayer.

  Topps 1980 #: 482: Rickey Henderson

  When my year in the cabin ended, I was broke. The adjunct thing had left me worse off financially than when I’d started. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. I called my brother, who calmed me down. He had been in plenty of bad spots himself. He was like a hitting coach talking to a player in a deep slump, encouraging him to keep looking for his pitch.

  If I could have moved back in with him I probably would have, not knowing what else to do, but he had moved into an apartment with Kelsey. His leaving our old apartment, which he had shared with our friend Pete while I’d been in Vermont, did open up a spot for me. Once again, I returned to where I’d been before, more or less. I had my notebooks, my box of baseball cards, and a credit card tab that made me feel like I was on the brink of mathematical elimination.

  The photo on Rickey Henderson’s 1980 rookie card was taken during 1979. He made his debut that year in a midseason doubleheader that the A’s lost, part of Henderson’s career-opening seven-game losing streak. Henderson finally played in a major league win, then the A’s promptly lost Henderson’s next three games, won one, lost five more, won one, lost five more, won one, and lost five more. The A’s record in Henderson’s first 29 games was 4-25. This was not that far off par for a rancid team that went 54-108 on the year. If anyone was going to start mailing in his efforts, it would have been a player finishing out that dismal campaign. And yet here is Henderson, the rookie, locked in, ready to battle.

  Pete helped me get a job at the bookstore where he was working. I remember standing at the store’s raised information counter and staring across the store at one of the cashiers. She had dyed one lock of her hair bright pink. I felt another faint tugging at something below the ache that had long ago settled in my chest. It was like finding the card of an unknown rookie in a pack, maybe near the end of a pack, maybe near the end of the last of four packs you bought at the end of the last full summer of the gods, the end of an era of awe, and something about the card pushed back against that feeling of everything ending and made you wonder.

  I don’t know if there’s such a thing as love at first sight, and I can’t remember the moment I discovered Rickey Henderson’s 1980 card in a pack, but I’m sure the card made me wonder. The rookie’s odd crouch differed not only from the posed wax-figure stances that had populated most of my cards to that point but differed also from the feeling that mathematical elimination was unavoidable, that life itself was a losing season. Here was an electric moment, full of possibility, a young man who’d so far known nothing but losing in the majors but who nevertheless was about to treat the next pitch, the next moment, as if it could not be more important.

  One of my tasks as a clerk was to periodically go behind the counter and retrieve the milk crate filled with customer returns and reshelve them. I met the cashier with the lock of pink hair during this task. If it had been up to me I would have said nothing and skulked by her to get the crate of books, then maybe thought about the moment later, revising the part where I let the pitch sail by. Luckily, she had a more direct approach to life. She shoved her hand at me.

  “Hi, I’m Abby,” she said.

  By then, all my gods were gone except one, heaven eroded but for Rickey Henderson, who persisted into the new millennium, on a new team every season or every half-season. You began to assume that you could always pick up a page with box scores and find his name somewhere. You began to assume that since he’d been around so long, he’d be around forever.

  How long can anything last? My brother and I still saw each other occasionally, and if I was slumping he’d always make me feel better, but the halts and pauses in our conversations kept growing.

  “Rickey Henderson is still kicking,” I told him one day. We’d been sitting on a park bench, drinking Budweiser tall boys out of paper bags. We hadn’t said anything for a while. I’d started gazing at the box scores in the newspaper that had been poking out of the bulging satchel he always lugged everywhere.

  “Rickey Henderson,” Ian said. “You don’t say.”

  “Seattle, of all places,” I said. Ian raised his bag of beer.

  “To Rickey Henderson,” he said. I tapped my bag of beer against his and we drank.

  Abby and I spent a day together just walking around. It was nothing special. It was one of the best days of my life. We went into an aquarium store and looked at the fish and petted a black cat that was sleeping on one of the tanks. We went to a couple shoe stores looking for and not finding a pair of the kind of suede sneakers I like to wear because they remind me of the 1970s. She bought some cheap sunglasses at an outdoor bazaar. We got something to eat at an Italian place, then sat and drank coffee in a narrow, empty space in the back of a small café. We walked to the subway, and she kissed me good-bye as her train to Queens was rolling into the station.

  Topps 1976 #135: Bake McBride

  Bake McBride is one of those names that I’ll never be able to say without feeling a flicker of happiness. There are others. Oscar Gamble, Jim Bibby. Dick Pole, Pete LaCock. Mario Mendoza, Mario Guerrero, Bob Apodaca, Biff Pocoroba. César Cedeño and Sixto Lezcano and Omar Moreno and Mark Lemongello. The Penguin, the Hammer, Toy Cannon, Quiz. You say the name and a door opens wide. You remember that world. You remember that time. You say Bake McBride and he’s there, faster than any human could ever be, fast as you need him to be.

  I had always been afraid I’d say my brother’s name an
d find I’d been left behind. I had always been pulling on him, clinging to him, allowing absences in my own life to be filled by presences in his, day after day threading my life so intricately into his that eventually it got to the point that when either of us moved so much as a muscle the other felt it as a ripping of internal threads.

  I can tell you what Bake McBride hit as a rookie and in what round he was drafted and how much he weighs and with what arm he throws. I can even tell you that my brother, like me, always loved Bake McBride, the player, the name, the way the two things match: the line drive contact of a .300 hitter in the hard consonants, smooth, effortless gliding in the long-vowel finish. Bake McBride. But I can’t tell you if my brother might have had fears similar to my own about being left behind. All I have ever really known for sure is the kind of thing you could put on the back of a baseball card. Numbers. Places. Years. Season after season, we lived together. Through childhood, through most of our twenties. Even when I went away for brief periods, I always circled back. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t only my weakness and uncertainty that might have maintained this circle, and that I wasn’t the only one who worried that someday that circle might get broken.

  On the rare occasions in my life when I’d had a girlfriend, my brother had gotten a slightly stricken look on his face, as if he were watching someone bicycle through a red light into the path of a speeding truck. I can’t fault him for that, considering not only how my relationships usually ended but also the hesitant, uncertain, awkward way I entered into them in the first place. After all, the look on his face might have been a reflection of my own.

  Still, as my life began to intertwine with Abby’s, I resented Ian’s careful tight-faced hints that I slow down and think about what I was doing. I wanted to tell him about how good it felt to simply walk around an aquarium store with Abby, but I couldn’t find the words, partly because we’d never talked about things like that, and partly because I resented that I needed to defend my decisions. At that time, my brother, who for years had been struggling far more than I’d been willing to notice, was working hard at discovering why his life was the way it was, and a shaky evangelical zeal for this work colored our interactions. One evening, as we were sitting on a park bench, he sensed my resistance to his hints to slow down and began nudging the conversation in a more general direction, toward the whole big box of cards of our lives, from birth on up.

  “We have to figure this shit out,” he finally said. But the word we, the very thing I had clung to from my first conscious moments long into adulthood, felt suffocating.

  “I don’t have to figure out anything,” I said.

  Eventually the hinting and denying of hints led to my brother asking that I meet him at a place called Mullins. We sat at the bar. A baseball game was on.

  “So look,” he finally said. “I’m going through some things right now. Some really rough water. And I just can’t be around you and her right now.”

  We finished our beers and walked together to the subway. When I got home I would be unable to sleep. I would stare at the ceiling all night thinking that what my brother said, however it was intended, amounted in my mind to an ultimatum: me or her.

  But as we waited for the train, I only wanted there to still be something between us, something to say. I remembered the fantasy basketball league that we were both in. The draft was coming up soon.

  “So who’d you rank first?” I asked.

  “Hm? Oh, Tracy McGrady,” Ian said. “Big year.”

  “I got him one, too,” I said. “He can give you something in every category.”

  We weren’t making eye contact.

  “Yup, Tracy McGrady,” he mumbled. He leaned over to see if a train was coming.

  “Tracy McGrady,” I said. My stomach started to hurt in the ensuing silence. Is this it?

  “Troy O’Leary,” I said, like casting a line into the water. My brother checked his watch.

  “Ed O’Bannon,” I said, trying again. The tunnel started rumbling, the train on its way. The light got brighter. My brother said something, but it was lost in the clattering arrival.

  “What?” I yelled. He waited for the brakes to stop screeching.

  “Willie McCovey?”

  I nodded.

  “Willie McCovey,” I said. We were both looking at the doors. They opened and we got on. The train started moving. There was just enough space for us to sit down but we remained standing. I only had two stops until I transferred.

  “Donovan McNabb,” I said.

  “Shaquille O’Neal,” he said. We pulled into a station and the doors came open. Nobody got on or off. The doors closed. The train started moving again.

  “Lynn McGlothen,” I said. My brother held on to a pole with one hand and tapped his chin with the other, looking down at the grimy floor. He had a big satchel full of undone work around his shoulder. I had a feeling we were missing something obvious. The train arrived at my stop. The doors opened. I got off and turned back toward my brother. Our eyes met. The doors closed and the train pulled away, the best one forgotten, the best one left unsaid. So say it now, two voices in tune, two voices as one. Say it and he’s here: Bake McBride.

  1980 Topps #720: Carl Yastrzemski

  I moved out of New York with Abby, to somewhere else altogether, attracted to the idea that it was unfamiliar, a place beyond the reach, so I tried to believe, of any personal echoes.

  And yet in this new place, Chicago, I started almost immediately to dig deeper into my childhood baseball card collection, as if I’d finally de cided I had to figure this shit out. I taped the card I loved most to the wall by my writing desk. Yaz at bat.

  Dig in. Stay balanced. Wait.

  The statistics on the back of the card provided further instruction. The tiny type, the many seasons, the stunning number of hits, the even more stunning number, hidden but revealed by simple subtraction, of outs. You’ve got to fail. No way around it. You fail and fail. You keep trying.

  The deeper I dug, the more I noticed strange, inexplicable absences and other strange, inexplicable presences. Team checklists that I’d filled in thirty years earlier no longer seemed capable of accuracy. I didn’t have some cards that the checklists said I should and had other cards that according to blank checklist boxes should not have been in my shoebox at all. Just whose cards were these, exactly?

  Unpacking another box, which had been taped shut since before I’d gone away to be an adjunct professor, I discovered Ian’s Yaz cap.

  At my brother’s request, I got on a plane to fly to a family therapy session. I sat in a small white room with a therapist, my mother, my brother, and Kelsey. Dad had opted not to come, citing his age and his hatred of air travel. I don’t think Tom had been asked to come, maybe out of deference to my mom, who had burst into tears the last time she’d seen him, some years earlier, at a reading of one of my pile of unpublished short stories.

  The therapist used a whiteboard and a black marker to map out a family tree that included the unusual configuration of our family during the early 1970s, while we were living in the experimental three-parent house in New Jersey. There my brother and I were, on the same branch, below the unusually augmented parental branch, three names above us instead of two. All of us except the therapist sat as if we were bracing for a blow to the head.

  “What was life like for these two?” the therapist asked. She pointed at the lowest branch.

  “Painful,” Ian said.

  She asked other questions. She had to raise her voice at times above the sound of a lawn mower outside. The grass must have been wet because the mower kept clogging and almost stalling, but then whoever was pushing it eased off, and it sputtered and spat back to life. It made me think of our house in East Randolph. I mowed the front yard and part of the side yard, and Ian did the back and part of the side. It also made me think of Tom. When I’d lived in the cabin, I’d gone over to his house once in a while and helped him mow his lawn, and after that whenever I went back to visi
t in the summer I’d always try to fit in a couple hours with the mower.

  I don’t know who we all are to one another exactly, but at least I can mow a fucking lawn.

  Eventually the sound of mowing receded to a faraway moaning and hacking and then finally went silent, and the therapist asked me how I would characterize my childhood. A word came out of my mouth, followed by others. I had a thought partway through: What the fuck am I saying? Speech suddenly resembled my recurring dream of having to parallel park a semi: huge, unwieldy, impossible. My voice finally sputtered to a stop, and I sat there with no firm idea of what I’d said beyond the first word. Even the first word confounded me. It didn’t seem like something I’d say. But I’d felt the need to explain that those years, my childhood, our childhood, weren’t only the roots of destructive need. Those years weren’t only pain. Those years were the opposite of pain. Pain was that ache in my chest. Pain was the slow severing of one voice into two.

  “Happy,” I’d said.

  Afterward, we played miniature golf. Around the turn to the back nine, as we were waiting for a big family with a lot of laughing kids to finish the tenth hole, Ian and Kelsey stepped over to the snack counter to get ice cream and my mom walked behind a miniature church and started weeping.