Cardboard Gods (13 page)

 

What do you do when the thing you value most starts slipping out of reach? There's a YouTube video of Mark Fidrych pitching in a minor league game long after his summer of joy. He was far removed from being the most famous athlete in the country, the
Rolling Stone
cover boy, far removed from having electric stuff, far removed in every way from being an elite athlete (when he records the final out he stumbles to the ground like a rec league player who's downed a six of Strohs during the game). But he knows how sweet it is to be in the game, to be on a team, and to be on a team lucky enough to win that day. He doesn't shrug off the victory as if a minor league win is somehow below him. He is happy and, since happiness only exists when shared, he immediately shares that happiness with his teammates, bounding into the scrum of minor league nobodies. He was always this way, even at the height of his fame.
We
did it, he always seemed to be saying, thanking as many people as he could, not merely slapping backs and palms but reaching out to everyone and hanging on.

One night Mom and Tom went out, leaving my brother in charge. The phone in the kitchen rang. I got out of the hammock in the living room and went to the kitchen. I answered like I was J.J. Walker.

“Chello,” I said.

“We're gonna come and get you,” a low voice whispered. Click. A few seconds later the phone rang again.

“Gonna mess. You. Up.” Click.

I called to my brother, who was watching
The Incredible Hulk
. When the phone rang again we got close and held the phone so both of us could hear.

“We
know
you're all alone,” the voice said. “Gonna
kill
you.”

“Hey, you listen—” my brother said, but the line was already dead.

“What are we gonna do?” I said. I looked out the window, into the dark. You couldn't see anything but the low branches of the front yard tree waving in the wind like a maniac.

My brother yanked a meat cleaver out of a drawer. He stalked around the house with it and checked that all the windows and doors were locked. He turned the sound on the television down. He came back to the kitchen and sat ramrod straight on a chair near the phone and stared out the window into the darkness, the handle of the meat cleaver in one of his fists, the blade sticking up straight like he was holding a flag at a parade. I sat a few feet away at the bottom of the stairs, holding my aching stomach with both arms. You could still sort of hear the Hulk throwing guys around and then the piano when it was time for David Banner to sadly move on again but mostly the only sound was wind rattling the branches of the trees.
Every once in a while a car approached, the headlights attached to a volume knob of pain in my stomach.

“I
hope
they fucking try,” my brother said.

Another night I woke up halfway and could feel things starting to go bad. It always started the same way, my night terrors, with me coming half-awake and sensing that things were wrong and getting worse by the second. My brother was still up, reading, even though it was late, which meant that Mom and Tom weren't back from another evening out. I called my brother's name.

“What's wrong?” he said.

I climbed down the ladder of the loft bed Tom had built for me, past the Nerf hoop Tom had screwed to left post, past the speakers he'd mounted that played my Kiss records, past the Victory Leaders card—my only card that showed Andy Messersmith—that I'd taped to the right post. My breathing was getting more rapid and shallower. My heart was starting to race. I could feel it all about to start, and once it started it wouldn't stop.

“Hey,” my brother said. He sat up in bed, pulling the covers along with him. He had a book in his lap.

“How about a little Kirk and Spock?” he said. Before waiting for an answer he started reading. It was one of his
Star Trek
novels by James Blish. I held on to the ladder to my loft bed for a while as he read. I recognized the characters. The story was unfamiliar, but after a while I started to get interested. There were two Spocks. One was real. One was just a mistake. I went and sat in the space my brother had cleared beside him on his bed. He kept reading until my eyelids grew heavy. I got up and climbed my loft bed ladder past the Victory Leaders featuring Andy Messersmith. Ian started reading to himself again. I was sleepy but still scared, the OK world a trembling curtain that could lift at any moment to show me the awful infinity.

“Hey, Ian,” I said.

 

In the fall, on Sundays, we watched the Dallas Cowboys games they showed on CBS, which because we couldn't get NBC were the only games available to us besides the other CBS standby, the morose, colorless Joe Pisarcik-led New York Giants. After the Cowboys games we went outside and threw a football around. My brother was Roger Staubach and I was Tony “Thrill” Hill. When it was my turn to be Roger Staubach, my brother was Drew Pearson.

“I'll be Preston Pearson now,” I said after a Drew Pearson score by my brother. Preston was a backup but sometimes came in and made tough, gutsy, backup-guy plays.

“Whatever,” Ian said. “Who even cares? This is baby stuff.”

“I'll do a buttonhook and then shake it and bake it the rest of the way,” I said, pointing vaguely to where I'd be making my route.

“Whoopee,” Ian droned. Just before I hiked him the ball he added, “Preston Pearson isn't Drew Pearson's brother, you know. He's not anything.”

“I know that,” I said, but I didn't and was disappointed. I had loved the idea that two brothers could be on the same team. My shotgun hike didn't even reach him, then I tripped a little when I started running. Ian's pass was too hard and bounced off my chest.

“Flag on the play?” I asked, rubbing where the ball hit.

“I am fucking
bored
!” my brother yelled up at the gray sky. I knew what was next.

“Go down there,” Ian said, pointing. I picked up the ball and walked it to the far end zone, which was just the grass in front of the electric fence that kept the sheep in. Ian moved as far away from me as he possibly could and still be on our property. His back was to the road. I punted the ball as hard as I could but it only got about halfway to him. He ran toward it and picked it up just before it would have stopped rolling. I ran toward him, since I was supposed to try to tackle him now. When we came together I grabbed at him and he shoved me to the ground and went on to score. He spiked the ball and it bounced crazily through the electric fence and into the sheep meadow. I walked toward the road as my brother carefully stepped over the electric fence to retrieve the ball. It was getting darker. He kicked the ball all the way to me and it punched me in the ribs on the way to the grass. I picked it up and started running. Halfway down the yard, I tried to do a Tony Dorsett juke but my brother grabbed me and flung me down, ripping the ball out of my hands. I watched him run away from me for another touchdown.

 

Why, of all the players that ever came to me, was Andy Messersmith taped to the post of my loft bed? I'm not sure. I know Andy Messersmith was the first baseball player I remember seeing in action on television. It was right after we'd moved to Vermont, while we were still living in another family's house in Randolph Center. Andy Messersmith was on the screen, pitching. There was something else
about him, something I didn't quite understand. He had a claim to being the first free agent. I didn't really understand what this meant, but it seemed significant that he was the first of something in the actual world and the first of something in my world. I guess I wanted to hold on to that feeling of those very first days collecting cards, those very first days learning the history of baseball, those very first days of being in a new place where we didn't know anyone and it was just me and my brother against the world.

I needed to believe my brother was flawless. For a long time, this was easy. I was the one who had problems in the world. I was smaller than him, weaker than him. I had night terrors. I was scared of everything. I was colorblind. I had barely any sense of smell.

After a while, it also came out that I couldn't really see. I was riding in the VW Camper with Mom. We drove by a big field. There were a bunch of cows lying around off in the distance.

“Look at those friggin' cows,” I said.

“Oh my god, what did you say?” my mother said.

“I don't know. What? Friggin'?”

“Those are hay bales.”

“Oh,” I said. “Really?”

“I'm terrible,” my mom said, crumpling. “I'm a horrible mother! How long have you been having problems seeing?”

“I see everything,” I said.

We went to an eye doctor a couple days later.

“When you're in class, do you have problems viewing the blackboard?” the doctor said.

“I don't know.” I thought about my class, all the beanbag chairs scattered around, everybody wandering. “We don't really have a blackboard.”

“He means are things blurry,” my mom said to me.

“Things are the same as always,” I said.

“Hey, four-eyes fag,” an older kid said a week or so later.

My brother hit two home runs in little league that year, our last year together on our little league team. One home run meant you were flawless. Two meant O My God. The second of his home runs made it all the way to the trees beyond the chain-link outfield fence. We all poured out of the dugout and were standing by the plate yelling as he jogged around third. Everything was crystal clear because now I had glasses. I couldn't believe this was how everyone always saw things. The white chalk lines. The green blades of grass. The top of the chain-link outfield fence ringing with sunlight. The O My God trees beyond. My big brother laughing, coming home.

 

That summer, 1978, it looked like our favorite major league team was flawless. We went to our one Red Sox game of the year and maybe because they were way in front in first place or maybe because I had glasses, or maybe both, everything sparkled with perfection.

Also, it was helmet day. Every kid got a helmet, and my brother was just barely still young enough. Having a shiny Red Sox batting helmet made everything even shinier and even more perfect despite the weird fight that had happened on the drive down. When Yaz came to bat I shouted Yaz a million times until my throat was sore.

“Yaz! Yaz! Yaz! Come on, Yaz!”

“Can you please shut up a little,” Ian said.

He was in a bad mood because he had a hangover. And mad at me because I had passed on the news to Mom out loud, on the drive down, that he had a hangover. I thought a hangover was skin hanging off your finger and didn't understand why the word made my mother look at my brother like she was going to cry.