Cardboard Gods (18 page)

In 1979, I didn't get any Carl Yastrzemski cards. It was my first Yazless year since 1976, when I'd sent him my plea for an autograph. I kept buying packs, hoping to find Yaz. I also kept hoping to find Yaz in the mail. I checked every day for a reply, as I'd been doing for years, even though I knew such a thing was by now impossible.

What happens when reasonable hoping turns to something else? A ritual, a tic, religion, addiction. I was someone who waited until what I was waiting for began to belong to some whole other world. I was someone who was no longer satisfied with just one or two packs. I was someone who needed to keep shoving more and more gum into my mouth.

 

Three years earlier, my first Yazless year, Topps had included a special card in its 1976 set that showed the winner of a 1975 bubble-blowing competition among major leaguers. I never got the card myself, but my brother did and showed it to me.

“Whoa,” I said.

“A bubble that big,” my brother said, “is
impossible
.”

The bubble was larger than the player's head. The jaws of a set of calipers strained to their breaking point, measuring the fragile, magnificent orb.

“
Kurt
,” I read aloud, but then I stopped.

How did you even pronounce the last name of the one man who could do something no other human being could? The unusual collision of consonants near the end was beyond my still-growing reading abilities. I looked to my brother.

“Bevacqua,” he said.

“
Bevacqua
,” I whispered.

 

In 1979, I may or may not have noticed that Kurt Bevacqua seemed to have vanished. I didn't get a Kurt Bevacqua card that year or the year before. The last time I'd seen Kurt Bevacqua was in 1977, in a card that showed him to be adrift in a blurry, ethereal netherworld, wearing, or appearing to wear, the doctored cap and uniform of an expansion team that had yet to officially exist and for whom he would never play a single game. Behind him, the lifeless, bulldozed plain of a landfill, or perhaps a dormant spring training complex stripped of all its accessories. No batting cages, no pitching machines, no stands, no bases. All in all, Kurt Bevacqua seemed to be in the process of passing through some sort of veil separating the Big Leagues from the Great Beyond. He didn't seem pleased.

“What the fuck is going on?” he seemed to be saying.

The statistics on the back of Kurt Bevacqua's 1977 card supported the notion that he was vanishing. In the just-concluded 1976 season, perhaps worn out from blowing world-record bubbles, he struggled for playing time with the last-place Milwaukee Brewers, hitting .143 in an achingly paltry seven at bats. He was in his late twenties, too old to be a prospect (if he ever had been). As he rode the pine and watched his teammates rack up 95 losses, it must have at some point occurred to Bevacqua that he may not be long for the world he'd come to know. I imagine Kurt Bevacqua asking himself the inverse of the famous anthem of the big time, “New York, New York”:
If I can't make it here, how can I make it anywhere?
Maybe a feeling of doom began to infiltrate the ever-wider spaces between at bats. Maybe a hazy sensation began to prevail. Maybe things that once seemed inarguably solid started to seem no sturdier than the flimsiest
maybe
. Maybe he sat on the bench trying to grip the handle of the primary tool of his trade and strange new doubts began to form.

My bat
, thought Kurt Bevacqua,
is turning to fucking mist
.

 

One morning in early September 1979, I walked with my brother through a dense early morning fog, the whole world vanished except for us. I knew the way, because we were walking toward the elementary school near our house, the one I'd gone to for years. But I wouldn't be going inside the school anymore. It was my first day of seventh grade, and we were walking to where the bus would
pick us up and take us over the mountain to the sprawling concrete structure that included the junior high and high school. I was scared. I picked up a rock and threw it into the smoky whiteness. It must have landed in the grass of the pasture I knew was out there, but I didn't hear anything.

“Hey,” I said to the pasture. “Hey!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ian said. Then he said more softly, “I mean, shut up.”

We were getting closer to the school but I still couldn't see it.

“Maybe the Red Sox can still come back,” I began, “if they get on a r—”

“Quit dreaming,” Ian said.

I knew he was right. For the first time since my Yazless year of 1976, the Red Sox weren't even in the race. Everything had been reduced to individual records. Every man for himself.

The familiar school building finally came into view, barely more substantial than the fog. We stopped at the edge of the parking lot and started waiting. I pulled a slip of paper from my pocket. It had my name on it and all my classes and the times they began and ended. My stomach began to hurt. I put the paper back in my pocket.

“Maybe Rice or Lynn can still win the Triple Crown,” I said. They were both having great individual seasons.

“Quit dreaming,” Ian said. He squinted into the fog in the direction the bus would be coming from. I thought about the one part of the 1979 season that still had meaning. Nobody could deny it.

“Well, at least Yaz—” I said.

“Can you please just maybe be quiet?” Ian said, and edged farther away from me.

“Here it comes,” he added.

I didn't see anything, but I heard a deep grinding and groaning from the center of the fog. Then the huge flat face of the school bus appeared, its two eyes blazing.

 

In 1976, my brother and I had gazed together at Kurt Bevacqua's impossible feat, and together we had begun trying to approach him. For a while, his contest-winning deed could not possibly have loomed larger in our minds. It existed at the nexus of practically everything we loved most: baseball, sugary candy, the whole 1970s proliferation of crazes, most specifically the 1970s Guinness Book of World Records mania for transforming nonsensical trivialities
into celebrated, numinous significance. Kurt Bevacqua and his otherworldly utterance in bubble gum anchored the glittering parade of freaks and fads and the just plain fantastic, taking the place of highest honor among such indelible figures as the man with the world's longest fingernails, the man who pulled locomotives with his teeth, the man named Robert who was so tall he seemed doomed to unbearable loneliness, the other man named Robert who was so fat—even fatter than the fattest twins in the world, that famed cowboy-hatted, motorbike-puttering twosome—that when he died he had to be lifted from his house by crane and buried in a crate big enough to transport a grand piano.

Kurt Bevacqua's bubble was at first as unapproachable as any of the impossibilities made real in the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records, but as the years went on my brother and I got better and better at blowing bubbles, learning to whisper breaths with increasing subtlety into the fragile, pendulous globe that grew like a second featureless head from our own kissing lips. If either of us had a good bubble going, and the other was in another room in the house, the bubble blower would carefully make his way to the room where the other was and alert him to the possible Bevacqua-equaling extrusion with an urgent, if necessarily soft, moaning sound in the throat. The other would look up from the comic book or TV show he was absorbed in and honor the possibly earthshaking significance of the moment with an almost prayerful silence.

We never quite got to Bevacqua, however, the bubble always popping just before immortality arrived, and my brother's interest in such things gradually waned. By 1979, it had disappeared altogether, and I was left to pursue Bevacqua in solitude, understanding even as I did so that I was childish, uncool, an understanding that made the ritual feel even more solitary than it already was.

 

I had to be in a certain exact place at a certain exact time. There was the schedule with my name on it and all my classes and the times they began and ended. There were bells to move everyone along. There was a locker with a combination I had to remember. There was no more wandering or lazing around making sarcastic remarks from a beanbag chair.

Meanwhile, as the 1979 season drew toward a close, Carl Yastrzemski chased the most hallowed career benchmark for hitters: 3,000 hits. If he could do it, he would be in the record books forever,
an immortal beyond all doubt. I checked the box scores. I listened to the games.

“Come on, Yaz,” I was thinking.

After looking earlier in the year like he was going to soar past the mark by midseason, Yaz fell into a prolonged slump that slowed his quest to an agonizing crawl.

“Come on,
Yaz
.”

I started getting homework. I ignored the assignments. I started getting numbers written in red pen at the tops of quizzes and tests. This is exactly what you are, the numbers said. You are nothing special, they said.

“
Come on, Yaz
.”

After finally scratching out his 2,999th safety, Yaz fell into a hitless trance. Planes circled overhead, trailing premature congratulatory banners. Cameras flashed all over the sold-out ballpark again and again, recording the continuing failures of an ashen-faced batter suddenly so rigid he seemed to be turning to stone.

“I just wish it were over,” he told reporters.

The longer Yaz's increasingly inglorious pursuit of the record went on, the more I wanted him to achieve the immortal mark heroically, with a massive game-winning home run deep into the right-field stands, or somehow even out of the park altogether. It should shatter windows. It should stop traffic. It should make the whole world stagger and quake.

 

A few weeks after Yaz finally got it over with, late in a lopsided meaningless game, by pulling an ordinary grounder just past the opposing second baseman's glove, I got my first-ever report card. The grades were like the statistics of a player who is probably not going to be around much longer.

My mom was called into school, and all my seventh-grade teachers sat in a circle of chairdesks around her and took turns describing my incompetence. I can see her at this meeting, slumping in her own chairdesk, staring at the linoleum, her arms crossed tight over her stomach. Both she and Tom had gotten regular jobs by then. To hear about me from my teachers, my mom had to take half a personal day from her new position writing and editing technical manuals.

“He's so withdrawn,” one of the teachers says.

“He definitely gives the impression that he doesn't want to be here,” says another.

“It's almost like he wants to disappear,” says another.

 

One afternoon when Mom and Tom were still at work and my brother was at junior varsity basketball practice, I sat on my brother's bed and opened my three last packs of 1979 cards. I shoved the gum from all three packs in my mouth and chewed for a while as I sorted through cards that included neither the latest member of the 3,000-hit club nor the 1975 Joe Garagiola/Bazooka Bubble Gum Blowing Champ. I blew a few preliminary bubbles, then stood and walked over to my side of the room and looked out the window at a driveway empty but for the rusted van at the far edge, surrounded by weeds, a chimney sticking out its roof. Then, slowly, gently, I blotted out my view with a bubble that in another time would have made my brother whisper, “Bevacqua.”

That summer, I had come upon a term in Louis L'Amour's novel
Hondo
that may have changed my life, although maybe my life was moving unstoppably in the direction of that term anyway. Hondo, this tan, unshaven, highcheekboned guy who slept on the hard ground under the stars and engaged in knife fights with bloodthirsty Apaches and occasionally swooped down from parched mesas to rescue beautiful defenseless women from the clutches of bad guys out on the most brutal fringes of the nineteenth-century American West, was characterized at one point in the narrative as a
loner
. I clearly remember what I thought upon reading this:
When I grow up I want to be a loner
. It seemed tough, mysterious, admirable, invulnerable. You'd occasionally ride into town for your grim, manly supplies, your oats and pemmican and lye soap and bullets, and people would look at you with awe, respect, even envy.

Within a couple months of reading
Hondo
, while getting my first taste of junior high, I started to understand the realistic dimensions of the life of a loner. I sat in the back of classrooms, saying little, my homework undone, looking forward mostly to the Fudgsicle I would eat at lunch. My circle of friends dwindled to a few thin, equally myopic acquaintances that I sat with at a mostly empty corner table of the cafeteria, taking turns flicking paper footballs through one another's thumb-uprights. Outside of school, I leaned on baseball as much as I ever had, despite my brother's increasing disinterest. I was a baseball-loving loner. I could not have been more primed for the arrival in my consciousness of relief ace Kent Tekulve.