Cardboard Gods (22 page)

“Step Three,” my brother said. “This place is a shithole.”

In July my teammates and I and all the other little leaguers marched in the parade down Main Street in Randolph, dressed in our uniforms, walking past cheering people with flags in their fists. The parade ended at the little league field, where every year there was a town-wide chicken barbecue picnic that coincided with an All-Star Game pitting the best twelve-year-olds from our town against a team of players from some surrounding towns. I had been selected to play in the game that year, which made me feel like a superstar even though just about any twelve-year-old boy in our town who had played all four years of little league made the All-Star Team. I didn't consider that at the time, however; instead, I focused on the dazzling word itself.

All-Star
.

It emblazoned the best cards you could ever hope to find in a pack, and it called to mind the highlight of my and Ian's summer, our one chance to see all the All-Stars at once, many of them for the first time, their previously unknown skills astonishing. The power and the squat, Thing-like physique of slugger Greg “the Bull” Luzinski in 1977. The diving forkball of reliever Bruce Sutter in 1978. The cannon arm of right fielder Dave Parker in 1979. Most of all I thought about how Ian had once been a July 4 All-Star, and how I'd proudly watched him during that game, and how I would now play in the same game.

I didn't start but got one at bat halfway through the game and popped up to shallow center. I played right field the following half-inning. A batter dumped a base hit in front of me, and instead of stopping at first he tried for second. Unlike my brother, I'd not bloomed
into a strong-armed pitcher in my final little league season, but after all the hours playing catch with Ian I could at least throw it fairly straight, and after I fielded the ball on a bounce I chucked it to our shortstop in time for him to apply the tag. By that time, I had already begun periodically narrating my life in my mind as it happened, combining a daydreaming loner's fuzzy disconnect with reality with an ever-growing treasury of sports terminology.
Gunned
was the not entirely accurate verb that immediately leapt to my narrating mind.

I gunned him out,
I thought.
Just like Dewey Evans. Just like 1979 All-Star Game MVP Dave “Cobra” Parker.
I pounded my glove as I walked back to my position, sneaking a peek at the crowd, searching for my brother, wondering if he'd seen me unleash my
gun
.

Later, most of the people in town gathered in a field on the outskirts of Randolph and waited for night to fall. All of us went. Mom, Tom, Ian, me. I still had my uniform on, maybe because I knew when I took it off I'd never put it on again. Fireflies streaked in and around and above the clusters of people all over the darkening field, then bright explosions bloomed in the sky.

 

In August my brother let me come with him one day. We hitchhiked up and out of our valley to Randolph Center, where we snuck onto the grounds of Lake Champagne, avoiding the two-dollar entrance fee. We played a couple games of air hockey in the empty rec room, then moseyed on down to the lake and swam out to the empty dock in the middle. We lay there and the sun beat down on us, drying our bodies. I drifted off to a perfect golden version of sleep, then woke to the sound of a splash.

My brother was gone, but the wet ass-print of his cutoff jeans was still there on the wood of the dock, as was a trail of drops of water that must have fallen from the fringe of his cutoffs as he walked to the edge of the dock and jumped in. I got up and followed the trail of drops and didn't see him anywhere. If I didn't know the secret of the dock I would have thought it was magic or an awful tragedy. But I did know, so I jumped in and swam down under the dock to the secret air pocket underneath. My brother was there, floating in the muted light that filtered through the slats of the dock above.

“Yo,” he said, his voice making a ripply echo.

His legs looked short under the surface as he pumped them to stay afloat. Little kid legs. Closer to the surface, you could see that he was becoming an adult, a few curly hairs sprouting from his chest.
I treaded water too, and the bicycling motion made me think of a dream I'd been having more and more. The dream always started with me standing in the driveway, near the basketball hoop, alone, as if everyone had gone away somewhere. Then I stepped up into the sky. It wasn't like in comic books. No unfettered soaring. Instead, I
climbed
the sky, pedaling as if on an invisible bicycle and with some effort, like going up a hill, working at it, but also ecstatic, an ache of joy in my chest for remembering how simple it was, how simple it had always been, to fly up and away from my emptied house and all through the sky above our town.

“Yo,” I said to hear the little echo. My heart was starting to beat harder because of all the kid-leg pedaling.

“Yo!” Ian shouted. And I shouted “Yo!”

We got quiet again. The empty dock above us bucked in a gust, as if connected to the thumping in my chest. My heart, the seesawing dock, the spliced giggling sunlight through the slats, the deep water below, the whole wide world and beyond. A pulse runs through everything, but we hardly ever know.

 

As September loomed, I was back on my own, the sweet myth that summer might last forever disintegrating. I'd been buying cards for months already, the thrill of seeing the year's new card style long gone.

Any pack I could buy would be mostly doubles, guys I'd already picked up in previous packs, one monotonously recognizable personage after another, zombies in infielder crouches or with bats outstretched. Tedium, disappointment, the taste in my mouth back to what it was before I opened the pack, the stick of gum that came with the cards already a hard rubber pebble.

To this too you add prayer. You do this because without it what else is there? You do this because there's always a chance. You might just find, mixed in with all the doubles, a card like the one pictured above.

I was twelve when I found it among all the repeating Thad Bosleys and Steve Muras. There was no bigger star than Nolan Ryan. He seemed to have superpowers. Other pitchers such as Jim Palmer and Tom Seaver won more games and Cy Young awards, but only Nolan Ryan had the power to crack open the hard lid of the late summer sky and let a little of the dreamworld come leaking in. He threw the ball fast, faster than anyone ever had, faster than anyone ever
would. A twelve-year-old kid who had played his final season of little league and gone through one demoralizing year of junior high with another year about to begin could walk home from the store with this card in an unopened pack and back in his room he could open that pack and find this card and hold it in his hands and feel like he was touching a little piece of lightning from another wider world.

Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly.

In September the mountains all around us rippled with a slow glowing fire, leaves turning orange and yellow and red.

In October, as Steve Carlton and the Phillies were beating an ailing George Brett and the Royals in the World Series, the leaves began to dry and fall. Brett had proved mortal after all, not only failing to hit.400 but at the most crucial moment of his career developing the ugliest malady I'd yet heard of, hemorrhoids, which as I understood it were painful bulging cysts of the asshole.

In November, baseball gone for the year and, as it would turn out, my desire to buy large quantities of baseball cards gone forever, things got uglier still, a cold wind knifing through skeletal trees and across ground hard and wan as concrete. Late that month, we went to my grandparents' house on Cape Cod for Thanksgiving. The day after the feast, since there wasn't much else to do in November, a contingent of the extended family traveled to the mall in Hyannis. My brother and I went to a record store. At first we split up, flipping through albums at different places in the alphabet, but up in the A's I found a new album by a band I thought we both liked. After we had realized we had been fools to like disco, we had switched to the unsucking Rock of this band, among others (including, prominently, AC/DC). I brought it to Ian.

“Check it out,” I said. “Aerosmith's latest.
Night in the Ruts
.”

My brother half-looked, then snickered, shaking his head a little. He continued flicking through albums. I looked down at the cover.

“Night, night, night in the
ruuuts
,” I sang, inventing a title track. Ian glanced at me and then moved down a couple rows. He pulled an album out and looked at the back of it. I got a glimpse of the front, which looked ugly. Down near the bottom was what looked like a shred of paper in a kidnapper's demand note. One of the words in the shred was “Sex.”

“Hey, what is—” I said.

“Fuck off, huh?” Ian said. “Please?”

 

Some things are beautiful. Some things are ugly. As I looked to my brother to let me know which was which, my brother had begun to look to guys a year or two older than him, the members of the varsity basketball team, who had just embarked on a legendary season that would bring them all the way to the state championship game. (Ian was still on the junior varsity squad, which traveled with the varsity to all their games.) The varsity featured two brothers, the Cones, who had family in California, information that was used to explain the cutting-edge music they introduced to their teammates and that defined the clique based around the team. I assumed my flawless brother was a central figure in this clique, but since then I have come to understand differently.

“Sometimes I still wish I could, just once, dunk on fucking Chomentowski,” Ian said years later, a hungry, pained look on his face as he named the varsity star.

They called my brother “Head Case,” a nickname hung on him by the varsity coach, a mole-faced martinet whose voice was always hoarse from screaming. My brother was big and athletically gifted, a potential varsity star, but he had mental lapses and bursts of dubious on-court improvisation that, because they veered from the lockstep dictates of the coach's 1950s-era “Holy Cross” offense, appeared selfish (especially since they were usually ineffective), and probably the coach believed that if he harangued and browbeat my brother enough he'd eventually become the brainless pick-setting lummox in the pivot that the coach's antiquated vision of basketball required. The varsity guys ran with the Head Case nickname for different reasons, not really caring if the younger player developed, since they were already winning every game they played. They saw that there was something about my brother that didn't quite fit. Maybe they noticed his growing desperation to escape the town, their town. Maybe they noticed, as I never could, that at times he could be a bullshitter.

I think of the day he went to the Cones' house with his Tony Alva skateboard. The Cones had built a skateboarding ramp, and I suspect that my brother, a subscriber to
Skateboarder
magazine, had told them on more than one occasion that he was something of a demon on a skateboard. I don't know how I know this except maybe that my brother was unusually quiet when he came home from their house, but my feeling has always been that when he got to the Cones' place he had to reveal that he had been blowing hot air all along. Maybe up until the moment he got to the top of the ramp he had believed, had needed to believe, that he would naturally be able to perform the acrobatic feats he'd seen guys doing in the photos in
Skateboarder
magazine. But while the Cones rolled up and down the ramp with lidded-eye ease, snickering, Head Case fell flat on his big-mouth face, his expensive spotless board flying out from under him.

The Cones and the rest of the varsity had that snickering gazing-down-from-on-high attitude in general, and it and the notoriety they got for being such a successful team brought them into conflict with the nonathletes of the school, particularly those who still had shoulder-length hair and found beauty in the unironic grandeur of Arena Rock. Music defined the borderlines of this conflict, which occasionally boiled over into fistfights. If you were with the jocks, as my brother wanted to be, you better know what ruled and what rotted. You better know to snort at
Night in the Ruts
. And you better know your shit backward and forward about the new jagged sound the Cones were bringing back from the sophisticated distance.