Cardboard Gods (29 page)

A long night devoid of stories ensued. Dave had a particularly bad trip and kept saying that he was cold,
so cold
. Even after we finally escaped the clutches of the traffic jam, we spent a lot of the night in or very near the car. For an eternity I sat on the ground against the
car, leaning against a tire, and stared at my pant leg, praying for it to reflect the light of dawn.

 

Dock Ellis was wild that day. During the night he'd been listening to Jimi Hendrix, and maybe the snarling, snapped-power-line frenzy of Hendrix's guitar was still ripping through him. Through the first five innings, he walked five batters and hit a sixth. But no one had scored, despite all the baserunners dancing around behind him like jackals. No one had made any solid contact, either. Through five: no hits. Through six: no hits.

 

As the sun began to rise, my brother and I left Dave in the car, still shivering under all his clothes, and went to an open area and threw a Frisbee. Before you are born you are one with the universe, after you die you're one again, but when you're alive you're like a piece of the whole that's come loose and is falling. That's how I felt for most of that acid trip. A chunk of flesh plunging through the dark. But when I played catch with my brother I no longer felt that way. There was just an old indestructible connection, the disc a bright shared pulse in the dawn.

 

In the seventh, as Dock Ellis's whole body thrummed like something connected to the apocalyptic heartbeat of the universe, a Padres pinch hitter stung one through the box, but second baseman Bill Mazeroski dove and made the catch, preserving the oval on the scoreboard below the letter H. In the eighth, as his pitches continued to snarl and sneer, Dock Ellis surrendered his eighth walk of the game but then got the next batter to ground out to the shortstop, ending the inning. In the ninth, all the colors of the rainbow huddled behind the muted tones of the gray, misty day like giggling guests at a surprise party, about to leap out and start screaming. Dock Ellis stood at the center of it all and realized that all he had to do, all he ever had to do, was play a simple game of catch.

 

The car died before we even got out of California, on a long uphill part of the highway just outside Truckee, causing us to abandon our cross-country drive and fly home. When I got back to college I found that the ranks of my party buddies, which had been shrinking at the transient school since the end of my first semester, had dwindled to nothing. A few weeks in, telling myself I was aiding my writing by
further exploring the inner reaches of my mind, I flew solo through a sheet of acid one hit at a time.

During one trip I played pickup basketball and found it impossible to miss. I sank every shot I took, even ridiculous sprawling heaves meant to test the limits of my hot streak, which ultimately seemed not to be a hot streak at all but a temporary glimpse of who I really was, unencumbered by all the layers of failure and doubt and guilt.

Most often I spent the trips staring at the wall or into some damp woods behind the house where I was renting a room. I was hoping for a vision, or for a return of that feeling of childhood I'd had during my first trip. That feeling never did return, however, and the closest thing I had to a vision was when I was wandering around campus and some faroff mountains briefly turned into a pair of dirty Converse All-Stars.

Finally, I reached the end of the sheet, taking what would be my last hit of acid on Halloween 1987, at a Phish show at Goddard College. It was a bad trip—narrow, jittery, alienating, laced with the smell of my own burning synapses—and I spent most of it crashing around alone through limb-scraping brush in the dark woods behind the art building, where everyone was having a fantastic time dancing and laughing together, all the revelers wrapped in colorful costumes, the guitarist and bass player hopping up and down in jester hats, the drummer in a matronly dress. All I had on was my Josh Wilker suit—ripped jeans, T-shirt, army jacket, dirty Converse All-Stars, skin—and if I could have I probably would have taken it all off and set it on fire.

 

Maybe I'm haunted by boundless possibilities. Maybe I always have been. My earliest years, the late 1960s and early 1970s, came in a time and place bubbling with the idea that anything was possible. The ecstatic visions of Jack Kerouac seemed less an elegiac psalm to an evaporating world than a prelude to a world yet to come. You could be whomever you wanted to be and each day was going to be a new transformation, the promising light of the present moment giving way to even brighter, warmer, wider light. In the early 1970s, you could, as Dock Ellis did late on the night before a day game against the Padres, take a hit of acid and be unbeatable, untouchable, unhittable. You could be the best possible version of yourself, all your lesser costumes burned clean away.

When I finished college, in 1990, there weren't any major or minor league teams knocking down my door, so to speak. My BFA in creative writing was as useful, professionally speaking, as a degree in pointing at clouds and saying what they resembled. I had no skills, no connections, not even much ambition beyond a hazy collection of vague hallucinations about a future involving writing, some shattering moment of spiritual enlightenment, rooms full of people cheering for me, and fucking.

I gave away my records and most of my books and threw away anything else I couldn't carry on my back. Luckily, my baseball cards had been transferred a few years earlier to the storage facility. I like to think if I had them with me I would have held on to them as I prepared to blindly flee from the beginning of Life, but I was in something of a panic of self-abnegation. Maybe I would have chucked them in a Dumpster. But maybe then I would have seen Dan Spillner smiling back at me through the Dumpster stench. Maybe, moved by some combination of his vaguely familiar name and bland mustache and friendly smile and neck acne, I would have climbed in after Dan Spillner and his cohorts and begun this rescue mission years earlier than I finally did.

Instead, I took a trip to Europe, where I spent my little wad of savings as sparingly as possible. After a couple months I was broke, the two notebooks I'd filled still lacking any sort of lasting story. Besides a few stray conversations, my only human contact had been one drunken youth hostel breast grope in Scotland, near the end. I can't even prove the trip happened, as there's no visual record of it. I hadn't brought a camera. I'd visited many places where cameras were
always flashing, and after several weeks of solitary travel I began to wonder if my true self resided, if anywhere at all, solely in partial glimpses of myself in other people's photographs. I was the blurry elbow of the stranger passing through.

 

By the time Dan Spillner smiled for the camera in his 1979 card, he had managed to stick around long enough for the evidence of his minor league struggles to have disappeared. This was common. At a certain point, if you were able to hang on for a while in the majors, your minor league records, no longer needed to fill space, disappeared from the back of your card. Gone was any evidence of anonymity and strife, of any kind of a past that may have seemed to be leading nowhere. And who knew what the future held? As yet, for Dan Spillner, there had been no defining moment, no gleaming triumphant connection, no indestructible story. But there were still some years to come, and maybe they would engrave the name Dan Spillner in the books.

 

The day after I returned from Europe, I got a temporary holiday-help job as a UPS driver assistant. I started chipping in on the rent with my brother for my mom's railroad apartment on Second Avenue and Ninth Street in Manhattan, which he'd been living in alone since Mom had gone to France to work on her PhD. When the holidays ended I switched to loading trucks at the UPS warehouse on Tenth Avenue and Forty-second Street. My shift started in the middle of the night. My job was to grab packages coming down a long, groaning conveyer belt and sort them into one of four trucks parked behind me. Four others also worked the conveyer belt, each with four trucks to load. Five loaders facing us worked a second conveyer belt. A cheap boombox played “Everybody Dance Now” over and over. The loader to my right shadowboxed during the occasional lulls in packages coming down the line. I was the only white guy besides the harried supervisor, who rushed around in a short-sleeve button-down shirt and tie. The only thing we ever had that remotely resembled a conversation was when he noticed the Red Sox cap I'd worn to work.

“Rico Petrocelli,” he barked, hurrying past. Then, over his shoulder, his voice mostly blotted by the conveyor belts, he seemed to say the name Carl Yastrzemski.

As it turned out, the most notable moment in Dan Spillner's long career as a reliever on perennial also-rans came in 1983. I'd watched it in the TV room of my boarding-school dorm. He'd been the blurry elbow of the stranger passing through, the journeyman with the bland mustache, the last man to ever face Carl Yastrzemski.

 

It was tiring, monotonous work. The boxes turned my hands black and all my clothes gray. During the nightly ten-minute break, I sat in one of the trucks and read Dante, hell then purgatory then paradise as the months went by. At quitting time I walked home down the west side and cut across Twenty-ninth Street past towering early morning prostitutes, spent condoms strewn all over the sidewalk like kelp left behind by the receding tide. Near home I yanked a newspaper out of the trash and read it back at the apartment while eating generic three-for-a-dollar mac and cheese and drinking cans of beer, the blinds shut against the morning light.

One day near the end of my walk home I stopped at a light and looked across Third Avenue and saw my brother standing there, staring back at me. He was on his way to his office job. A heavy duffel bag weighed him down. I had my newspaper from the garbage. We both started laughing. One minute you're a kid and the next you're chained all night long to a conveyor belt. And your brother, your hero, is lugging a duffel bag full of undone work back to an office where his biggest thrill in many months has been finding and correcting a misspelling of the proper noun
Yastrzemski
.

My brother worked steadily. He took after our father in that way. Every morning up and off to the grind, day after day, week after week. I shied away from joining him. I didn't think I was competent enough to work a job that required skills beyond anonymous, temporary lifting and carrying. Also, after all my Kerouac worship and my childhood surrounded by adults (besides my father) doggedly trying to exist outside steady jobs, I feared that steadiness would lead me to a life without value. I'd be like a card in a new pack that you barely notice as you flip through searching for some kind of promise.

 

Eddie Murray's 1978 card had promise, evidenced by the gleaming ALL-STAR ROOKIE trophy in the bottom right corner. This trophy showed up on a few cards each year and then, in the coming seasons, depending on how the recipient of the trophy had fared, it would either stand as a rich silver harbinger of the good things that had come to pass or as a glum tin comment on the trophy winner's failure to deliver on their potential. When you're in your early twenties, life carries the burdensome imprint of that trophy. Will it come to mock you? Will you squander the promise of beginning?