Cardboard Gods (30 page)

 

I quit the truck loader job and fled back to Vermont for a few weeks, staying at Tom's condo, where I spent an inordinate amount of time putting golf balls across the wall-to-wall carpeting at table legs. In the evenings Tom came home from his steady job as a dealer rep for
a company that sold tankless water heaters and barbecued on his deck as the two of us drank and looked at the man-made waterfall twenty feet away. He was glad to have me there.

“How's Jenny?” he sometimes asked, meaning my mom.

When I wasn't staging table-leg golf tournaments, I found time to write a young adult sports novel that, I later would come to understand, drew far too heavily on my childhood love of
The White Shadow
. As soon as I finished the thing, I returned to my brother, who had moved to an apartment in Brooklyn, making way for my mom, who had come back from France. On my first day there, I took a long walk from the apartment to the Brooklyn Heights promenade and stared across the East River at the Manhattan skyline, imagining that I would soon enough bring the city to its knees with my undying work about teenaged boys shooting baskets. I never did sell the book, but as I waited for it to sell I got what I figured would be a temporary job at a liquor store where my brother had worked while attending NYU.

 

Eddie Murray won the Rookie of the Year award in 1977, but it should have gone to Mitchell Page, who nearly led the league in stolen bases while also easily besting Murray in the two most telling of the basic offensive production categories, on-base percentage (.407 to Murray's .336) and slugging percentage (.521 to Murray's .470). Which of the two young sluggers would rapidly decline with each succeeding year, banished from regular playing time by 1981, and which player would eventually join Hank Aaron and Willie Mays as only the third man to ever amass more than 3,000 hits and 500 home runs? When the 1978 cards came out, you couldn't know the answer to that question. By the early 1990s, of course, as I took my first steps as an adult, Mitchell Page was long gone while steady Eddie Murray was still driving in his 90 to 100 runs a year, a perpetual standout always just shy of superstardom, seemingly immune to the ups and downs that threatened and confused and defined the lives of everyone this side of the Hall of Fame.

 

My mom worked a temporary job in the print department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Going back to graduate school had been even harder than she'd imagined, but she had stuck with it, steady as a Hall of Famer, despite the mountains of reading and
endless memorizing of facts and writing of papers and contending with ambitious, moneyed fellow students, most of them young enough to have been her children.

Her biggest ally along the way had been the same guy she'd separated from two decades before. She and Dad had never shown any antipathy for one another that I had seen and, beyond staying friends, had in fact, for reasons I never quite understood, never even bothered to get a divorce. When Mom moved to New York for graduate school they began to see more of one another, and Dad was so encouraging about her studies that when she finally completed her dissertation on Honoré Daumier she dedicated it to him.

She was still working to complete that dissertation while she was employed at the Met, but after many years she was in the home stretch with her studies and working, albeit temporarily, at one of the greatest museums in the world. She was a worrier, though, and worried that she'd still somehow be unable to finish her dissertation and that she'd be unable to find work after her temporary job ended. She worried about Dad. She worried about Ian. She worried about me.

“How's Tom?” she sometimes asked.

 

Everything seemed to have within it at least a hint of aftermath, and sometimes much more than a hint. My liquor store job was no exception. The store had once been successful, but since two large warehouse-style liquor stores had opened nearby business had waned. Sometimes people stuck their head in the door just to tell us that we were selling something for considerably more than one or the other of the warehouses. Sometimes, just for something to do, we took empty individual-sized boxes of Absolut and used them to cover up large gaps in our shelves. This practice of covering up the empty shelves increased as the years went by until eventually most of the store was empty boxes.

“Wow, you guys really have a lot of Absolut,” a customer would sometimes observe.

When I wasn't filling empty spaces, I was filling empty time. Sometimes I'd read the baseball encyclopedia we kept in the back. Sometimes I'd glare out the window, sorting passing women into imaginary piles, fuckable and unfuckable. Sometimes I watched baseball games on the television behind the counter, both New York teams perpetually playing out the string, Charlie O'Brien grounding
out to second, Steve Balboni staring into space, Eddie Murray padding his prodigious career RBI numbers with a sacrifice fly to plate Bill Pecota late in a 7-3 loss.

I worked most shifts with a married adjunct philosophy professor named Dave. On Fridays, Dave took a twenty from the register and we bought Italian food from a restaurant around the corner and ate it in the back with a bottle of wine. Dave did most of the talking, and he also took care of the refilling of our chipped coffee cups. Once the bottle passed its halfway point, the conversation turned from sports to memory lane—to Dave's memories, that is, or to be even more specific, to the difference between Dave's girl-glutted past and my gnawingly lonely present. Dave spun great expansive tales of romantic adventure and seduction that always seemed to begin with him leaving the liquor store with a bottle of wine in his satchel and always seemed to end with him smoking a joint with some beautiful, sensuous she-beatnik on a rooftop below the gentle caress of the 3 a.m. night. I loved the stories, loved how he told them, loved feeling a little drunk at work on the free wine, loved the way the whole ritual seemed to beckon for a wider world than the one I was experiencing in most of my waking hours. Later, before we locked up the gates for the night, I dutifully tried to follow Dave's lead, jamming a bottle of wine into my backpack next to the Dostoevsky and the Mead Wireless notebook filled with my feverish screeds. But my Friday nights, instead of ending on a rooftop with a girl, always ended while waiting with my brother in a stink cloud of bum urine for the F train to Brooklyn after last call.

 

Ian and I went to games sometimes. Most of the time, baseball in the early 1990s seemed to me like the Merle Haggard song: “It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad).” We spread ourselves across several seats in a half-empty stadium in the Bronx or in Queens and watched with detached bemusement as a fly ball conked Deion Sanders in the head or Vince Coleman pulled a hamstring or Scott Kamieniecki served up a few gopher balls or John Franco walked in the go-ahead run.

Sometimes we still went to a game with more at stake than simply wanting to pleasantly kill an afternoon. My brother wore a Red Sox cap and I wore, more often than not, the painter's cap with YAZ on the front that Ian had bought outside Fenway a few years earlier. One Memorial Day, thusly clad, we ventured to Yankee Stadium and watched from high above the left-field foul line as Red
Sox pitcher Danny Darwin gradually surrendered most of a big early cushion, the stadium crowd getting louder and louder, nearing its transformation into the Beast. Finally Jeff Reardon was summoned from the bullpen in the bottom of the ninth, and Mel Hall ripped Reardon's meaty offering high and deep. The shrinking white pill disappeared into the right-field stands like a catalytic tablet into a witch's cauldron. The Beast erupted. Its closest tendril, a cackling blonde woman, pummeled the two of us, Ian on the shoulder and me on my Yaz-capped head, amid the thunderous noise as Mel Hall strutted from base to base.

After Hall finally touched home plate, it took so long for my brother and me to get to the subway that I'm not entirely sure I'm not still there, insane, dreaming all subsequent events. We took a wrong turn upon exiting the stadium and had to circle the whole giant palace of horrors through an endless circling thicket of Yankees fans, the subway nowhere in sight. Ashen-faced, our Red Sox caps stuffed in our pockets, my brother and I said nothing, just trudged. I remember seeing one young sunburned and well-lubricated Red Sox fan flailing against the Beast.

“
Fuck
Bucky Dent!” he kept shouting as he stumbled through the heckling throng. Veins stood out in his forehead and his voice cracked. “Bucky Dent
sucks
!”

You poor crazy bastard
, I remember thinking, not without some admiration. It was like watching someone try to start a fistfight with an oncoming train.

 

My dad's apartment was only a couple blocks from the store. He had retired and sometimes stopped by on his way to or from killing a few hours at the NYU library.

“Here are some vitamins,” he said one day, shoving a container the approximate size of a watercooler across the counter to me.

“Here's a carbon monoxide protector,” he said another day. “It's important that you and Ian have one of these in your apartment. You must read the instructions on how to use it correctly.”

“OK,” I said, like he was telling me to brush my teeth.

Sometimes I saw him on the weekends, too. It was a good part of those years, getting to know my father. Once we went out for dinner and after a bottle of wine I asked him about the day we had all moved away from him to go to Vermont.

He stared down at the table for a long time, and I thought he wasn't going to say anything.

“That night,” he finally said. Then he shook his head and didn't say any more.

 

Eddie Murray bats right, according to the listings on the back of his rookie card. Eddie Murray bats left, according to the photo on the front. Eddie Murray stares at the viewer in this photo, many years away from becoming the career RBI leader among switch-hitters. Nothing has been settled. Nothing is known. The world is uncertain, riddled with mistakes. How do you proceed when you don't want to proceed, when you want to stay a rookie forever?

 

Most days I had nothing in particular to do until my shift started in the evening. Some days I'd write, some days try and fail, some days who the hell knows. Watch
Charles in Charge
, sleep, pace, beat off, worry, do a few push-ups, stare out the window at a sliver of sky. One of those days I spilled out of the building to go to work and a passerby peered at me and remarked, “
Damn
, look like you getting your
ass
kicked by
life
.”

At the store, I had to learn to hide this ass-kicked-by-life face behind a more implacable mask. The door was open, and anyone could come in, and sometimes the people who came in were asking or begging or probing for a weakness to exploit or just plain looking to steal.

“No,” I learned to say. But it only worked if you filled your whole body with the word.

Behind the counter, we had a baseball bat hanging by the knob from two nails, Jeff Burroughs's autograph engraved in the barrel. I took it off the nails and hefted it sometimes, whenever I felt the armor of the word “No” wearing thin. I no longer imagined, as I had when I was a kid hefting a bat, that I was smacking triples and doubles and home runs, but instead that I was cracking kneecaps and shattering ribs. The daydream's backbeat:
no, no, no
.

 

It's one thing to be able to look back at the rookie card of a legend and appreciate the card's faint aura of uncertainty. It's another thing to be taking your first steps in adulthood without any sort of notion at all about where you're going to end up. You begin to imagine your own possibilities as something you could hold in your hands, like
a rookie card, so as to imagine tearing that card to pieces, as if by doing so you could rid yourself of the oppressive weight of possibly amounting to nothing instead of something.

And even if there's nothing to grab on to, nothing specific to tear into shreds, that won't stop you from trying. In October 1992, for example, my brother and friends and I reacted to the Toronto Blue Jays winning the World Series by gouging Canada from the map of the world that hung on the wall in the back of our favorite bar, the International. It's not that we hated Canada but that the Blue Jays winning the World Series had been unthinkable when we'd been kids, and if the unthinkable was now happening, it must mean that our childhoods were truly gone without a trace. But more than that it was just something to destroy, and something is better than nothing.

By the following year, our disenchantment with the world had grown, and once again we transferred that disenchantment to baseball. Baseball no longer held us like it once had, back when nobody knew if Mitchell Page or Eddie Murray would turn out to be the better player. We knew we were changing and that baseball was basically the same, but we couldn't gouge at ourselves like we'd gouged at the map in the International, so we decided to Blame Baseball. And in 1993, my brother and I and two friends went to a game we dubbed—not without some awareness that we were full of shit (all four of us have attended many baseball games since then), but also not without some real vitriol—the Last Baseball Game Ever. We were all suffering through varying degrees of loneliness and either unemployed or lashed to repetitive menial jobs of one stripe or another. So why not at least pantomime the killing off of the last of the haunting, painful hopes of childhood? Why not declare that centerpiece of our younger years, baseball, forever null and void?

We chose for the Last Baseball Game Ever the second-to-last Mets home game of that team's disastrous 1993 season. The game turned out to be the longest and most uneventful game I've ever seen. Not even a single run was scored for sixteen innings, and while sixteen innings of scoreless ball might seem a likely home for one after another of pressure-packed clutch pitching performances, game-saving fielding gems, and fascinating managerial moves, it was in fact a game in which nothing whatsoever seemed to happen. Batters grounded softly to second and popped out to left field a lot, maybe. I'm not sure. But it went on and on.