Cardboard Gods (31 page)

After the eighth inning, they closed the concession stands. Sobriety set in, coupled with gnawing hunger. The zeros kept growing across the digital scoreboard. I began to hope they would stretch on forever. This hope combined with our ever-increasing mobility throughout the stadium to make me feel as if a state of damp, cold, mediocre grace had descended upon us. At some point late within the regulation nine innings, we'd ventured down from our seats in the upper deck to tentatively test out the mostly empty sections in the loge boxes. Nobody said anything, the ushers apparently too deadened by the abject misery of the Mets' season to even try for bribes anymore. And as the game edged into extra time we moved even closer, until by the twelfth or thirteenth inning we were mere rows from the home dugout on the third-base side.

We were surrounded for the first time all night by other fans, and there was mixed into the hundred-loss malaise a feeling of giddy excitement—none of us belonged here, and yet,
here we were!
The people who usually sat in these seats were far, far away that night, at some event that mattered, and we finally had our chance to See What It Was Like.

I realized at some point that the closest player to me as we sat in those seats was the Mets third baseman, well-traveled veteran Chico Walker, who in what seemed like another lifetime had been the young player dispatched to replace Carl Yastrzemski in left field on Yaz's last day. Our proximity to the field and the relative quiet of the stadium introduced the rare opportunity to say something to a player on the field that he would hear. As I was trying to think of something Yaz-related to shout to Chico Walker—as if he could always be used as a cosmic conduit to Yaz—I noticed the identity of the one person in uniform even closer to me than Chico Walker. The Cardinals' third-base coach shared the last name and physical description of a former player whom I like to believe, against the mounting evidence to the contrary, was long ago sliced into tiny bits in a wood-chipper accident. There he was, just standing there straight and tall, as if nothing had ever happened. I found myself half-standing out of my seat, the ache that had long ago settled in my chest flaring sharply up my throat and out into the air.

“Bucky Dent, you ruined my life!” I yelled.

 

The zeros kept spreading as if by mitosis across the scoreboard. We shifted over to an even sparser gathering of fans on the first-base
side. It was at this point that the game really seemed headed toward infinity, and I stopped shivering in the damp fog as a calm came over me, as if I were about to drift into fatal hypothermal slumber.

Unlike my brother and me, the two friends who had come along with us were full-blooded Mets fans, and so they couldn't as easily embrace my vision of an everlasting game without a winner. Because of that, they eventually struck up a rendition of “Meet the Mets.”

At first, just their two voices were singing the song, but then a third shaky voice that seemed to be coming from the thin, damp fog itself joined in. For a brief moment, there seemed to be no one connected to that other voice, but then this slight, gray-pallored guy in a dirty Atlanta Braves cap appeared on the fringes of our ragged congregation.

He spent the remaining moments of the game in our company, a guy about our age with lank dirty hair down almost to his shoulders and an aura about him of either being someone who lived in his parents' basement or, perhaps more likely, who had recently been evicted from his parents' basement, leaving with a broken-zippered duffel bag containing a change of clothing and the tattered edition of the baseball encyclopedia from his childhood.

In the weeks and months and years to follow, he appeared periodically on the fringes of our gatherings as if from nowhere. He always remembered us from the Last Baseball Game Ever and acted briefly like he was a familiar part of our group before wandering off. He materialized without exception on nights when the element of directionlessness in our lives seemed even more pervasive than usual. The last time I saw him was years ago, but I'm still not sure I won't see him again. He briefly wandered into a bar on Second Avenue near Houston Street dressed in a replica of Michael Jordan's short-lived number 45 Bulls jersey and matching Bulls shorts, vaguely acknowledged us, and then wandered back out into a night that was way too cold to be dressed in a remaindered basketball uniform.

On the night of the Last Baseball Game Ever, he faded back into the ether from whence he came moments after the game finally ended in the bottom of the seventeenth inning, as if he could exist only while things were undecided, nothing but zeros on the board. Eddie Murray, the only player present who had appeared on one of my childhood baseball cards, started the rally with a leadoff single. After a sacrifice bunt and a Chico Walker popup, Murray loped around third and toward home on a Jeff Kent shot into the gap. But
before he became the winning run, the only run, the Last Run of All Time, Eddie Murray tiptoed to a stop a step away from scoring. The on-deck hitter, Joe Orsulak, had to shove him across the plate.

I spent a lot of my twenties in the International. More often than not, my brother was there. We had a lot of good times there, and we had a lot of times where it seemed like we were waiting for something to happen.
That door will swing open and my life will begin.
I wanted it, dreaded it, feared it. The days went by, the weeks, the years. I worried that my brother and I were destined to live together forever, like Miss Emily and Miss Mamie, the desiccated spinster sisters from
The Waltons
. Since I'd left college, we'd already shared three apartments: the narrow railroad in Manhattan, a dump in Brooklyn that constantly trembled from the vibrations of the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and a railroad in Brooklyn where my brother slept in the living room and I crammed myself into a loft bed in a converted closet a few feet away, as close to my brother's bed as I'd been as a kid. When we finally got home from last call at the International, dawn breaking, I'd fall unconscious below dim glow-in-the-dark stars left over from when previous tenants used the loft bed for a young child.

 

J. R. Richard spent his early to mid-twenties trying to find the strike zone, and then suddenly it was like whatever he had been looking for found him, seized him, changed him. He began taking long, loping strides toward Cooperstown.

He was 6'8”, threw blazingly hard, wore the dazzling colors of the distant, exciting, up and coming Astros, had a cool, mysterious name, and once he became a star he always seemed to be featured by Topps in one of their rare action shots, the photos making him seem
even bigger and more electrifying than the increasingly impressive numbers on the back of his card suggested.

Back in the heyday of J. R. Richard I sometimes passed entire afternoons wondering who could beat up whom in the Marvel superhero universe, and though I understood that the worlds of baseball and comics did not overlap, J. R. Richard (last name virtually identical to Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four) was an exception, and I thought of him as if he could be placed somewhere in the penultimate tier of the Marvel rankings, able to trade skyscraperrocking blows with the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, or Luke Cage: Power Man. And even the three top Marvel strongmen—the Thing, Thor, and the Incredible Hulk—though perhaps too powerful for J. R. Richard to hold off in a fistfight without the help of some lesser masked functionary such as Hawkeye or the Falcon, could not, if the situation were ever to arise, touch one of the lightning-bolt fastballs that sprang from J. R. Richard's giant superpowered hand.

 

My brother was even more mesmerized with J. R. Richard than I was and modeled his pitching motion on the one shown in this 1977 card: high bent-kneed leg kick, hands held tight to the chest, scowling eyes locked on the catcher's target. He perfected the motion while hurling a tennis ball at the strike zone he'd duct-taped to our wooden garage door. The sound the ball made when hitting the door got louder as the years passed, my brother amid the seismic epicenter of his puberty seeming to get bigger by the day: 6'1”, 6'2”, 6'3”. By the time he had reached his full height of 6'4” and no longer played organized baseball and was openly longing to leave home for good, the scowling, bent-kneed windup and gunshot report of the garage door had become the primary elements in a ritual of imagined escape, each pitch a prayer for an impossible transformation from cornered teenager into the pure violent beauty of J. R. Richard throwing heat.

 

Sometimes my brother didn't show up at the International.

“Where's Ian?” I was asked.

I never really knew. I tried throughout my twenties to make time stand still, the two of us side by side at home and at baseball games and on barstools. I tried not to feel anything if I could help it, but I felt the ache in my chest whenever he failed to show up. I rarely found out where he'd been or what he'd been doing on those nights,
but one night, as he later told it, he was wandering around the city, getting angrier and angrier. Rich pricks everywhere. Hipsters, yuppies, predatory phonies. The whole city one big exclusionary enterprise, roped off by velvet to keep the likes of him out. He went into a Korean grocer and bought a persimmon, about the size and weight of a baseball. He continued his walk, hefting the fruit, continuing to stoke his rage, and when he came to a velvet-roped club not far from our dank, smoke-glutted lung, the International, he shouldered through the front door, yelled, “This is
hell
!” and hurled the persimmon with all his might and all his J. R. Richard inspired technique.

 

We got into a drunken fracas at the International once. I don't remember how it started, if I ever knew, just that the narrow bar was unusually crowded that night and Ian took umbrage at what he perceived to be the arrogant attitude of some random skinny cool guy and his friends, which unlike our own lonely gathering of mutterers included some girls. What I discovered is that while I generally go to great lengths to avoid confrontations, I won't hesitate to jump into the middle of things to defend my brother. It turned out to be nothing more than a shoving match centering around Ian attempting to strangle his smirking adversary, but I think it still deserves to be noted because it was the only time in my life that I can remember jumping into action without first thinking about it. Soon the shoving cooled to a shouting match, which ended for me when a pretty woman in the other group referred with scorn to the theme-restaurant sweatshirt I was wearing.

“Calm down, Hooters,” she said.

 

The great majority of the time, however, nothing really happened. My brother and I and our friends generally loitered until last call at 4 a.m., the favorite part of the night occurring near that time, after we'd all released the burden of hoping that something would happen to change our lives. Some song on the jukebox would hit like Novocaine and it no longer mattered that life was sliding past like scenery in a cheap cartoon. In fact, it felt pretty fucking good. My brother once put words to the feeling: “Numberless nights at the International Bar began their stretch run thusly: It's 3:52 a.m., I've got a headful of static from drinking cheap swill, and Peggy Lee starts teetering through ‘Is That All There Is?' on the ol' Wurlitzer. And
through all those painful years, I was comforted each time; I'd feel a crooked, fallen smile take shape: ‘Yessir, that's all what she wrote.' Various harpies would leave me be and I'd relax into appreciation of what was. McKenna gesticulating wildly, maybe. Or ‘That Guy.' Or just Rose behind the bar, humane and beautiful and flatly real. Who needs the transcendent greener grass when opening to What Is is so rewarding? (Of course, I'd forget that five seconds later, or at least by the next morning, and shoulder the misery again.)”

 

My brother decided he was going to learn how to play the cello. He liked the melancholy sound of the instrument, so he rented one from a music store and signed up for lessons with a recent Juilliard grad, a young, stern Asian woman who was openly incredulous about his intentions. He wanted to use the cello to wrest some beauty from his life, but he rarely got around to taking the thing out of its case. Soon another entry was added into the endlessly rich lexicon of euphemisms for masturbation (e.g., Question: “Where's your brother?” Answer: “He's ‘practicing the cello.'”). Nonetheless, he lugged his albatross to and from work whenever he had a lesson, shoehorning himself and the obese case into the jammed F train at rush hour all the way from our neighborhood in Brooklyn to his job editing travel books on the Upper West Side. This went on for a couple months. One Sunday just before he finally admitted defeat, he roused himself from an “Is That All There Is?” hangover to practice his assigned homework, another lesson and its accompanying scolding from the Asian woman looming. The apartment looked, as usual, as if it had been ransacked. It may have been around the time when we had a rotting jack-o'-lantern with carved-out drunken Xs for eyes collapsing into itself next to a bottle of Jim Beam on our “dining room” table. Bleary-eyed, unshaven, wearing only his boxer shorts and a wife beater dotted with Ragu stains, my brother performed his first and last opus, a halting, truncated, off-key rendition of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”