Cardboard Gods (7 page)

In a 1975 card that I had gotten just a few months earlier than the 1976 card shown here, a much younger looking Mike Cosgrove had oozed easy confidence, his body communicating looseness and ease, the natural balanced grace of a lefty. He stared directly at the viewer, a trace of a small, confident smile on his unblemished face, his hair straight and blond like a sun-drenched surf bum's. The back of the card contained the story of his quick rise through the minors, including the season he fanned 231 batters in 172 innings. After that he began splitting time between the minors and the majors, finally spending the majority of a season in the big leagues during the final campaign listed, 1974. Below the line for that year is a statement of praise and hope: “Mike became lefty ace of Astros' bullpen in 1974 & may be starter in 1975.”

But just one year later, Mike Cosgrove no longer looks directly at the viewer. He's no longer young. The bill of his cap is misshapen, as if it has been mangled by bullies or forgotten in the rain. He wears badges of desperation indigenous to his awkward, searching decade: a perm, a dust-thin mustache. Behind him, simultaneously claustrophobic and vast, loom the unmistakable high stands of a major league stadium. He has made it; there is no joy. On the back of his card, all traces of his minor league successes have been expunged, leaving only the thin gruel of a big league mop-up man destined to vanish from the game altogether before next season's set of baseball cards hits the stores.

A friend of Mom and Tom's from New Jersey came to visit, a woman who brought her two daughters along. She'd just gotten a divorce. She and her ex-husband had been among the people who'd put ski masks on and kidnapped Tom on his birthday. Throughout the visit, she cried a lot and played side one of
The Band
over and over until I wanted to murder whoever was responsible for “Rag, Mama, Rag.”

“It's so beautiful up here,” she said to my mom.

“It's not like we thought,” Mom said. “It's really hard.”

“You're so lucky,” the woman said.

“I don't paint anymore,” Mom said.

The woman slept on the couch with the television on and her daughters slept in our room. They were the same ages as Ian and me but seemed older and wiser. Ian played Truth or Dare with them. I didn't want to play. It scared me. I pretended to go to sleep.

“How come he won't play?” the younger girl said.

“He's a baby,” Ian said.

 

The days started getting shorter. I had gone through the whole summer of 1976 and hadn't gotten a Carl Yastrzemski card. I decided to write him a letter. I told him the Red Sox were my favorite team and he was my favorite player, then I asked him for his autograph.

I sealed and stamped the letter and took it out to our aluminum mailbox, flipping up the red metal flag to signal the mailman. Later in the day, when I saw that the flag was back down, evidence that the mailman had made his daily visit in the four-wheel-drive Subaru required for rural Vermont postal delivery, gravity loosened its hold just a little. My letter was on its way to Yaz!

In a certain way my real life began that day, my life in the world. Up to that point I had never wanted anything beyond what was close at hand, beyond my family, my home, my town. I began waiting for something more. The leaves started dying. Everything was going from before to after.

 

Instead of an encouraging personalized line of text below the numbers on the back of Mike Cosgrove's 1976 card, as there had been the year before, there is this non-sequitur: “At the turn of the century the Chicago Cubs were known as the Colts.” In the photo on the front of the card, it's tempting to think the scattered figures in the distance are heckling the man in the extreme foreground, that scorn
from strangers could be the cause of the complicated expression on Mike Cosgrove's face. But they are just as likely to be talking about how the Cubs used to be known as the Colts as they are to be talking about, let alone bothering to mock, Mike Cosgrove. They really have nothing to do with the likes of Mike Cosgrove. The vague repulsion or sour apprehension rippling his pasty features is his alone, the light from the dirty neon of the pawnshop within.

Everybody was going from before to after. Everybody had a look on their face like they'd just caught a whiff of a nearby landfill. Everybody was ambivalent about the length of their hair. Everybody was aging in regrettable ways. Everybody dabbled in jogging and chanting and cocaine. Everybody went back and forth from having a regular job to laying on rusty lawn furniture all afternoon unemployed. Everybody bought their children faulty mood rings and overly cheerful sex education handbooks. Everybody began wondering how to file for divorce. Everybody was a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. Everybody wore rainbow colors and succumbed to depression. Everybody was kung fu fighting. Everybody was Bo McLaughlin.

Everybody except Steve Garvey.

 

In 1975,
Sports Illustrated
featured a picture of Steve Garvey on the cover. In just a couple weeks, Saigon would fall, closing the book on America's disastrous military involvement in Vietnam and seeming to clinch the 1970s as a decade immune to American heroics. The year before, as the American president was being forced from office for criminally subverting democracy, the handsome, clean-cut, future
Sports Illustrated
cover subject became the first baseball player voted on to the All-Star Team as a write-in candidate. Democracy was dead? Long live democracy!

“Steve Garvey: Proud to be a hero,” the cover caption read.

 

By the time I got this 1976 Steve Garvey card, my identity outside of baseball was as an outsider and a weirdo in my own town. The class I went to was not like other classes. My family was not like other families. There was a man in our house, Tom, who was not my father, and not only that but he had long hair and a beard and he drove around in a van with a metal chimney sticking out of the roof.

In what seems in retrospect an unbelievably dangerous move, given that the innovation introduced a blazingly hot open fire inside the rusty frame of a moving motor vehicle, Tom had rigged the van with a portable forge so that he could travel from farm to farm throughout central Vermont offering his services as a blacksmith. He soon discovered that the demand for this was next to nothing, especially since the service was being offered to wary lifelong Vermonters by a longhaired flatlander in jeans and a yellow Superman T-shirt. The few willing farmers who did have a horse or two lazing
around on their dairy farms so neglected hoof care that when Tom occasionally got a job to shoe a horse, which involved clipping the animal's overgrown, infected hooves, the horse repaid the effort by kicking him in the ribs. For some time after Tom's plan to be a blacksmith had revealed itself as a hopeless case, he was still advertising the unusual nature of our family by driving all over the place with a chimney sticking out of his van.

“Why is there a chimney in your dad's van?” I was asked more than once by other kids. It wasn't really a question.

“He's not my dad,” I'd say.

That denial also existed inside the walls of our house in a more intimate, more pointed way. There wasn't much discipline in my family, per my mom's “let them grow wild and free” child-rearing philosophy, and this made things even more difficult than they already would have been for the adult male interloper. Sometimes Tom tried to guide the behavior of my brother and me by speaking to us rationally. As soon as he started, however, we began drowning him out with a chant meant to convey profound boredom.

“Lecture, lecture, lecture,” we droned.

Had I been put in the same situation in my mid- to late-twenties as a stepfather figure who wasn't even an official stepfather (instead forever just a
boyfriend
, both of the syllables of the word implying superficiality), I probably would have bashed the two miscreants' heads together, then hopped the nearest jet going far, far away. But except for one time when I was particularly sarcastic and Tom grabbed my arm and gave me a brief Indian burn, his frustration never boiled over into any kind of physical act. More than that, he hung in there. He stayed. Day after day, he was there.

My brother had more trouble with this enduring presence than I did, possibly because to me there had always been a Tom, whereas my brother was old enough to clearly remember a whole other family. For that matter, my brother could even remember a family that didn't include me, so my stronger attachment to Tom may also have had something to do with he and I both being intruders in the original, uncomplicated family.

I don't remember if my brother ever unleashed that trademark phrase of the boy in the broken family—
You're not my father!
—at Tom, but that was certainly the feeling underlying his side of their frequent yelling matches. These fights gave me stomachaches and sometimes worse. During one particularly vicious battle, I had to
leave the house to go cry in the backyard, my hands pressed against my ears. Mom and Tom sat me down later for a talk.

“Why do you cry so much?” my mother asked.

 

During those years I used these baseball cards to dream myself into the True America, the one I believed existed somewhere far away. A True American was happy and painless. A True American was clean-cut and handsome. A True American looked you right in the eye, no sarcasm or fear or complicated feelings. No weird hippie food or long hair or unusual family configurations. No chimneys sticking out of vans. A True American stood tall. He didn't limp around hunched over in pain from horse kicks. He didn't skulk through his own town like an outsider and a thief when he needed to go buy more baseball cards. A True American played every game and collected 200 hits and 100 RBI every year and was elected to the All-Star Team every year and wore red, white, and blue and was proud and was a hero.

 

Tom eventually gave up on being a blacksmith, but it happened gradually, rather than falling in one decisive moment, like Saigon. Tom started picking up work here and there, as did Mom, and Dad kept plugging away at his sociology research job far away, sending money all the time. The idea had been to grow all our own food, but our garden always seemed to be beleaguered, weed-glutted, and stunted, no matter how hard my mom worked at it. The winters were brutal and went on forever. The nights were cold and long and sometimes punctuated by my night terrors. I ran through the house screaming past everyone calling my name and trying to tell me it was OK, but no one could ever help me, not my brother, not my mother, not Tom.

 

You would think that I would have come straight to Steve Garvey for help. That I would have been drawn to his first appearance in my collection, a 1976 card featuring an all-American asphyxia-blue two-plus-two-makes-four symmetry broken only by the reaching out of the 1974 NL MVP's glove hand, an aesthetic disturbance that seems to call on the viewer to complete some larger symmetrical pattern. You would think I would have jumped at the chance to imagine myself answering that call. An honorable, well-adjusted, Garveyesque boy would respond to this beckoning with a fittingly direct rock-jawed
all-American reply, the baseball equivalent of a firm handshake: a straight brisk overhand strike. A logical balancing of the equation.