Cardboard Gods (14 page)

Our team got beat up pretty badly, and some of the seats down low opened up. I couldn't believe how close we got, me and my brother. I couldn't believe no one told us we had to leave. I couldn't believe how brightly the batting helmet shined on the head of the player in the on-deck circle, Butch Hobson. I'd never been closer to a god. Ian's helmet shined the same way. I took mine off and looked at it and it shined just as bright, then I put it back on and was about to yell to Butch Hobson but it was like my throat was clogged with light. He leaned on his bat and watched the game, as if it was no big deal that they were losing the game, this one game. And it was true. They still had a huge lead in the division. They were flawless. For example: Butch Hobson, who had driven in 112 runs the year before, hit ninth in the order.

Later, as the summer wore on, the flaws would begin to show, starting with Butch Hobson's arm. Because of things you couldn't see coming apart inside him, he started to lose control of his throws to first. Some of them sailed into the seats where my brother and I had sat. You needed
real
helmets to sit there, not just the cheap plastic jobs we had gotten at the gate. The errors piled up. The division lead shrank. Both of our helmets lost their shine and I dropped mine and it cracked. Mom and Tom found some pot in the little desk by my brother's bed.

“Why do you have this?” Tom said.

“You're sneaking through my stuff now?” Ian yelled.

“That's not what we're talking about here, man!” Tom yelled.

“You smoke pot all the time,
man
!” Ian yelled. I went to the backyard and clamped my hands over my ears.

 

But I didn't know any of that on Helmet Day. On the way home, Ian put his new helmet over his face and went to sleep. Mom nodded off, too, her head bobbing with bumps. Only Tom and I were still awake. I discovered I could change the appearance of the headlights of the cars coming toward us by taking my new glasses off. With my glasses on, they were all just headlights, but when I went back to my true way of seeing, the headlights separated into spheres made up of many smaller lights. They reminded me of dried-out dandelion bulbs, the kind you make wishes with, but the seeds were points of light. I imagined I could make my deepest wish. What would it be? I thought about Yaz.
Come on, Yaz!
I thought about winning. I thought about me and my brother jumping around together, champions at last. I looked over at him dozing on the seat beside me. I wanted to stay awake.
Champions at last
. But as I watched the dandelion headlights floating toward us, my glasses in my hands, I started to breathe deeper and slower, and finally with one last waking wishing breath, all the seeds of light scattered.

I remember the precise moment I found this card in a new pack. I had just bought the pack and was walking home. I was by the spot on Route 14 where an abandoned general store with an Esso sign and dust-covered windows faced, across the road, an empty metal trailer that had once been a restaurant called Chez René. Usually I was able to delay gratification for a while, carrying my standard purchase of two packs of cards all the way home before opening them, but on this day I needed that painkilling hit just a little bit quicker and slid my finger under the plastic flaps, breaking the infinitesimally thin coat of glue and releasing the scent of the gum.

I shattered the shard of gum with my teeth as I leafed through the new cards. I spotted the N.L. ALL STAR shield first, then read the name that I recognized from following its awe-inspiring march through the previous season's statistics pages in the newspapers. The broken-pieces phase of the gum gave way to the soft and cohesive sugary phase, and I heightened the moment, which would soon give way to the texture-of-a-pencil-eraser/flavor-of-spit-and-disappointment phase, by flipping the George Foster card over to affirm that the legend told by the newspaper statistics was true. After all, nothing was an inarguable fact until I saw it on a baseball card, and here it was: George Foster had hit 52 home runs during the 1977 season, the most any player had hit in my entire lifetime.

In 1978, the 50 home run plateau was mythic. Only ancient guys from the black-and-white world preceding the epoch of the cardboard gods had ever reached that Olympian height. But now George Foster had done it, and as sugar coursed through my body I held in
my hands that very same George Foster, or at least a little sliver of George Foster that had fallen like a red and brown and white leaf all the way from the forests of heaven to the rundown valley of East Randolph, Vermont. I paused for a moment, then hurried home before anyone could fuck with me.

One day a year, during our visit to see our father, my brother and I would take a break from everything that really mattered and become Mets fans. They were easy to love, in part because there was nothing for us to lose by doing so, since we didn't live and die with them, and in part because everything about the team seemed to be a lovable and paradoxical mixture of spectacular and incompetent: first baseman Willie Montanez making incredible scoops of wild throws that were already several seconds too late; catcher John Stearns forming a brick wall at home plate in hopes of impeding the runner as the relay throw sailed into the dugout; Bruce Boisclair lacing a double to right and getting thrown out easily trying to stretch it into a triple. Even the lingering vestiges of the Mets' glory days seemed affected by the glittering ineptitude: Jerry Koosman dashingly windmilling and firing his way to a 3-15 record, Ed Kranepool clouting pinch-hit drives to the warning track.

By 1978 centerfielder Lee Mazzilli was becoming the star of the show. Mazzilli was good at just about everything. He could draw walks, hit for a decent average, smack 15 or so home runs and steal 15 or so bases a year, and cover a lot of ground in the outfield. You could almost say that he was faultless, a characterization that he seemed inclined to emphasize by custom-tailoring his uniforms and maintaining his archetypical feathered haircut with the level of care usually only given to invaluable cultural relics, which in a way is what it was. By 1978 my brother and I were mesmerized by feathered haircuts, and seeing such a glorious example of the new bulletproofcool style on a baseball player was particularly enthralling. I can see
him yet, king of my once-a-year-beloved Mets, his cap flying free to reveal his immaculate Scott Baio locks as he sprints across the brown Queens grass in his impeccable uniform to dive stylishly for a line drive that touches down yards away from his outstretched glove.

 

The morning of our Mets game in the late summer of 1978, I was eating cereal how I always ate it, without any milk and definitely without any of the cut-up bananas my father and brother had in their bowls. I was humming the home team's theme song and wondering about it.

“Are you going to be taking algebra this year?” my father asked my brother.

“We started learning some at the end of last year,” my brother said, “but it was baby stuff.”

“It's very im—” my father said. I started singing.

“Meet the Mets, greet the Mets, step right up and beat the Mets,” I sang. I really thought these were the words.

“Why do the Mets say to everyone to come and beat them?” I said. I was reading the sports page, and I was about to tell my brother the Mets' putrid record as soon as I was done with my next bite of Cheerios when I noticed that my dad was glaring at my cereal bowl.

For whatever reason, seeing me eat cereal without any milk was the last straw for my dad. I can only guess what else was on the overloaded back of the proverbial camel whose back was about to be broken by my next unsoggy bite, but it may have been a compendium of all the ways I wasn't quite right. Here is an almost certainly incomplete list: 1) I daydreamed too much. 2) I didn't know which way to look when we crossed streets while walking around the city. 3) I didn't remember to look
any
way sometimes, lost in my own thoughts as my dad and brother talked about things I didn't understand or care about. 4) I had had a middle-of-the-night screaming bout of night terrors when we'd visited my dad's brother's family in New Jersey. 5) On another night that led to an even worse morning than the one that followed the night terrors, I'd wet the foam mattress I slept on in my dad's apartment. 6) I was, according to my dad, a “mama's boy.” (Many years later, I would understand he was probably cringing at the echo in me of his own younger self.) 7) The only thing I knew about was baseball, which was silly and devoid of worth. 8) Worst of all, my picky, idiotic eating habits. Chiefly: I didn't eat fruit! 9) And now this! Milk-less cereal!

Even though I sensed that something not too great was about to happen, I went ahead and took my bite of cereal, still trying to think only about the Mets.

“Gah!” my father barked.
“You don't do anything right!”

My brother jumped to my defense.

“No, he just likes it better when it's crunchy,” he said.

“Oh my god,” my father said, already mortified by his brief eruption. His head was in his hands. I wish I could say I was sitting there toughly. But yet another way in which I was not flawless was that I often burst into tears. My dad began apologizing in a devastated way that I found overbearing and confusing.

“Please forgive me,” he kept saying. “Do you forgive me?”

I didn't understand what he meant. Forgive? But I wanted him to stop smothering me with the question with his big sad breathing face inches from mine, so finally I nodded, and he went back to more or less leaving me alone.

 

If you listed the things my father hated the most in this life, you'd come up with many of the things that made up a day at Shea Stadium. Subway rides, sports, crowds, the deafening roar of jet planes: It was all there. He spent most of the game glaring at the
New York Times
and clamping his hands over his ears for the constant procession of La Guardia arrivals and departures.

Meanwhile, as the customary beating the Mets were sustaining passed the halfway point, I started focusing on the dozens and dozens of empty seats below us, much nearer to the field. We could see Lenny Randle and Steve “Stevie Wonder” Henderson up close. We could say something to Lee Mazzilli and he'd hear us.

My father wasn't crazy about moving down, but finally he agreed, and for a second we were right there, just like we'd been at the Red Sox game earlier in the summer. But before we'd even breathed out once, a man in a blue windbreaker tapped my father on the shoulder.

“No one's even sitting here,” my father whined.

“Sorry, chief,” the man said. That's my clearest memory of all those games at Shea in the 1970s: staring at my father's back as we climbed farther and farther away from the action to where we belonged.