Cardboard Gods (2 page)

When I brought a new pack home I pulled that box to the center of the floor on my side of the room, then I opened it so that all the cards I already had would be staring up at the ceiling, waiting to see who'd be joining them.

Then, kneeling, I opened the pack.

 

I wonder sometimes if the years have beaten all this out of me. Have I lost all trace of the direct path to happiness? Have I lost belief in the boundless possibilities in that slim moment when I levered my fingernail below the flap of an unopened pack?

And in the tiny clicking sound of the flap disconnecting.

And in the first strong whiff of gum.

And in the first glimpse of some unidentifiable piece of a card, a swatch of grass in a photo on the front, a row of numbers on the back.

And in the way I would always blur my vision as I pulled the white-dusted shard of pink gum from the pack, so that I couldn't yet see any names or other identifying information on a card until I placed the gum on my tongue.

And in the way the gum shattered into many pieces and then, after a moment, re-formed into an improved version of itself. For a few seconds, the lifespan of happiness, the gum was soft and sweet,
and sugar coursed through my bloodstream, and I looked for the first time directly at a brand-new card and felt the sunshine coming up from it as if from some better world, some wider moment suddenly so close I could hold it in my hands.

 

Behold this card. Behold this world of drama and wonder. Behold the uniformed maestro at the center of everything, his head thrown back in awe, his arms outspread as if to proclaim:
Behold
. Behold this maestro's singular mellifluous name, Rudy Meoli, doubled within and without the borders of the moment in flamboyant cursive and sturdy black block. Behold the similar doubling of the timid lowercase word on the maestro's chest by a thunderous uppercase echo from above—ANGELS—as if somewhere just beyond the fringes of this world exists an invincible solidity, the answer to the question in our hearts. Behold this angel.

 

For a long time, I lived in an angelic state of stupidity and grace. I knew how to find happiness. I thought that something magnificent could occur anywhere. For a long time, years, I didn't understand that I wasn't witnessing the occurrence of something magnificent in Rudy Meoli's card from 1975, my first year of collecting. I didn't understand that all I was looking at was some little-known marginal who'd just squandered one of his rare chances to reveal any previously undiscovered magnificence by hitting a weak foul pop-up, the easiest of outs. Even to this day there's a faint residue of my inability to interpret the blatantly obvious in this picture. On some level, perhaps the only level of any importance in this life, I still think of Rudolph Bartholomew Meoli, a backup infielder with a .212 lifetime average and more career errors than extra-base hits, as one of the most thrilling performers of his era, a superstar in the reign of happiness and confusion.

When I try to identify my earliest memory, I see my brother. I'm chasing after him, a toy machine gun in my hands. I wanted to be part of the war game he was playing with his friend Jimmy, but he and Jimmy were too big for me, their legs too long. I couldn't keep up. Around that time, Ian began serving as my interpreter. I could make sounds, but no one could understand them as words except my brother, who passed along my wishes to the grown-ups. I liked this arrangement. Two boys with one voice.

When I try to identify my first baseball card, I see my brother, and I see this 1974 Topps Cleon Jones. I hold it and feel something twitching, beating, like wings. I don't remember the moment it came into my hands, and in that way it's like the person I most closely associate it with. I imagine I asked for and received the pack of baseball cards that included Cleon Jones because my brother had a pack of baseball cards. But in truth I can't place Cleon Jones's arrival in my life, and in a way he never arrived in my life because, like my brother, he was always there.

I believe the Cleon Jones card came to me while we were all still living together in one house in New Jersey, even though in the middle of that year we left Dad and moved to Vermont, where the card also could have come to me. But I like to believe the card predated the move that in many ways signaled not only the beginning of my years of collecting but the true beginning of my conscious life. There has to be a beginning, a first event in any cosmology, and I have subconsciously and consciously come to believe that Cleon Jones is mine, the central figure of the creation myth in my flimsy personal religion.

And who's to say for sure that this wasn't the first moment of the universe? A loud crack had just occurred, setting everything in motion. In the very next second, Cleon Jones is going to start running as fast as he can, and from the looks of it he is going to run for a while before having to stop. It's that moment when everything has just begun, and you don't know how it'll turn out, and you can't help assuming that it'll be great.

 

When the gods stopped coming to me, years began rushing by in a blur, faster all the time. The most recent ones crumble upon the slightest inspection, as if manufactured from a cheaper material than they used to be. Months and weeks are even flimsier, days a succession of smudged facsimiles.

On a recent vacation, I went back to the house I lived in the longest, in East Randolph, Vermont. On my way to the house I stopped at the general store where years before almost all of my baseball cards had come into my hands.

I pulled the rental car into the parking lot and mumbled a stiff, fakely folksy “Howdy” to three younger guys sitting on the bench on the porch. Cringing over this greeting—people in the town I grew up in didn't saunter around saying “howdy”—I entered the store. The cash register had been moved to the opposite side of the store from where it once was. There was a pale, gnomish lady in her fifties behind it. I lurched up and down the aisles for a few seconds. On my way out the door the cashier spoke.

“Help you find something?”

“Baseball cards?”

“No.”

With those words echoing in my head I drove to the house I grew up in, following the same short route I used to walk when bringing a new pack home. During the drive I recalled how I would open the pack in my room and place the gum from the pack in my mouth and crack it to pieces, releasing the first blast of sugar into my system so that the arrival of my newest gods coincided exactly with the sweet, fleeting bliss I'd come to need.

It doesn't last long, that sweetness. In its wake: a deeper need.

Baseball cards?

For a long time, I sat behind the wheel of a rental car and stared across the road at a house owned by strangers. What brought me here? What do I lack? What could I possibly hope to find?

In late 1969, hoping to find, at least for a day, a widening of what had become for her an unhappily narrow life, my mother boarded a charter bus from my birthplace, Willingboro, New Jersey, to a peace march in Washington, D.C. I don't remember that day, but I was there, in my father's arms, as my mother waved down to us in the parking lot from her seat on the bus. I was probably crying. I imagine that my father, an absent-minded sociologist, was holding me like an absent-minded sociologist might hold an unraveling unabridged dictionary. My brother, a little older, was probably confused.
Where's Mommy going?
My father's last words to my mother that day, so I'm told, were instructions to watch out for rock-throwing thugs hired by the Power Elite to discourage political dissent.

“That's my husband,” my mother announced pointedly as the bus pulled away from the two young children clinging to the man in the button-down shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. These were her first words to the stranger sitting next to her. By the time she had boarded the bus it was very full, and she'd gone up and down the aisle twice looking in vain to find an empty seat next to a woman. Finally she had given up and sat down in the only available seat, next to the young man with the scruffy fledgling beard, hair to his shoulders, and round John Lennon specs.

The bus ride took a few hours. The young man beside her, Tom, was a good talker. He told her stories of battling forest fires in Alaska, and of tripping on Owsley acid in an Oregon forest of giant ancient redwoods, and of crisscrossing the country on a BMW motorcycle.
He had blue eyes. He had delicate hands. He had a flask of brandy under his soft wool poncho.

 

By 1973, the number of my parents had grown from two to three. Tom shared a bedroom with Mom while Dad slept on a foam mat in a room down the hall. They all believed it was better to blaze a new trail rather than follow the old corrupt paths that led to lies and napalm and Nixon and sadness. Why not try to add or even multiply love rather than subtract or divide?

This kind of thing was not exactly common, but in those days it wasn't unheard of either. For example, that spring two major league baseball pitchers, Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, traded families. Everything. Wife, kids, pets. The unusual swap, if remembered at all today, is generally treated with mockery.

But I happen to know, without ever having spoken to either of them, that when they did it they meant it. They were sincere. Maybe the family swap was in large part an extension of the fun they were all having together, but they must have believed they weren't merely pulling a pleasurable stunt. Beyond the pleasure of the moment, there must have been a hope for some as yet uninvented republic of joy.

Forget that they both had career-worst seasons, or that in general they never really were the same players again, or that Kekich decided after a few weeks that the experiment wasn't working out, a decision that came too late—his wife and Fritz Peterson already having decided they wanted to make the swap permanent. Forget all that. For a slim, brilliant moment the world seemed to be clay in their hands, moldable to any shape they desired.

 

My mother had become an artist by 1973, a pretty young woman with long brown hair and a rainbow spattering of bright paint on her sneakers and jeans and shirt and sometimes even on the lenses of her glasses. She worked on her paintings, big hyperreal Pop Art portraits of her friends and family, all the time, every day, and her major-chord love songs eventually covered most of the walls of our house in New Jersey. My favorite was the one of me and my brother, the two of us watching TV. We're both in our pajamas, rapt looks on our faces, sitting very close together. In fact, I'm leaning into him, my shoulder touching his arm. In the painting, we're still a year or two away from discovering baseball cards, but all the elements are
in place: my need to be close to my brother, our shared instinctual desire to find some kind of pop-culture escape, our fascination at what seemed to be both a simpler and more magical artificial world beyond the intimate snarl of affection and silences in our three-parent home.

“It wasn't easy in that house,” Tom told me years later. “I'd feel bad even touching your mom on the arm if your dad was around.”

By 1973, Tom's beard and hair had grown into something worthy of a man who had been shipwrecked on an unmarked island for a decade. He had been a professional actor in New York and in traveling companies all over the country, and he embraced with customary zeal his new role as a part of the family's unusual experiment. He also worked part-time as a sculptor's helper for a local art-minded pharmaceutical industry billionaire, plus he and my mom made candles and sold them in a little gift shop near our house. Once they took the candles into Manhattan and tried to sell them on the street, but cops fined them for not having a permit. Cops often hassled Tom at that time. I picture him after coming home from yet another brusque, invasive frisking by hippie-loathing members of the New Jersey State Police, he and mom laying in bed and whispering their wishes about going somewhere far away from the concrete jungle, the malignant suburbs, somewhere where they could really be
free
.