Cardboard Gods (20 page)

Earlier that season, before I knew for sure that we were never going to win, my team got off to a shaky but not utterly hopeless start in an opponent's cold, near-empty gym. It was a Saturday morning. For some reason Mick wasn't there to coach us that day. Maybe his eighth-grade team, a much more successful squad, had a game somewhere else. The young guy who filled in for him, Duncan, was in his early twenties. Like the young man pictured on this baseball card, Duncan had a sparse mustache and a dazed, faintly melancholy air. As he stared out at the action, he kept gumming his mustache with his lower lip, as if to keep making sure it hadn't evaporated. If he was anything like I would be when I got to be that age, he had taken up residence in the tenuous shadowlands of
maybe
. Maybe everything will be OK. Maybe it's not too late. Maybe what's gone can return.

 

Maybe in this baseball card a painted backdrop of a fake blue sky was wheeled in to cover the mildewed bricks of a windowless room deep within the Cleveland Indians' spring training barracks. Maybe this room was where the oft-disabled former number one draft pick David Clyde preferred to endure his daylight hours. Maybe the backdrop belonged to a photographer who, until his struggling business began cracking under the weight of unwholesome rumors that included the word
statutory
, made his living creating disquietingly impassioned portraits of high school seniors. Maybe the photographer had fled to Arizona with a U-Haul full of his yearbook-picture backdrops to start anew, and to avoid temptation he had steered clear altogether of wistful teenagers, instead picking up freelance work involving the
negligible subjects that the pensioned, fully vested Topps photographers preferred to avoid.

When he was young, David Clyde, nationwide high school sensation, had been the opposite of a subject to avoid. He had been a sure thing, literally unbeatable, 18-0 his senior year, his left arm like something out of an old Greek myth, golden, invincible, blessed by the gods. The media swarmed. The scouts came running. But then for many years he knew little but disappointment, pain, unstoppable descent. Maybe he knew at the time this photo was taken that it was over, that he had already pitched his last major league game. Maybe on the other hand he was thinking that maybe everything would be OK. Maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe what's gone
can
return.

Maybe after the shoot he and the photographer gravitated toward one another, as those reduced to maybes sometimes do. Maybe they went for beers and shots at the topless joint out by the abandoned A&W on the frontage road. Maybe they knew enough to stay silent throughout, neither asking the other any questions about the past.

 

Early in the second quarter, just after the teams switched baskets, Duncan called a timeout. We huddled around him. He lower-lipped his mustache while looking over our heads and up at the scoreboard.

“Things are starting to get away from us,” he said. “But look. We've still got a shot, maybe.” When he lowered his gaze from the scoreboard, his eyes happened to fall on me, and they stayed on me as he said, “But we've got to make something happen right now.”

I understood he would have looked at someone else if he'd known anything about our team, but it still made me feel good that he addressed his words to me. I stared back at him and nodded. The buzzer sounded. A thought occurred to me as I retook the court. It made my whole body tingle.

The ref handed my teammate Chris the ball and Chris slapped it with his right hand, a signal to the rest of us to start milling around, pretending we had set plays. In a rare burst of on-court assertiveness, I cut hard to my left, breaking free of the listless scrum of bodies near the center jump circle. I caught the inbounds pass in stride and started dribbling toward the wide-open hoop. I had not yet scored the first basket of my career in organized ball, so as I dribbled a kind of joy bubbled up through my rib cage and into my throat.

Previous to that moment there had only been an aimless Saturday morning murmur of voices in the gym. Suddenly the murmur spiked, went weird. I'd never heard the sound before and hope to never hear it again: A generalized, ingrown gasp, like a note from a choir on a record played backward. I pressed onward, dribbling, still preposterously open, ignoring.

I stopped just inside the foul line and hoisted the side-holstered push shot that all kids use before they get the hang of a real jump shot. Improbably, the basketball grazed the inside of the rim and nestled through the net. The strange sound that had risen up all around me ceased. I turned, smiling, expecting to see my teammates smiling back. Jesus, the look on their faces. The look on Duncan's face. My own smile congealed. The players on the other team stared one more beat, still stunned, then started spasming with laughter. Eventually the scoreboard operator, also laughing, added the tally to the swelling number beneath the word HOME.

Is life a battle between good and evil or an inconsequential rest stop between oblivions? Consider Luis Gomez, the expansion team bench-warmer, waiting slack-armed for his turn in the batting cage, where he will likely have only enough time to practice bunting before a Blue Jay regular commands him to step aside. As he waits for this truncated, ignominious turn, two blurry figures hover above his narrow shoulders, each figure perfectly positioned to whisper into an ear. But what could these indistinct spirits possibly have to say to Luis Gomez? In his eight-year major league career, the utility infielder batted .210 with a .261 on-base percentage and a .239 slugging percentage. He never hit a home run. He stole 6 bases but was thrown out trying to steal 22 times. Once he was called on to pitch in a bullpen-savaging blowout. He gave up three runs in one inning. In his final game he batted eighth in the order, just above the pitcher's spot, for a lineup that was one-hit by Mario Soto. The last of Gomez's fruitless at bats was a pop-up that whimpered to extinction in the glove of the opposing shortstop. He stands here somewhere in the middle of that featureless career, waiting for a couple weak swings in the cage, and the two entities hovering near his ears seem incapable of making themselves understood. They will only mutter as they fade, the two voices indistinguishable from one another, no guidance, no angel and devil, no choice between paths, no paths at all, or maybe infinite paths, all of them leading to dissolution.

As I understand it, the term
mint
is used in the hobby of baseball card collecting to describe cards that have been utterly sheltered from life and its inevitable slide toward deterioration. There are other gradations below this topmost designation, but I doubt if there is a label far enough removed from mint to describe the select group of cards, my favorites, that I touched more than I touched anything else in my life. My incessant childhood pawings pushed these cards beyond the limits of the language of commerce, dulling and creasing their surfaces, corroding their edges, blunting their corners. In a monetary sense, these beloved cards have been nullified. Reduced to nothing. Handled too much, clung to too tightly. The absolute opposite of mint.

These were the cards that I kept going back to. I searched for them in their rubber-band-wrapped team, needing to touch them again and again. I needed to see, and say, the hallowed names. I needed to read and further internalize the rows upon rows of hallowed numbers in tiny type. I needed to know there is greatness in the world. There are things that won't be forgotten.

I sensed at times that I was an infinitesimally small speck, inconsequential and frail in an unfathomably large expanse of space and time. The universe went on forever and time stretched forward and backward forever and I was an almost-nothing within it. All my cards pushed back against this almost-nothing. They were
something
. The final card, from 1976, of Hank Aaron, the Home Run King, was the very pinnacle of this feeling, this
something
. Four years after I
found it in a pack, I had begun to lose my grasp on the gods. That year, 1980, would be my last full year of collecting baseball cards. But I continued to cling to Hank Aaron with all my ruinous might.

I looked forward to little league that year more than ever. It was my last year of eligibility. It was the most important part of my life.

A few weeks before the season started, my father gave me a diary for my twelfth birthday. The hard cover had been made to look like denim, and there were a couple of gnomes on it. In fact, it was called a Gnome Gnotebook. I thought it was stupid and babyish. Gnomes? I wanted to ask my dad if he thought I was an infant.

“Thanks, Dad,” I said.

“You must write something every day,” he said. “The creative life is the most worthwhile existence available.”

“OK,” I said, exactly as if I were agreeing to brush my teeth after eating a box of M&Ms. I didn't touch the thing for weeks, until the evening after the first practice of my last season in little league. I had recently read Sparky Lyle's hilarious book,
The Bronx Zoo
, which had been written in the style of a diary, and I've always thought that my life as a would-be writer began with me hoping that the moment I put pencil to page I'd find myself involved in uproarious locker-room cake-sitting hijinks and riveting controversies and a white-knuckled all-important struggle for a pennant. And that was and always would be a big part of it, that desire to somehow make my thin, meandering life as meaningful as something in a book. And another big part of it was having a father, and an entire family, that believed that writing something every day was worthwhile. But I think I also started writing for the same reason that the Hudson River School of painters of the nineteenth century started creating giant romantic canvases depicting untrammeled American wilderness at the very moment that wilderness was beginning to disappear.

I don't know the exact words I used to describe that season, because several years later, in a fit of frustration, I hurled the gnomes and all my other writing notebooks into a Dumpster. But I think my first sentence went as follows: “I couldn't lay my glove let alone my bat on anything today.”

Sometimes I wish I still had that Gnome Gnotebook, but it probably couldn't tell me much I don't already know. I know I didn't come close to writing daily updates throughout the season, my entries tailing off the moment I realized that writing about life didn't suddenly and automatically make it more interesting. I know the first time I
ripped the Gnotebook in half was later, the following year, when for the first time I tried and failed to untangle my thoughts about a girl. I know when my junior high basketball team, bolstered by the addition of an older, bigger kid who'd been left back, finally broke through and won a game, barely, halfway through eighth grade, I cut off a small lock of my hair and taped it to a page.

 

My brother, who loved Hank Aaron even more than I did, had a poster above his bed of the moment when Hank Aaron became the career major league leader in home runs. The poster showed the whole field. If I remember it correctly, the pitcher, Al Downing, was still following through, as was Hank Aaron, and the other players on the field were craning their heads to follow the path of the ball. The most memorable feature of the poster was the small white circle superimposed on the photograph to highlight the location of the ball. Without it, you wouldn't notice the pale blur in the sky above the outfield. You wouldn't notice the most amazing thing of all time. Sometimes you need to see the halo.

 

In that last little league season of mine, the usually dominant team helmed by my seventh grade basketball coach, Mick, was suddenly awful. Mick's Yankees had won the league title the first three years I'd been in little league, while my team, the Mets, had gone 9-6, 6-9, and 6-9, two of the losses in each of those years horrific blowouts at the hands of Mick's crack squad. There was no mercy rule then, so they beat the shit out of us until it got too dark to see, final scores usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 37-2.