Cardboard Gods (27 page)

In his late-blooming prime Evans did everything with a majestic calm, the absolute opposite of how I felt that fall with nowhere to go but Fenway. The way he loped out to his position in right field. The way he warmed up his famous arm by throwing laser beams out of a sleepy, feline half-windup to some bullpen lackey armed with the added protection of a catcher's mitt. The way he slowly strode to the plate, letting the pitcher stew in the rising sound of the crowd. The way he then coiled himself down into his disciple-of-Hriniak stance, different from the stance he had shown in the 1977 card I'd gotten years before, the newer stance a back-slanting crouch, weight on his right foot, left foot bent and extended with toe just touching the dirt, bat back and nearly horizontal and loose-gripped and slowly pulsing in measured counterpoint to the larger, louder thrumming chant of his nickname,
Dewey
, on all our tongues.

 

I worked part-time at an ice-cream parlor for a couple months, until one day the manager tried to get me to hand out fliers in the store mascot costume, a (Chocolate) Moose suit. I refused, so he just sent me out as myself. It was the middle of November, baseball as gone as the leaves, and as I held out slips of paper to passersby ignoring me I was struck by the feeling that there was barely anything even holding me to the sidewalk. I eventually dumped the fliers into a trash can and just walked around for a while, but I couldn't escape the feeling that at any moment I might start skittering down the street like an empty pack of cigarettes caught in a gust. A couple days later I quit and took a bus toward the heaviest concentration of my family, Manhattan. I stayed for a few weeks at my dad's apartment, sleeping on a spare foam mat that collided at its foot with the foot of the “master” foam mat. In the mornings I'd pretend to sleep as Dad stepped over me to get up and get ready for work. Sometimes I'd meet my mom at a diner for lunch, an oddly formal, grown-up meeting, a knapsack full of art textbooks on her side of the booth, a newspaper I'd fished from the trash on mine. At night I saw my brother, who lived in an NYU dorm just a short walk away from my father's apartment. We got stoned as he and his roommate took turns putting on bass-heavy
dub records turned up so loud we wouldn't have been able to speak even if we'd wanted to. The unbroken ladder of years was gone, as was the sense that Ian was climbing a couple rungs higher than me, in a direction that he understood. Now we were both just adrift. What was there to say? Better to dissolve together into the deep, warm throb of a Robbie Shakespeare bass line as if it were the echo of the heartbeat of something benevolent and immense.

Eventually I left his dimly lit room and stumbled back to Dad's place, where he would already be asleep, all the lights off. His apartment had only one room with a door, the bathroom, and since I often came home too high to sleep, I spent most of my late nights there sitting on the shut lid of the toilet, reading
On the Road
for the first time, slowly, ecstatically, my shining face inches from my father's toenail clippers and rusty can of Barbasol. I wanted my life to be like the one in that book—exciting, adventurous, everything hallowed—but I had no idea how to make it happen.

 

In January, desperate to retreat from the shapelessness of life beyond school, I got into a small state college situated on top of a mountain in northern Vermont. Halfway through my first semester, my friend John and I reanointed our reggae-laced afternoon pot smoking as a round of special Season Opener bong hits and were coughing and red-eyed with the radio tuned through static to WDEV, the Red Sox radio affiliate in Vermont, as Dwight Evans got the 1986 season started with a bang by leading off the first inning with a home run.

“
Dewey . . . Dewey
,” we rasped.

 

That summer I returned to Cape Cod. My brother had gotten a summer job outside Boston, in Framingham, on a crew that ripped apart rooms with crowbars and sledgehammers. I made my way to Fenway more often that summer than I ever had or ever would, taking a quick bus ride in from Hyannis to meet up with Ian when he was free. He'd just completed his third year of college, but he wasn't really very close to finishing. Soon he'd drop out and get a job driving a UPS truck.

Before one game, we ducked into a souvenir store outside Fenway and Ian bought a closeout item, probably the cheapest thing in the store, a white painter's cap with the word
YAZ
on the front and various career achievements listed on the sides. He put on the cap and we walked right up to the bleacher ticket window and bought our
tickets and went into the game. We were no longer able to yell for the player honored on Ian's two-dollar cap, but late in the game, with men on base, Dwight Evans strode to the plate. It was the summer of 1986 and the Red Sox had been winning. We'd been starting to wonder if there was anything beyond the usual early season mirage, but this wondering only verged on full-throated belief when Dewey crouched down into his stance amid the rising chant.

“
Dewey . . . Dewey
,” we sang.

 

I wanted to avoid another stint at the Shell station, so I got a job canvassing door to door for Greenpeace. I did okay my first day on the job, but later it was sorted out that part of the reason for the success was that I had inadvertently strayed from my prescribed route and horned in on the potential donors on another canvasser's turf. This got sorted out as my supervisor drove me and the other canvasser back to the office. My supervisor eyed me in the rearview mirror.

“You're like some kind of an evil genius,” he said in a reedy, snickering voice. He was a thin blond guy a year or so older than me who went to Tufts, which I have ever since pictured as being populated largely by thin blond guys making cutting, ironic comments. On my second day, I made a little less money than I had on the first, and on the third day I made still less, and so on.

 

I watched a lot of Red Sox games with my grandfather that summer. He wasn't really that big of a sports guy, but he was willing to watch whatever made me happy, so long as it didn't interfere with his late afternoon viewing of
M*A*S*H
.

The television was in his room. I sat on his orthopedic bed and he sat on his La-Z-Boy, both of us using remote controls to lift and lower our torsos and legs until we were in suitable game-watching position. During lulls in the action my gaze sometimes drifted from the screen to the curling black-and-white snapshots under dusty glass on the wall behind the television. Sometimes I looked to my left at my grandmother's bed, where she'd died. Sometimes I found myself staring at my grandfather's purple-splotched hand as it lay flat on the La-Z-Boy armrest. His lungs were giving out, and he was connected by blue tubes to an oxygen machine that emitted a constant low-level hum from the next room.

During one game, my grandfather suddenly maneuvered the La-Z-Boy into an alert 90-degree angle and began blowing air through a disconnected French horn mouthpiece. He had been the leader of a Dixieland band in his younger years, and more recently, until his lungs started giving out, he had played the French horn in a band of similar old guys who all dressed up in maroon uniforms and performed numbers such as “The Hokey Pokey” at a bandshell in nearby Chatham every Friday night. The sound produced by the mouthpiece was a meager, rangeless brapping.

“I do this to keep my lips in shape,” he explained after he had been tooting away for several minutes. An unwelcome thought formed in my mind.
In shape for what?

The things he played on the mouthpiece were all indecipherable, with one exception. In a late inning the Red Sox got something cooking, and the old man took a deep breath and blew a monotone, spittle-thin version of the cavalry call—“Brapada brap pa braaa.”

I didn't like it. It was too corny and hopeful. Even though the Red Sox had been playing well that year, and even though I was starting to believe, I still preferred to approach each game armored with the protective conviction that my team would blow it, no matter what.

“Brapada brap pa braaa,” my grandfather played again. He glanced at me and smiled, his frayed gray eyebrows rising.

“Brapada brap pa braaa,” he played.

“Charge,” I finally said.

 

On days when it rained really hard Greenpeace canceled the canvassing. Those rainouts were among the greatest days this chronic life avoider has ever known. It's been more than twenty years and I still can't get over them. The job of knocking on door after door to cheerfully recite a scripted spiel about the encroaching environmental apocalypse and the need for monetary contributions made my stomach hurt, plus I was terrible at it. I came to love waking to the sound of rain. It meant the pressure was off.

On what would be my last day at that job, I left my route after a couple hours of doors slamming in my face and wandered over to a Cumberland Farms. I bought a Coke and, to cheer myself up, a pack of baseball cards. I was leafing through the cards back at my pickup spot when the smirking blond guy from Tufts pulled up. He stared at my baseball cards.

“A kid give those to you?” he asked.

The next morning I found myself praying for a giant rainstorm so I could get stoned, make Steak-umms with melted American cheese, and watch television all day with my grandfather. But the sky was blue with no hope of rain, not a cloud anywhere. I felt like I might puke. I called the office. The blond guy answered.

“I can't do this anymore,” I said. “I'm really, really sorry.”

“Ha. Don't be,” he said.

I spent a few days as if they were rainouts, then rode my grandfather's disintegrating bike down to the Shell station to see if they were hiring.

 

That fucking summer. I think of the song “Sledgehammer” everywhere. Cars full of college girls in bikinis pulling into the station, that song blaring for a couple minutes, then fading as the girls disappeared. Later, back home, I cast myself in scenarios in which, instead of being profoundly oblivious to me as I washed the windshield, the girls in the front seat noticed me peeking down at the tops of their breasts and yanked me into the car to rip off my high cap and collared shirt and so on.

 

And I think of my bike ride home at night from Greenpeace, before I quit. Halfway through the eight-mile trek, as I passed from the ocean side of the Cape to the bay side, the road turned from a long gradual uphill to a long gradual downhill, and the traffic thinned to almost nothing. I coasted through the dark, riding atop the white line on the shoulder of the road. Most nights I stopped and swam at a pond where my grandfather had done slow old-guy laps before his lungs gave out. I floated on my back, looking up at the stars, listening to the thump of my heart as if it were the heartbeat of the whole dark lake below and all the star-studded blackness above.

My grandfather would be in bed by the time I got home, his main oxygen machine humming in the dining room, the clear plastic tube snaking under the shut door into his room. He always made sure there were beers in the fridge for me and frosted mugs in the freezer. Most nights I got home too late to catch the Red Sox game on the radio in my room, but once they were still playing when I got home, in extra innings, and they pulled out an incredible win after Angels third baseman Doug DeCinces botched what would have been a game-ending catch of an easy pop fly. They'd been doing well all year, but that game really got me going.
My god
, I thought,
could 1986 really be the year?
I allowed myself to envision my deepest wish coming true. Yaz wouldn't be there, but Jim Ed still would be. Dewey still would be. And there'd be pandemonium in the streets, and confetti raining down, and me and my brother in the middle of it laughing and screaming.

 

And I think of Dwight Evans slowly striding to the plate with the game reaching a crucial stage, me on my grandfather's orthopedic bed, my grandfather safe and sound in his La-Z-Boy. The next summer he'd be in a nursing home. The summer after that he'd be gone. I think of Dewey working the count to 3-1. I hear the chant of 33,000 people on the television. My grandfather joins in. The crowd noise blooms into a great wordless roar that covers the hum of the oxygen machine. My grandfather bobs a loose fist in time to the chant, the tip of his trumpet mouthpiece sticking out through two purple-splotched fingers. He turns to me, grinning, his eyebrows raised.

“Dewey . . . Dewey,” he chants, and he won't look away until I join him.

Comic books and baseball cards, the primary pillars of the fantasy world in which I spent most of my childhood, come together in this 1977 Bobby Grich card, which has always reminded me of Marvel comics artist Jack “King” Kirby's lantern-jawed, dimplechinned heroes, who often paused amid dire intergalactic battle to fill the entire comic frame with their chiseled heads and deliver clear-eyed pronouncements of urgent courageous purpose, just as Grich seems to be doing here. Most baseball cards imply that the next moment beyond the moment of the photo will be a few batting cage swings or a saunter to the outfield to shag some flies. But here it seems more likely that Grich—as soon as he is done uttering something along the lines of “He has gone mad with power and MUST BE STOPPED!”—will in the next rectangular frame chronicling his adventures leap high into the sky on superpowered legs to collide with a dark muscular otherworldly destroyer with dead eyes and ornate Aztec-inspired headgear.