Cardboard Gods (34 page)

I remember you scumbags
, Yankee Stadium must have said, squinting down at us.

If memory serves, there's a somewhat unusually placed traffic light at the end of the Macombs Dam Bridge. Or maybe it isn't normally there and Yankee Stadium put it there just for that moment. Anyway, it changed from yellow to red. My brother's mind was elsewhere. A car barreled straight at us, eyes wide in the faces of its passengers. Brakes squealed, then came the surprisingly soft sound of crunching metal.

Amazingly, no one in either car was hurt in the head-on collision. But after my brother nursed his convulsing vehicle to the shoulder, where a battalion of muscular young Bronx residents from the other car commenced screaming at him, I watched my brother age before my eyes. His posture sagged. His face went gray. He was barely getting by as it was. He had let his insurance payments lapse. He was getting screamed at. His car, which he needed to complete the travel book he had been contracted to write, was clearly now no more than a few heartbeats away from flatlining. Pete and I looked on, Pete freshly saddled with the criminal mischief charge, me with the sad feeling that came from watching my older brother, whom I'd always idolized, standing there in the middle of it all like a pitcher with nothing left and no help on the way, a mop-up man who has to stay in the box and take a beating as the boos rain down.

 

I applied for a job as an adjunct professor at the college I'd attended as an undergrad. I didn't have any teaching experience, but the recommendation of two of my old writing teachers helped me get the job anyway. Or maybe they just needed a body. I was given two classes, Basic Writing and College Writing. The pay was meager, but that had never held me back before.

Terror crested four times a week in the firing-squad minutes directly preceding every meeting of my two classes. Each flare-up of terror gave way to a kind of public seizure that gripped me for ninety minutes before casting me back to my solitude sweaty and stunned, my voice raw, as if I had spent the entire hazy interval sobbing. The students gone, I sat at the head of the empty class until my legs stopped trembling. I usually felt ashamed about one or another of the things that had tumbled from my mouth during the ill-planned lesson.

Most of the other adjuncts at my college also seemed to be just passing through. There were a couple of longtimers, but they had fit their adjunct duties into a sturdy arsenal of chisel-jawed remunerative pursuits, one guy teaching a couple of classes when he wasn't leading tours through the Amazon rainforest and selling photographs to
National Geographic
, another guy maintaining his on-campus reputation as a ruthless grammarian between professional jazz trumpeting engagements. Most of the others seemed to view the low-paying, no-insurance, no-security job as a stepping-stone to something better. I may have entertained that thought, too, early on, but in the same blurry, hypothetical way that I daydreamed about someday winning a National Book Award or owning a house or ceremonially passing my baseball cards down to a son. It soon became apparent that the job was merely another in my long line of crumbling ledges to cling to by my fingertips.

That year I finally got my driver's license, and in the summer I drove to Ohio, where my mom was still living and where my father had moved, too. At first he had gotten an apartment of his own a few blocks away from her, but by the time I got there he had moved into the guest room in her little house.

“All those years he looked out for me,” my mom told me one night. “Now I'm going to look out for him.”

 

In August I returned to Vermont, and just before classes and my ledge-clinging resumed I moved into a cabin in the woods. The cabin had no electricity, no running water, a small woodstove for heat, and a big plastic lime-coated barrel for my excrement. I needed somewhere, anywhere, to live, and so My Year in the Woods began as much out of desperation as out of a desire to follow in the heroic footsteps of Thoreau. But the idea did appeal to me. Maybe in solitude I'd be able to penetrate the essence of All Things. Maybe when that fucking tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, I'd be there to hear it.

My friend Charles sent me off to my year of solitary purity with a gag gift of a battery-powered television about the size of two decks of cards. I went through a lot of batteries that year. Another vice I cultivated at the cabin grew out of another gift from Charles, a small orange plastic propeller toy. You use both your hands to spin the stem of the propeller and it flies through the air for fifteen or twenty feet. It's the type of thing you might try a couple times before moving on with your life, but during my year in the woods I created a golflike game that involved trying to hit a series of trees around the cabin with the flying propeller in the fewest “strokes” possible. Then, reverting to a practice that had devoured huge tracts of empty time in my childhood, I populated the game with an ever-growing catalog of
intricately conceived imaginary personalities revered by millions of imaginary fans for their prowess in the hallowed, physically taxing, mentally punishing, spiritually grueling sport of Twirly Propeller.

Instead of completing the novel I'd been hoping to finish (about a directionless liquor store clerk), or taking assiduous egoless note of the natural phenomena all around me, or resolving to pretzel my stiff, inflexible body into a straight-spined lotus position and chant sutras until the top of my head split open to guzzle nirvana, I enacted Twirly Propeller tournament after Twirly Propeller tournament, each a harrowing marathon with several elimination rounds that gradually built to the breathless white-knuckle tension of the Championship Match. It's all gone now, but throughout my year in the woods I kept in my head the entire history of Twirly Propeller, all the single-match, yearly, and lifetime records, all the famous rises and falls, all the improbable limping heroic Comebacks from Complete Oblivion.

 

But sometimes I just sat and listened to the woods. And I loved coming back to the cabin on a clear night when the moonlight was shining down on the birch trees. And I loved being able to drive a little ways and see Tom at the house he and his new wife, Susanne, had bought, a beautiful place halfway up a mountain, the dream of a stable life in the country finally come true. And I loved one day that spring, sitting on the porch of the cabin, sun melting the last of the snow, a fat biography of Elvis Presley on my lap, but me so glad to be alive I couldn't read. And every once in a while I was able to put a few words together in my notebook that tugged at something inside me, something below the ache that had long ago settled in my chest.

The deepest tugging sensation grew slowly, as if sprouting from a planted seed, out of a practice I started halfway through the year to stave off insanity. I began selecting a baseball card from my collection at random and laying it on the table by the door, where I would then look at it for a few days in the morning light and the dusk light and the light of a guttering kerosene lamp and the light of loneliness and the light of being a brother and the light of being a son and the light of being a failure and the light of a guy who was running out of money and the light of a guy who kept forging on through the snow and the mud and even the painfully tender first sounds of spring.

Thoreau did not spend his year in the woods staring at baseball cards, but I wasn't Thoreau. I was someone who had leaned on my cards throughout childhood and who had since childhood felt an ache in my chest as if something was missing. After a few days, I tried to put down a few words in my notebook about the card that I'd randomly pulled from my collection and placed on the table. Words didn't surge forth as in my long-held dream of a Kerouackian volcano of creation. But I could tell that something was there, a faint but perceptible tugging.

Bob Davis's 1981 card was one of the most haunting of my random selections. Maybe it's because Bob Davis's expression seems like that of a man who's trying to remain cheerful in spite of the tiny constant ringing noise that's made his sanity into a thin, fraying, tightly stretched rubber band. Or maybe it's because of the clammy gray catacomblike background, such a stark contrast to the overwhelmingly predominant baseball card backdrop of blue sky as to suggest something about Bob Davis's extremely peripheral, ogrelike isolation on the far fringes of major league baseball. Or maybe it's because of the discovery I made that Bob Davis, clinging for dear life to the thin pleasure of a tobacco wad, shares my birthday. As a kid, I hadn't noticed that any god shared my birthday. Probably Bob Davis had been too anonymous to draw me into a close inspection of his card, especially in 1981, when baseball cards were ceasing to be the center of my life and my life was proceeding without a center. Maybe he'd been in the last pack I ever bought as a kid, a gray particle on a screen showing a TV station that had fallen almost completely into static. Probably I hadn't looked past his anxious grin on the front or his .198 lifetime average on the back before tossing him into my box of cards with the others, only to find years later that even this ignored obscurity on the expansionary fringes of my neglected heaven had some significant connection to me, that even the least of a great forgotten beyond was capable of answering a prayer.

When my year in the cabin ended, I was broke. The adjunct thing had left me worse off financially than when I'd started. I didn't know what to do or where to go. I called my brother, who calmed me down. He had been in plenty of bad spots himself. He was like a hitting coach talking to a player in a deep slump, encouraging him to keep looking for his pitch.

If I could have moved back in with him I probably would have, not knowing what else to do, but he had moved into an apartment with Kelsey. His leaving our old apartment, which he had shared with our friend Pete while I'd been in Vermont, did open up a spot for me. Once again, I returned to where I'd been before, more or less. I had my notebooks, my box of baseball cards, and a credit card tab that made me feel like I was on the brink of mathematical elimination.

 

The photo on Rickey Henderson's 1980 rookie card was taken during 1979. He made his debut that year in a midseason doubleheader that the A's lost, part of Henderson's career-opening seven-game losing streak. Henderson finally played in a major league win, then the A's promptly lost Henderson's next three games, won one, lost five more, won one, lost five more, won one, and lost five more. The A's record in Henderson's first 29 games was 4-25. This was not that far off par for a rancid team that went 54-108 on the year. If anyone was going to start mailing in his efforts, it would have been a player finishing out that dismal campaign. And yet here is Henderson, the rookie, locked in, ready to battle.

Pete helped me get a job at the bookstore where he was working. I remember standing at the store's raised information counter and staring across the store at one of the cashiers. She had dyed one lock of her hair bright pink. I felt another faint tugging at something below the ache that had long ago settled in my chest. It was like finding the card of an unknown rookie in a pack, maybe near the end of a pack, maybe near the end of the last of four packs you bought at the end of the last full summer of the gods, the end of an era of awe, and something about the card pushed back against that feeling of everything ending and made you wonder.

 

I don't know if there's such a thing as love at first sight, and I can't remember the moment I discovered Rickey Henderson's 1980 card in a pack, but I'm sure the card made me wonder. The rookie's odd crouch differed not only from the posed wax-figure stances that had populated most of my cards to that point but differed also from the feeling that mathematical elimination was unavoidable, that life itself was a losing season. Here was an electric moment, full of possibility, a young man who'd so far known nothing but losing in the majors but who nevertheless was about to treat the next pitch, the next moment, as if it could not be more important.