Cardboard Gods (15 page)

One night in September 1978, late, Ian and I were home alone and I asked him about the universe. I remember when it was because of Lyman Bostock. Ian had his light on and was reading. I was up high, in my loft bed.

“What's at the edge of it?” I said.

“The universe is expanding,” he said.

“Expanding? But where? Into what?”

“It's too complicated to explain to you.”

 

Sometimes cards had to be changed in a hurry to reflect offseason transactions. I imagine that such changes now can be effected digitally, seamlessly, leaving no trace of any previous worlds. But when I was a kid, these changes were done with an endearing crudeness that always allowed ample evidence that the past could not ever be fully erased. For example, in Lyman Bostock's 1978 card, Bostock is presented as an Angel, but the garish coloring along his neckline suggests makeup applied by a tipsy floozy more than uniform piping, and his helmet more closely resembles frosting on a personalized supermarket cake than a decal on hard plastic. He is certainly no Angel, not fully, not yet.

 

The universe didn't make sense. If something was expanding, then there had to be something it was expanding into. There couldn't just be nothing. I stared at the ceiling that was only a couple feet from my head. There was a little hole up there, directly above my head, and it was my theory that the hole had been made by rats who lived up above our room in a crawl space and every once in a while dug away at the ceiling with their claws when no one was looking, like
prisoners chipping away at their cell wall. Maybe one day they'd claw all the way through and fall on me and bite me and I'd get the Plague. All the kids of the town would visit me, wearing surgical masks, and they'd give me presents as I shivered and coughed and said brave things. I'd have my baseball cards at my bedside. One day near the end when it was difficult to speak I'd croak to my weeping mother that she should give all my cards to my brother when the time came.

“What are you talking about?” she'd blubber. “You are gonna be just fine!”

“Hey, Ian,” I said now.

He flipped the page of his book, ignoring me.

“Hey, Ian, what happens when you die?”

 

When I had gotten Lyman Bostock's doctored 1978 card I knew him solely as a name near the top of the list of batting averages printed in the Sunday sports section. I studied those averages religiously, as religiously as I've ever studied anything. I loved the exactness of them. I loved that there was a hierarchy, an order, Singleton and Brett near the top, Kingman and Belanger near the bottom, and I loved even more that occasionally certain previously unknown players moved into the upper echelon of that hierarchy, sometimes creeping up the list past the sturdy .280 Amos Otis types, sometimes materializing out of nowhere, as Bob Watson would do for the Red Sox in 1979 upon amassing the minimum number of at bats. I don't know which route Lyman Bostock first took, because I don't remember a time before Lyman Bostock was among the batting average leaders, and yet I also do recall thinking of him as a new guy, a youngster storming the rarefied realm lorded over benevolently by his wondrous Twins teammate Rod Carew. In general, I thought about him this way: Lyman Bostock was rising, each year a little higher. His move to the Angels in 1978 provided a temporary hiccup in his career's rising motion, but within that first year with his new team there was a microcosm of his career, a smaller rising, his batting average going up and up after a bad April.

At some point during that season I started cutting out the batting average list from the Sunday paper and taping it to the post of my loft bed, below the 1975 Victory Leaders card featuring Andy Messersmith. Each time I taped a new version of the list to the post,
I looked for Lyman Bostock and was happy to see him rising, a little higher each week.

 

Ian didn't answer when I asked him what happens when you die. I stared some more at the ceiling and thought about the rats falling through and the Plague and my tragic death. Everyone weeping. Maybe they'd bury my cards with me, bawling about how much I loved them. Or maybe my cards would be covered with the Plague and they'd have to be destroyed. Or maybe they'd have to burn me
and
the cards. What would be left? A car approached that sounded sort of like our VW Camper, Mom and Tom returning, but it didn't stop. I started to really think about the whole thing, and not in a fun way.

“How can it be?” I asked out loud. “We're here and then forever we're
gone
.”

“Look, just don't worry about it,” my brother said.

“One minute suddenly nothing and that's it,” I said, my voice rising.

“It's not going to happen for a long time.”

“But it's going to happen!”

“Think about something else.”

“Oh man oh man. It's going to happen,” I said, starting to panic. “Omanomanoman.”

I climbed down the ladder of the loft bed, past my Victory Leaders card and the latest Sunday averages, and went and sat on the stairs and gripped my stomach with both hands, rocking back and forth, overpowered by the idea that someday I would not exist.

 

Earlier that day, we had learned about Lyman Bostock. He'd been riding in the backseat of a car and had been shot and killed by a man aiming for someone else.

 

“Hey, Josh,” Ian said. I didn't turn around. He was standing behind me at the top of the stairs. I heard pages riffling.

“Oh man, oh no,” I muttered.

“Hey, Josh. Who is the all-time career leader in triples?”

“Oh man. I don't know. Oh god.”

But then I told him. Sam Crawford.

“Ding!”

More sound of pages riffling.

“Now, all right, now who's the all-time
single season
leader in doubles? Wow, that's a lot of doubles,” Ian added.

And I told him. Earl Webb. And he kept on asking questions with answers that I knew.

Eventually, I was able to get up off the stairs and go back into our room and climb my loft bed ladder past the list featuring, near the top, Lyman Bostock's name and his average. I lay down and looked at the ceiling. Four hundredths of a point shy of .300 forever.

“Hey, Ian,” I said. “Can you ask me a couple more?”

Late in the 1978 season, my brother, whose nickname was Brillo, tried to get a feathered haircut like Lee Mazzilli. Somehow, the town's feathered haircut maestro, a young barber named Woody, was able to wrench my brother's tightly coiled curls into something that looked like what the cool kids in school had on their heads, but it lasted for only one day before puffing back out into a half-Jew-fro. My brother was angered by this, which was no surprise. My brother angrily simmered more and more. I mostly associated it with the Red Sox' ongoing collapse, which at one point caused my brother to rip his beloved copy of
Spock Must Die
into shreds.

Mom and Tom must have identified the anger as coming from a different source. One day a book showed up on my brother's bed called
The Big Book of Teenage Answers
, with a note that said “Love, Mom and Tom.” I saw it first, before Ian got home. The book was written by a Bionic Woman-looking woman and a guy who looked like Steve Garvey but with cooler hair, like Lee Mazzilli's. There was a photograph of them on the back. They were both smiling with large white teeth and leaning their tan arms on curly ten-speed handlebars. I flipped through the book. A drawing of a naked woman had holes in parts of her skin to show what was inside her body. I looked at it for a while. Then I flipped around some more and stopped on a section called Ejaculation:

I went downstairs and got the cup I usually used for chocolate milk and brought it back upstairs, then I climbed into my loft bed and gave it a try and found I was apparently flawed in a whole new way because nothing happened except the shame part, a little. I tried to put the book back on my brother's bed exactly the way I'd found it.

That night, my brother and I were both lying in bed. We hadn't been talking as much as we used to. What was there to talk about? The Red Sox were choking worse than any team ever had. What else was there between us anymore? But sometimes my brother needed to tell me a story as much as I needed to hear him tell it.

“Me and Dean just walked out of school yesterday,” he said. I knew who Dean was. He had a flawless feathered haircut. And one other thing!

“You crushed your second home run off of Dean!” I said.

“That was a billion years ago,” Ian said.

“Wait, you left school during school?” I said.

“We went to his house and he gives me this glass of water. He's like, ‘Hey, here's some water, chug a lug.' But it was
vodka
.”

I knew not to say anything. But I was thinking, How could someone just walk right out of school? Weren't there any rules at all?

“We got so fucked up,” my brother said.

Fucked up?
I thought. I couldn't imagine what that meant. The next time I was alone, I checked
The Big Book of Teenage Answers
, but I couldn't find anything. What the hell was going on?

 

It was all falling apart, but there was still one last chance it could
come back together. The day after the 1978 season was supposed to be over, we were let out of school early. All over New England it was the same. A half-day. A holiday. One game. A 14-game lead gone, but still one last chance to win. Amazing that I still believed: We had Mike Torrez; they had Ron Guidry.

How can I explain Ron Guidry?

At that time, I was afraid to bicycle past a Doberman pinscher who was, according to the neighbor kid who owned him, so fierce that he often chewed through his chain and went on bloodthirsty rampages. I was afraid of that dog. I was afraid of bullies. I was afraid of girls. After reading
The Big Book of Teenage Answers
I was afraid that something was horribly wrong with my penis. I was afraid of ending up in a situation where I would be forced to eat fruit, which repulsed me. I was afraid of our basement. I was afraid of the three-note Duracell ditty that ended with the sectioned battery slamming together. I was afraid of nuclear bombs. You could be sitting there on the floor of your room, sorting your newest baseball cards into their respective teams, and it could all vanish in one bright flash. I was afraid of everything ending. I was afraid of death. I was afraid most of all of my night terrors.

In light of all those fears, I can't really say that I was afraid of Ron Guidry. I mean, I wasn't afraid Ron Guidry was going to leap out from behind a snowbank and bash me with a rock. I wasn't afraid Ron Guidry was going to force me to touch my tongue to a frozen metal pole. I wasn't afraid Ron Guidry was going to burn our house down. And yet, when I hold this 1979 Ron Guidry card in my hand, more than thirty years after 1978, when he went 25-3 with a 1.74 ERA—numbers so astounding they seem inhuman, merciless, obsidian, obscene—to lead the 100-win Yankees past my team, the 99-win Red Sox, it's as if I'm holding a small box made of thin, fragile glass, a scorpion inside.