Cardboard Gods (21 page)

But in my fourth and final year, another 6-9 trudge for the Mets, Mick's team was terrible, though somehow even this got framed in professional-seeming terms, the Yankees “rebuilding” instead of just sucking. I guess Mick's scouting had temporarily failed him. Who knows, maybe he had tried to break certain habits for a while, vowing to stay away from playgrounds. All I know, or need to know, is that we finally got our chance, for once, to kick their fucking ass. There was a moment in that ass-kicking that needs a halo.

 

The first person I wanted to tell was my brother. When I got home from the game I went to find him. He was lying on his bed, reading one of his science fiction books, the Hank Aaron poster on the wall above him.

“I did it,” I said. I was still in my uniform. I had my glove on, and I pounded it with my fist.

“Hey!” I said. My brother looked up.

“I did it! Against the
Yankees
. I smacked a fucking homer!”

Ian's eyes widened.

It wasn't the reaction I was looking for.

“An inside-the-parker?” Ian asked.

“No, a real one,” I said. “Gone.”

“Wow,” Ian said. “That's great.”

He went back to reading. I walked to my side of the room and started unbuttoning my uniform. But then I stopped. I didn't want to take it off. I rebuttoned the top buttons and kneeled down and pulled out my baseball cards. There was one in particular I wanted to see, yet again, the one with more home runs on the back of it than any baseball card had ever had.

 

Since I was not as big or as good as my brother, and since I was so obviously flawed, and since I wore glasses (nobody who hit home runs wore glasses), I had always assumed that hitting a home run was beyond my reach. Though I was an okay hitter for average, I'd never even hit a ball off the fence. But my at bat against the Yankees provided the perfect storm—a straight medium-fast pitch right down the middle from a talented but undeveloped nine-year-old, Mike LaRocque, a good swing by me, perfect contact, and then about an inch clearance both over the chain-link left-field fence and to the right of the short metal foul pole. The more mythic little league heroes pounded their homers into the river a hundred feet beyond the center-field fence, but so what? If I knew anything from my baseball cards, it was that a home run was a home run.

I didn't really understand what had happened until I saw the infield ump circling his finger in the air. I staggered around the bases with a huge dumb grin on my face, and at home plate all my teammates mobbed me.

 

If I could take one moment from my life and save it from erosion and degradation, from the diminishing repetition of need, I'd choose that at bat. I'd start the memory as I was walking toward the batter's box and end it with me stomping on home plate as my teammates
laughed and screamed and pummeled me. In other words, if I had a halo, I'd use it to mint those angelic seconds when I was Henry Louis Aaron.

I bought more cards in 1980 then I ever had or ever would. I read the box scores in 1980 closer than I ever had or ever would. I studied the Sunday averages more intently than I ever had or ever would, reading every name and number from the bottom of the list to the top, where George Brett was flying higher than anyone I'd ever seen.

Brett had been rising higher and higher since I'd been paying attention, but in the summer of 1980 he reached yet another, unthinkable level. Ty Cobb hit .400. Rogers Hornsby hit .400. Nap Lajoie hit .400. Dead guys hit .400. Men from the age of color photography did not hit .400. And yet, here he was, alive and kicking: George Brett!

 

That spring, a kid in my grade boasted to me that he'd lured two girls from our school into one of our town's many gravel pits one night. He claimed they had both insisted on ripping off their shirts, at which point he discovered that the brown-haired girl's nipples were brown while the blonde girl's nipples were white, a notion that confused and excited me.

Since my first failed try the day the book appeared on my brother's bed, I had continued periodically trying and failing to follow the directions in
The Big Book of Teenage Answers
for producing ejaculate. The day I heard the gravel pit tale I went home and gave it another shot. I closed my eyes as I got going and envisioned myself in the gravel pit with the two girls standing in front of me in button-down shirts. I unbuttoned the brown-haired girl's shirt first, because she was prettier, but it wasn't until I was imagining putting my tongue
to the salty white nipple of the somewhat homely blonde girl that a hot flush shot through my body and I produced, in a dribble, a rivulet of sticky substance that was not milky, as the book had said it would be, but clear.

I had stopped bringing my chocolate milk cup up from the kitchen every time I attempted to be what the book said was an ordinary teenage boy (not that a cup would have been of much use), so I used a pillowcase to wipe up, then jammed it under my mattress, where it or one of its relatives would reside, wet or encrusted or both, for the remainder of my increasingly private life in that house.

Over the summer I periodically put aside my cards and the Sunday averages to imagine myself in the gravel pit near our house, minding my own business, when a female would appear, approaching rapidly, as if she had something of great importance to tell me. Most often this female would be Cheryl Tiegs in her see-through fishnet bathing suit. Other popular gravel pit visitors were Lynda Carter decked out as Wonder Woman and carrying her truth lasso, Bailey and Jennifer from
WKRP in Cincinnati
, a teenaged cock-gobbling nymphomaniac from a
Penthouse Forum
letter that I'd somehow gotten my hands on who was described as having “tits like melons,” and a scratchy-voiced girl from my grade who had appeared at school one spring day wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt that could not conceal that she suddenly also had
tits like melons
. And once in a while I imagined myself hanging around the gravel pit, chucking rocks at the little gravel pit caves that tiny birds flew in and out of, when all of a sudden from around the corner, running, would appear the biggest-breasted woman of them all, coming for me.

The year before, during the major league All-Star Game, George Brett had been voluptuously assaulted by this woman, Morganna the Kissing Bandit, a giant-chested blonde who periodically vaulted fences and ran across the field in the middle of major league games, her increasingly famous attributes cha-chonging wildly, to plant kisses on the faces of stars such as Pete Rose, Nolan Ryan, and Fred Lynn. George Brett, as far as I can figure, was the only man to have his work interrupted twice by the affectionate interloper.

Morganna, whose measurements were 60-23-39, epitomized a key element of my entire unsavory fantasy life that went even deeper than my gnawing desire to make contact with a large naked boob or two: Somehow, someday, a woman would run right at me and smother me with an almost carnivorous affection without my having to do
anything. The ache of puberty for me was the feeling that I existed at an impossible remove from any melon-baring deshirting, and my fantasies were as much about imagining the erasure of this infinite gap as they were about the brief guilt-laced physical euphoria they helped bring about. The image of Morganna galloping across a baseball field, of all places, to benevolently suffocate her prey with her uncontainable femininity is the Rosetta stone of all the fantasies from that summer of George Brett. In the scenarios I was the same as always, a kid whose life revolved around baseball, and then suddenly I'd be swept away by a version of sex no more complicated than a big warm wave. I wouldn't need to know anything or do anything. I could simply, passively, blissfully surrender.

 

After surrendering, it was back to the cards. I must have liked all the cards I got that summer, because I kept getting and getting, but I'm sure the cards in a pack that excited me the most were the ones with the word “ALL-STAR” emblazoned across the top, and of all those I can't imagine any card would have pleased me more than the one featuring the god currently soaring above the legendary .400 barrier.

Since the front of George Brett's 1980 card showed him in a moment of almost foreboding contemplation, I didn't spend much time gazing at it but instead flipped the card over immediately. The backs of the 1980 cards featured cartoons for the first time since 1977, and, even better, the cartoons referenced the player on the card instead of relating some random shred of baseball trivia. George Brett's cartoon had a caption that surely snagged my attention: “George is one of 4 baseball-playing brothers.”

I would have showed it to my own brother but he no longer collected cards, so I was on my own to study the numbers. Brett's numbers for 1979 were thrilling: a .329 average and 42 doubles, 20 triples, and 23 home runs. Just looking at them was enough to get me thinking about Brett's team, the Royals, who had been a force in the American League since my love of baseball had begun, a speedy, slashing battalion of attackers that cut the Red Sox to ribbons whenever they ventured into the Royals' carpeted domain in Kansas City. As long as they weren't revealing the Red Sox as plodding, one-dimensional lunkheads, I loved envisioning the Royals in action, a dynamo of base-stealing, triple-ripping sprinters with Brett at the center, coiled low in his mystical Charlie Lau crouch and smashing anything and
everything you tried to throw past him for gap-bound bases-clearing screamers.

That summer I had more time on my own than I'd ever had before, my brother off elsewhere whenever he could find a way, usually just using his thumb. Inside the house and out I made up solitaire baseball-based games involving whatever was at hand—a tennis ball, the ridges of the aluminum roof, a Nerf ball, a Wiffle Ball bat—and in those games I invented whole teams and leagues and narratives of unbearable suffering giving way to tearful limping indomitable triumph. Again and again I pitched to my knees with my arms raised like Bjorn Borg after finally fending off John McEnroe's monumental challenge at Wimbledon.

“Yes!” I cried out. Sometimes a tear or two actually streaked down my cheeks.

Before I reached that climax, I always included a Royals-like team of gazelle-thin doubles bashers somewhere in my fictional baseball world. The Red Sox were my team, and Yaz the central figure in my prayers, but when it came to fantasy I never channeled myself into the sullen lumbering carcasses of the Red Sox. To do so would be to stay within my world, within the confines of the reedy changing body I needed more and more often to escape.

 

Sometimes I asked my brother if I could go with him when he left the house. He said no again and again until I stopped asking. Then one day when I was kneeling on the floor of our room, looking at baseball cards, he tossed a Nerf ball at my head.

“You know how to hitchhike?” he said.

We walked through town and past the general store, not ducking in to buy any cards, and then we stopped at the corner, where a road branched off Route 14 and climbed up and out of our valley.

“Step One: always bring along a basketball,” Ian said. “Then people know you're an all-American boy going to shoot some wholesome baskets instead of a maniac on angel dust who will knife them.”

He didn't say this until we'd already been standing there for quite a while.

“What's angel dust?” I asked. A little later I asked, “Do cars ever come?”

“Step Two,” he said. “Give up all hope of ever getting a ride ever.” A minute or so later he added, “Because about two people live in this entire fucking valley.”

A few minutes after that a car came down Route 14 and turned onto the road where we were standing. Ian cradled the basketball in his left arm and raised his right thumb up high. I stood behind him and kind of put my thumb up too. The car went on by.

“It's tougher with two people,” Ian muttered. I thought about how close we were to the general store. I had a dollar, enough to buy four packs and go on home and shove all the gum into my mouth at once. Another truck approached. A guy in mirrored sunglasses leaned out the passenger-side window, his mouth hanging open in a smile, his tan elbow hanging down.

“Get a fucking car!” he yelled.

The driver leaned on the horn, which played “Dixie,” like the General Lee.

“Fuck you!” my brother yelled as the truck disappeared over the rise. Its engine made an angry sound as it started climbing the mountain up and out of our town, away from us, a pack of hornets moving on. When the sound disappeared altogether Ian bounced the basketball once on the concrete.
Boing.
It made me think of the sharp, stunted echoes you hear in an utterly empty room.