Cardboard Gods (25 page)

Before this goes any further: What the fuck? Specifically, what the fuck are the Milwaukee Brewers doing in the National League? When I last looked, I mean really looked, back at the end of my childhood, that unbroken ladder of years seemingly aimed in the direction of the gods, there was no clearer representative of the American League than the Brewers. They never sent their keg-bellied hungover hurlers to the plate. They never hosted games below the ceiling of a retractable dome. They never allowed their simple brutish contests to be marred by the calculating timidity of sacrifice bunts. They had the beards and long greasy hair of motorcycle thugs and guzzled Miller High Life and gnawed bulging wads of tobacco and slugged long home runs or struck out swinging. They listened to Waylon Jennings and Hank Williams Jr. on their way to discharge shotguns at wildlife. They smashed into outfield fences and bought mescaline from hippies before pounding them with tire irons. Didn't they? I mean, now that the Milwaukee Brewers are in something called the Central Division of the National League I don't feel I can make confident assertions about anything. But I can at least say this: As much as any team was ever one guy, the Milwaukee Brewers in the late '70s and early '80s were Gorman Thomas. And Gorman Thomas did not ever show his grizzled, menacing face in the National League. Until October 1982, that is, and that was only because by then the Brewers had laid waste to all the American League teams in their path and the only thing left for them to conquer was the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League, which they probably would have done if the majority of the games in the
1982 World Series were played in an American League park and not upon the fake National League turf of Busch Stadium. After those four National League games, Gorman Thomas was never the same, and neither were the Brewers, and come to think of it, neither was I.

And what's Tom Seaver doing in a Cincinnati Reds uniform? Tom Seaver was known as the Franchise, a nickname nodding to the fact that he
was
the New York Mets. He had always been the New York Mets. He would always be the New York Mets. And yet, here he is: Something else.

As he glares out from under his new red cap, his approach appears unaltered:
Give me the fucking ball and I'll win
. Still, no one is immune to the erosion of the unbroken ladder of years. After a few years in exile from the New York Mets, Tom Seaver seemed to be close to joining me among those who'd recently let go of playing baseball. In 1982, his final year with the Reds, he went 5 and 13 with a 5.50 ERA.

What do you do when the unbroken ladder of years disappears?

 

My mom came up to my room one night. It was the spring of 1983. She asked me if I thought I might want to try going away to school, as Ian had done.

“I don't know,” I said.

Eventually, she drove me down to western Massachusetts to the boarding school my brother would be graduating from soon. A guy in the admissions office interviewed me. I had no extracurricular activities to tell him about, beyond my horrible basketball team. I didn't like any subjects in school. Still, words somehow came out of my mouth when it was my turn to talk.

“Good stuff, good stuff,” the interviewer kept saying.

A few weeks later, my mom got word that they would be willing to get her started on another heavily loan-burdened tuition payment plan, similar to the one she was already on for my brother.

“So what do you think?” she asked me.

“I don't know.”

 

By then, Tom Seaver had been traded back to the Mets. It wasn't exactly a triumphant return. All the Reds could get for the future Hall of Famer was Lloyd McClendon, Charlie Puleo, and a minor leaguer named Jason Felice. Reunited with the Mets, his struggles continued. One night early in Tom Seaver's second go-round in New York, I stumbled into a return of my own. A couple buddies and I had gotten an older guy to buy us some rum. We were wondering where to drink it. I'd never gotten drunk before. We ended up, probably at my suggestion, at the little league dugout where I'd spent a lot of good moments, including my first and only minutes as a kid who had just made perfect contact and hit a home run.

The brief, inexplicable triumph of that day struck me as unreachable the moment I sat down on the wooden bench, gripping, instead of a bat that had just been used to hit a home run, a liter bottle of rum-spiked Coke. As I looked out through the chicken wire at the field, I was surprised by the smallness of the diamond, by the closeness of the outfield fence, by how easy it would be to hit a home run. A sharp ache spread through my chest as I realized the impossibility of going back to that much simpler world. You can only go forward, never backward. I started drinking. The ache gradually gave way to one of the best feelings I'd ever felt. It began to really hit me when we left the dugout. We were running toward an older kid's truck that had appeared in the nearby parking lot. My strides had a slow-motion buoyancy, as if gravity were loosening its grip. We piled into the back and rode around shitfaced and laughing under the stars for the rest of the night, the bumps in the road lifting us up into the air like we were unbuckled astronauts far beyond the earth's pull.

 

That fall, I went away to the boarding school in western Massachusetts. I spent the first weeks in a state of barely concealed terror. All the other students seemed impossibly sophisticated, way out of my league. One day I had been the sole inhabitant of a rural, socially retarded kingdom of daydreams, solitaire Strat-O-Matic baseball, and
WKRP in Cincinnati
-based masturbation, and the next day I
was stiffly traversing a rolling green campus of solemn ivied buildings and sharp-witted upper-middle-class Izod-clad sophisticates in slightly muted Spandau Ballet haircuts who had long ago lost their virginity on the sunsplashed decks of Nantucket sailboats. Initially, my only way of dealing with the terror of the situation was to seize hold of my strong resemblance to my brother.
You're just like your brother
, I was told repeatedly, often as a filler for the uncomfortable silences that surrounded me like a force field.

I wasn't crazy about being an echo, but being an echo was better than being nothing at all, especially if it was Ian's echo. He had done well at the school, or so I thought, playing on the varsity basketball team, acing English papers, serving as an official Student Leader of his dorm. Years later, I found out he carried an ineffably deep loathing of the memory of himself at that school. During his two years there, he had forced his unruly collection of adolescent hurt, yearning, and anger inside the borders of a desperate impersonation of a well-adjusted, high-achieving paragon of old-money virtue. I was impersonating an impersonation.

 

One bright and sunny Sunday a month or so after my arrival I slipped into the TV room on the first floor of my dorm. The TV room was for defectives, especially on a bright and sunny Sunday when you could be out talking and laughing in your polo shirt with a gaggle of beautiful girls in front of a leaf pile, your lacrosse stick perched on your shoulder. My other stints in the TV room thus far had been sad, shame-filled congregations with other dateless and misshapen fellows to watch Michael Jackson and Prince prance around on
Friday Night Videos
while the regular kids groped one another through L.L. Bean garments under the soft, English Literature-enhanced boarding-school stars. But on this particular Sunday I had no company at all. It was just me and the television.

In this one instance, I didn't care what anyone thought. I had to watch television on this particular Sunday, for it was October 2, 1983. It was Carl Yastrzemski's last game.

Come on, Yaz.
I was able to say this to myself at first, but as the game went on and he kept failing to homer, my little prayer began to sneak out of my mouth. By Yaz's last at bat I was pleading out loud to the television, my cracking voice slapping off the concrete TV room walls. He settled into his familiar stance, twirling his bat forward and leaning toward the mound slightly, as if trying to hear
the pitcher's internal monologue. The TV thinned the crowd noise to a hollow buzz, but I could still tell that they were all shouting the same syllable as me, everyone wasting the last of their voices on that yawing, fizzling, incantatory sound.

“Come on, Yaz!” I hollered.
“Come on, Yaz!”

The Red Sox wouldn't be going to the playoffs that year. Not even close. Yaz would be leaving without a World Series win. Yaz would be leaving. This was it.

The pitcher was a journeyman with a bland mustache. He had trouble finding the strike zone with his first three pitches. Yaz, not wanting to end it all with a walk, ultimately had to lunge at a high fastball. He popped out to the second baseman. Before the following half-inning began, he took his position in left in front of the Green Monster, and then Chico Walker ran out to replace him. As Yaz jogged toward the dugout, the crowd rose and cheered him one last time, but I just sat there trying not to look like a dweeb in the TV room crying.

 

I fell behind in all my classes, especially trigonometry. Numbers had once been the haven of certainty in my life. Ladders of numbers. Numbers that swelled and waned like the tide, numbers that gleamed, numbers that wheezed, clownish, laughable numbers, awe-inspiring numbers, numbers that seemed to tell stories much clearer than anything else in the world. 3,000 hits—like Yaz had gotten. 400 home runs—like Yaz had gotten. 200 strikeouts, every season—like Tom Seaver had gotten every year from the year I was born up until he showed up on a card as a Cincinnati Red. 300 wins—like Tom Seaver looked like he might fall short of as he faltered through his second stint with the Mets. These were numbers I understood.

 

As my first year at boarding school was ending, Tom Seaver left the New York Mets again, this time latching on with the Chicago White Sox, where he had to wear a jersey with wide horizontal stripes that made him look kind of old and kind of fat. Despite appearing (as most of the White Sox did) as if he'd be more at home lofting high-arcing softball pitches with one hand while gripping a sixteen-ounce can of Old Style with the other, he turned things around in Chicago and began stomping rather than limping toward 300 wins. He would steamroll past 300, the number no match for the relentless man.

As for me: One afternoon in the spring of my junior year at boarding school, I took one look at the impenetrable questions on my trigonometry final exam, then spent the remainder of the test period filling a blue examination booklet with an apology to my teacher. It may as well have been my suicide note to the world of numbers. Afterward, a senior drove up over the border, into Vermont, where the drinking age was still eighteen, and bought so many bottles of booze that when he got back we spread them out on a kid's bed and took a picture of them. So many bottles you couldn't even count them all. The giddiness was palpable. We were about to blast all the numbers clean out of our heads.