Cardboard Gods (28 page)

As far as I know, Grich never tangled with Galactus or Modok or the Red Skull; he did once scream at Earl Weaver for pinch hitting for him too often when he was a rookie, but no blows were thrown by either man. Mostly, Grich quietly went about his job, over the course of his career creating a body of work bettered by only a few second basemen in major league history. (Bill James, a longtime advocate of the underrated Grich's estimable worth, ranked Grich as the twelfth best second baseman of all time.)

This card heralded the beginning of Grich's stay with the Angels. (Note the blotchy, doctored uniform piping, Topps scrambling to adjust for his free agency defection from the Orioles.) Interestingly,
I have no memories of Grich besides this card until a moment at the very end of his Angels sojourn. The reason the latter moment, which came during the Angels' 1986 American League championship series tilt with the Red Sox, stands out in my memory is that once again Bobby Grich seemed like a character who'd be at home in the pages of a superhero comic. I don't recall exactly when the moment occurred, but it was either after the Angels' third win, which put them up three games to one, or after the Angels took a commanding lead in the next game. The California sun was shining down, the home fans were screaming joyously, and Grich leapt into the air to give a seismic high five to a teammate, who in my memory was, fittingly, the Angel with a superhero's bulging musculature, Brian Downing. Both Angels seemed larger than life, especially Grich, as if with a couple uncanny Hulk-like leaps he could bound all the way across the continent to New York to finally participate in a World Series.

He shrank back down to human size soon enough, I guess. He became like the rest of us once again, who only ever fly in our dreams. I don't remember noticing him as the Red Sox clawed back to beat the Angels and win their first pennant since 1975.

Not that I was looking for him. I was too busy flying.

The little color television in the corner of the dorm room seemed to be emitting the kind of gamma rays that center superhero origin tales. The three young men with me in the room—Steve from Peterborough, NH; Tom from Marblehead, MA; and John from Norwich, VT—were all glowing, as if they would soon be able to shoot fire from their fingertips or stop bullets with their chests or topple a building with one punch. And I seemed to be levitating several inches off the ground. In a few seconds we'd all be invincible.

We had a two-run lead in the bottom of the tenth inning of Game Six of the 1986 World Series. The first two Mets batters had made outs. No one was on base. We needed to record just one more out for the deepest wish of our childhoods to come true. I started wondering how I was going to get to Boston for the parade, and if my brother would be able to meet me there.

“Where can we get champagne this time of night?” I said, and Gary Carter stroked a sharp single to left.

 

It's easy to try to make sense of it all now. To soberly and magnanimously absolve everyone involved from blame. To claim I'd never assigned blame in the first place. To claim I never wished grave ill on John McNamara or built a lexicon of mockery around the sad failure face of Calvin Schiraldi or evaded the question of who was responsible for the ball skipping to the backstop and allowing the tying run to score, Bob Stanley or Rich Gedman, by simply throwing them both onto the noxious dump fire smoldering for years and years in my mind. To claim that because I had almost completely stopped
believing the game could still be won by the time Mookie Wilson's ground ball bounded toward Bill Buckner, and because I was not one of the idiots who harassed him and his family until he fled Boston for Idaho, or one of the idiots who years later held up a sign saying they forgave him, as if he had something to be forgiven for (
Forgive us, Bill Buckner
, the signs should have read), that I was somehow not complicit in the crushing weight of history that came down on Bill Buckner's shoulders, obliterating the achievements of a career that included 2,715 hits and 1,208 RBI and a .289 lifetime batting average and an All-Star berth and a batting title and a division crown and a pennant and a moment just a few moments away from invincibility. To claim the thought of Bill Buckner never prompted a sharp ache to spread through my chest. To claim I wasn't overwhelmed by a bitterness that severed a connection to the closest thing I had to a religion in such a way that the connection, though it would survive, would never be fully repaired.

 

Steve from Peterborough, NH, swore and cried. Tom from Marblehead, MA, smashed empty beer bottles against the wall. John from Norwich, VT, climbed into his bed and curled into a fetal position, pulling his covers over his head. I just stood there looking down at a phlegm-colored institutional rug, a painful, skeletal grin on my face that I couldn't get rid of, a corollary to the painful beating in my head:
What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?

I thought childhood was over. I thought I'd lost the touch of the gods. It was a cold late morning in January 1987. A friend handed me and a couple other friends each a tiny perforated cardboard square imprinted with a yin-yang symbol. We placed the cardboard onto our tongues.

We were near a playground. As we started to feel something in our limbs, a giddy electric shivering, we got on some swings. Childhood returned, and not just the memory of childhood but the full feel of it, the narrow, deep glee of simply
swinging
.

 

You can just get by from day to day or you can swing. Dock Ellis swung. He spoke up loud and clear when something bothered him. He wore hair curlers on the field during pregame warm-ups. According to the book Dock Ellis collaborated on with poet Donald Hall,
Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball
, he once announced before a game against the Reds (whom Ellis felt had established a psychological edge over Ellis's Pirates), “We gonna get
down
. We gonna
do
the
do
. I'm going to
hit
these motherfuckers,” and then in the first inning he backed up his words by drilling the first three Reds batters before throwing six straight balls to Tony Perez and Johnny Bench, who had temporarily given up baseball for dodgeball. (At that point Ellis's manager finally removed him from the game.) Off the field, he visited prisons and befriended and helped the inmates, laying the groundwork for a post-baseball career as a devoted and talented social worker. Even when he was near the very top of the game, he spilled over the sides of it. Early in his career, on an off day, Dock Ellis met up with a friend who had some tiny perforated squares of cardboard.

I wanted to follow the footsteps of another character determined to spill over the sides of life, Sal Paradise. And just like the narrator of
On the Road
, I had an old boarding-school roommate who, by living in California, offered a suitably faraway point B. I rode a Greyhound bus all the way, having no adventures to speak of, the vast land that was the star of my favorite book scrolling past the dirty bus window like stock footage in a dimly lit documentary.

Once I got to California, I soon ran so low on money that I had to exist for a while on tortillas and cream cheese that I stole from a small grocery store. I got so desperate I applied for and, because they took anyone, got a job once again fundraising door to door for an environmental protection organization. I was worse than ever at it, and one day in Lompoc I hit a new low, unable to get a single penny from anyone. Near the end of my shift I knocked on a door and a thin guy with aviator glasses answered. I began reciting the official spiel in my customary hesitant monotone.

“Hey, let me ask you something,” the guy said, cutting me off.

“Okay,” I said.

“How would you like to experience something a thousand times better than any acid trip?”

I looked down at my clipboard, at my watch. I looked back up at the guy. I went inside and chanted Nam Myoho Renge Kyo with the guy and his Asian wife for a while, the three of us kneeling in their living room.

“Wow, huh?” the guy said afterward. I assured him that he'd changed my life, even though I still felt the same. Before leaving his porch I tried to finish my spiel and get a contribution. He was leaning in his doorway. He waved a hand around like he was shooing a bug.

“We've moved beyond all that,” he said. “Don't you see?”

A few days later I got a job at a gas station. I worked there for a month and a half and quit in time to spend my last couple weeks in California smoking pot, meditating on a cliff overlooking the Pacific, and reading books that in various ways affirmed that the whole wide world was an illusion.

 

While the rest of his teammates and the team they would be playing slept, Dock Ellis, eyes wide open, marveled through the night and into the next day at the whole wide world far below.

“I might have slept maybe an hour,” Dock Ellis recalled in
Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball
. “I got up maybe about nine or ten in the morning. Took another half tab.”

As he regained the full altitude of his orbit, he realized that, in just a few hours, back down on earth, he was scheduled to pitch. No one had ever attempted to pitch a major league game while experiencing the hallucinogenic effects of LSD, but Dock Ellis ran toward life no matter what. He arrived at the ballpark with only enough time to watch the ball leap from his fingers a few times before the Star-Spangled Banner was played.

 

My brother met me in California at the end of the summer. He was about to drop out of college for a while and work, but before donning the UPS browns he wanted to get a taste of the big wide world. To spill over the sides. He and his friend Dave had taken a meandering route west, and the plan was that the three of us would drive all the way back east together. By the time they picked me up they had built up a bond from all the miles, their in-jokes and references to road experiences making me feel like an outsider. I was hoping that on the drive east I'd become a full partner in the trip. Also, I hadn't yet learned how to drive and was hoping (and dreading) that I'd get a chance to practice as we shot across the continent. I imagined that somehow on the long drive I'd free myself of all my limitations; somehow I'd no longer be myself but someone better.

Before heading east, we detoured north for a two-day outdoor concert featuring Santana and the Grateful Dead. The line getting into the parking lot was never-ending, long enough for us to purchase three hits of acid from some guy, long enough for us to talk over how best to use our new acquisition, long enough for us to dismiss the rational choice of waiting until the next day so that we could take the hits just before the concert in favor of an alternative and more immediate time of liftoff, because at the present moment we were bored out of our skulls, inching along at a mile an hour if we were moving at all. So, still paralyzed in traffic, we just said
What the fuck
. Onto our tongues went the little squares of cardboard.