Cardboard Gods (3 page)

I'm sure there were also plenty of neighbors who gave Mom and Tom the stink eye for their looks or our abnormal family situation or both. The saddest story my mom ever told me was about the time she tried to take my brother to his classmate's birthday party a couple houses down, only to be told by the boy's mother, through a latched screen door, that it just wasn't possible to invite everyone.

“Gotta draw the line somewhere,” the woman explained. From inside the house came the sounds of the party, floating through the screen to my mom and my brother.

If I'd been older when he'd begun living with us, I probably would have resented Tom's presence, but to me having a mom and a dad and a Tom was normal. It's all I knew. Plus, he was young and energetic and fun, willing and able to play with me in an unselfconscious, roughhouse way that my shy, reserved father, who was nearly twice Tom's age at that time, was not.

I have trouble picturing my father in my sketchy memories of those days. He was gone a lot, away earning the family's only steady income at his research job in the city or holed up in the guest room
that had become his room when Tom moved in. I remember he had a mustache because I recall he liked to kiss me on the cheek. I didn't like it.

“Baby fat,” he'd say teasingly, pinching the other cheek, the one he hadn't kissed.

“I'm
five
!” I'd yell, scowling, angry that he didn't even know I was no longer a baby. I wriggled away from him, still rubbing his bristly kiss off the other side of my face. I see this scenario occurring on the couch in our living room, my dad just home from work. He has on brown slacks and a white button-down shirt and a tie. A normal American in any other time and place, but the oddball in our world. The television is on.
George of the Jungle
.
Ultraman
. I stare at the screen, breathing through my mouth. My brother's on the couch, too. Eventually, my father sighs, rises from the couch, and trudges up the stairs to his little room, shutting the door.

 

One night, my brother and I are watching TV in the front room when men and women in ski masks burst through the front door. It's Tom's birthday. Much later, I'll understand that the whole thing is a gag, that Tom and Mom's hippie friends were inspired by the ongoing Patty Hearst saga to “liberate” the birthday boy.

“We've come to free you from society's shackles!” one of the kidnappers yells in Tom's face as they seize him. Tom struggles and giggles as he's dragged from our house. Mom follows, an accomplice, a tight smile on her face like someone on a roller coaster about to crest its first peak. I can't tell if what's happening is bad or good.

Who can tell me?

I look to my brother.

“Hey, Ian,” I say.

He stares at the television.
Lost in Space
. The flickering light from the screen makes his face seem to change. He's sad. He's mad. He knows things I don't know.

“Hey, Ian. Ian,” I say.

Once, when I was in my twenties, I ran into an acquaintance on the F train, a guy I'll call Wendell, whom I knew from pickup games of Ultimate Frisbee in Prospect Park. We were on the train for a long time, long enough for me to decide for some reason to start filling the conversational gaps with details of my upbringing. I mentioned the three-parent experiment. I mentioned that as that experiment was crumbling, the dream of a new experiment was born, to live a completely self-sufficient life way out in the country. Mom and Tom yearned to live closer to nature, to leave the toxic concrete suburbs behind, to leave complications behind, to
get back to the land
. I mentioned that a key component of this dream was Tom going away to blacksmith school so that he could learn a trade that, in most people's minds, was as obsolete as powdered wigs and muskets. Wendell, clad in a suit, returning home from his well-paying job, had worn an expression of amused surprise throughout my dissertation, but when I got to the blacksmith thing he burst out laughing.

“My god,” he said. “What were they
thinking
?”

“I know, I know,” I said, because I will almost always agree with anyone about anything. But after Wendell and I parted ways—he lived in a nicer neighborhood—I began what would turn out to be a lifelong habit of imagining myself responding with fierce eloquence to his mocking rhetorical dismissal of my family's unusual choices.

“Look,” I would begin, “things were different back then.”

 

Look, it was a time to Try New Things. Not all of those things worked. But even in the mistakes, or maybe especially in the mistakes, the
cockeyed grandeur of the 1970s comes through.

For example, in 1974, when Mom and Tom were making their final preparations to make what they envisioned to be a move far away from civilization and all its conventional ways, the World Champion Oakland A's added a man to their roster with no discernible familiarity with baseball and invented for him the brand-new role of designated pinch runner.

Herb Washington was and would always remain the only pure designated pinch runner in the history of baseball. Though the A's also used other players primarily as pinch runners during the mid' 70s, Washington was the only specialist to never once bat or take the field as a defender and so was the only player ever to have “Pinch Run.” as his listed position on the front of a baseball card.

A's owner Charles O. Finley, a wealthy, blustering, delusional mad-man or visionary who in some ways epitomized the sublime and ridiculous era I have been trying my whole life to fully understand, envisioned Washington, a former college sprinter, as yet another advantage for the formidable Oakland squad. But instead of being a fortification of the already high-powered engine that had carried the A's to league supremacy throughout the early- to mid-1970s, Washington ended up being the most superfluous (hence greatest) hood ornament on the biggest, baddest, Blue Moon Odomest Cadillac in the league.

As recounted on the back of his 1975 card, Washington entered 91 games in 1974, his first season in the majors. He stole 28 bases and was caught stealing 16 times. That is not a good ratio and in fact would be identified by present-day baseball number-crunchers as counterproductive, Washington's jittery, unpolished improvisations on the basepaths killing too many possible rallies to justify the occasional extra base. He lasted only until May of the following year, adding two more stolen bases and one more caught stealing to his all-time record.

When I was a kid I did not scrutinize the stolen-base-to-caught-stealing ratio but was instead mesmerized that these statistics were included at all, for at that time and throughout the 1970s stolen bases were not among the statistics on any other card. I also completely believed the overheated back-of-the-card space-filling prose created by a nameless Topps functionary who wrote, among other things, that Washington was “personally responsible for winning 9 games for the A's in 1974.”

My guess is that in a couple of these nine games, Washington merely trotted across the plate in front of a home run by one of the actual baseball players on the team, that in a few more of the nine games he scored after a series of events not of his own doing that would have led just as easily to a score by the actual baseball player he replaced, and that the game or two where his speed actually seemed to provide the winning edge were more than canceled out by his inexperienced baserunning gaffes in other games and by his taking the place on the roster of someone who could, say, field a ground ball or dump a pinch-hit single into right field once in a while. Then again, his mere presence may have inflicted psychological damage on other teams. By carrying a guy on their roster who could not hit, pitch, or field, the A's were in essence declaring to their opponents that they could kick their asses with one hand tied behind their back.

Also, and perhaps more significantly, the inclusion of Herb Washington served as a message from the A's to all the suit-wearing, sober-minded Wendells of the world that they were brave enough to try something new. Whether the useless innovation of Herb Washington signaled the apotheosis of the A's dynasty or foretold the team's impending descent at champion-sprinter speed into abject late-1970s suffering is beside the point. The point is that life is not to be methodically considered and solved like a math equation. Life, fucking Wendell, is to be sprinted toward and bungled beyond recognition.

I won't say I haven't also wondered in the course of my life what the hell my parents were thinking. Even during my earliest years of consciousness, when I generally understood the experimentation of the adults in my family as simply the way life was, I instinctively began to reach for things that had clear rules and distinct lines between what was good and what was bad.

In fact, one of the things that would draw me into the world of the cardboard gods as much as anything else was its clean, well-defined system of statistical landmarks. You knew where you stood with the numbers on the back of a baseball player's card. If a guy hit 30 home runs and drove in 100 runs, he was a star slugger. If another guy turned in a sub-3.00 ERA, he was a top pitcher. It was as simple as that, no gray areas, no confusion.

For starting pitchers, it was all about wins. If you won 20 games, you were an ace. Conversely, if you lost 20 games, you were kind of a rag arm, a luckless mushballer (though probably not utterly incompetent; after all, your team must have seen reason to keep running you out there to take all those beatings).

These seemingly mutually exclusive starting pitcher landmarks would be well-known to me by the time I started inspecting the baffling statistics on the back of Wilbur Wood's card. In a five-year span, the aging knuckleballer with the nineteenth-century name won 20 games four times, but he also lost 20 games twice, 19 games once, and 17 games once. The most confusing year of all was one of the years when all three of my parents lived in the same house, 1973, when Wilbur Wood won 24 games and lost 20.

I could never figure out if Wilbur Wood was bad or good, but eventually I came to see him as being, in both name and deed, some kind of throwback to the rugged, spike-gashing dawn of major league baseball, when hurlers started both ends of a doubleheader and then came on in relief the next day at dusk despite massive corn liquor hangovers to strand the go-ahead and winning runs in scoring position. Wilbur Wood was beyond Old School. He was Old Testament. He was the last vestige of a time when men named Mordecai and Smokey Joe and Grover strode as giants upon the land, their won-lost records both gleaming and gory, good and bad entangled.

When Wilbur Wood hung it up, it left no one to stop the meek five-inning starters and one-out lefty bullpen specialists from inheriting the earth.