Cardboard Gods (33 page)

My mother got a temporary job at a college art museum back in Vermont, within a fairly short drive of Tom's condo. They had a lot of shared history, a lot of good memories. They decided to give it another try.

A year or so into this second try, in the summer of 1995, my mother's temporary job at the college art museum ended, and she spent most of the summer away from Tom, back down in New York, sleeping on the “guest mat” in my dad's apartment and finishing her PhD thesis. She had paid the rent on her vacated apartment in the Vermont college town throughout the summer, however, so I invited myself to stay there for several weeks, thinking of it as a “writer's retreat” and, more generally, as something to snap me awake from an adult life that to that point, my twenty-seventh year, hadn't amounted to much. I had no specific idea about what I would do with the time, but I hoped—blindly, desperately—that when I got back to Vermont, back to the green mountains that had mothered all the many bright colors of my childhood, a novel of great genius would begin flooding out of me.

A creeping panic began when I got my first glimpse of the tight, sullen face staring back at me from the bathroom mirror. It was a small, hot apartment with a low ceiling and no view and a clock that went tick tick tick. I didn't have any means of escaping myself. I didn't know anyone in the town. I didn't own a car, or even know how to drive one.

Every day, I walked to the nearby college library, where I read old issues of
Sports Illustrated
in between attempts to write in my notebook that invariably ended with me either knifing deep gashes in the pages with my pen or scrawling dire threats against myself. Back at
the apartment, I watched reruns of
Home Improvement
, perhaps the worst sitcom ever made, to help cross the chasm of the late afternoon. With evening in sight, I started drinking and ate gigantic mounds of generic macaroni and cheese with sliced-up generic hot dogs.

At night I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, dreading the next day's blank page. Sometimes I was able to sink into a torpor vaguely resembling sleep by jerking off to memories of the sex I'd had with an ex-girlfriend just before leaving the city. As the summer wore on, I began to build that cursory encounter into something monumental, almost religious, one bright shard shining in a polluted sea of gray. In sheer desperation, I began to convince myself I was falling in love.

My mom came up to visit two or three times. On one of these visits I went with her and Tom to a lake for one of their canoeing outings. They canoed a lot, much more than they ever had in their first go-round. There was a lack of conversation during the car ride to the lake. By that point my mom may have gotten the news that she had another temporary job waiting for her in the fall, at a college museum in Ohio. I can't remember. I also can't remember if I'd yet started to have conversations with Tom in which he confided to me that he was struggling with the idea of continuing a relationship with Mom if she moved that far away. Either way, the silence during the drive seemed heavy to me, as if things were about to fall apart.

But once we got to the lake, and put the canoe in the water, and got in, and shoved away from shore—the very moment we shoved off—the burden dissolved. For the first time all summer, I felt okay. I sat in the middle of the boat without a paddle, Mom was up front, and Tom was in the back. They had once built a whole life together, had created a home, had raised two boys. Little wonder they were like two parts of a whole in a canoe. As we crossed the lake I felt blessed, for the first time in a long time, as if we were afloat in one of those rare safe pockets in life, the diminishing gray future and the unreachable primary brightness of the past gone, dissolved into a pale blue stillness. Nobody spoke, as if the moment was so fragile it would break under the weight of any sounds beyond those faint clacks and burbles marking our movement across the reflection of the sky.

Near the end of the summer, my mom came up to start gathering things for the move to Ohio. It seemed a particularly uncertain moment for both of us, for everyone. The “novel” that I'd hoped would change my life was nothing more than a notebook that looked as if
it had been mauled by a pit bull with ink on his fangs. My mother was edging into more of an unknown than she had in many years, perhaps ever, going off alone to a part of the country far away from where she had spent her whole life. Nothing had been resolved between her and Tom as far as what would happen between them when she moved away, but from what happened next I can be sure that my mother was counting on the relationship, that quiet, bittersweet canoe ride, to continue.

What happened next was Tom broke up with my mom. As I understand it, they had tried once before, during the mid-1980s, to keep things going while living in two separate places, and it hadn't worked. Tom didn't want to try that again.

For a long time, one of the longest nights of my life, I lay in the dark on a cot outside my mother's bedroom in the apartment that had already established itself as the location of my most abject failure. I couldn't help overhearing my mother's side of the phone calls. All night long and into the sickly first light of a new day, that rotary dial sound: Zick. Zicka. Zickaaaa. Zick. Sometimes the phone calls ended with a slam. Sometimes they ended as if the phone fell from a dead hand. The worst was when the phone was put down with tenderness, as if tenderness could coax something gone to return. As for the sounds that were made by the human voice in between the beginnings and the endings of those phone calls: I'm not going to say a goddamn thing.

The next day, we went to the storage facility a few miles away from our old house. My weeping mother held the steering wheel in one hand and a damp wad of tissues in the other. The storage facility, a converted barn, gray and lopsided, eventually came into view.

The dark interior of our storage cell was clogged with the last of the residue of our Back to the Land dream. Broken homemade furniture, rusty garden tools, garbage bags full of faded tie-dyed scarves and silk-screened T-shirts, dust-covered cross-country skis, disintegrating books about gurus and canning and sociology and New Games, warped records by the Beatles and the Firesign Theater, the rolled-up canvases of all my mother's giant bright paintings, Tom's old blacksmith tools. Box after box of the things that carried us only so far.

The box that contained my baseball cards was among that detritus. I opened one flap and the brightness of the cards inside stung me. I carried the box out of the room, the flap still open, the faces of baseball
players staring up at me. Outside, we had been making two piles: a small pile to go to Ohio and a much larger one for the dump. I understood that my box of cards belonged in neither pile. But I wasn't ready to look at the cards, either. Those bright colors. Those faces. Those names. I closed the flap with one hand so that my box of cards was just a box again, but then I held it to my chest for a while, delaying my return to the dark room where my mother was sneezing and crying.

I carried the box with me to Ohio, where I helped my mom get settled. Eventually she stopped breaking into tears every few minutes and I got on a bus headed back east. I waved to my mom from the Greyhound window, the box of cards on my lap, where it stayed through the whole ride. I still hadn't been able to look through them, but I opened the flap a couple times and felt a terrible pull that seemed too much for me to handle.

When I got off the bus in New York, I went to the liquor store and begged the owner, Morty, for my job back. It turned out there was an opening for me as big as a canyon. I would start pulling long shifts six days a week and living in the apartment owned by Morty above the store.

With that position secured, I stomped off to my ex-girlfriend, the one I'd had sex with just before leaving for Vermont, and begged for her to take me back, too. As with the job, I'd been the one to break things off. Neither the job nor the relationship had seemed to be right, then, but after my miserable summer I was convinced that what I needed was the life of a Regular Joe. I needed to behead my ridiculous aspirations. I needed a job. I needed a girl. The options I had recently abandoned seemed to be my only options, so I pursued them with a tenacity that I have seldom displayed before or since. My ex-girlfriend was particularly skeptical of my turnaround, but I kept pleading, promising her that I was a Whole New Guy, until she finally relented.

While I was taking a week or so to set up my new life as a person without any problems, I was staying at the apartment I'd shared with my brother for several years. The day before I left to move to the apartment above the liquor store, I finally got the courage to pull open both flaps of the box I'd found in the storage facility.

My brother was in the room with me when I started rooting around in the box. Since I had collected cards because of him, my cards were really
our
cards. This was our coauthored youth, right here, one card at a time. But somehow the cards that had been the
center of my earliest waking years remained estranged, even as I held them up one by one in my hands.

I didn't understand it then, but I still had more fucking up to do before the gods would finally speak to me again. My return to the liquor store wouldn't work out, nor would the revived relationship with the ex-girlfriend, nor would any of the jobs or relationships to follow for year after year after year. When my job at the liquor store ended, I moved back in with my brother, the untended weeds of our lives continuing to tangle even as the same estrangement infecting my baseball cards seeped into our brotherhood.

Maybe I knew that things wouldn't work out at the liquor store, that since I wasn't bleeding internally the invisible Siamese connection to my brother hadn't truly been severed, that I'd eventually return to a corner of his apartment, a corner of his life. But it seemed at the time that I was finally striking out on my own, finally leaving the past behind. I wanted to find some glowing, definitive, triumphant piece of it as I sat with my brother and pulled baseball cards from the box I'd found in the storage facility. But nothing was happening. Many of the faces seemed unfamiliar. It was all just cardboard.

A certain stunted suspense began to preside. It was a more concentrated version of the definitive mood of our disappointing adult lives to that point. Night after night, week after week, year after year, and now, in miniature, card after card, the question arose.

Eventually I pulled Carmen Fanzone from the pile. I felt something in my chest, like the flicking of a latch. When I showed the card to my brother, we both erupted, laughing until tears started leaking from our eyes. It was the kind of laughter that kept multiplying, finding new detonations in and around the very idea of Carmen Fanzone. The melancholy deadpan. The gag-store mustache. The comedy-sketch name. But it was more than all that, more even than the Rowland Office laughter of brotherly laughing fits. The laughter was that type that hits you just a few times in your life, seismic laughter, sprung from the fault lines of the questions you can't answer.

My brother was the first to be able to speak.

He said, “There was never no goddamn Carmen Fan
zone
!”

Some time after I moved back from the apartment over the liquor store into yet another apartment with my brother, he and I and another friend, Pete, drove upstate for a court date. On an earlier trip, Pete had gotten arrested for being the point man in our absurd drunken scheme to steal a poster from a movie theater lobby. The poster featured an ape wearing glasses and playing chess. Pete was apprehended by blond, tan, gum-chewing teenagers in national movie theater chain golf shirts. They held him until the cops arrived.

On our return trip for the court date we passed Yankee Stadium. This was during the era when the Yankees won the World Series every year. We all felt like there was no place in that city for conquered misfits like us, two Red Sox fans and a Mets fan.

Fuck you, Yankee Stadium
, we said, our middle fingers high.

On the drive home after the court hearing, at which Pete was lectured by an incredulous ninety-year-old judge and charged with criminal mischief, we were tired and silently drifting into our own orbits, bracing for the indignities of the days and weeks to come. No one said anything for a long time. I remember that the song on the radio was that insipid virus of a ditty, “Walking on the Sun,” a clear sign that we had ceased giving a shit. Let whatever comes, come. My brother was at the wheel, driving the used car he'd bought with advance money for a travel book he would never complete. We crossed over the Macombs Dam Bridge, Yankee Stadium behind us.