Cardboard Gods (5 page)

I've invented a lot of versions of the dialogue that might have occurred during the slim moment when we moved from our VW Camper to the house, that last moment before we began to understand what we had won, but it's just as likely that there was no dialogue, that we all walked together in silence toward the broken door.

Inside, obscene graffiti covered the walls.
Fuck you. Suck my cock. Eat my hot an jusy cunt.
There were pictures scrawled in magic marker or carved by a knife. I learned from the images that men had giant poles protruding from their midsections and women had, in the
same general middle-body area, awful jagged gaping wounds, and sometimes these two things would come together, causing both parties to scream.

One room downstairs had buckling green linoleum and smashed plates and old food all over the floor. Mangy carpeting smothered the floors of the other rooms. Warped wood paneling made up some walls, while other walls had been stripped down to crumbling, gouged-away sheetrock.

There was dust everywhere, so much so that soon enough we'd all be walking around with bandanas around our mouths and noses like we were all about to rob a stagecoach. But on the first day we sniffled and sneezed, not yet figuring out that first remedy in what would become an era of tireless remedies and adjustments and innovations by Mom and Tom—and, in different, more internal ways, by my brother and me.

Upstairs there were two rooms, plus a narrow walkway along the side of the staircase that led back to a dark area that seemed to have no purpose beyond gathering trash from the family before us, including a case of Coca-Cola bottles that had all been filled with urine. After that discovery we entered the room my brother and I would share. The ceiling and walls seemed to be diseased, a pox of tiny holes everywhere, some clustered to form fist-sized lesions, plaster or pasteboard dangling from the edges.

“We'll make it better,” Mom said.

“I thought we won,” I said.

Ian reached and touched the border of one of the larger scars on the wall and a tiny silver ball fell out. There were these BBs all over the floor, mixed in with chunks of the ceiling and walls.

“We won an auction,” Mom said.

“What's an auction?” I said.

“It's not like winning a contest,” Mom said. “It's—”

She started crying a little.

“We'll make it better,” she said.

 

On one of our first days in our new life, while Mom and Tom worked hard to get the house into a livable state, my brother and I explored the farther reaches of what was ours. We poked around the obscenity-laden garage, roamed the trash-strewn, overgrown yard, and, eventually, braved a visit to the tiny lopsided shed at the border of the property.

The shed looked as if it had been hammered together with the same inebriated rage that seemed to have caused all the destruction in the main house. The low roof was slanted, as was the doorway, which was also rife with jutting rusty nails, and the shed's one narrow window looked back on the house like an eye that had been battered to a cockeyed slit in a bar fight. Not much light got in. I wanted to leave, go back outside, but after we'd been in the shed for only a few moments, my brother discovered a loose board in the middle of the creaky floor.

He lifted it up as I came closer. There was a shallow hole in the dirt below the loose board, and as our eyes adjusted to the dim light of the shed we could see that there were objects in there. The treasures of the family before us. My brother started reaching down in.

There were some empty shotgun casings. There was a grimy teddy bear with a gaping hole in its crotch. My brother handed it to me and Styrofoam pellets leaked from its wound, clicking on the floor-boards. Its fur was clammy. One of its black glass eyes was missing.

My brother kept pulling things out. There was a tube that looked like toothpaste but wasn't. There were some more Coke bottles, but these had cigarette butts in them, not piss.

Finally, my brother extracted a magazine that showed people who lived in a place with no clothing. We moved to the shed's one window and looked at it together, my brother flipping the pages. The people sipped drinks naked and laid around on the beach naked and played volleyball and badminton naked. Their limp and sagging privates seemed both sadder and scarier than the monstrous versions I had seen scrawled in magic marker or carved by knife in the main house. The color in all the photos had faded. In many of the pictures the naked people smiled broadly, as if they were very happy, as if they had finally found the paradise they'd been longing for, a place of sheer perfection.

I never, ever wanted to go there.

 

I began to need all the gods I could get that year, the year my budding baseball card collection moved with me into the room that had been mangled with a BB gun. The superstars with their gleaming numbers and unbroken tenures in cities that cheered for them long and loud weren't enough. I needed a teeming battalion of gods. I needed gods with warning-track power, gods with waning speed, gods who drifted from team to team, gods who got released, gods
who got sent down, gods who waited and waited and never got recalled. I needed flawed gods, forgettable gods. I needed nobodies, journeymen, automatic outs. I needed gods who were neither here nor there.

I needed Eddie Leon. I needed a guy posing in a Chicago White Sox uniform while the crooked, cut-off, erroneous card he is posing on identifies him as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals and the back of the card declares he is neither a White Sox nor a Cardinal but a New York Yankee. The back-of-the-card scripture also points out that he “has been among Chisox' leaders in Sacrifices in '73 & '74.”

Among the leaders. On a single team. In bunts. I don't know how you could say any less about someone without saying nothing at all. It suggests that when the White Sox really needed some bench guy of slight build and twitchy middle-infielder reflexes to go up there and lay down a beauty, they looked first to somebody other than Eddie Leon, but if their top-ranked bunter was for some reason otherwise occupied, perhaps because he'd been entrusted with the more important task of going into the clubhouse to fetch an icy drink for one of the RBI guys such as Dick Allen or Beltin' Bill Melton, well, then it was Eddie Leon's time to go up there and intentionally make an out by tapping the ball as softly as possible.

Or, to put it another way, using the capitalization style of the back-of-the-card text, then it was time for Eddie Leon to Sacrifice. To Make Sacred. And if a fallible, forgettable guy like Eddie Leon in the wrong uniform on a defective card is capable of not only
being
sacred but
making
sacred, then who in our own damaged world is beyond the reach of hope?

Not long after our move into the house, my father sent my brother a speedometer to fasten to the handlebars of his banana-seat bicycle. It was a thing of beauty, that speedometer, the serious black face accented by precise white numbers and hash marks and a thin silver needle. My brother rode the bike to the top of the rise in the road by our new house. I stood in the driveway and watched him disappear from sight, over the crest of the hill. Then he reappeared on the other side of the road, standing and pumping on the pedals and glancing up and down from the road to his speedometer. He yelled out intervals of increasing speed as he neared me and reached me and flew on by.

“Ten!”

“Fifteen!”

“
Twenty!
”

 

At that time, the tail end of the summer, sticky-pus weed-bulbs called wild cucumbers were blooming everywhere in the copious weeds of East Randolph. I had never seen these plants in either New Jersey or in Randolph Center, but they seemed to flourish in our new rundown town. The bulbs were prickly skinned sacks containing fluid as white and sticky as glue, and they had some heft to them and just happened to be a size that perfectly fit the palm of a kid. Hence, the kids of East Randolph introduced themselves to my brother and me by whipping wild cucumbers at our heads.

One day not long after the wild cucumbers had begun to fly, my brother and I rode our bikes to the town's general store to buy baseball cards. The ride passed without incident, but when we got to
the cracked concrete drive of the store, a pack of kids emerged and encircled my brother and his banana-seat bicycle. They were understandably drawn to the fancy speedometer, but instead of marveling at it, as I had, they mashed wild cucumbers into its shining black face, breaking the needle and, it turned out, irrevocably fouling the interior mechanisms.

My brother, in a silent rage, tackled the main instigator and pounded on him until the kid, using some weedy East Randolph know-how, ended the barrage by yanking out a hunk of my brother's curly hair. It was the first in a series of fights between my brother and the kids of our new town. It was also the beginning of my lifelong practice of moving around in public as invisibly as possible.

I turned out to have a gift for invisibility, but even when those first solo trips to the store to get baseball cards went by without any trouble, I was unnerved by all the unknown houses, many of them dilapidated, some of them even abandoned, windows as dark as the shed window that stared unblinkingly at our house with its knowledge of violated teddy bears and awful nude valhallas.

The general store added to the feeling of foreboding. A big part of this was because the name of the store was Race's but it was owned by a family whose last name was not Race. It didn't make sense to me, compared to the store in Randolph Center that had been called Floyd's and was owned by jolly Santa-bellied Mr. Floyd. The discordance seemed to be an extension of our experience with our new house, which was really the house of the family before us, who made sure to put their suffering mark everywhere before they moved, apparently against their will, into a glum scattering of trailers a few miles away. Everything in East Randolph was provisional and nothing really belonged to anyone, and even the names of things were in question. It's no wonder that my need for the precision of baseball cards, with their definite names and numbers, increased when we moved to this new town.

The store was more dimly lit than the one in Randolph Center, and it had a cavernous back area where hulking men in hunting jackets would often be sitting, either ignoring me or staring through me as I walked toward the back to get to the open box of packs of baseball cards. A little bit later in the fall, these men would be among those authoring the procession of bloody deer corpses across the front porch of the store, which featured a large scale for weighing game. The owner of the store was the biggest of these men, and after
rising and lumbering in his steel-toed shoes from the shadows and up to the register in the front, he would ring up my sale without speaking or looking at me, breath steaming in and out of his nostrils audibly. I always walked out of Race's gripping my purchase tightly, as if the cards inside the waxy wrappers were already worth far more than what I'd spent on them. As if they were worth a safe place in the world.

Most of the cards from that year, 1975, were off-center, the bordering thicker on one side than the other. In years to come I'd wonder if the process of making the cards that year was not standardized and mechanized at all but instead one that relied on the judgment and dexterity of a nineteen-year-old Coast Guard dropout named Smitty who'd just spent his break smoking a joint out by the Dumpster. But when they first came into my hands, the mistakes riddling the 1975 set made the universe captured by the cards seem to my seven-year-old self to be homely, disheveled, approachable, as if my Mount Olympus was as close at hand as a bake sale advertised by a mimeographed page tacked to an elementary school bulletin board. I needed to feel this closeness that year more than any other.

The off-balance layout was apparent in Ed Brinkman's card, which further lessened the feeling of distance between the viewer and the realm of major league baseball by presenting a figure who seemed to have called in sick to his job as an instructor of remedial math and driver's ed at the vocational high school to sneak onto the grounds of the Detroit Tigers training complex. The distance lessened further still with the discovery that this nearsighted ectomorph turned out not to be an impostor at all but a starting major league shortstop; moreover, he had been a starting major league shortstop for well over a decade. He even had his own crudely personalized bat—“BRINK”—which he presumably used in the just-concluded season to launch 14 home runs, his career high.

The total effect of Ed Brinkman's card, and of many of the cards that year, was to present for me a world that seemed flawed enough to allow even me to be a part of it, but that also was capable of the fluid dream-magic of make-believe. I could stand in the middle of my little BB-riddled room alone and hold Ed Brinkman brand new in my hands, and believe Ed Brinkman wasn't that far away from being pelted with wild cucumbers, and believe he was right beside me, and follow him from our new low valley all the way to the majors.