Cardboard Gods (8 page)

 

One day I left my free-school classroom to go to the bathroom and a couple of tough older girls cornered me in the hall.

“Hey, hippie dipshit,” one said. “What's the capitol of Idaho?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“See? Retards, every one of 'em,” the second one said.

I tried to move past. The first one sidestepped in front of me and leaned closer, squinting. I could smell her spearmint gum.

“Hey, hippie dipshit, what's two plus two?”

 

Everything about Steve Garvey says that two plus two equals four. A part of me loved that kind of symmetry, loved that there was a definite answer to a question. This was the part of me that was most drawn to baseball. There were rules and numbers upon numbers, all of them adding up to a definite sum, the score of a game, or home runs in a career, or wins and losses. Though it would surprise the people who later tried to teach me geometry and trigonometry in my teenage years, one of the subjects I moved toward of my own volition in my hippie free school was math. I wanted to add two and two and get four, and then multiply those same numbers, and other numbers, and even divide them to get more complicated but no less definite answers to problems. I even wanted to do things that combined more than one operation, as on the happy day when I learned how to tabulate batting averages.

But there was more to life than two plus two equals four. I understood this from living in a house that featured plenty of things that didn't quite add up. For example, around the time I learned how to tabulate batting averages, a tree appeared in the middle of our living room.

The tree was actually a large branch with smaller branches that during a violent storm had fallen off a big tree out by the shed in the backyard. By that time, maybe a year after our move into the foreclosed property, Mom and Tom had fixed up the vandalized house by working with a resolve and passion that I have yet to be able to muster in my own adult life. They wanted the house to be more than simply livable, more than just two plus two equals four. They wanted it to be unique, singular, even a little irrational, a suitable echo of their iconoclastic back-to-the-land dream. Toward this end,
they dragged the fallen branch inside and installed it in the middle of our living room so that it seemed very much as if a tree were growing up from the basement and through the ceiling. They hooked one end of a hammock to the tree and fastened the other end to the wall by the wood stove. You could lie in the hammock and look up at the tree and imagine that the line between inside and outside was blurred, that the forest off in the distance had through some impossible leap of illogic entered our home.

I was embarrassed by the indoor tree if anyone from outside my family saw it. But if no one was around I liked it. I loved it. I lay in the hammock and gazed up at as I swayed. And in the first spring that the tree lived in our living room, and for a spring or two after that, real leaves somehow bloomed from the branches.

 

What are you supposed to do when big and tough older girls corner you with a question like that? You're kind of damned if you do and damned if you don't. Especially if you've seen leaves bloom from a tree attached to nothing in the middle of a house.

“Four,” I answered, feeling like a liar.

“Lucky guess, shit for brains.”

 

I didn't like being an oddball outside of class, but I liked the class itself. In the big classroom that had desks and beanbag chairs scattered around randomly, we staged plays and made animated movies and built light sabers out of flashlights and colored plastic. One fall we all got a “ticket to the symphony” in the morning and in the afternoon we were led outside, to an empty meadow, where our teacher responded to our puzzlement by smiling and telling us to “just
listen
.”

The following spring, we were told one morning that we were going to be taking
a trip back in time
, and that afternoon we walked down the halls past all the classes that had kids sitting at desks in straight rows. The kids in those classes all looked out at us as we paraded by. We moved out of their sight and into the day. The sun was shining, one of those moments after a long winter when your body seems to open like the petals of a flower. We took the short walk I took every day, a few hundred yards down Route 14 to our house.

When we got to our driveway, smoke was coming out of the chimney of Tom's blacksmith van. Tom stood by the van's sliding door, stoking the forge inside. We all came close, drawn to the blazing
warmth and the white-hot coals. I hadn't seen him at his forge in a while. He had gotten a part-time job taking care of rats at a university lab. High weeds had grown all around the van. Tom's beard had begun its gradual retreat toward nonexistence. He was wearing his yellow Superman T-shirt, which had begun to fade.

“I thought we were going back in time,” a kid said.

“Long ago, a blacksmith was important,” the teacher explained.

 

Steve Garvey was the pinnacle of a certain centrally important facet of what my baseball cards meant to me, that sense of well-groomed normalcy and heroism and answers in a world that seemed most of the time to harbor none of those things. You would think for that reason I would have loved him, but to me he was like the superhero referenced on Tom's faded yellow T-shirt. I loved the flawed super-heroes of the Marvel universe but always disliked that clean-cut and unquestionably moral DC product, Superman. Maybe it was because nothing could ever hurt him, besides that bullshit plot gimmick, Kryptonite.

 

Tom pulled an iron rod from his van and started trying to bend it. His hands shook but the rod stayed straight across the cracking iron-on Superman
S
on his chest.

“Whew! I can't do it!” Tom announced. He acted in plays and had a deeper booming voice that he used sometimes. “Anybody else want to give it a try?”

We all knew it was impossible, like making two plus two equal five. But we all tried, the rod passing from kid to kid. The last kid to try handed the rod back to Tom, who looked a little tired. He caught my eye and flashed a quick smile, then looked down at the iron rod in his hands. He sighed.

“Oh well,” he said. “Guess it can't be done.”

 

I needed heroes. I needed gods. But Steve Garvey and Superman took it too far. In the world they ruled, two plus two could never equal five, except by mistake, and mistakes had no place in the world they ruled.

 

By the end of the field trip Tom had made sure that we all got a chance to make two plus two equal five. We all took a turn heating an iron rod in the forge until the rod turned white, and with Tom's help we
pounded the rod on an anvil until it flattened and bent in the grasp of tongs as easily as clay, and we all used the tongs to plunge the transformed metal, which had gone from white to deep red, into an aluminum pail of water, producing a loud sizzling hiss that never ceased to amaze, and then we all got to pull the tongs out to reveal that we had not only bent an iron rod but had made it into something completely different altogether, something that made us all feel miraculous and lucky. We walked back to school gripping horseshoes.

Behold the All-Star. As shadows give way to sun, he pauses, reveling for a moment in his own magnificence, readying to move onto that bright stage he was born to command.

The year before I got this 1976 card, I'd caught a glimpse of the last of the A's dynasty at my first baseball game, when Ian and I had spent our voices cheering for Yaz. Our seats were in right field, close enough for the star player of the visiting team to hear us if we called his name. I don't remember if I ever did, but I do recall marveling at how he was known by everyone around me by just one name, his first name, as if the fans yelling it, or muttering it like a curse, were as intimately acquainted with him as I was with my brother.

A sense of excitement and apprehension surrounded Reggie throughout the game. Where Yaz kept failing to answer the crowd's call for greatness, Reggie kept disappointing the crowd's uneasy murmuring hope that he could be contained. Finally, late, the sky darkening and the huge, blinding banks of artificial lights flooding the field in something brighter than day, Reggie capped his methodical destruction of the home team by lashing a double to plate the go-ahead run. As he stood with one foot on second base, his hands on his hips, the crowd wove their voices together in a ragged chorus of caustic, resentful awe. Just before the bottom of the ninth the sound rose up again from everyone around me, directed at the powerful gold-clad man walking toward us, to his position, the customarily unfocused haze of unhappiness for once alighting on something specific, the strutting spectacular conquering god.

Though in the latter years of my childhood I would come to loathe Reggie Jackson as much as anyone in the crowd around me that first day at the ballpark, I now believe Reggie Jackson is worthy of my gratitude for being the loud and proud center of the baseball era I've clung to my whole life. He may even have been the best player. I would have guessed that Joe Morgan or perhaps Fred Lynn or Jim Rice outperformed Reggie during my baseball-card-collecting years of 1975 through 1980, but on closer look Morgan had a couple of subpar, injury-hampered years, as did Lynn, and both Boston sluggers benefitted significantly from playing in arguably the best hitter's park of the time; meanwhile, Reggie just kept mashing, year in and year out, wherever he earned his bulging paycheck. And on top of all that, Reggie was Mr. October, the successor to Bob Gibson as baseball's best postseason performer.

But Reggie's central position in this world, my world, was not based solely, or even predominantly, on performance. Though baseball has never been a hermetically sealed universe unto itself, it seems to have embodied the times during the 1970s with an abandon never seen before or since, seething and sparkling and belching and flailing with all the careening spasms of the epoch. And no baseball player epitomized the times more than Reggie: Reggie the iconoclast who shattered baseball's implicit ban on facial hair; Reggie the bombastic celebrity most aptly described by the
Sports Illustrated
cover caption that read “Superduperstar!”; Reggie the embodiment of the new baseball term “free agency,” with all its tangled connotations of hard-won rights and individuality and base self-interest and greed; Reggie the self-proclaimed straw that stirred the drink; Reggie the biggest and loudest and most petulant and sensitive and compelling beast in the whole late 1970s Yankees dynasty known as the Bronx Zoo; Reggie the candy bar that told you how good it was when you unwrapped it; Reggie the walking 60-point tabloid headline; Reggie the one-man neverending tickertape parade. Even my father, who never cared about baseball, knew who Reggie was, and throughout his life he has mentioned the time—and not without some awe—when he stopped on his way to work in downtown Manhattan to join a crowd and watch Reggie, larger than life, pass by on a slow-moving convertible as the confetti rained down and everyone chanted his name.

But even in this card, as in all cards: transience. The faces in the crowd—faces that will watch the every move of the lordly All-Star
in the foreground—have been blurred to something like Monet's lily pads, those hypnotic omens of the inevitable dusk into which we'll all dissolve. All names, even those of the greatest among us, will eventually unravel to silence. And by the time the card thrummed in my palm in 1976, the regal joy of the card's blazing gold uniform was a lie: The one and only Superduperstar had moved on, traded to Baltimore in a move prompted by Reggie's impending free agency. The magnificent early-1970s A's, the most successful baseball dynasty to never wear pinstripes, became an empty golden shell for the remainder of my childhood, gutted by the complicated, equivocal freedom of the day.