Cardboard Gods Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  1st PACK - 2 +2+ = 5

  Topps 1975 #533: Rudy Meoli

  1974 Topps #245: Cleon Jones

  1976 Topps #582: Mike Kekich

  Topps 1975 #407: Herb Washington

  Topps 1978 #726: Wilbur Wood

  Topps 1975 #511: Texas Rangers Checklist

  Topps 1975 #634: Cy Acosta

  Topps 1975 #528: Eddie Leon

  1975 Topps #439: Ed Brinkman

  Topps 1976 #628: John D’Acquisto

  Topps 1976 #256: Rowland Office

  Topps 1977 #5: 1976 Victory Leaders

  Topps 1976 #122 Mike Cosgrove

  Topps 1978 #437: Bo McLaughlin

  Topps 1976 #150: Steve Garvey

  2nd PACK - FREE TO BE

  Topps 1976 #500: Reggie Jackson

  Topps 1976 #300: Johnny Bench

  Topps 1977 #634: Big League Brothers

  Topps 1980 #48: Rick Miller

  Topps 1978 #314: Paul Lindblad

  Topps 1977 #418: White Sox Team Card

  Topps 1975 #293: Dick Sharon

  Topps 1980 #445: Mark Fidrych

  Topps 1976 #199: N.L. Victory Leaders

  Topps 1977 #89: Butch Hobson

  1978 Topps #500: George Foster

  Topps 1978 #147: Lee Mazzilli

  Topps 1978 #655: Lyman Bostock

  Topps 1979 #500: Ron Guidry

  Topps 1975 # 299: Bucky Dent

  3rd PACK - HALO

  Topps 1978 #670: Jim Rice

  Topps 1979 #310: Thurman Munson

  Topps 1980 #72: Fred Howard

  Topps 1977 #317: Kurt Bevacqua

  Topps 1980 #573: Kent Tekulve

  Topps 1981 #29: Darryl Dawkins

  1980 Topps #697 David Clyde

  Topps 1980 #169: Luis Gomez

  Topps 1976 #550: Hank Aaron

  Topps 1980 #450: George Brett

  Topps 1980 #580: Nolan Ryan

  Topps 1981 #630: Steve Carlton

  Topps 1975 #274: Vicente Romo

  Topps 1980 #97: Bill Lee

  Topps 1978 #152: Ivan DeJesus

  4th PACK - YAZMOBILE

  Topps 1979 #376: Gorman Thomas

  Topps 1978 #450: Tom Seaver

  Topps 1980 #218: Jose Morales

  Topps 1977 #25: Dwight Evans

  Topps 1977 #521: Bob Grich

  Topps 1978 #473: Bill Buckner

  Topps 1975 #385: Dock Ellis

  Topps 1979 #359: Dan Spillner

  Topps 1978 #36: Eddie Murray

  Topps 1977 #260: J. R. Richard

  1975 Topps #363: Carmen Fanzone

  Topps 1981 #221: Bob Davis

  Topps 1980 #: 482: Rickey Henderson

  Topps 1976 #135: Bake McBride

  1980 Topps #720: Carl Yastrzemski

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  I don’t remember what I wished for before our wishes were the same. It didn’t matter who was blowing out the birthday candles or throwing a coin into a fountain or scattering the seeds of a dandelion. When we were given a wishbone, I wanted to win, and so did my big brother, but for a long time it didn’t matter which way the wishbone broke. I don’t remember what I wished for before baseball.

  At the end of the summer of 1975, when I was seven, we went to our first game. It was only a couple weeks after our recently reshaped family had moved into a damaged house in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere. Mom and her boyfriend, Tom, had their hands full trying to make the place livable, and they didn’t have much money either, but they knew what my brother and I had begun to wish for. So they took a break from ripping up rotted carpeting and tearing down warped wooden siding and painting over swear words and crude pornographic drawings, and we drove three hours in our VW Camper to Boston. The length of the trip seemed almost unbearable to me. I couldn’t wait to finally get a glimpse of my gods.

  When we walked up the concrete tunnel and I saw the field for the first time, the deep green color of the grass hit me like the heartbeat of something benevolent and immense. I followed my family to our seats in a daze. You only sense that pulse a few times your whole life.

  A little while later, after the game had begun, my brother elbowed me in the side.

  “Hey, here’s Yaz,” he said. It was true. Walking to the plate was the real version of the figure from my favorite baseball card. He had big numbers on his card stretching far back in time, to way before I was even alive. He had been an All-Star year after year. He had won the Triple Crown. Everyone everywhere seemed to understand.

  “Come on, Yaz!” my brother yelled.

  “Come on, Yaz!” I yelled.

  Everyone everywhere was yelling for Yaz.

  As the game went on, the desire on the part of the crowd for Yaz to come through grew into something deeper and more desperate. A hunger. Each time he came to the plate the sound of 30,000 people pleading his name got louder. We pleaded along with the crowd again and again, our throats getting hoarse. He kept failing. His last chance came in the eighth inning with a man on second. We tossed the last shreds of our voices into the roar.

  1st PACK

  2 +2+ = 5

  Topps 1975 #533: Rudy Meoli

  For a long time, I knew how to find happiness. All I needed was a quarter.

  I lived in the country, far away from almost everything. Far away from the suburbs where I was born and had spent the first six years of my life. Far away from clear television signals. Far away from my favorite place in the world, where the baseball team I loved played its games. Far away from my father. Far away from all other kids except one.

  Sometimes that kid, my older brother, Ian, would nod when I held up a baseball glove and a ball, and we’d go out into the yard. But sometimes he would be far away, too, lost in a thick book about distant worlds. I’d say his name and say his name, but when he was this far away he’d either say nothing or tell me to leave him alone.

  But I was close enough to one thing. If I had a quarter, I could walk a half-mile to a general store and buy a pack of baseball cards.

  Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from ripping open the pack within seconds of its purchase. But even while doing so, I was aware that it would have been better to wait. So most days I carried the pack home unopened. It was important to discover the new cards at home, as if in some way delaying the discovery until then helped define that faraway house as my home, as someplace special in the world.

  I switched the pack back and forth from my hands to my pocket as I walked, liking how it felt in both places. I liked to feel the waxy surface of the pack and the thin raised rectangle of hard gum inside. I liked to feel the sharp edges of the cards through the pack, too, and to imagine that they’d somehow never once been touched by human hands.

  When I got home I went up to the room I shared with my brother. In the early years I would do this in hopes that Ian would be there, so I could show him the new cards as they came to me. As the years went on he was there less and less, and sometimes even if he was there I’d be able to tell that he was far away, and I’d take the pack to my side of the room without saying his name.

  As I write this, decades later, almost all the things that made that room my room are long gone. The poster of David “Skywalker” Thompson levitating his way to a tomahawk slam. The poster of Ace Frehley, his silver-painted eyes clamped shut, using his guitar as a phallic conduit for the infinite wonder of the cosmos. The magazine cutout of Cheryl Tiegs in a see-through fishnet bathing suit walking straight toward me with a dreamy smile. All the various lint-covered objects made of Nerf. All the piles of hand-scrawled solitaire Strat-O-Matic scorecards. The only thing that remains is the heart of the room, the box containing all the b
aseball cards I ever brought home. The box I’ve carried with me through my life.

  When I brought a new pack home I pulled that box to the center of the floor on my side of the room, then I opened it so that all the cards I already had would be staring up at the ceiling, waiting to see who’d be joining them.

  Then, kneeling, I opened the pack.

  I wonder sometimes if the years have beaten all this out of me. Have I lost all trace of the direct path to happiness? Have I lost belief in the boundless possibilities in that slim moment when I levered my fingernail below the flap of an unopened pack?

  And in the tiny clicking sound of the flap disconnecting.

  And in the first strong whiff of gum.

  And in the first glimpse of some unidentifiable piece of a card, a swatch of grass in a photo on the front, a row of numbers on the back.

  And in the way I would always blur my vision as I pulled the white-dusted shard of pink gum from the pack, so that I couldn’t yet see any names or other identifying information on a card until I placed the gum on my tongue.

  And in the way the gum shattered into many pieces and then, after a moment, re-formed into an improved version of itself. For a few seconds, the lifespan of happiness, the gum was soft and sweet, and sugar coursed through my bloodstream, and I looked for the first time directly at a brand-new card and felt the sunshine coming up from it as if from some better world, some wider moment suddenly so close I could hold it in my hands.

  Behold this card. Behold this world of drama and wonder. Behold the uniformed maestro at the center of everything, his head thrown back in awe, his arms outspread as if to proclaim: Behold. Behold this maestro’s singular mellifluous name, Rudy Meoli, doubled within and without the borders of the moment in flamboyant cursive and sturdy black block. Behold the similar doubling of the timid lowercase word on the maestro’s chest by a thunderous uppercase echo from above—ANGELS—as if somewhere just beyond the fringes of this world exists an invincible solidity, the answer to the question in our hearts. Behold this angel.

  For a long time, I lived in an angelic state of stupidity and grace. I knew how to find happiness. I thought that something magnificent could occur anywhere. For a long time, years, I didn’t understand that I wasn’t witnessing the occurrence of something magnificent in Rudy Meoli’s card from 1975, my first year of collecting. I didn’t understand that all I was looking at was some little-known marginal who’d just squandered one of his rare chances to reveal any previously undiscovered magnificence by hitting a weak foul pop-up, the easiest of outs. Even to this day there’s a faint residue of my inability to interpret the blatantly obvious in this picture. On some level, perhaps the only level of any importance in this life, I still think of Rudolph Bartholomew Meoli, a backup infielder with a .212 lifetime average and more career errors than extra-base hits, as one of the most thrilling performers of his era, a superstar in the reign of happiness and confusion.

  1974 Topps #245: Cleon Jones

  When I try to identify my earliest memory, I see my brother. I’m chasing after him, a toy machine gun in my hands. I wanted to be part of the war game he was playing with his friend Jimmy, but he and Jimmy were too big for me, their legs too long. I couldn’t keep up. Around that time, Ian began serving as my interpreter. I could make sounds, but no one could understand them as words except my brother, who passed along my wishes to the grown-ups. I liked this arrangement. Two boys with one voice.

  When I try to identify my first baseball card, I see my brother, and I see this 1974 Topps Cleon Jones. I hold it and feel something twitching, beating, like wings. I don’t remember the moment it came into my hands, and in that way it’s like the person I most closely associate it with. I imagine I asked for and received the pack of baseball cards that included Cleon Jones because my brother had a pack of baseball cards. But in truth I can’t place Cleon Jones’s arrival in my life, and in a way he never arrived in my life because, like my brother, he was always there.

  I believe the Cleon Jones card came to me while we were all still living together in one house in New Jersey, even though in the middle of that year we left Dad and moved to Vermont, where the card also could have come to me. But I like to believe the card predated the move that in many ways signaled not only the beginning of my years of collecting but the true beginning of my conscious life. There has to be a beginning, a first event in any cosmology, and I have subconsciously and consciously come to believe that Cleon Jones is mine, the central figure of the creation myth in my flimsy personal religion.

  And who’s to say for sure that this wasn’t the first moment of the universe? A loud crack had just occurred, setting everything in motion. In the very next second, Cleon Jones is going to start running as fast as he can, and from the looks of it he is going to run for a while before having to stop. It’s that moment when everything has just begun, and you don’t know how it’ll turn out, and you can’t help assuming that it’ll be great.

  When the gods stopped coming to me, years began rushing by in a blur, faster all the time. The most recent ones crumble upon the slightest inspection, as if manufactured from a cheaper material than they used to be. Months and weeks are even flimsier, days a succession of smudged facsimiles.

  On a recent vacation, I went back to the house I lived in the longest, in East Randolph, Vermont. On my way to the house I stopped at the general store where years before almost all of my baseball cards had come into my hands.

  I pulled the rental car into the parking lot and mumbled a stiff, fakely folksy “Howdy” to three younger guys sitting on the bench on the porch. Cringing over this greeting—people in the town I grew up in didn’t saunter around saying “howdy”—I entered the store. The cash register had been moved to the opposite side of the store from where it once was. There was a pale, gnomish lady in her fifties behind it. I lurched up and down the aisles for a few seconds. On my way out the door the cashier spoke.

  “Help you find something?”

  “Baseball cards?”

  “No.”

  With those words echoing in my head I drove to the house I grew up in, following the same short route I used to walk when bringing a new pack home. During the drive I recalled how I would open the pack in my room and place the gum from the pack in my mouth and crack it to pieces, releasing the first blast of sugar into my system so that the arrival of my newest gods coincided exactly with the sweet, fleeting bliss I’d come to need.

  It doesn’t last long, that sweetness. In its wake: a deeper need.

  Help you find something?

  Baseball cards?

  No.

  For a long time, I sat behind the wheel of a rental car and stared across the road at a house owned by strangers. What brought me here? What do I lack? What could I possibly hope to find?

  1976 Topps #582: Mike Kekich

  In late 1969, hoping to find, at least for a day, a widening of what had become for her an unhappily narrow life, my mother boarded a charter bus from my birthplace, Willingboro, New Jersey, to a peace march in Washington, D.C. I don’t remember that day, but I was there, in my father’s arms, as my mother waved down to us in the parking lot from her seat on the bus. I was probably crying. I imagine that my father, an absent-minded sociologist, was holding me like an absent-minded sociologist might hold an unraveling unabridged dictionary. My brother, a little older, was probably confused. Where’s Mommy going? My father’s last words to my mother that day, so I’m told, were instructions to watch out for rock-throwing thugs hired by the Power Elite to discourage political dissent.

  “That’s my husband,” my mother announced pointedly as the bus pulled away from the two young children clinging to the man in the button-down shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. These were her first words to the stranger sitting next to her. By the time she had boarded the bus it was very full, and she’d gone up and down the aisle twice looking in vain to find an empty seat next to a woman. Finally she had given up and sat down in the only available seat, next to
the young man with the scruffy fledgling beard, hair to his shoulders, and round John Lennon specs.

  The bus ride took a few hours. The young man beside her, Tom, was a good talker. He told her stories of battling forest fires in Alaska, and of tripping on Owsley acid in an Oregon forest of giant ancient redwoods, and of crisscrossing the country on a BMW motorcycle. He had blue eyes. He had delicate hands. He had a flask of brandy under his soft wool poncho.

  By 1973, the number of my parents had grown from two to three. Tom shared a bedroom with Mom while Dad slept on a foam mat in a room down the hall. They all believed it was better to blaze a new trail rather than follow the old corrupt paths that led to lies and napalm and Nixon and sadness. Why not try to add or even multiply love rather than subtract or divide?

  This kind of thing was not exactly common, but in those days it wasn’t unheard of either. For example, that spring two major league baseball pitchers, Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson, traded families. Everything. Wife, kids, pets. The unusual swap, if remembered at all today, is generally treated with mockery.

  But I happen to know, without ever having spoken to either of them, that when they did it they meant it. They were sincere. Maybe the family swap was in large part an extension of the fun they were all having together, but they must have believed they weren’t merely pulling a pleasurable stunt. Beyond the pleasure of the moment, there must have been a hope for some as yet uninvented republic of joy.

  Forget that they both had career-worst seasons, or that in general they never really were the same players again, or that Kekich decided after a few weeks that the experiment wasn’t working out, a decision that came too late—his wife and Fritz Peterson already having decided they wanted to make the swap permanent. Forget all that. For a slim, brilliant moment the world seemed to be clay in their hands, moldable to any shape they desired.