Cardboard Gods (19 page)

Kent Tekulve didn't seem to have anything at all in common with his fellow Pirates, that loud and vibrant collective rolling toward the last and perhaps most emblematic World Championship of the whole hairy, careening decade. The tightly knit Pittsburgh club embraced the infectious disco hit “We Are Family” as their theme song, but in that family Kent Tekulve seemed to be the odd sullen cousin who sat in the far corner at weddings, ominously fiddling below the table with the open blade of his Swiss Army knife as the rest of his extended brood clogged the dance floor laughing. He was a gray crayon in a box of multicolored Crayolas, an undernourished pigeon in the vestibule of a birds of paradise exhibit, a narrow tray of oatmeal on a buffet line otherwise bursting with towering, flamboyant culinary delectations. While Tim Foli and Phil Garner turned double plays with the polished harmony of the barbershop quartet their old-time mustaches suggested they were a part of, and strapping sluggers Dave Parker and Willie Stargell worked together to bash in runs as if swinging John Henry sledgehammers in steel-driving rhythm, and everyone in the dugout laughed and strutted and slapped five like they'd just come offstage from a sweaty, glittering ass-shaking gig with George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars, Kent Tekulve lurked far away in the dank, shadowy bullpen, waiting to be summoned in those rare nervous moments when all the boisterous shouts of joy shrank to troubled murmurs. This is the fantasy of all real loners: that one day the world that has shunned them, and that they have shunned, will come to them desperate for help. And that they will then stride to the very center of the predicament and, despite their thick glasses and bulging Adam's apple and mathematician wrists and ungainly, unmanly submarine delivery, earn widespread grateful weeping adoration for extinguishing the dire threat and saving the day.

My brother no longer cared as much as I did about the likes of Kent Tekulve or Kurt Bevacqua or baseball cards or baseball in general. When he'd first entered puberty he'd found a new sport, one that better suited him in terms of all the changes he was going through, primarily his rapidly elongating limbs but also—in the new favorite game's quicker, more jagged rhythms, its intensity, its violence, its promise of flight—his mercurial moods. I liked shooting baskets with Ian on the hoop Tom had nailed to the garage, but I dreaded the moment when we would go from just fooling around to playing an actual game of one-on-one, Ian bowling me over for layups and blotting out the sky whenever I attempted to score. Nonetheless, the moment I got a chance to follow Ian into organized basketball, I did.

My seventh-grade team played its first game in November 1979. I don't remember the exact date, but it could have been November 4, the day 66 Americans were taken hostage in Iran. It could also have been a few days later, November 13, when Darryl Dawkins shattered a glass backboard with a dunk.

In retrospect, the former date was certainly more significant, punctuating not only a bad year (which had already included Three Mile Island and Skylab) but an entire decade of unprecedented American impotence and defeat. But the Dawkins backboard-shattering dunk made much more of an impact on me, especially since he repeated the feat a couple weeks later. He was a rampaging monster who could not be stopped. My brother seemed to share my awe.

“There aren't going to be any backboards left,” I said. I was hovering near the edge of Ian's side of the room, close enough to see
that the newspaper spread out on his bed was open to a story about Dawkins.

“The guy is nuts,” Ian said. “He says he's from the planet Lovetron.”

It had become a rarity that my brother and I would riff on something together. I was hesitant to say anything more about Dawkins for fear that I would blurt something stupid and childish and slam the door on the conversation before it even began. But I couldn't help myself. Darryl Dawkins was just too much.

“I hear he names all his dunks,” I said.

“I know,” Ian said. He got up and I thought for a second that I had said something boring that everyone knows and that Ian was getting up to leave the room. But he went to a corner of the room near the door and dug out the little orange Nerf ball from under some laundry. He walked back in my direction, passed me, and dunked the ball through the plastic orange hoop near his bed.

“The In Your Face Disgrace,” he said.

The ball rolled to me. I picked it up and did my own dunk.

“The Go-rilla,” I said. Ian grabbed the ball before it hit the floor.

“The Look Out Belooooow,” he called, like he was yelling across a canyon. He used his right hand to slow-motion pile drive me into the cheap seats (I slow-motion fell down onto his bed) and then he slammed the ball through with his left.

I was giggling as I rose from the bed. So was he. We both reached for the ball and clonked heads.

“Gah!” I said, laughing.

“Out the way, fool!” Ian said, then he picked up the ball and bounded all the way to the far side of the room and then bounded back, all in slow motion like it was a highlight. He pretended to dribble, rocking his shoulder hilariously like a Muppet strutting with a cane.

“This one's the Greyhound Bus,” he said, “because I'm going coast to
coast!
” He dunked it on the last word.

I had to sit down I was laughing so hard. I looked at the article and tried to read aloud the name of Dawkins's most famous dunk, the first one to shatter a backboard. For the record, Dawkins dubbed this cultural treasure (which referenced first his own nickname and then the last name of the big stiff guarding him) the Chocolate-Thunder Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump Roasting, Bun Toasting, Wham-Bam-I-Am Jam. But all I could get out was the word “Chocolate” before bursting into hysterics. My
brother was laughing, too, so hard that he also had to crumple down onto his bed. This went on for a while, but eventually Ian ran out of laughs and started looking at the article again as I continued to convulse with giggly aftershocks.

“Whew,” I said. “Heh.”

“Bam,” Ian said, looking at a photo in the article of the magnificent wreckage, glass flying everywhere.

“Shit, I want to dunk it so bad,” he added quietly.

“Chomentowski can dunk, can't he?” I asked. This was the budding star on the varsity team.

“It's because his hands are so big,” Ian said. “His deadfinger is lethal.”

I already knew that the deadfinger was a famed invention of Chomentowski and the other varsity guys, and it was when you turned your ring finger into a whip dangling down from your fist and then whacked someone in the arm or neck or head, but my brother demonstrated on me again anyway.

“Fuck!” I said.

“I can touch the net,” I said, rubbing the deadfinger wound on my shoulder. This was true only because one of the nets in the junior high gym had started to unravel and a strand was hanging down.

“I can touch the rim,” Ian bragged. “I can grab the rim, actually. I tomahawked a volleyball.”

“Wow,” I said. Many years later, I might have been able to tell that he was beginning to cycle up and away from the truth. But then I believed everything he told me, especially if it contained the element of flight.

“It was no big deal,” he said.

“Did a lot of people see?” I said. “You must have been skying. Did you—”

“Fuck, don't wet your pants,” Ian said. He turned the page and started reading another article. “I already told you, it was nothing.”

 

My seventh-grade team lost its first game by a couple points, then lost its second game by a few points, its third game by several, and so on. We would lose every game that year.

Many of the pummelings were punctuated by my glasses getting raked off my face. This would generally happen during struggles for a rebound that bore a resemblance to the battle captured on the lone Darryl Dawkins card in my collection, part of my exceedingly brief
and desultory foray into collecting basketball cards that occurred a couple years after my basketball career began. In the Dawkins card scenario, I was spindly Kevin Grevey, awkwardly reaching for a ball far beyond my grasp while getting gratuitously drilled in the base of my spine by Doug Collins. I would be losing my glasses in the next moment, as one or both of the opposing team's board-dominating behemoths semi-accidentally lowered their elbows into my face.

After a few of these incidents my frames finally broke, and from then on each spectacles-related calamity entailed both of my lenses dislodging from the frames and skittering across the floor. The ref eventually blew his whistle and members of both teams got down on their knees to locate the frame and lenses for me, at which point I'd then go to the bench and wrap more adhesive tape around them while my coach, a much-beloved youth league icon named Mick, rubbed his eye sockets with the heels of his hand in the manner of someone with a migraine.

My team was, as far as I could tell, Mick's first-ever losing team, which made me ashamed. Worse, I started to suspect that I was bad luck, the reason any given team might lose. I'd watched Mick coach my brother's good seventh- and eighth-grade teams, and I'd been on the losing end of several severe baseball diamond beatings by Mick's dynastic little league squad, the Yankees. I had always wished that Mick could have been my little league coach, since it seemed that everything he touched turned to gold.

Mick was revered as a great teacher of sports, especially baseball. His little league team was always getting the jump on everybody else, having preseason training camps inside gymnasiums during those never-ending weeks in Vermont when the calendar says spring but snow and freezing rain keep pounding down. Mick was dedicated, even umpiring all the games his team wasn't playing in, which probably also allowed him to probe for weaknesses among the opposition. Contrary to the clichéd image of the dominant, red-faced, win-at-all-costs little league dictator, Mick was actually quite soft-spoken and mild, though he also was able to carry an air of authority about him. I was far from the only kid who wasn't on his team who wished he was.

But the real key to his success, at least in the commonly held view, which mixed admiration with envy, was that unlike other little league managers who just picked names out of a hat when it came time to draft new nine-year-olds every year, Mick “scouted.” I was
never exactly sure what this scouting entailed, but I envisioned Mick pulling up to playgrounds, his car idling as he looked out from beneath his cool big league flip-down sunglasses in hopes of spotting some natural talent. I'd often wished that I'd been one of his finds.

Yes, much later, long after I'd moved away from that town, Mick was imprisoned for molesting one of his little league players. He had been victimizing children for many years, all the way back to my time. In fact, when I was in seventh grade there was a rumor that a kid on my terrible basketball team, let's call him Wayne, had claimed that while on a camping trip with Mick he'd been woken in the middle of the night by the sensation of the coach's mouth on his dick.

“No way,” I said to this nauseating rumor.

“Wayne's a liar!” said another kid hearing the rumor for the first time.

“Wayne is so full of shit his eyes are brown,” another kid agreed.

The whole thing was just impossible. Mick was the best!

Mick never asked me to come on one of his camping trips, a stroke of good fortune that I attribute to my ineptitude. He was drawn to good athletes. Wayne was a good athlete. And the one time Mick did do something to me that felt odd was late in that winless seventh-grade season, right after I'd stumbled into an impersonation of a good athlete and sunk two shots in a row. Mick subbed for me after my second basket and sat down next to me as play resumed. He was beaming.

“You're doing great, Josh, just
excellent
,” he said, which felt good. I wasn't exactly amassing a giant stockpile of praise elsewhere in my life. As Mick spoke he let his hand fall on my bare leg. He kept it there after he'd finished talking. While watching the action on the court, he gave my thigh two long, ardent squeezes.

Not that I knew the word
ardent
at that time. In fact, I couldn't have put any words at all to that moment. Darryl Dawkins had a name for each and every one of his world-rocking dunks. I didn't have a name for anything. I didn't take any more shots that game, and when I got home the only thing I told anyone was that we lost.