Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker Read Free Book Online Page A

majors, finally spending the majority of a season in the big leagues during the final campaign listed, 1974. Below the line for that year is a statement of praise and hope: “Mike became lefty ace of Astros’ bullpen in 1974 & may be starter in 1975.”
    But just one year later, Mike Cosgrove no longer looks directly at the viewer. He’s no longer young. The bill of his cap is misshapen, as if it has been mangled by bullies or forgotten in the rain. He wears badges of desperation indigenous to his awkward, searching decade: a perm, a dust-thin mustache. Behind him, simultaneously claustrophobic and vast, loom the unmistakable high stands of a major league stadium. He has made it; there is no joy. On the back of his card, all traces of his minor league successes have been expunged, leaving only the thin gruel of a big league mop-up man destined to vanish from the game altogether before next season’s set of baseball cards hits the stores.

    A friend of Mom and Tom’s from New Jersey came to visit, a woman who brought her two daughters along. She’d just gotten a divorce. She and her ex-husband had been among the people who’d put ski masks on and kidnapped Tom on his birthday. Throughout the visit, she cried a lot and played side one of The Band over and over until I wanted to murder whoever was responsible for “Rag, Mama, Rag.”
    â€œIt’s so beautiful up here,” she said to my mom.
    â€œIt’s not like we thought,” Mom said. “It’s really hard.”
    â€œYou’re so lucky,” the woman said.
    â€œI don’t paint anymore,” Mom said.
    The woman slept on the couch with the television on and her daughters slept in our room. They were the same ages as Ian and me but seemed older and wiser. Ian played Truth or Dare with them. I didn’t want to play. It scared me. I pretended to go to sleep.
    â€œHow come he won’t play?” the younger girl said.
    â€œHe’s a baby,” Ian said.
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    The days started getting shorter. I had gone through the whole summer of 1976 and hadn’t gotten a Carl Yastrzemski card. I decided to write him a letter. I told him the Red Sox were my favorite team and he was my favorite player, then I asked him for his autograph.
    I sealed and stamped the letter and took it out to our aluminum mailbox, flipping up the red metal flag to signal the mailman. Later in the day, when I saw that the flag was back down, evidence that the mailman had made his daily visit in the four-wheel-drive Subaru required for rural Vermont postal delivery, gravity loosened its hold just a little. My letter was on its way to Yaz!
    In a certain way my real life began that day, my life in the world. Up to that point I had never wanted anything beyond what was close at hand, beyond my family, my home, my town. I began waiting for something more. The leaves started dying. Everything was going from before to after.
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    Instead of an encouraging personalized line of text below the numbers on the back of Mike Cosgrove’s 1976 card, as there had been the year before, there is this non-sequitur: “At the turn of the century the Chicago Cubs were known as the Colts.” In the photo on the front of the card, it’s tempting to think the scattered figures in the distance are heckling the man in the extreme foreground, that scorn
from strangers could be the cause of the complicated expression on Mike Cosgrove’s face. But they are just as likely to be talking about how the Cubs used to be known as the Colts as they are to be talking about, let alone bothering to mock, Mike Cosgrove. They really have nothing to do with the likes of Mike Cosgrove. The vague repulsion or sour apprehension rippling his pasty features is his alone, the light from the dirty neon of the pawnshop within.

Topps 1978 #437: Bo McLaughlin

    Everybody was going from before to after. Everybody had a look on their face like they’d just caught