Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker Read Free Book Online Page B

a whiff of a nearby landfill. Everybody was ambivalent about the length of their hair. Everybody was aging in regrettable ways. Everybody dabbled in jogging and chanting and cocaine. Everybody went back and forth from having a regular job to laying on rusty lawn furniture all afternoon unemployed. Everybody bought their children faulty mood rings and overly cheerful sex education handbooks. Everybody began wondering how to file for divorce. Everybody was a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. Everybody wore rainbow colors and succumbed to depression. Everybody was kung fu fighting. Everybody was Bo McLaughlin.

Topps 1976 #150: Steve Garvey

    Everybody except Steve Garvey.
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    In 1975, Sports Illustrated featured a picture of Steve Garvey on the cover. In just a couple weeks, Saigon would fall, closing the book on America’s disastrous military involvement in Vietnam and seeming to clinch the 1970s as a decade immune to American heroics. The year before, as the American president was being forced from office for criminally subverting democracy, the handsome, clean-cut, future Sports Illustrated cover subject became the first baseball player voted on to the All-Star Team as a write-in candidate. Democracy was dead? Long live democracy!
    â€œSteve Garvey: Proud to be a hero,” the cover caption read.
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    By the time I got this 1976 Steve Garvey card, my identity outside of baseball was as an outsider and a weirdo in my own town. The class I went to was not like other classes. My family was not like other families. There was a man in our house, Tom, who was not my father, and not only that but he had long hair and a beard and he drove around in a van with a metal chimney sticking out of the roof.
    In what seems in retrospect an unbelievably dangerous move, given that the innovation introduced a blazingly hot open fire inside the rusty frame of a moving motor vehicle, Tom had rigged the van with a portable forge so that he could travel from farm to farm throughout central Vermont offering his services as a blacksmith. He soon discovered that the demand for this was next to nothing, especially since the service was being offered to wary lifelong Vermonters by a longhaired flatlander in jeans and a yellow Superman T-shirt. The few willing farmers who did have a horse or two lazing
around on their dairy farms so neglected hoof care that when Tom occasionally got a job to shoe a horse, which involved clipping the animal’s overgrown, infected hooves, the horse repaid the effort by kicking him in the ribs. For some time after Tom’s plan to be a blacksmith had revealed itself as a hopeless case, he was still advertising the unusual nature of our family by driving all over the place with a chimney sticking out of his van.
    â€œWhy is there a chimney in your dad’s van?” I was asked more than once by other kids. It wasn’t really a question.
    â€œHe’s not my dad,” I’d say.
    That denial also existed inside the walls of our house in a more intimate, more pointed way. There wasn’t much discipline in my family, per my mom’s “let them grow wild and free” child-rearing philosophy, and this made things even more difficult than they already would have been for the adult male interloper. Sometimes Tom tried to guide the behavior of my brother and me by speaking to us rationally. As soon as he started, however, we began drowning him out with a chant meant to convey profound boredom.
    â€œLecture, lecture, lecture,” we droned.
    Had I been put in the same situation in my mid- to late-twenties as a stepfather figure who wasn’t even an official stepfather (instead forever just a boyfriend , both of the syllables of the word implying superficiality), I probably would have bashed the two miscreants’ heads together, then hopped the nearest jet going far, far away. But except for one time when I was particularly sarcastic and Tom grabbed my arm and gave