I.
Somewhere in this giant expanding dumpheap of memories and obfuscations I’ve talked about the first concert I ever went to. I went back to that story in my book, in a chapter on, among other things, the 1980 card of White Sox pitcher Fred Howard and Disco Demolition night and my brother and my father and regret and disconnection and stupidity. I used to think my life was one story, some form locked within stone, and once I chipped away at the stone long enough and skillfully enough I’d have it, the truth, but now I understand that I’ll never be done telling what happened, and what happened will change each time I tell it, and each time I tell it new absences will form, and the absences will call me back for yet another return, and so, for example, I’ll always be 11 years old tagging along with my big brother with our father, his ears wadded with cotton, as chaperone to Madison Square Garden to see Ted Nugent only to find out afterward that we never saw Ted Nugent at all but only saw the warm-up band before our father led a ferocious charge toward the exits, all of us under the impression that the concert was over despite the lack of any other fellow attendees leaving. My brother was the first to put the story of that night in writing, for a ninth-grade English essay, and he was the first to alter it in the telling, still too ashamed at that point about missing Ted Nugent to admit our fuckup in the essay; the teacher praised the level of detail in the first part of the essay, which described the warm-up act, and critiqued the strange vagueness of the essay’s concluding sections. “More details needed,” she wrote in the margins next to my brothers fraudulent Nugent bloviations. In a different age, time would have made every part of the story vague. Everything becomes vague anyway, but I think my generation, perhaps the most backward-looking generation yet to walk the earth, is the first blessed with ample concrete evidence and artifacts of what, in earlier times, would have been the utterly transient particulars of fleeting youthful experiences. Whenever the story starts to feel vague, more details can be found instantly, in video and audio and print form. The borders of my mind have deteriorated and merged with Google. I am constantly searching.

II.
I can locate the exact date of my first concert. According to multiple sources, it was August 4, 1979, at Madison Square Garden. I have not been able to find the exact setlist of my first concert, but the band I saw appears to have played the same setlist throughout their summer tour, and so it is reasonable to assume that the setlist below corresponds to the sonic assault that terrified me and made me feel awful and regretful about my father’s suffering presence beside us. It was his worst nightmare come to life. The sheer piercing force of the sound—I couldn’t even understand it as music, and in some ways it was an experience so forceful as to be beyond memory, like the whiteout moment I experienced some years later after careening off the side of a cliff while mountain-biking. But I do remember a few things about the sound: 1) it’s loudness; 2) the older teenage and early 20s burnouts all around us nodding to one another approvingly about what they saw as the undeniable high quality of the warmup band (I could not hear what they were hearing but I distinctly remember witnessing this approval); 3) the presence of the repeatedly screamed lyric “Sin City.” This last detail was what allowed my brother and me to confirm the following day at Crazy Eddies on Sixth Avenue that we had officially not seen Ted Nugent but had seen the band who had a song called “Sin City” on one of their albums. All three of these memories may have become suspect, as all my memories are, but I am able to find corroboration for all three with my deteriorated searching co-opted mind. Taking the memories one at a time: Yes, they were fucking loud. This is corroborated in an explanation from the Ten Most site for the ranking of AC/DC as the second loudest band of all time:

No question regarding it these guys are systematically the loudest indoor arena rock band from the Bon Scott years all the way through the Brian Johnson era Angus and Malcolm Young are the loudest guitar combo running through their marshall stacks both sides of the stage running them clean & overdriven getting that pure marshall sound – you can’t top that.

And yes, they fucking rocked surprisingly hard as a warm-up act. The Ten Most appreciation of AC/DC continues:

I saw AC/DC with Bon Scott open for Ted Nugent at Madison Square Garden in 1979 and they altogether stole Ted’s thunder (altho Ted was very loud too)

And yes, in all likelihood they played “Sin City” when I saw them on August 4, 1979. Yes, I can even go back and watch a performance of every single one of the songs they performed that night, not from that night, exactly, but from that era.

Live Wire
Problem Child
Sin City
Bad Boy Boogie
The Jack
Rocker
Dog Eat Dog

One other thing I recall from that night is that the guitarist got up onto the shoulders of the singer. This memory was cast into some doubt when someone else who’d seen them back then recalled that when he saw them a roadie was the one giving Angus a piggy-back ride. But the photo at the top of this page, taken from the 1979 tour, suggests that what I thought I saw actually did occur. Bon Scott was not averse to carrying some weight in the name of rock & roll.

III.
I can’t say I hated AC/DC the night of August 4, 1979, but it was something like that. I was not ready for it, and it hit me like violence. Our little trio of me and my brother and my father, it was fragile. We only saw our dad every so often and only saw him for an extended period once a year, a two-week visit every summer. We were in the middle of one of those visits, the first such visit where one of us, my brother, had edged over the border from childhood into something stranger and estranging. I liked the feeling, fragile as it was, of the three of us all being in something together, but that concert, that violent assault of sound in a huge arena of lidded-eye cool guys, disallowed any closeness between us. None of us understood what was happening, and none of us were happy, and nobody could say anything to anyone and nobody could be heard.

I don’t know why I soon gravitated to AC/DC. Within a year or two I had almost every record they’d produced. I’d been moving toward them anyway in my own musical tastes. I already owned several KISS records and was gradually commandeering my brother’s soon-to-fade interest in “hard rock” as my own, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, etc. He never did become an AC/DC fan, branching off instead into bands more clearly marketed as punk and New Wave, so AC/DC became “my” band. I liked everything about them. I liked the simplicity, the loudness, the hooks. I blasted the songs in loneliness and confusion and they blasted loneliness and confusion, blew it away. I liked that the center of the band was an older brother and a younger brother. I still like that. It’s my favorite part of a band I still love. Two brothers putting down a twin riff so tight and together it is like an artery rushing beats of rich blood from one heart.

IV.
A few days ago I finished a great book by Joe Bonomo on Highway to Hell, the AC/DC album that debuted in America five days before I saw my first concert. I put down the book, put on some headphones, and turned up some AC/DC so loud that for a few moments I couldn’t hear anything else. Bonomo tells the whole story of Highway to Hell, unearthing details of its creation, illuminating its magic, and revealing the absences and needs of both adolescence and adulthood that might keep bringing a deteriorating, searching mind back to that loud sound again and again. You should check it out. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s something eternal about adolescence, about its promises and deceits; and about the adolescence, blinking into light so bright that the horizon is obliterated. A teenager is pulled in many directions at once: between sensation and substance; between impulse and responsibility; between innocence and guilt; between shallowness and depth. Highway to Hell and the panting scenarios therein are sensational, impulsive, and shallow, and no less human because of it. When I listen to the songs now, my brain can go into sleep mode, and my body can listen and move, and that’s a great pleasure—one of the great pleasures that rock & roll gives us—and it’s a different thing altogether from pining for lost youth or regretting moves not made, girls not chased, drinks not downed. That Bon Scott was thirty-two when he wrote the lyrics suggests that he was an eternal adolescent, but the longer I live with the songs, the more I felt that he was blessed by this state more often than he was burdened by it. He allowed himself access to a youthful pulse that beat into a future lifting with fun, not collapsing under regret.

Between the two of them, Maury Wills and Bill Russell handled the great majority of the shortstop duties for the Los Angeles Dodgers franchise over the first two and a half decades of its existence. Wills arrived in 1959, the team’s second year in Los Angeles, and captained the infield until being traded away before the 1967 season; he returned to the Dodgers in 1969 and remained the starter until 1972, when Bill Russell took over the job for the next twelve years.

Before the 1971 season, the player pictured here arrived in Dodgers camp with the conviction that he would shoulder aside fellow up and comer Russell while wrestling the starting job away from the aging Wills. He mentions both players by name in a February 23, 1971, article titled “Valentine Confident”:

I realize you don’t just step in and move out a star like Maury Wills, but I suspect one of us will be moving to another position. I’m aware that the Dodgers want to make a shortstop out of Bill Russell and move me to third base. Well, no way. I intend to be the Dodgers shortstop for many years.

He can’t be faulted for being confident. He’d been a legendary multisport high school athlete and had just come off a spectacular season at the Dodgers Triple A affiliate where he’d batted .340 with 39 doubles, 16 triples, 14 home runs, and 29 stolen bases. He had also bounced back from two horrific injuries, first from a beaning that came within a quarter inch of killing him and next from an injury to his leg that had doctors seriously wondering whether he’d ever play again. These things didn’t stop him. What chance did Maury Wills or Bill Russell have?

This card from the dusky latter stages of the 1970s makes plain that Valentine’s day never arrived. He’s not wearing Dodgers blue, for one thing, and the “OF” position indicator inside the little baseball icon dangling like a washed-out Christmas ornament from his bat shows that he ended up getting moved as far from shortstop as is humanly possible in baseball without moving a player entirely off the diamond. That latter move is not far away, either, at least going on the diminishing playing time suggested by the meager stream of numbers on the back of the card. The numbers are framed above by personal info, including that Valentine was drafted #1 by the Dodgers, and below by some space-filling prose that has nothing to do with Valentine’s on-field accomplishments: “Bobby’s father-in-law is Ralph Branca, former big league pitcher, 1944–1956.” You might think this gap between great expectations and (at least in terms of his own bold estimations at the start of the career now about end) trivial accomplishment would gnaw at a guy from inside. Valentine does look a little worn on the front of the card, but despite his somewhat forlorn and abandoned surroundings he doesn’t look beaten. By now he knows the drill, so the photographer probably didn’t even have to tell him to pretend he’s waiting for a pitch. He takes his stance and glares out at nothing as if it’s not nothing.

How Strange the Design

Conclusion

There used to be a big bookstore on 57^th Street and Broadway, Coliseum Books. It lasted from 1974 until 2002 in that location. Sometime in late 1999 or early 2000, a young woman applied for a job there. She was working toward a criminology degree at John Jay College nearby and needed a job. She applied at a bunch of places around the area. Pounding the pavement. Around that time another young woman stopped in the store to pick up an application for her boyfriend. I was still living a few hundred miles away, in a cabin in the woods with no electricity and no running water. I had essentially run out of money and was running up a credit card bill to buy food and cheap beer, which I would lug up the hill in a backpack. I would then eat and drink and play my guitar and sing and, I don’t know, yearn.

Coliseum Books didn’t call the young woman back for a few months. When they finally did, she barely remembered applying there. She went in and talked to a manager, who asked her what she hoped to do after finishing college, and she said she wanted to work in a prison. The manager laughed. She was hired as a cashier. I left the cabin around then and returned to New York City. I started rooming with my friend Pete, who had also gotten a job at Coliseum, thanks to his girlfriend picking up an application for him. I needed money badly, and Pete put in the good word for me. I talked with the manager, the one who had laughed about the young woman’s desire to go to prison, and he hired me. It was a huge store, and there were a lot of employees there. I worked the closing shift, and so I’d only catch occasional glimpses of the people who worked during the day. One day I was starting my shift with a stint at the information counter, and I noticed across the room a little pink exclamation point, a dyed strand in the hair of a young woman working one of the registers.

***

“It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be.” – Bob Dylan

I am grateful and terrified. I have a kid now. My love for him is beyond my ability to describe. So I will instead describe this 1980 Craig Reynolds card. Is it not an example of something endangered? I stopped collecting cards in 1980 and bought a few in 1981 but was flummoxed by puberty and by my brother’s disinterest in cards and by the 1981 strike and by the rapid dissolution of the Red Sox would-be dynasty of the 1970s and by the proliferation of baseball card companies other than Topps. This last thing hit me as a bit of confusing expansion of what was necessary to have in life. For years I understood that the completion of the collection of one single set of cards (a goal never attained, but that’s besides the point) was something I was aiming for. With two other card companies, there were now other sets to complete, and a decision to be made on which was the most important set, a decision that would be unsatisfactory because there would always be the nagging suspicion that another set had cards that existed and had possibilities in them that were being ignored. Life splits into many different roads, is what I began noticing in 1981, and the upshot of that realization is that no matter which way you go you will lose. I don’t mean that you are bound to fail at whatever you try (though I guess odds are you will, more often than not) but rather that choosing one thing instead of another will leave the other thing unexplored, a loss, and uncertainty will then be your fucking shadow evermore. Welcome to age 13 and the rest of life.

But that’s not what I’m talking about when I mean endangered. I’m talking about the pose. I meant to get to saying that soon I would not be collecting cards, but every once in while I’d have a look at a pack and each pack as the 1980s wore on featured an increasing number of action shots. Now all cards are action photos. The still life with bat featured here:  gone. It frightens me, this knowledge that everything that is will go. I turn to religion sometimes, but it’s a religion of strange design: I hold onto cards. It’s a Sunday and I’m going to spend it playing with and holding my son. He’s asleep right now and so I’m holding onto this card. It feels good in my hands. Solid. Makes me grateful. Let us pray.

***

After a few years with the Pirates organization, Craig Reynolds seems to have been buried deep enough on the organizational depth chart behind starting shortstop Frank Taveras and backup Mario Mendoza that the Pirates dumped him in a post-expansion draft trade with the Mariners. Reynolds started at short for the putrid Mariners for two years (and 202 total losses), but then the Mariners acquired Mario Mendoza and sent Reynolds packing to the Astros, who had been looking for someone to fill the void left by longtime starter Roger Metzger. Reynolds, finally free of Mario Mendoza, held down the starting spot in Houston from 1979 through 1981. Then Dickie Thon took over.

I remember thinking Craig Reynolds was unusual and even kind of cool for being a shortstop who batted only left-handed. I think he was the only lefty-swinging starting shortstop (not counting switch-hitters) during my childhood. They really don’t come along that often. One of the better ones was Joe Sewell, whose major league career began when the Cleveland Indians needed to immediately find a shortstop to replace Ray Chapman, who had been killed by a pitch from Carl Mays.

Craig Reynolds reclaimed the starting shortstop job he’d lost to Dickie Thon when Thon was badly injured by a pitch from Mike Torrez. Thon, a deeply religious man, seems to have leaned on and gained strength from his faith during the long process of coming back from the injury that impaired his vision. Eventually, he got to the point where he was at least somewhat effective, primarily against left-handed pitchers, and the right-handed-batting Thon and the left-handed-batting Reynolds began sharing the position. Shortstop is surely the most unusual position on the field to utilize a lefty-righty platoon, so in a way the presence of Reynolds facilitated the gradual reincorporation of Thon back into baseball. Like Thon, Reynolds was (and is) very religious. He’s a pastor in Houston’s Second Baptist Church, which according to Forbes is the second largest “megachurch” in America. He is certain about his path in life.

“I know for sure that I’ll spend eternity in heaven when I die,” he says.

***

My wife and I were talking about Coliseum Books the other day while sitting at our dining room table. Our baby was asleep in the other room. Our boy. I have never known love like this. What if she hadn’t gone in and asked for an application that day she was wandering around looking for work? What if any of the other places where she applied called her first? What if Pete’s girlfriend hadn’t gotten Pete an application? What if I hadn’t been broke and jobless? What if I had succeeded at anything in my life to that point?

***

Because I don’t know how any of this—beanballs and faith and uncertainty and gratitude and yearning and cardboard and losing and love—can possibly be tied together into a nice bow, here’s Joe Sewell, from A Donald Honig Reader:

Looking back on the years I see how fortunate I was. And sometimes I can’t help thinking how strange the design was. We think we run our own lives according to our own plans. But we don’t. Not always anyway. I’ve often wondered what my life would have been like if a ball hadn’t gotten away from Carl Mays at Yankee Stadium in August 1920 and hit Ray Chapman in the head. Because the moment that ball left Carl Mays’ hand, my life began to change.

How Strange the Design

Five

I am looking for a pitch to hit. I get an at-bat every day, in the early morning before work, while the baby is still asleep. I sit at my desk. I take my stance, so to speak. I wait. Most of the time, I can’t even see the pitch. It has come and gone and my at-bat is over. Other times, I swing wildly. I want to connect. I want to, well, I’ll just say it, I wish I could make a living writing. I hope someday it will happen, but I’m not a fucking rookie anymore, so the notion of “someday,” which I’ve been addicted to for many years, should probably be avoided. Fuck someday. This present life, its contours and limitations, this is what exists. I’m not bitching. I mean I’m not ungrateful for the life I’ve got, the love, my family, my health, some employment, sporadic doses of good old television and booze to ease the pain. But the writing, well, this is probably it: one at-bat a day if I’m lucky, or maybe not even an at-bat, and not in a professional game either but for free, for nothing but the chance to connect. I am doing this for free. I am doing this for freedom. Like Bukoswki said in “Death Is Smoking My Cigars”:

I wanted the word down
and they wanted me at a punch press,
a factory assembly line
they wanted me to be a stock boy in a
department store.

well, death says, as he walks by,
I’m going to get you anyhow
no matter what you’ve been:
writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher,
sky-diver, I’m going to get
you . . .

o.k. baby, I tell him.

we drink together now
as one a.m. slides to 2
a.m. and
only he knows the
moment, but I worked a con
on him: I got my
5 god-damned minutes
and much
more.

When the at-bat ends, I haul my bike out onto the street and ride it to a bus that takes me to work. I try to ride my bike carefully. I say a little prayer for safety before getting on. Still, there is a heightened awareness when riding a bike in a city, buses and trucks and texting-while-driving minivans careening all around you, that in life you are on one path and whatever it is that will end you is on another path, and one day these two paths will intersect. I am hoping to be very old when this intersection occurs, lying on a bed tired of life and satisfied and with my family still healthy all around me. I don’t want to say goodbye to anyone. I don’t want this to end.

Have I mentioned baseball yet in this post, besides the hackneyed “at-bat” conceit? Okay then, here: Ray Chapman had the habit of diving into pitches, I guess. Or maybe I’m confusing him with some other batter who famously caught one in the head. Chapman was a very good young shortstop, and one day his path intersected with the path of Carl Mays, or more specifically his head intersected with one of Mays’ pitches. Mays had a history of pitching inside. Also, it was getting dark. Chapman apparently never saw the pitch. You’ll never see it coming. It’ll just end. That’s how this game is designed.

But back to at-bats: I waste a lot of them. I get up and dick around here and there, looking on the internet, browsing decades-old newspapers in the Google archives for news about Sweathogs and bench-clearing brawls and Kurt Bevacqua. Lately I’ve been poring over a book I basically stole from my brother, A Donald Honig Reader. Whenever my life is overwhelming me I read it and read it. It is falling apart from this persisting need. It belongs to my brother, this book, but we lived together for a long time and our stuff intersected and so it seemed not implausible to me to think that the book could get mixed up in my stuff when we went off on our own paths, finally, but in truth I think I was entirely conscious of taking the book and only thought about the plausibility of a mix-up to soothe my conscience. I am not even a very good person, really. For example, yesterday I got home from work and was trying to rock my son to sleep in my arms and he was getting there, finally, when one of our cats came in the room and tried to get my attention by meowing and my kid’s eyes snapped open and I shoved the cat off a bureau and sort of kicked him a little to get him to sprint out of the room. I didn’t hurt him but I scared him, and I was angry at him. I love him, this cat, and I felt like a piece of shit for acting this way, a piece of shit, a piece of shit, but I was frustrated that it was taking so long to rock my son to sleep, and I was tired from working all day, and my legs were beat from biking to and from the bus with the heightened awareness that someday a Carl Mays beanball will end me, so to speak, and my brain was mushed from the long bus ride, and life was just catching up to me, my hopes and dreams and blah bah fucking blah. Fuck. Anyway, I stole this Honig book from my brother and sometimes don’t write in the mornings but read it obsessively, repeatedly. It is a massive book containing many first-person oral histories of old ballplayers. It is a beautiful thing, in quality equal to Lawrence Ritter’s more well-known and (deservedly) revered book The Glory of Their Times and in sheer quantity dwarfing Ritter’s work. Anyway, not too long ago I was reading the story of the guy who replaced Ray Chapman after Chapman died from the beaning, Joe Sewell. Some words near the end of Joe Sewell’s story hit a chord, and since then I’ve been trying to write toward those words with these cards. I have this card and one more and then I’ll leave this meandering nonstory and move on to some other cardboard investigation if I don’t get beaned or felled by disease or stray-bulleted or bushwhacked or broken or blasted to smithereens, sweet Yaz almighty bless this tenuous life.

So then anyway on to this fucking card. This card is from 1980, the last year I collected cards. All the cards that came to me up to then were something to count on, and the center of each year’s collection was the team I loved, the Red Sox. But immediately after the 1980 season ended, the Red Sox changed drastically, Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, Butch Hobson, and Rick Burleson all departing—half of the eight regulars (George Scott was already gone) who remained from the superb 1978 squad that had been undone by (if you believe in horoscopes) the trend toward the unusual and bizarre. This was jarring. Suddenly everything was different. Burleson and Hobson were the first to go, in a December trade that brought Mark Clear, Carney Lansford, and Rick Miller to the Red Sox. The arrival of Burleson in California effectively ended any chance that this 1980 Angels Future Stars card had of telling the exact truth. The Angels figured they were set at shortstop with Burleson and, badly needing pitching, shipped the player on the far right of this card to Houston for Ken Forsch. All three Future Stars had played for the Angels, sparingly, in 1980 (along with Bruce Kison, who had come over from the Pirates). Thon had played the most, performing decently as a middle infield backup to aging starters Bobby Grich and Freddy Patek. Thon held down a similar role for the Astros in 1981, then took over as the starting shortstop in 1982 and moved to the glowing edge of stardom in 1983. So this 1980 card was almost right: Thon really was a future star, but just not for the Angels.

The future, the past: you can’t pin them down. They are too strange. This moment: typing rapidly on some keys with letters on them, hoping to get some feeling in my flesh before shoving off to work. Work. That started for me for real in the summer 1985, after I’d been expelled from boarding school. I got a job pumping gas. I remember the slow moments at the Shell station, time transformed into torture. My life since then has mostly been getting through time, making up little games to preoccupy myself. Work means giving yourself over to some other entity for some money, enough to keep the wheels turning. Before the summer of 1985, I was still in the kid’s world. In the summer of 1984: no job except throwing bales every few days at a nearby farm. Otherwise, I was still on my own to waste time. I played a lot of solitary games all over the house that summer. I was sixteen. I should have been, well, who knows. I probably shouldn’t still have been throwing a tennis ball off the roof and making up games. I remember Dickie Thon from that summer, not anything he did—I don’t remember noticing he was absent from the box scores that summer—but the image of him suggested by his promising 1983 numbers. I used those numbers—the steals, the homers, the triples—to create an imaginary character in my solitary games. Thon. In my games this Thon was taller than in real life (I had no idea how tall he was and see now from this card that he was 5’11”; in my imagination he was 6’3” at least), tall and thin and fast, powerful enough to smack home runs but just as prone to sting line drives deep into the corners of the Astrodome and wind up in a flash on third with a triple. I saw him in my mind out at shortstop, too, standing tall and possessing a cannon arm, a little like Cal Ripken but faster, making everything look easy. His name was sort of futuristic, maybe because it was similar to “Tron,” and there was permanence in it, too, simple and elemental, a piece of the ancient word marathon and somehow the piece that made the word ring. The Asros uniform was part of it; Thon would not have been this last pillar in the mansion of imagination of my childhood had he worn any other uniform but that last blazing rainbow flare from the 1970s. By then, the summer of 1984, Dickie Thon had already intersected with a Mike Torrez pitch that ended his season and his stardom. He would struggle all the way back eventually, working, working, but he was never the same. I don’t care about that. I still see him as beautiful and brilliant in my mind, the way I did that last wide summer my time was my own.

How Strange the Design

Four

There’s a trend toward the unusual, even the bizarre. That was the horoscope for Mike Torrez on October 2, 1978. But what use could this information have been? Torrez may or may not have read his horoscope that day, but he did go into the game with a plan, at least for the batter who ended up proving the accuracy of the horoscope.

“I wanted to pitch him in,” Torrez said in a 2001 USA Today article, referring to the Yankees’ light-hitting shortstop, Bucky Dent, “get him off the plate, then go away from him with a good slider, give him an outside pitch down and away. I never got to throw him an outside pitch. I got too much of the plate.”

He wanted to get him off the plate but being human and fallible failed in his attempt to use a plan to stave off the unusual, even bizarre. The day was undone.

Which reminds me, I never finished telling you about Luke Walker. When last seen on these pages, he had just thrown a historic pitch—the first ever in a night game in the World Series—for a strike and was ahead in the count to Orioles leadoff hitter Paul Blair. Things rapidly disintegrated. Blair singled, as did Mark Belanger and Merv Rettenmund, loading the bases with no outs. A passed ball scored Blair, Frank Robinson was walked intentionally, and Brooks Robinson and Boog Powell plated two more runs with back to back sacrifice flies. Down 3-0 in the first inning, Luke Walker was lifted from Game 4 of the 1971 World Series, and a call was made to the bullpen. A tall, thin rookie named Bruce Kison moved toward the center of the diamond.

Kison had started the 1971 season in the minors. While there, he was featured in a Sports Illustrated article by Pat Jordan on bush league life in the Pirates’ system. The piece included this telling sketch of the young unknown:

Kison retires the side in the fifth, but in the sixth he gives up two singles with one out. He gets the fourth batter to pop out to third base and then he fires two quick strikes past the potential third out. [Catcher Woody] Huyke crouches behind the right-handed batter and sticks two fingers beneath his glove. Kison flicks his glove fingers. Huyke responds with one finger and Kison nods slightly. Woody then hunches over the outside corner, but before he can set himself Kison flicks his glove again. Huyke shifts to the inside corner and places his glove at a level with the batter’s knees. Again Kison flicks his glove. The catcher raises his target until it rests inches from the batter’s chin. Kison goes into his motion and fires a fastball directly at the spot where the batter’s head would have been if he had not fallen to the dirt.

Kison was promoted to the majors in July, where he contributed to the Pirates’ pennant drive with 6 victories (and 6 hit batsmen) in 95 innings of work. In relief of the battered Luke Walker in game 4 of the World Series, the Pirates teetering on the brink of a 3-1 series deficit to the defending champs, Kison hurled 6 and a 1/3 innings of one-hit shutout ball, earning the win. The key line from the box score would have to be this one:

HBP: Etchebarren (1, by Kison); F Robinson (1, by Kison); Johnson (1, by Kison).

The three hit-batsmen in one game established a World Series record. An AP article about the game attributed the high-speed assaults to Kison’s “history of wildness.” Pat Jordan revisited Kison in another Sports Illustrated story after the World Series, and the former pro pitcher turned legendary sportswriter provides a more nuanced view of Kison’s propensity for hit batsmen:

Those Orioles were simply being served notice that despite Kison’s virginal appearance he was not one to treat idly. Kison had hit a high proportion of batsmen in his three-year professional career. He hit seven batters in one minor league game, which he won. His difficulty stems from a fastball that breaks sharply in on a right-handed batter at the last second. This break is often misjudged and can result in bruised ribs. Also, because his curveball is such a brief affair and anxious batters tend to lean far over the plate hoping to paste it to the right-field wall, Kison must protect himself by firing an occasional pitch inside. This combination of a batter leaning one way and a fastball breaking the other accounts for the knockdowns. There is a feeling among Kison’s friends that he is not particularly upset when he hits a batter, that he feels it helps compensate for his limited repertoire (two basic pitches) and his boyish appearance. Yet, in the fourth game of the Series, he claimed his youthful wildness was responsible for the three hit batters—Dave Johnson, Andy Etchebarren and Frank Robinson. Strangely enough, he did not walk a single batter during that span.

***

“Any pitcher who permits a hitter to dig in on him is asking for trouble. I never deliberately tried to hit anyone in my life. I throw close just to keep the hitters loose up there.” – Carl Mays

“I wasn’t trying to hit anybody. I can’t help it if my fastball runs in on the right-handed batters.” – Bruce Kison

Bruce Kison uttered the above quote in 1974, after a game between the Pirates and the Reds. Kison’s pitches had been sizzling under the chins of Reds’ batters all game, and finally in retaliation Reds pitcher Jack Billingham plunked Kison. Billingham was ejected, and manager Sparky Anderson came onto the field to argue the ejection with home plate ump Ed Sudol. During the argument, Anderson stepped on the foot of Pirates’ catcher Ed Kirkpatrick, who reacted by shoving Anderson. At that point, according to the powerless would-be peacekeeper Sudol, swarms from both teams “ran onto the field like animals.” A prolonged fist-swinging brawl ensued.

Three years later, Kison plunked slugger Mike Schmidt, who took offense and began jawing at Kison. According to Pirates manager Chuck Tanner, the dialogue between Schmidt and Kison proceeded like this:

Schmidt: The next time you do that I’m going to come after you.

Kison: Why don’t you come now?

Within moments, both benches had emptied. Pirates catcher Ed Ott, a former wrestler known for body-slamming and choke-holding fellows during brawls, grabbed Schmidt, and Phillies man-mountain Greg “The Bull” Luzinski grabbed Kison.

Kison, seemingly always ready to send a purpose pitch, remarked of Luzinski afterward, “Boy did he have B.O.”

How Strange the Design

Three

But I never finished telling you about Mike Torrez. That’s my tribute to the first sentence of the Denis Johnson story, “The Other Man,” which begins “But I never finished telling you about the two men.” It is one of my favorite first sentences. It works in the context of a standalone story as a disorienting, alluring first line, speaking of the inability of anything to be fully said or known, and it works in the context of Johnson’s book of linked short stories, Jesus’ Son, as a way not only to loop the story back to an earlier story (“The Two Men”) but to communicate that this fractured life is all one song, strung together imperfectly through digressions and obsessions and compulsions and associations and the meandering hunger of the disintegrating mind. Everything is woven haphazardly into a uniform of strange design. I never finished telling you about anything. I never will.

***

Since his appearance as an Expo in perfect balance in his 1974 card, Mike Torrez has grown a mustache. Perhaps this is an attempt on his part to exert some control over concrete reality amid the constantly changing particulars of his existence. He has been in constant motion. From December of 1974 to November of 1977, less than three full years, he has gone from the Expos to the Orioles to the A’s to the Yankees and finally to the team referred to on the front of this card clumsily and flimsily with some rushed goopy paint, the sloppy attention to the finer elements of design leaving some equivocation about the pitcher’s current whereabouts.

***

“As I age, I find the distinctions between past and present increasingly nebulous; it all just blends together in one eternally present memory, kind of like a Bob Dylan song.  Or as he puts it in his memoirs, ‘I kept up with the news, except that it was the news from the Civil War. That was the news I was interested in.’” – Sean Dolan

***

I never finished telling you about Juan Epstein. Several days ago, when I’m sure I should have been doing something else, I was meandering around in the Google newspaper archives, looking through articles in scanned 1970s newsprint for traces of Robert Hegyes, the recently deceased actor who played Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter. I found a favorable review of an episode of Welcome Back, Kotter set to air that night, October 2, 1978. I know that date. Of all the days I could have walked into in all the scanned newspapers in all the world . . .

***

The flickering signs of promise in the stats on the back of Mike Torrez’ 1974 card have bloomed on the back of his 1978 card into robust testaments to stardom, namely 68 wins in 4 years, a borderline-ace average of 17 per year. Constant motion has not adversely affected performance, Torrez apparently possessed with phenomenal focus, impervious to the intimations of transience and disappearance all around him. I’m sure I was glad to find him in a pack, glad to see that he seemed to be on my favorite team.

***

As soon as I noticed that the date of the newspaper that Juan Epstein had brought me to was October 2, 1978, I scrolled to the sports page, and there it was: the Red Sox had tied the Yankees the day before, on the last day of the regular season schedule. A one-game playoff was set for that afternoon. I scrolled to the standings to see everything in perfect poise, the team I love tied with the team I hate. The playoff game and probable pitchers were listed in the upcoming game schedule below the standings. Ron Guidry that year was the best pitcher I’d ever seen, but I still had hope in Mike Torrez.

***

There is one odd note amid the numbers on the back of Mike Torrez’ 1978 card. According to the information there, and compared to corresponding information on his 1974 card, Mike Torrez is in the process of shrinking. In addition to losing 13 pounds of weight, he has lost an inch of height, dropping from 6’6” to 6’5”. I wouldn’t have noticed this oddity upon finding this card in a pack. I would have been happy to find a player listed as a member of my favorite team, and I would have focused on all the wins. I might have found the doctored uniform slightly unsettling in a subconscious way, but I was not yet in the habit of tuning into omens of estrangement.

***

It’s a given that I watched the episode of Welcome Back, Kotter on the night of October 2, 1978, as it was my favorite show at that time and I wouldn’t have had any other plans. Funny to think about plans for the evening of October 2, 1978. My world would have been leveled by then. In the episode, Juan Epstein and the rest of the Sweathogs—save for Barbarino, who by that point because of John Travolta’s growing fame had begun disappearing from the show (that individual disappearance the fatal beginning of the eventual disappearance of the show altogether)—attempt to talk a depressed girl off of a high ledge she has crawled onto with the intention of permanently disappearing.

***

Unwilling to return to the present, I scrolled over to the horoscope page for October 2, 1978. I used the birth date listed on the back of Mike Torrez’ 1978 card to locate his astrological sign. How were things going to go for him that day? All his career he’d been a winner. “Most efforts should prosper,” begins his fortune. “Even so, think before you speak or act. There’s a trend now toward the unusual, even the bizarre.”

A Brother’s Voice

for Sean Dolan

I followed my big brother everywhere he would allow me to follow. This went on long after childhood. After college, utterly clueless about what to do, I crowded into the narrow railroad apartment my brother was living in on 9^th Street in Manhattan. I spent weeks huddled there as if taking shelter from bombings, drinking beer and eating entire boxes of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies and watching television. The whole world terrified me. I understood I needed to make some money somehow, but I had no skills and only one vague, impossible goal: to be a writer of books.

Because my brother had once worked for UPS, I felt slightly less paralyzed with fear when considering applying for work there than I would anywhere else in the overpoweringly daunting megalopolis. I got hired as a temporary driver’s helper, and then after the holidays I shifted over to loading packages at the UPS warehouse in the middle of the night. I often got home from work as my brother was leaving for his job with a publisher of nonfiction books for young readers.

Incapable of making friends on my own, I had no social life beyond what I could siphon off from my brother. I got to know some of his friends from the publishing house. Unlike my job at the warehouse, where I spent my ten-minute break alone in the back of a truck scowling into my paperback copy of Dante’s Inferno, the place where my brother worked seemed to have a lot of shared weird hilarious life spilling over the margins of the daily grind. My brother was in a lunchtime Strat-O-Matic league there, and reports on the games in that league and on other real and imaginary doings were filed periodically by one of the editors in the persona of a crusty besotted Runyanesque sportswriter named Pokerchips Munson. My brother showed me some of the works of Pokerchips Munson, and they always made me laugh. More importantly, they gave me a sense when I needed it most that it was possible for someone to write for the sheer joy of it, and though I would and will always have a tough time remembering it, I got a sense that this impulse—writing for the fuck of it and the fun of it—was the key to bringing some real human life to the page. I was reading Dante every day, hoping for genius to somehow seep into my package-smudged fingers, but in the end Pokerchips Munson ended up meaning much more to me than Dante.

The creator and caretaker of Pokerchips Munson was a senior editor named Sean Dolan. He was a little older than my brother and me, and he didn’t come out for drinks as much as some of my brother’s other co-workers, including Sean’s brother Terrance. Like Sean, Terrance was a brilliant storyteller, and some of my best memories of those years include sitting in the back of the International bar in the wee hours of the morning as Terrance told us tales from his life of violence and inebriation and hilarity and mayhem and wonder growing up in the toxic mysterious wastelands of Long Island. I didn’t hang out as much with Sean, but even so he came to have a significant place in my lfie. There was something calming and encouraging about him. The adult world seemed to me to be a place where you of necessity gradually narrowed yourself down to nothing, but here was a guy who had been at it for a while and had found a way to keep his world wide.

The place where my brother worked seemed to be riddled with battles and upheavals, my brother and his friends  pitted against various solitary backstabbers out for personal advancement. That’s how it came to me in my brother’s stories anyway, or at any rate how it stands now in my poor and entirely suspect memory. It’s been a long time. My favorite story from those days involves Sean and his brother Terrance. They were a meeting in which one of the backstabbers was pushing an agenda that adversely affected the Dolans. The younger, hotter-tempered Dolan rose to his feet, fists clenched.

“I was going to kill him,” Terrance told us late one night at the International. “And then I heard Sean. His voice.”

“Terrance,” Sean had said. Just that, his name. But it was enough, that voice that had always been with him, a steadying hand on his shoulder. A brother’s voice. Terrance came back to himself. He sat back down.

Sean was the reason I wrote my first book, a young adult novel. He had remarked to me and my brother that there seemed to be a lack of young adult novels about basketball. Someone else could have said this and it wouldn’t have made any impact, but for some reason his voice triggered something. It was calm encouragement and was just what I needed. I quit my job at UPS and spent the summer back in Vermont, sleeping on couches and writing every day. I never sold the novel, but that doesn’t change that the writing of it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. To be writing a novel, waking up every day and pushing it forward a little more and a little more. It was a glimpse of my dreamed-of impossible life.

When I finished the book I went back to New York and resumed living with my brother. Sean read my book and praised it, which thrilled me, and though the publisher he and his brother and my brother worked for didn’t publish fiction, on the strength of my novel Sean offered me a gig writing one of their nonfiction titles. It didn’t pay much, maybe enough to live on for a month of three-for-a-dollar mac and cheese, but I didn’t give a shit. Because of Sean, I was a writer of books.

Sean eventually left that publisher, as did Terrance and my brother and all our other friends there. Everyone went their separate ways, as is the way of the world. I ended up in Chicago. I had gone on from writing that first book for Sean to writing several others, all nonfiction books for young readers, but my dream of getting a book out into the world that had my own voice in it, a book worthy of Pokerchips Munson, had proven elusive. In the summer of 2006, I was at a low in my writing, having spent several years working on a novel that I was finding impossible to get published. One of my chosen methods of anesthetizing the pain of disappointment, of life, is to immerse myself in an on-line version of the game Pokerchips Munson used to report on, Strat-O-Matic. It is an extremely solitary pursuit, for the most part, and I generally have no interaction whatsoever with the other managers in my on-line leagues, the point for me being the dissolving of my actual social being into the particulars of the game. But at that low point of my writing life in the summer of 2006 I turned to a newly begun Strat-O-Matic online league and noticed that one of my fellow managers had a familiar name. I sent him a message titled “Pokerchips Munson.” He wrote back instantly: “Josh, is it really you?”

That was in late August, 2006. Within a few weeks, for the fuck of it and the fun of it, and quite possibly also for the simple reason that I could tell Sean about it, I started posting on a blog my thoughts about baseball cards I randomly pulled from my old shoebox. Sean was one of the first people I told about the blog. He was immediately appreciative. Yesterday and today, I’ve been looking back at his messages to me in the Strat-O-Matic league message system and in my email archives, and it’s amazing how often he took time to tell me he liked what I was doing. More than that, he told me what I was doing in such an informed way that it seemed he knew where I wanted to go with the entire project better than I did. Years later, when I started trying to sell a book that told a story of me and my brother and my baseball cards, the center of my proposal was a something Sean said just a little over a month after the start of my blog, back when I’d barely begun. He knew where I was trying to go, and he encouraged me to get there.

He kept encouraging me over the years. I never encountered him again in the Strat-O-Matic leagues, but I exchanged messages with him periodically over email or through facebook, and I got to know him a little better through his voluminous and wonderful writings on his Lonesome Coyote blog. Not too long ago, he posted something on facebook about how Jerry Garcia helped him get through his long runs on cold days. I don’t do a whole lot of facebook chattering, but I chimed in on that post to join Sean in singing the praises of Jerry. Sean replied, “Josh—damn, man, did I know you were a Deadhead?” I didn’t have a chance to reply to that in a timely way, and these online conversations quickly move on to other ones and so his question was left hanging, an open invitation for more talk some other time. Like all the interactions I ever had with Sean, it seemed like there would be no end to the conversation we could have on the subject at hand, whatever it was—Bob Dylan or the Dead or old San Antonio Spurs point guards or Frederick Exley or anything and everything beautiful and ridiculous and alive under the sun.

Baseball, too, sure. He loved baseball. His favorite player was Thurman Munson. I wish I could ask him his thoughts on this 1978 Thurman Munson card, but earlier this week, Sean died in his sleep.

His voice was a hand on my shoulder, calming me and telling me to go on, go deeper and wider and farther. In an email to me in the fall of 2006, when I was starting to write for the first time in my life really just for the fuck of it and the fun of it, Sean wrote, “Proceed fearlessly, heeding no voices but your own.” A hand on my shoulder. A brother’s voice.

How Strange the Design

Two

One day when I was young and stupid, my brother and I walked down the road together. It was a summer day. I wore a green cap with a white felt M on it, the cap from our little league team. We walked toward the general store, as usual, but that day we walked past it, over a short bridge above the river. Just past the bridge, a road split off from our road and climbed up out of the valley. The house at the intersection of the two roads had spilled things onto the lawn, and they were for sale. We found a box with some baseball cards. The cards were all beaten up and featured players we’d never heard of. This 1970 Luke Walker card was among them. I didn’t recognize the name. He was gone from the major leagues by then, and his brief moment in the national spotlight had occurred years earlier, when I’d been too young to notice. The obscurity of his name and of his worn-away face made the card seem strange and ancient, as if it had traveled through centuries to reach me. All the cards were like this. My brother and I thought we had found mysterious, valuable relics selling for pennies a piece. We thought we’d struck it rich.

That was over 30 years ago. Now I wake up early every day while it’s still dark so I can write a little before everything resumes its unstoppable forgettable forward lurch. I usually have about an hour. Sometimes I waste most or all of it. Sometimes I cast around the internet for pieces of the past. Two mornings ago instead of writing I found a newspaper article on Luke Walker from 1971. He’d won 15 games in 1970, and in spring training before the 1971 season he brushed aside a reporter’s suggestion that he was primed to win 20 in the coming year by rhetorically wondering why the reporter was limiting him to that benchmark. Why not 25? This is how you feel when you’re young and stupid. You hold cardboard in your hands and it feels like great riches. You hold a ball in your hands and it feels alive. Luke Walker didn’t remotely approach 25 wins in 1971. He didn’t even reach double figures in wins after 1971, and by 1974 he had thrown his last pitch in the big leagues.

One day when I was young and stupid I walked back home with my brother, my pockets bulging with what seemed to be a fortune in unfamiliar currency from a vanished civilization. It was a summer day. I wore a green cap with a white felt M on it. I don’t have that cap anymore, but I still have the 1970 Luke Walker card that was in my pocket, and yesterday morning instead of writing I found a trace of a moment of great promise in Luke Walker’s life. Most of the video containing this trace is taken up by pregame chatter and player introductions, but the very end includes the historic first pitch of the first night game in World Series history. The camera is set up behind home plate, providing a daunting view of the pitcher, a twitchy, bristling lefthander named Luke Walker. He winds and fires, and the ball comes in fast and with a darting downward snarl to it, catching the low outside corner of the zone for a called strike, an unhittable pitch. The game is halted so that a suited lackey can jog onto the diamond and retrieve the ball for posterity, and at that point the video ends, with Luke Walker on the mound under the lights in the World Series, ahead in the count.

How Strange the Design

One

The few 1974 cards I own have aged more gently than my cards from later years. I wonder why. Is this difference a result of a change in the materials and processes being used to create cards after 1974, or is it just a trick of my own mind, some kind of deeper, more distorting nostalgia for the longest-tenured cards in my collection? The edges of my 1974 cards have all been rounded to thin furry shoulders with the years, while the edges of the cards from the following years seem stiffer, more rigid, less personal, or less prone to allowing the personal to merge with the impersonal.

The 1974 cards remind me of my brother. All my cards do, but the cards from this year most of all, simply because as the years went on I separated from him a little more all the time; in the beginning, I didn’t know or want to know where I ended and he began. In a way, my possession of my own 1974 cards was a way to begin possessing a sense of a self independent from him. He had his cards and I had mine, but since the 1974 cards were the first in this separation they have the strongest air of being shared, not mine but ours.

It’s all one song. The past and the present and the future, the objects we’re drawn to, the people we’re drawn to, the people we drift from, the distances, the absences, the erosion, the softening, the blurring, the converging. One day this Mike Torrez card will disappear altogether. It is in the process of disappearing right now. It is itself the process of disappearance posing as a solid object. The worn-soft edges, the feel of love, it will give way and give way and finally be gone. I’ll be ashes long before that happens, but it’ll happen, and when it does it means this card and I will be everywhere and nowhere, all one song.

Mike Torrez is poised as perfectly as humanly possible at the center of the disappearing. He kicks one leg high, balanced, alert, focused, the potential of the moment at its peak. Everything is still to come, for me and for Mike Torrez. He will become a 20-game winner in 1976 and a World Series hero in 1977. There will be more beyond 1977 for Mike Torrez, but for now let’s stop right there with thoughts of what will be. That’s the year I’ll be starting little league. I’ll be standing in centerfield with a baseball uniform on, pounding my glove and cheering on my brother. He’ll be on the mound, wearing the same uniform, pivoting in his pitching motion and kicking his leg high.

Welcome Back, Kotter debuted in 1975 and ran through 1979, the sweet spot of my childhood. It was my favorite show. I loved all the Sweathogs, Epstein most of all. He had a funny swagger, a giant afro, a maniacal look in his eyes, a (Chico) Marxian air of absurd careening pomposity-leveling chaos. He was half-Jewish, just like me, but unlike me he was proud of whatever parts made up all of him. I’ll stop there—I don’t want this to become some kind of serious sensitive self-exploration. Welcome Back, Kotter was no more and no less than exactly my idea of fun back when I was just becoming a member of the human race, and Juan Epstein was the heart and soul of the fun.

The man behind Juan Epstein, Robert Hegyes, died this past Thursday. I spent some hours yesterday and today poking around his website, where he has written several thoughtful and interesting notes about his life and about the show that made him famous. The site is organized in a somewhat unorthodox way, but be sure to check out the Kotter show section (start at this link and then click through to other pages with the “next” button at the bottom of the page). The highlight of that series of pages, at least for this constant searcher on the seas of memorabilia, is a scanned version of the feature on Hegyes, in its entirety, from Dynamite magazine. The only magazine that eclipsed Dynamite for me back in those days was Mad Magazine. On another page on Hegyes’ site I discovered that he, like me, had been raised on Mad:

I grew up reading Mad Magazine and laughing my ass off. Alfred E. Neuman for President, was my motto. I still think he could beat George W. Bush to this day. One day someone walked in and said, “Hey look, you guys are on the cover of Mad Magazine.” Forget TV Guide, People, and the National Enquirer. I knew I had made it.

In another section of the site, Hegyes writes with great warmth and humility of a chance meeting with George Harrison. If anyone has ever met a hero, they’ll recognize Hegyes’ internal monologue as he walked away from his brief moment with the Beatle. If I’d ever met the man behind Juan Epstein, I would have been reeling in the exact same way:

“I thought of a hundred things I wanted to say, but nothing I could have said was more important than, thank you.”

***