This morning just before waking up I had a dream about being in an elevator that climbed for a little while before beginning to descend, then plummet. Before impact I woke to a song, generic classic rock, on my alarm clock radio. I used to have it tuned to the sports station but I got sick of waking up to the voices of Mike and Mike. Sometimes, actually, I get sick of sports. All the time with the sports, and for what? Bunch of strangers running around, altering my mood, usually for the worse. (It never lasts long, this swearing off, and back I go like a barfly to his dive.) Anyway, I switched to classic rock as my morning cattle prod. I don’t remember what song was playing this morning. I flicked it off within a second or two, rose to a sitting position, and sat there for a while, feeling like I weighed a thousand pounds.
It’s been hot. Tomorrow, when the heat is due to break with thunder storms, I’ll be getting on a plane and flying up into it, I guess, and to Oakland, where in 1975 Sal Bando fielded this groundball. It was—it had to have been, judging from the umpire stationed in the outfield, a deployment of an umpire only used in the playoffs—the last postseason game of the Oakland A’s dynasty. Sal Bando had played in plenty of them, captaining the team to three World Series titles, but this would be the last for the three-time defending champs, who were dethroned by the Red Sox in three straight in the 1975 ALCS. Bando didn’t go quietly that day, notching 2 hits in 4 at-bats and knocking in 2 of the 3 A’s runs. But he went.
Yesterday, on my way home from work, the bus broke down. After a long time, another bus pulled up behind the broken one, and we herded out into the stiflingly hot day and then crammed into the replacement vehicle, which was much smaller than the original. I got a seat near the back and had it to myself for a moment, but then a man wearing a McDonald’s cap and hauling a large backpack flopped down next to me, his backpack pressing into my arm. I gave up trying to read my book about natural childbirth and jammed headphones into my ears, but two teenage girls behind me yelled to each other so loudly I could barely hear the Howard Stern show. The air conditioning conked out after a few minutes, a prelude to the whole replacement bus failing, and the beleaguered driver steered it the side of the road, where we waited in it for several minutes before a third bus groaned to a stop behind us and we herded into that one. I sat up front this time, and two seats away a guy with a cane dozed so deeply that his head almost came down into my lap with his nodding. An older woman entered the bus and struggled up the steps, and the guy with the cane, who seemed to know her, guided her down into the seat between us, a target she didn’t quite hit, landing instead on my left leg, heavily, where she remained for several slow miles. She smelled of booze.
For most of my life I held out the idea of being a writer as something off in the future that would solve all my problems. I wrote. I write. There are always problems. I’m a proofreader. I’m a rider of crowded, failing buses. I’m a few weeks away from the pages of that book on natural childbirth coming to life. That book is scary enough, and from everything I’ve heard from people who have had kids, the book and all books will be of little help. It will be something else altogether.
For most of my life I figured there was another adjacent life, purer, and that I’d somehow figure out a way to leap from the frame of my own life and into that other life. In this 1976 Sal Bando card you can see—thanks to the shoddy work of someone at the Topps factory, someone whose mind wandered as he or she cut a sheet into individual cards—a glimpse of another card, below, a shred of a bat in the left corner. Maybe birth is just a big colored sheet in heaven getting cut. Maybe I’m one of the cards that has a piece of another card at the fringes, forever suggesting that I could have been, might someday still be, someone else entirely.
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In other Sal Bando-related news: Algonquin Books’ Free Beer Tour is currently in a phase of working backwards through the primary cities of the all-star third baseman’s playing career. Last Thursday, Boswell Books hosted a stop at a bar called Sugar Maple, in Milwaukee, where Sal Bando finished up his 16-year career, and this coming Thursday, June 9, there will be free beer and words at Diesel Books, in Oakland, where Sal Bando not only captained the Swingin’ A’s, but lived among the people, in a regular house, a regular guy. This latter aspect of Sal Bando’s career in Oakland makes for a satisfying bit of texture in David Anthony’s feverishly compelling 1970s-set novel Something for Nothing, in which a man unraveling into a life of desperation and criminal activity occasionally fantasizes about a friendship with his famous neighbor, Sal Bando. Anthony will be reading from his novel at Diesel Books, along with me and Pete Nelson, author of the brilliant and soulful I Thought You Were Dead (which also occasionally references, deftly and touchingly, another power-hitting corner infielder of the Cardboard Gods era, Harmon Killebrew).
Cardboard Gods 
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