Dazzler
One
Today, a Sunday, the toughest of days, it was warm, in the 60s. It hasn’t been that warm in a while. It’s been a long winter. “Want to go over to the beach?” I asked my sons. It’s often hard to get them to leave the house, but this time they were out on the sidewalk, waiting for me, while I was still tying my sneakers. When I got out there, I felt a few raindrops. We all pulled our hoods up and walked down the street. For a long time, it seemed like I’d never not be carrying one or both of them, and now here we all were, walking. As we crossed the street, a woman carrying a stack of papers in her hand veered over to us. “Yes, I have lost my cat,” she said in some kind of a European accent. She showed me the flyers. A small, black cat looked out at me. The three of us started looking for the cat as we walked on. We looked under cars and through fences. The rain started falling harder. We turned around and walked back home, well short of the beach. “Do you think she’ll find her cat?” Jack asked. “Yes,” I said. Later, and also earlier, and repeatedly throughout our lives, the younger boy, Exley, got upset that his older brother didn’t feel like playing with him, and so he started screaming at the top of his lungs with feral power. Jack has extremely sensitive hearing, so these screams are like knifing him in the brain. He gets as overwhelmed and angry as his brother, and both are hitting and screaming, and my wife and I are pulling them apart and trying to speak calmly and also often losing our fucking shit and at some point during this shitstorm I thought about Strat-O-Matic basketball, which I haven’t played in over thirty years. There was a thing on the cards called a “Dazzler,” which connoted a brilliant pass that led to an instant basket. Magic Johnson had a lot of them on his card. As I played it alone in my adolescent bedroom it pressed some numbing synapse in my brain that I have been addicted to in one way or another ever since. I want to not feel anything but that sizzling fiction of connection. Anyway, another Sunday a while back, my sons and I smeared glue and glitter on some cards. The one at the top of this page got the worst of it. On the back, which isn’t as thoroughly bedazzled, it’s possible to read a note about Andy Hawkins’s 11–0 start to his 1985 season. That’s the year I really started drinking booze and smoking pot. I’m more or less off all of that, but the impulse to obliterate everything with some glittering reversal of reality is as strong as ever. I don’t know what to do. I never have. At least Sunday’s just about over now, both boys asleep, but now it’s on to Monday, the toughest of days.
Cardboard Gods 
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