Cardboard Gods by Josh Wilker Page A

Saturday Night Fever soundtrack in a store window. We went into the store and my mother asked for the record, but the only copy left was the one in the window. She convinced the store owner to sell us that one.
    It was an unusual purchase. Previously, both my brother and I had begun to own our own records, a consumerist action that would eventually eclipse even that of owning baseball cards. But this time we were all in it together. When we got home, we went to the living room to hear the record for the first time, together. But the record had been damaged by sitting in sun in the store window. The needle bounded rapidly across the warped surface. There was no music, just a few truncated, pulsing yelps.
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    For a short while, the colors from my mother’s paintbrushes began
sprouting up in various places in and around our town. She made big, vibrant signs for a food co-op and a restaurant and a thrift store. She made smaller, less flashy signs for an office complex and a tiny law school.
    The man who ran the law school became a repeat customer, but he would always neglect to pay for a sign until he’d badgered my mother into starting a new sign. After a while, my mother began avoiding his calls. I suppose the situation called for action on my mother’s part that was squarely in that dour realm of business. No action was taken, besides the instruction to me that if I answered the phone and it was the law school guy, I had to tell him that she wasn’t home.
    This may not have been the beginning of the end of the sign-painting business, but it was at least concurrent to the beginning of the end. Spreading colors all over central Vermont was one thing. Collecting from deadbeats, telling deadbeats no: that was something else entirely.
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    In the picture on my 1980 Mark Fidrych card, the Bird attempts to simultaneously hide and caress a baseball in his hands as if cradling a terminally ill pet in a veterinary waiting room. He is four years and several trips to the disabled list removed from whispering brilliance into a baseball. The marginalia on the back of this card clings desperately to that year like a profoundly lonely middle-aged man still masturbating to the image of a beautiful woman he somehow lucked into a brief fling with the summer after college ended. Fidrych’s Rookie of the Year award for 1976 is mentioned, as is his 2 innings pitched in the 1976 All-Star Game, and the space-filling cartoon along the left-hand border features a baseball player, generic except for the curly Fid-fro billowing out from under the hat, holding a giant trophy entitled “1976 MAJOR LEAGUE MAN OF THE YEAR,” an award I’ve never heard of. The statistics alone are left to tell about the other years: in 1977 he pitched in only 11 games; the next year he pitched in only 3; and in 1979, the last season listed on the back of this card, Fidrych pitched his fewest innings yet, just 15, losing 3 games, winning none, and getting battered for 17 runs, all earned. In this 1980 card, he seems to have literally signed his name as “Mush.”
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    What do you do when the thing you value most slips out of reach?
I remember a sign my mother made for a small recording studio, near the end, after it was clear that the sign business was going to fail. She took a long time on the sign, using many drawings to plan it out, then painstakingly transferring her design to a thick slab of wood that Tom cut into a circle. Tom also sandblasted the design Mom had created of a sun with a wise-looking, calmly joyful face in the middle of the circle so that the sun became three-dimensional. Mom painted the sun with gold-leaf paint, and when the sign was finally finished it glowed. I loved it. A photo of it appeared among a bunch of signs with an honorable mention designation in a sign-painting magazine my mother subscribed to for a while. Some years later, someone stole it, part of a larger gradual disappearance of my