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Cardboard Gods
Josh Wilker
$24.95 (Seven Footer Press)
Nerdhood is charming. In the midst of our youth it is a pestilence, a compulsion that must be fed and a contagion that must be avoided. With the nostalgic hindsight of adulthood, it’s something to covet, relive, and in Josh Wilker’s case, chronicle in a novelesque memoir about baseball cards and brotherhood.
The Chicagoan’s site, Cardboard Gods, launched in 2006 as an homage to and restoration of Wilker’s childhood collection of Topps baseball cards from the mid 70’s to the mid 80’s. This particular strain of nerdism infected many hosts, and Wilker parlayed his blog success into a memoir released in March(Seven Footer Press), Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told through Baseball Cards.
Clever, witty, self-effacing, fun and poignant, Gods is too good to be classified as mere blog-to-memoir, that genre stamp of the digital age. This is a narrative of two brothers figuring out their place in the world when the only thing that can be relied on to make sense is the clear stats of baseball. “All I have ever really known for sure is the kind of things you can put on the back of a baseball card…Season after season we lived together,” Wilker writes about the inexplicable but inevitable drift between the brothers in their twenties.
Like the blog(700-800 hits/day), each brief chapter opens with a player’s baseball card and is used as a springboard of exploration. And it’s not just the heroes of the game (fyi: cards of all the big-time major leaguers end in 5 or 0) like the Wilkers’ beloved Carl Yastrzemski (come on Yaz!), but the uncelebrated players you’ve never heard of. Take Herb Washington, who played 1.5 seasons for the World Champ Oakland A’s, owned by carnie-like innovator-owner Charles Finley. Washington never took the field, never swung the bat; his baseball card is the only one in history listed as Pinch Runner. Wilker takes this innovative oddity as a parallel to his own family life, when his father let his mother have a boyfriend, and the “three parent experiment” began.
Throughout the memoir we get these clever juxtapositions, how baseball card collecting—not for monetary value but for something to have, to grow, to own—was the only constant in the turbulence that is any adolescence. Gods is as much about the cards as it is about growing up and Wilker, an award-winning MFA grad, uses that period of cards, from ’74 to ’81, as a point of reflection from his youth to his adulthood when his team, the Boston Red Sox, is finally forgiven by winning the series in 2004. It is this moment, of winning not just as a fan but as a man, when he and his brother Ian are able to understand each other as adults, that the memoir’s full poignant scope is realized, and Wilker’s talent as a storyteller are undeniable.
The site goes on now, even as Wilker tours the book, logging the miles on the boundless trip of nerdhood. Stay posted for a Friday Feature interview in advance of Wilker's reading at Quimby's on Thursday, 4/29/10 at 7pm.
Note: Though the book is packaged like a pack of baseball cards, there is no gum.
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