LAST WEEK, at the cash register of a sporting-goods store, I saw what looked like a display of baseball cards. It annoys me that in corner stores, where baseball cards ought to be sold, they are less and less present. Why? Because children no longer get allowances to mete out, nickel by nickel, for jacks and licorice and Three Musketeers. Instead, television enlists them in screaming lobbying campaigns for $189 skateboards and mortgage-endangering trips to Disney World. Society values families less as a means of sheltering and educating children than as a means of yoking grownup incomes to kids’ unconstrainable appetites for junk. That’s why baseball cards are sold where scooters are sold, not where ice cream is sold.
But this was just the beginning of my disillusionment. I noticed an 11-year-old tearing open a pack of trading cards, with his friends clustered around him.
“Hey, I got a Nalper!”
“What’s a Nalper?”
I expected the kid with the card to flip it over and read: “Switch-hitting utility man Rex Nalper socked a pair of two-baggers for the Tribe in the first of a twinbill after being claimed off waivers from the Chisox. He likes to hunt in the off-season.”
Alas. Kids don’t care much any more about baseball cards–which neither explode, sparkle, emit weird noises, nor expose their navels. They care about cartoons and Japanese video games, as I realized when this one continued: “It’s a Nalper! It lets you nalp two of the other guy’s splutorgs!”
“Yeah! Unless he has a mimzor card!”
“Yeah! Or a puke gun!”
Between the ages of 7 and 12, I would start buying baseball cards the day the first series came into the store in March, and spend every spare coin on them until the last series was being packed away in November. I kept them neatly stacked in boxes, sorted into teams and then alphabetized. Half my vocabulary, much of my math, and all of my ability to pronounce Spanish surnames comes from baseball cards.
With their judicious deployment of photos, statistics, chronological tables, prose narrative, and sometimes cartoons, these were a miracle of the biographer’s art. I wish I could pick one up to give you an example, but as it happens, I don’t own a single baseball card. Too bad. They’re worth a lot of money nowadays. But, junior year in college, I sold my entire collection to pay for… what was it again? Textbooks? A beaver coat? Cocaine? Occasionally the memory jolts me awake in the middle of the night and makes me sob. Not often–maybe twice a week or so.
I console myself that I was doomed to get ripped off anyway. The collection I sold in college was the second one I had assembled and lost. Fascism–or “the desire to be part of something larger than yourself,” as the same phenomenon is called when mainstream politicians invoke it–cost me my first. Billy Boyle, the fat kid next door, didn’t have many cards. But he explained to me one afternoon that if four of us (Billy, my two best friends, and I) put all our cards together in one Super Baseball Card Club, then we would have every card there was. He was telling the truth, in the sense that I would be telling the truth if I told Tiger Woods that if we put our golf skills together and split the profits, one of us might win the Masters.
The Super Baseball Card Club did indeed have every card–some of them in quintuplicate–but the collection could only be viewed in the Super Baseball Card Clubhouse, which was Billy’s bedroom. As the distinction between the Super Baseball Card Club and Billy’s personal property grew harder and harder to descry, my friends and I sought to withdraw from the arrangement. But secession was against the bylaws, which, in turn, were hard to distinguish from Billy’s threat to give a bloody nose to anyone who told his parents about the club.
Billy was thuggish and slow. He never understood, even in sixth grade, that if you bought a Monopoly property for $350 and gave the banker $500, you got $150, not $250, change. (“Because three plus two equals five!” he reasoned.) After Billy knocked the table over a few times, we agreed to give him an extra $100 every time he needed change. He was thick enough that he always lost anyway. This ought to dispel the idea that worldly success rests on a “head for figures.” For, as only the most naive reader will need to be told, Billy is today an absurdly rich man. The biggest lesson that I learned from baseball cards is that such rewards tend to tumble into the hands of those who, if there were any justice in the world, would have their splutorgs nalped with a puke gun.
–Christopher Caldwell
