Card Fever

Card Fever

By Matthew Duffus

One rainy fall afternoon, three friends and I walked to a baseball card shop to purchase cards we intended to mutilate. Two of us hated the Pirates, the other two, the Orioles, so we paired off to do our worst to the opposing team’s players. The cards we bought cost less than a quarter each, the players soon relegated to the dustbin of statistical insignificance. Rey Quinones and Neal Heaton, Jay Tibbs and Mike Devereaux. We spent no more than a dollar per team.

When we arrived at the cash register, we couldn’t help bragging about our intentions. We were fourteen, brash, and convinced we were the cleverest kids the owner had encountered. Rather than marveling at our creativity, however, he glared at us. We were denigrating his dedication to sports, to memorabilia. We were middle-class kids with enough to spare that we could destroy our purchases.

Upon exiting the store, we split up, planning on meeting later at the middle school athletic fields, where we would display the damage we had inflicted on our enemies.

***

For an area with 25,000 residents, my hometown managed to keep three card shops in business. Two of them were located a few blocks apart, adjacent to the historic downtown mall, a fifteen-minute drive from home or an hour-plus walk. My friend Bill and I would take the fire trail through the woods and down the mountain, meander through the residential neighborhood at its base, and follow the winding streets that led downtown. We’d leave mid-morning, arriving in time for lunch at the local Coney Island Hotdogs, where we’d eat chili dogs and drink enormous Cherry Cokes.

We preferred the shop closest to the mall. It sat four doors down from Coney Island in a building that used to contain a jewelry shop. The front display windows held antique pennants, Louisville sluggers, and autographed photos. Inside the showroom, recessed lighting spotlighted the glass cases. I can imagine nervous young men scrutinizing the engagement rings they used to house. By the late 1980s, the shop was full of pubescent boys and adult males, studying those same cases for their own treasures.

We’d spend an hour scrutinizing the holdings, noting new cards and studying the ones we’d long coveted but were beyond our means. We’d finger the money in our pockets, earned through chores or given as gifts, and mentally calculate tax to avoid the embarrassment of having to put back a card. Once we’d made our purchases, the owner would slide them into a pristine paper bag with edges as sharp as the cards they held. We’d leave the store, find a bench on the outdoor mall, and compare our bounties. We read the statistics on the back and the brief player biographies and trivia with as much attention as we gave to our classwork.

Then we’d begin the slow trudge up the mountain, the clearest sign of our dedication. It took almost twice as long to get back to our neighborhood, but it felt like no time at all as we contemplated adding our latest purchases to our ever-expanding collections at home.

***

Collecting cards is synonymous with trading them, and we were no different in that regard. Of all of our many trades, Bill and I negotiated our grandest one during a sleepover in eighth grade. I ended up on the losing side, teaching me the fraught economics of collecting. I’d recently bought a Rod Carew rookie card while visiting family, paying forty dollars that stunned my thrifty grandfather. Bill, knowing what I was unaware of—that Carew was sure to earn a place in the Hall of Fame later that year—worked out a swap for the mid-career Hank Aaron that I coveted. It wasn’t the worth of the card that struck me, but its age—seven years older than me.  Bill had owned it, encased in its own special stand, for longer than I’d known him.

We added more equivalent cards to the trade that night, not out of need but simply to make it more impressive. We were playing to our friends, who would hear about the massive trade on Monday and hopefully be amazed. In the end, we traded more than one hundred dollars’ worth of cards, each. Bill didn’t let on that he’d fleeced me until the Hall of Fame balloting was announced, at which point the Carew tripled in value.

***

Not even the drizzle that fell on us could dampen the pleasure we took in defacing the baseball cards we’d bought that fall day. Jeff, my fellow Pirates hater, and I wandered the neighborhood between the card shop and the middle school, looking for ways to abuse the Pirates. We swished Quinones in a puddle, rubbed out Heaton’s face against a tree. We tried to peel the gloss off of Don Slaught’s card. Ecstatic over the damage, we sought constantly to one-up each other, even stopping before a pile of dog shit, daring each other to go for it. Neither of us did.

The four of us would drift apart midway through high school. I went in one direction—band geek—while Justin became a jock, and Bill and Jeff accumulated AP credits as quickly as the school began offering the classes. Our card collecting days would soon be behind us, and in retrospect, it seems like that loss of interest foreshadowed this increasing distance. Without the connection forged by this shared hobby, we discovered we had less in common than we thought.

But for that one afternoon, we convened near the soccer goalposts and dropped into crouches to compare the damage we’d visited upon those innocent cards. We laid them out like gamblers who’d gone All In with four aces. This reveal was anti-climactic, to say the least. We’d all thoroughly defaced our hated rivals. But so what? I couldn’t articulate an answer at the time. Now, I see this as the beginning of the end for our friendship. Destroying baseball cards was good fun at the time, but it divided us into sects, fandoms, asserting warring identities independent of the larger group. Soon, I would become the remainder, the leftover that kept the equation from coming out perfectly. But in that moment, as the rain picked up, we all agreed to leave the cards in the grass, adding yet another insult, and raced for Justin’s house a block away. We had homework to complete before our moms arrived and took us in separate directions.

As we ran up the hill, I kept my head down. The sidewalk contained more cracks than any of the cards we’d demolished. A massive oak’s roots had split an entire segment of concrete, which I attempted to leap over, unconvinced that I could stick the landing on such a wet day. I made it in stride, though I realized when I looked around that I was lagging behind. My friends’ shirts stuck to their backs, as I could feel mine doing as well. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull even.   

Matthew Duffus is the author of two full length works, the novel Swapping Purples for Yellows and story collection Dunbar’s Folly, and of the poetry chapbook Problems of the Soul and Otherwise. He can be found online at matthewduffus.com and on Twitter at @DuffusMatthew.