All the Old Haunts (12 page)

“Holy smokes,” your uncle marvels.
“That
bastard? You actually went to that card show for this, huh?” He pretends, like a lot of people in Boston, to hate, or at least not care about, Bill Russell, who is famous for hating, or not caring much for, Boston. “I heard they had to pay him two million damn dollars just to come back here for two lousy card shows,” he says with obvious disgust. But he doesn’t let go of the ball. He stares and stares into it, turning it around in his hands, as if he’s reading his future or his past in there. He shakes his head and mutters something about watching, as a kid, Russell eating Chamberlain alive. Then he offers you one hundred dollars for the ball.

You take your ball back with a silent knowing smile. You feel the power and satisfaction, exactly the same rush as blocking a shot, swatting it ten rows up into the stands, you are sure. You get a little crazy with cockiness and attempt a dribble on the kitchen tiles as you head out. You bounce it off your instep then chase it down the hall feeling stupid, tall and stupid.

Your father does not get the autographed picture of Patrick Ewing you ask him to get at the game, even though his brother, your uncle, explains the whole Russell-Ewing historical continuum. Your father just doesn’t get it. Oh, he
gets
Russell, and he
gets
Ewing. What he doesn’t get is the whole “autograph thing,” the “collectibles thing,” the thing where a big healthy kid can reach
over
the protective fence around the players’ parking lot at Fenway Park to get a hat signed by Mo Vaughn, but that same kid could not learn to grab a rebound. Couldn’t even rebound. “Even Manute Bol catches a rebound once in a while, for god’s sake,” he points out.

You have two jobs to pay for your hobby. That’s what they call it in Beckett’s magazines, the Hobby. You are a Hobbyist, or a collector. Football isn’t a sport, it’s a Hobby. There are two slants to every article—what a player’s achievement means to the game, and what it means to the Hobby. You, you are a most dedicated Hobbyist, paying for it all by shoveling snow and cutting grass, and by working in, of course, a card shop. You long ago lost contact with the other stuff, the game.

Vic owns the shop, the Grand Slam. “Listen, kid,” he says after sizing you up in about thirty seconds. He always calls you something diminutive—kid, boy, junior—as he looks straight up at you. “Listen kid, the shop, it don’t mean nothin’, understand? It’s a front. I mean, it ain’t illegal or nothin’, but it ain’t a real store, neither. The real business goes on back there,” he points to his little cubbyhole computer setup in back. “That’s where I work on the sports net. I’m hooked up to every desperate memorabilia-minded loser in all of North America, Europe, and Japan. But you gotta run a store to belong to the on-line. So this,” he points to the glass counter he’s leaning on, like a bakery case only filled with cards, “is where you will work. All you gotta do is look big, look kinda like an athlete, cause my customers like that, they like to feel like they’re dealing with a honest-to-god washed-up old pro or somebody who almost coulda been somebody. You can do that.”

You assure him that you can.

“Talk a good game, boy,” Vic said that first day and many days since. “Talk a good game and the whole world’ll buy in.”

Buy in. You know buy in. You’re in, way in. Your dad hasn’t been in your bedroom, not once, in three years, so he doesn’t know about your achievements. Your mother has, so she does. She’s the only one who does.

She does the cleaning, and all that polishing. The caretaking and the secret keeping.

“Check it out, kid,” Vic calls from the back of the store.
“The Hockey News.
Classifieds. Ken Dryden, okay?
The
Ken Dryden. Probably the best money goalie of all time. He’s in here begging for a mint-condition Bobby Orr 1966 rookie card. Says he
has
to have it. Practically he’s cryin’ right here in the
Hockey News.
Look, you can see his little tears ….”

Vic is at the safe now. The squat safe he keeps under his desk. He keeps all the really big items, his personal stock, in the safe. Whenever he has a chance, Vic cracks open the safe to show what he has that somebody else wants.

Ken Dryden. 1970–71 O-Pee-Chee rookie card, three hundred dollars.

“There,” Vic says, placing the tissue-wrapped, wax-paper-folded card on the counter. He slides it out of the wrapping. It is pristine, like it’s fresh out of a pack. “Poor Kenny Dryden has to have this. He’s offering ten thousand dollars for this. Kid, you know what I say to Ken Dryden? I say get a life, Ken Dryden, or get yourself another ten grand. Cause I ain’t even picking up the damn phone on this card for less than twenty thousand dollars.”

You’ve seen this all before. You’ve seen the card, seen the posturing, heard the patter. It is the closest Vic ever gets to emotional. Bobby Orr is the only thing that does it.

“I was gonna
be
Bobby Orr, y’know, kid. You have no idea what it was like, growin’ up around here in them days. It was
crazy.
The guy meant so much to me … so much to everybody. I just swore, you just swore, that he could do absolutely anything. Final game of the playoffs, Bruins down 4–0 with a minute to go. I just knew, you just knew, that Orr was gonna pot those five goals in that last minute and make
my
life so perfect ….”

And you’ve seen the daze before, too. Vic gently wraps up his precious card and mumbles. “Musta spent five solid years pretending I was him …”

“So what happened?” you ask, trying to get him back.

“What happened. What happened was I grew up. Orr didn’t score the five goals, and I grew up.”

“Card means a lot to you, huh?” you ask.

He doesn’t look back at you as he returns to the safe. He holds the card daintily between thumb and middle finger, raising it over his head. “Ya, it means a hell of a lot. It means a nice new car for Vic. Some loser’s gonna come up on the computer one day and pay the bill.”

You hear that a lot, too. Vic talking back to the computer. Loser. Chump. Fool. Rube. “There are exactly two types of people in this game,” he said. “Businessmen and fools. The businessmen sell memories to the fools who don’t have nothin’ else.”

He is explaining this, adding one more coat of shellac to your shell, when she comes in.

“Manon Rheaume,” is all she says. You don’t exactly hear her because Vic is ranting and you are staring.

“Manon Rheaume, she repeats. “Do you have her card?”

“Uh … how ’bout some Gretzky? We have a rare …”

You go into your spiel, pushing the stock of Wayne Gretzky items like Vic said to: “That guy hasn’t done anything for years. What’s he win lately, the Lady Byng trophy? Ohhh, please. Only us Hobbyists keepin’ his career alive. He’s like a bug with his head pulled off, he keeps wigglin’, but it ain’t exactly life.”

“I don’t want any Gretzky,” she says. “I want Manon Rheaume, and only Manon Rheaume. If you don’t have her, just say so and I’ll go someplace else.”

“No, no, wait,” you say, finally registering. You don’t want her to leave. You don’t get that many customers in the store during the week. You don’t get many girls. You don’t get many beautiful girls who are six feet two.

“Sure we have Manon,” you say, pulling out a drawer. “Manon is hot.” You meant it in more ways than one. Manon Rheaume is the first woman to play in the NHL, a goalie. She’s much prettier than the average hockey player and one card even has her lying belly-down in a come-on picture pose that has never before appeared on a sports card to your knowledge. You prayed no one would come in and buy it.

But she does. She makes a grunt of disgust when she comes across the cheesecake picture, but she buys out all six different Rheaume cards. And the poster where she looks like a real goalie, and the back issue of
Beckett’s Hockey Monthly
with her on the cover.

“You a Hobbyist?” you ask.

She laughs. “No, I’m a feminist.”

“Me too,” you say, though you have no business saying it.

“Do tell?” You make her laugh again. You find that it’s easy to make her laugh, and you want to keep doing it.

“Do you play hoop?” you ask, and she stops laughing. It seemed a natural enough question, and one of the few things you felt capable of discussing. But you should have known better.

“Yes, I play it,” she sighed heavily, “but I don’t discuss it.”

Your mind makes little crackling noises as she starts backing away from the counter and you desperately search for a new topic. “You have grass?” you blurt.

“Pardon me?”

“I do that. My other job. Cutting grass. Or shoveling snow, but I figure you don’t have any snow to shovel in July so I figured I would ask, if you had grass. To cut. He lets me, Vic, ask people, if they need yard work. Nothing personal.”

Her smile comes back, and your palpitating slows. “You know, if I talked to you on the phone, I’d have known how tall you were.”

You don’t have to ask, because you know exactly what she means. You slide your own card, a business card your mother had made up for your birthday, across the counter. MVP YARD WORK it reads, with your name and number and a silhouette of a little man pushing a mower.

She takes it. “We have grass,” she says. “But I cut it.” She puts your card into the stack with the Rheaume cards. “But I’ll keep this, for the collection. Maybe it’ll wind up valuable someday when you’re a big somebody.” She waves and leaves.

“Don’t waste your time,” Vic yells after listening to the whole thing. “She’s a brute. Looks like that Russian basketball freak.”

He is wrong. She is lovely.

“For me? Are you sure?” You ask. Your mother is grinning with excitement when she hands you the phone.

“Well, like I said, I don’t need your services, but I told my next-door neighbor about you, and he’d like you to come by and, if you’re cheap enough, do his yard.”

You thank her, take down the address, then lay awake all night thinking about what to wear. You are so nervous that you get out of bed at five
A.M.
and start ripping open all your packs of Upper Deck Collector’s Choice cards. The 1994 series contains a bunch of prize cards in which you can win shirts and hats and pictures, but that is nothing. You want the grand prize—getting your picture on Junior Griffey’s 1995 Collector’s Choice card, where you will be right there inside the package for all the world to rip open and see. You have been pacing yourself at a pack a day, just to have a little something for the summer days, but this morning you break out. After twenty-five packs and no winner, you quit.

Though it is hot out, high eighties, you wear sweats to cut the grass. Bulky sweats. You wear them because they are beautiful and well cut with the logo and breezy tropical colors of the Florida Marlins. They give you the illusion of size, as opposed to the reality of just height. The illusion of fluid motion, that sleek fish cutting through the surf, as opposed to the reality of robotic jangling elbows and clomping flat feet.

You wear it because you figure she’ll be watching, and she is. Part of the time sitting on the steps, part of the time walking alongside as you push the man-powered old mower over the quarter-acre lot. She makes small talk, mostly about you and your jobs and your independence, which she envies. She may notice, but she makes no mention of the sweat running down your face all over. She sweats, but neatly, a bubbly glistening contained on her lip and brow.

You try not to, but you do occasionally steal a glance sideways to look at her, talking and moving at the same time, gesturing even, comfortable with it all, with those long long legs loping along serenely like a giraffe. Through the fog of the heat vapors rising and the perspiration falling from the tips of your eyelashes you look and you want to get to her. To reach out your spidery arms, which aren’t good for a great many things but which could certainly reach from here and bring her in closer. You know it’s unreasonable, you know it’s very soon yet, and you know you don’t actually do that sort of thing, you know all that. You want to do it just the same. You don’t, of course.

You finish your work, frothy as a farm beast, drench yourself with the hose, and collect your pay.

She invites you. Across the lawn, with its fresh clippings sticking to the black leather sneakers you wear for the same reason fat people wear black shirts. The smell of the cut grass is a bit of a revival, filling your head, giving you the feeling as it always does, that something has been done, that something is improved in your wake. She offers you a Jolt cola or a Gatorade, your choice, and you say that both together sounds like a good idea.

As you sit on the upturned wheelbarrow in her driveway sipping your drinks, she absently scoops up a basketball and dribbles it. Then she flicks her wrist and the ball clangs off the rim mounted above the garage door. She chases it down and lays it in. She takes it back out fifteen feet, wheels, and drops the shot.

You watch her for a while and enjoy it like you’ve never enjoyed basketball before. Because it’s not quite basketball. You watch it the way you figure people watch ice-dancing. She is grace, all her moves just one long continuous extension of all her other moves. She shoots with one hand, the other hand, both hands. She looks like the Statue of Liberty for a second, then like Gregory Hines splitting in midair. Even when she misses she looks good, rebounding with an explosive two-step and putting the ball back up while she’s still in the air.

“Twenty-one?” she asks mischievously, squeezing the ball with her elbows pointed straight out in either direction.

You turn and look down the driveway behind you, to see who she’s talking to. When you find no one you turn back to see her grinning, pointing at you, with the ball on her hip now.

You first shudder. But now you’ve got the Jolt in you, and the Gatorade. And you’re at least four inches taller than her.

“Take that sweatshirt off at least, will you? You’re going to die right here in my driveway.”

You laugh, but there’s no way you are going to take off your shirt in front of her. “It’s not so bad,” you say, and push up your sleeves to the elbows.