You have two jobs to pay for your hobby. That’s what they call it in Beckett 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/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 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 care-taking 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, $300.
“There,” Vic says, placing the tissue-wrapped, wax-paper-enfolded 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 four-nothin’ 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 says. “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 foot two.
“Sure we have Manon,” you say, pulling out a drawer. “Manon is hot.” You mean 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 pose that has never before appeared on a sports card to your knowledge. You’ve 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 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,” she says.
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. Y
our 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 lie 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 of hers loping along serenely like a giraffe’s. 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.
First you shudder. But 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.
She offers to let you have first possession. You decline. You are the man, after all. And you don’t want first possession. She shrugs, takes the ball, doesn’t move her feet at all as she floats a shot over your head. It doesn’t go in, but by the time you’ve turned to see, she’s already blown by, picked up the ball, and rolled it in.
She takes it out again, dribbles to her right. You keep your hands up. That’s all you know, keep your hands up like a human letter Y and keep yourself between her and the hoop. Desperately you try to do that, but you can’t manage to sidestep, sidestep, and you wind up running awkwardly cross-body, foot over foot. You manage the small victory of not falling, but watch as she passes directly under the basket to come up for a reverse layup on the other side.
She cannot believe you are as bad as this so she laughs, thinking you are toying. You laugh along, dropping your hands. As soon as you do, she races by. You chase. She stops short. You fly past. She pulls up and banks an easy jumper.
She’s into double figures and your Florida Marlins sweats with the leaping fish are soaked by the time she seems to gather that you have nothing. Nothing. You don’t laugh anymore, don’t smile. You try like hell. Only halfway through a game neither one of you wants to finish. But she’s kind enough not to offer, and you’re stupid enough not to quit. You sweep at the ball and actually tick it, knocking it out of her hands. She doesn’t chase, and you get it. You are an impossible twenty feet from the basket, but you heave the ball from where you are. Air ball, of course, and she looks irritated that you did it.
She stands practically in your shoes as she squares up to take the midrange jumper. You are looming over her, the shot begging to be blocked. If there is one thing you should be able to do, this is that thing. She goes up, you go up. You can see the ball, you can see your outstretched hand, you can see her outstretched hand as the ball leaves it.
It has always been this way. It has never mattered whether the shooter was a foot shorter, or could not jump, or didn’t even try to jump. It’s as if there is just something, something about trajectory, something about time, that everyone else knows but that you do not. You have never arrived at that point in the air at the same time that the ball has. Never.
What you need here is a cold-blooded killer, someone willing to stick the dagger in, twist it, beat you soundly and quickly. What you have, unfortunately, is a girl with a heart. She tries to joke again, but the pity is clear on her face and in her game. As she creeps toward twenty-one, she tries mightily to get you some points. She dribbles the ball off her foot, expertly booting it right into your hands. You fire up another brick. She hauls in the rebound out of instinct, but stands flat-footed and lets you take it away from her. It is a gimme, but you panic and roll it off the rim.
“Why didn’t you just stick it, for God’s sake?” she yells, angry like a coach. She’s mad at having to work harder for your points than for her own. “You’re that close to the hoop with the ball in your hands, you jam it in. It’s not even regulation height.”
Out of her exasperation come more baskets. A bank shot, a hook shot, a short baseline jumper—all rain right over your head. It feels better than the charity, though.
She needs only one basket to finish it, to skunk you finally, a shutout. “Don’t forget, gotta win by two,” she says, a tired smile relighting her game face. She dribbles once behind her back, between her legs, to her right, to her left. By most standards, she is not a great ballhandler, very shaky and off-balance with the showtime moves that seem unnatural to her. But you can’t touch her.
Suddenly
for no good reason she pulls up from long range. She doesn’t penetrate at all, which she has already proven is easy enough to do. Instead she lets it fly, from three- or four- or five-point land. A line drive, a bullet. You turn to watch the shot ricochet off the front of the rim and bounce all the way straight out to you. She hasn’t moved for the hoop, so there you are with the ball and nothing but air between you and the basket.
You put the ball on the floor. It works once. You bounce if successfully a second time, then manage a third, fourth, fifth consecutive off-balance dribble as you lumber toward the hoop.
If you were alone, you would have taken some small pride in having come within five feet of the basket before having the ball trail off harmlessly in one direction while you and your empty hands go flailing off in another.
You don’t try to talk to her as you angle off the side of the driveway, across her front yard, toward home. You stare straight ahead and compulsively keep pushing your sleeves back up. They slide back down over your forearms; you push them back up.
“It’s not important, you know,” she says from right behind you. You don’t want to hear it. She comes up alongside, locked into step with you, the two of you marching along like a pair of string-bean soldiers. She marches and swings her hands, a little comedy, as she tries to catch your eyes with hers. You see her clearly in your peripheral view, but you will not turn.
“Realty,” she says, “I really don’t think it’s a big deal. I beat guys all the time. We’re not all athletes, you know.”
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