Memoir
Juice and Cookies
Exerpt from "Brat: How my generation ruined everything"
At age nine, I needed something important to do with my life; something I could master and know everything about. I settled on collecting bottle caps. This made sense, because they were on the ground nearly everywhere; people walked right over them all the time. I had a mission. I would retrieve and catalog these discarded artifacts. And someday my knowledge would benefit mankind.
There was a lot to know. I could name a dozen soft drink brands right off the bat, before even getting to the obscure ones, like Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Soda. Soon, I had a collection in the thousands, occupying a large swath of our back porch. They were carefully categorized in rows. The fact that no one else could see any value in them was fine with me. It was my collection.
Then, for no reason, I lost the passion. I looked at my collection and thought, what is this? A bunch of bottle caps. That was it. I threw them away.
Just as well, because around then I discovered baseball cards. A friend tipped me off on where to buy them—a small grocery store a couple of miles from my house. I rode my bike there and found the cards in a cheesy display case near the front counter. Giving my quarter to the clerk, I hurried outside and tore off the wrapper. A stack of so-so players. I was mildly disappointed. Then, there he was: Mickey Mantle. The best of the best. It was an omen. I stuffed the card-shaped sheet of bubble gum in my mouth and rode home, sated. Wait till my friends saw this.
The bubble gum in baseball card packs was always stale, but none of us minded. It was so stiff it usually shattered, and you’d have to pick up the pieces one by one. The cardboard taste reminded me of the cards themselves, so I learned to like it.
Collecting cards was a casual thing till the fifth grade, when I went to a new school. There, I fell in with a group of real collectors. It was like going from gin rummy to high-stakes baccarat: These guys were serious. Every day, they’d bring stacks of cards to school for the mid-morning trading session. Over juice and cookies, we’d barter and haggle. The cards we traded here were good—but not the best. Real pros kept their best trophies at home; they were much too valuable to flaunt in public.
There was a certain etiquette, which was invisible to the uninitiated. Someone interested in, say, my ’56 Roy Campanella would be free to take the card, and handle it — but was not permitted to look at the back. That’s where the manufacturer’s number was, and with that number he could order it directly from Topps Bubble Gum himself. So, the numbers were valued commodities in their own right. Trading numbers became a spinoff activity for the more sophisticated, like trading stock futures or derivatives.
We imagined the people at Topps Bubble Gum as a mysterious band of wise men, zealously guarding the secrets of the universe—especially the card numbers of all the good players. They must have had a good reason for not divulging them, apart from making life difficult for us. Did they know how much we lived and died by their stupid cards?
It would have been shattering to find out the truth: We were nobodies — kids, after all. And theirs was a wholesale business. They couldn't waste time looking up individual cards without a reference number. They probably thought they were doing us a favor, filling our five and ten dollar orders. Instead of the Illuminati, there was some poor stockroom guy filling orders from a thousand twerps like us and waiting for five o'clock to roll around. He wasn't about to look up the card number of a '53 Ted Williams—even if it was a life and death issue to us.
The best part of collecting baseball cards was the window it opened to the past. As I looked at my 1953 Satchell Paige or 1956 Willie Mays, I’d be transported to a mythic time, when players were larger than life, their faces airbrushed like figures out of a storybook. This was the dawn of history, a heroic time, when I had barely been born. I just knew things were better then.
I identified most with Ernie Banks, the great Chicago Cubs shortstop. It was an accident of history; I was the shortstop on our Little League team, so it made sense to take him as a role model.
But there was more to it. Ernie was a great player on a lousy team. That tension and tragedy resonated more than his astonishing home run totals. Banks was famous for his cheerful equanimity in the face of loss. One can only imagine today’s pampered superstars in a predicament like Ernie’s. Their agents would have been on the phone day and night, shopping for a better deal. Ernie’s attitude was summed up in his famous line: “It’s a beautiful day; let’s play two!”
I gazed at his baseball card from 1961—the year after he belted 41 home runs for his hapless Cubs. A serene, sensitive face gazed back. It seemed to say, “Don’t worry, even if you’re in a crummy situation. Just do your best with what you’ve got. It’ll work out alright.”
That I should adopt a black man as my personal hero didn’t seem odd. Indeed, it hadn’t even occurred to me. Ernie and I had a mystical connection. The twinkle in his eye spurred me on. On a hot day, when I was choking on infield dust and watching my Little League team go down to another miserable defeat, Ernie would be there encouraging me. I came to a conviction then which never left me: every kid needs an Ernie Banks.
My fervor for baseball coincided with the cataclysmic American League pennant race of 1961. The Yankees juggernaut was on its way to another league championship, but the real race was between their two sluggers—Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle. Both were hitting home runs at a clip to beat Babe Ruth’s season record. Would one of them reach the fabled 60? Or both of them? As the season wound to its furious close, excitement gave way to ecstasy. We were witnessing something unprecedented, like the coming of the Kingdom of God.
Mantle was golden, a natural athlete who bore his stardom with nonchalant ease. Maris was different, an unlikely hero. For starters, he was from North Dakota—a place which evoked no images whatsoever. He was uncomfortable with the press, given to self-doubt and dark moods. He didn’t look like a superstar; more like someone you’d see loading grain at the feed store.
All this made him especially attractive: he was like us. He just happened to be on a supernatural streak, hitting home runs like a man possessed. As the season wore on, Mantle got sick, allowing Roger Maris to pull ahead. Eventually, Maris broke the record—and just as quickly faded back into ordinariness.
When the World Series arrived, we faced a dilemma: the games were broadcast on the radio, but during school time. This was intolerable. In the end, our problem was solved with the ingenuity of youth, and a razor knife. My friends and I started showing up at school with extra books. These were thick books, impressive ones, not on anyone’s reading list. What no one could see was the hollowed-out space inside the pages, just big enough for a transistor radio. When the teacher launched into a boring lecture, we’d lay our heads down discreetly, and enter a world no one else could see or hear. A faint signal emanating from the innards of an innocent-looking book became our lifeline.
It was a rare triumph for the forces of fun, over the forces of non-fun. Life would take us in different directions after that, but we all tucked that victory away for future reference. You have to take inspiration where you can find it.
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