Ultimate Sports (28 page)

The lights were on inside his house, but he didn’t go in. “Is your father waiting up for you?” I knew my father was going to kill me. Vicik just shrugged.

We walked along the edge of the curb, talking a little. I kept waiting for him to say he was going in, so I could leave. He kept talking, telling jokes. He sat down on his steps, leaning forward with his head in his hands. He stopped talking.

“What’s the matter?” I said. He shook his head.

Finally, I couldn’t stay another second. “I’m going,” I
said. I knew I was letting him down, but I couldn’t help it. When I looked back, I saw him go into his house. I didn’t know why, but I went back and stood on the sidewalk and looked in the window. I saw a man. He looked like Vicik, only bigger. I saw him push Vicik against the wall. Vicik fell back. He didn’t raise his hand. He didn’t defend himself. He stood with his back to the wall, his eyes on his father. When his father swung at him he ducked, and ducked again, but his father kept hitting him.

I ran all the way home. There was no traffic, nobody on the streets. When I got to my building, I took off my shoes and went up the stairs like a burglar. I turned my key in the lock and slipped inside. Then stood there, just inside the door, listening. I didn’t hear anything but my own breathing.

Where were they? What if they were gone? It was the same thought I scared myself with sometimes when I woke up in the middle of the night. What if they said, Enough! They were sick of waiting for me, sick of my games, sick of trying to make me be good.

Then I heard something from the living room, where they sleep. Something moving, something big and dark, and creeping toward me. “Who’s there?” It was white and big, and in the doorway. A ghost wearing white underwear.

“What are you doing?” my father said.

“Nothing.”

“What are you standing by the door for?”

“I’m not.” I laughed. It was dumb to laugh. I should have been sorry. Made an excuse.
There was an accident
.…
We had to go to the hospital
…
and the police station
….

“You’re laughing? You come home at this time and you’re laughing?”

From the other room, my mother called, “Don’t get excited.”

My father held the alarm clock. “You see what time it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s twelve on the clock. What were you doing till twelve o’clock?”

“Playing Johnny on the Pony.”

“With horses, you play with horses at twelve o’clock?”

“We’re
the horses, Pop. It’s only a game.”

He sat down. “You’re a horse now? What kind of game is that?”

“It’s teams, Pop. It’s like tug-of-war. It’s fun.”

For a long time he sat there, rocking forward and back with the clock in his lap. “A game.” He repeated it several times, rocking back and forth.

“Gonif,” he said, finally. “American gonif.” American thief. “In this country, you can get away with anything.” Then he told me to go to bed, and I did.

Handball was Harry Mazer’s favorite sport when he was a kid—one-wall handball against the side of buildings, until the city built six courts in his New York neighborhood. After school and on Saturday mornings he lived at those handball courts, he says. He played four-wall handball for years, until he dislocated his thumb and switched to racquetball. After tearing his ankle a few years ago, he reports, he only “plays catch and throws rocks and hard green apples at signposts” near his home in central New York State. “I love throwing things,” he admits.

He also enjoys writing novels for teenagers, something he has been doing for nearly twenty-five years, starting with
Guy Lenny
, a story about a boy who lives with his divorced father.
Snowbound
, a winter survival story that was made into an NBC television movie, remains one of his most popular books. Among his other novels are
The War on Villa Street, The Dollar Man, When the Phone Rang, The Island Keeper, The Last Mission
, and
Someone’s Mother Is Missing
. Romance plays a role in several of Mazer’s novels, including
I Love Tou, Stupid!, The Girl of His Dreams
, and
City Light
. With his wife, Norma Fox Mazer, he has published
The Solid Gold Kid
, which the American Library Association named one of the 100 Best of the Best Books for Young Adults published between 1967 and 1992;
Heartbeat;
and
Bright Days, Stupid Nights
. His most recent novel,
Who Is Eddie Leonard?
, is about a boy who believes Eddie is not his real name and that the Leonards are not his real family.

“Falling off the Empire State Building,” Mazer says, was inspired by the recent death of a neighborhood boy he knew in childhood. “He was a good athlete, and like all the really gifted, physically, he seemed to live in a state of grace, like a prince, relaxed and easy. Nothing got him excited and he never got mad. He was so good, an ideal person… somebody to admire.”

You
were not born into physical greatness and all the love and worship and happiness that are guaranteed with it. But fortunately you were born American. So you can
buy
into it.

You have Paul Molitor’s special rookie card from 1978. Who knew he’d be such a monster when he got to be thirty-seven years old? Alan Trammell’s on the same card. Again, who knew? Those two could just as easily have wound up like the other two rookie shortstops on the card, U. L. Washington and Mickey Klutts. Mickey Klutts? Was he a decoy? A you-can-do-it-too inspiration for the millions of Mickey Kluttses in the world?

So nobody knew, which is good for you. You got it at a yard sale, along with a thousand other cards that some scary old lady was dumping. Her scary old man had died. As far as she was concerned, he’d taken all the cards’ value with him. She didn’t know. Bet there was a lot more she didn’t know.

You have complete sets of National Hockey League
cards from everybody for the last three seasons. Fleer, Topps, O-Pee-Chee, Pinnacle, Leaf, and Upper Deck.
Two
sets of each, in fact, one you open and look at, one that stays sealed in the closet to retain its value because you’re not stupid. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not stupid. Hockey, understand, is the wave. That’s where it’s at for the future, collectiblewise.

Anything that has Eric Lindros’s picture on it, or his signature, or his footprint, you own it. Big ol’ Eric Lindros. You own him.

Ditto Frank Thomas. Big ol’ Frank Thomas. You own him.

You just don’t own you. Because you’re not going to be on any card. Because you have to be on a team first, and you’re not going to be on any team, are you? Six inches. You were so close. “You’re a good kid, boy, and you busted your ass harder than anybody who’s ever tried out for me, no lie. If you were just six inches taller, you’d have made that final cut for the jayvee.”

You’re six feet six inches tall. Thanks, Coach.

When you’re six feet six inches tall, everybody asks you, “You playin’ any ball, kid?” If you cannot answer yes to that question, looking the way you do, you let everybody down. It’s like asking an old man, “So how’ve you been?” and he answers, “No good. Prostate’s blown to hell. Incontinent. Impotent. Death’s door.” You bring everybody down.

You can’t do that. Bring everybody down. Because even though they don’t know it, when you bring them down, you bring you down. Only lower. You always go lower down than everybody else. Where no one else goes, where no one else knows. So you learn. You go around the whole thing.

“So, you playin’ any hoops?” your uncle asks when he comes by to take his brother, your father, to the Celtics-Knicks game. You don’t answer yes, you don’t answer no. You smile sagely, nod, and hold up a wait-right-here finger to your uncle with the beer and the electric green satin Celtics jacket. You go to your room and come back with a ball. The ball is a regular $20 basketball with a $295 Bill Russell autograph on it.

“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 $100 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,” your father points out.

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. 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 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.