Cards

The kid's name was Drew, so we sort of had that in common. As I recall he had an uncommonly flat face, a large blocky forehead centered around a nose so flat that Columbus would have sailed right off the damn thing. I think he was five. It's hard to remember. I may have been seven. I hadn't yet started to comb my hair, so it just kind of sat atop my head like an ill-constructed rat's nest. I wasn't fond of showering.

My mother was renting a house for herself and the three of us kids. We lived next door to people who turned out to be distant relatives of ours. They had a large RV that was always parked on the cul-de-sac. The point is, we were renters, single parent family with three kids.

That's why the strange part of my memory of Drew is that I had somehow conceived of his family being beneath ours, and I'm not sure how that's possible. My mom did the best she could, but we certainly didn't wake up and practice cotillion before eating poached eggs. Most mornings I'd curl up over the heater on the floor in an old blanket and let it fill with hot air. We were a bit removed from the upper class.

That's why I'm not sure at all why I thought this flat-faced kid was beneath me. I have two guesses. One, perhaps his father smoked, and I conceived of this as some sort of mark that they lacked class. This may or may not be true. My father smoked, not often, and I didn't conceive of him as being low class, so this may be entirely untrue. I remember that he drove a truck.

Okay, I've got three. The second is that I conceived of dads who drove big trucks around as a low class since my primary influence was my best friend's dad who drove a pretty awesome sports car and who was a doctor. Perhaps I'd unwittingly slipped in some class markers with all the time I'd spent at their house.

The third, and most likely, is that he was younger and I'm a grifter at heart. I mean, when you're seven a five year old is vast marks down on the totem pole of intelligence, and I don't think the flatness was helping his cause. Anyhow, I loved baseball cards. Specifically, I loved to trade baseball cards, and I remember sitting in Drew's room, shaggy brown carpet, boxed window, dust motes, and sitting down with his cards and mine and whispering like the devil in his ear.

"I'm going to cut you a deal," I'd tell him, selecting out one of his best cars, Bobby Bonilla or Gary Sheffield, and we're talking more like Upper Deck or Fleer Ultra type stuff, not Donruss, and I'd convince him that though it pained me to do it I'd trade him several Garth Iorg's for one Bobby Bonilla. I don't think I fleeced him entirely. Rather, I generally included a Wally Joyner type guy in the deal who hadn't really ever amounted to anything. And as we spent the afternoon dealing cards I felt the spirit moving in me, commerce, I was born for this.

The point is that I sort of ripped him off, which was considered fair game in trading cards, and that's why I was surprised when his dad showed up on our front porch later that day and asked for Drew's cards back in exchange for mine. It violated all sorts of ethical codes of card trading as well as how one should properly go about raising one's children. If he was dumb enough to trade them then they were rightfully mine. However, his truck driving dad didn't see it that way, and this just confirmed for me that I had been right about the whole family. They were low class. Who would do such a thing?

I stopped hanging out with Drew shortly thereafter. It's tough to be friends with a kid who is two years younger than you anyway, especially one who's family no doubt makes more than yours, but who you have somehow conceived of as lower class. You see, I've been a snob my whole life, even when I didn't have any right to it just like I didn't have any right to those Fleer Ultra Bobby Bonilla's. And as Drew's father left with those baseball cards in his meaty left hand, our crab apple tree making shadows on the long strip of driveway I knew, just like I knew in that dusty room that I'd done something wrong. But the feeling of those cards in their little plastic holders is so sweet. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Very little, I suppose. But, what good will it be for a man if he gains a Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card, yet forfeits his soul? Ephemeral though it may be, some.