Screw it all I'm doing is writing about baseball cards

We used to drop in on small shops, low squat buildings that used to be dentist offices or old hotels. The parking lots never had more than eight or so spaces, concrete blocks watched over intently by old trees still held onto by old wooden sticks from their misspent youth. We'd duck in the double doors, never clear on the push or pull, and talk with old men in beards and glasses over glass cases that we'd later, and with much less intensity pick out rings for our wives, cases filled with cards, arbitrary prices scribbled in the corner. We'd talk over the cost, wander in off the street to gawk, just to get a feel. Sometimes we'd buy things, packs usually, and then open them feverishly in the parking lot. We subscribed to Becket Monthly. We watched our little Ken Griffey Jr. card go from 15 dollars to 180 in a matter of three or so years. We were making money.

It was in these giddy years, the early nineties, that we were all making a killing on baseball cards. We'd go to card shows and sell them old Bob Gibson's for a hundred bucks. Everyone was making money. We didn't ask ourselves if it was wrong that the three dollar cards of our youth were now going for thirty, we just hoarded more of them, gathering our wealth in the pictures of our heroes. Though, to be fair, as time went by the relationship became a bit more vexed. This is pre-fantasy sports mind you. But we were the original fantasy sports players. We knew that if Bonilla went for 35 homeruns that our card could be worth five dollars more. In retrospect, we all wish Jr. had taken steroids and destroyed Aaron's record like Bond did. We'd have made a killing, hell, even the ubiquitous fleer card could have been worth something. We started buying packs of Score, trusting Donruss, it was all gold.

And then the market crashed. We should have seen it coming. We had to know that the deals we'd been making in those small shops, always empty of natural light, in back rooms and back alleys could not last forever. Camelot was gone. Just like that our cards all started dropping in each month's Beckett. Our fortune had been built upon a lie. Roberto Alomar wasn't even a first ballot hall of Famer, how could we have thought his rookie card was worth seventeen dollars? What were we thinking? Investing all those hours we could have spent playing video games or working on our jump shot just frittering away over cards? We were going to sell boxes of them to pay for college. We were all going to be rich and retire and buy small islands off the coast of Spain.

It had all gone wrong, and we saw that we had only ourselves to blame. We knew those shifty eyed guys in the old apartment building had been selling us magic beans that would never grow, but we didn't want to admit it to ourselves. We wanted to believe that a Billy Ripken bat that said fu--face on it was going to put us through our first year at Ivy. That we were going to sleep with Jose Canseco's under our pillows and wait for the card fairy to bring us piles of cash. That's why anyone who traded cards in the early nineties should have seen this coming. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.