Sadly, none of the Twins has ever appeared in South Brook in full uniform to deliver the mail or fix the furnace because these gods all spend their off-seasons in sunny places with exotic names like Jupiter, Florida, and Surprise, Arizona, and Rancho Cucamonga, California.
In every other respect the men on the fronts of the cards—to judge by the backs of their cards—have interests that align exactly with ours, beginning with baseball but not ending there. Like us, Mike Cuellar “likes the comics.” George Theodore “likes marshmallow milkshakes.” Jim Holt of the Twins “enjoys watching television.” Tom Paciorek “has a great appetite for hamburgers.” Walt “No Neck” Williams’s “hobby is drawing.” Ernie McNally’s hobby “is being out-of-doors.” And the back of Hal Lanier’s baseball card says, simply, “Hal collects baseball cards.”
Only I don’t really collect baseball cards. I have about a dozen guys no one has ever heard of standing at attention in a Velveeta box in my closet, but when I brought them to Kevin’s house one day, his sister Pam’s boyfriend looked at mine and casually dismissed them before gazing in exaggerated wonder and phony astonishment at Kevin’s collection, in an obvious effort to ingratiate himself with Pam.
Kevin’s sister is a cheerleader at Lincoln. Every kid in South Brook will go to Lincoln, which has the same green-and-gold colors as the Oakland A’s. We all want to wear Adidas Roms because the three stripes are Lincoln green. It’s difficult to say if it’s the 48-degree chill or something else causing the goose bumps when the Lincoln cheerleaders chant at hockey games, “Lin-coln Bears, we’re for you! I say Ah-ah, ooh-ooh!”
And, “We got the spirit. Yes, we do! We got the spirit. How ’bout…you?!”
My brother Jim will be going to Lincoln in a year. He’s thirteen now, and left-handed, with a dark red Afro that makes him more like Rod Carew than the rest of us combined. He’s a dominant baseball pitcher, has a terrifying slap shot, and will soon be playing varsity hockey, football, and baseball for the Bears as well as setting the school’s all-time record in the bench press, a skill he has honed on the little Sears weight set in the basement. He easily pins Tom or me to the floor, kneeling on my wet-shoelace biceps while drooling onto me or administering the 99 Bump. If we give him any fight-back or lip, he says “You have made a grievous error” and redoubles his tortures.
To any question I ask, Jim usually replies “You writing a book?” Or he answers with another question of his own: “Does your face hurt? ’Cuz it’s killing me.” Any declarative sentence is met with “Wanna cookie?” Or “Wanna medal, or a chest to pin it on?” If I tell him I got a hit in my baseball game, he’ll say “You’re my hero.”
Jim’s “the man of the house” when Dad’s away, as Dad often is. Like the monster on the Dixie Riddle Cup, the best way to talk to my father is long distance.
Dad comes home from Los Angeles one summer night in 1974 and—evidently caught short at the airport or gas station—he pulls from his briefcase a hastily purchased present. It’s a three-pack of 1974 Topps cards in a cellophane wrapper, forty-two cards in all. Through the first windowpane I see the horizontal action image of Dodgers first baseman Steve Garvey. In a single act of God I have tripled my baseball card collection, and my first thought is to find Pam Sundem’s boyfriend and see him try to dismiss this titanic assembly of today’s superstars. Vida Blue! Joe Morgan! Rodney Cline Carew!
They all go into the Velveeta box, which I keep separate from my football cards. The football cards came with a Parker Brothers game called Pro Draft, in which players try to assemble the best starting offensive lineup from the eleven football cards they select in a “draft.” There are two Vikings among the dozens of cards: Chuck Foreman and Milt Sunde. Milt Sunde is from Bloomington and went to Lincoln High when it was still called Bloomington High School. His last name is pronounced “Sunday,” which is a bottomless source of fascination to me. An NFL player named Sunday is like a priest named Sunday. Better still, Milt Sunde’s dad has an appliance repair shop across from Nativity. Though I never say anything to Mom, I live in silent hope that she’ll one day bring our toaster in for repair and maybe the Vikings guard will be there visiting his dad, and I can meet him.
But this is an impossible dream, because the Minnesota Vikings, unlike the workaday men on the baseball cards, do not walk among us. They are colossi with steaming breath and smoldering Afros who retreat to some frozen fortress of solitude when they’re not smashing one another in the mouth with what Dad always calls—with an admiration born of having played the game—a “forearm shiver.” Then he slaps his right forearm into the palm of his left hand. The resulting sound—a slap that goes off like a gunshot—is terrifying and induces in me a different kind of shiver.
I wake up on a Saturday morning in August to five bracing hours of television. Starting at seven with The Hair Bear Bunch, I sit Indian-style five feet from the screen through Yogi’s Gang; Scooby-Doo; Inch High, Private Eye; Goober and the Ghost Chasers; Sigmund and the Sea Monsters; The Pink Panther; The Jetsons; and Fat Albert, until the lunch whistle of Billy Preston singing “Nothin’ from Nothin’” on American Bandstand reminds me that it’s noon.
The Minneapolis Tribune Sports section sits rumpled and already read on the kitchen table. The Twins beat the Orioles last night on two doubles by Steve Brye. The Royals beat the Brewers for Steve Busby’s seventeenth win. Cubs catcher Steve Swisher turned twenty-three. Steve Mizerak was attempting to win his fifth straight U.S. Open Pocket Billiards Championship in Chicago. As I read this over a bowl of Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries, after ten consecutive television shows, the lesson is clear: there has never been a better time in human history to be young and sports obsessed and named Steve.
The front section of the Trib—the wrapper that keeps the Sports section dry on our driveway—is devoted almost entirely to yesterday’s resignation of President Nixon. The president was on every channel last night, smiling and waving as he boarded a helicopter. He looked happy. Whatever Watergate was—whatever this long-running series on TV and radio was all about—it’s apparently over, and Nixon evidently won. He’s heading to California now, to the land of The Brady Bunch, Adam-12, Emergency!, The Carol Burnett Show, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, The Streets of San Francisco, Sanford and Son, and every game show on which every contestant is from West Covina or Oxnard or San Clemente, where Nixon’s going. I envy him, going to California, to be with the Beach Boys, as my Endless Summer draws to an end.