I Am DB

Do kids still collect baseball cards? I honestly have no idea, but in our digital, wireless world where it seems every toddler has an iPhone and as natural an ability to play video games and browse the web as they do to walk, swallow or breathe, the idea of collecting 4×4 slices of paperboard with player photos and stats seems an antiquated concept. Personally, I was never a baseball card collector. As I’ve said before, I was a weird little kid who lacked the zeal for sports that all red-blooded American boys are supposed to have. Instead, I had movies. But that didn’t leave me without cards of my own to collect. Movies had cards too.

Last year, while visiting my childhood home for what will be the last time before my parents enter semi-retirement and move away, I unearthed a treasure chest from the back of a closet, on a shelf just above the several cardboard tubes filled with movie posters I collected a kid. This treasure chest was in the form of a wine box, and its contents were sweeter than any bottle of Riesling. It contained all the movie cards I still had from my childhood. The loot covered  all three Star Wars movies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dick Tracy, and a few one-offs – a pack of Goonies cards, a lone E.T. card, some Aladdin cards, and a small assortment of Fright Flicks cards, which depicted scenes and creatures from 70’s and 80’s horror movies. These are the remains of one of the primary collecting crazes of my youth. I know that at one time, I also had cards from Tim Burton’s Batman, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Jaws 3-D (complete with 3D glasses); I’m sure I had some from the second and/or third Superman movies, and I definitely had a few from…wait for it…Howard the Duck. (Wow…that’s two Howard the Duck references in as many months! How often does that opportunity present itself?) The closest I ever got to sports cards were my World Wrestling Federation cards (all gone now, sadly), though perhaps the Comic Ball cards – illustrated by Chuck Jones and placing the Looney Tunes characters in various baseball storylines – count as baseball cards. But probably not.

Still, how much of an oddball could I have been? Clearly there was an interest in these items. Somewhere out there, other kids must have also been buying up packs of Who Framed Roger Rabbit cards. God bless ’em, wherever they may be. My favorite neighborhood stores to walk or bike to were the video store and the baseball card shop, which, though dominated by sports cards and memorabilia, still catered to my interests with a healthy section of movie and pop culture cards. (Garbage Pail Kids stickers got an awful lot of my money in those days too.) And no matter what kind of cards you collected, whether it was MLB or Rocky (I had a few of those too), you eventually came up against the same problem: completing the collection.

With most of these cards, there were usually at least two series, distinguished by different colored borders. With Return of he Jedi, for example, there was a 132-card set with red borders, and an 88-card set with blue borders. While I had both, it was the red-bordered set that I came nearest to completing. Problem is, when you would have most of the cards in a series, continuing to buy new packs was a maddening endeavor since you were all but guaranteed a bunch of doubles. With each pack bought and each plastic wrapper peeled back, it was like hoping to find one of Wonka’s Golden Tickets. If you flipped through the eight or ten cards and actually found one of the few you still needed, the elation would nearly match what Charlie Bucket experienced when he finally found his slip of gold, and there was no “Mr. Slugworth” on hand to spoil the triumph.

I remember my mother sending me down to the neighborhood market one day in the summer of 1990 to pick up a carton of milk or something. By that time, I had nearly completed my collection of Dick Tracy cards, and had reached that period where every pack I bought was full of doubles. Tired of throwing my money away, I would try to carefully open the pack in the store, before buying it, to see if it had a card I needed. This, of course, had to be handled discreetly. That day, I delayed the milk to hit the candy and card aisle first. I picked up a pack, and carefully peeled open the back, trying to keep the folds intact so that if I found nothing but the expected duplicates, I could slide them neatly back into place, fold the edges back down and return the pack to the box without anyone being the wiser. Unfortunately, the manager came through from the rear of the store and caught my suspicious behavior. He pointedly asked me if there was something I needed. Caught by surprise, I told him I was fine and proceeded a moment later, after he’d walked on, to get the milk. My heart was racing. I felt like I had been caught stealing. The manager must have suspected the same. When I got to the counter to pay, he asked me where the cards were. I told him I decided not to get them, and he continued to look at me doubtfully, as if I was a thief.

I hadn’t really done anything wrong. So I opened a pack of cards without buying it. It’s not like it was a carton of food that was going to spoil. It’s not like I licked that thin, rock-hard stick of gum those packs of cards always included. But I still left the store in a panic, feeling guilty and stressing about what would have happened if he had banned me from the store. How would I have explained to my parents why I could never return there? Card collecting had driven me to the fringes of the criminal life. Even now, I sometimes awake suddenly in the night, broken out in cold sweat over the haunting memory of being briefly suspected of pilfering a pack of Dick Tracy cards.

Anyway, part of my task while home on this recent trip was to go through things of mine that were still in closets, the basement and the attic so I could get rid of lingering childhood artifacts before my parents move. But I couldn’t part with the cards. I stuck the wine box in a shopping bag and brought it as a carry-on when I flew back to California. I have no idea why. What can I do with them? What did I ever do with them, other than lay around in my room flipping through them and reliving the movies? I just couldn’t bear to toss them or give them away. (I should add, I also had to go through two carrying cases full of Star Wars action figures. I couldn’t give all of those up either, so I packed about 20 favorites in my suitcase, tucked in among the clothes, and made my peace with the rest of them – and the C-3PO and Darth Vader carrying cases – being given away to a little cousin or the grandkid of one of my parents’ friends, or who knows who.) So now the box of cards is shelved in my own closest, unlikely to be touched except on occasions where nostalgia takes hold and I feel an urge to recall days of yore.

I was just looking through my Dick Tracy collection, which contained 88 cards and 11 stickers, and son of a bitch…I’m still missing card #45.