Jacob Lambert - Writing

		Bruce's House of Baseball Bruce's House of Baseball was a tiny shithole of a store. Even to a child, it seemed small. Bruce, naturally, was huge, a quiet, bearded giant whose head nearly touched the ceiling. He would stand in his customary spot behind the fingerprint-smeared glass case and watch us swarm in off the avenue with his balky eyes, cigarette burning in the ashtray behind him. His white undershirt was stretched and not quite clean, and the carpet was chewed and gritty. But the House was full of baseball cards, and for all we cared, he could have been set up in the men's room up the road at Bunny's Tavern. Despite his oafish appearance, Bruce knew exactly what he was doing. The baseball card business was peaking, transforming millions of schoolchildren into miniature analysts whose parents paid for subscriptions to Beckett Monthly. Bruce's was directly across the street from South Orange Middle School, where dozens of us spent our lunches feverishly discussing rookie cards and batting averages. His store was empty in the early afternoons, but by three o'clock, the place was jammed, my classmates and I clamoring to turn over the money that our parents had given us for rectangular pizza slices and boxed milk. For a half hour or so we would climb all over each other in our efforts to be next in line at the box of Topps or Upper Deck packs, impressing each other with our finds (A Brian Downing error card!) and negotiating deals. He would stand bemusedly, cigarette in hand, and clean us out as efficiently as a blackjack dealer, taking advantage of our queasy need for One More Pack, one more shot at a Gregg Jeffries rookie. When the money had made its inexorable journey from our pockets into Bruce's worn cigar box, we would filter out in groups, broke and slightly dazed. This would have run its course like most Middle School fads had it not been for the appearance of The Box. One Monday, I entered to find my classmates, not clustered about the neat Fleer and Donruss cartons at the counter, but on their knees in the corner, digging violently through a large cardboard box. This development served to transform Bruce's House of Baseball from a corner pub that poured drinks for determined alcoholics to a full-blown shooting gallery. The box was filled with hundreds of lucite holders. Each contained ten cards, and each was sealed with medical tape to withstand the daily storm of tiny hands. The cards depicted players that the discerning seventh-grader couldn't have cared less about, bums like Paul Zuvella or Randy St. Claire. Occasionally, though, one of these cards carried a small white sticker, on which "free turn" (Which entitled the bearer to another pack) was written in Bruce's lazy, nearly illegible hand. If your sticker said "1988 Topps", or "1990 Score", you had won an old-fashioned pack of cards. But then there were the big stickers, which made the head swim and the neck tighten with excitement. "1969 Johnny Bench." "1972 Willie Mays." "1958 Mickey Mantle All-Star." The ante had been upped enormously, and the response was immediate and frenzied. The Box had made it possible to obtain a card that was actually in the glass case, an area that was regarded with something approximating religious respect. It was accessible only to the few adults who frequented Bruce's, grown men who could afford to shell out seventy dollars for an old Carlton Fisk card. Now we could obtain one of those beautiful relics, and all we had to do was pony up a dollar and "Pick a Winner," as Bruce's marker-on-cardboard sign above the box jauntily demanded. On that first Monday, I hurriedly gave him my dollar, pushed my way through the crowd, and snatched my first pack, which, of course, yielded nothing. Within the week, I had carefully adjusted my ten-dollar-a week lunch budget to allow for the "rack packs," as they came to be known. This early attempt at bookkeeping resulted in a balance of zero dollars for cafeteria lunch, with ten dollars scrupulously set aside for the big man across the street. I have no recollection of going hungry, nor do I remember stealthily fixing myself lunch while my parents slept. I doubt that I counted on my friends' support to get me through, since they, too, were giving all of their lunch money to Bruce. Those weeks, like the initial flirtations with any addiction, were revelatory. We discovered a wide-eyed lust for The Next Thing that we had never felt before. We were American kids, for sure, and we had all mastered the art of pestering our parents for sneakers and Nintendo games years before. But this was different; The Box called out with a disturbing urgency. The rack packs served to bring us together in a way that the old Topps packs never had. We were now trying to achieve something meaningful. Along with the unbelievable lows that we felt as a result of the inevitable dry spells were some true victories. There were Paul Molitor and Ken Griffey rookie cards, an old Warren Spahn. Perhaps the greatest win was the 1971 Steve Garvey rookie, which Bruce himself disputed with uncharacteristic vehemence because the winner was suspected of not just stealing the winning pack, but shoveling handfuls of them into his coat. In the end, Bruce handed it over, and the winner stood in the center of the tiny store, clutching the old card for a moment before heading back to the pile. The baseball card industry choked itself to death by the mid-nineties, but even if it hadn't, by then my friends and I had discovered that there were females among us. Dayna LaConti was blossoming, and Leigh Gaetano was beautiful and self-aware. Ohara Marcus was flat-out transcendent. Girls like that certainly wouldn't let us grope their tiny breasts if all we talked about were error cards and Mark McGwire. Over a period of months, The Box went from the core of our lives to a laughable afterthought. Blindsided by the intrusion of adolescence, Bruce gradually became one more anonymous storekeeper on South Orange Avenue. Bruce's House of Baseball is now a nail salon, or perhaps an Oriental rug store. I was in high school when he closed up, but none of us ever mentioned it. At one point, a thin man named Freddy opened his own wormy card shop in the same spot, which didn't last long. He didn't have Bruce's marketing savvy, but that wasn't the problem. The moment for that sort of thing had long since passed.