A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
In my adult,
time-worn memories it feels as if A.J. and his sister, Dana, were always
standing there in front of their grandparent’s house, on our dead-end street,
just waiting for my family’s car to pull up on the day we moved onto Penn Oak
Manor Drive. But of course, that wasn’t the case. We’d already moved into that
shinning duplex on a hill a week or so before. Maybe even a month before. Time
was relative to a child freshly ensconced in his family’s second rented home,
in as many years, since moving back to the Pittsburgh suburbs.
This would be late
Spring of 1983. Return of the Jedi territory. The end of one saga as mine
continued on in strange and sometimes wearisome ways. Nine years on the planet
earth and I was already on my fifth home and fourth school. I felt like an
outsider most times. I think A.J. was holding an X-Wing Fighter in his hands
the day we met.
Oh,
how I hated making new friends by the spring of 1983. I’d done the deed one too
many times in my young life. New kid in the neighborhood. New kid at school.
New kid in a new state. New kid back home in Pittsburgh once again meeting new
kids. Hey do you like this? Cool, I like it too! Hey do you like that? Cool,
I like that too! Cheery and willingly available were masks well worn by me
before the age of ten. I found being the new kid so often to be both humbling
and loathsome. I found the task subservient.
By nine I didn’t
want to make new friends in a new neighborhood. A. J’s X-Wing Fighter be
damned. At best, I was happy that the kids in school weren’t changing again
that year. Changing homes this time didn’t mean having to change schools. Yet
there I was; a new kid on a new street again. It was time to put on a smile, be
affable, be likeable, go and say hi.
A.J.
and I bonded instantly over Star Wars, not baseball cards. Baseball cards which
had been my usual currency in both the city of Pittsburgh and in West Virginia.
A.J. wasn’t into cards at all, save a random non-sports or Star Wars card here
and there. And I wasn’t too keen on collecting this:
It would take a few more years
before I truly understood Carrie Fisher in that golden bikini. And Many more before I understood the complexity of sexism and casual misogyny.
A.J. also wasn’t
into sports at all. He was into music and sci-fi. Summers that had usually been
reserved for requisite wiffle ball games among the kids on the street, had
morphed into hours and hours of me and A.J. on my porch with Star Wars action
figures. Just the two of us. My brother every so often. In fact, I didn’t even
seem like there were any other kids around in the neighborhood. Just me, A.J.,
my brother and his sister. Our small clique. It was kind of calming for a
while, after the kid-riddled, drama of my last neighborhood.
The way we played
with Star Wars action figures was different than how other kids I knew went
about it. Gone were just moving our meager collection of figures around,
recreating what movie plot points we could remember. No, A.J. and I would
create new adventures and intricate plots into our play. Plot points that we’d
have to remember and set up for the next day.
We even wove other
action figures into the stories. The Dukes of Hazard and Super Hero figures I
had laying around became easy villains. A.J. had Star Trek figures, so we’d us
them too, as a rival star fleet. When we were done building our own exhausting
saga, A.J. would invite me over to his grandparent’s house to watch Star Trek.
A point of contention between me and my parents.
To
say that people in the neighborhood were wary about A.J. and his family, would
be an understatement. They’d moved back in with A.J.’s grandparents a few years
before my family showed up on the block. The move sent people into a tizzy.
A.J.’s dad, Frank Fanello, was infamous in the neighborhood that he’d grown up
in. Frank had been a violent and wrathful kid. Frank had been a draft dodger,
even though he was forever clad in military fatigues and sported the kind of
small, green pillbox hat that would make Fidel Castro envious. Rumor had it
that Frank had killed his girlfriend’s dog back in the day. The poor pooch the
victim of a jealous rage. Poisoning or outright slaughter; the gossip mill
could never get it right.
The neighborhood
was often serenaded with the sound of Frank playing guitar alone in his room or
in the family’s basement. Creepy, wailing noises that reverberated across the
street, disrupting family dinners on warm, spring evenings. A.J.’s family were vegetarian
before it was hip and somewhat banal to make that declaration. Frank had read a
book called Sugar Blues, and that was it for his family. Gone went sugar. Gone
went flour. The Fanello family’s vegetarianism never quite mirrored Frank’s archaic
Charles Manson-esque rap sheet, but it kept the nosy neighbors busy. I was
learning that there was little to do in the suburbs but talk.
The gossip made my
mom wary to let me go over to A.J.’s and watch Star Trek. But she ultimately
allowed it. Nothing seemed odd to me in his home, except that A.J.’s
grandparent’s furniture had plastic on it, and they spoke only Italian. Maybe
the chocolate chip cookies didn’t seem right, lacking sugar as they did. Carob
chip cookies they were called. And the peanut butter that we ate in dry, wheat
pitas didn’t have any taste. Otherwise A.J.’s home was just like any other
duplex on a dead-end street full of duplexes.
And I didn’t see
much of the infamous Frank Fanello. I had brief sightings of a skinny man with
a pock-marked face dressed in military gear. A calm yet stern voice calling
downstairs for A.J.’s mom. A hushed, anxious tone from the basement.
Occasionally you’d hear guitar. But none of it mattered to me. I had A.J. and
he had me. We had Star Wars and our plots, and Star Trek on the television. A.J.
was a good friend to a lonely kid in a new neighborhood. Even if he didn’t like
to play any ball, or got bored when I pulled out the baseball cards.
But
everything changed for A.J. and I late that summer. It turned out that we
weren’t the only kids in the neighborhood, as my brother and I found out one
mid-August evening. I don’t know where A.J. was, but the Fanello family home
was dark and ominous on that particular day. It had been a long time since I’d
played any ball, so my brother and I took our wiffle balls and bats out to the
cul-de-sac for a one--on-one game that usually ended in a fight. Brothers being
brothers.
While we were
playing, a group of kids walking by down at the end of our street must’ve seen
us. Before we knew it there was a dark-haired boy with ivory colored skin, and
two brunette girls, sisters, in our field of play. The boy was named Miller
Anatasio. The girls Carolyn Smith and her younger sister, Alice. And for a few
hours we had ourselves a good old street wiffle ball game. And, in Carolyn, my
first real crush.
It had been a long
while since I’d had that kind of fun with other kids. I loved Star Wars. I
loved Star Trek. But I had to admit to myself that it felt good to be doing
something different. Miller made plans to come up the street and see us the
next day. More wiffle ball! Oh, and he collected cards too. Baseball and football.
People have vast
and varied friendships. Or so I’ve been told. You can be one person with one
set of friends, and a different person entirely with another. Some of those
friends can weave seamlessly between your cliques. Mailable and trustworthy.
Some mix like oil and water.
A.J. and Miller
were as oil and water as two boys could get. Miller wasn't as into the imaginative play that went on between A.J. and I. At age ten, Miller was
already an old soul. His parents were older than our parents. Miller wasn’t
into things like Halloween. He spent his Sunday afternoons watching NFL
football with his dad, and could rattle off the most intricate of statistics. He
was out of place in our ongoing action figure series, and in the universe that
A.J. and I had created for them.
And, as I said, A.J.
had no time for the various sports that us kids played. Wiffle ball? Nerf football?
An A.J. needed not these things. That’s not to say A.J. didn’t try. He tried
for me. He tried in order to keep up with Miller. A.J. tried to navigate his
place in this new sports world, even when all of these other kids, from other
neighborhoods, started showing up on our dead-end street to challenge us at
wiffle ball and football games.
And the sad thing
about it all was that these kids all knew about A.J.’s family. They went to
school with him. They knew about his and Dana’s vegetarian meals. The kids all
knew about his dad; Frank Fanello’s legend extended well beyond our own
dead-end street. Frank was a nutbag. Frank was a weirdo. And for that the kids
didn’t like A.J. Fanello either. Frank’s kid had to be a weirdo too. This led
to arguments. Frustration. The dark side of friendship.
Ultimately,
A.J. and I would fight. I was torn and he was torn. There was a world
developing between us. We grew out of action figure playing and had nothing
else. We wouldn’t see each other for days, weeks, months.
His old man really
WAS crazy. During lulls in our relationship, Frank Fanello would do things to
make it harder and harder to instigate a truce. His go-to was to come outside
and play electric guitar while us kids played ball on the concrete cul-de-sac.
Frank would open up his garage, plug in his amp, and stand at the end of his
driveway wailing away like he was playing at Woodstock. He probably was in his
own, sullied mind.
And Frank wouldn’t
let us get our balls. If a wiffle ball or Nerf ball went into the Fanello
driveway, Frank would stop playing guitar and take it. If one of us kids was faster,
we’d try and snag the ball before he could. Then you’d have this crazy scene of
a man in military fatigues, shouting and chasing around twelve-year-old and thirteen-year-old
boys for a scuffed wiffle ball. What’s worse? At times, Frank would make A.J.
come out and play with us. Not with us, really, but against us.
Frank would have
A.J. and himself play us neighborhood kids. Two on two, or two on ten; it
didn’t matter to Frank Fanello. He was a tyrant to his son during these games.
Yelling at A.J. when he struck out. Yelling at A.J. when he missed a catch.
Calling him a baby when A.J. ultimately quit playing and ran inside.
Then Frank would
play us one-vs all. He’d tell stories to us kids. He told us he knew guys in
Vietnam who used to throw kids out of planes. All of this was to try and
challenge or intimidate us. But Frank’s cajoling only served to alienate A.J.
from everyone. Also, my old man., who actually served in Vietnam, told us to
tell Frank that he was one of those guys. That shut his ass up.
At
this point, if you’re still reading, you must be asking yourself what does any
of this have to do with a 1972 George Foster baseball card? Like I said, A.J. tried. Through all of the
emotional adversity and the pressures from the behavior of his old man, A.J.
tried. He tried for years, balancing me and the other kids, his crazy old man,
and a deteriorating home life that was becoming public spectacle for the
neighborhood. A certain Memorial Day weekend comes to mind as an example of
what A.J. put up with and had to carry. Frank Fanello chasing his wife around
their yard with a steak knife, grabbing her by the arm, placing the knife in
her hands and then kneeling before her, with his head tilted back, begging her,
begging her, to slit his throat…all while A.J. and Dana crying and begging them
to stop.
A natural
collector of action figures and all things Star Wars and Trek, A.J. wanted to
get into baseball cards too, as a means to try and fit in. We took him with us
on one of our Monroeville Mall trips to the American Coin. A.J. even sprinted
down the hallway, as was our custom, as if he had loads and loads to be excited
for once in the hobby shop. Conformity can be a cold comfort.
A.J. studied our
behavior, not unlike Mr. Spock. He began looking through the bins of collated
star cards just like the rest of us kids did. He wasn’t even tempted by the
non-sports cards sitting there in wax boxes. A.J. decided right there on the
spot that George Foster was his man. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the name.
Maybe it was George Foster’s cool sideburn look with raised eyebrows and a wry
smile. The 50 Home run season. A.J. bought some George Foster cards that day…one
of which was his 1972 Topps.
1972 Topps baseball had an aura about them to us kids. Unlike most other cards they had a trippy, psychedelic late 60’s/early 70’s vibe. And that was all coming back in the 1980s. Even the Monkees were relevant again.
On 1972 cards the team names shouted out at us in bright, bold almost 3-D colors. The 1972 set had the penultimate cards for Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente.
Willie looking old and worn-out.
Roberto looking ghostly on his card, seemingly alone, eyes downward, focused on the baseball he was bouncing in his hand. It was almost like he knew that plane was going to go down.
1972 Topps was a work of art. A.J.
appreciated art. The George Foster cards became a point of pride for him.
But A.J.
assimilation was all a fantasy. It would never work. A few weeks later we were
back on the cul-de-sac, playing Nerf Football. A.J. and Dimitri Danielopoulos vs Miller and me. D
didn’t want to be on A.J.’s team. They were in school together. Dimitri knew
the rumors about A.J.’s family. He’d been stuck on third base that Memorial day
weekend of Frank Fanello and the knife.
Somewhere in the middle of the game D
and A.J. got into a fight. A screwed-up signal. A.J. dropping a pass.
Him being awkward and unathletic but still out there trying. A.J. always put
the wrong hand above the other when he batted. Some fists were thrown. D
hitting A.J. and A.J. covering for dear life.
Frank Fanello came
out onto the porch and just watched his son take a beating. It took until A.J.’s
mom came running out for the beating to stop. Were Miller and I going to stop
it? Why didn’t I? I’ve always wondered if I subliminally hated A.J.’s so-called
weakness in that moment. A.J.’s mom grabbed D to keep him from hitting., but
had forgotten to restrain her own son. Beaten and swollen and crying, A.J. saw
an opening and began pounding on D.
Finally, I had to
run to my house and get my mom. She broke up both sides. The tangled mess of a
sobbing A.J., his mom, and now a sobbing Dimitri as well. A.J. and his mom crossed the street home,
both heads down. Frank waiting on the porch in the shadows, waiting to call his
kid a wimp. It was A.J.’s final ostracism from the rest of us.
The next day there
was a stack of cards left on my porch. They were protected in a Ziplock freezer
bag. They were all of the cards that A.J. had collected over that short period
of time. Some Pirates. Some cards I can’t remember. All those blessed George
Fosters. In the middle of the stack was the 1972 Topps Foster, George smiling
at me, his bat over his shoulder, as I confusedly looked at the card.
A part of me
wanted to keep the Foster Card. Keep them all. In the end I ended up giving the
stack back. I placed the Ziplock bag on the beginning of A.J.’s driveway. A few
hours later I looked out my living room window and watched in horror as A.J.
ripped up the cards and scattered their pieces all over the pavement. Ever last
one of them. Even that 1972 George Foster.
Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.
If you want to learn more about 1972 Topps you can do so HERE and HERE
If you want to learn more about the career of George Foster you can do so HERE and HERE
Next Friday: I’m going to dig
into the P.C. that I’ve been rebuilding by taking a look at some of the past
players I collect and the various reasons why. I’m going to go alphabetically. First
up to bat next week: controversial home run champ, Barry Bonds.
--JG
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