1991 : I'm Going Through Changes

 

A change was coming for me in 1991.

            And I need a change. I was tired. Tired of being overweight. Tired of being ignored by girls that I was attracted to, or unable to talk with them because I felt less than or invisible. I was tired of being made fun of by my classmates. Or if a friend and I got into a fight, them having the easy scapegoat of calling me a fat ass. How does one come back from fat ass? It’s belittling and embarrassing. In effect, I was tired of being me. I wanted to lose weight. Become, fitter, happier, more productive; comfortable. Be someone different. But it’s hard to escape yourself.

One of the last straws for me was Jamal Johnson, in English Lit class of all place, menacingly stalking around the room before the teacher had arrived. Jamal, in the infinite wit of a bully, had decided to play a version of duck, duck, goose; see how many kids he could get before the teacher arrived. Good ol’ Jamal went around to each kid, sitting aptly in their seats, shouting, duck, duck…or goose.

Jamal wasn’t very bright. But he was cruel. A third-rate varsity football player who had to compensate for his lack of skills on the football field by being a bully. When Jamal got to me, instead of saying duck or goose…he said cow. The joke was obvious and dull. But so was high school. Most of the kids in the classroom had a hearty laugh at it. Most likely I turned scarlet; the hapless victim yet again. Then the teacher came in and everyone forgot Jamal’s joke…except me. It’s 2021 and I still haven’t forgotten the joke.

            That incident happened right before Christmas break in December of 1990. But this essay isn’t about that incident. It’s about what happened in my life during and after. Oh, and it’s also about baseball cards.

            Thanks to Jamal’s delicate prodding and obvious concern for my health, I decided in earnest to lose weight come the New Year. It wasn’t my first time trying. Having gained weight years back while living in West Virginia (ages 7 to 8), I’d spent the bulk of my childhood wearing the fat kid label. I’d suffered the indignities of doctor’s scolding. I found guilt and shame in a box of Pop Tarts. I’d spend weeks eating non-fat yogurt and pretending I’d liked it. Playing J.V. football helped a little bit and I shed some pounds on the offensive line. But then THIS happened.

A leg injury that was probably the beginning of me turning from a chubby kid into a fat and depressed teenager. It seemed de rigueur that people would make fun of me. An accepted part of my legend. And it wasn’t just kids. Jamal mocking me at school was one thing. Like I said before, Doctors did it too. But that very same Christmas I overheard a friend of my mom’s scolding her for letting me eat so much. School was one thing. But the ridicule was happening in my own damn home.

Shortly after, I made a decision. I was going to lose weight. A lot of weight. So much weight that no one could say a goddamned thing to me anymore. I was going to play sports and girls were going to like me. Because I was fitter. Better. I was going to lose weight, and I was going to lose it…with the help of this guy: 

Back in the late 80s and early 90s, everyone’s mother or older sister probably had an exercise or workout tape in their home. My mom was no exception. She had the first of the Richard Simmons’ Sweating to the Oldies VHS tapes. I remembered Richard from the television show that he had back in the early 1980s. He seemed affable enough. A little flaky and shouty. But he’d once been a fat kid too…just like me. Richard Simmons seemed like he’d empathize with my plight. He seemed like he’d care.

I started Sweating to the Oldies three times a week. In my view, anyone working out to a video looks kind of silly. Even fit, attractive people. But a soon-to-be seventeen-year-old obese boy? One who shared a room with a younger brother, who was the exact opposite of him physically. A brother who was blessed by being a picky eater. A brother who had girls calling him in seventh grade. A brother who played sports. A brother who could, and did, walk into said room with his friends while I was in the middle of doing said exercise tape. Often it wasn’t a good scene. But I kept to it. I kept seeing Jamal Johnson walking around that classroom. Duck, duck, COW!

            I also cut down on my food intake dramatically. Hindsight being what it was, I was essentially starving myself. Goodbye double helpings of spaghetti and five slices of pizza. Goodbye Hostess products. So long Pop Tarts. Hello a pack of those cheese and peanut butter crackers, a diet Pepsi…and little else. No junk food at ball games in the spring. I wouldn’t even chew the gum in packs of cards.

It was hard at first. Hunger became a fact of life just like being overweight had been. I had no other friends trying to lose weight. Lunches at school were a smorgasbord of junk food and strong, sugary drink. I felt isolated from my friends now as well. But I had Richard Simmons, Rich…or Dick whenever I was angry and needed someone to shout at while exercising. I wasn’t fully alone.

And…I could feel the change happening. I could feel those polyester pants, the ones my parents had to have custom made at Kay’s Men’s Clothing in Downtown Pittsburgh, because I was too overweight to buy from off the rack (unless I wanted a massive hem job done of the pant legs); I could feel those polyester pants loosening…and loosening.

            In 1991, I was going through changes emotionally and intellectually as well. Before 1991, all of my money went to buying baseball cards. Packs and some singles when I was on the kid’s version of the dole, i.e., digging for change in couch cushions, accepting an allowance for chores that I didn’t want to do to begin with at home, or outright begging for .50 cents. Then I got my paper route job and upped the ante by buying wax boxes. The paper route was financial liberation to an extent. I had the feeling of not worrying about money when I bought cards. As long as I kept the totals from my parents. If I did that, the sky was the cardboard limit.

            Then a funny thing happened in the fall of 1990. Not too long before Jamal Johnson and his wacky, eye-opening duck, duck goose game. I began to develop other interests aside from sports cards. I started getting into music. And not just the R&B and rap of my day, or Top 40 radio. But music. Bands. 1960’s and 1970’s stuff. The Stones. The Door. I became a Beatles addict. I borrowed and dubbed as many of my friend Kris’ Beatles CDs as I could…until he half-sarcastically told me to buy my own. So I did.

            Rubber Soul was the first Beatles CD that I ever bought.

        I also got into literature and film. And writing. My book shelves and VHS shelves began to rival my CD stand in terms of growth. While I was still buying a lot of Topps cards, I was nitpicking the cards from the other brands. I was finding that I had less and less time to whip out the ol’ shoebox and muse over card designs and statistics. Less, desire too. Instead, I fancied myself a poet, and spent evenings in my room trying to compose verses that would attack the culture norms of the time (i.e. my school hierarchy), or make a young gal swoon.

I started submitting poems to school’s literary magazine. They were mostly diatribes against the jerks in school, or wannabe Beatles lyrics circa Sgt. Pepper. Here, unfortunately, are a couple of examples. A portrait of the artist as an over-sensitive seventeen-year-old kid.

But more than anything in my life, I’ve stuck with writing. Thirty plus years is dedication. I’d like to think I’ve done okay at it.

            It wasn’t just those aesthetic items that were chewing into my card purchasing money. By spring and summer of 1991, with the weight coming off and my ego getting a small boost, my conspicuous consumption began to expand and change even more. Clothing now entered the picture along with the music, books, and VHS artsy films. And not just the sweatpants and polyester pants that I was forced into buying and wearing. I mean GEAR. Here’s an idea:

That spring of 1991, I got my first, real part-time job that wasn’t cutting my old man’s grass (which I did exactly once, I think), or slinging newspapers and being chased by dogs and my own avid imagination at five o’clock on a dark morning. I got myself a genuine job at the Monroeville Mall. The mall of George Romero fame. The mall of my early baseball card dreams.

And it wasn’t just any job. It was the Pittsburgh Pirates Clubhouse shop, where I joined the ranks of dudes with floppy hair wearing sporting goods gear, and jamming to Jodeci and A Tribe Called Quest. I spent my weeknights and weekends selling baseball caps to everyone from suburban bros to gangbangers from the city. The early 90s were ground zero for people getting into wearing sports clothing as style and fashion. Now baseball hats existing as accessories for everyone from rappers to business bros is the norm. Yours truly had a coveted, ahead of its time job.

You know what else came with that job at the mall? Girls. Girls came into mall in droves. They came alone. They came in packs. They wore short skirt and short shorts in the summer. They seemed to like the dudes who worked in sporting goods, had floppy hair, and listened to A Tribe Called Quest. I was among their ranks. Girls came in the store and loitered for no reason. The change that I’d wanted so badly was finally coming.

            Baseball cards were changing too…albeit at a slower pace than I was changing. The arrival of Upper Deck in 1989 was an obvious game changer for baseball cards and sports cards in general. It took the other brands a few years to catch up. In 1991 they still weren’t there, at least not with their base cards. Donruss and Fleer put out base product like this.

Upper Deck was still the most stylish but my 1991 budget wasn’t paying for that. 

Score was all right in 1991

but, at 900 cards, the set was too vast and too many whistles and bells that took away from it.

        Full disclosure, the card brands were trying to catch up to Upper Deck. Just not yet with their base cards. By 1991, Topps, Fleer and Donruss all had premium, higher quality (i.e. more expensive sets that they produced). Even though I didn’t buy any of the premium sets, I’ve really grown to love Topps Stadium Club over the years and am slowly putting together the 1991 premier edition set. Here’s Bobby Bonilla’s card.

But I still bought Topps base cards. Good old Topps. The smell of cardboard, gum and wax. Okay, not quite wax. Remember those changes? 1991 was the first year that Topps stopped putting its card in wax packs. The brand moved into the modern era but using a more tamper-proof cellophane packaging.  But the packs still had the gum. And the cards were still on that gray card stock. So not a total revamp.

But you could see a change coming in the cards. 1991 was Topps 40^th anniversary so they wanted to make a splash. And did they ever! The boarders where wide and white and crisp, like Topps had something to show Upper Deck. The images on Topps cards were a marked improvement over 1990, and some of the most inventive and startlingly beautiful images that they’ve ever captured on baseball cards.

Topps brought back horizontal image cards. 

A first since 1974. They used the team’s script on the front of the cards instead of just a logo. And the backs on 1991 Topps? Let’s just say some of them could be illuminating to say the least.

Here are some of my favorite cards from the set.

In the fall of 1991, I was a senior. I had a cool mall job. And I had lost 70 pounds. People’s reactions were typical. Surprise. And then the realization that an actual human being had been there all along. When word got out about my job slinging ballcaps at the mall, the “cool” guys from class began coming into Pirates Clubhouse, looking for a discount. Which they weren’t getting. Weight loss or not, and half-baked small talk instead of insults in class weren’t going to cut it after years of abuse. I couldn’t sell myself out for a change in the status quo. Not to those jerks.

But I also found that losing weight hadn’t changed me all that much. I still had the same friends. I still had the same insecurities as before, now coupled with the stress of people paying actual attention to me. I couldn’t get with the cool guys because there was too much resentment. Also, Jamal Johnson was still an asshole; he just found different things to bully a guy over. I couldn’t get with the girls, because I found that instead of having a change in confidence, I was still felt like that invisible fat kid. I couldn’t really shake the old me, even though I was seventy pounds lighter.

I began to develop a chip on my shoulder. If a girl liked me, I was aloof and cold. You didn’t like me before, why do you like me now? Became my motto. Even if the girl had never known me from before. I was circumspect when my co-worker, floppy-haired buddies wanted to hang out. I couldn’t take a complement to save my life. Like Topps in 1991, I still had some kinks to work out before I could really change. I had lost weight. I had new clothes. But I was still gray cardboard stock.

And I did change...kinda. We both did. By 1992 it was going to be a whole new ballgame for me and for Topps. We’d never be the same.

Thanks for reading. Happy collecting.

 If you want to learn more about 1991 Topps, Joey Shiver, AKA Dub Mentality, has an article that you can read right HERE

Wax Pack Gods has an article on the popular 1991 Topps Set HERE as well

Next Friday:  I’m going to dig into the P.C. and take a look at some of the Willie Stargell cards that I have. I want to take a look at Willie the player and Willie the captain. I also have a special connection to Willie, one that has recently increased, which I'll discuss next Friday, as I also pay tribute to an even more wonderful man.

 --JG