My friendship with A.J. was beginning to become a messy situation.
I had to begin learning how to compartmentalize my friendships. Why was no one else? Miller and A.J. simply could not coexist. I had tried for over a year with the both of them. I tried including Miller whenever A.J. and I played with our Star War action figures. But he didn’t understand the nuances of the way we played. The plot archs we created. And he became bored. Grabbed a wiffle ball or Nerf football and went out into the cul de sac to throw/play by himself, or Miller recruited my brother to join him.
The budding sports fan in me (beyond paying a passing glance on TV) iand avid card collector took this as a provocation. I found myself growing bored with action figures. Bored with intricate plots. Bored with A.J.’s seemingly one-note set of interests: Sci Fi or Rock and Roll. It didn’t help that Carolyn Smith made her way up the street more and more. I had a crush on Carolyn Smith. Even if her asshole sister Alyssa tagged along.
And A.J. could not play sports. Would not play sports. He put the wrong hand on top of the bat. Threw a Nerf football sideways like he’d learned the sport from Kent Tekulve. Would not fix his errors no matter how many times we told him. Was belligerent if Miller tried to help. Suffered the ridicule as a point of pride. Would slam down a wiffle bat, throw a Nerf ball far into the neighbor’s yard (surprisingly overhand), and then stormed off.
For the record, A.J. was not uncoordinated. The kid could play guitar like nobody’s business.
As I grew older, I understood what A.J. was doing. The purposefulness of his rebellious acts. The spectacle of the ostracized. His throwing down the friendship gauntlet. His “him or me” bravado. Over the years, A.J. performed this act of contrition so many times that it grew tiresome and old. I better learned how to manage it. I kept our friendship for as long as I could. But at age ten? At ten I just wanted to have the best of both worlds. Of all worlds. I wanted Carolyn Smith to think that I was cool.
On a particular late August Saturday, in 1984, A.J. went too far with his dramatics. It being late August we were playing Nerf Football in the old dead-end. Had to be. In Pittsburgh, the torch passed from baseball to football with relative ease. There was no Major League baseball postseason to look forward to in Pittsburgh in 1984. Dave Parker was in a Reds uniform for Christ’s sake.
As I remember it, we were playing two-on-two. A.J. and me. Miller and my brother. Always. Miller and A.J. couldn’t play together. Me and Miller? There was no competition there. My brother and me? Back then, at times, we rivaled the Davies and Gallagher brothers in terms of our personal ire and competitive nature. It was best that we were on opposite sides of any team sport that we played. And even then, there could be familial fireworks.
I don’t know what started it. One of A.J.’s side-armed passes. His inability to make a catch, despite having the long, gangly frame of an all-pro wide receiver. Me coming up on the losing end again. All I remember is that I had it that day. I spiked the damned Nerf football and then went and pouted on my porch, followed soon by Miller and my brother. We left A.J. to stand alone on that cul de sac, like some poor, judged fool in the Roman Coliseum waiting for a hungry lion to decide his fate. What else was there to do but for him to storm inside? Again.
Fine, I thought. Let it take another week for him to come knocking on my door. I was getting too old for Star Wars men anyway. But Miller, my brother and I still wanted to play Nerf Football. We couldn’t play one on one with Miller as QB; that would’ve been Cain and Able territory. My parents didn’t deserve the burden of burying a son over a Nerf football game. Miller, in his infinite wisdom, went inside my house and called Carolyn Smith.
Ah, Carolyn. Despite her charms (and she had many: thick, chestnut hair, dark luminous eyes) she was quite the athlete. Soft ball. JV hoops. She’d even once played tackle football with us in her backyard, until her mom showed up from work and put an end to all of that by chasing Miller and I half way up the street.
With Carolyn we were set to play again, Miller, wicked cupid that he was, put her and I together on a team. I don’t know if there was chemistry or not. But I know there was accuracy. There was competence. There was a will to actually compete and try to win the game. The politics of balancing friendships vanished. In its place, four kids playing Nerf Football in the cool breeze of the coming autumn.
Yes, we had cool August days back then. School started the following week for our quartet of Catholic kids. Quintet if you counted Alyssa, who’d tagged along just to say nasty things about the way we played. But who wanted to? It was an idyllic scene of childhood merriment and fun. The moment almost too good to be true.
It was too good to be true.
Midway into our game we heard the rattle of a garage door. Then Frank Fanello, A.J.’s reclusive, lunatic dad, was out in the driveway, clad in those green khaki military fatigues that he wore. We watched as Frank brought an amp to the end of the driveway. He plugged an extension cord into the amp then walked back into the garage to plug it into the wall. He came back a minute later holding a ruby red electric guitar, which he proceeded to plug into the amp. The loud fuzz of feedback made Alyssa cover her ears. Then Frank Fanello began playing guitar right there are the end of his driveway.
I know, I know. I’ve mentioned all of this before. Us kids vs. the guitar virtuosos of Frank Fanello. But this was the first time that he’d come onto his driveway to serenade us. The first time there'd been any reaction to A.J.'s ostracism. To say we were floored would be an understatement. I remember Miller laughing, like a what-in-the-shit? is this laugh. Neighbors opened screen doors to see what in the hell was going on. Then they shut their doors just as quickly when they realized that it was just the neighborhood lunatic harassing a bunch of kids. So much for it taking a village to raise children. After a few minutes of being flabbergasted beyond conversation, we stopped playing football altogether. Miller mentioned that we go up to the Thrift Drug to buy us some football cards. So, we left Frank Fanello to his goddamned guitar playing.
1984 Topps Football cards had been out for maybe a month at that point. We were buying them sparingly. A pack here or there at a time. Of course, at ten, that was typically how I bought cards, due to an extremely low cash flow. I remember 1984 Topps being the first football cards I ever bought in pack form. The design has always been iconic to me as a result. The top slanted bar with the player’s name. The bottom one with the team. A white band that said all-pro for the players that earned it. Those crooked, clear pictures that looked more akin to what Topps would do with its 1985 baseball brand than anything remotely like its hazy sister baseball set from earlier that year.
1984 Topps Football had Terry Bradshaw’s last card. Franco Harris’ last card as a Steeler. John Elway’s rookie card. Eric Dickerson’s rookie. Roger Craig. Some cat named Curt Warner who had been all the rage. Howie Long’s rookie card, as well as cards for a number of vets. Joe Montana’s fourth card. Lawrence Taylor’s third card. Cards for Steve Largent. Jack Lambert. Dan Fouts, Kellen Winslow, Wes Chandler, Chuck Muncie, and Charlie Joiner; the San Diego Charger team that Miller made sound like legends.
But the card we all really wanted to pull out of a pack was the rookie card of Dan Marino.
To understand Dan Marino to kid in Pittsburgh in the 1980s is to understand standing on the shoulders of a god. Dan Marino. Danny to the folks who’d been watching his exploits on the football field since his high school days at Pittsburgh’s Central Catholic. The kid from the Oakland section of Pittsburg who went to Pitt. Legions of us followed his career. The lucky ones chose the number 13 when the JV and Varsity football seasons started. And there he was on a genuine football card! An all-pro in his rookie year. For sure he was going to win at least a dozen Super Bowls…right?
I had an art teacher
at Central Catholic (a sadistic bastard…but that’s a story for another time). On
the first day of Intro to Art class, he picked one student sitting on his
little, brown wooden stool, and said to him. Do you know whose seat that is?
The impressionable young freshman would obviously shake his head no. Then
sadistic art teacher would get a broad smile (as I remember him, he was an evil
version of Mister Rogers, complete with zip-up sweaters) and a say, why that’s
Dan Marino’s seat. He would let the freshman revel in that for a moment, a
moment of dead smiling silence. Sadistic art teacher would then point around
the room to other kids sitting on other stools, saying, and that was Dan Marino’s
seat, and that was Dan Marino’s seat, and that was Dan Marino’s seat.
Until he covered
the whole room.
But that wasn't enough to break the Marino mystique for us at his/our alma mater. During my Sophomore
year, Central decided to retire Dan Marino’s number 13. The powers that be
invited him back for a ceremony. Us students were told that under no circumstances
were we to bother Mr. Marino. Yeah…okay. Midway through the day as I was going
to the library, I saw Dan Marino. Pressed up against a wall. Pen up to his
chin. Signing autographs for dozens upon dozens of high school boys while the
black-clad Christian brothers kept trying to pull kids away from their football
hero. Dan looked like he was enjoying it.
But I digress…
All the while we were opening cards, Alyssa Smith sat on Miller’s steps scrawling something in this tattered notebook that she carried. Carolyn, never one for cards, had left us an hour or so ago. Yet her sister stayed. I didn’t like Alyssa. There was a Jeykl/Hyde thing about her. One day she was sweet and kind. The next she was beyond mean. Alyssa usually went after me for my weight (she wasn't very creative in her cruelty). I steered clear of her as much as I could, as much as one who had a massive crush on her sister could. I don’t know what it was with Alyssa. For one, she was practically my age but two grades behind. For another, both Carolyn and their older brother, Bobby, has been adopted by the Smith family. Alyssa was their natural born daughter. She seemed to resent the attention that her sister and brother got…and she took it out on hapless victims like me.
Or on A.J…this time.
“What do you think?” Allison said, turning to Miller, my brother and I. She had torn a piece of paper from her notebook and was dangling it before us.
Miller took the bait. He took the paper from Allison and read it. His face turned scarlet. “What is this?”
THIS PART IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR TO BE READ BY CHILD EYES
KIDS.....FOCUS ON THIS GUY INSTEAD:
“It’s a song.” Alyssa took the paper back from Miller and proceeded to sing the following to us: “A.J. is a son-of-a-bitch, dick-brained, cock-sucking, motherfucking, fag-faced vegetable...his dad is a bone-faced dog.” The last line she sang low, like the baritone in a barbershop quartet.
I was floored. I hadn’t heard that kind of language come out of half of the boys I knew, let alone a single girl. Fag-faced vegetable? Why that was sickening poetry. Who knew this kind of sinister wordplay could come out of Alyssa Smith? As bi-polar and rude as she could be, Alyssa had never exhibited any skill with the devil’s language. It was gross. It was cruel. Miller burst out laughing. We were all intrigued.
“I want to leave it in their mailbox,” Alyssa said.
“You can’t do that,” I said.
“What?” she laughed. “Are you and A.J. gay for each other.”
It was my turn to turn red. Ten years old and I already knew what that meant. What an accusation like that could do a guy in the neighborhood, even if he played wiffle ball, Nerf football, and spent all of his money on cards. Gay was gay in 1984. Once you were labeled...it was hard going back.
But the better
angels of our nature visited us that day. Or Alyssa got bored and went home. I
can’t remember which, except that it was made crystal clear that such nefarious
a verse would not reach the eyes of A.J. Fanello or his nutbag father. Miller,
my brother and I stayed on Miller’s porch for a little bit longer, looking at
our cards, before the late afternoon began to creep into the day. Last Saturday
of the summer. The next day would be Sunday. And the insufferable bore of
church. A gloomy cloud hanging over the hours after. Then the beginning of the
routine that would occupy my evenings for the next 9 plus months.
Fucking school.
KIDS LOOK AT THIS KIND MAN....READ NO FURTHER'
The paper read:
A.J. is a
son-of-a-bitch, dick-brained, cock-sucking, motherfucking, fag-faced
vegetable...his dad is a bone-faced dog.
Alyssa. She’d snuck
up the street and left that sinister jingle for me to find. Why was I always
the target? I thought. The wrinkling and the burn marks were extra evil. But
then it hit me. And I looked up, away from the note, over to the Fanello house.
A.J. was in his bedroom window on the second-floor. Our eyes met for a moment.
Then he shook his head and shut his curtains.
And I knew what Alyssa
had gone and done.
Thanks for reading! Happy collecting!
If you'd like to learn more about 1984 Topps Football cards you can do so HERE
If you'd like to learn more about Dan Marino and his football career you can do so HERE and HERE
NEXT FRIDAY: I'm going to take a look (and the only way that I know how) at 2021 Bowman Baseball cards...and we're going back to 1989. Back to when I was a miserable overweight fifteen-year-old who saw no light at the end of the tunnel...but who really loved 1989 Bowman baseball cards...so well be taking a look at them too.
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