Execution Style.

The baseball card shop I used to frequent as a child still occupied the same building downtown. It had changed hands, I had heard, but still sold cards and collectibles. It used to be run by a young Italian guy in his late 20s, always wearing a pompadour and a Misfits t-shirt. He was a really nice dude. When I was some 8 year old kid coming around with innumerable questions about baseball cards and never buying a goddamn thing, he never once gave me the brush off. Twenty years later, with the same curiosity and lack of funds, I walk into the shop. At the very least, I’d like to price some of the cards still housed in my mother’s garage. A mighty fortune may await me.

First thing, the bells on the door ring. No response from the proprietor as I enter and greet him. Just a stone look, arms folded, a fat man with slicked back gray hair. He doesn’t look the least bit happy at the possibility of business. In addition to this asshole, the place has changed dramatically. There are hardly any cards here at all. Nothing in the flat and formerly eye level glass display cases. Just packs, mostly unopened complete sets, overrun by the scatter of sports memorabilia. Autographed portraits in overpriced glass frames. A neon sign with Budweiser and San Diego Padres logos brightly linked. A life sized cardboard cut-out of Derek Jeter, a large tag that reads Limited Edition. The price is so fucking ridiculous that I feel sick and angry and never want to think about it again. Anyhow, the place sucks now.

I don’t know what to ask the fat man behind the counter, perplexed by the erosion all around me. And it’s almost as warm in here as it is outside. So I move about the place. It’s still small but now more crowded with clutter. I ask the man, the only other person in the store, if they sell price guides and he still doesn’t say anything. The fat fuck just moves his head in the direction of a rack. It’s sitting in the far corner of the tiny shop. He lazily points at it, flailing his left hand slowly in the general direction. He’s putting more effort into the thousand ounce fountain soda in front of him. The occasional slurping is the only sound in the world. I try to pay it no mind.

I see shit in here people would never buy. Out of market stuff, things from Milwaukee that people in Milwaukee don’t want. I don’t understand it but it doesn’t get me down. It’s just another place that isn’t the same anymore. And I don’t know how any place selling collectibles survives in this town, past or present. Nobody has the money or the time for this shit. So I distract all these thoughts along with the mute behind the counter with the magazine rack where several price guides are waiting to answer the questions that this asshole won’t.

There’s only one price guide that I can recall and it stands out in front of the several others I’ve never heard of. So I pick it up and look for some year in the 1980s, which is easier to find because there used to only be a small handful of brands. And I’m about to find this rookie card to see if my fortunes in life have changed and if I have finally found the reason why my path has lead to this moment in time!

And then the dick behind the counter finally speaks.
“Hey,” he says.
So I look up at the sound, the interruption, the proprietor of this stupid establishment.
He says, “Hey pal! There’s no looking up the prices, ‘kay?
You gotta buy somethin’, you gotta pay for that thing there, y’understand? There’s no lookin’”

I say nothing, suspended in my own shock and disgust. I can’t believe this motherfucker. I look all around me for support, for other eyes of mutual disdain, makeshift weaponry pointed in his direction.
I look outside into the heat of summer and search the parking lot for possible recruits for the angry mob I hope to assemble. There’s nobody there. All is empty and quiet and dead.

I know there are things of more importance and misery going down outside the tinted storefront windows, far worse things in my own life as well. But something inside here has to be settled. The world gets worse everyday and we still strive to find the surface and live. And here this spineless fuck sits and looks at me like I’m the asshole! Maybe it’s the fact that I am an asshole for being here and wasting precious hours of my life once again, wasting precious energy on the hatred of this man I don’t know and his Steve Young collectible plates. Whatever it is, I can’t take it. I want to kill this piece of shit. But instead I just stand there. I drop the magazine on the floor. Its pages crumple and rip a little and the fat man just looks at it. He looks startled now and is once again mute. I want to tell him my story and how it has all come to this. I want to tell him how his worthless position and his smug demeanor have led to this final and violent moment in time.

Despite my thoughts of murder, I leave the magazine on the floor and try to laugh a little, breathing in heavily each time. And I walk out of the store, across the empty parking lot and I’m thankful when my car starts. I drive over to my mother’s house where I spend that evening going through old baseball cards and quietly plotting arson and murder. I think about the gasoline and the rags and an array of bludgeoning tools that hang above me in the garage.

Then I find a Fernando Valenzuela card. It’s a 1986 Topps #630. And it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I know it’s not worth that much. It’s no rookie or rarity. But I’ll never trade it so its price remains a nameless and redundant figure. For me, it’s a rare find, perfect and inexplicable.
I look at the card and I see Fernando, poised, clocked in, a seasoned veteran at twenty five. The still photograph makes it look as though you’re at the plate and Fernando’s about to throw it straight through you. The wind up, the pitch, another screwball to Mike Scioscia. Strike three, motherfucker.

I find a plastic case to put the card in and think of the inevitable cathedral. I will construct an altar to be built around it. There will be other things to be blessed and sacrificed, small things within reach that spark far greater ones, inside the noise of my skull and the pain in my chest. They are the only things that matter.
I take the card with me when I leave the next morning. I drive North on the boulevard, away from the town, the card shop and everything else.

I never kill the proprietor. I never burn the place down. I never go back there for that reason or any other.