Chapter 18
Sonny boy, yeah we’ve got it made
Don’t you know we’re all here together?
And time, time is on our side
It’s the time of our lives and we’re brothers forever
“Brothers Forever”
Young children, even younger than we were in 1977, know what money is and what it can do. At first glance, and for some, a lifetime of glances, money is the primary measurement of self-worth and the vehicle for happiness. Having money can make some feel freer or more powerful.
The boys and I had a limited relationship with the power of cash money. For starters, we didn’t have any. But we knew it to be valuable because our parents used it to buy us stuff, like fishing line and lures. Still, we couldn’t wad up a dollar bill, stick it on the end of an Eagle Claw hook, and catch a fish with it. We couldn’t float down the creek on top of it. And we couldn’t peg each other in the back with it from twenty feet during a mud ball war. As a result, the connection to commerce was a bit hard to muster enthusiasm for. I know that sounds like the attitude of unappreciative, spoiled brats, but I would say that clueless and living-in-the-moment were more accurate indictments.
We saw more value in the types of paper we were intimately familiar with, the kinds that entered our lives on a daily basis: toilet paper, coloring pages, the lined paper in our school binders, and the colorful Monopoly money that never seemed to make it back into the box. But there was only one type of paper that had the power to send us into a frenzy. It had magical powers, but only appeared once a year. Yes, I’m talking about Christmas wrapping paper.
Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Hamilton, and Andrew Jackson may have adorned the bills that purchased the surprise gifts, but Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus, and Rudolph were the famous people we looked forward to seeing on paper. And yes, we considered them all to be real people, even Rudolph.
To us, coin money was more real than cash. The fact that we actually carried coins, made coins more valuable. We picked up coins off the street and carried them in our pockets on a regular basis, and coins filled the piggy banks we each had on top of our dressers. Coins were also heavier than paper bills. At ten, heavier meant bigger, and bigger meant better. Bigger fish were better. Bigger candy bars were better. Bigger bikes, bigger cap guns, bigger smiles, bigger dreams—all were better. That childlike disconnect with money helped us establish an entirely different currency to govern our economy on Starmount.
My parents were social workers, which meant I was already familiar with the concepts of rich and poor. Though the nuances escaped me, discussions of poverty, of equal access, and of folks deserving a fair shake in life reverberated from our kitchen table, where my parents had countless in-depth conversations with students and colleagues. I understood early in life that being poor meant one had less options. I understood that being truly destitute meant more than just not being able to buy something you wanted. It meant you struggled to get the bare minimum of what you and your children needed. And it meant happiness often took a back seat to survival.
I knew my family wasn’t poor, and my friends knew the same about themselves. Fortunately, poverty was a concept we didn’t have to grapple with in our own lives, which left us free to focus on being rich.
Being rich was easier to quantify. Having six million dollars was rich. In our minds, you had to have six million dollars to be rich, nothing less and nothing more. That particular marker of wealth did not come from some high-minded financial index. The TV show, The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors, defined wealth for us. With six million dollars, you could see a mosquito flying ten miles away, run faster than a sports car at top speed, and yes, even fight off an evil-eyed Bigfoot with fangs. If you were the Six Million Dollar Man, you were rich.
Our neighborhood stock market was leveraged by the trinkets we deemed necessary and the acts of labor we viewed as valuable. We were not collectors for the mere sake of collecting. We knew the value of what we had. Trading was, for us, an art form that was helpful in both short-term profiteering and in establishing one’s long-term deal-making stature.
Though baseball cards are often thought of as the clichéd favorite, we actually traded more robustly in football cards. Like their baseball counterparts, football cards were sold in packs of fifteen for about thirty cents, complete with a flat, extra-wide stick of bubblegum. The cards were in color; sometimes a profile, and sometimes an action shot; and listed the player’s name, team, and position on the front. The back of the card detailed the player’s physical attributes, his career highlights, and often a trivia question about the player’s team, with the answer written upside down directly underneath the question.
Occasionally, you’d get a checklist card, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was a card listing all the possible player cards for a particular team. I’m sure the older, savvier boys up the street found this list helpful, especially when trading for money, but we just found it a massive waste of space where a prized card or an extra piece of bubblegum could have been.
A smart trader looks to trade-up by knowing what his cards are worth and which cards are essential to the competition. It’s not that we weren’t smart negotiators; it’s just that our loyalty to our favorite teams always trumped our trading sensibilities. When we got a card that we had some emotional connection to, we were reluctant to let it go, even if it were a gateway to obtaining a more valuable prize. Personal experience and family history dictated the cards we coveted, and not the card’s financial worth. Having lived in West Virginia, where the Pittsburgh Steelers were regional royalty, any Steelers card possessed equal value in my eyes. The same held true for my friends with their favorite teams, the Miami Dolphins, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Chicago Bears, the Dallas Cowboys, and the Oakland Raiders.
That year, Matt Bourgeois could hardly contain his card-buying addiction. His favorite team, the Oakland Raiders, won the Super Bowl, beating the Minnesota Vikings 32-14. Fred Biletnikoff’s card became Matt’s Holy Grail. He had to find it. The Raiders were not my team, so I would have gladly traded a Biletnikoff or Ken Stabler card for any Steelers benchwarmer without a second thought. In turn, I would easily be able to score a Terry Bradshaw or a “Mean” Joe Greene card for some lackluster third-stringer that completed one of my friends’ favorite teams. Boyish loyalty carries a dear price, but we never let that get in the way of making a bad deal.
The cards, of course, were not the only items up for trade; there was also the gum. Most of the time, that stick of gum was stale and hard. You could tell right away when you slid the powder-covered stick out of the package. If your thumb and forefinger didn’t leave an imprint, or if the gum snapped in the process, it wasn’t going to be of much use in or out of our mouths. We occasionally got lucky, and it was actually chewable. In those cases, that flat extra-wide piece of bubblegum served to mollify and push through any contentious trade on the table. We didn’t recognize it then, but that was our first lesson in how important it is to grease the skids in the art of making a deal.
Candy was generally a prime currency in our group. Some candy, especially the hard candies you’d find in your grandmother’s house, never carried much street value. They were better than having nothing, but the excitement wore off quickly. On the other hand, if you were lucky enough to be in sole possession of a big Marathon bar, a Zero bar, or, better yet, a packet of Pop Rocks, you wielded the power of a taste-bud bonanza and the promise of a sugar high.
Eating candy and trading sports cards seemed to go hand in hand, and made arm-twisting easy to get away with. The obvious candy to wheel and deal with during the occasional open market on baseball cards, was the Reggie! bar. Named after Mr. October himself, those round, chocolate-and-caramel-covered peanuts were iconic. Looking back, it seems that we were ahead of our time in knowing what would trend hot in the candy market. Early the next year, in April of 1978, fans threw thousands of Reggie!s onto the field of Yankee Stadium after Reggie Jackson hit a home run against the Chicago White Sox at the end of the first inning.
A moment of desperation for one kid was often opportunistic crassness for another, especially when it came to candy. It was easy to gain possession of a friend’s favorite toy or secure use of their brand-new bike for the day with the promise of sugar. Candy was the equivalent of the junk bond, but the bubble never burst. In what I like to think of as a sign of our still-cocooned innocence and honest friendship, we rarely traded for the selfish kill. We mostly wheeled and dealed to protect the balance of the group and the loving status quo. Half of one particular brand of candy was commonly traded for half of another, or sometimes even given away outright under the guise of altruism, motivated in part, by over-indulgent nausea.
Favor through personal labor was another form of currency among the Sons of Starmount. We carried extra tackle boxes to the pond and walked two bikes at once through the woods for one another. We sometimes covered each other’s chores, like raking leaves and cutting grass. We even carried each other on our shoulders across expanses of water and wood.
Courage was also a form of currency; more like a sub-currency, really, because it was at times used as leverage for winning football and baseball cards, candy bars, and the occasional dime. We all possessed courage in similar quantities, but not always at the same time. That’s what made it valuable.
We dared each other to do all kinds of dangerous and stupid things. When the challenge of a dare was too intimidating, we coughed up our worldly possessions to encourage others to do what we thought we could not. Ultimately, we all ended up performing equal labors and dares, and not unlike our adult counterparts, the bounty won was eventually lost. We pocketed our riches accumulated through trading, but in the end, it was a rip-off. We would have done it all for free: the dares, the dangers, the friendship. All for free!
The tender we traded in on Starmount was far more valuable to me than what I trade in today. The currency of football cards, candy, courage, and personal labor all easily eclipse the value of today’s money. The bills currently in my pocket, the credit cards lining my wallet, and the direct-deposit paycheck that magically appears in my checking account every other Friday morning don’t make me feel as wealthy as I did back when friendship was the ultimate currency. On Starmount in 1977, the great thing about friendship is that no matter how liberally each of us spent it, we all wound up getting rich.