
For
a long time, these cards lived in a box in a storage facility out by a
golf course in Randolph, Vermont, jammed in among broken furniture,
garbage bags full of faded clothing, disintegrating books, the
rolled-up canvasses of my mother's oil paintings, tarnished silverware,
etc., etc. The house I'd grown up in with my brother, mother, and
mother's longtime boyfriend, my second father, Tom, had been sold and
replaced by several small, separate, temporary living spaces inhabited
by my scattered family: Tom's condo by a manmade waterfall in
Montpelier, Mom's apartment within earshot of shootings in one section
of Brooklyn, the apartment I shared with my brother in another section
of Brooklyn that constantly trembled because of its proximity to
traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, my dad's tiny monk-cell in
Manhattan. Nobody had an attic and nobody had the heart to just throw
away all the not quite necessary shit from that previous life of living
like people on television, together in a house. But nothing lasts
forever, not even the occupation of storage facilities. My mom and I
cleared everything out one summer in the mid-'90s when she took a
temporary job at a museum in Ohio. I took the baseball cards back to
New York and was looking through them and showing select cards to my
brother. When I showed him this card his reaction summed up the strange
and unexpected feeling of disconnection from the cards, as if the
iconic images of my youth had somehow been erased like the vanishing
scribblings on a shaken Etch-a-Sketch. Where was my childhood? Who were
these imposters? When my brother finally stopped laughing at the man in
this photograph, he declared: "There was never no fucking Carmen Fan
zone!"
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