“How am I supposed to send him to school with that? He can’t heat it up.”
“They don’t have a microwave at his school? With what we pay in taxes. Vito, my friend, what do you want then? Look here, I got some prosciutto, some gabagool that’ll go great with some…”
“Just turkey.”
“Turkey? Turkey with what? Nana gave us this spicy mustard that’ll… Hun, you know my mother makes delicious German food too, right? Okay, so we got this mustard…”
“Mayo, on white.”
“Maanuggia! You sure you’re my kid? Because I don’t know a Ferraro who would eat that scumbadeetz.” (Translation: garbage, crap.) “We sure as heck didn’t in West Orange. I’m gonna set something up with you and Gianluca. His mother is a nice woman, from Sicily. Here, look here, I’ve got some nice mortadella from Calandra’s…”
“I’m sick and tired of talking about lunchmeat!”
“Eh oh! You better cool it, pal, or you’ll get moonAtz. Don’t look at me like that. I’ll give you more crack than Harlem,” he said, laughing, and then dove back into the fridge.
“It’s that damn kid at his school and those other brats. I’ll tell ya, if that crap was going on in my neighborhood, someone would just clock ’em,” said my mother as she shuffled the clanking pots and pans around underneath the counter.
“Eyy! Can you not, hun? I went over with the kid when you’re allowed to hit someone. Right, pal?!” he called after me as I sought refuge in the basement. “Plus, hun, not all of us grew up in Germantown. You Philly kids are brutal!”
“Yeah, that’s right. Don’t you forget it.”
I had started to believe that my entire second-grade experience was a wash. My beautiful, intelligent teacher was taken from me, the malignants seeped into my one period free of Mrs. Sherman’s ballistic arithmetic attacks, Lenny was removed from my cluster, and anytime I attempted to add a plot twist to my however slowly moving epic, Arjun would make faces from his desk, completely blowing my cover.
But then came the spring, and inside me another renaissance blossomed. I was starting to think that the blooming flowers had magical powers. This rebirth wasn’t just an internal rebirth and it wasn’t just from the blooming foliage and opening day baseball, but it was a rebirth compounded by an external influence—so external it was from all the way across the other side of the map in my father’s atlas. And like the ’60s had the British Invasion, the late ’90s faced the Japanese Infiltration, and with it, Glenwood Elementary discovered Pokémon cards.
I bought my first pack, a “starter pack,” at New World Manga in Livingston, where my cousins Markey and Luke lived, along with Matt Dershowitz’s uncle and Jeremy Finklestein’s bubbe. Although the cards in the perfect rectangle foil pouch were the same in every starter pack and therefore there were no surprises (Karl got one the day before me and I shuffled through them like an addict), it was still a cathartic experience to slightly turn my first holographic (a.k.a. “holo”) in the light and watch the shiny paper dance and sparkle.
Machamp became my new champion. Why the blue, four-armed humanoid with rippling muscles had elected to fight barehanded instead of wielding weapons, I would never understand—he could hold four swords or axes or maces if he wanted to—but Karl said he was a great Pokémon nonetheless.
But the real fun, the real thrill that would get the heart pumping as we walked through that glass door with the chiming bell overhead, was to pick up a couple of “booster packs” from the goateed gentleman behind the counter.
The contents of these packs were completely random. Three packs could equal three holos—or zero. And those in the former camp felt like King Arthur for the day, gay and spry, while those in the latter sulked and pouted and refused to cooperate when deciding on dinner options.
I thumbed through my cards with a Cheshire cat smile as we sat at our booth in Burger King. I could barely get through two bites of my oversized chicken sandwich before repeating their names in soft whispers: “Venusaur. Scyther, Nidoking. Venusaur. Scyther. Nidoking.” Man, oh man, did that feel good.
The cards we bought were in English—you were supposed to use them to play a game, after all—but they sold Japanese ones, too, that just seemed so damn authentic. My mother wasn’t having it, though. She said my grandfather would be rolling over in his grave if he knew I was trading cards written in Japanese.
“Hey Mom, did he fight with a sword like a samurai when he was in Japan?” My grandfather had “island-hopped” the Pacific during the war—not as glamorous as it sounds, I would later discover.
“No, honey,” she said. “We’re Americans, we fight with guns.” I still liked to imagine my grandfather in a black-and-gold kimono, wielding a shimmering katana as he battled Japanese infantry.
At Glenwood, the jubilance around Pokémon cards barely lasted the week. By Friday’s recess, I had lost Venusaur, Scyther, and Nidoking in three separate transactions that all remain a menacing blur. Jack Yamamoto was instantly thrust into the position of arbiter for all transactions and his say was final, sealing the deal with a stern, “No trade-backs.” He rendered his decisions from on top of the jungle gym as we stood in the wood chips in clusters and soaked it up like he was Christ on the mount. He even “translated” the cards written in Japanese and made rulings on those, too. But we had no way to check if he was just making stuff up because no one else at Glenwood knew Japanese. Paxton even insisted that Kevin Liu read the cards as a way to balance Jack’s unchecked powers, but Kevin cried that
