Pokemon Cards

My older brother is about 11 and half years older than me, so there was a slight generational gap between the two of us. Like a generational pothole. Here’s a quintessential example of this pothole:  When I was 9-years-old, my brother said to me, “When you’re older and I know that you’re mature enough not to lose them, I’m going to give you all of my baseball cards.” I could tell from his cadence and the accompanying tender trombone melody that this was meant to be a big moment between the two of us. I was supposed to say, “Do you mean it, big brother, really and for true?” So I did say that, because I was a perceptive 9-year-old and very good at picking up on these kinds of social queues, but I remember in my head thinking, “Fucking great. What am I supposed to do with a bunch of pictures of old dudes printed on paper?” It was 1999 and I was 9-years-old; the majority of my friends were other 9-year-olds like myself. Not a single one of them would be impressed by these useless pictures of people none of us had ever heard of; they were collecting Pokemon cards!  I didn’t have any like 24-year-old friends who would be vaguely impressed by my baseball card collection; I did have a 20-year-old friend for a while, but the police made him quit skateboarding with little kids, and the median age of our group returned to nine. I had it rough bringing baseball cards to a Poke-party. All of my friends’ parents seemed to be completely game for spending tons of money on these useless pieces of paper, but it was not something my mom could be convinced of; I guess my brother must have wasted his own money on the baseball cards. I was extremely jealous of this one kid whose parents bought him all of the newest and rarest Pokemon cards on eBay; they were dropping crazy money on this shit.

One day, the jealously got the best of me and I stole a book full of his best cards on my way out of his house. I had brought my brother’s baseball card book with me that day and was able to hide his book inside of it. On my way home I noticed a few cards fall out of the book and I turned around and was startled to see a huge trailer of cards leading all the way down the sidewalk. Fortunately, they were just my brother’s baseball cards and not my sweet new Pokemon card collection. It was snowing out so I just left it to nature to hide the trail of bread crumbs I had left in my wake. I immediately started showing off my new cards to my sister and a bunch of kids on my street. I strutted around showing off the cards like I had just won the lottery and pulled up to my house in a Lamborghini. I guess the kid I stole them from’s parents were able to follow the bread crumbs after all, as they showed up at our house and asked for his cards back. I obliged, as though my mom or her belt gave me a choice, but it turned out that I had somehow lost of the cards, which was a rare Japanese exclusive card that my mom then had to buy off of eBay for $80. $80 in 1999 was 80 gallons of unleaded gas, which was roughly how much I would need to get far away enough from my mom at this point.

I eventually realized that a lot of my friends were way too poor for their parents to be buying them all of these non-essentials, and I soon discovered that they were obtaining their cards through shoplifting. That ended up working out much better for me, because I guess K-Mart employees had no idea that 9-year-olds were not to be trusted. I ended up giving all of my stolen cards away to a girl that I had a crush on. I told my girlfriend this story and she told me that her mom also wouldn’t buy her Pokemon cards, but it didn’t matter because boys would just give them to her all of the time. I asked a few other girls about their Pokemon card collections from when they were younger and they invariably told me they were given all of their cards by boys that they knew. You girls got all of your Pokemon cards for free? Check your privilege. I’m just kidding; I know that girls have it much harder. You probably were expected to put out after being given those cards. Men are animals and I guess women are Pokémon. Or are boys Pokémon in that analogy? Where was I going with this?