All the Marbles
Non-Fiction by John Moore
I still have my marbles. A few, anyway, found at the bottom of a softening liquor box with a collection of obscene Javanese kris handles, a globe of the Moon, a manuscript of short stories I'd forgotten I'd written, envelopes stuffed with letters from mislaid friends — an inexplicable handful of small spheres of coloured glass. I grabbed them like a salvage diver snatching jewels from the sandy sea-bottom grave of a galleon.
Rolling them in my palm, savouring the sibilant clicking, I practised my impression of Bogart doing Captain Queeg's court room mad scene from The Caine Mutiny. The sensation took me back to childhood schoolyards, recesses and lunch hours exhausted in the massed brutalities of British Bull dog, girls who showed their underpants and sometimes more behind green painted wooden back stops we flicked our baseball cards against — and inevitably to Marble Season.
At my own kid s' elementary school a few years ago, I overheard the principal making the "announcements," officially banning all Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh trading cards because students had been bullying to acquire them. A boy had just been jackknifed in a Quebec school yard over a Japanese anime trading-card deal gone bad. Despite clever multi -media marketing of the cartoon versions and a hydra of anime spin-offs as video games, toys, and trading cards, the whole shelf of "pocket monsters" were on a crash trajectory for the same seldom-opened junk drawer, attic, or crawlspace box where once-treasured baseball and hockey cards and bags of chipped and worn marbles repose like the funeral good s of a young pharaoh.
What kids remember where they left the obsessive fads of the last decade— the Pogs or Kinder Surprise toys, the Tamigotchi Eggs and the brood of "electronic pets" they spawned? How quickly they became just more bits of plastic junk on the floor parents stepped on in the dark and tossed in the trash with a curse.
When I was a kid, with no marketing savvy whatsoever, Marble Season returned to elementary school playgrounds ever y year as regularly as an outbreak of plague in a crowded medieval city.
It came on like recurrent malaria, a kind of brain fever afflicting male children only. Girls skipped , using single and double ropes or long strings of knotted coloured elastics attached to a fixed stanchion at one end and wrapped around a girl's leg at the other — called Chinese Skip — to create complex choreographies accompanied by song-chants, some of very ancient origin, which still haunt my dreams of childhood. Marbles was a boys' game.
There were no warning symptoms of the onset of the marble epidemic. Large numbers of boys would just turn up at school one day with alleys rattling in their pockets and Roy Rogers lunch kits. Within days, marble bags swung from every wrist. Smaller than a gym-strip bag, these were often likewise sewn by mothers from scraps of fabric leftover from McCall's dress patterns that had come to grief on the rocks of middle age. The primo marble bag was the purple velvet bag with the golden cord that proclaimed parents with the taste and in come to drink Seagram's Crown Royal rye whisky.
That purple bag was as much a status symbol as the number and quality of its con tents. But, like a gem dealer's inventory, the marbles it held weren't merely "marbles." There was a ranking system of value as arcane as any you'll find behind the steel doors of the Diamond Club in New York or Amsterdam. That I still recall it in detail testifies to its power over boys of my age.
Illustration by Derek Von EssenThe Alley Mercantile
No overt attempt was ever made to control or curtail Marble Season, but no one ever got stabbed over marbles either. In the 1950s, marbles were still seen by the adult world as a quaint detail from a Norman Rockwell painting, the harmless passtime of boys in 1920s knickerbockers; a relic of a simpler time. School officials sensed Marble Season was an infinitely more complex social event than it appeared , but they couldn't penetrate its mysteries any more than an undergraduate anthropologist could wangle an invitation to a genuine voodoo ceremony. In fact, marbles were the currency of an underground economy, as arbitrary and exclusive, as ruthless and secret as any black market.
The most common variety was cat's eyes: small clear glass spheres with wafers of colour suspended inside like a child's hand wind mill. Rarer were the ones we called "dates"— opaque white marbles the same size as cat 's eyes, but with streaks and swirls of yellow, black, and brown sweeping across their surfaces like storms on Jupiter. I always secretly liked dates because they suggested mysterious planets or exotic candies. But despite their rarity, in the official ranking they were worth less than cat's eyes, and the rule of the marble market was more absolute than the loop-holed regulations of any Securities and Exchange Commission. If you walked on to the grounds with a bag full of dates, you'd be laughed out of school, so I kept mine in a drawer at home, a private vice, along with my collection of matchbook covers from exotic motels and illustrated fishing flies torn from the backs of discarded Sportsman cigarette packs I risked hepatitis to fish out of ditches.
Higher in value than regular cat's eyes were the crystals, what we generically called "alleys.'' The same size as regular alleys, crystals had no internal leaves of colour, but they weren't clear either. A suggestive cosmic drift of tiny bubbles and a subtle overall tint distinguished them. Like tiny self-contained galaxies, they were hypnotically beautiful, instantly collectible, and worth a heaping handful of cat’s eyes.
Above them were cobs — big marbles, three times the size of the average cat’s eyes. Though most contained the same internal colour-wafer structure, they were worth a dozen or more regular marbles in a straight trade. Rarer and more valuable still were crystal cobs. Nearer the apex of value were king cobs — giant marbles, double the size of a cob but still cat's eyes.
At the apex of the market, the dream and ultimate prize of every collector, as unique and covetable as the Hope Diamond or Star of India, was the crystal king cob. This was a marble you paid in alleys just to see briefly, to touch only if the owner was a best friend or someone who owed you for the loan of a rare comic book. They were almost never traded. To possess one was to be famous, a guarantee of instant star status.
In an odd specialist category of their own were the steelies. Really just ball bearings of various sizes, the legitimacy of steelies as marbles was always in question. Most kid s refused to shoot against steelies with glass marbles because of the extra punch they packed and the devaluing chipping they caused.
Childhood’s Casino
Like trading cards, marbles could be used to play games, but in their purest sense they constituted an economy in themselves.
Arbitrary tokens of value— "money” by another name — they temporarily possessed what anthropologists call mana: power or virtue. They were the chips of childhood's casino. Only geeky kids actually played with them. I remember only two games in which they were used — the traditional thumb-shot into a circle in the dirt, a miniature version of the ancient game of bowls, and ''Chase," a pointless excuse for kids with only a few marbles to wander off to the margins of the playground, pretending to have something to do by flicking marbles in a hare-and-hounds ground level game of tag.
The real action was in the covered playground , where the Marble Kings ran their pitches like carny gypsies. This was the Marble Midway, trading floor of the Alley Mercantile Exchange, a recess bazaar, a pre-teen souk, where young hustlers would set up shop with no more than a precious marble and a line in the dirt.
Scoring a shooting fault line with a Keds sneaker heel, they would pace off the distance and sit, legs apart, with the prize presented between their knees.
The proposition was simple: shoot from behind the line, hit the offered marble and it was yours. Misses rolled into the crotch of dusty jeans and were swiftly swept into the marble bag of the operator. An operator might lose two cobs, but gain dozens of alleys he could trade for three or four more cobs with neighbouring entrepreneurs. Soprano pitchmen hawked their wares, ''Cob here!" or "Crysssss-tal cob!", "King cob hee-ah!"
It was a cacophonous casbah in which the neophyte was frequently fleeced, his marble bag left as flaccid as a eunuch's scrotum. A thumb-snapped sphere of glass moves fast and takes some unpredictable hops on a sneaker-scrubbed pitch. The unwritten rule was that the struck marble had to move; so one of the lower tricks of the trade was to knuckle the offered prize into the dirt slightly, like a golf ball in a soft sand trap, and deny even clear hits on the grounds that the big cob on offer hadn't moved. An obvious dodge was to present a big cob steelie, but no one but a total dinkweed would shoot at that.
Some kids take to dealing instinctively. Their marble bags always bulged and even when they seemed to lose, they recouped their glass fortunes quickly, like eccentric tycoons. Marbles taught them more than just the arts of acquisition. The fundamental dichotomy of being a Marble King became clear when they figured out that marbles in themselves didn't constitute "real" wealth. Marbles couldn't be re-converted into coin for Mars bars, Hot Rod magazines or cigarettes you swore you were buying for your Mom and later shared in the ravines behind the school. Their value existed only within the closed temporal system of Marble Season economics.
The Big Scramble
To fully savour the status conferred by packing a big bag, alley tycoons had to prolong Marble Season for as long as possible, even though their own gifts for sharp trading and accumulation worked against that end. If the bulk of the theoretical "wealth" in the system became concentrated too quickly in too few hands, losing kids would also lose interest in marbles, and their parents would lose interest in buying replacements at the five-and-dime. The problem of redistribution of wealth in a closed system was solved in a manner reminiscent of the once-banned potlatch ceremonies of the Native people of the Pacific Northwest.
Having amassed a glass fortune by skill and guile, the marble millionaire could only achieve truly legendary status by a gesture so grandiose, so contrary to market principles, that it was absurdly heroic — he would hold a Big Scramble. Small scrambles were a frequent source of impromptu entertainment. Marble Kings routinely amused themselves by pulling a valuable marble from their bags without warning, tossing it into the air and shouting, "Scramble on a crystal!" or "Scramble on a cob!" just for the pleasure of watching lesser mortals grovel and grapple in the gravel over the unexpected prize. But this was small change, like a dot-com tycoon tipping a waiter a C-note.
The Big Scramble was not a spontaneous gesture. It was a sacred ritual planned for a specific time — but not after school because witnesses would disperse homeward too quickly, dissipating the adulation. Big Scrambles were held at lunch hour so morning recess could be spent passing the word to create anticipation and suspense. For the rest of the morning the announced host would then be treated with the exaggerated deference paid to human sacrifices before their immolation.
At the lunch bell, the ritual host-victim would retreat to the boy's washroom with his most trusted attendants to prepare himself and allow twenty minutes or so for starving kids to gobble their sandwiches and gather below the appointed "high place”—a big rock, stump, or concrete exit ramp. Lugging a bag bulging at the scams with precious alleys, the Anointed One would at last appear and mount the altar to the respectful rustle of crumpled lunch bags. Surveying the reverent congregation below him, he would savour the moment, then hold the Great Bag aloft and shout, as loud as a boy's unbroken voice would allow, the sacred incantation: "Scraaaaambullllll!"
Opening the neck of the bag. he would swing it by a bottom corner in a violent, almost sexual transport of surrender, creating spiral nebulae of glittering gem-like interruptions of the atmosphere that arced and fell to earth like tracer bullets or errant meteors, wounding the spectators, who convulsed like a single captive Caliban under the shining lash. Alone in triumph, he revelled in the spectacle of earthly power as the marble-maddened mob grubbed in the mud, snatched, slapped, punched, kicked, bit, and tore from each others' hands, pockets, and bags.
Without a single marble in his orgiastically drained bag, the erstwhile Marble King would descend and walk among the grovelling hoi polloi — apart, aloof, a kind of playground God for a day: revered, untouchable. Next morning at recess, he'd set up his pitch with a few hoarded cobs and start all over again.
The Rich Are Different
Teachers were sensibly suspicious of Marble Season. They sensed the superficial parallel between marble pitches and the ring-toss hustles of the carny midway. But they still thought of marbles as "toys" like the big teddy bears or trashy souvenir prizes that were all you could win at Playland. Because they never saw marbles as "wealth," they never understood that marbles constituted a micro-economy — a network of mergers and acquisitions, hostile takeovers, investment and return and, above all, risk.
Gambling is almost universal in human societies, no matter how primitive, even the larval societies of childhood. The true appeal of gambling lies not in the chance of gain, bur in the possibility of challenge, of altering the existing social order. Win the 649 Lottery, or go to Vegas and draw to an inside straight at the big money table, or tickle that SuperJackpot poker machine and you're suddenly rich. And, as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed to Ernest Hemingway, ''The rich are different."
Despite Hem's deflationary reply, "Yes, they have more money," Fitz was right, if not exactly the way he meant. To those who inherit or acquire great wealth, gambling affords merely the lame frisson that accompanies rapidly losing more money than most people will ever possess without suffering unduly. As organized crime and national, state, and provincial governments know too well, the real gamblers are the poor, for whom the prize is nothing less than the transformation of life. That's what Marble Season offered: an opportunity for hustle to triumph over muscle, for skill and brains to beat the brawn-and-bluster status quo of the schoolyard.
Sure, a bully might acquire marbles quickly by intimidation, but he'd lose them as fast to someone half his size at one of the shooting galleries, and everyone would know how he came by them anyway and hold him in utter contempt. Bullies who prided themselves on extorting lunch money wouldn't dare hijack a fat marble bag because when word got around, they'd actually lose status for breaking the house rules of childhood's casino. Like being banned from the only bar in a small northern town if you're a bullying drunk, the old tribal system of being "cast out'' for certain transgressions still works.
Marble Season literally levelled the playing field with sneaker heels. It squared a lot of social scores that would otherwise have been settled more predictably and bloodily "at the yellow bridge after school." It gave simple bullies pause and let some unlikely heroes take a brief glorious walk in the sun. Marble Season taught us more about the nature of value, market economies, social status, and real life than anything we learned in twelve years of school.
In one of the dollar stores that are inflation's answer to the old five-and-dime as a kid's Cave of the Forty Thieves, I rediscovered marbles I hadn't seen in forty years. A Cob, a handful of Cat's Eyes, even a few Dates, nestled in little net bags I hefted in the palms of my hands. For the price of one and two dollar coins, I could instantly be the Marble King I had always dreamed of being.
That would be cheating, so I only bought one bag, just to keep the old ones company in the rotting box. They don't have Marble Season at my kids' school and even anime trading cards have become passé now. His video-game-wired generation doesn't seem to collect anything specific at the moment, but they will.
Marble Season taught us it's human nature to invest objects with abstract value — cowry shells, crystal cobs, gold nuggets, coins, bills, stocks, bonds, or certificates of deposit.
Some of us learned to substitute money for marbles in the equation (marbles=money) and keep playing the game as if "the one with the biggest Crown Royal bag wins.' They became entrepreneurs in the 1980s, when being called one in the popular press was reason enough to break out the Kristal and evolved into the kind of fatuous shits who gild their greed by dismissing money as "just a way of keeping score."
Others interpreted the same lesson to the opposite conclusion, deciding that money=marbles means that bills are just paper, asswipe glorified with political portraiture, that coins are merely slugs of stamped cheap metal and that the smart thing to do with both is to invest them in wine, pleasure, and song and spend the rest foolishly, as they say in Ireland. The odious arithmetic of "keeping score" is irrelevant if you refuse to play the game.
More than a century of revolution, civil war, and global tension inspired by these variant economic ideologies has failed to resolve the argument over whether or not anything arbitrarily designated as a medium of exchange, "money" by any other name, can truly represent the value of goods or labour. For now, I 'm hanging on to my marbles and trolling flea markets for a faded velvet Crown Royal bag to keep them in. When all the trading cards, Game Boys, and electronic pets end up in the land fill — and when the reactionary fantasies of proponents of globalisation finally succeed in concentrating so much of the theoretical wealth of the world in the hands of so few people that the rest of us recognize how vastly we outnumber them — I 'm going to teach my kids how to scuff out a pitch on top of the bulldozed grave-mound of western civilization and yell, "King cob heeee-ah!" in a voice that'll have a brave new world lining up to lose their marbles. ■