Collecting

McSweeney’s Submission #2:

Collecting is a great habit. It starts out simply enough. When you’re a kid, it might be comic books or baseball cars. It could be stuffed animals or dolls. It’s a wonderful thing, on a Saturday morning, to lug your shoeboxes full of cards, plop down in front of the TV to watch cartoons, eat cereal, and organize your collection.

You spread out the cards. Do you divide them up by teams or according to card number? And how on earth do they number those cards anyway? It doesn’t make sense to you that Steve Garvey (#380) was between a checklist (#379) and Ralph Houk (#381). Not being able to decide, you guzzle down the last of the warm sweet milk at the bottom of the bowl and go outside to play.

As you move into high school and then college you start listening to ‘good’ music – and so begins a lifelong obsession with collecting vinyl records. It starts out hunting used record shops, flipping through stack after stack of cutouts searching for an old New Order 12”, or an out of print copy of On Fire by Galaxie 500.

You haunt garage sales on the weekends, hunting in vain for a mint copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, with an unpeeled banana and the torso on the back cover. Or a mono Blonde on Blonde, WITH the picture of Claudia Cardinale that was removed in later pressings.

At an estate sale in Connecticut, you find a paperback copy of Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. You buy it for 75 cents and take it home, only there discovering it’s signed. And, as you move from undergrad into a master’s program, you find yourself obsessively searching on eBay for a signed Player Piano. You know the one. It’s got the Scribner’s ‘A’ AND the seal. None of this book club crap for you.

It will go well with the Houghton Mifflin hardback of Sirens of Titan. Only 3,000 printed back in 1961, and you have two of them. One’s an ex-library, but you’re ok with it. Of course, you have to use your student loan money to pay for it, which means putting of getting your degree in urban planning and development.

‘Screw it,’ you think. NYU will always be there, but that second Sirens was ending in three days. It was a no-brainer. It was time for a semester off anyway, you think as you move into collecting magazines that contain stories by your favorite authors not published in any later collection. You amass a wonderful collection of Faulker and Salinger, before moving on to collecting vintage magazine subscription cards, and eventually just the Target cigarette inserts from 1970’s pulp novels.

After getting a job as a dishwasher, you begin to see famous people’s faces in stains on your apron. You begin taking them home, amassing a wonderful collection that contains Don Amechee, Rita Hayworth, and Gerald Ford, among others. You connect with a group of apronairres online, even traveling to the national convention in Boca to show off your mint Buster Keaton. A collector from Kansas offers you $7,500 for it and you laugh in his face.

You go on unemployment after the diner fires you, which frees up your day to keep track of your online auctions and dumpster diving. You’re shocked that people actually throw out broken wicker chairs, you newest collectible.
When your chairs, aprons, signed books, comic books, baseball cards, records, magazines, Target ads, and balls of Laundromat lint take up all the space in your apartment, you move on to collecting homeless signs, as they’ll fit neatly behind your shelves and under your bed.

You’ve already scored a ‘Homeless Vet’, an ‘Anything helps, god bless’, and the coveted ‘Will work 4 beer’ sign when your landlord evicts you for failure to pay rent and something about cluttering up the basement with your mint collection of plastic Safeway bags dating back to 1961.

You phone your dad, a tractor collector who lives upstate. When you ask him if it’s ok to crash for a while, he explains he only has room for you outside, in one of the vintage Coleman pup tents he hordes as his collection of original political yard signs endorsing ballot initiatives takes up all the space in the spare bedroom, and the living room is full of the vintage hay bales he’s been collecting for years.

As you move upstate with your collections packed neatly into a 24’ U-Haul, you thank god you don’t collect Star Wars crap like your brother. What’s fun about collecting pieces of plastic made to look like Harrison Ford?

Tags: Writing