Object No. 95 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Lauren Mechling, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $30.]

It was during Charlotte Sanger and Georgia Howard’s punk period — which actually had nothing to do with music and everything to do with mustard nailpolish and slinking away from Pine Ridge High School ’s mandatory double-period orchestra — that Charlotte spotted her mother in the front of the Pine View movie theater, waiting for the lights to dim and the 11:50 a.m. screening of Wayne’s World to begin. She was feeding herself popcorn, her right arm windshield wipering in unthinkingly perfect time.

“Crap.” Charlotte instinctively pulled her REM sweatshirt hood over her head. The last thing she needed was a run-in with her mother, who’d just last week moved up her curfew in response to her B minus in English.

Georgia, who’d pulled a zine out of her backpack, had no idea what was going on. And, come to think of it, neither did Charlotte. What on earth was her mother doing at a Wayne’s World screening when she had a deadline she’s been bitching about all week? Was she having an affair? Dread pooled in Charlotte’s stomach, but when she leaned a few inches further up and got a better picture of her mother, she wished the answer had been so tacky and simple.  She was eating the popcorn out of the blue family vase, the same clumpy one that was on permanent display on the living room mantel, next to the photograph of Charlotte and her brother, Dec. The popcorn carton was nowhere in sight — it must have been on the seat next to her, or the floor. Christ.

Had the vase been vaguely attractive, that might have explained it — her mother was a fan of “dressing to impress” and storing Nilla wafers in a crystal cookie jar. But that wasn’t it. Transferring popcorn to a weird case was just about the least impressive thing a suburban mother could do. Christ, Charlotte thought again. Her mother was going insane.

Charlotte and Georgia left before the movie was over — orchestra was one thing, but they couldn’t afford to miss 7th period. The rest of the day, Charlotte felt a shade of blue that was new to her. There were no hues of anger or hysteria or self-congratulation. Just blue.

When she came home that afternoon, she was expecting to find some sort of catastrophe. But Dec was watching “Family Ties” and her mother was upstairs, working on a drawing, per usual. The vase was in its rightful place, in all its lumpen glory.

It’s remained there to this day. Her mother has continued to function— there have been no signs of lunacy. And every winter, when Charlotte returns home, she waits until she’s alone in the living room to share a meaningful moment with the vase. Your mother is going to unravel, it tells her. All it will take is the tug of one thread.

Object No. 94 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Victor LaValle, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $51.99.]

Who the hell goes to Portugal? In my family?

The question arose as my sister and I were going through my grandmother’s things—her effects. She’d died of old age at Queens General Hospital and she’d been longing for it. Some people never want to go, but not her. She’d lived long (96 years), seen her grandkids and great grandkids.

The old lady didn’t own the apartment she’d lived in, alone, for 22 years. After she died my grandmother’s landlord (New York City Housing Authority) sent a letter: two weeks to clear her things. Then they would be bagged and bussed to a dump. So my sister and I spent evenings taking the 7 train to Jackson Heights, climbing nine flights to grandma’s apartment (her elevator was about as reliable as our older sister). We decided what to keep, what to sell, what to donate, and what to leave for the City.

Let’s be blunt: the mitt’s not pretty. Okay, it’s ugly as an unwashed butt. I didn’t find it in my grandmother’s kitchen. Or in the living room, where she’d sit and have tea in the afternoons. It was in her bedroom, slipped between the mattress and box spring. Some old ladies stow bags of cash, my grandmother hid a Portuguese cooking glove. I showed it to my sister, but she’d found my grandmother’s small Bible. Was leafing through, marveling at the notes our grandmother left in the margins. She got the good book; I kept the mitt.

Then, I brought the thing home and forgot about it! My sister and me, we helped our mother through the next few months. Eventually I found myself getting back into life. Like I started going on dates again. My head clear, my heart ready, my bed cold. So one night I’ve got this lovely woman at my place. She comes over to split a bottle of wine while we prepared a meal. My part consisted of uncorking the bottle. Meanwhile she made squash soup. The second or third step is to bake the two halves of a split squash, hot enough until you can peel back the rough outer skin with a butter knife. She opens the oven door and asks for a mitt to pull out the tray and what do I reach for? That’s right. Had it in a cupboard over the sink.

My friend slides the glove on, reaches into the oven, but as she’s pulling the tray she loses her grip and the squash goes to the ground. I just laughed. I was drunk, and this pretty lady had already let me kiss her. What could I be upset about?

But she wore another expression. Not anger.  Not pain. Bewilderment. She slipped the oven mitt off and turned it inside out. I thought she was going to rip it so I shouted, but then I saw the inside of the oven mitt. It was covered in words.

Not writing. Letters stitched into the fabric! We read the words, starting at the top, where the middle finger would reach. It read: My dearest Grace (that’s my grandmother) I hold your memory like I held your form. I feel sunlight across my body and the warmth of you. The warmth of being inside you…

And it went on like that.

A lot.

Turns outs my grandmother was kind of a slut!

My friend and I poured wine. Toasted the old woman. Good for her.

Object No. 87 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Merrill Markoe, has ended. Original price: 59 cents. Final price: $21.80.]

Any image that has been carefully placed in an antique gold frame embossed with angels and laurel wreathes becomes transformed in to something elevated and celestial. “All you need to know about this old person/building/animal/plate of food/scenic vista/bleeding martyr is that it is sacred to me and  holds a very special place in my heart,” the frame seems to tell us.

But what if you are the kind of person who wishes to remember the bad times? You believe there is wisdom in being surrounded by cautionary tales; reminders of your most fatal blunders. How else to remind yourself to never again respond too quickly to a seemingly harmless social invitation and risk becoming mired in an evening so vile it undermines your sense of self worth? So you bring home a memento of that detestable event: a whimsical cocktail stirrer or a personalized matchbook. But where do you put these wretched things? Or the snapshot you still have of that person you dated who stole your credit card and talked with a phony English accent? Let’s not forget that former best friend of yours who calls to brag about the good things that happen to him by disguising them as disappointments, tragedies and inconveniences. “I’m so depressed,” he says, “That deal I closed has moved me in to a much higher tax bracket.” Then he leaves you with a faux ironic  autographed photo of him standing in between Spencer and Heidi. You need a place to put that unpleasant souvenir of friendship gone sour. One that will admonish you never to take his phone calls again. Ditto the business card left behind by the tech guy who came to fix one broken USB port, dissembled your entire internet connection, refused all blame, and insisted on getting his full fee.

Well, some people put these things at the center of dart boards. But that has become a cliché. And why run the risk of attracting unwanted dart games? No, when you want to demean an image, hold it up to spite and ridicule and single it out as something worthy of scorn, you want a frame that conjures a rage like the one that overwhelmed that Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush. You want a frame that says “I step on you with my bare dirty feet.”

This poorly articulated caricature of a foot wearing a flimsy multicolored flip flop sits atop a frame that boldly declares, “Whatever I have enshrined here is something I hold in contempt. He/she/it is sub-par in every way: cheap, shallow, unimaginative, disposable, as void of any real value as the very worst, most despicable gift catalog. And just like the frame itself, they too are under the false impression that they are adorable and a welcome addition wherever they go.” May they eat every meal for the rest of their lives from a plastic plate festooned with Santa’s adorable helpers, listening to a never-ending loop of the opening line of “Up Up and Away,” by the Fifth Dimension.

Object No. 75 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Teddy Wayne, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $20.50.]

At the Ramada Hotel and Conference Center Qualcomm Stadium San Diego, on a June weekend in 2007, eighty-two men and women from Sealy, the mattress giant, converged for their national sales meeting.  Sealy was falling behind in the burgeoning memory-mattress market and its finances were, in industry parlance, “sagging.”  One right rectangular prism made of Lucite with a “Catch the Wave” decal, half-filled with viscous liquid, was awarded to Richard Caulkins, a mustachioed sales manager from Omaha whose branches had outperformed all others in the previous quarter.  Upon his return to Nebraska he gave it to his eight-year-old son, who sloshed the liquid around for a few minutes and unsuccessfully attempted to crack the prism’s clear walls before getting bored and running out of the house to play.

But its history is immaterial.  You will receive the Lucite prism.  You will marvel at its viscosity.  You will think of a motor oil commercial from your youth touting its product’s ability to resist viscosity and fight thermal breakdowns.  You will place the prism on your coffee table as a kitschy, ironic gesture.  You will wonder if you are too old and bourgeois to be decorating ironically.  When friends come by, they will, in puzzlement, ask if you received the prism from work.  You will titter, explain that its placement is ironic, and nervously gauge their reactions.  They will smile politely and tilt the prism’s liquid around a few times, then return to the previous conversation, which will be about work problems, or sexual problems, or interpersonal problems.  These are problems with which you are familiar from either previous discussions or your own identification with them.  You will recite rote solutions or expressions of sympathy from muscle memory, meanwhile casting a surreptitious glance at the still-sloshing prism, watching its encased waves that cannot be caught, thinking about thermal breakdowns, closing your eyes and dreaming about diving into the bracing Pacific, imagining the Caulkins son’s escape from his father’s suburban row house with the aimless adventure only children possess, and, when you open your eyes, the liquid’s viscosity will have brought itself to rest, thickly, silently, within its six clear walls.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Thomas McNeely, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.]

As a mug, it was useless: pot-bellied, so whatever we drank, herbal tea, cheap whiskey, cheap red wine, dribbled down our chins, as if we were children; the pouch behind the cat’s head, a promise of tidy convenience, worse than useless, good only for planting cigarettes like flags after we’d given up on it as a mug.  Its only redeeming aesthetic feature, the patina of mold we were never able to wash from the right side of its nose, at least offset its louche, ridiculous, wall-eyed gaze.

We found it on the back porch, a screened-in box tacked to our apartment atop a treacherous flight of stairs. Down the street, at one end, the last bus stop to the university between two liquor stores, at the other end, a park that looked dark even at midday, always deserted. We took boxes of junk by bus from our dorm, the tail end of our freshman year in college, both of us barely nineteen years old.

The day we found it: Late afternoon, early evening, scraps of cloud like red satin blankets, surcease of summer heat. We lugged plastic milk crates from the bus stop up the vacant street, past the liquor stores, trying not to talk about what your mother had said, that you were on your own.

As I put the key in the lock, my hand shook, thinking how flimsy it was, how easily it could be broken. It was our first time there without the landlord, a tidy, soft-spoken man whose sex life we speculated upon; everyone was a character to us, then.  I thought I should carry you across the threshold; maybe we did this, ironically; maybe I’m only imagining it.

I remember how our footsteps echoed, how doors creaked across bare wooden floors.  We roamed the house tentatively, as if it wasn’t really ours.  In the kitchen, you jimmied open the back door, which I’d forgotten, a surprise, a secret passage.

Outside, the wall of maples above the creek you had yet to discover had already darkened to shadows.  I started to speak, to warn you not to step through the hole in the porch; but you’d already turned, holding the cat mug like a prize, plucked from a cobwebbed corner, straddling the gap in the floor.

“It’s hideous,” I said.

“It’s wonderful,” you said.

“It’s wonderfully hideous.”

“It’s hideously wonderful,” you said.  “I like it.”

We washed it as best we could in the coughing sink. Tiny spiders erupted, scattered ahead of the rushing water.  We put it on a windowsill, saying we would clean it later, when we had soap.

On a curio shelf, we found a roach the landlord had left, and smoked it, and made love quickly, clumsily, on a sleeping bag on the bare wooden floor.  Sometime that night, I woke to the platting of distant gunshots outside.  I lay on the narrow strip of fabric, holding you, imagining our empty apartment, the cat on its windowsill watching us, the vast, encompassing night sky above.

May, 1987, Austin, Texas, two bedrooms, half a house, $225 a month; signs and wonders were everywhere, then: runes, tarot cards, the harmonic convergence, though we didn’t believe in any of that.

I wanted to call you, to tell you I’d found the cat, unpacking boxes in another house.  But it was late, and I didn’t know if you would answer.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ed Park, has closed. Original price: $2. Final price: $62.]

If you came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, you probably have some sense of what the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons was like. Players became characters — dwarf or knight or wizard — and wandered labyrinths looking for treasure, battling monsters along the way. Dice were rolled, charts consulted. Even if you never played, you probably knew someone who had, a brother of a friend or a nose-breathing cousin who himself resembled a minotaur.

Serious gamers will also recall other so-called role-playing games that cropped up during this era, such as Traveler, a militaristic science-fiction title with a map of the galaxy; or Gamma World, set in a post-apocalyptic America, in which your character had weird but potentially useful mutations — infrared vision, extra leg. But I don’t know anyone, aside from me and my next-door neighbor, Darren, who’d even heard of Mountains of Moralia, the sole offering of Radon Claw Game Labs.

The cover of the utilitarian rulebook featured what looked like a large gray triangle, which upon closer inspection revealed itself to be the titular land formation, spidered with trails, along which motley caravans of adventurers clashed with trolls, rocs, slavering wolf packs, and sentient malevolent vegetation.

Glimpsed a certain way, one could discern two dark watery eyes and a ragged mouth incised in the mountain itself — the first clue that all was not as it appeared on Moralia. The first section of the rulebook was a 10-page description of some fabled road that all travelers must take to approach Moralia — a text seemingly designed to make potential players chuck the thing in the trash. Darren read it aloud, as fast as he could, and then we turned to the pages concerning Character Generation.

Curiously, one did not play a single adventurer (dwarf, wizard, etc.), but instead took on the character of a huge chunk of land — that is, a Mountain of Moralia. What I’m saying is, you basically pretended you were a mountain. As if hypnotized, we followed the rules to the letter, rolling dice in the strange permutations typical for fantasy games. But this time the results were applied to things like Forest Coverage, Erosion Quotient, and Mammal Population.

Soon we had generated our two mountains. I named mine Epak’s Peak; Darren dubbed his This Totally Sucks. Part Two was a sample scenario in which the mountains… fought each other. Using Land Magik, you flung your rocks, animals, trees, grass, dirt, and so forth at the other mountain, trying to reduce it to rubble. However, as you lost these items, you were reduced, and there was a chance that, say, a boulder flung at your opponent became embedded in its side, thus giving it more mass.

This went on for round after round, hour after hour, and should have been the most boring thing in the world. Yet Darren and I soon found ourselves playing Mountains of Moralia to the exclusion of all our other games.

When Darren finally emerged triumphant, we jumped to Chapter 8, where we learned that we had just finished waging the Battle of Lavache, and that we could send in a certificate, signed by all players, for a free limited-edition trophy.

We sent it in, waited for six weeks. This is what we got. We never played Mountains of Moralia again. When I found this cow figure last week, stored with the fine china, I e-mailed Darren and asked if he still had the game. He said he didn’t know what I was talking about.

[The auction on this Significant Object, with story by Mimi Lipson, has ended. Original price: 39 cents. Final price: $31.]

From AW: The Lost Diaries

Wednesday, June 13, 1979

Halston was having a birthday party for the Dupont twins, so I glued myself together and cabbed to the Pierre to pick up Bianca ($5). She’s still mad at Victor about the sweater, but I think it’s really because she found out that he went to Mick and Jerry’s black and white party at Mr. Chow’s. Bianca’s ass is really getting too wide to wear Halston.

The party was fun. Halston had a birthday cake made up that looked like a giant popper. Victor was passing out these ugly coffee mugs that said “Halston” and had sketches from the fall line on them. Mugs, like from a truck stop. They had wavy American flags on them, too, and when I asked Halston why they had the flags, he said, “Don’t you think it makes them so much more butch?” Maybe I should get some mugs made up for Interview. Are they camp?

Thursday, June 14, 1979

Woke up tired from sleeping on my back so I don’t get any more wrinkles. I’m going use to the vaporizer instead from now on, if I remember to. And I’m still black and blue from the B12 shot that Martha Graham talked me into.

I don’t want mugs for Interview anymore. I’ve decided that they’re tacky. I thought about saving my Halston mug for a time capsule, but I gave it to Brigid instead. She’s probably just going to throw it out or give it to the Salvation Army or something.

[The bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Lydia Millet, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $22.72.]

I went with my friend G to her great aunt’s house a few weeks after the aunt passed away. G had been called in by the family to pick out one or two keepsakes. Because she lived in a cramped studio in Hell’s Kitchen she didn’t want anything, a, and b, according to G’s mother every item of value had been carted away five minutes after the old lady died, by a daughter-in-law no one liked. By the time G was called in to make a selection they’d already held the estate sale, so all that was left were the sale rejects. “Harsh,” said G, but she decided to go anyway because it was June and New York City was hot and humid and stank. The aunt had lived in one of those nice little towns on the Hudson, green with a pleasant breeze, and the train would let us out about three blocks from her house. Also there was a good diner in the town that G, who was a part-time food critic with a specialty in burgers, wanted to try.

So we got in the train one Saturday afternoon and we went to the house. It was a modest fake Tudor place, pretty much empty now except for a few dusty boxes of trinkets. G’s second cousin R was there, who she hadn’t seen since they were fourteen, went to summer camp together, and ended up making out. (She told me that later.) Now he lived in Jersey and had a lot of tattoos. They sat on the stoop smoking and talking while I rummaged around in the boxes, just for something to do. They were mostly ceramics of chickens, cows, and other livestock, the kind of cheerfully painted ones some ladies like to keep in their kitchens. Beats me why they do that. Maybe they want to feel their kitchens are farmhouses. Anyway, no one wanted these things. Some had been thrown into the boxes carelessly and were already chipped.

I’d never met the great aunt but as the sun sank low outside, G and R’s laughter floated in to me, and shadows crept over the bare living room floor I started to feel bad for all those abandoned barnyard animals. I picked through the pigs and roosters with a kind of sadness until finally I found Chili Cat. Ugly as sin, there was no getting around that. No reason at all for the cat to be festooned with red chilis. There was a Mexican motif, I guessed. Maybe Tex-Mex. Chili Cat was supposed to be festive.

G never picked out anything, herself. We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.

[Bidding on this Significant Object, with story by Luc Sante, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $17.79.]

Only now do I feel free to tell my part in the theft of the famed Light of the East diamond from the home of Roscoe and Mindy Furgarden in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1979. The 517-carat colorless gem, one of the world’s largest, had disappeared and reappeared many times in its tangled history. Its latest reemergence, among the effects of the Marquis of Glendale, had occasioned a crowded and contentious Sotheby’s auction that was won, to the dismay of all, by an anonymous telephone bid placed on behalf of the Furgardens.

The identity of the winner was sufficiently well concealed that the Furgardens felt no hurry to stow the diamond in a vault. Mindy needed to spend time staring at it, in her boudoir, where the illuminated five-part dressing mirror enhanced and multiplied its splendors. She couldn’t keep her mouth shut, though, and happened to tell her very best friend, Sheila Showpony, all about it on the terrace of Sheila’s Elizabethan cottage in the Hollywood Hills, right when my friend Craig was crouched nearby, cleaning out the pool filter.

Craig wasted no time organizing a crew of four to heist the rock. Sully was driver and lookout, Rat the lock specialist, and Craig and I were set to penetrate the boudoir. We frankly had no idea how to go about fencing the thing, but it was too rich a score to pass up. We learned that the Furgardens would be attending a charity polo match on the evening of June 18th, leaving the house in the care of their housekeeper, Mildred Swing, who was known to suffer from narcolepsy, and a retired cop named McDrain who acted as majordomo and security guard. McDrain’s weakness was the dog track, so we faked a hot tip on the sixth race to get him out of the house.

As we pulled into the driveway, the night was clear and we felt confident. Rat eased open the rear service entrance and we were in. We tiptoed up the stairs and found Mildred watching The Rockford Files in her room, her eyelids drooping. We easily found the master suite; within, the second door we tried led to Mindy’s boudoir. And there on the vanity lay the biggest diamond any of us had ever seen, lying casually on a chamois cloth like a naked movie star sprawled on a satin sheet.

Then the lights went out. We never found out what happened — had we cut an electric-eye beam? But we went into action mode. I wrapped the stone in its cloth, secreted it in a pocket of my jumpsuit, and we ran, bent low, down the carpeted hall and the carpeted stairs. We jumped into the car and made straight for our safehouse on the outskirts of Burbank, listening for sirens.

We yanked all the shades down and turned on a single light. I pulled the package out of my pocket. With slow, dramatic gestures I unwrapped it, only to discover… a Sanka ashtray. It was about the same size. In the dark I must have — I didn’t want to think about it. The others left me bleeding in an alley with the ashtray jammed into my mouth. I hung on to it for years as a bitter reminder, but eventually I drove to the nearest Goodwill box and shoved it in. And the stone? It disappeared that night and was never seen again.