Object No. 91 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Meghan O'Rourke, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $62. ]

After my mother died, a stranger emailed me. He told me that my mother had been the most important person in his life. They went to Catholic school together. He was unpopular, she was popular; he was a bad student, she was a good student; he was a football player; she was a cheerleader. Though he wasn’t in her clique, one night at a dance, she came up to him while “Hey Jude” was playing and asked him to dance. Something clicked.

They told each other everything, walking home from school carrying books, talking on the phone for hours at night, to the annoyance of siblings and parents. (This was before call waiting.) One day after school they went to the beach club and swam in the ocean for hours, talking, sitting on the rope buoys. Her lips got blue. He told her they should go in, but sitting on the furthest buoy, she said, let’s just stay out here a while longer. The two of them sat together under the big sky, listening to the cries of the birds, as if they were made for water.

The other boys in her clique got annoyed that my mother was spending so much time with this guy. One of them tackled him hard during football practice and broke his wrist. So this guy decided, with regret, it was time for him to leave my mother alone. First, though, he made her Mario, the baker mouse. It took him three days of work after school. Mario is made of soft felt, string, and paper. If his feet are not really there, that is because this young man was not much of an artist.

When I was a child, my mother used to keep Mario on a shelf near the oven. Sometimes I would play with him. She told me that Mario was magic; in the night, he made muffins light as manna and delicate as silver. If you happened to sleepwalk into the kitchen, you could eat the muffins, but they disappeared by morning. I always hoped I might sleepwalk, because the muffins, my mother said, cast a spell on you. If you ate one, your dreams would be vivid. You would feel light and airy when you wake, not tired. You would finally remember that feeling which always seemed like a secret you couldn’t name, and carry it around with you.

Soon after the man gave Mario to my mother, she met my father.  She married my father a year later, when she was 17. There was nothing more between my mother and this man. Then one day last year, he Googled my mother. He saw her death notice. And he contacted me to tell me about Mario.

For these reasons, I believe Mario is good luck. He is made out of feelings as much as he is made of felt. And his favorite thing to bake is red velvet cupcakes.

Object No. 86 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by (Slate contest winner) Matthew J. Wells, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $54.]

Booth 106 was the regular table of Evelyn Nesbit — it’s where she was introduced to Charles Dana Gibson, who used her as the model for his famous Gibson Girl drawings; it’s where she met the young John Barrymore, who became her lover and got her pregnant twice (once in the booth itself and once in his apartment); it’s where she was introduced to architect Stanford White by fellow Floradora Girl Edna Goodrich; and it’s where she met her future husband Harry Thaw, who murdered White at Madison Square Garden on June 25, 1906.

Originally surrounded by red velvet drapes, the booth is now open and unlit. On the wall is a photo of Nesbit from her Gibson Girl days and beneath it, on a small shelf, is a little jar labeled “BAR-B-Q Sauce.” The jar was originally purchased by Nesbit as a gift for White — whenever White would meet her for dinner, he would order ribs, and she paid the waiters to always keep the small jar full of sauce at the table for White’s special use. Very special, according to suppressed trial testimony after his murder — allegedly, the ribs weren’t the only things White covered in barbecue sauce behind those drapes.

After White’s death, Booth 106 was roped off as a sign of mourning, a RESERVED sign was placed on the table, and per Evelyn Nesbit’s wishes, once a week the bartender would refill the BAR-B-Q jar, as if in preparation for White’s eventual return. The table went empty for almost two years (not even Nesbit sat at it), until the afternoon of January 5, 1908, when Harry Thaw sailed into the Naughty Pine, plunked himself down at Booth 106, ripped up the RESERVED sign, tore down the red velvet curtains, draped them around his body like a winding sheet, and demanded a shave. When told that he was in a bar and not a barber shop, Thaw cried, “Then I’ll do it myself,” whereupon he pulled out a straight razor, stropped it on his leather belt, and taking the BAR-B-Q jar, proceeded to slop sauce all over his face as if it were shaving cream. Then, pretending to stare into a mirror, he gave himself a blood-soaked shave while humming “I Could Love A Million Girls,” the song that had been playing when he shot White in the face.

“You must be a lunatic,” said one of the waiters. Thaw just smiled at him. His first trial for the murder of Stanford White had ended in a deadlocked jury; but the next day, when his second trial began, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

***

NOTE: This story was also published at Slate.com. Read more about this winning entry, and the runners-up, here.

Object No. 58 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Tim Carvell, has ended. Original price: 50 cents. Final price: $35.]

On December 17, 1948, the Humboldt twins entered the world, Jerome screaming, Luke laughing. This pattern held. Jerome grew up to be as petulant, difficult and miserable as Luke was cheery, optimistic and polite.

Their father, Max, owned the Humboldt Tiny Decorative Box Corp., the main employer in Ossipee, N.H. He grew to hope Luke might one day take over the business. After all, Luke loved crafts — at the age of nine, he’d papier-mâchéd a doghouse in a perfect replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wingspread House. (The doghouse remained sadly unoccupied, as Jerome’s cock-fighting ring had placed the family on the ASPCA’s “watch list”.) But at his wife Sheila’s urging, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, in 1969 Max willed the business to both boys.

This was a horrible mistake. Not six months after drawing up the will, Max died from what is known in the decorative-box trade as “varnish lung”. (The coroner tactlessly described Max’s lungs to Sheila as “the shiniest I’ve ever seen”.) At the time, Luke was in Ecuador with the Peace Corps, teaching tribal children appliqué and decoupage. And so it fell to Jerome to lead the company.

To everyone’s surprise, Jerome leaped at the opportunity. Far from lacking interest in the family trade, he’d quietly written a manifesto, “On the Morality of the Small Box”, arguing that tiny boxes were a means to liberate the world from falsehood — and any box that failed to do so was “a plywood sin”. He swiftly redesigned the company’s wares, banishing all forms of decoration; the factory soon produced only severe black boxes, adorned with 9-point Courier declarations: “Love is a precursor to sorrow.” “Joy fades.” “Pets die.”

The boxes were a disaster. Within six months, business had tapered off to zero, and the payroll dwindled to one: Jerome. Ignoring the pleas of the townspeople, Jerome persisted, drinking heavily and hand-making his grim boxes late into the night.

What happened on Christmas Eve, 1970 was, Sheila insists, an accident; out of deference to her, let us say that it was. That night, Jerome accidentally fell into the hydraulic laminator, having accidentally disabled its safeguards. The machine swiftly rendered his body into a shiny oblong disc of viscera. Horrifically, his body was found by none other than his brother, who tiptoed into the factory early Christmas morning, hoping to surprise his father and share tales of his Ecuadoran glitter co-operative, only to find his brother’s pressed corpse.

Such an event might have broken another man. But Luke worked through his grief, throwing himself into designing his brother’s coffin. To accommodate the corpse’s unusual shape, the container was necessarily round, and he decorated the lid with a tender photo of Sheila cradling Jerome. (A photo, Sheila later confided to friends, snapped moments before Jerome bit her.) But the night before the funeral, the casket remained maddeningly incomplete. Then Luke’s eyes lit upon the inscription on one of his brother’s boxes: “To one person, you may be the world, but to the world, you’re only one person.” And he realized that it needed but a slight tweak. In what became number 3 on Small Box Monthly‘s list of the 100 Most Significant Moments of the 20th Century, Luke Humboldt reached for the paint. He wrote: “To the world, you may be only one person, but to one person, you may be the world.”

The next morning, as the casket was lashed to the roof of a hearse, an onlooker muttered, “Now there’s a box someone might buy.” And Luke — looking out upon the unemployed citizens of Ossipee — knew what he had to do. That very evening, he started producing small replicas of Jerome’s splendid coffin. To you, this may be just one small box. But to Luke Humboldt, this box contains the world.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Rosecrans Baldwin, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $26. ]

The North Americans refused accusal. Constructed great cities and gave their names to them and let them crumble and then walked away. Disappeared in The Big Sand. Said never to apologize and seldom to slow down. Who judged on souls, some anointed, some not. That’s what the relics show. People of the small picture.

Shown: Totem of North American Perry Atlas. He found it tissue-wrapped in a rental car. Atlas, cell-phone salesman, who gave up his marriage and family in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a week’s affair with a bartender who was post-pregnant and couldn’t help but look around for what came next. Miscarriage, and Atlas later homeless in Shreveport.

Then carried by two murderers — killing from self-loathing, having already killed four — on a drug spree through Illinois. One with a gun, one with a map. They were bragging, lurching towards Springfield, and hit a Wendy’s. Robbed a hundred bucks from the register and found two hands in prayer on the counter and palmed it too, propped it up on the dashboard for good luck. An accident, a heart attack striking the driver that evening, killed both, and that was that.

Finally, the totem of North American girl Dahlia, who received it in the mail from her sister, Mocha, who was always sending her dumb shit, those small praying hands being the last straw, said Dahlia; they’re being, duh, obviously a reference to how Mocha saw Dahlia’s prospects in life (without a prayer); Dahlia’s suicide securely severing their relationship.

Nothing survives. The American dream mutated to its rest, but it was doomed from day one, so were the Americans. So are we.

—from Exhibition Captions of Gao Jianqing Sanderson, Doomsday Collector (ICBC Wal-Mobil, 3055)

[The auction for this Significant Object, with song (MP3, and lyrics, below), by Teddy Blanks, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $2.38. This was part of a special collaboration with Design Observer, where it was co-published here.]

CLICK BUTTON to listen to “Figurines” by Teddy Blanks.

“Figurines”

All those years we were married,
You, the beloved host of a daytime talk show
I’d stay home with the children
arranging your figurines for display

Now I stare at the mantle
Fixed on a small white porcelain motor scooter
Remembering how you told me
You wanted to ride a real one someday

Studio B, and all the lights
Flashing lowly in your metered dreams
TVs have taken flight
Leaving your objects rusting away

Three straight days of headline news
Your memorial, it was deeply moving
All the stars call to tell me
“She was the queen of daytime TV”

But I’m stuck here with your boxes, baby
Just like it was on the day you left here
you took off on your scooter,
leaving the porcelain one to me

Were you asleep? Was it too dark
when you swerved across the boulevard,
and all the braking cars,
crashing directly into a tree?

Walked right up to an ambush
They were just standing there like a ticking task force,
sisters reading your diary,
combing the wreckage, taping the scene

Camouflaged in the background,
I’m just a footnote in the life of a fallen legend,
father of her two children,
keeping her archives ordered and clean

Studio B, and all the lights
Flashing lowly in your metered dreams
and all that’s left in sight
is your collection of figurines

[Guitar on 'Figurines' played by Patrick Albertson]

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Jason Grote, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $16.49.]

I wish to reassure anyone who is considering purchasing me that it is not my look of need, afflicting though it may be, that is responsible for the fate of my last three owners. For reasons that I can only imagine are aesthetic, I tend to be attractive to elderly people, specifically elderly women, and cannot be blamed for their mortality. The fate of my third owner, the young man, was some sort of freak event. I assure potential buyers that I am not cursed. At least I am not cursed in that way.

I cannot recall the specific turn of events that led to my being placed behind this glass. I have memories of walking around, of freshly mown lawns, of friendly dogs licking my hand, and of attending church services and barbecues. However, this could be a trick of memory: it is possible that I have only seen or heard about these things, and not experienced them at all. The only thing I can truly be sure of is the glass, and the dust on the glass, and what little I can see of the world beyond the glass.

I remember my first owner, and how she would return my longing gaze and sometimes speak to me. I remember how I gradually came to be ignored as part of the sad and massive encrustation of knick-knacks in her home, a home that grew darker over time. I remember her death, which I did not witness directly (it happened in a hospital, I think), but gradually became aware of as her younger relatives (some known to me, others not) gradually emptied her home. The harsh sunlight, something I had not seen or felt in years (maybe decades) seared my eyes. They tossed me in a box, among many others of my kind, and I stared up at an empty blue sky for what seemed like an eternity but could have only been a few hours.

There I was purchased by my second owner, a happy, rotund woman with a chirpy voice who loved me dearly. I stared at her from her desk for many years, and she would occasionally coo at me while she typed on an electric typewriter. I never knew what she was typing, and would imagine the contents of her letters or her novel, the types of poems she would write. Her voice was musical. She was a widow, I think, and she dated a frightening man who would scream at her television.

Her fate is too sad to bear, but suffice it to say that I wound up, along with all of her other belongings, in a Salvation Army — in an ossified part of the store where the occasional board game or ski vest might move, but which mostly enjoyed a dusty, purgatorial paralysis. It was here that I was eventually purchased by my last owner, a nasty, slovenly young man who thought he was funnier than anyone else seemed to. It is not in my nature to hate, and I cannot say that I wished for the violent fate which eventually befell him, but I will not miss looking at his thick glasses or weak, bearded chin, or listening to his non-stop, grating voice. He never bothered to dust me off, believing my filthy state to be somehow more authentic or entertaining. But circumstance (and a spurned business associate) intervened and I was not in his possession for long.

And now, dear buyer, I wish to be yours. I know that you are looking at me right now, but I cannot see you. I want to be able to see you through my dusty glass. I have so much love to give.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Adam Davies, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $14.50.]

Authentic

MR. YODELS

Love Totem

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” edition

This is the only witness to — or, some say, the cause of — the tragic death of
legendary chanteuse and muse to famous Ecuadorian footballer

Francisco Chavarria

NOT AN IMITATION!

Condition

The artifact is in good condition.  Some slight damage, consistent with the violence of the wreckage, on the Tres Marias rabbit headpiece and on the hand-painted ovoid eyes.  Otherwise the piece is exquisitely preserved, including (as required by the folk magic tradition) Mr. Chavarria’s “plasma donation.”

The Mr. Yodels Tradition:

Jacob Tauxe, the notorious “Swiss Voodoo Houngan” from Bern, designed the original line of ceramic Mr. Yodels figurines employed by frustrated suitors as love totems.  By a feat of acoustic engineering yet to be explained satisfactorily, all custom-made Mr. Yodels figurines produce a distinctive upper-and-lower register song — the “love yodel” — when placed at an open window by which the loved one walks, provoking powerful spontaneous feelings of pair-bonding, veneration, and leghumpery.

Dangerous and unsanctioned Do-It-Yourself models — those made without knowledge of the proper techniques or precautions — are rumored to be responsible for the unions of Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett, Woody Allen and relatives, Elizabeth Taylor et al., Chrysler and Daimler, and others.

The “Sylvia St. Etienne” Mr. Yodels:

Caracas, 1956.  The fiery Ecuadorian striker Francisco Chavarria meets the legendary Hollywood songstress Sylvia St. Etienne, best known for her sultry interpretations of “Ashes in my D-Cup,” “Cabana in Urbana,” and “That Was It?”

For seven glorious, champagne-drenched, strawberry-inserting, mogul-free weeks the couple was inseparable — until Ms. St. Etienne met the mogul Sven “Big Krona” Uggla.  Then they separated.

Heartbroken, and publicly humiliated, Mr. Chavarria vowed to get her back, but Ms. St. Etienne was — as they say in Monte Carlo — “avec mogul.”  With no other recourse to intercourse, the jilted footballer traveled to Switzerland and implored Mr. Tauxe to fashion for him the most powerful of all Mr. Yodelses. But the Swiss Voodoo priest, bitter over Mr. Chavarria’s last-second game-winning header over the Swiss, refused.

Desperate, Mr. Chavarria fashioned his own Mr. Yodels, ignorant of the necessary protocols, and tied it underneath the passenger seat of Big Krona’s BMW 507 roadster, thinking, you know: The windows will be down. Gotta work.

Only ten hours later, after Sylvia St. Etienne gave the last performance of her life, singing the hits from “Hurry Up, These Sheets Itch and I’m Sweating,” “Waiter! There’s a Jackass in my Demitasse!” and “Side-Saddle Won’t Work,” she drove off into the night with Big Krona and plunged to her death in a mountain gorge.

All that remains of the great singer are her treasured recordings—and, now, available for the first time to the public, from the estate of Mr. Abernathy Hastings of Newport, this gloriously preserved Mr. Yodels.

Look at the eyes:  you can almost see what Francisco Chavarria saw.

Witness the ears:  you can almost hear what Francisco Chavarria heard.

Observe the mouth:  you can fit a Bud Kinger in that thing.

Reserve set low by request of the estate, this auction represents a rare opportunity to own the last remaining vestige of one of the 20th century’s most tragic love stories.

It may also possibly crack walnuts.