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. 73 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Christopher Sorrentino, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $38.]

My parka (Coat, Cold Weather, Men’s, Field, OG-107) hangs from a hook whose shape is in the likeness of Pickwick, of Dickens’ classic and eponymous book. The hook is mounted on the back of my door. Above the olive-drab parka, I can see Pickwick gesturing expansively. This is kind of a funny coincidence because just earlier today I was standing outside the home of Stanfield Mooney, in my accustomed spot, hoping to get a chance to talk to him about my ideas and see if he might be able to put me in touch with his agent, a simple but apparently impossible request, when I noticed that a box of books had been placed on the sidewalk just before the wrought-iron fence there. In the box was a copy of The Pickwick Papers. Yehudi, I said to myself, now there is a sign if you’ve ever received a sign. I opened the book. Sure enough: Ex Libris Stanfield Mooney. No interlinear comments or significant underlining, though.

I took Stanfield Mooney’s personal reading copy of this timeless classic back to my room and made a Survivor Sandwich. This is slices of apple between which you put cheese, or meat, or what have you. It provides stamina, fiber, and internal purity. While eating I gazed at the photos of Stanfield Mooney that I’d pinned to the cracked plaster of the walls enclosing my small and shabby one-room crash. Mooney with Mailer. Mooney with Vonnegut. Mooney accepting the National Book Award. Mooney disappearing into a limousine during his intense but brief affair with the beautiful Lauren Holly (what role did he play in bringing about the end of her bright career?). A somewhat Pickwickian figure himself, come to think of it. It’s very interesting that Mooney is here, there, and everywhere but never seems to have a moment to talk to me about The Underwater Mosaic, a novel idea which I’ve been told by Bernard Gerthner himself, the Bernard Gerthner, would probably make a very appealing motion picture idea. It’s all about ideas, and I have them. I am simply without the necessary connections to say, Let’s make this happen!

When I finished my sandwich, after the prescribed two Nutter Butters, I searched in Stanfield Mooney’s personal reading copy for clues. I don’t like to read much, so I didn’t find anything. Gun magazines, sure. Magazines with full-color photos of women blowing up balloons in their underwear, definitely. Books, though, are a problem, especially since the Bernard Gerthner himself assured me that it was all about ideas, which I have galore of. Then I stared at the brass effigy of Pickwick, leering and gesturing above the slump of my empty parka, bringing myself into a mild trance state. Do you like paperback word-search puzzle books? Playing 33 rpm records at 45 rpm? Me too. Messages abound. “Kill.” “Lock and load.” “Let’s do lunch.” “Does not meet our needs at the present time.”

I like to think that one day someone will be waiting, rain or shine, outside my own stately home, where among the elegant furnishings and appurtenances I will have scattered some of the “lesser things” from my “salad days,” such as the Mr. Pickwick coat hook. That?, I’ll chuckle. Oh, there’s a real story behind it. Then I’ll smile and gently shake my snifter. Perhaps there’ll be a Mrs. Pickwick hook for Lauren, when she starts answering my letters already. They’ll find a box of books and thrill to see Ex Libris Yehudi Mirandez when they check out the endpapers. I’ll slap my name right over Mooney’s.

Object No. 71 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Shelley Jackson, has ended. Original price: $1. Final price: $30.99.]

When I first met him, the moon — a chip of bone in the pale blue of morning — was just past full. I can be sure of that, though it was only later that the phases of the moon became as familiar to me as the seasons or as my breath coming and going. He was crouching against a tree in Prospect Park, nearly naked despite the autumn chill, the pale skin stretched over his shuddering ribs disfigured with a rash. He was swiping at his red, swollen, and tearing eyes with one paw, while the other, with a very practiced motion, was employing what looked at first glance like a bar of soap, to harry clouds of short, coarse, whisky-colored hairs from a pair of loose drawstring pants and a tunic draped over his lap. I did not think anything of the fact that both items appeared to be inside out. I did not pay any special attention to the fellow at all, who seemed to me an everyday sort of eccentric, only (for I have an eye for curiosities, particularly those ingenious contraptions rendered pathetically de trop by advancing technology — clockwork computers, water clocks and the like) to the object he was holding, which I now saw to be a rounded bar of ivory (or an imitation) in which a cylindrical brush had been ingeniously set so that it might skim a smooth surface and rid it of debris — the tool of a butler or maître d’, I thought, for clearing crumbs from a place-setting.

I stopped to comment on it, reaching out a casual hand. He snarled at me, and I took my hand back, the small hairs standing up on my neck.

I hardly think I felt an attraction then, despite his undress; he was not a prepossessing sight, with his wet red eyes and nose, and his rash. So how can I explain, except by some atavism buried deep in the genes, that I did not excuse myself and continue on my way, but cringed down before him on the grass with a truckling grin?

Events followed, many good, some very bad. He left me this object and my life, which was good of him.

He was exceptionally fastidious, for a werewolf. Indeed, his whole family, or, I should say, his pack, was so. They left no bone unburied, and curried the furniture daily to rid it of hair. To do so was their pride, as an ancient, aristocratic family, but it was also necessity, since every member of that bloodline was congenitally allergic to dust, to dander and, such is the cruel levity of fate, to dogs — and a wolf is but a purer, more essential dog.

He is not the only person I have loved whose constitution was at war with his calling, but he handled it rather better than some.

Object No. 67 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Matthew Klam, has ended. Original price: $1.99. Final price: $15.75. ]

I acquired this object at a flea market in the parking lot of a bilingual high school. Its little hands are smooth flippers. I believe it to be quite valuable, possibly antique, based on dates of patents listed on the ornate bronze panel on the inside door. Chinese in origin. Solid cast iron. Quite heavy. Designed to resemble the lead character of the short lived American cartoon, “Chucky the Chicken.” I never saw that show. There are knockoffs out there, and research indicates that knockoffs are made of brass or cheap plastic, but this one is well built, from original specs.

You may keep it in your car. You may keep it in your home. You may carry it on your person.

Be warned. There is a loud clicking sound coming from the control module.

For a while I kept this in my glove compartment. The original instruction manual mentions that the magnetic field it emits can change traffic lights from red to green. THIS DOES NOT WORK. Also, you will cause a pile up!

If you decide to keep it by your bed (as I did) and begin seeing colorful lights reflected on the walls and windows as you try to sleep, DO NOT WORRY AS THE OBJECT IS OPERATING NORMALLY.

DO NOT touch it or disrupt the cycle as this will cause IRREPAIRABLE HARM and may give you a POWERFUL ELECTRIC SHOCK. KEEP AWAY FROM CHUCKY UNLESS INSTRUCTED BY CHUCKY HIMSELF.

• Phase 1/Initial Phase: Transmission of messages.
• Phase 2/Functional Phase: Chucky cycling normally.
• Phase 3/Unity Phase: Walls bleed beautiful colors.
• Phase 4/Perfected Phase: Controller/controlled.
• Phase 5/Paradise Phase: Identity of Supreme Dictator revealed.

Chucky said to me, “HELLO MY LITTLE FRIEND. I am your GOD. Shift administrative tasks to your REPRESENTATIVE IMMEDIATELY. Prepare for LOVE SYMBOL.

Ha ha. And well we know what that love SYMBOL is now, DO WE NOT?

Certainly this object may have other uses. Keep it as an antique vase or planter, or with slight modification use as liquor locker, gun cabinet, bomb safe, champagne cooler, cocktail pitcher, etcetera. Dental detail alone is worth the price. Cannot verify that all parts are included. Cast iron is in excellent condition, however: do not microwave!!

Do not touch the outer shell with your tongue. Do not form contractions. FOLLOW THE MANUAL. Do not attempt modifications. Try to keep the dust out of his middle. CLEAN the inside WITH YOUR TONGUE if your TONGUE is long ENOUGH. THIS IS NOT HARD TO DO if you stick your tongue out. FARTHER. A LITTLE FARTHER.

N.B.: Cast iron may actually be ceramic. Bronze panel and inside door may be difficult/impossible to locate. Instruction manual not included.

[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 for this Significant Object, with story by Stewart O'Nan, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $71.]

Every evening when Henry came home from work, without fail, he set his briefcase on the marble-topped table in the front hall, climbed the stairs to their room, faced the dresser and emptied his pockets before hanging up his jacket and tie and washing for supper. Occasionally one or the other of the children shadowed him as he performed this ritual, eager to obtain a final, binding permission or appeal an earlier verdict of hers, but Emily actively discouraged this, as she discouraged outright lobbying at the table. She tried to make his transition from office to hearth as relaxing as possible, to the extent that she refrained from following him up, even if she’d spent the afternoon fretting over some pressing domestic issue only his considered input could resolve.

The tray in which he deposited his wallet and keyring and change had been his father’s, a period piece which seemed by its design to represent a bygone and overblown masculinity she associated with Anglophile prep schools and stuffy hunt clubs.A painstakingly detailed mallard’s head, forged from some cheap metal, rose from the partitioned rosewood dish, as if half of it might be employed as a decoy. Emily had never liked the duck, as they called it, despite its sentimental origins, but now that Henry was gone, she couldn’t part with it.

Neither could she use it. The change which Betty dusted every other Wednesday had resided there since Henry had gone into the hospital, eight years ago, and while Emily took no great pleasure or comfort in the meager hoard, every other Wednesday after Betty left, she made a sober reconnaissance of the duck. Only then, reassured of the order of things, could she sleep.

So it was with more than mild surprise, the week after Easter, that she noticed the two quarters that sat on top (one heads, the other tails) were gone. Kenneth and Lisa had visited the weekend prior. Immediately she suspected Sam, and just as quickly chided herself, knowing his sensitivity about his troubled history. The possibilities weren’t numberless, though, and as she lingered in her nightgown with a soothing Bach prelude playing by her bedside, she realized that whether she wanted to or not, she would never know the solution to this mystery, and rather than let this new arrangement stand, she scooped up the remaining coins, shook them in her fist like dice and dropped them back in the dish, thinking, already, of what she would tell Betty if she happened to ask.

[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.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Kurt Andersen, has closed. Original price: $2. Final price: $15.50.]

Although I live now in Indianapolis, I grew up in Gas City, which is a town (not a city) about an hour and a half northeast. During the summers after 7th and 8th grades through a program run by the Grant County FFA (Future Farmers of America) I worked as the “hired hand” on a quarter section (160 acres) down between Jonesboro and Fairmount owned by a couple in their 70s named Mr. & Mrs. Winslow. Every weekend Mrs. Winslow (Ortense) baked a pecan pie, and so every Friday afternoon she’d have me crack and shell about a pound of pecans (Priester’s). And I’d use this Santa Claus nutcracker to do it.

On one really hot Friday the first summer I worked there the two of us were on their porch, me cracking the pecans and she sitting in her metal chair, and she was looking at me odd, kind of smiling but kind of sad, too. She sometimes said weird things, which I chalked up to her age (like about her “time in Hollywood”), but since she was staring with that funny look and not saying anything I asked her if something was wrong. She said, “Oh, no, dear. It’s just that seeing you, there in the afternoon light, in your t-shirt with your hair damp and pushed back, you suddenly looked to me just like Jimmy when he was your age. And gosh, he did love that nutcracker.”

I didn’t have any idea who Jimmy was, since her husband was Marcus Sr. and their son was Marcus Jr. But when I said “Excuse me, who?” she turned sort of weird, like I was making fun of her. “You’ve never ever seen Jimmy on TV?” she said. I told her we were Pentecostal, and didn’t watch television, so she explained to me that Jimmy Dean was her nephew who she’d raised from the time he was nine years old, before he got famous. “Oh,” I said “Jimmy Dean. That’s interesting, Mr. Winslow. Do you get free sausage?” I assumed her nephew was the founder of the Jimmy Dean Sausage company. She laughed and laughed, but then the phone rang and we didn’t talk any more about him.

That night I asked my mom if she knew who the Winslows’ nephew was, and she explained that “Jimmy” was James Dean, who’d grown up on the Winslows’ farm in the 1940s and graduated from Fairmount High and then became a movie star. She said she’d never seen one of his movies.

A year later, Mr. Winslow died. And on my last Friday working at the farm, which must have been August of 1976, at the end of a long day, we were drinking lemonade, as usual, but this time Mrs. Winslow was putting vodka in hers. We were out on the porch again, me cracking pecans, and we’d just heard a train pass by and blow its whistle, and suddenly she asked if I wanted to take the Santa Claus cracker to keep, as a keepsake, since with Marcus Sr. gone she’d decided she’d stop baking pies. I didn’t really want it, but to be polite I said sure, and thanked her. Then in a big gulp she finished her third glass, and sort of giggled. “But don’t you ever do what I once caught Jimmy doing, OK?” When I asked what that was, she giggled again and said she couldn’t say, but I chuckled too and kind of insisted, so she told me. One afternoon in the spring of 1945, when Jimmy was 14, she’d heard on the radio that the Nazis had surrendered, so she ran into Jimmy’s room to tell him, and found him sitting on his bed with his pants off and his penis stuck in the nutcracker.

She smiled and shook her head. I didn’t reply, and at that point she seemed to realize it was, as my kids would say, “TMI,” and stood up and took the pitcher of lemonade and her glass and the vodka bottle inside.

But I did take her nutcracker home, and have kept it ever since. Until recently, the only other person I ever told about what they call its “provenance” was my wife – my ex-wife now – and I didn’t want to reveal it publicly until our kids were grown, since I thought it would embarrass them (or worse) when they were little. Plus, Mrs. Winslow has long since passed on. So when my girlfriend, who’s a Realtor, told me she’d seen on Antiques Roadshow that a jacket of James Dean’s was worth $1000, I told her about the nutcracker. And now she’s convinced me to sell it. She says I owe it to history and, in a financial sense, to myself. (I called the guy who runs the James Dean Gallery, up north of Fairmount, at Exit 59 off Interstate 69, to find out how much it might be worth, but he pretty much hung up on me.)

Although I haven’t cracked a nut with it since that afternoon in 1976, I have no reason to believe it doesn’t still work fine.