Object No. 98 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Stacey Levine, has ended. Original price: $4. Final price: $10.50.]

I’m not a collector, but really a purloiner, and there’s only a brief backstory to these novelties.

When my second wife died, I sought companionship. So I installed a soda machine in my bedroom — it would be a conversation piece and might make me more attractive to the ladies. I disabled the cash acceptor. I started going for walks to the little square in downtown Orange, and I thought: Why is no one talking to me? Yet soon I was helping a lady cross the street with her grocery bags. She was en route to a cousin’s wedding, she said, and I could come along with her. The grocery bags were full of almonds and snacks sweeter than that.

She was a Somali Jew. Her cousin came from a family of plumbers, and the relatives were working that day at the community center where the wedding was held. The kitchen sink had flooded the main hall. All kinds of guests streamed in, African and white. Grandmothers with shoeboxes of homemade cookies. Middle-aged men in sports shirts and a singer whose entourage of laughing musicians trailed behind her.

The woman who had invited me scarcely glanced at me, though for a few minutes in the press of the crowd, she held my hand. That action made my own hand feel dry. I was about to tell her so, but she ran off with her sisters or other women.

I assisted the three plumbers and another workman as they installed a sump pump in the floor near a storage room door. I thought they should put the sump pump inside the storage room — but no, that idea made them upset. Nearby, a crew of hippie-caterers in sandals began setting up a drinks table. We got the sump pump installed and were testing the alarm when the bride, groom, and minister walked onto the sump pump cover — they liked validating the workers’ labor in this way. We all stood back to see if the pump could handle the weight of three people.

It could. The ceremony began on the sump pump and I slagged to the back of the room. I paced. I had a great pain to mitigate. I saw the bookends in an unwrapped box on the counter and thought, “What a stupid gift to bring to a wedding. Who would do that?” Then I stole the bookends. What a coward I am.

Later I considered the bookends might have been a present destined for another event, and that someone merely set them on the counter temporarily.

I asked the lady to visit me the next day. So I hid the bookends under my couch. She stood on my doorstep. I told her right away: “I am strong as an ox.” She said: “Fine — I like people from foreign lands, because they are less polite and I seek umbrage in that.” I asked her what she was talking about, but the conversation moved to other things.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Sloane Crosley, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $57.66.]

Alec Baldwin never had a Bar Mitzvah. The non-fact of this, the bloated lack in the calendar of his mind, haunted him. How could he be a sterling example of manhood to little Billy, Danny and Stevie if he wasn’t even a man himself?

Then, in 2002, Alec attended the International Conference of Music and Theatre in Chicago, Illinois where the keynote speaker was one Michael Jackson. The conference, previously held in The Drake hotel, had moved to the Marriott. But Alec, who had ignored e-mails regarding the venue change, showed up at The Drake.  Furious, he called his then-4-year-old daughter just to bitch about the situation.  That’s when he heard someone shout his name. It was Michael Jackson himself.

Michael too had gotten the right address wrong. Or the wrong address right.  He urged Alec to join him in the bar, where they ordered sidecars and a ramekin of Kahlua for Michael. The two men, as they would come to find out over the next few hours, both turned 13 in 1971.  As celebrities do, they kinda sorta knew each other from being famous. Though one was more so than the other.  In 1971, Jackson went solo.  In 1971, Baldwin walked to the 7-11, got a Slurpee, and drank it while doing his homework.

As the night stretched on, it came out that Michael had also never been Bar Mitzvahed. He also wasn’t Jewish, a fact which saddened Michael almost as much as it did Alec.

“Let’s do it tonight,” said Michael, dipping his pinky into the Kahlua and sucking on it, “let’s have a joint, belated Bar Mitzvah. I can arrange for us to have a rabbi and a caricaturist here in 10 minutes.”

“Tonight?” chuckled Alec. “Who’s bad?” He shook his head.

In the end, they compromised. If they couldn’t have an actual Bar Mitzvah, they at least wanted the trappings. Maybe a sombrero or a pair of boxers that read “I Danced My Pants Off At Michael & Alec’s Bar Mitzvah!” They journeyed to the gift shop, and found exactly what they were looking for: A whole shelf of rainbow sand-filled horses. Beautiful plastic stallions with long necks that reached above the snow globes and miniature Sears Towers. They each bought one and took them outside.

“Now what?” said Alec.

“Now,” said Michael, unscrewing the cap of his rainbow steed, “we write two things on slips of paper: our hopes and dreams and how we think we’re going to die.”

“Isn’t that three things?”

“And then we put the paper in this horse and shake it down to the middle and bury it in our backyards, and say a Jewish prayer when we do.”

“Jesus, you’ve really thought this out.”

“It’s just how my mind works,” said Michael, ripping a piece of scrap paper from his day planner.

He borrowed a pen from the doorman, which Alec kept. Alec finished first.

“Caught on your hopes and dreams, huh?” said Alec.

“No,” Michael scribbled solemnly, “it’s just that I know exactly how I’m going to die and I want to get every detail in there.”

And so they shook their notes into the sand and parted ways, promising to bury their horses.  Which Alec did as soon as he got home. But Michael, whose motivations were more about a good party than a spiritual reckoning, completely forgot about the entire episode. He wasn’t even unpacking his own suitcase by this time.  A Neverland butler took the sand horse down to the basement, and threw it in a cardboard box marked “MICHAEL’S RANDOM CRAP.”

There it sat for 7 years, gathering dust. I know, it was in a box. But whatever, there was dust. It’s a big house to clean. The sand horse was not among the pricey Access Hollywood-exposed gems of the Neverland auction. It was simply overlooked. This is not only a beautiful specimen of kitsch, but it contains the hopes, dreams, and death visions of Michael Jackson. The sand, it should be noted, has never been poured out.