Object No. 99 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Edward Champion, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $56.]

The resilient ruffians ran away with the geisha’s canes just after she refused to perform a classless act. While it was true that the geisha dramatized the occasional lowbrow feat, befitting an object of her status, even she had her standards. She’d wobble her elliptical hips within a studded hula hoop forged from painful tungsten alloy. She’d gorge on great sticks of fire while her blind part-time assistant hurled jeweled daggers round her anatomical outline. And if wanton clients had serious dinero — particularly that shiny new oval currency with the Prince Albert piercing — she’d even flash a bit of flesh, relishing her total control over the crowd. The bobbled harpies working the onyx alleys could hike up their skirts for a sou, but she knew every sector on her body was insurable and she remained committed to securing the compensation befitting her curvy carapace. It hadn’t been easy to work her way up from the snowbound steppes without a rep, but she stage-managed her prestige through her divine Venetian valet de chambre.

However, she needed her two canes to get around.

Now wobbling atop a safe surface, the geisha ruminated upon the false proposition with unintended consequences. The three men had imparted intent to pay serious cash, approaching her with necktie paradoxes she decided to disregard. The geisha asked what they would like, shifting her harsh all-business larynx into a soothing dulcet tone. One claimed that his nether enormity was so round and imposing that it confounded the sensors scanning allplace from space.

“Don’t speak like that to a lady!” snapped the trio’s ringleader, who slapped the boor with a mesh metal glove and jabbed him in the anatomical vicinity of recent boasts.

“You’ve bifurcated my loins!” cried this sausage-laden braggart.

“That’s overstating things,” said the ringleader. “It is exquisitely rude to speak of your insufficient indignities before one of the finest entertainers that this village has to offer. There are subtler ways to elicit a response.”

The ringleader then whispered his lewd request into the geisha’s ear.

“I will not!” shrieked the geisha.

Talks were aborted, but there was a struggle. The self-proclaimed longjohn purloined his trophy.

The final indignity came with the ringleader’s second sordid offer that involved swapping one art for another. But was it so venal? Which line was straighter? The geisha had initially squawked in commerce-laden consonants. Instead of shedding seven veils, she could pilfer from faux furriers and highwaymen expanding their chicanery to a global stage. She reminded herself that she wasn’t getting any younger and that vocations were adaptable. And the new art presented an atonal atonement, an opportunity to correct the scales. Who needed seven notes when there was a human register?

The ruffians returned for their answer. She assented, and the trio gained a fourth member. The run would last longer than any half-baked phantom of the opulent. The new vocation defied objectification and required no crutch.

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. 92 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Mark Sarvas, has ended. Original price: 25 cents. Final price: $41.]

When I was seventeen, I was expelled from high school. My father, reasonably enough, gave me a choice: Get a job or get out. The only job for a 30-mile radius was the night shift behind the counter at an Amoco station on a deserted back road off the interstate. Scott, the owner, told me I probably wouldn’t see a customer most nights. He was chubby, hairy and, at 26, overly proud of himself for owning a gas station.

Back then, gas stations had no mini marts, no hot dogs, not even Gatorade. It was mostly candy bars and smokes, if you weren’t picky about your brand. Gas fumes mingled with the scent of cleaning fluid used to wipe down tools. I had an AM radio with lousy reception and, on his way out the door, Scott tossed me an Amoco yo-yo for entertainment.  Ahead of his time, he was branching out into branded swag.

Four nights into the job, Scott’s prediction had held up. I was fiddling with the yo-yo, which had become an obsession. There was something soothing about the bouncing repetition, and it helped pass the time. I was watching it travel up and down the string when I heard a girl’s voice.

“Walk the dog?”

A customer.  My age, perhaps a bit older. Her skin was red and flaky, her teeth gappy and her clothes sized for someone fifteen pounds lighter. But I was 17 and she was a female who talked to me and that was that. I looked up blankly. She indicated the yo-yo.

“Can you walk the dog?”

I shook my head and her disappointment was palpable. She bought some Bubble Yum and a pack of Parliaments and was gone.

I spent the entire summer practicing walking the dog. I wrote away to the Duncan Yo-Yo company and they sent me the instructions. Hour upon hour, not just at the gas station but at home, in the street, everywhere, I walked the dog. I knew she would come back.  I was right. When she returned to the station, I was ready. She nodded at me when she walked in, with the easy familiarity of old friends.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch this.”

I flicked my wrist and sent the yo-yo hurtling down the string, which chose that moment to come undone. I watched in horror as the hunk of black plastic rolled away and disappeared under a rack of motor oil, leaving a limp string dangling on my middle finger. I couldn’t bear the pity in her eyes so I busied myself with fishing it out, and it was only after I heard her leave that I emerged with it, dust-covered,  in my hand.

The next day, I learned that Scott, my fat, hairy boss, had slept with her. A week later, I left for New York City, mended yo-yo in my coat pocket.

Object No. 85 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Meg Cabot, has ended. Original price: 75 cents. Final price: $108.50.]

So Brandon was going to Cabo for spring break and I saved up all my tip money for a year to chip in for the rental car to go with him.

But then at my last cleaning Dr. Jones said if I didn’t get my wisdom teeth pulled out right away my incisors were going to overlap, and I might never get my dream job as a television news journalist like Katie Couric.

“When was the last time you ate?” Dr. Jones wanted to know.

And I was all, “At my shift just now at Señora Mexicana.”

“That’s okay!” he yelled.  “We can use a local!”

I tried to say no but Mom was all, “It’s much better this way, sweetie,” because I could recover during the break and not miss any classes.  “Besides, Novocain is cheaper than anesthesia!”

Plus, I don’t think she’s ever liked Brandon.

I couldn’t even reach him in time to tell him what was going on. I could only reach my best friend Kara, who was still at her shift at Señora Mexicana.

Kara was like, “Oh, don’t worry, hon, I’ll find Brandon and take care of everything.” Which made me feel a little better.

And then the next thing I knew this nurse was jabbing needles into my gums and I heard this crunching sound and even though Dr. Jones said it wouldn’t hurt, it hurt a lot!

And then Mom was going, “Don’t worry, sweetie, you can do Cabo next year” as she helped me out to the minivan.

But the whole time I was lying on the couch in front of the TV, trying not to get dry sockets, Brandon never called.  He never once called, or even texted.

The funny thing was, neither did Kara.

And then when he finally did show up, he was all, “I thought of you every minute, babe!”

And then he gave me this authentic wooden cow, or snake, or whatever it is.  Real Mexican villagers carved it, he said.

But if so they must know Kara, because it looks exactly like her.

Especially the empty space where its heart should be.

Because it turns out Brandon found someone to take my place in the rental car.

Not to mention in his bed at the hotel room.

But I had a lot of time to think about it while I was waiting for the swelling to go down, and I decided it’s okay. I’m going to go back to school, and back to Señora Mexicana. I’m going to save up all my tip money.

Only not to go to Cabo. To go to New York City. To get an internship with Katie Couric, or some other empowering woman who knows the pain of betrayal and getting all your wisdom teeth pulled out with just Novocain.

And someday when I am anchoring my own half-hour national news show, Brandon and Kara will turn on their TV and see me and go:

“Wow.  I used to know that girl.”

Object No. 81 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Bruno Maddox, has ended. Original price: $3. Final price: $19.50.]

Did she love me? Nah. Did I love her? Yeah. So I got her this wooden map of Thailand with four hooks sticking out. Figured she could use it to hang items on — you know, in her future life. Whether or not she chose to let me be a part of that.

I wrapped it up best I could. Frank’s cologne came in some green tissue paper which I tried using first, but the hooks and the peninsula kept poking through, or seeming like they were about to, so I went back to the shop and bought a little girl’s raincoat with a white fur hood. Back in the room I stood on the coat and tore the hood off to make a pouch for the map. It looked good, and I felt a tingle of hope and fear. Because my love was real.

Our flight was at seven, checkout was noon. Frank and Headcase were having pints at the roulette table in the lobby and I said I was going quickly say goodbye to Sick Mick at the hospital. “Tell him he’s a woman,” Headcase told me, looking at the wheel and fingering his chips. “Since when is alcohol a poison?”

Her mum let me in and shooed me to the back. The door was open and she was on the bed reading a magazine very intently.

“I love you,” I said, when we were sitting on the bed together.

“Yes,” she said. “I love you.”

I shook my head. “No,” I explained. “Love…” I pointed to my chest and mimed lines going from my heart to her face. “I love you.”

She watched closely. Her long hair brushed her crossed legs as she nodded. “I love you.”

Down the corridor, a door slammed. I told her I’d got her something.

The lads still give me guff about it. “I know what you’re thinking,” Sick Mick’ll say if I daydream in the cafeteria, and that’ll set the others off, which I like because it makes me remember her.

But it’s not what they think. You see, she didn’t know what it was. I had to explain that this was her country, and that there were others, and about the world, and I left her there staring at it. And while I do often think of her, when I wake up, or coming back hammered after being out with the lads, it’s not sexual in nature. Well, it feels sexual, but what I see is her at a podium, dressed like Margaret Thatcher, addressing the International Union of Nations or something, jabbing the wooden map I gave her at all the sheikhs and toffs and monocled kings, shouting the words to the sad, sad song she sang that first night in the bar at karaoke. She sang it in Thai, that night, but the English words were behind her on a screen:

Leaves are falling on my heart.
Why did you set fire to our love?

Object No. 66 of 100

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Cintra Wilson, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $14.90.]

Dearest Friend in Christ,

As only you know, this is the trophy treasure I have won in great personal championship at ladies intramural sport. I am in daily prayer that in Christian spirit only you will see this appeal, and know of our plan to transfer the ownership of this darling golden statuette of high monetary value into your home. It is as you remember the key to our future plan of my safety rescue and personal fortune.

As we discussed, I wish my best most coveted and rare valuable trophy prize to be safely in your Beloved hands. You may then assure me with your sweet words, Dear Heart, that you have it resting in a mounted place of honor in your diplomatic safe house. I will be afterwards in waiting for your signal to transfer the misallocated foreign aid (US) $344 MILLION I have received in error to threaten my political life daily, into the bank of your politically stable country. Also I am hoping to send, at future times, to our secret beautiful love child out of wedlock, the contested blood-diamond necklace worth (US) $6,900,00.00 belonging to my dearest departed aunt Hortensia Claire Watsson, may she lie in eternal embracing of the Christ.

Since I am the tallest woman in this region of 2 meters height (near seven foot), the situation grows darkest every hour, Dearest, as I am visible to both armies and those who wish our Christian endeavor harm. Make haste! And soon we will be locked in prayer over this beautiful golden basketball remembrance of my victorious athletics together.

I will be in prayer, and hoping to embrace you soonest.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Dean Haspiel, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $6.75.]

Kentucky reminds me of my first and, probably, only encounter with a friend whom aliens had, supposedly, abducted. In the late 1980s, I co-created and drew a comic book mini-series with a writer who lived in Kentucky. I wanted to draw a sequel and I decided it would be best to knock brainpans face-to-face. So, I saved up some monies and booked a weekend flight to Louisville, where the writer lived at the time with his wife.

He was late in picking me up and, out of boredom, I circled the paltry airport gift shops and was blindsided by the golden light and piercing black eyes from what looked like a stained glass horse trapped inside a porcelain dish. Emblazoned in classy golden letters was the word, “Kentucky.” I had to buy it. However, I couldn’t own it. Not in my house. So, it would become an impromptu house gift.

That first evening, the wife pulled me into the kitchen, and alerted me that aliens had regularly abducted her poor husband. With tears in her eyes and a tremble in her voice she told me that he would go missing for a night, sometimes days, and would come back home deranged and depressed, his mind fried, his body despondent. They weren’t having sex any more and she was worried he would be abducted forever.

What had I walked into? The writer’s depression was soon confirmed when, that night, I discovered him sitting in a chair, alone in another room, facing the wall in the dark. I asked him if he was okay and he told me that his head hurt.

The next day he seemed to be feeling better but said he couldn’t work just yet. So, he took me for a long drive around his stomping grounds and introduced me to a very sexy young woman with dark hair. I don’t remember her name, but let’s call her Janice. Suddenly, my pal was radiating sunrays. He seemed smitten with Janice, but cautious. She was a Philly, a true Kentucky dish. So, I could empathize with the extra skip in his step. But the second Janice was gone, he fell back into a morbid slumber. I was starting to get pissed off, especially since he wasn’t telling me about his cosmic anal probes and instead was moping about like a 12-year old.

He suggested we drive home and try to write. After an hour or so, he looked at me with swollen eyes and told me his head hurt. He walked into his bedroom and shut the door. Like a looming specter, his wife floated over from the kitchen and, after a very long pause, suggested we call Janice over for dinner. She had heard of Janice but never met her and thought a single guy like me might like her. “Sure, why not?” I sighed.

My writer pal appeared at the dinner table, but was incredibly uncomfortable. His wife mollycoddled him while Janice launched a campaign of woo towards me that was so paramount it was a parody. They turned in early — but Janice decided to hang out with me. Talking turned into touching and the natural evolution of two naked people doing what they’re known to do. We rolled around and smashed into something so hard it cracked. It was the Kentucky dish, and it was in pieces.

Janice split early the next morning and my pal stumbled out of his bedroom door in a near coma. His eyelid batted a catatonic wink to acknowledge me as he shuffled into the bathroom. His frightened wife snuck out of their bedroom towards me and whispered that she thought he had been abducted by aliens last night but found him in their closet, standing and staring at wire hangers.

Back home in NYC, I wrote our proposed sequel myself. I never drew it but it broke my cherry to write and draw my own comix. My Kentucky pal would later divorce his wife and write other, great stories that won awards. It was years before it occurred to me that he hadn’t been abducted by aliens at all.

[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.