The Collector

The collector started with pennies. Or seashells, he could no longer recall. The two were opposites married in his obsessive vision. The seashells, indifferent and precultural, washed out of circulation on the shore, or came to him in tissue-paper-cushioned packages from a warehouse inventory. No two were alike, as with fingerprints or snowflakes, yet they conformed to hierarchies of scarcity and value, made a subject for catalogues and lists. That these were also skulls, a assembly of carapaces, opened a first doorway into the morbidity of his love. Abraham Lincoln was a crazed worthless token, brown and bearded, a filthy tide of unsilver pouring from of his parents’ pockets, but subject to secret reorganization in embossed cardboard folders. A penny was not so much money as the DNA of money. Spotting the year and the mint-signatures under Lincoln’s nose was the first act of reading the secret inscriptions that underwrote the universe, a child’s garden of conspiracy. Wheat-backed pennies were the essential evidence that the past was a purer land, that Americans had been expelled from a garden. The wartime aluminum cents were evidence of life on Mars.

Putting Lincoln’s head upright in orderly rows was something, anyway, a sport for bleary afternoons. The staccato profile made a wedge of digits, ones-not-zeros, accumulating in an arrow moving past-to-future. Though pointing to a time when he’d jar or shelve them with his father’s cavalier disdain, the precision and recursiveness of the pennies riveted him inside his present, the dawdling idle hours spent within the brackets of the blue-embossed cardboard holders. The shells were more troubling, harder to quantify. The boxes in which they were stored accumulated crumbs in the corners, evidence of dissolution, of the shells’ complicity with stardust, with the antihuman ebb of entropy. One day on a visit to his grandparents’ neighbor he spotted on a coffee table a hideous decorative clock from Florida ornamented with affixed shells, several valuable specimens possibly ruined with clumps of glue and glitter. Shells grew, he understood now. They were clocks themselves. They lurked in fathomless beds of frond and mud, were exuded in octopus and shark shit.

These were his first two ruined collections, early maps of shame. The hinges frayed on the gap-haunted blue cardboard penny books. Pennies from a certain mint refuse to migrate to the coast. Perhaps some doppelganger boy elsewhere held the reverse of your collection, hoarded your missing pieces, like a game of Gin Rummy or Go Fish. Speaking of fish, the shells stunk. They delivered up not only sounds but odors from elsewhere. They refused to be decanted, were just passing through.

He began to associate the shells with the curls of yellow, calcified snot he’d accidentally archived beneath his desk.

One day his mother presented him with a bankbook containing a balance begun by his grandmother’s birthday check. She showed him paper rolls for gathering pennies, for proving their value in weekly schleps to the bank teller’s window, then offered him the flood of crappy pennies wedged in drawers and overrunning jars everywhere. He capitulated, quit examining the coins for their pedigree, quit yanking them from circulation. They had their pitiful denomination after all. Savoring the rarity of one in a thousand was too much like staring at your feet as you walked. After a while you had to just accept that each foot flopped in front of the previous, forever, even when you took your eyes away.

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He wondered if he was doomed to collect everything before he was done. He fell for the whole baseball card thing for about five minutes, long enough to pass through Mannerist, Modernist, Minimalist, and Postmodern periods at the speed of sound. The flashy cards revealed too much, bright emblems, team trademarks smeared everywhere and disguising nothing, the pitiful, needy eyes of dying veterans and no-hope rookies, faked smiles to mortify your glance. Grey cardboard flipsides loaded with inane jokes and statistics, prehistories of minor league struggle, and dusty with starch. Did anyone collect the gum? The cards were for statistical study – no, for flipping – no, for protecting in laminated folders – no, they were only a product, a scam, the grocery clerk annoyed that you didn’t figure it out sooner and just get your dad to buy the whole carton on one visit instead of slouching around the joint bugging him for weeks.

At the end he wrecked the whole relationship in one resentful, shattering act, a spasm of appropriation and collage involving toy scissors and a bottle of Elmer’s. On the inside of his notebook binder the California Angels fluttered, pinkish baseball putti, over a roaring inferno of flame-licked Reds and Dodgers. Disembodied mitts swarmed the scene like luna moths, horrified and attracted as he himself had been.

Ground zero for all collections, it seemed, was the glue bottle, the lumps of pearly translucent white that held the swirling chaos of the world in place even as they officially devastated the value of any item affixed, according to all known specialists. You were a fucking idiot to glue anything to anything else but you did it all the time. A ‘real’ collector tolerated the slippage, the loose and therefore implicitly temporary nature of his hoard, by capturing coins and cards and shells and stamps in sheaths and slipcases, delicate frames. You glued shit to backgrounds like a maniac. You’d have sealed the books on your shelves in laminate if you could. Superglue, which was reputed to solder fingers to eyeballs, was too scary to even let into the house, knowing your propensities.

The gluing impulse was especially treacherous when it came to stamp collecting. He’d been given the albums and a headstart of a million torn-off corners of envelopes by an uncle in from Vegas. Here was another precise history to duplicate, every stamp ever issued in the United States, plus their dark cousins, the Postage-Due stamps. In fact, in two years of solid work he’d never catch up with the backlog of stamps to soak or steam off envelopes. The ideal stamp had nothing to do with this bogus labor anyway, but was clean of postmark, never licked, perhaps even in an intact block of four. These were purchased at the ‘Collector’s Counter’ on the eighth floor of the department store, a somber ritual, religious possibly, related to visits to the bank window, and with no overtones of the grocery-store baseball-card gum-and-garbage runs. Yet faced with a pristine stamp and its appointed place in an album, a date with destiny, how to keep from just licking the thing and pressing it into place? What the fuck was a dry-mount, anyway? On a humid day they licked themselves, self-ruining, so why lose the chance? Thirty year-old stamp-glue had the titillating savor of an old wine uncorked. Who was it waiting for, if not for him?

Maybe the only thing you collected, after all, was glue itself.

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Drugs and music made another set of twins. Each were like seashells or stardust you took into your body. Living where he did, in the city locked in pavement to the sea, the drugs and the music were his first chance to import nature beyond his own boundaries. They made tidy analogues for sex or the forest, possibly more satisfying than any wider exploration would ever be, certainly safer. Drugs and songs were seashells he could seek to turn into pennies. First you saw a band, absorbed the essence of live moments which like drug fumes evaporated into your organs and left no evidence apart from your altered sense of self and any bragging rights you’d risk. Then you collected their albums, all the b-sides and rarities from the Denver mint. In drugs he dabbled, a ready tourist, stopping nowhere but gathering sample flavors like stamps in a passport, Quaalude, Mescaline, Amsterdam Hash. His record collection, on the other hand, was a plummet into addiction. He’d boarded a carousel of pure and infinite unsatisfaction, where solid ground whirled beneath his gaze, no chance of stepping off. He rarely listened to a song to its end anymore, perpetually upping the dose with a junkie’s agitation. The connoisseur soon learned every song had ‘versions’, which raised the stakes. Music was a kind of fractal disaster area.

The first time he put blotter acid on his tongue he thought: they printed the player’s statistics directly on the gum. And the player is me. The whole team, pitcher, catcher, batter, even the third base coach frantically signaling from his lime-drawn grass box in the foul area, touching his nose, his ear, his crotch, the bill of his cap – hey, what’s he trying to say to me?

If I’m the coach why don’t I grasp the coach’s signals?

If I am my own collection why am I scattered outside of my body?

If that’s my favorite band why don’t I enjoy any of their albums?

Now somebody started a band, four guys in a basement, pawnshop instruments reflecting no consensus as to whether stickers were cool or not, in a sea of amplifier wires in a concrete zone cleared in the clutter of abandoned family stuff, including, he couldn’t help noticing, a pile of rotting stamp albums, lurching herky-jerky song openings with no firm conclusion in mind, except perhaps the ongoing argument certain to escalate to band-breakup-level sooner or later, which would easily enough solve the problem of how to end the song. Somebody else renovated a two-story house in Culver City to make an indoor marijuana factory, sun-spectrum light-fixtures, sprinkler hoses for nutrient-enriched water, rows of green plants throbbing with redolent active ingredient, flowerbuds rupturing, the plants’ overwhelmed stalks needing support from slings, crutches, buttresses. This was a going concern, you could splice the DNA of the best weed you’d ever toked into the motherplant in the closet and like a science fiction monster you’d rule the earth, exactly as you couldn’t splice the Sex Pistols DNA into your shitty band and were destined to rule exactly nothing.

One day a bunch of them drove down into Borrego Springs on mushrooms and it was exactly as good as Disney’s The Living Desert and at that moment he realized that everything he loved most was a seashell. Maybe it was time to get out of the city.

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Now he was a bird-watcher, with binoculars and a field guide. He walked in the woods but also sought to draw his collection to himself, magnetize his subjects like iron filings. He lured them to the edges of the house, to miniature platforms and chimney-shaped feeders mounted and hung in the trees, with piles of seed and corn and dried berries, bait for feathered creatures. He spied at them through his windows, enumerated them in his book, a reverse peeping-tom. Sparrow, wren, cardinal, crow. The house resembled a big knocked-out cartoon head, circles of birds wreathing it as he dashed, like a lone pupil in kooky eye-sockets, from window to window. He got himself a birdwatcher’s clock, too, which chimed a different birdsong at each hour. On a daytrip to the beach he garnered pipers who ran like tidy punctuation at the edge of surf, then was taken aback at two lumpen terns nosing for clams at the breakwater rocks. Guiltily he noted these rarities in his book. Not all birds were birds, he felt. Category errors nagged his psyche. He wanted a division between water and sky. He saw he was trying to purify, the collector’s fatal mistake. Repentant, he logged the dirty-looking terns. Between birds he picked mushrooms, not psychedelic things, and at night he gazed at the stars. His military-surplus thigh-pockets bulged with field guides. At night a single light brought flat moths of all sizes to his windows, self-adhering decal-souls. But he hadn’t glued anything to anything else in what felt like years. Whatever he’d wish to affix was beyond reach of Elmer’s nozzle.

Then came the squirrels. These anti-birds clarified things radically. They filched seed and corn, clambered along wires, defeated all measures, and, bad actors, screeched off the visiting birds. The vermin needed to be thwarted, which gave his life a new grim purpose. A war of logistics rapidly escalated, how to feed one kind and starve another. The squirrels twitched past any obstacle. Soon enough he concluded death was not only the preferred solution, it was too good for the bastards. He’d been converted into Elmer Fudd, a poker-in-holes. The wabbit kicked the bucket. The day he found his first victim curled like an ampersand in dead leaves, tiny mouth curled in disdain, tail rigid, he understood. It wasn’t really about the birds anymore. Poison was the new glue.

Years later he attended a party at the home of a wealthy big-game hunter, a man of feral leisure. The hunter had a carriage house behind his mansion, full of trophies. He’d left it open for the guests to peruse. Wandering in among a gaggle of partiers, bearing drink and ice in a plastic cup, expecting perhaps a few tattered mooseheads, he was shocked instead at entering a multi-chamber temple of earthly death. The walls were heaped everywhere with stuffed and mounted corpses, ibex, yak, water buffalo, Scottish goats with wiry beards. Room after room, countless bodies leapt from the walls, cougars and pythons arranged in elaborate tableau, miming attack, their frozen moments of death, perhaps an argument that the hunter had only shot in self-defense. The floor beneath guests’ strolling feet was a bear’s skin, then a tiger’s, then a pebbly crocodile’s back. Plaques accompanying the stuffed heads accounted for the dates of the kills, a regimented life’s work, no time wasted in the global hopping. Photographs showed the teams of natives who’d assisted in trapping the victims, framing them for the hunter’s bullet. The hunter the triumphant white face in their center, boot on a head with a lolling tongue.

Staring at the uncredited taxidermist’s eyeball work, he spotted the telltale glue.

Back in the main house, they were introduced. The ruddy-faced hunter’s eyes glistened with impatience at the inadequate hairless apes circulating among his kills. In that razor-look the collector felt himself collected, or at least browsed. The hunter had worked out a handshake unlike any other, encircling a proffered hand in a tight ring and squeezing the line of knuckles together to produce unmistakably intentional pain. You had to grant it was an accomplishment: a handshake you’d gnaw your arm off to get free of.

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“ Sometimes when I see a Lincoln head penny I still think that an uncirculated 1909 S-V.B.D. would be the ideal one.”

“Remember William Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy, searching through that whole bedspread covered with pharmaceuticals, just looking for one Dilaudid? He tells them the rest of their stuff is crap, that the Dilaudid was the only pill worth anything.”

“When I was a kid I used to get confused about the difference between astronauts and dinosaurs. The only evidence of either one was basically just footprints. And rocks.”

“Dude, what if birdwatching was not about watching lots of different birds, but watching just one. Pick a bird – not a species, but a sole, actual bird – and follow it anywhere, watch it forever. Like, Vertical instead of Horizontal birdwatching. That would be pretty fucking cool.”

“You know those machines that smash a penny into a souvenir image of some local building or monument? I can’t begin to explain how depressing I find that.”

“What I find depressing is that you can pay to have your filthy name put on a star or a crater on the moon that never did anything to hurt you in the first place, never so much as glanced in your direction.”

“I once put a quarter in a vise and cut it in half with a hacksaw. Then walked around with the halves in my pocket, trying to figure out if it was still money.”

“Me and my brother once spent a 5-dollar bill that was autographed by Muhammad Ali. We basically just needed five bucks that day.”

“I heard this comedian say that he keeps his seashell collection scattered on the beaches of the world.”

“I still like birds, though.”

“I like birds fine, man. Just not at the expense of other things. Like, say, mammals.”

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His uncle, who’d lived alone in an apartment, had to be moved into a home. His father asked him to drive out to Vegas to help. In an instant, walking through the door, a lifetime’s romance with his uncle’s bachelorhood was shattered, a romance he hadn’t noticed himself sustaining. The rope-tied newspapers and unopened mail formed a maze for a creature barely human, a rot-gnawed habitrail space, demanding contortions just to reach the bathroom door, the toilet itself a barely visible outpost in a mousehole carved in mountains of bathroom magazines. A sofa had been buried what a quick inspection proved was nineteen years before, Newsweek with Bhopal on the cover.

When he got home he tried to flush the stamp collection down the toilet. They reeked of putridity to him now, a flaky carcass, skin of so many lost years, steamed off envelopes whose overlaid routes would describe the nervous system of the world. The plumbing choked on the stamps. He ended up plunging the toilet. The stamps, moistened a third time for their final voyage, swam on his tiles, and over the bathroom’s doorjamb, to be wrecked on the reef of the carpet. Others invested in the toilet’s crannies, where he had to scour them free with a brush, one curved like the mirrors a dentist uses to get an angle on a molar. He felt by the end like a toilet-cleaner bird, picking at the porcelain mouth of a miniature hippopotamus.

These days he wondered if all the aspirins and cigarettes in circulation resembled pennies, whether they were issued from different mints, and whether their point of origin as well as their date of issue could be ascertained by examining microscopic serial-number imprints.

He began to consider the possibility of an aspirin or cigarette collection mounted into embossed cardboard holders, as with his lost penny collection.

Such a collection would of course be destined like all others for failure, the die-cut cardboard slots intended to bear the earliest and scarcest aspirins or cigarettes reproachfully empty.

He had fantasies of flash-laminating his coffee table, capturing everything on it in a plastic glob, magazine, coins, half-eaten sandwich, ashtray.

The truth was he needed to quit smoking, clean his apartment, scoop up the pennies everywhere. He’d laminate when he was dead, what was the hurry? Stuff was collecting everywhere you looked.

He’d be okay. The universe was the glue that held him together.

* * * * *

 

 

Art Review, 2004