Collecting Collectors
So, I had my book launch for Mister Joe’s Pirates last Saturday at the Seidr Brewery in beautiful downtown Arab, Alabama. Seidr boasts a Norse mythology theme, which is to say all the drinks are named after Viking shit and the bartenders are forced to cultivate aggressive facial hair. It’s not talked about much in the history books, but the Polacks fiercely aligned themselves with the Viking way of life. Only difference, the Polacks tended to raid their own coastlines. It was like trick-or-treating your own house, except bloodier, and then you bitch because all you came away with was a couple handfuls of Bit O’Honeys.
I won’t go into too much detail. My newfound humility forbids me to recount excessive acts of self-glorification. It’s enough to say that I sold a lot of books and I was roundly championed as the greatest living writer to ever come out of Hydra Hydraulics.
The highlight of the evening for me was reconnecting with my old buddy, Kelly B. We hired into Hydra around the same time back in the late nineties. He left the company for good back in 2008. Eighteen years ago. Difficult to wrap my mind around the passage of time. Kelly and I kept track of each other through the social media, and also randomly running into each other at the town’s lone Chinese buffet.
About two years ago, Kelly suffered a head-on collision with some jackass who couldn’t keep his fucking nose out of his text messages. The wreck liked to kill Kelly. It nearly broke him in half as the wrestling announcer, Jim Ross, was prone to say whenever someone was thrown from heights greater than forty feet.
Eighteen broken bones. Hip replacement. Screws everywhere holding bones in place. Four months recovering in a nursing home, watching octogenarians hobble into his room and steal his Jello.
“As I lay there,” Kelly says, “watching Rosemary’s toothless maw slurp down my lime green dessert, hazy with a baseline agony that would have had you caterwauling for someone to put you out of your misery, I swore to myself, the moment I recovered, the moment I escaped these four walls, I’d hire back in as an orderly and eat all the Jellos, right in front of their trembling faces, then I’d get the money I got coming and I wouldn’t sit on it. Hell, no. I can die any moment. You can die any moment. I intended to spend every penny of it. And I almost have. On knives.”
Kelly went on to tell me he invested 350K into his knife collection. Over 2800 knives, mostly rare and limited editions, stored in a room devoted to knife cabinets.
“Any throwing knives?” I ask.
“No. I don’t throw knives.”
“Fuck, if I had almost three thousand knives, I’d make sure I could throw at least a couple of them. I mean, you only got two hands, you know. You can stab no more than two motherfuckers at the same time. If you’re good.”
“I don’t stab people with my knives,” Kelly says, and I can’t tell if his injured expression is a mockery or not. “I’ll never stab people with these knives. They’re not made for stabbing folks.”
I think he doth protest too much. I’ve seen his knives. The seven knives he has on his person right now and the many, many knives he showcases on his Facebook page. The knives look perfectly capable of stabbing folks. Being sharp and pointy and all.
“These knives have an aesthetic beauty that’s meant to be appreciated in a violence free environment.”
It’s strange. My youngest brother, Alex, possesses only one knife. Yet, he’s stabbed three people with it. Not fatally, mind you. I would never mention the fatalities in a public forum. The three guys he stabbed (on three separate occasions; it wasn’t a Friday night free-for-all) were all poked as a result of self-defense or pre-emptive self-defense. Alex and a violence free environment are forever mutually exclusive, and I love him for it.
Now, I’m catching maybe every third- or fourth-word Kelly speaks. Maybe it’s the many flagons of mead, Ragnar’s Charm, affecting my concentration. Maybe the logistics of knife collecting sounds like a foreign language. Bench made. Magna cut. Rockstead Higo. There are meanings there I can’t grasp.
“The best knives are made right here in Alabama. McNees knives. They started out in Vernon back in 2008. They push out maybe a hundred knives a week so they’re highly sought after and hard to get. I got eight of them on me right now. This titanium one here is a Dixon model, after the knife they made for Norman Reedus for Walking Dead.”
“I’ll be damned.”
Kelly’s Irish green eyes glow with the delight of expounding in excruciating detail his collecting obsession. And it occurs to me, the people I’ve gathered around me today, Robbie and Nestor in the corner with perhaps North Alabama’s greatest collection of Fantastic Four comics and original comic art, respectively. My own passion for possession. Signed first editions. Clive Barker original artwork. 1962 Mars Attacks cards. Metal Aladdin lunch boxes from the 1980s. Nintendo 8-bit video games. Remco era Universal Monsters.
Jonathan hangs out on the fringes of the conversation. I’ve known him for nine years, but he tends to keep his personal information secretive on account of these weekly columns I write.
“How about you, Jonathan?” I ask, thinking maybe the mead might have loosened him up a little. “You collect anything?”
“I collect rejections.”
“Rejections?” As a writer, I suppose I can relate to that, but I’ve never known Jonathan to put pen to paper with a mind bent toward creativity.
“Watch this,” Jonathan says. “Hey, Sera, whatcha doing after the party? You wanna grab some chicken wings at the Zaxby’s?”
“No.”
“All right…” Jonathan turns back to us, smiling. “One more for the collection.”
Well, that’s not the strangest thing I’ve seen collected. That distinction belongs to my brother, Pete, and his immense collection of pocket pussies. His collection of prefab vaginas extends back to the 1960s and the hard plastic models sporting velour pubic hair, operational models no better than a hole cored through a Barbie doll, preferable though to the 1930s pocket pussies chiseled from oak with a horsehair fringe.
I don’t know that I’ve seen so many pocket pussies gathered in one place before, and, honestly, walking into Pete’s house, it’s a disconcerting sight. You know, I’ve always been uncomfortable in the presence of mannequins after midnight. Pocket pussies have a significantly stranger effect. I feel as though I’m amongst the trophy galley of a fake serial killer, but Pete assures me, it’s a perfectly natural inclination to hoard pocket pussies. To him it’s about the inherent beauty and the appreciation of artisanship.
Like my friend, Kelly, Pete ain’t stabbing anything with his collection.
“These are for show, not for go,” Pete says.
“Hey, I ain’t judging,” I judge.
“I’m serious,” Pete says “Those pocket pussies are no different than my vintage baseball jerseys or my first-generation Air Jordans. I keep that shit minty.”
“Pete, you’re wearing a vintage Nolan Ryan Astros jersey, right now. And it ain’t in that great of shape; you got mayonnaise stains all over the shoulder.”
“False equivalency. Look at this. I got the Faye Reagan pocket pussy, both pre and post meth addiction.”
“How can you tell them apart?”
“Well, you gotta look at the latex labia. See those foam bumps from the herpes sores?”
“Christ, man. All right. Is there any resale value here?”
“Of course, there’s a collector’s market. It’s very niche, but it’s there if you know where to look. Most of these pocket pussies you’re looking at right now I bought from the secondary market. I take them out of their boxes to display, and I keep the boxes in the attic. Some of the boxes because of the graphics hold more monetary value than the pocket pussies themselves.”
“Makes sense, I guess. Do you have any favorites?”
“I got a few I favor more than others. But it’s kinda like trying to pick your favorite kid, you know? They’re all important in their ways. The post car accident Anna Malle is up there.”
“Didn’t she die in that car accident?”
“Well, yeah, that’s why it looks all abstract and shit like Picasso designed it. Very avant garde. I also like the Bonnie Bleu, limited edition, one of five hundred, which is ironic since, you know, she’s not known for limits…”
“I get it, Pete. I just don’t know what to make of it.”
Pete’s eyes glow with the enthusiasm of being able to talk about something that really gets his juices flowing.
“Is it any less absurd than buying several copies of the same book just because it has different cover art?”
“Well, you got me there, Pete. This is plum normal compared to my… books.”
Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Rat now living in rural Alabama. He writes when his pen allows it. He’s a husband to a lovely wife and father to some fantastic kids. He collects pop culture ephemera. On most days he prefers Flash Gordon to Luke Skywalker and Neil Diamond to Elvis Presley.
THE POLISH HAMMER POETRY CORNER is a weekly column, posted each Tuesday morning.
