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  Now. Get to the flea market and focus on lures. Take out the flashlight—it’ll still be dark when you arrive—and shine it on tables. Stray from people who sell figurines, baby clothes, pit bull puppies, rebuilt lawn mowers, action figures, fast food restaurant toys and giveaways, Pez dispensers, yellowware, silverware, socks and underwear, baseball cards, chickens/rabbits/goats, heart pine furniture, shot glasses, phonographic equipment, Rottweiler puppies, used books, VCRs, computers, advertising yardsticks, and hippie decals.

  Look for tables filled with fishing rods, cigar boxes, used tools, guns, and tackle boxes. Look for tables filled with a mixture of everything. Shine your light on wrinkled men who might be selling off their oxygen tanks, flippers, masks, snorkels, needle-nosed pliers, and whatnot, men who’ve given up altogether on the fishing-lure collectible craze because they didn’t map out lakes, talk to old men, plot strategy, sink cement blocks, and everything else detailed in Part One (1) of “How to Collect Fishing Lures.”

  When you come across a table or display of everything from Gee Wiz Frogs to Arrowhead Weedless Plugs, keep your beam on them for exactly one nanosecond (onebillionth of a second). Pretend that you have no interest in the fine Celluloid Minnow or the Jersey Expert. Look over at the AK-47 on the table, or the Zebco rod, ball-peen hammer, and socket-wrench sets. Feign disinterest, is what I’m saying. Go, “Oh, man, I ain’t seen one them since I grew hair south,” or something.

  Say a personal mantra that the man doesn’t know what he owns. Over and over in your head say, “Quarter-quarter-quarter-quarter,” and so on.

  Here’s the worst scenario: he says, “Yeah, the T.N.T. number six-nine-hundred was real popular. It’s going for upwards of seventy-five dollars on the market, but I’m only asking thirty for it.”

  Do not walk away. Don’t nod in agreement. Don’t shake your head sideways, either. Slowly direct your flashlight’s beam into the man’s face and, using all common sense and knowledge of the human condition, measure how desperate he is. Don’t blurt out, “Will you take a quarter for it?” Maybe say, “I’ll check back with you later,” or, “Good luck,” or, “It’s supposed to be a nice, sunny day.”

  After you have picked through all the tables—if this particular flea market has indoor booths and outdoor tables you need only concern yourself with the tables—go back to your pickup truck, turn on the overhead light, and read through the Garage/Yard Sale section of the Classifieds. Circle the ones that’ll be near your drive home. Also, look under Antiques and see if anyone sells a large quantity of vintage lures at rock-bottom prices, which won’t be there. But you have to look, seeing as you’ve gotten to the point of obsession.

  Drive slowly past the front yards of strangers and make educated guesses as to whether they’ll have any lures. The formula is about the same as the flea market—if you see an inordinate amount of baby clothes heaped up on card tables, drive on. If you see a table saw and leaf blower, stop. Yard-sale lures run cheapest, but after factoring in gasoline and wear and tear on the pickup truck it might end up about the same as the sixty-two-and-a-half-cent (62.5¢) average you keep at the flea markets.

  It’s now seven thirty or eight o’clock in the morning. Stop and get a six-pack of beer. Carry what lures you nearly stole and catalog them immediately. Write down name, price you paid, and what the particular lure books for.

  Open the first can of beer. Change the truck’s oil. Cut the grass. Rearrange all of your lures in alphabetical order, followed by price, followed by oldest to latest model. Watch one of those fishing programs on the same channel that showed infomercials back when you didn’t know what to do after becoming unemployed. Give your dogs a bath.

  At exactly noon drive back to the flea market and find the man who wanted thirty bucks for the T.N.T. number six-nine-hundred. He’ll be sitting on the tailgate, probably staring at the ground. Go ahead and say, “I’ll give you five dollars for this lure.” He’ll get offended but eventually sell it, seeing as it’s exactly what it cost him to rent the table. If you want, on the drive back home, tally up what you bought and what you spent—nineteen lures for seven-sixty ($7.60) and one for five bucks ($5). That comes to twelve-sixty ($12.60) for twenty (20) vintage lures. It comes to sixty-three cents (63¢) on average, I promise.

  Finally, the reason why you’re alone and without a pistol is because a friend, son, spouse, or significant other is always apt to walk ahead of you, find a cheap and rare lure, hold it up, and yell, “Hey, here’s what you’ve been looking for!”—which will cause the seller to jack the price times fifty. Then you’ll have to shoot your passenger.

  Prisoners can’t keep lure collections in their cells, what with the barbed hooks. So that means more for you. As always, you want more.

  There will be days when you find no lures beneath the surface of natural lakes, man-made lakes, farm ponds, or slowmoving murky rivers. No one at flea markets in a tri-state area will have any on display. A traveling antique roadshow might come through the area and nobody there will have a single common lure, much less overpriced Paw Paw Spoon Belly Wobbler Minnows, Paw Paw Spinnered Plunkers, and Paw Paw Sucker Minnows. You will wonder if your chosen field of expertise has bottomed out. You will think back to the supply-and-demand lecture you heard years earlier in college. If the drought turns into a month, you’ll find yourself seeking a palm reader. On a good day she’ll tell you all about how long some scientists dedicate themselves to a specific disease, virus, or birth defect without giving up hope. On bad days she’ll laugh at you and say, “Fishing lures? You collect fishing lures? Good God, man, get a life—there are three million homeless people in America.”

  It might cross your mind that idiotic dictum that goes, “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” If this occurs as a soothsayer tries to make sense out of the lines in your palm, remember this one: “Find yourself a lure and you got the beginning of a collection; carve yourself a lure and chances are some moron from New York City will think of you as a primitive artist and want to represent your work.”

  Okay. It is my belief that you won’t find lures for extended periods of time because your body tells you that it needs a rest from either, (A) staying under water too long; or (B) because you’re about to lose your temper at a flea market and thus get shot by a seller without a sense of humor or patience. It is at these times that you need to go find an old-fashioned dollar store, a five-and-dime, a Woolworth’s, they’re still in operation. Buy a bag of wooden clothespins. Buy some plastic eyeballs at a hobby-and-craft shop, and eyelets. Buy red, yellow, and green enamel car-model paint and a thin, cheap brush. Go get some three-pronged trebles at the nearest three-pronged treble outlet.

  Because you own a pickup truck and have been in textile management most of your life, you will have a nice folding knife. Thin the midsections of each clothespin, between the head and the two line grippers. Whittle away. Paint the things differently, so it doesn’t come across as assembly-line work. Make spirals and polka dots. Paint racing stripes down the legs and think up cool names like JumpaToad, JumpaFrog, JumpaSkink, JumpaMander, JumpaCricket, JumpaHopper, JumpaMinnow, JumpaMouse, JumpaBlowfly, JumpaShiner, JumpaWobbler, and Jumpa-Wigwag-Humdinger-Smacker. Break off some of the legs of every other lure so you can add “Junior” to the title.

  With your needle-nosed pliers, open up the treble hooks, insert the free end into an eyelet, close the circle back up, and screw the eyelet into the clothespin’s end.

  Always screw last.

  It is too hard to paint the lure afterwards. To make an authentic homemade primitive lure might cost as much as a dime (10¢). You have two options: either go to the flea market and try to sell them for fifty bucks ($50) each, in hopes of selling one or two to men who also collect fishing lures and haven’t been able to find any of late, or for two dollars ($2) apiece, in hopes of selling the entire lot in one sweltering summer day out on the jockey lot.

  I’ve done both. Because you know
about men and women with a pocketful of case quarters, it’s easier to wait out for wealthy people traveling from elsewhere who think they’ve found a regular idiot-savant craftsman.

  I’m not sure, but I think it’s how Bill Gates and every televangelist got started.

  No matter what, do not think about your life prior to collecting and selling fishing lures. Forget that your ex-wife gave up on her wrong-headed singing or acting career and is about to marry a cattle-and-citrus tycoon down in Florida. Forget that your son writes folk songs about check dams, culverts, and the silt of humanity when he’s not making a hundred grand a year getting hired out as an anti-PR idea man. Don’t remind yourself that the neighbors are about to start up some kind of homeowners’ association and they’ll write a letter about your yard presently, seeing as when you came home from flea markets as outlined in “How to Collect Fishing Lures,” Part Two (2), you never cut the grass.

  Remember the hum and drone of the spinning room, before the government lifted sanctions, tariffs, taxes, and whatnot on Southeast Asian countries. Smell the linseed oil barely solid on wooden loom-room floors, and the older doffers, weavers, and spinners who spoke of textile-league summer baseball games as reverently as they spoke of their mothers and friends without fingers.

  Think about how you don’t want to be remembered merely as a human being who crunched numbers and yelled at workers for not getting yarn and cotton thread perfect.

  Understand that there’s something magical in a fishing lure—between two-and-a-quarter (2 ¼) inches and five (5) inches long, single, double, or triple—trebled, reversible metal discs and wings, with or without bucktail, propellers, belly weights, joints, week guards, head plates, side hook hangers, and nickel finish. Revel in the mystery of how such a device could, without pheromone or promise, attract descendants of the first living creatures worth noticing.

  Admire the notion of symbiosis. Think of how the lost, snagged, sunken lure needs you as much as you need the lost, snagged, sunken lure. On good days, think of yourself as a lure of some type, only half-human.

  COLUMBARIUM

  NOT UNTIL MY FATHER WALKED INTO THE POST OFFICE—or perhaps it was a few days earlier at the bastardized crematorium—did I understand how much he despised my mother’s constant reminders. For at least fifteen years she substituted “No,” “Okay,” or “I’ll do it if I have to,” with “I could’ve gone to the Rhode Island School of Design,” or “For this I gave up the chance to attend Pratt,” or “When did God decide that I would be better off stuck with a man who sold rocks for a living than continuing my education at Cooper Union?” I figured out later that my parents weren’t married but five months when I came out all healthy and above-average in weight, length, and lung capacity. To me she said things like, “I should’ve matriculated to the Kansas City Art Institute, graduated, and begun my life working in an art studio of my own, but here I am driving you twenty miles to the closest Little League game,” or, “I had a chance to go to the Chicago Art Institute on a full scholarship, but here I am trying to figure out why the hell X and Y are so important in a math class,” or, “Believe you me, I wouldn’t be adding pineapple chunks, green chilies, and tuna to a box of macaroni and cheese for supper had I gotten my wish and gone to the Ringling School of Art.”

  I went through all the times my mother offered up those blanket statements about her wonderful artistic talents usually by the fireplace while she carved fake fossils into flat rocks dug out of the Unknown Branch of the Saluda River there at the post office while my dad and I waited in line. She sold these forgeries down at the Dixie Rock and Gem Shop, or to tourist traps at the foot of Caesars Head, way up near Clingman’s Dome, or on the outskirts of Helena, Georgia. My mother’s life could’ve been worthwhile and meaningful had she not been burdened with motherhood; had she not been forced to work as a bookkeeper/receptionist/part-time homemade-dredge operator at the family river rock business; had she not met my father when her own family got forced to move from Worcester, Massachusetts, because her daddy was in the textile business and got transferred right before my mother’s senior year in high school. There were no art classes in the schools here; she could only take advanced home ec and learned how to make fabric and dye it, just as her father knew how to do at the cotton mill, more than likely.

  “I could’ve gone to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had I not been forced to take an English class that I’d already taken up in Massachusetts and sit next to your father, who cheated off my paper every time we took a multiple-choice test on The Scarlet Letter. I blame all of this on The Scarlet Letter, and how your dad had to come over on more than one occasion for tutoring,” my mother said about once a week.

  I didn’t get the chance to ever point out to her how Nathaniel Hawthorne lived in Massachusetts. A year after her death I figured out the math of their wedding date and my birth, and didn’t get to offer up anything about symbolism, or life mirroring art, et cetera. My mother died of flat-out boredom, disdain, crankiness, ennui, tendonitis from etching fake fossil ferns and fish bones into rocks, and a giant handful of sleeping pills. Her daily allotment of hemlock leaves boiled into a tea probably led to her demise, too, if not physiologically, at least spiritually.

  According to my father, the South Carolina Funeral Directors Association didn’t require normal embalming and/or crematorial procedures should the deceased have no brothers or sisters and should said dead person’s parents both be dead. Looking back, I understand now that my father made all this up. At the time, though, I just sat on the bench seat of his flatbed, my mother in back wrapped up in her favorite quilt inside a pine coffin. “We’re going up to Pointy Henderson’s, and he’ll perform the cremation. Then we’ll scatter your mother down by the river so she can always be with us.”

  Mr. Henderson was a potter and president of the local Democratic Party. About once a year he came down from the mountains and enlisted Young Democrats—and we all joined seeing as once a year, too, he held a giant shindig that included moonshine for everyone willing to either vote right or, if underage, at least put yard signs up.

  “Cremation takes two to three hours at 1400 to 1800 degrees,” Henderson said when we got there. “I did the research long ago.” He got his two daughters to heft my mother off of the truck and carry the box to the groundhog kiln, which appeared to be dug into the side of an embankment. “My fire reaches near two thousand degrees on a good day,” he said. “After Mrs. Looper cools, I’ll go to ashing down the hard bones, if that’s all right.”

  My father nodded. He’d done his crying the night before, as had I. “We’ll come back in a couple days,” my father said.

  “You and me’s kind of in the same business, I guess,” Henderson said. “You take rock and sell it to people want paths to their front doors and walls to keep them out, and I take clay and sell it to people who want bowls on their tables.”

  I didn’t get the connection. I guessed that clay was kind of like ground-down rocks, to a certain extent. I looked at Mr. Henderson’s daughters, who were my age, and were so inordinately beautiful that no one spoke to them in school. If Homer came back to Earth and met the potter’s daughters, he’d’ve had to rewrite the Siren section of The Odyssey. One of them said, “Sorry.”

  I said, “I’m a Democrat,” for I could think of nothing else. “I’m thinking that some laws need changing.”

  The other daughter said, “Sorry.”

  My father and I drove back home, as they say, in silence. Right before my mother slumped over in her chair dead at the age of thirty-three, she had set her last pancake-sized rock, a fake millipede etched into it, down on the stool. For her carving tool she’d been using a brand-new single-diamond necklace my father bought her. I don’t know if her engagement ring, which she normally used for such forgeries, had worn out or not. My father had bought the necklace as a way to celebrate a new account he’d won—as the sole river rock supplier for an entire housing tract deal down in Greenville that would in
clude a hundred patios and driveway-to-front-door paths.

  I sat at the kitchen table reading a book about three out of the four ancient elements. My mother had just gotten up to go to the bathroom, I assumed. She said, “I could’ve gone to the Maryland Institute College of Art. Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time.”

  Those were her last words, as it ended up. “Mom’s last words were, ‘Here I am walking to the bathroom one more time,’” I said. My father, without offering a reason, performed a U-turn in the middle of highway 108 and drove back to Mr. Henderson’s. I said, “I guess she didn’t know those would be her last words.”

  “Maybe she was a visionary. Maybe heaven’s just one giant toilet, Stet. I don’t mean that in a bad way.” I knew that he did mean it that way, though. My father didn’t cotton to there even being a heaven or hell. In the past he had said, “If there was a hell in the middle of the planet like some idiots believe, I think I’d’ve seen a flame or two shoot out from as deep as I’ve dug for rocks over the years.”

  We drove back up Mr. Henderson’s rocky driveway not two hours since we first arrived. He had already shoved my mother into the chamber. My father told me I could sit in the truck if I wanted, which I did at first until I realized that I had something important to say to the potter’s daughters, something that might prod them into seeing me as special. Something that might cause both of them to be my dates at the prom in a few years. I got out and stood there. Mr. Henderson explained something about the firing process, about the wood he used, something about how he can perform cremations cheaper than making his own pots because there’s no glaze involved. His daughters walked up and stood with us twenty feet from the kiln door. I said, “My mother was an artist.”

  They said, in unison, “Sorry.”

  Smoke blew out of the kiln’s chimney and my father said, “Well I don’t see any smoke rings going skyward. Which means I don’t see a halo. Come on, son.”