Sprinkles the Possum

So, it's been a while since I had anything interesting to report, but here's a good one from a couple weeks back...

Talked to a guy in Costa Mesa or some other horrible place in OC. He was in his 50s and wanted to sell off his 60s/70s cards that he had stashed since childhood. Usually in my wheelhouse, so braved afternoon freeway traffic.

It was Jenn's last week of work, but my daughter was already done with school, so I had BOTH kids with me for extra excitement. Long drive through brutal City of Industry, etc., traffic, during which they both passed out in the car seats. Arrived in not run down, but certainly not fancy, neighborhood of small tract houses.

Guy opens the front door, and it's one of those places where you can see straight through to the backyard, which was full of stacks of truck and auto tires. Joy. Guy is 50ish with 'stache and bleach-blonde hair and jacked out of his head on meth. Double joy. I was about to pull the plug on the whole adventure, when the wife shows up cradling something in a blanket in her arms and asks whether the kids would like to go to the back yard and see "Sprinkles" (full disclosure: I've forgotten the actual name, but it was something like that). I took a closer look, and she had a FUCKING BABY POSSUM that she was toting around like an infant, cooing and doting on it.

Uh... I don't know...

Sprinkles doesn't bite. She's very gentle.

Uh...

I turn to methman and he just shrugs with a pained smile.

Kids... do you want to see the opossum?

Uh... okay... The 7 year old looks at me like she understands completely how insane this is, but goes along with it. 3 year old thinks everything is cool. So, being the excellent parent that I am, I allow my offspring to follow a clearly demented woman with a baby marsupial into a backyard full of truck tires. God, now that I think this through, what an asshole I am.

Anyway, we look over the cards for a while. Lots of stuff that would be valuable, but in bad shape, so I know I can pick it up for nothing. There is an open window and the front porch on other side and the kids and crazylady have moved to there. She lets Sprinkles walk along the windowsill, where 15 seconds later, it takes a baby possum shit on the sill. I learn very quickly that possum shit smells like dogshit, except approximately 50 trillion times worse. Methman and I are quickly gagging and trying to not retch and I run outside in case I actually puke. The kids think this is all very funny.

So, bought em for nothing, sold them for a bit more, and still freaked out.

Wait! There's more!

More email from the mentally ill southern jackass. I wrote to him that his first email was "The number one most fucked up thing anyone has ever said to me in my life," and he responded:

glad message was received correctly, i like #1 ratings, u jews killed your own, CHRIST, and you need to be accountable for that. sorry for making you feel responsible..

jews killed their own messiah, CHRIST JESUS, that is the crime, i will stand on JESUS CHRIST as thec SON OF JEHOVAH, GOD, you stand on anyone else, and let's see who stands!


Anyone know how to send an email worm?
I'm messing with his head and telling him I'm Irish and he's inbred.

The Jew Fear, Part 2

So, this is an entirely different aspect of the Fear.

Guy today posted this in L.A. Craigslist:
http://losangeles.craigslist.org/sfv/clt/1661989835.html

Notice, he's from Mississippi. These are incredibly rare cards and I'd lay odds at 1000:1 that they're fakes. If they're not, the guy is selling them for nothing, which is what one might expect from some inbred white fucktard from Mississippi.

So, I wrote him an email asking what he would offer in terms of a guarantee of authenticity, given that there are so many fakes of these (quick historical note, in 1914/15 these were surprises in boxes of CJ. There were a zillion and none of them have survived. Mice nibble the sweet goodness right out of em).

Seems like a reasonable question, right? Anyway, here is the actual quote I got from this fucking pig:

"I don't sell to Jews."

I shit thee not. If you would like to harass him, that probably wouldn't be a bad use of your time.

The Last Time this Happened, Part 2

A few months passed. We crept toward the dread of the 2004 Presidential Election, my band slowly devolved into a joyless task of herding (mentally ill) cats, and I continued to not work. In September, the Ad Agency Guy called to offer a second week of sign sitting, this time at a slightly higher day rate in Minneapolis. Although I longed to finally see the home of all my boyhood heroes, I had booked what turned out to be the last tour I ever did (and a complete and utter nightmare on all accounts), and had to turn it down. The wife not happy with that, but held her tongue, probably sensing that my protracted rock and roll adolescence was FINALLY winding down to oblivion.

Very surprisingly, as I thought I had heard the last of this, I got ANOTHER call to have a go at a sign in Seattle in mid-October (the Red Sox were just completing they're playoff comeback against the Yanks), and jumped on the chance. Evidently, they could not find a local desperate idiot, so offered to put me up in a hotel, give me a substantial per diem, and this time it was only 2 3-hour shifts/day instead of a dawn to dusk marathon.

Seattle in late Fall is wet and freezing. Also, the sun doesn't come up in earnest until at least 6:30. This meant driving across town to a 5th story rooftop across from the baseball park downtown in complete darkness, taking a few steps down a ladder (no repelling this time, thank god) and waving in pitch blackness to cars so far below that NO ONE knew I was there (well, until the very last day, but we're not there yet). In Portland, I got a few honks and waves. This time, I might as well have not been there.

The whole week must have been nothing more than fulfilling the contract, because this time, they didn't even bother lying to me that this was a big event. No one from the agency came to see me even once. I was completely on my own. This meant shedding pieces of the uniform as the week went on, i.e., Shirt/tie/slacks/dress shoes/glasses turned to Shirt/tie/jeans/sneakers/no glasses by day 2. Also, I was up so high that no one would have been able to spot me wearing an iPod all day, so I spent a lot of time with PJ Harvey.

Did I mention wet and cold? By 7AM, I was soaked with that wet, misty crap that passes for rain in Seattle, shaking and chattering. Being cold, of course, is a powerful diuretic, which plays prominently later, so stay tuned. To pass the hours, I performed a HIGHLY scientific experiment of counting Kerry vs. Bush bumper stickers and found that King County was about 8:1 Kerry. I also began writing a mocumentary film script in my head for an entirely-optimistic, wholly-unsuccessful actor who spends an entire summer on billboards, slowly loses his mind, woman, and dignity, and ends up throwing things, including poop, at passing cars. I have notes somewhere should you be interested in buying this brilliant idea.

The in-between hours were pure bliss. I wandered the streets of Seattle, mainly Belltown and the Pike Market areas, went to the library, ate pretty well, and took naps. Lovely time, but then back up on the board for the evening shift, during which the predominantly red taillights turned to white headlights, and still no one saw me. My friend SKloos thinks that this was my subconscious creating a waking dream for me to see that my long and unsuccessful music "career" had now become a grotesque caricature - me jumping up and down in public, trying to be noticed, but being ignored by all. As always, he was probably right.

AHA! But then I was noticed on Friday afternoon! Safeco Field had been a giant, empty parking lot and unused grass park all week, but on Frday, around 2PM, cars started to amass. After about a half hour, I started to realize that something odd was going on: every car was filled with white men. Not one woman, not one person of color. At first, I was thinking Gay Pride Mariners appreciation night, but where was the Rainbow Coalition? Why only Whitey? AHA! This had to be one of those "Promise Keeper" type things where massive numbers of mentally ill men get together to watch feats of strength and speak in tongues!
Reflect upon the salient details:
a. I have curly hair and look like a Jew (or some would say, a half-black Jew)
b. These guys, not so much
c. These guys probably not the type to be cool with folks who don't remind them of them
d. This was still in shouting distance of 911.

It was only a matter of time. A group of them started to amass at the base of my billboard's building, pointing up at me and shouting words I couldn't make out over the din of the traffic (but, I was pretty sure had nothing to do with "Hey! That guy is pretending to be DEX, but he's wearing sneakers! What a fraud!). This crowd grew in size over the next 10 minutes or so, before I heard the unmistakable sounds of cops behind me. They suggested that I put my hands up over my head and turn around, and low and behold, TWO pistols were pointed at me.

What followed was one of the most farcical bad cop/worse cops routines I have ever seen, with the heavy played by a LINEBACKER of a lesbian cop. This woman had done so many roids that her Adam's Apple heaved lustily with the thought of pushing me off that rooftop.
HER: WHAT ARE YOU DOING UP HERE?
ME: Hi. This is my job. I've been up here all week. I'm DEX. Get it?
HIM: Sir, we received complaints that someone suspicious was watching the people going to the event from up here.
No. You probably shouldn't be listening to those freaks -
HER: YOU'RE THE FREAK! (swear to god. this is a quote).
ME: I'm going to very slowly reach into my pocket and get my cell phone and you can redial the last number to my employers.
And so I did. And so they did, and that was that, except the kicker:
HER: WHAT DO YOU HAVE IN THOSE BAGS?
ME: I don't really think you want to see.
HER: SLOWLY PICK UP THE BAG AND TAKE OUT WHATEVER IS IN THERE!
ME: Okeekoke (sounds of rustling papter bag and removal of 2 full-to-the-brim bottles of my urine).
HIM: I'd suggest you want to throw those away, Sir.

And they left, and I decided that was the end of this adventure, left an hour early, and drove home in the rain to Portland, where my wife got a pretty big kick out of my tale.

A Brief Mathematical Truth

The poorer the neighborhood, the more the seller wants for his valueless cards. This is a direct, mathematical correlation.

The Last Time This Happened...

The last time I went through a long period of under/unemployment was while I was living in Portland, OR. I sent resumes out every day and hear back maybe once a month. I moved up there with my long-term SF job, but when the dotcom bubble burst, I was covered in soap shrapnel and left on the banks of the Island of the Jobless with my wife, the grad school chick. There just were no jobs to be had. Different situation than today in L.A. in which there are great jobs here and there, but WAY too many applicants for each. Portland was a great rainy cave to hibernate for several years. It is the largest den of slack I have ever encountered. Makes for truly great conversation in the coffee houses, but not much in terms of career development.

At this point, the whole baseball card angle wasn't even a twinkle in my mind's eye. Thinking back, we might still be living there if it had, cost of living being as low as it is. I spent my days drinking coffee, puttering in the recording studio with occasional clients or alone with my guitars, and perusing the barren landscape of the Portland Craigslist job boards.

One particularly desperate afternoon, May 2004, I checked out the "Creative" section in "Gigs." Unlike L.A., this section gets at most 10 posts/day, and they almost never involve pay. On this day, however, there was a promising lead looking for actors for a corporate job. I had ZERO acting background, but figured that a guy like me who has played in bands in nothing but my underpants on several occasions should have the gumption to fake it through a casting. So, I called, got an appointment and showed up a few hours later. The room was filled with guys holding headshots who had been sent by their agents. There were all dressed business casual with horn-rimmed glasses. It looked like a Weezer fan club meeting. Me? Jeans and T-shirt. I didn't get the memo. What the hell - they had magazines and snacks and coffee. In Portland, any excuse to drink more coffee is a go.

I eventually got called in and met with a big blonde guy in his early 40s from an ad agency in L.A. and his assistant, who ran the video camera. They gave me the rundown, which was that the "Dex" Yellow Pages, which had been running a series of pretty damn funny TV commercials featuring a character actor you've all seen elsewhere anthropomorphizing the yellow pages. He'd be crammed into a cabinet above the microwave and someone would open the door and ask him where something was and he'd give way too much information very quickly before being shut back into the cabinet. So, the company had hired this agency to create a week-long event in which an actor would spend a week living on a billboard in NW Ptown, waving at cars, being interviewed on radio spots, and showing how to do something on camera every day, e.g., bonsai or guitar repair. "Dex Knows..." Food from the best restaurants in town would be brought up to Dex to sample and comment on, etc., etc.

So, long story short, I got the gig. Yes, this surprised me too. Looking back, the first three choices must have turned it down, but being as broke as we were, I took it; only, it had changed and morphed before the date. It seems that in the 11th hour, the corporate dickheads who own the Dex pages started to worry about their corporate identity, blah blah blah, and scaled the whole project down to me up on a billboard (one of the side of a building types, not a free standing one) for a week waving at cars while clutching an umbrella to prevent 3rd Degree sunburn (this kindness was granted to me on the 3rd day after my desperate pleas finally stopped falling on deaf ears) and risking life and limb getting on and off the board because no ladder had been erected. I had to repel up and down the wires and hook of the pulley system that raises the board up the side of the building while wearing a pair of dress shoes they insisted I wear because it was what the actor wore on camera. This made it about 50x more life threatening. Maybe 1 out of every 500 cars that drove by realized I was up there and honked clearly thinking a crazy person was on a billboard for no apparent reason. I am SURE that not one of them said to himself, "Hot damn! That guy is wearing those same Kenneth Coles as that funny guy on the teevee!"

On the first morning, there was a 30 second live radio spot for a local AM, and THAT'S IT. I was on my own, frying, singing to myself (I wrote 2 songs from my "Walk under and on" record entirely in my head and then came home and figured out on guitar), and losing my mind. No food was provided from Portland's finest eateries. Instead, a few times a day, I would shimmy down the pulley system, appealing to deities long since abandoned, and grab whatever was most edible at the crappy corner market in the bottom unit of the building. I would also use their restroom, but the rest of the day had to resort to a system of emptied water bottles. The more times I had to get up and down off the thing, the more chances of dying horribly in a public spectacle. To avoid sunstroke, I was guzzling as much water as I could, and it would go through me in that June afternoon sun in minutes. The trick is to get the water bottles with the wide mouths, but that's as much info as I'll offer on this subject.

I was up there for 8 hour stretches Monday - Friday, after which I was lobster colored, dehydrated to the point of considering hospitalization, etc. This was the weirdest week of my life. WELL, until I did it AGAIN in Seattle in October, but you'll have to wait until the next episode to hear about that...

A Quick Note on Names...

I just sold a Phil Rizzuto autograph card to a guy with the last name Krapovich. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and change the old country name. Maybe Krappo or Krapper or something more Americanized.

In fact, what's wrong with Brown? That would work.

Bunning Update

So, it turns out that I didn't have his rookie 1957 card, but did have an autographed "Super" from 1964. I have listed it thusly:

Autographed Topps Super card of Jim Bunning, Phillies Hall of Fame Legend and all around Senate asshat...

How Jim Bunning Assholedom Effects Me

One thing that happens when you spend a lot of time buying and selling cards, is that the entire thing is de-mystified. They look like dollars, not something you want to admire. Cards that as a kid I would have flipped over just look like entries on my spreadsheet now.

That said, I do have a small collection consisting of Dodgers, some of the top Hall of Famer types like Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Williams, Koufax, and Hall of Fame rookie cards. This last category is the only thing I've spent any money on. It's a finite group, so not an endless money sinkhole like collecting sets or autographs, and cool in a museum sort of way.

One of these is my 1957 Jim Bunning rookie. Honestly, I know nothing about the guy as a player, but WHAT A FUCKING ASSHOLE this assclown is as a Senator. I think I have to unload this card just to make sure it doesn't infect the rest of my collection. Seriously. You reading this, Bunning? Go fuck yourself in the earhole.

Thank you...

The Tranny Cards

Last summer I came across a listing for a collection of 50s/60s cards in middling condition. This is right in my wheelhouse. The minty pricey stuff is owned by collectors, who ALWAYS have magical ideation and think that economic trends and market values do not apply to their very special property (note: this is more or less the same reason it is a bitch running a record label!).

I called and spoke to a Christine. These were her cards that she collected as a kid in the L.A. area. They were heavy on Dodgers, but had lots of stars. She was taking a lot of heat from her band (she was the singer) to sell off her cards to buy recording gear. Very deep voice. A chanteuse, I figured.

So, I drove down to the decrepit Fox Mall in the LAX area, where we were to meet in the parking lot. This struck me as unusual, as most of my dealings have been in Starbucks or MacDonald's, but what the heck. Any public place where it is less likely to get hit over the head with a sack of nickels for one's wallet is fine with me. A few cell calls later, and we found each other. She was driving a VERY beat up late model Toyota, and waved me over to the car.

Have you seen "The World According to Garp"? Remember Lithgow? That's what was going on here. 6'2" or thereabouts, pronounced Adam's apple, lank hair, man hands, house dress. The works. Christine, evidently, collected this back in her Chris days. Now, as many of you know, I spent many years in San Francisco, so it will take a WHOLE FUCK OF A LOT more than that to make me flinch, and I think this worked in my favor. I smiled and played along. Gender is whatever you want it to be. She told me that she could tell I was a "cool guy," and was sure we could work out a deal.

I went through the books of cards, which I ballparked at about $1500 of Ebay value for me. Some very pricey stuff, Mays and Mantle and Koufax, etc., in affordable condition. I figured she'd ask for a grand and I'd counter at $800 and we'd have a deal. What do you want for them? Well, what do you think they're worth? I was just about to answer when she blurted out How about $600? Now that is unusual. No reason to bargain from there. We got some cash from the ATM, I took em home and turned them around for $2K.

I need to hang around the Tenderloin and ask the girls if they have any baseball cards.

The Jew Fear

So, one of the most interesting things about being born into a Jewish family (or any other minority, I'm sure, but I'm not qualified to comment), is the legacy stereotypes you're saddled with from the moment you pop out of the uterus. Jews are cheap and conniving, right?

At some point in early adulthood, this fear really sunk in - there was nothing I could do. I could give every penny away my entire life, and some redneck would still call me a cheap kike, accuse me of "Jewing him down," etc. Granted, I grew up in Southern California, not Alabama, and it's not 1955 anymore, but fears are not rational. So, my coping mechanism has been to never bargain for anything. I'm the guy who pays full retail FOR EVERYTHING, particularly if the seller is wearing a Christmas sweater, a crucifix or any other hints of religiosity or Midwesternism. Fat woman with bad bleach job and a cute kitty T-shirt? How much you want? I'll pay double.

Oh, or if he looks to be Palestinian.

This process I have named "The Jew Fear." It's an expensive way to go through life, but a little self-flagellation is good for you. Right?

How does this all connect with the cards? There is NO way to make a penny doing this if you don't get your goods for as next to nothing as possible. Every transaction involves quite a bit of back and forth over what they're "worth" (well, except the Tranny Cards, but we haven't gotten there yet). As noted earlier, just about everyone thinks their childhood collection has 2-5 times the value than the market will bear. I've walked away from several possible deals once realizing that the person had delusions of grandeur... or RUN away (see my first blog), but that's rare. In nearly every case, in order to make this whole enterprise work, I have had to resort to my ancestral tendencies that I have spent so much of my life squashing down.

So, what I'm trying to say here is that if you have a car for sale, I'm the guy you want to sell it to. BUT, if your card collection is for sale, expect Shylock.

Necrocardia

As you might imagine, a decent amount of collections get sold because of someone dying (or running out on wives/girlfriends, which is more or less the same thing). I've had few scores and quite a few wastes of time (see "The Great Ice Tea Caper').

I met up in a parking garage in Studio City with a 60ish-year-old British gentleman who didn't know Babe Ruth from Babe the pig. His half brother had killed himself 25 years earlier and he wanted to dump a pretty large collection for a few hundred bucks. Most of it was garbage, but way on the bottom of the cardboard box was the stash box where the young suicide had cherry picked out the best cards from all the other boxes. Doubled or tripled my investment on that one.

This story, while the worst of the bunch, captures the flavor of the typical necrocardia escapade: Ad in Orange County (meaning an hour drive, minimally from my spot out in NW L.A. County) ran for a Huge Collection of cards. I called and spoke with a 50 or 60 something man. These "were" his son's, he told me, cryptically. Have encountered that particular parsing before, I guessed his meaning. There were tens of thousands of cards. His son had spent every penny at card shows, etc., ending about 10 years ago. So, promising, but... are these mainly 80s/90s type cards (i.e., landfill, as described in early posts), or is it a mix of older and newer cards? He had no idea. These had been stashed away in his garage for 10 or so years (again, a story I have run across many times after someone dies and someone else doesn't have the heart to put in the garbage bin or run down to the Goodwill). All he knew was that he had invested quite a bit of money into these and was certain that they would be his retirement fund one day (or not, as it turned out).

Okay, I'm game, I told him. I figured, if this guy had spent all his last pennies on these, and had picked them up at card shows, unless he was a complete boob, there had to be good stuff in there. So, I drove on a Saturday morning before traffic. Or, there wouldn't have been any, but there was an accident at the interchange to the freeway that stretched the last 2 miles to their home in Whereverthehellsville. An hour and half later, I arrived. He and his wife, both in their early 60s, and very nice/parental, were cleaning out the garage. They were moving away, and it was time to part with their late son's things. This was the first time they had mentioned him being dead.

All the cards were laid out in boxes on the table. I started going through them. Crap. Garbage. Recycling. Shite. Cardboard. There were 5 or 6 cards set aside in plastic holders that maybe had 1-2 buck Ebay value and the rest was just give away little kid stuff. I decided to tell them, but keep it light. The story brought about this unimaginable sadness in them both. Not that they wanted a bunch of money (they weren't asking for more than a couple hundred bucks), but that their son had misjudged life even in this final evaluation of his affects. The floodgates opened, and they told me that for the last few years, he had descended into the hells of drug addiction (I was guessing meth or junk, but who knows?). He ended up living in some horrible addict squat where he slowly sold off everything bit by bit, drained his family of money, and then croaked.

So, either this was the crap he couldn't sell, or he was delusional. Or stupid. Or all. In any case, I'm standing there with two parents of a dead child, feeling like one wrong word could send them over the edge into an extended sobbing, snot-dripping catharsis, which would not be how I wanted to spend my Saturday. So, I paid them 20 bucks and loaded all this garbage into my trunk. Went home and put an ad for free cards for kids. A tank full of gas and $20 bucks: I guess that was the price of not being an asshole for the day.

Addendum to Stealing from the Mentally Challenged

Well, it looks like I stumbled upon, and narrowly avoided, a REALLY elaborate scam. "Edwin," the ostensible retard, is Edwin Arroyo, a guy in California who has been identified by someone on about every Craigslist board in the USA as part of a scam ring probably based in Mexico. Evidently, they get cases from real cards from PSA (I have NO idea how they would do this without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars) crack out the original cards, and insert fakes and re-seal.

All very confusing, and still not sure why they ended communication with me. I wonder, but doubt, if they came across my blog. THAT would be interesting.

Whew!

The Great Ice Tea Caper

If you step back from it for a moment, the whole notion of pieces of cardboard with printing on them being worth many thousands (and sometimes we're talking about hundreds of thousands) of dollars is absurd, but people tend to value anything that is rare and reminds of departed ages. I've seen furniture on Antiques Roadshow that is so ugly it hurt my feelings that is ostensibly worth a zillion dollars, so why should cardboard be any different?

Quick primer: baseball cards since way way back are printed in in number order in large groups on large pieces of cardboard, and then are cut down to individual cards. This adds a further layer of absurdity, i.e., why should the 1952 Topps #310 George Metkovich have a book value of $100, when the card that was on that big sheet of cardboard, #311 Mickey Mantle, books at $30K? I would go out on a limb and guess that the relative scarcity of these 2 cards is very similar. More or less identical numbers of them were produced, after all.

However, Mantle has been hoarded by collectors for 50+ years and Melkovich? Not so much. (Historical Aside: 10 years with the Pirates, White Sox, Red Sox, etc., batted .261, and did some acting). So, there is a real shortage of Mantle cards in terms of liquidity. Even if there are roughly the same number of them as the other cards on the big sheet, good luck finding one, and be ready to mortgage your house or rob a bank to buy one. These rare cards are the ones that collector dorks will shell out the biggest bucks for, and are the source of dreams for desperate schemers like me who have been out of work for a long time.

Which brings us to The Great Ice Tea Caper:

I learned pretty early on that when someone lists a group of cards on Craigslist for, say, $100, there is more or less zero chance that it is worth more than 85 cents. These tend to be collections of mass produced recycling from the 1980s. There are maybe 10 cards worth even a few bucks on the open market made between 1981 and 1991. So, after many frustrating drives to Satansarmpit and the like, I stopped looking at those ads and concentrated on ones that listed groups of cards for multiple hundreds, thousands, etc. These, as we will see, are not always made up of valuable cards, but the odds are better. Then the game is to convince the person that he (it's almost always a guy) really wants to sell them for less than he's asking (see more on this in future post "The Jew Fear").

So, I came across a CL post for a group of cards from some codger in the High Desert that included TWO Babe Ruth cards. It was listed for something like $1800, and I figured I'd give a call. He answered on the 10th ring, and the reverb signature on the call definitely seemed like trailer. Evidently, these had been his now dead brother's cards (more on this subject in future post "Necrocardia") and he was going to be in my neck of the woods in a few days. My feverish brain raced. An old guy's cards - could be legitimate Babe Ruths, which, as you can probably imagine, are worth a fortune, even when mangled. I asked him to read the back of the card to me, which usually can save a lot of time if it starts "One of the great baseball players of the 1920s..."), but he said his eyes were pretty bad. He was looking for $1800 bucks, because that was what he need for something or another.

So the day came. We arranged to meet at a deli near my house around 8PM. I got there on time, and he was sitting in a booth with his wife, and it looked like they had been there quite a while, had had dinner, etc. Both of them were in the late 70s and looked like a nice couple. He had a box in front of him, but I played it cool. Never seem over-eager and all that when you're the buyer. The waitress arrived immediately and asked me what I'd have. Uh... Ice Tea. I never drink ice tea, so have no idea what that was about.

So, I'll bet you want to take a look, eh? he said with a big smile as he pushed the cards to me. Yeah. Thanks. I opened the box, and in about 20 seconds, could tell that this was a box of 1980s garbage that his dead brother must have collected when well into his 50s. I tried not to show anything on my face out of respect. What was I going to tell this sweet old couple who had driven to me to show me their cards? I came across the Babe Ruths after a while. They were both valueless Famous Stars of Baseball type things printed in the 80s or 90s. I went through the entire box, and estimated the aggregate value at... well, zero, really. Not one card that any collector would pay a dime for.

I looked up and they were both looking at me intently. Well... here's the thing. This isn't going to be your retirement fund. Their faces deflated. I explained what they had and found myself apologizing for telling them about it. He took it pretty well, but was clearly disappointed. His wife was just embarrassed by the whole thing and bought my ice tea for my trouble.

Sigh.

Letting the Days Go By, Part 3

All righty then...

So, cards were 100% of the radar from the late 80s until 2007, when Henry was a few months old. He expressed ZERO interest in TV, except for sitting in my lap while I watched the Dodgers and giggling when I told him one man was going to throw the ball and the other man would catch the ball, etc.

Something about being with a 6 month old watching baseball sparked my memory and I checked out Ebay. In those long off salad days, I actually had 2 jobs and income, and for my birthday in November, I bought myself a small collection of 1957 Dodgers, including Drysdale (rookie), Koufax, and Reese. Didn't want the rest (who really needs Clem Labine?), so re-sold them, recouping most of the original investment, keeping the 3 I wanted for more or less free, and starting this entire mess!

Very quickly, I realized that Ebay was not the place to acquire cards. Too many people doing the same thing as I was, all bidding against each other. No real bargains to be had that way. The key was the Collectibles section on Craigslist. I started spending inordinate amounts of time searching "Cards," "Card," "baseball" on CLs across the country, and buying collections sight unseen from Georgia and Oklahoma. This proved to be a real crapshoot. I made out like a bandit a few times, but got stuck with TWO counterfeit Joe Dimaggio cards and completely ripped off (sent money order, got dookie) by a scumbag in Las Vegas who is now serving time for theft, armed robbery, etc., all un-related to me (maybe I'll devote some time to this clown in a later entry).

I'd cherry pick out a few, and sell the rest card by card on Ebay, making a few bucks here and there. All small potatoes stuff, as I was full time employed and really thinking about getting together a collection of Hall of Fame rookies that maybe Henry or Violet would appreciate some day. The real illness didn't start until I got laid off in September 2008, right in time for the Great Recession. In fact, come to think of it, I might have been a leading indicator. While sending resumes off to the void and getting the occasional fruitless interview, I started thinking more and more that maybe I should sit this one out and just sell cards until the economy rebounded. Depression was starting to rear its ugly (and familiar) head, and I thought maybe this was the key top kicking it in the sack and running away while I had a chance. Plus, I'd probably have more free time to try to write something again (I mistakenly reckoned).

While doing a couple of weeks' contract work for another company that folded a few weeks later, I happened upon an Ebay listing for an GIFUCKINGNORMOUS collection listed at $50K and not getting any bids. It turned out to be in Los Angeles, and I went to see the whole thing.

Nice young Armenian cat with the unlikely name Hampig (I shit thee not - Ham and Pig in the same name. Definitely not a Muslim) was selling out of his stake in a local card shop to focus full time on his other business. Pretty amazing stuff. All sorts of Hall of Famer autographs and vintage cards. Graded Mickey Mantles, etc etc. All in all, we agreed that if I could con a bank into loaning me 30K, I'd buy him out.

The biggest surprise in this whole escapade was (looking for votes here):
a. that Bank of America loaned me all the money with no verification of income in an era that banks were supposedly not loaning money to ANYONE;
or
b. that Jenn went along with this scheme.

Either way, by March 2009, the garage in my old house in the Valley was CRAMMED with boxes of cards. 2 car garage filled approximately to 30%. Couldn't park a car in there. And so it began. 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week, sorting, cataloging, listing, selling, shipping cards, arguing with shut in collector freaks in New Jersey about what constitutes an EXMT card vs. an EX+). To all of you haters who think I'm a lazy S.O.B. smoking pot all day in my underpants, this is not the case. I probably put in more hours than any of you. The difference, though, was that I really didn't make any money for my efforts. Oh, and also that my endeavor is completely embarrassingly lame.

At first, it looked like a grand slam. I cleared over 11K/month for the first month and visions of making 80K selling cardboard started to fill my pretty little head. But the second month it was 6K, and never over 3-4K after that. After I sold off the best stuff, there were diminishing returns. It became very clear that I might be working for scratch after loan interest, mailing costs, envelopes, etc. I had paid the ham pig too much. It was really impossible to know before putting theory into practice(at least to me), but in retrospect, I shouldn't have paid more than 20-25K. Kept me sane though. Better than not getting a job day after day, week after week.

So, eventually, I cleared it all out. This took about 9 months. I re-invested several times and bought smaller groups of cards. Nowadays, when I buy, I'm looking to make no less than 100% profit, or I walk away from the deal. I am finally net positive, but not by much, and certainly by a LOT less than I would have made pouring coffee somewhere. But, who would want to read that blog?

Starting next time, I'll start busting out the highlight stories, beginning with "The Great Ice Tea Caper."

Thanks for reading.

Letting the Days Go By, Part 2

(If you haven't read part 1, this will make less sense)

My cards lay in their plastic sleeves gathering dust in my parents' house for 5 or 6 years until I needed a better guitar than that crappy white Ibanez with the Heavy Metal whammy bar and remembered them. AHA! Cardboard for pickups seemed like a great trade. I borrowed my sister's car (this is a long story that I'm not going to go into, but, yes, I'm still bitter), got them out of my old room's closet, and headed down to the local card shop.

I figured, after a quick tally, that I had maybe $1000 in cards. Here is when I learned:

Life Lesson #1:

Everything is worth exactly and only what someone else will pay for it!

The shop owner quickly flipped through the book, his eyes lighting up once or twice and told me I'd give you $100.

Holy shit say what?

Really? For which ones?

For the lot. You have some decent stuff here, but I have doubles and triples on most of it.

But... but... the book says -

The book doesn't mean anything, kid. Hundred and a quarter is best I'll do for you.

So, I went staggering out with my cards under my arm. Was I going to have to get a job to buy a guitar? The horror. I tried another shop in a different neighborhood, and got more or less the same spiel. However, at this second shop, on the way out, a guy about my age stepped outside when I did and started a conversation.

Man, you don't want to sell your cards to a shop. That's the worst money you'll ever see.

Oh. Okay. So, where do you sell cards, then?
(note: this is in the ancient pre-Internet era. There was no Ebay, no Craigslist, no nuthin).

I know a lot of people. Let's go sit down and check it all out. I live around the corner.

So, idiotically, I followed. We sat in his apartment and he went through the book, more enthusiastically than the store owners, and told me that he knew some guys who would for sure buy them, so just leave them with him, and he'd sell them for me and take 10% commission. This leads me to:

Life Lesson #2:

Don't Be Such a Fucking Idiot, Golden!

Yes, it's true: I left my property with a random stranger. I guess I figured I know where the guy lived, and it really never occurred to me that someone could be a complete slimeball. I'm too honest myself to believe that other people can behave that way. Or something like that. In any case, yes, this does prove what many of you have said to me over the years about my relative intelligence, and yes, this motherfucker did in fact leave town with my stuff. I called him a million times, never got any response, and headed over there, probably on day 3. He was completely moved out and the manager of the complex had no forwarding info. Line disconnected the next day. Game over. That stung.

So, as for LL#2, I think I did learn to not be so trusting, and "I'm never letting someone steal my baseball cards again" has been one of my internal catch phrases. Whenever presented with an opportunity to further prove how completely detached from reality I am, I have pictured my card's stealer riding off into the sunset laughing maniacally (Moo-A-HA-HA-HA!), and have (on most occasions), not taken the absolute stupidest choice.

As for Life Lesson #1 - I applied this to selling my first house in Portland. The buying agent told my selling agent that his clients wouldn't pay our asking price, because the the comparable houses in the neighborhood hadn't sold at that price. Show me the comps, he evidently told my agent. I quickly reflected upon LL #1 and told my agent that he could suggest to his counterpart that he shove the comps up his ass. We got asking.

Come to think of it, I can't remember where I got the money for my better guitar...

Stealing from the Mentally Challenged

This was supposed to be How Did I Get Here, Part 2, but today's events take precendent...


This morning, I saw a post on craigslist (where I find everything I sell) for a pretty high graded Sandy Koufax rookie card (1955 Topps). Sells in the $800 range on Ebay, consistently. It was described as being in "a plastic case," which lead me to believe this was a person who didn't know what a graded card was (i.e., that it increases value, etc). I haven't had a chance to go into this yet, but basically, the only way to make any money at this is to COMPLETELY FUCK PEOPLE IN THE ARSE on their stuff. This makes me feel like a complete jerk... but also kinda good in a king of dipshits kind of way. I'll write at length on this subject soon.

So, I wrote and offered $300.

About an hour later, I got a call on my cell phone from an unknown area code. It was a very mentally impaired/retarded man named Edwin who, as soon as I had confirmed that I was the one who offered to buy his card, launched into a breathless rant about how his father had died and left him with a number of extremely valuable cards and his mom said he could do what he wanted with them and he really wanted enough money to buy an XBox and ran through all of his cards without pausing for a moment to let me react. At least, I'm pretty much sure this is what he was saying. He told me he'd take a picture of all the cards laid out on his bed (see photo with identifying numbers removed) and send it to me.

For the next hour or so, I figured I had me a great blog post brewing up about the greatest attempted scam I'd come across yet. Some guy with actor training putting on a voice of a retarded guy and offering to sell $200K dollars of vintage cards for less than pennies on the dollar (quick note: these are a greatest hits package of the most desired cards in unbelievable condition - auction house stuff). The mark gets greedy, sends a few hundred off and gets nothing, or a bag full of rocks in return. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And what if it were on the level? Was I really cold hearted enough to steal money from a retard? Really? As I swam laps, I started to negotiate with my soul - well, you could give him several thousand bucks and he could buy every XBox game ever made. What could be happier than a retarded guy with 500 video games? Etc. Bad, bad thoughts.

So, while I argued with my soul, I got a call from the same number an hour or so later from his older cousin. He explained that, yes, Ed had "some mental problems," and they were in fact cards inherited from his extremely rich father, but he wasn't going to let him give them away -

- No, I wouldn't take advantage of someone like that...

...Dammit.

So, still talking about doing a deal, bankrolled by Mr. Bigtime in NYC, but it would be very high cost, comparatively low return. Still, not bad if it comes together.

Letting the Days Go By

So, how did I get here?

In 1975, 2nd grade, the big thing at my school was baseball cards (then yo-yos, those little parachute army men, etc.). For the unfamiliar, it's a pretty amazing set, art-wise. All cards are divided in half with one color on each half, and a different scheme for each team. I remember seeing older kids with rainbow stacks of gum-scented cardboard and thinking I have to get in on this whole deal.

My neighborhood is in the hills in the SF Valley. My folks' house (where they still live, 39 years and counting) is on the corner of 2 impossibly-steep hills, Eddingham/Adamsville. The ice cream man, whose truck said "Uncle Ron" on the driver side (and who my mother was sure was a child molester, but that's a whole nuther can of woims), made the loop around the hood and then parked at the corner by my house with that horrible music blaring out of the 2 dollar speaker every day of the summer. Every kid in the neighborhood would congregate and buy his wares there. I don't know why he didn't catch on and stop doing the loop around the other streets, but Uncle Ron had his methods.

At first it was innocent. I'd take my allowance money and wait my turn to buy 25 cent packs, forgoing the tantalizing Bomb Pops and 50/50 bars. By the time, I had exhausted those funds, I turned to the plastic water bottle in my closet that my parents must have been filling with pennies for me since I was born (I had no idea where they came from). I'd organize front pockets with 25 pennies carefully counted out in each, and then invariably spill them on the sidewalk and down the gutters when trying to extract them when it was my turn. I can remember the look on Ron's face as I approached the truck, and now that I have children, recognize that it was that grimace born of wanting to tell a small child to fuck off, but knowing it's not really the best choice under the circumstances.

My other main source was the blood money my dad paid me at the liquor store when he bought the cigars that he smoked in the car away from my mother. Every visit was good for a pack or two with the implicit deal that I wouldn't rat him out. Then there were the jumbo cellophane packs that I could pester the babysitter into getting me once in a while at Thrifty's.

In those days, it was all about getting the Dodger cards, none of which, by the way, are worth anything to collectors nowadays. My cards were sorted and resorted into dogeared condition, like most kids'. I was so young that I learned that the Dodgers had been in the World Series and lost to the A's by reading about it on the cards.

And so it went for several years, culminating in the 1982 Topps set, which I shoplifted pack by pack down my pants at the Alpha Beta, before I lost interest in new cards and started trading up to the good stuff: Mantle, Clemente, Mays, Bench, Rose. The national fever for cards was in full swing, and I would spend hours on my bedroom floor calculating and re-calculating the supposed value of my collection (more on that in later installments). I did great work with a spoiled only child up the street named Brian, whose methods were erratic and quantity over quality-centric. I ended up with most of his best stuff for larger groups of my crap. At its peak, I had a pretty impressive collection of all the Hall of Famer types worth at least a few bucks.

This went on into my first years of high school, when I kept it my little dirty secret, as it had become obviously dorkish by then. Then water polo, girls, cheap beer, and minor acts of juvenile delinquency replaced baseball cards and they gathered dust in my closet for several years.

In the next installment: how I learned that I'm an idiot in earnest/lost all my cards.

I'll Start at the End

This might be the one that makes me finally put an end to this adventure, which seems like as good a place to start as any.

She claimed she had a large collection of cards left behind by the man who dumped her and left the country. Her finance, she said. She knew nothing about them, but her friend did. She put him on the phone and he described the massive number of cards they were sorting through.

Do you have vintage? That's really what I buy. Pre-70s.

Shitloads, dude. Seriously. There are so many fucking cards here that my head is spinning.

So, I arranged to drive an hour south on Saturday morning, when the traffic shouldn't be too bad. Costa Mesa, wherever the hell that is. What should have been the first sign, if I had paid attention, was that the Border's Books where we were supposed to meet was out of business. Who the hell has heard of a Border's Books shutting down? Maybe not many readers in Costa Mesa. Maybe more of a Jerry Springer kind of town.

The door was left open, and he was standing in the entryway with an eyes-bulging-out-of-the head intensity. My first thought was Meth, but I wasn't sure. Maybe just a thyroid gland problem. The house had no heat and reeked of cat piss. He had just moved in, she apologized to me. Bought it foreclosed. "Red Tag" he said, whatever that means. She asked me if I wanted something to drink and was all pleasantries.

Sitting in a chair, not saying anything, was a massive hulk of a guy looking half awake. Not nodding or anything like that, but just not there. He smiled with a mouthful of dirty FUCKED UP teeth. By then, I was starting to pay attention. A vague, un-named fear started to tickle the back of my neck. Still, a buck's a buck.

The cards were in boxes and piles on the table in the front room. I asked him if the older stuff was sorted out.

I had it pretty sorted on my bed, but then I had to move it out here.

So, we started to go through them. Tens of thousands of cards, more or less all from the 1990s.

Hey, so I'm not really seeing the older stuff we talked about...

It's there, man. I've seen a bunch. You just haven't liked any of it.

He's just saying that shit to try to get a lower price, chimed in the Large Dim One. If I had any sense at all, that should have been my cue to walk.

So, we plowed on. Hours passing as I flipped through card after card, maybe setting aside 30 that I would consider buying (2 of which where from the 60s or 70s). Meanwhile, She tried to be helpful, pulling out one value-less card of some long forgotten shortstop or catcher. How about Bump Wills? I tried to humor her the first 40 or 50 times, but ran out of steam and just gave her the sort of Uh huhs that a parent gives his 6 year old daughter to try to maintain sanity on long road trips.

At some point, I came across a pair of 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie cards. Both in pretty good shape, but one off center at least 70:30. I set those aside in my pile and He noticed. I sold one of those a few years ago for $1000. This is when things took a turn seriously for the worse. This card has a high book value of $80, which means, if you are a complete idiot hellbent on overpaying for things in life (you probably shop at Nieman Marcus, etc), this is the most you might ever pay for a Near Mint (NM) copy of the card. These were a condition step below that, and would probably bring $40-45/each on Ebay. So, feeling my usual need to express to a complete stranger when his ideas reek of crack cocaine abuse, I mentioned all this.

Dude, that card books for $1500!

Not so much. Eighty.

Man, I just saw it in the Beckett Guide (which he couldn't subsequently find). I'll bet you a thousand dollars.

This was too much for me. I just don't have that level of politeness in me. I'll tell you what, I'll bet you $1000 that the book value of that card is under $500, but it will be the worst bet you ever made.

I've made a hell of a lot worse bets than that! to which She and the Large Dim One chortled, and which I saw to be the gospel truth. He hemmed and hawed, but didn't pursue it any further (well, actually, he did ask me if I felt lucky enough to bet him if I could flip heads twice in a row, but that's inconsequential to the story arc here).

As you'll see in future posts, there is an inversely proportional relationship between market knowledge and belief in the value of ones cards. I'd explain further, but there's a lot of math involved. In any case, I now knew what I was in for - or at least what I would typically been in for had this complete lack of knowledge not been paired with brain damage, inbreeding, and/or drug abuse. I thought I'd bring a little reality into the conversation and convinced him to go look up completed auctions of his ostensible $1000 cards on Ebay. There were 15 or so completed auctions in the last few weeks of this card in similar condition, all of which sold between 30-50 bucks with one outlier at $60. See?

Nope, his brain was hellbent on making the data support his thesis, like my Republican acquaintances who still try to find ways to make Trickle-Down Economics seem like a great, efficient system. What about that one listed for $880?

That's an overpriced card graded PSA 10 and there were no takers at that price.

Yeah, but these cards are 10s!

No, these cards are ungraded cards in similar condition to the ones we just saw selling for the EXACT amount I told you they sold for.

Man, you think you know a lot more than you do. I'm a self-made millionaire! You should be listening to me. I have a photographic memory and I can tell you right now that I saw that card in the price guides for $1500.

You think I make this shit up? That was fucking verbatim. The man was becoming unhinged in front of my eyes. I, being an idiot, decided to see it out to the bloody end. By then, The Large Dim One and She had come back into the house from a lengthy smoke break. I was starting to have visions of being jumped, but squashed them down as paranoia.

How about we just look over my stack of cards, figure out a price, and I can get back on my way? I suggested as calmly as I could. He stood listening, clearly agitated.

I figured that I could realistically re-sell the lot for between $500-600, so I started at 50% - I'm thinking $300 for the group.

I saw him start to shake with rage, as if I had offered him to kick him in the sack and fuck his woman in exchange for his property (remember, by the way, these were NOT his cards - they were Hers). I tried to talk my way through it: I'm buying a group, so would expect a volume discount, etc, etc. I think that's a pretty fair offer.

I don't think it's a fair offer at all.

Okay. What do you think would be?

This is the point at which some back and forth typically goes on, at the end of which I walk with the cards, they walk with my cash, and we never see each other again. Not this time, though. His anger at me started to become more and more visible in his deranged eyes and he started barking at me again about him being a self-made millionaire (which, by his filthy hands and general odor, I'm thinking was as true as his earlier claim to have gone to USC "for a while").

I started to back away from the table. This is getting kind of silly, I said nervously.

She agreed and tried to calm him down some. If you're not comfortable with the offer, we can just call it off -

He interrupted her, having now boiled completely over. I WANT YOU TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE he yelled at me. I'M DOING THIS AS A FAVOR FOR HER AND I WANT YOU THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!

I looked at him and, stupidly, said Well, that was a waste of 3 hours. I walked toward the door with him in pursuit, ready for me to say the one more word that it would take to justify kicking the living shit out of me. The Big Dim One then arose from his stupor and also came at me shouting to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE! That was all it took and I all but broad jumped out the front door.

I realized that this was the sort of situation in which you leave or they end up hiding the body under the back porch and retreated double time to my car, shaking with fear and adrenaline.

Took me two hours to calm down. That was the worst one yet. I might be done.