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.