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...