Authors: David Shields,Matthew Vollmer
Starting Bid: $20.00
Antique Mahogany Chess Set. Pieces Hand-Carved (Bone). Late 19th Century. Travelling Set: Doors are Double-Hinged (Brass), Opening Up and then Out. Game Board is Inlaid—Alternating Mahogany and Rosewood. Dimensions: Box Closed: 11”x 6”x 3 ½”; Box Open (Including Doors): 20”x 12”x 2”. All Pieces Intact. Light Scuffing/Burn Marks/Blood Stains along Bottom Left Corner. Made in Sri Lanka (Ceylon).
My brother James evolved to wunderkind the summer between my sophomore and junior years. Held back in kindergarten due to the perceived inability to speak, he took the SATs after middle school and scored in the top percentile. This result was enough for him to leapfrog three full grades, making James, at fourteen, a high school senior. I was prepared to spend my days physically defending him but he was never once mistreated, Grover Cleveland’s Class of ’93 making him a sort of ad hoc mascot for intellectual endeavor. NYU felt the same way, and spring of that year my brother received a 15K renewable fellowship, along with tuition remission, and five months later moved from New York’s second-largest city to its first. While uncoordinated to the point of klutzdom, James looked the most athletic in our small clan. He held a hockey player’s build: broad shoulders with a narrow waist and chicken legs, his body thinning as one’s eye moved down. We had the same hair, stick straight, a shade my mom’s dad referred to as “Irish Brown.” This same man would bestow upon my brother the aforementioned chess set, acquired by my great-grandfather during his years in the Merchant Marine. While not nautically inclined, I will admit a penchant, albeit romanticized, for travelling the seas via steam liner or some other outdated vessel, the world still enormous, wonder a possible thing.
For my family, these months were the happiest of any I can recall. My father, normally martinetish, loosened his proverbial neckwear: there was a trip to a water park, tickets to Bisons games. From the cheap seats of Dunn Tire we cheered and swatted bugs in the hot white air. Summer ended, and we stuffed the minivan full of boxes and moved my brother to Brittany Residence Hall on East 10th Street, some five minutes from Manhattan’s Washington Square. I recall no voice of concern over whether or not it was truly a good idea for a fifteen-year-old to be living semi-independently in Greenwich Village, any dissent drowned out by the purple and white brochures that were arriving weekly to our Buffalo address. While our parents searched for hot sandwiches in the surrounding blocks, I sat with my brother on his vinyl dorm mattress. What do you think about all this, I asked. I don’t think I thought about it at all, James said. The chess set was beside the bed, on his desk. Do you want to play, my brother asked me. I’m not very good, I admitted. The face my brother made next was one of supreme fatigue: he brought his chin down, closing his eyes. His brow furrowed. At fifteen, the skin above my brother’s eyes was creased. Okay, James told me, but will you?
I think we fell victim to the ease of familiarity, a malady I imagine common to siblings who consider one another the closest of friends. I played chess with James that day and lost badly and the next day, after a night at a nearby hotel with my parents, returned to the other end of the state. James’ roommate was from Taiwan, friendly but far from the things that he knew, and his homesickness kept him near-mute. I suppose the University (an institution my father would later try to sue) considered the best thing to do was pair James with someone wholly non-threatening, a social leper of sorts, who would not introduce my brother to the typical vices sought by those in their late teens. To say this plan backfired does not, perhaps, go far enough. Fall semester passed without incident, but James returned home for Winter Break half terrified outsider and half angst-ridden quasi-adult. He’d undergone a latent growth spurt as well, adding another two inches of height to a frame that was having attention paid to it per the use of NYU’s weightlifting room. Dinners were stern affairs, the thick silence broken only by my brother’s obscenity-laced reviews of the food, the house, Buffalo itself. There was brief normalcy for December’s last week, but with the Christmas trappings quickly outdated, the gloom, like a moat, encircled my brother once more. James left in January; I drove him to the Greyhound, my brother turning down my dad’s offer of transport cross-state. In the grey light of the freezing depot, I hugged James goodbye. Visit, he told me, then boarded the bus. I did not. Two months later came a typed notice on school stationery: course work was strong but too often missing; attendance mottled at best. Sometime in late March we lost contact, our calls answered only and always by the Taiwanese roommate, who informed us finally, and in mediocre English,
James take the chess set. He gone.
May. A month of trips to Manhattan, our father taking leave from Grover Cleveland, a substitute in his stead. There were meetings with Provosts, waits at police stations. There was a trip to the morgue, the John Does slid from their metal tombs, white sheets pulled down to show blue, still faces. Also: the minivan’s ashtray, packed with tan butts; street performers in Washington Square, on stilts. My parents’ meager savings, garnished by a second mortgage, went to the hiring of first one and then two private detectives, their firms’ workers scouring the boroughs, Hoboken, points north. NYU put my parents up, when it could, in housing used for visiting faculty: there were long hours in leather armchairs, down pillows that did little to drown out the street noise below. I went with them some weekends but was still in school myself; I did no homework, sat stunned in my desk, and received straight A’s. College admissions notices arrived in the mail; I was a good student but a poor tester, with little interest in the extracurricular. Two SUNYs made offers but NYU turned me down, the thin envelope a dark cloud portending storm. My parents spoke little and grew gaunt. For a full week freezing rain slicked the roads, the world crystalline. And then news: a sighting in Newark, a grainy snapshot of someone in rags. It barely mattered if it was my brother or not: here was hope’s wellspring, the nightmare’s long end. We canvassed as though running for office, the Brick City’s telephone poles clothed in our xeroxed flyers. Door after door was answered, it seemed, by the same enormous black woman, her meaty arms spread for consolatory embrace as we gave thanks then descended the thirtieth, the fortieth, the eightieth porch. A third mortgage, the bank said, was out of the question. Winter turned to spring.
Chess, of course, often ends with no winner: there is the draw, the resignation, the fifty-move rule. My parents didn’t give up so much as cede to logic: there were no tactics left to employ. They came back to Buffalo; I graduated in May; James jumped from the roof of a building in June. He’d been holding the chessboard when he went airborne, landing headfirst. Toxicology found traces of phencyclidine. James’ last meal was bread. In a mortuary not far from Symphony Circle, I asked the Funeral Director how they’d put my brother’s face back together. My mother was in a separate room, perusing caskets. Light baroque played from speakers in the walls. Well, the man said, looking to my father for intervention but finding none, in cases like your brother’s, we insert a plate. He shifted from one foot to the other and I smiled; discomfort meant life, and it was a joyful thing to see. And this plate, I said, how will it look like my brother’s face? Well, incisions are made at the temples, and here, the man said, pointing under the chin. So you peel back my brother’s face and put the plate in, I said. That’s right, the man said, as though he’d solved something. And what about the stuff that’s in the way, I asked, the bone and such. My father was reading an unfolded brochure about flower arrangements, engrossed. The bone is sanded down or removed, the man said, his consternation growing. And how about his eyes, I asked. The eyes are untouched, the man said. AND HOW ABOUT HIS SOUL, I said. Okay, my dad said. Okay, that’s enough.
I put in two years at SUNY–Albany, fucked on drugs and not part of the world but not ever, really, wanting to die—as I mentioned already I have the heart of a coward, an organ so puny and useless it can subsist on next to nothing at all. I walked the campus at night dressed in a long wool coat, drunk on gin and setting small fires in the bathroom sinks of empty school buildings. I trailed coeds until they jogged from fear. Tossed out, I packed up and struck west, sending a postcard to my parents bought at a gift shop in Dayton. A Unique Possession from a Bygone Era. Board’s Hinges may need Oil.
Starting Bid: $89.99
13” Tulipwood and Teflon Stiletto. Italian-Made (SKM). Single-Action OTF; Blade Retracts Manually. Length of Closed Knife is 7 Inches. Used Once.
Bad times in Decatur. The Midway Inn let you pay by the week, and I developed a dangerous friendship with the night clerk, a trailer-bred gun nut twice my age who sometimes kept minutes for the local chapter of a hate group called Lone Wolf. I was drunk always, beyond grace, and Wynn Jost saw in me a lamb, someone whose psyche held all the worth of a torn kite, and was thereby open to suggestion via the newfound fraternity and acceptance provided by himself and other members of his ethnocentric cell. I worked at a meatpacking plant; I literally packed meat, wrapping t-bones in wax paper and boxing them, sixty-five per. The drone of industrial machinery was womblike, the white conveyer belt splotched, in patches, to pink. Some of Lone Wolf’s goons worked here as well; a hulk named Jack Milk handed me, weekly, half-full cartons of cigarettes, the paper container’s free space filled with hate literature meant to be distributed in the dark hours of morning to mailboxes within walking distance of my motel. In this man’s stone basement I sat on a metal folding chair, surrounded by a dozen of Central Time’s Aryan zealots. The aforementioned Mr. Jost, intellectual ringleader of this poor circus, forced these men (most of whom had not finished high school)
to give reports
on Nazi memorabilia Jost had purchased at trade shows in the greater Illinois area. Trip-ups in reading words off the page were covered up by loud cries of White Power. An urn for coffee sat tabled under a German flag.
I was scared and lost and Jost was letting me live in the Midway for free, the owners absentee and oblivious. I bought the above switchblade at a pawn shop for protection, and three nights later Jost found it stashed beneath my mattress, tossing my room while I was out delivering pamphlets that explained why Jews would lead the human race to Apocalypse. I should emphasize here, for clarity, that I really was starting to digest what was being fed to me: that White Christian Protestants were being treated unfairly in the media, the workplace, the cities; that the continued crosspollination of the races would lead to the demise of Christian Virtues; that it was kill or be killed, and the war, begun long ago, was roiling around us, more acid and thicker than ever before. Trauma (James) both debts and affords, the results often scary. Jost, along with Milk and three others, were waiting for me in my room when I returned that night. They drove me in Milk’s Buick to an all-night gas station, where we waited for the next person of color to pull in. Forty minutes passed, the six of us crammed inside, listening to hate metal on low volume. Near dawn, an elderly black man shut off his Chrysler and entered the Conoco. He beelined for the bathroom; Jost handed me the knife. White Power, he said. White Power, I said, and got out. What happened next was a miracle, so unearned I am sure that I cannot pay for it, ever, in this life. The black man stood at the sink, rinsing. He turned his head when he saw me come in. White Power, I said. What Power, he asked. I pulled the knife and sprung the blade. I saw all of you in that car, the man said. He had on a navy blue baseball cap, the name of a naval destroyer spelled out in gold. So, I told him. The man unbuttoned then rolled up one sleeve of his dress shirt. Cut me, he told me. Here, on the arm. What the fuck, I said. Do it, the man said. They won’t come check on you. Do it. Right now. He moved his arm, bent at the elbow, out toward me. He wore glasses; he had pleated khakis on. Come on, man, come on, you don’t have the time. He bobbed his arm up and down, his bare arm. I strode over to him and sliced. The blade sunk under the skin. He made a sound that was something very near a yawn, a morning sound, a first sound of the day, then stumbled backward into the hand dryer. I dropped the knife and picked it up and turned and ran out of the store.
Back in the Buick I threw up on myself, the men of Lone Wolf cooing like bemused middle-schoolers, which I suppose in some ways they were. My accommodations gratis, I had a small nest egg stored, and once Jost’s pickup departed from the Midway’s lot that morning, I ran, at full speed, to the bus depot, buying a ticket for the next coach out. I wrapped the switchblade in my work shirt and mailed the whole thing back home to Buffalo. Maybe you don’t believe the story I’ve just told. I can only reply: Lucky you.
Buy It Now: $10, Firm
Brown Mesh Trucker’s Hat, “Custer Gas Service, Custer, South Dakota” Printed on Front of Hat. Good Condition. Bill Rounded (Broken In). Ready to Wear.
A long engagement to one Katherine Anne Svenlund that consumed over three years of my late 20s. Sioux Falls is a pleasant place and were I a different person, more even or stalwart, I might have managed an existence in that large village, continuing my work as Night Manager of Country Buffet #3847 and spending much of my free time browsing the ample selection of goods offered at the Salvation Army out near the airport. The Svenlund family is of fine Nordic stock, if genealogically naive, as their ancestors arrived to this country via
propagandistic literature
, specifically brochures and/or pamphlets that outlined the unequivocal agricultural promise of the Great Plains (I should mention here, out of fairness, that these false promises were not limited to peoples of Norwegian descent nor just the acres comprising South Dakota; rather, America’s new Robber Barons hired a great number of men to promote falsely that most of Middle America was a Farmer’s Utopia—that places of near-apocalyptical aridity and barrenness were ripe wombs of earth, an agrarian delight, and that much of the middle part of the country was populated via the exacting of high levels of bullshit).