by Luke Geddes
“Hello,” Delores said, trying to make out the face that was obscured by Pete’s fat thumb, its nail ringed with dirt. She could barely hear her own voice over the chorus of cat-like hissing that surrounded her. She disliked Pete, but the Barbies hated him.
“So… um.” Pete scratched his neck, searching for something more to say, an excuse to stand around and continue leering. “You heard about that missing girl?”
“We’ve all heard about it.” Delores refused to look at him, gazing instead into Barbie’s eyes. “That poor girl.”
“Her name’s Bobo,” Pete said and chuckled. When Delores refused to join in, he explained, “Just like Bobo the Bear. From the Muppets?”
“I don’t watch children’s programming,” Delores said. “It’s a tragedy what’s happened to that girl.”
“It sure is,” Pete said. He twirled his doll like a magic wand. Delores got a better look at his square-topped head, but she still didn’t recognize him. “Just snagged it from the new guy. You wouldn’t believe the deal I got.” Delores said nothing, continued to comb Barbie’s hair. “You know, I read on the internet that he has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. When he dies, the values are gonna skyrocket. My contacts in Hollywood tell me they’re working on a movie.”
“What are you talking about? Contacts in Hollywood?”
“The internet,” Pete said. He held up the box, pointed to the name “MC Hammer.” He definitely was not part of the Barbie family, even if the doll was of comparable dimensions. “I thought he’d want to meet your Barbies.” Pete forced a laugh, phlegmy and joyless, then blurted, without intonation, as if he’d been rehearsing it in his head for too long, “You look nice today, Delores. By the way.”
Before Delores could reply, the Barbie in her hand said, “Psst. Psst! Dolly, listen up!” Acting as if she were only scratching an itch, Delores lifted Barbie close to her ear. Barbie whispered, “Be nice to him, just this once.”
Barbie had told her to do many strange things before, things that did not make sense until after the fact. But be nice? To Pete? This was confounding. She could scarcely stand to look at him. Those bad teeth, his grease-wet hair, a gut that wasn’t just fat but misshapen and lumpy and pale, dark sacks under his eyes that were red and veiny from watching television all night, and that stale smell that always surrounded him. He was the opposite of Ken. The Barbies hated him, Delores knew it, but she knew better than to disobey. “Thank you,” she said, her smile plastic enough for Barbie herself.
Pete smiled back, his yellow teeth framed by pale whitish lips and uneven stubble. Delores suppressed a shudder. He straightened his shoulders so that his Ghostbusters T-shirt rode up, exposing a slab of pockmarked belly. “So what are you doing Saturday night? I mean, do you have plans or anything?”
At this she unleashed a very unladylike noise—half whine, half bark, all shock, all disgust—expelling a moist lingering doughnut crumb onto the neck seam of Pete’s T-shirt. He didn’t even notice. Again, Delores lifted Barbie and held her close to her ear. Be nice to him? she wanted to say. To him? As if answering, Barbie whispered, “Dolly, he has her.” Behind her, the other Barbies repeated as a chorus: “He has her! Her! Her! Her!”
Delores imagined the perspiration on her forehead bubbling and sizzling like oil in a skillet, but she did not wipe it away. She realized Pete had stopped talking and it was her turn to say something but she was paralyzed. Pete started up again: “Because I just got a great big package from one of my most reliable contacts. Guy used to work at Mattel in the seventies. Met him at the PlastiCon in Seattle last year. Cost a pretty penny but I think it was worth it. And since you’re the expert, I thought you could maybe help me appraise it. Supposed to be some limited runs and old prototypes and stuff in there.”
At this the Barbies began a high plaintive keen, interspersed with gasps of, “Her! Her! Her!” One voice—it sounded like the 1961 Number 5 ponytail—rose above the din to proclaim: “This man has Skipper!”
All her life Delores had relied on the Barbies’ intuition to build her collection. They shared a link, a sisterly bond, a higher consciousness, as if each was just one piece of a larger psychic whole. With their guidance, again and again Delores found herself in the right place at the right time, making the right deal from the right seller, and she’d come to acquire rarities—among them a freckleless Midge, a 1959 original with purple and gold wrist tag, and a brunette Miss Barbie—with preternatural ease. There was a plaque in her booth that read IF YOU DON’T SEE WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR—ASK. I’VE PROBABLY GOT TWO OF IT IN STORAGE. But there was one whom Delores didn’t even have one of, so rare that the collector’s guides valued her at “priceless” and illustrated her entry with nothing but a big black question mark. Since learning of her at a convention in the nineties, Delores had spent a lot of time and money, with the Barbies’ urging, to track down their long-lost sister. She’d even hired a private investigator to look into rumors that a disgruntled executive assistant at Mattel “liberated” her from the archives before disappearing herself in the late eighties. And now, if Barbie’s hunch was true, Skipper was in Delores’s grasp: Growing Up Skipper, model #7259-A, a rare prototype of the controversial 1975 Skipper, who, as the box put it, could “grow from a young girl to a teenager in seconds!” By rotating her left arm forward, that is, she grew small breasts. Growing Up Skipper in general—the ordinary model #7259—was much-sought-after but not uncommon; Delores had a dozen of them. What separated the prototype version from the rest, besides its extreme rarity, was the additional ability to menstruate, a twist of the wrist triggering an inner mechanism to drip ice-cold water into the accompanying undergarment accessory, spotting it red. According to legend, this feature was deemed either too expensive to manufacture or distasteful and was dropped before Growing Up Skipper went into full production. Many collectors believed she’d never existed at all, that she was nothing but a rumor or a joke, like Plastic Surgery Magic Barbie or Pride Parade Ken.
The thought was so beautiful and so impossible that at first Delores refused to believe it. In fact, she didn’t allow herself to even acknowledge the thought’s existence. It rested at the base of her spinal cord and subconsciously she fought to keep it there even as it forced its way up gradually like mercury in a thermometer and reached her conscious mind in a violent burst of realization. Now, faced with the reality that maybe, just maybe, she was in closer grasp of Growing Up Skipper than ever before, Delores didn’t feel the excitement she would have expected. Instead, she was almost overcome with regret, as if she never actually wanted to find her and thus to reach the end of her collection. But this was chased by the stronger feeling that she sure as hell didn’t want anyone else to have her, especially not Pete Deen.
“You know,” Pete was saying, “when Mark and Grant from Pickin’ Fortunes come to Heart you gotta have your best out, sure, but it helps, if you wanna be on TV as more than just a guy in the background, to have something special to show them. I don’t know how much you’ve seen the show. Mark and Grant have very different tastes. Mark’s more into…” Pete talked so fast that between sentences he gasped for air, his lips making disgusting fish-puckers. Sometimes he had to pause to use an inhaler he kept tied by a lanyard to the belt loop of his pants, picking up again precisely after the word where he’d left off.
Delores, of course, did not want to listen to it, and at the moment she couldn’t care less about Pickin’ Fortunes. All she wanted was that Skipper. They all—she and the Barbies—wanted that Skipper. She belonged to them, and Delores would do what was necessary to rescue her from Pete’s greasy clutches. “Saturday,” she said. “I’d love to.”
Pete went into a minor, though ecstatic, asthmatic fit. “Great,” he coughed, pausing to suck his inhaler. “I’ll mix up a batch of my world-famous limoncello. And…” He seemed to be grasping at some romantic gesture. He held out the MC Hammer doll, its knuckle brushing Barbie’s cheek. (She hissed.) “You can have this, if you want. For your collection.
”
“I don’t collect outside of the Barbie family.”
Pete held MC Hammer’s head against his nipple as if it were suckling. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
Barbie squirmed in Delores’s hand—or she made the sound of squirming. “Dolly, neither of us likes it, but sometimes a woman must do things she doesn’t like to get what she wants. Understood?”
Delores shook her head. She didn’t understand.
“Be kind,” Barbie said. The Barbies on the shelves repeated: “Be kind! Be kind!” Except for one, who said, “Will we ever have enough clothes?”
“Never mind,” Delores said. “I’ll take it.” She presented her palm dutifully, like a scorned child waiting to be whapped with a ruler.
The sound of a question fell out of Pete’s mouth but no actual words followed.
“I didn’t mean it before. I’d love your gift of the… ehm… MC Hammer.” She reached out and plucked it from his loosened grip. It felt warm and slimy. She held it by the parachute fabric around his ankles. Making like she was stretching her arm, she passed MC Hammer’s head before her ear for a second but heard nothing.
“Of course he doesn’t talk, Dolly. He’s just a doll.”
Pete set the box on a container of loose accessories that Delores had yet to organize. “I’m already clocked in for walking duties. You could join me if you want.”
Delores glanced at the Barbie in her hand. If she were capable of it she would have nodded her assent, Delores could see that in her eyes. “Yes, certainly,” she said. The Dealer Association meeting started in a half hour. She could put up with Pete for that long, at least. Resignedly, she returned Barbie to her proper place and cleared space for MC Hammer on the shelf with her other early-nineties males, although he clearly didn’t belong. Stepping back and seeing it on her formerly perfectly ordered display cut her breath short. Try as she could to ignore it, her eye was drawn to that sparkling purple jumpsuit, that self-satisfied grin. It would drive Delores mad.
She took the unwanted doll off the shelf and stuck it in her purse. “I will take it home to my personal collection,” she said, planning to dispose of it the second Pete took his eyes off her.
7 LEE
Lee was in the Hall Three booth trying to decide whether this Suicide album belonged in the “Electronic Pioneers (~60s/early 70s)” section next to Silver Apples or before Television in the “First Wave Punk—NYC” section—the album came out in ’77 but the band played its first shows as early as ’71, nearly a half decade removed from punk’s watershed year—when the countergirl Ellie emerged Spicoli-style from the restroom in a cloud of pot smoke. She slowed as she passed, staring at him with dilated pupils, her brow a question mark punctuating the do I know you? expression on her face.
But no, she didn’t know him, not as anything but one of the new dealers. He had a familiar look, that was all—not a famous or handsome or notable one—just familiar. He seemed to fit in anywhere, even when he tried not to. Unfamiliar hands constantly grasped his shoulder. Wives marveled that he looked just like their husbands. At airports, strangers trusted him to watch their bags while they used the bathroom. He was distinct enough to attract attention, but somehow also bland enough to be as quickly forgotten, like a character actor cast in different roles in separate episodes of Law & Order.
Anyway, the girl was just stoned. Not as if she’d know him from his photo on the inner sleeve of the debut (and only) album by his punk band Tears in the Birthday Cake, which went out of print and into remainder bins almost immediately upon its limited 1987 release. And she was far too young to recognize him from his brief and embarrassing stint in the Sodashoppe Teens, a long-forgotten group of Bay City Rollers wannabes thrown together by producer Don “Lollipop” Llewellyn in the midseventies, just a bunch of dumb kids who’d responded to an ad in the back of an issue of Teen World and didn’t look at the contract too closely, whose single “Handclaps in My Heart” scraped the bottom of the Top 100 in a handful of regional markets for a week or two. The band broke up after Llewellyn was arrested on child pornography charges, something related to a casting call for Sodashoppe Teenyboppers that the record company never authorized and the band knew nothing about. Today, they were trivia, only known—if at all—as an inauspicious early vehicle for then-seventeen-year-old bass player Mickey “Street” Gordy, the Teens’ sole African American member, whom Robert Christgau once called “the Zelig of the American Avant-Garde,” now known for a diverse and critically adored post-Sodashoppe oeuvre that held a towering influence on the post-punk, no wave, indie rock, anti-folk, and nu-funk movements. Meanwhile, no one remembered or cared about Lee’s punk era, more than a decade spent in a series of bands that imploded after a handful of shows. Maybe everything would have been different if he’d moved to New York instead of Boston, but he’d wanted to keep his distance from Mickey, who Lee did not think had ever actually known his name.
So no, Lee wanted to say now that Ellie had drifted into his booth and began to finger listlessly through the crate labeled “Resort Lounge & Calypso.” You don’t know me, nothing to see here. Just a burned-out, bankrupt scenester, pushing sixty (Jesus!), who last night lay in his childhood bedroom pretending to sleep while his boyfriend jerked off to a Shaun Cassidy spread in an old issue of Tiger Beat.
Now here came Seymour out of the women’s restroom in his own weed haze. “That rich Kansas farmland grows it strong, I guess,” he said, offering Ellie a conspiratorial wink.
“I thought you were headed home,” Lee said, annoyed that he didn’t sound annoyed. There was still so much unpacking to do, and Seymour had always hated pot. He’d been weird since they’d moved—maybe since well before then, but it was especially noticeable lately.
“I’m in no state to drive. Ha, is that a pun? Is it ironic?”
“It’s bullshit is what it is,” Lee said under his breath. Now he’d have to go get the stuff from the garage himself—he needed it out yesterday, it was psychically oppressing him, all this junk left over from their shop—and risk being late for their first Dealer Association meeting.
Seymour turned to Ellie, who was staring at a Martin Denny album like it held the secrets of the universe. “Don’t tell me you’d buy that just for the cover art.”
“I own a record player,” she said defensively.
“Oh god, I hope not some eighty-dollar Crosley from Urban Outfitters. Shit, I don’t think Wichita even has an Urban Outfitters. Anyway, Arthur Lyman’s better.”
“You buy things for the cover art all the time.” Lee was picking a fight, he couldn’t help it. “You’ll choose a breakfast cereal because the box color matches the kitchen.”
“Quisp is really hard to find.” Seymour eyed the Suicide record in Lee’s hand. “File it with the early electronic.”
Lee could think of nothing else to say, so he flipped past Silver Apples in the “Electronic Pioneers” crate and came upon the Sodashoppe Teens album, with its tawdry cover image of four clean-cut youths lying belly-down-feet-up on a purple heart-shaped shag rug and sipping milkshakes through curlicue plastic straws.
“Now, that is one I would buy just for the cover. Tambourine player’s a real hunk.” It was a prank Seymour had been playing for decades, hiding copies in Lee’s personal stacks to interfere with his anally hyper-meticulous organization system. Artist and genre dividers were fine for those with small collections, but Lee would never be able to find anything without dividers dedicated to era and movement and sub-movement, e.g., “Xian Acid Folk 1966–69,” “Private Press Folk Weirdos,” and “Surf Rock Instro (Cosmic).” That was just common sense. (“You might as well front-load with ELP and Steely Dan,” Seymour had said when they started to set up in Hall Three. “No one in Wichita could possibly have taste.”)
“Ha ha,” Lee said humorlessly. He replaced the Teens LP with Suicide and then tossed it into the dollar bin on the floor where it belonged.
“There is a Moog on one of those tracks.”
Se
ymour didn’t get the appeal of a private joke, of private anything. They’d just started doing business at the Heart of America. Lee would prefer to go at least a few weeks before word about his ignoble bubblegum pop past got out. “I think your parents were looking for you, Ellie.”
She ignored him. So did Seymour.
“Hey, Ellie. Top five desert island LPs.”
“Ugh. That’s a lame guys’ game.” Ellie was still immersed in their booth’s exotica department, gazing at cover after cover like they were Magic Eye posters.