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Lot of Children’s Winter Clothes: Two Parkas, Eight Ski Hats, 4 Pair Mittens, Two Pair Sorrel Boots, Child Sizes Ten and Six, Respectively.
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Born in Buffalo to middle-class parents, September 1975, my younger brother followed me from my mother’s womb some twenty-seven months later. We lived mid-block, between a divorced beat cop and a semi-professional painter named Janine Bench, who was in her fourth decade while I lingered in pre-pubescence. Winters were maelstroms of snow; there were consistent stints of no electricity, and people began buying firewood prior to Labor Day. I can recall watching Miss Bench painting by candlelight; the bedroom that I shared with my brother, James, had a window that looked out at her studio. My neighbor was a gaunt dishwater blonde with mild features, save for a rather pronounced chin, which made her profile unintentionally comic. She was naturally attractive but put little stock in her physical appearance, spending most of her time around the house in the same cocoa and pink velour robe, a neck-to-feet item that she rubber-banded the left sleeve of when applying paint to canvas. I imagined her rich, even though she lived right next to us and we were most certainly not rich, my mother working clerical at a Federal Building downtown and my father teaching math at Grover Cleveland, the public high school I would later attend. Miss Bench herself worked days at Oliver’s, one of Buffalo’s standout restaurants. I realize now that the reason I thought her wealthy was that her lifestyle was different than most people’s, that she was most generally “other,” an idea I was fascinated by: that there was always the anti-, the un-, lurking nearby, stockpiling. I spied on her whenever I could.
Nearly all these people have passed from this world: the beat cop got shot, Miss Bench had a stroke, my brother jumped off the roof of a building five blocks from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. My mother, too, is gone; she bought Kents by the carton, vowing always to quit. During one no-power stint in deep winter, I was sent down the block to procure more of these, the corner store, per a generator, open through the worst. Miss Bench was at work and did not lock her door and I had failed to keep my curiosity (innate) quelled sufficiently. That is, I turned the handle and went inside. Miss Bench’s front room held no furniture; she utilized the space as an ersatz gallery—paintings hung everywhere, large canvases in grays and blues and browns. Later I would realize these as poor imitations of the “Ab-Ex” tradition: destitute impostors of the work of Kline and Klee, lots of lines and boxes, the hues chosen most certainly influenced by the torpor of Buffalo winters. I took nothing and left, not realizing that my boots (the larger-sized Sorrels listed above) had tracked in snow from Miss Bench’s front steps, thereby indicating that a stranger had entered her house. Through high school she offered me only terse waves and sideways glances, acts that left me feeling wholly guilty, despite the fact that I had done nothing, really, wrong.
Starting Bid: $9.99
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VHS Recording of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, as Performed by the 1987 Sixth Grade Class of Phelan Academy. 72 Minutes. Shot with a Panasonic Dual-Head Hi-Fi Camera.
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Being in education and realizing that the extent of Reagan’s concern, in regard to public schools, hovered somewhere between “fuck” and “you,” my father enrolled me at Phelan Academy, a nonsectarian private institution that sat on the east end of Buffalo’s west side. I attended Phelan from third through eighth grade. In the fourth grade, a librarian stabbed another teacher upon discovering the tryst between the stabee and the librarian’s wife. The following year an ex-Bills linebacker wandered onto campus, high on PCP. (Later, while a sophomore at SUNY–Albany, I would better attempt to understand my brother’s own addictions by trying this exact receptor antagonist in a friend’s dorm room. The effects upon my person were not dissimilar to swimming in drool.)
There was a second performance of this musical that was not taped, performed at some other school very deep in the ghetto, a place that I cannot remember the name of. I and my classmates, less concerned about performing with any legitimacy sans the attendance of our parents, had located in the men’s dressing room a bright orange inflatable ball, which was taken by me or one of my cohorts from said dressing room and released onto the stage during a meager rendition of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” To say our chaperones—comprised of three teachers, including the drama teacher, an aged hippy with the first name of Splendor—were indignant would not do justice to the rage that they held inside them, and had to keep holding inside them for the full of the play, until the production was over, at which point a half-dozen of us were repaired to a vacant classroom and beaten savagely, boxed around the ears and held over knees and spanked, the latter of these minor tortures both painful and embarrassing, as we were really too old for this particular mode of punishment. I can only imagine how this meting-out later affected the sex lives of my cohorts, but in regard to myself I now admit fully a predilection for slapping firmly the bare rear of every single partner of intimacy, of raising my hand and then lowering it, and thereby leaving upon a half-dozen individuals misdirected acts of revenge. Opening and Closing Credits Included. Intermission partially edited out, though as the camera comes back on you can see clearly my brother, age nine, stop, for just a moment, in front of the lens. Slight wear marks in this section of the tape due to repeated pausing. Performance itself is unflawed.
Starting Bid: $4.99
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Lot of 2 (Front and Rear) State of New York License Plates, 1973–1986 Era. Plates are Gold with Blue Letters: 8675-NMS. Stickerless: Window Validation. Front Plate Creased (See Below).
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Unable to afford Phelan for the final stage of compulsory schooling, my parents enrolled me at Grover Cleveland High School, some ten blocks from Lake Erie and the Canadian Border. Occupying a full city lot, the school, erected in 1913, is in the Colonial Revival Style of the period: symmetrical façade, pediment supported by pilasters, voussoirs, etc. Steel-framed, with a stone red-brick and terra cotta exterior, this cupola-with-spire topped hellhole is where I would first make the acquaintance of one Frederick Ames Kemper, cast, like myself, in a non-speaking role in the drama that was Grover Cleveland’s junior varsity football team. The misery of the bus rides to away games is, in some ways, indescribable: I was lithe and asthmatic, and tormented with a sort of passion I can only term Roman. Everyone smelled like wet, dirty socks. But there also in that rage-drenched miasma (a Bosch canvas on wheels), Frederick: flaxen-haired, halcyon, a toiletries bag filled with Top 40 cassettes on the seat beside him, his Walkman headphones over, always, his ears. Frederick had made a name for himself even prior to his arrival at Grover Cleveland per the advanced utilization of his pronounced kleptomania: that is, Frederick Ames was a semi-professional thief. He lived in a creepy Victorian too near the Dewey Thruway, his father a gravedigger for Forest Lawn Cemetery and his mother, nebbish, a shut-in with a penchant for strays. Frederick’s skin was almost diaphanous: he looked like a cave-thing, bleached or otherwise improperly pigmented, and in this way propagated the Gothic bleakness that seemed inherent to his bloodline. I adored him and he knew it and, slowly, let me become his friend. On weekends we traveled by bus to Buffalo’s Downtown, robbing most frequently the strange and cluttered “everything” shops that all urban centers seem to possess. We took cameras, silk pocket squares for men’s suits, shoe polish, coffee mugs. Frederick often worked with his Walkman on, perhaps to make him look more casual, perhaps to keep some part of himself from analyzing what the other part was doing. My job was to talk, to distract: Frederick and I were cousins, arriving in Buffalo from Pennsylvania to stay with relatives who, it seemed, had forgotten to collect us from the bus depot. With strange men who smelled of booze or smoke or curry, I pored over neighborhood maps in the Yellow Pages while Frederick filled up his bag. I realize now that Frederick made the more severe looting excursions without me; he ca
me to school dressed, for a freshman, to the nines: new Jordans, gold jewelry, a full-length sateen Bills parka. For spending so many weekends together our small talk was minimal, and consisted chiefly of single sentences uttered by Frederick while we waited for the bus: My dad killed a cat with a shovel last night, or my mom thinks the moon is an eye. Implied in such statements was the fact that I would never see the inside of Frederick’s home, and only once did he see the inside of mine, being invited, by my parents, over to dinner the winter of that freshman year, the five of us eating chicken, green beans and mashed potatoes in silence. Afterward, over a dessert of chocolate pudding, Frederick had commented on how bright our house was. You like the blue, my mom had said. (She had recently painted the kitchen.) No, Frederick had said, I mean you guys turn on a lot of lights.
Our sophomore year Fredrick began to steal cars. Sometime over summer his mother had been moved to a state-run facility, and with her departure went the dearth of parenting Frederick received. Absent until lunch, Frederick would drive by the front of Grover Cleveland in a pilfered Skylark or Impala, his wan face glum. On what was to be the last balmy night of October, Frederick showed up at my house past one in the morning, waking me with bottle caps thrown at my second-story window. Frederick was drunk, and had a Porsche. I’d clothed and eased down the trellis in silence. We drove around some in the warm night air; the car’s leather smelled new, and even at twenty-five miles an hour, it was clear what the Porsche’s engine was capable of. At my feet was a half-finished six-pack of Labatt’s Blue. Where’d you get the car, I asked. This world’s spent meat, Frederick said back. We sped up, taking the neighborhood’s turns more sharply, and I understood at that moment that I was okay, and Frederick was not. Three blocks from Grover Cleveland we passed a cop heading in the opposite direction, and shortly there-after Frederick ceded what was left of his quickly-eroding calm. He upshifted then lost control, the car hopping the curb and hitting a spruce some ten yards from the high school’s front doors. Stunned but conscious we sat in the smoking wreck, looking at each other. Frederick’s head had connected with the steering wheel; one side of his face was already swelling, and above his eyebrows was wet red blood. He looked like a member of a war fought a long time ago. Then Fredrick told me to run. The Porsche’s shotgun door was bent in its frame, and I had to kick at it repeatedly to exit, sprinting down a side street and watching, peripherally, porch lights turn on, the homes’ owners awoken by the din of the impact. A mile later I stopped, out of breath and almost losing my night’s dinner. I turned to see how far Frederick was behind me, but no one was there.
The next morning, at breakfast, all was explained: the superintendent had made the cursory round of phone calls to high school faculty, and I came downstairs, freshly showered, to find out that Frederick was apprehended at the scene, and awaiting sentence while he lay, casted, on a gurney at Kaleida General. The cop we’d passed the night before had found Frederick behind the steering wheel, his leg broken, the Walkman’s play button punched in. I never went to the hospital to visit him, believing such a trip would incriminate me. Frederick was sent to a detention center north of Syracuse; he did not return to Grover Cleveland and my heart, a coward’s heart, was thankful for this. That night my father took us all out for dinner—a rare occurrence, and the significance of which was not lost on myself. On the trip home he strayed from the standard route, driving by the scene. The Porsche was still there. Buffalo is a poor city and damage control occurs slowly; the car had been unstuck from the tree, but no wrecker had yet to tow it to impound. It’s awful what happened there, my dad said. It sure is, I answered. Are all families’ secret thoughts Venn diagrams? Things that overlap and do not? That night I snuck back down the trellis. In my jeans pocket were two screwdrivers, borrowed from my father’s garage workbench. Frederick, if you’re out there, I have the Porsche’s license plates. Convo me and I’ll take down this listing. These items belong to you.
Starting Bid: $20.00
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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).
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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.
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts Page 19