Noise Colors

The Collector’s Dream

Bob Jones is balding, but still proud of his long, wavy ponytail. Stay in school, he tells the kids, don’t ever open up a comic-book shop. Behind the counter, he watches them, to make sure they don’t steal any magic cards, or take too long reading comics they won’t buy. Do you have an older sister, he asks me once. Do any of your friends have older sisters?

While classic rock radio plays “More than a Feeling,” and the El Niño rain slides in lines and sheets down the big window. The Collector’s Dream, says the vinyl graphic. Comics and Cards.

Bob Jones is a maverick businessman. With his mustache and white V- necks, he goes an honest solo, believing in boot-straps and hard work, believing in being good at arithmetic.

When I’m 14 he shows me the zine Heavy Metal: naked elf girls and space gladiators with basketball tits. I will be thinking about Sasha Malone instead, and the way her ear sticks past the black wiggles of her hair. I feel bad for him so I pretend to be impressed. A year later I’ll learn about his secret collection, three steps down at the back of the store. They’re like bad tattoos put to paper, each one the unskilled spurt of a private passion. Almost-recognizable celebrities, copyrighted characters, nuns, nazis, animals.

I’m working there by then, getting paid $6.25 an hour. When there’s no customers, Bob Jones does push- ups in the back. He seems to only eat Arbys roast beef, its smell a glum patch on the musty-paper background smell of the room.

A graying man with stacks of “Marvel Team-Up” looks me up and down. Wish my kid would get into comics instead of these computer games. Comics taught me to read, he says. And to Bob: How’s your brother? As Bob, frowning, slips each book into its own plastic sleeve. He got a job, at UPS, says Bob, wish he would stick with something.

You know, he says to me later, I’ve been at this for almost 15 years. At some point, he buys a new car, a garish blue Corvette. I am a little shocked. His ancient Datsun seemed such a part of him. The rents are going up, he gambles now, poker, after closing on sundays. Football games, on the internet. Sometimes he has a 40oz of Miller High Life behind the counter. The cherished things shine under glass, the Amazing Spider Man #1 and the First Appearance of Wolverine, untouched and unogled now, they wait. Bob asks once if I’ve been to Costa Rica. Why? Just wondering, he says. Heard it’s beautiful. Beautiful women, he says. Live like a king on the cheap.

One day I’m there to find a ruins of boxes all scattered where the floor space was. In place of his Corvette, a U-haul, and Bob is silent, only just sometimes laughing a little. His brother shows up, to drive the U-haul. I’m paid in cash, as always.

Next day the space is empty; Bob and the store gone, the shelving tumbled down and broken, sticking like broken teeth out of an overfull dumpster. Only half a vinyl graphic left to call it a Dream. The people who work in the strip mall don’t seem to know what happened. Rumors, only, they give , for me to sift through like for Near Mints in some old collection. Bob knocking out another store’s owner, over a parking dispute. Beating up the property-manager, when the final no-renewal notice came. Fleeing the IRS, maybe. The void he leaves, they fill with tableaux out of Maury or Jerry Springer, and soon he’s grown a bastard kid, a coke- habit, and a toothless ex- wife.

I could find out more, but for me he’s where he belongs now, as part of the striving fantasy he lived for. Bob Jones believed in the America that old comics promised. He believed in the America of Superman and Charles Atlas, of bottle rockets and to-do lists, night- school, new buildings and infinite renewal. I might not be able to share it but I want to see him somewhere done well by that belief, at least in his own world. In his Corvette, top-down, streaming across some back-country blacktop, “More than a Feeling,” blasting from the stereo. Or in Costa Rica, sipping tequila in some resort town beach, giving huge tips to waiters and hotel staff with the money he saved all those years selling comics.

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Existential Star Wars: “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi; I exist, and I find it nauseating.” 

Lines from “Ode on Melancholy” by Keats

Roxy Music, Ladytron. 

Thought this song was “overdone” the first time I heard it. Now it’s one of the few songs I find it hard to get tired of.

backyardshows:

Lise Sarfati

Maybe It’s sentimental, but when I look at this picture it seems to me there is something -accurate- in the model’s expression. Like, that face is a very precise way to describe a familiar but rarely-captured emotion.