[JollyElm]

A short time ago in a card show far, far away…


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Went to a show held at a swanky indoor/outdoor shopping center with fountains in the courtyard, and it was a giggle-fest adventure indeed!
We had seen 1970’s soft-rockers Pablo Cruise (which is the name of the group, not a person) there a few years back (see photo above),
which was way cool. In tribute, I shall pepper in references to a few of their charting hits.

The open layout was nice for us showgoers for a couple of reasons. First, the unrestricted airflow ensured that when you were stuck next to a disgustingly sweaty individual
(99% of the folks at these things), the breeze quickly swept his nastiness away outside and up and away into the sky. (Man, talk about destroying the ozone layer!!!)
And the easy access to sunlight meant you could swiftly refuel by holding your face up for a nice helping of solar energy...




1. Good Day/Bad Day Sunshine
However, there was a clear dichotomy happening with the vendors due to the vagaries of the set-up. Depending on where you were located in/at the venue, you either had “A Place In The Sun”*
or were one of the ‘mole people’ relegated to a dark and cramped (but airy) burrow. Between those extremes, there were all sorts of good and bad lighting anomalies.

One guy’s table had the bright sunlight streaming directly into his face, so every time I asked him something, he’d have to practically get on his knees to avoid the sun and see who he was talking to.
Not gonna lie, I asked him some needless questions just to make him go through the crouching rigamarole again. (Sometimes, you just gotta make yourself laugh.)


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At times he held a slab in front of his (ineffective) sunglasses to act like a visor, but a concentrated white beam of light kept reflecting off of it and bouncing around everywhere off of everything,
and I was completely transfixed by it!! If there were cats around, they would’ve been bouncing off the walls trying to nail their illuminated, but illusional, prey.


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On the darker side, I asked one guy if he was happy with his placement in what was essentially a sullen and gloomy dead-end back room.
He told me he felt like he was tied down and locked away in his grandfather’s basement again.

“Again”?? Whoa!! What an odd thing to say. Since Vallejo (pronounced vuh-lay-o) and San Francisco are nearby, I instantly got seriously creepy Zodiac vibes off of him.
Feeling kind of trapped, I decided NOT to stick around and ask any follow-up questions.



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2. A three hour show...a three hour show...
One modern dealer was outfitted in a big, floppy, white hat at his outdoor set-up, and he looked nice enough to chat with, so I chuckled and asked,
“Did you spend time as the first mate on the SS Minnow charter boat?”

A dead blank stare. In fairness, he was much younger than me, but I’ve always thought ‘Gilligan’s Island’ references were universal.

So I remarked how great it was being outside in the beautiful sun. He immediately decried that claim by telling me he burns easily and can’t put on suntan lotion,
because it gets grease all over his cards and holders. (Seriously...couldn’t he just wash and dry his hands AFTER putting the lotion on??)

He said, “Steve’s wife gave me this hat. (Who in high hell is Steve??) You wanna see anything?”

I told him, “No, sorry. You know how people either prefer Ginger or they prefer Mary Ann? Collectors feel the same way about vintage and modern, and I’m a vintage guy.”

(Truth be told, I’ve always hated the age-old Ginger vs. Mary Ann debate, because why would I waste my time fruitlessly pursuing either of those cock-teasing castaways when I knew that trying to
land Lovey Howell would be a much safer bet. Thurston would certainly be happy if I took her off his hands once in awhile. Sure, it would be "a cool kind of love,"** but we’re all beautiful in the dark, I guess.)

I asked if he was worried about the sun damaging his cards. “Shoudn’t you protect your inventory better? Not sure about the shiny stuff, but old cards fade big-time.”

Laughing a bit cockily, he said everything was going to sell quickly, so it’s not a problem, and offered me a, “No worries, bro.”

I said, “Really, at these prices??? That’s a lot of zeroes. I’d have to have Thurston Howell III’s money to afford anything...am I wrong?”

The lost at sea look on his face told me my ‘witty’ remark again sailed over his head, so I decided it was time to paddle away from his island...er, table.

As our time ended, I realized it was actually good he was clueless about all things Gilligan, otherwise to my great dismay, he would’ve uttered the trite and obligatory,
“The Professor could basically build a nuclear weapon out of bamboo and gourds, but he can’t patch up a hole in a boat???” as he guffawed at his own cleverness.



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3. A Shepherd of Potbellied Men
Some older guys were exhaustedly complaining about the lack of vintage cards at the show, and I offered a simple, “Yeah, it’s all new stuff these days.”

One of them replied, “I know, but the e-mail flyer my daughter sent me said there was going to be a 55/45 split with Topps being the 45. That’s such a lie.
Nearly half of the cards should be vintage Topps, but all I see is that ‘Pokey’ stuff (Pokémon, I assume?). What a rip-off!” (The show was free, so that exclamation was a bit off.)

My old self (see #5 below) would’ve needed to free myself from the reverie of wondering if his daughter was hot, but I knew exactly what he was referring to, because I saw the same thing.
Thinking of the Bible, “I am the good shepherd, I know collectors and collectors know me,” I decided to help him out.
“Do you mean where the ads indicated a 55/45 split between sports and TCG?”

His look told me, “Yes, exactly!!”

“Those initials actually stand for ‘Trading Card Game,’ not ‘Topps Chewing Gum’ anymore. It basically means there will be a lot of Magic and
(hitting the word kinda hard) ‘Pokey’ cards here. Hate to say it, but we’re dinosaurs. TCG will never mean Topps again. It’s “Out of Our Hands.”***

He replied with a defeated, “I had no idea.”



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4. “I want my two dollars!!!”
Digging through bins and assembling my ‘buy pile,’ I ran across an obvious ‘mispricement’ — a silly $2 sticker slapped on a toploader with a beautiful Carlton Fisk rookie card nestled inside.
As an unapologetic 1972 Topps superfan psycho, my only thought was, “Don't Want To Live Without It.”*

Momma taught me to be polite, so I told the dealer, “I’m no fool. Clearly this price is wrong...unless there’s hidden damage or something??”

Perplexed, he thanked me for pointing it out to him, and (taking it out to look at and show me) said, “Yup, it’s in great shape. No problems.”

I said, “Being only two frickin’ bucks, I couldn’t understand why someone hadn’t already jumped on it.”

He assured me that if that did happen, he would’ve immediately ‘corrected’ the price.

“Your ‘correction’ might be too rich for my blood, but how much do you want for it then?”

He thought for a moment and said, “Since you brought it to my attention, I’ll let you have it for $20.”
(I’ll skip the uncomfortable part where I groaned, “Whoa! Twenty bucks? That’s ten times as much as two dollars!” (I love math!) — while unsuccessfully trying to talk him down to $15.)

He suddenly realized that his $20 offer was hastily given, so he added, “I promised you $20, but if you DON'T take it at that price, I’m immediately going to put a much higher price sticker on it.”

My momma also didn’t raise no dummy, so (sounding weirdly like someone’s uncle at a barbecue) I said, “Yessiree Bob, I’ll take it!”



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5. High Toppstesterone or Frisky Business
Man, this show got me feeling old.

While I stared with anticipation at a nearby table (whose structural integrity was being taxed by the sheer weight of slabbed deliciousness atop it),
waiting for space to open up and allow me to squeeze in...WHAP!!! My girlfriend blind-side slapped me with an echoing ferocity!!!!

I shrieked out (you can insert your favorite curse words here), "#$@&%*#&@!!!!"
(Nice bit of trivia: symbols used like that to indicate cursing are called ‘grawlixes.’)

She barked, “You’re drooling!!! Stop checking out that girl’s ass!!!”

Doing that quick, repeated head-shaking and murmuring thing cartoon characters do to regain composure after getting smacked hard, I stood there baffled, having no clue what she was talking about.

But looking outward, I realized that among the throng of aged, ill-kempt showgoers in my line of sight, there also stood a young woman with a butt like a ripe peach. If this was an eye chart,
she was the huge capital ‘E’ at top, but my silly eyes were instead focused on the little letters spelling out “E D F C Z P.” That’s how oblivious I’ve gotten to anything other than baseball cards.

Looking to appease my girl (who clearly thought my imagined stare was telling the girl, “I Want You Tonight”*), I said, “Baby, you know I only have eyes for cardboard.”

(I didn’t have the heart to tell her that if I was going to stare lustily at someone, it would be at one of the shrewish, hard-faced wives sitting at the tables. Again, the whole Lovey Howell thing.)

Side note: When she gets out of jail for assault (Yes, of course I had her arrested!! There’s no room for violence at card shows!),
I’ll see if we can build things back up. Hopefully, “Love Will Find A Way.”*



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6. I always feel like somebody’s watching me...
Tell me, is it just a dream? Look, I’m no scopophobic (PayPal me ten cents for that word!!), but as I was combing through long boxes of toploaders (I had left my ‘spot marker’—see post #94—behind
to quickly cover a lot of ground),
I could feel the heavy glare of someone’s eyes on me (regrettably, it wasn’t Miss Peach Ass). I had to check my shirt to make sure there weren’t holes burned into it.

The person focused like a laser on me turned out to be the dealer, and he was seemingly waiting for me to do something wrong as I returned the stacks of cards to his boxes, so I gave him a questioning look.

He politely said, “I usually prefer that people only take 22 to 27 cards (it’s weird that he didn’t just say 25) out at a time.”

Not feeling loved, I replied, “Did I do something wrong? I build stacks to the sides and then righten and align everything, and carefully return them piecemeal to the box.”

He reacted, “No, no, no!! I meant that number for the people who rip through the cards and shove everything back in. You seem to take it very seriously, and I appreciate you.”
(Pet peeve alert: I hate how some pompous people now make a point of saying I appreciate YOU, instead of I appreciate IT.)

Perhaps others treat this activity more flippantly, but I see it as an unspoken rule that you treat all of the cards at a show as if they were your own.



***This interaction was from a show a while back, so think of it as a hidden track on a CD (for you younger readers, a compact disk (CD) is a studio-released digital audio 'record album')...***

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7. Well, the world needs Grich-diggers, too.
A dealer had a good part of a box dedicated to 1970s Bobby Grich cards, with plenty of doubles of each one.

Although his other boxes and bins had large “50% OFF Marked Prices!!” signs, this one had nothing, so I casually inquired what kind of discount the Grich cards had.
He reacted with surprise, “Oh no! Those prices are as marked.” (It sounded like a grandma saying, “My stars! Of course there’s no discount, dah-ling!!”)

He told me Grich is a surefire Hall of Famer this time (via some Veterans Committee, I assume), and “I’ve had his cards forever, but now it’s time to
share them with other collectors.” (So the purpose of business is to “share”? I had to hold in a laugh.)

“He’s a lock sabermetrically!!” The fact that he may have invented his own adverb there — although it did sound
like he said “sabermetric-ABLY“ — made me smile, and he reacted with, “What??”

Shaking my head, “No, nothing. You were saying?”

“He was the best fielder of the seventies by far. None better!”

Then, seeing the decidedly worn and whitened Oreo of a 1971 card for $50 in my hand, the salesman in him came out and nodded approvingly at me,
“You got a good eye. That’s his rookie card right here...and it’s a steal!”

The snark was obligatory, “Yeah, thanks, the inch high, Sharpied “RC” on the holder didn’t escape me.”
(If that’s a steal for fifty bucks, then an old guy with a cane would be this guy’s idea of the fastest man on the basepaths.)

And he went on, “I’ve been a fan of his since I was a kid, diving down the line in the World Series stealing doubles away. It was epic! Couldn’t get anything past him!!”

Huh?? Was he switching out Brooks Robinson or Graig Nettles for Mr. Grich in his head??

I know a couple of things. One, he was only an American Leaguer — Orioles and Angels — and two, he didn’t play third base...plus, I was relatively certain he never
played in the World Series (I confirmed that later), so I decided to test him by responding, “Yeah, against the Yanks. What a great series he had at third!! One for the record books!”

“You bet! I remember it like it was yesterday.”

(I bit my lip and DIDN’T respond, “Yes, it was the first time two AL teams faced off in the Series.”)

Okay, he really dug Bobby Grich, but next time he should do a tiny bit of research if he wants people to buy his excessive hype.



8. I’ve always depended on the blindness of strangers.
A dealer told me if I wanted to see anything, let him know.

In an overly friendly manner, I replied, “I’d definitely like to see the prices a lot lower.”

He replied, “Yeah, I know, sorry, but I’m trying to make money and it’s tough. My margins are super thin.”

“What do you mean?”

He explained that he doesn’t send in cards to be graded, so everything he has available was bought by him recently, and he had even purchased cards from another dealer that morning.

Whoa!!!! I immediately wanted to break out a Business 101 textbook and have a discussion with him.

“So, if a card regularly sells for $150 and you bought one recently, chances are you paid right around that price for it, right? Or, I mean, on average if you tally
up everything you’ve bought, it would probably come close to what any other collector at a show or on eBay would have paid for them?”

He said, “You’re certainly not wrong.”

Trying to be as diplomatic as I could, I said, “So, for you to turn a profit, you have to rely on people showing up who have no knowledge of comps
or what your cards really ‘should’ sell for...and you convince them to buy them at your prices??”

Suppressing a sheepish grin, he said, “You said it, not me.”



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9. The sticky bur of memory
Surely, I’m not alone, right? Don’t we all have cards that immediately trigger specific way-back memories??

On a table, I saw a 1973 Topps Luis Tiant card staring back at me, and BOOM!!! my mind instantly went rocketing back to May, 1973 and my friend Mike’s birthday party. In the crowded backyard, his mom (who we all found outrageously hot as we got older)
was handing each kid a Topps rack pack as a party favor. On the middle panel of mine sat Luis Tiant in all his glory, with that goofy, opened mouth look on his face. That memory, for whatever reason, is tattooed onto my brain.

I will never be able to see that card and NOT be immediately transported to that long ago, sundrenched day in New York again...and that memory
(slightly mind-edited to put Mike’s sexy mom in a string bikini) will remain unavoidably stuck to me forever.



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10. Shooting an Airball in the Humor Galaxy
With a sh•t-eating grin, a dealer handed me a 1977 Star Wars card (like the one above), chuckled and urged me, “Take a look at this. Notice anything??”

Not a fan of being treated like an idiot, I repled, “What am I, a moron?? Do I NOT ‘notice’ his huge, metallic hard-on? Yeah, the gold guy is excited. Everyone knows about this card.”

But sensing an opportunity for some laughs, I dove head-first into juvenile humor mode:
“Maybe C-3PO was thinking of Princess Leia in that Jabba the Hutt bikini when they took his photo?”
(I was terrified someone was going to call me out and say that unforgettable scene was from the third movie, Return of the Jedi.)

No reaction.

“Or maybe the droid has a weird fetish, and he’s turned on by thinking of Darth Vader’s decrepid, scorched old man head when he removes his helmet?”

Nothing.

“He doesn’t ‘wake up’ with morning wood, he wakes up with morning steel...or is it morning titanium?? Morning carbonite??”
(Hell if I know what C-3PO droids are made of.)

Still nothing. But “Whatcha Gonna Do,”* can’t force people to laugh.

Not giving my top shelf humor even a single giggle, he instead ‘corrected’ me with, “Whattaya mean??!! This is a one-of-a-kind error. I just bought it.”

Feeling bad, I said, “Sorry, you know there are more of these on eBay than there were people on Alderaan, right?”

Blank stare. Does he have a peanut and laughter allergy??

I continued, “Look it up! It’s the only Star Wars card normal collectors like me even know about. Decent ones probably go for a good amount of dough,
but if you bet ‘one-of-a-kind’ money on that card,
(had to think real hard to come up with this pun) then just like Luke Skywalker, you lost this hand.”

Where’s a laugh track when you need one??

I think that by pushing back, he found my lack of faith disturbing, and I could see the wheels beginning to turn in his mind as his face grew more serious. He clearly didn’t want to believe me, but he obviously did.
My takeaway was he probably spent a crapload of money buying that card from someone, but was now realizing he got burned worse than Luke Skywalker’s aunt and uncle.

I gave it one last go, “If the Topps artists were truly clever, they would’ve created a third version and put a large schoolbook in front of his crotch to camouflage his ‘excitement.’”

Another blank look.

“You know, like in junior high when your gorgeously-Italian Spanish teacher picks a very inopportune moment to call you up to the chalkboard in front of the class?" (True story and TMI.)

After I left, I’m sure he made a call to his own Boba Fett and offered him a bounty to locate and capture the villainous rebel collector who sold him the card.








May the (graded) fours be with you, my fellow collectors!! If you see Mike's mom, ask her if she'd like you to slather suntan lotion on her delicate shoulders.


*Pablo Cruise song
**Pablo Cruise lyric.
***Pablo Cruise album.