The Best American Essays 2014 by Robert Atwan, John Jeremiah Sullivan Read Free Book Online Page B

wickerlike creation with a cone-shaped hat and glittery blue rhinestone eyes, and a
Vintage/ Antique Brooch Pin UNIQUE orange splatter pain wooden? NEAT!
, which looked like a larval creature designed by Jackson Pollock. I had never once worn a brooch, nor could I recall ever saying the word
brooch
in my life. I came to understand that I was collecting the collection:
Anonymous collector, c’est moi.
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    As a reality check, I started e-mailing select links from Bergie’s eBay page to an old friend in Chicago, a consummate thrifter and expert on all things vintage. She wrote back:
That is seriously the most wacked out jewelry I’ve ever seen.
The next week she wrote:
So, I try to steel myself for whatever it is I’m about to see because it’s definitely going to be bizarre, and yet, I’m still never prepared for what I actually see.
Then she wrote:
Bergie’s subtitle for every piece should be: THE most bat-shit crazy jewelry man has created.
Finally she wrote:
I think he’s some kind of jewelry wizard and he’s conjuring it up somehow.
    It wasn’t like this thought hadn’t occurred to me. There were a large number of magical- and mystical-themed items in Bergie’s collection
(Vintage antique miniature charm pendant neat hieroglyph key, Vintage charm pendant or miniature king titan sea god, Vintage Brooch Pin VERY INTERESTING serpents eagles upside down cross crest COOL)
, and while I still nurtured my Krofft Brothers theory, I now strongly suspected Bergie’s entire story about the collection’s provenance was a fabrication. This was eBay, after all, where there is no limit on how many dead grandmothers you can have, or how much jewelry each might have left you. I noticed that as the number of Bergie’s listings multiplied by the week—he now had as many as 1,700 items for sale simultaneously—he kept updating his boilerplate. The mythical collector who had frequented Pasadena estate sales was still in there, but Bergie now claimed to have
over 3000 more signed brooches FEW THOUSAND MORE signed necklaces/sets and more bracelets earrings boxes full of undiscovered stuff than I can count . . . I have hundreds of pounds coming a week . . .
    Where in the known universe could anyone collect, steal, buy, or otherwise procure
hundreds of pounds
of antique costume jewelry per
week
? There were not enough little old ladies in the world, not even in Pasadena, to account for it. I thought of that scene in the movie
Poltergeist
in which a stream of dusty watches, bracelets, and brooches suddenly pours out of the living room ceiling, dropped by the dead from their world into ours. (The
living
room, get it?) There was a name for that stuff, according to my
Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical & Paranormal Experience:
apports, defined as “object[s] certain mediums and adepts claim to materialize from thin air or transport through solid matter . . . including food, precious jewelry, religious objects.” While most apports were small objects, the
Encyclopedia
said, some could be “large and quite unusual, such as flowers, books, serving dishes, and live animals, fish, and birds.” I had in fact recently encountered a large peacock jogging on the sidewalk alongside my car past blocks of low-rent apartment complexes, on my latest trip to the post office to pick up a package from Bergie.
    It was obvious from the comments on Bergie’s Feedback Profile that I was not alone in my bewitchment:
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Seller offered best price, quick and secure delivery magical item.
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My totem animal is the elephant. I love these guys.
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Unique dragon, great service. Thank you!
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Thank you I lost a brooch just like this & finally found it again.
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Not sure what it is, but love it!
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The beads do look like a rainbow.
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    Even the negative reviews sounded like they came from other magicians matter-of-factly shopping on eBay for tools of