Playing Cards

I collect stuff, always have. I come from a long line of lovers of stuff: pottery, cufflinks, Foo Dogs, Fiestaware—if it’s collectable, an ancestor of mine probably hoarded it. I most certainly have what Bob Ridgley & Terri Krantz referred to in their 2008 documentary American Collectors as “the collector’s gene”—an uncontrollable (or at least uncontrolled) urge to gather quantities of the same thing up in piles. Some collections are made to stack, like records or plates. Others—like tractors or cadavers—aren’t as easy.

Patti thinks I have a problem. Matchbooks, inkwells, KISS memorabilia and brass bug silent butlers are bad enough. But when I realized I was actually clipping the corrections out of the daily paper and putting them into an envelope labeled CORRECTION COLLECTION, I realized that maybe it was time I got some help.

The dark danger with most collections is that they’re open-ended: they can never be completed. You just keep on adding and adding– presumably until you die– at which point your kids have to come in and agonize over what to do with Dad’s prized collection autographed 8×10 black & white promotional photos of bald celebrities.

But I do have one collection that doesn’t take up much space, is easy to stack, and which has a definite end. Part of me hopes I never complete it…

I found the Nine of Diamonds today. I found it around the corner from my house, in the gutter– face up. I was on my way to catch the bus to work, and I jolted spastically in my path like I always do when I see a playing card on the ground. I bent swiftly to pick it up, as if someone else were also vying for it– like it was a dollar. It was weathered— muddy and mottled by gravel. Probably the most trashed card I have other than my Jack of Spades. That card, in addition to being mottled and faded and bubbled by moisture, is torn mostly in half. And burnt. It’s a card that someone clearly tortured for sport before tossing it out their car window, speeding away into the night, laughing and cussing.

I’ve often thought that by the time my lost & found deck is complete, I’ll be about ready to play a goodamned game of cards with it. But I don’t really enjoy solitaire, and doubt I’ll find an opponent for any face-down games. Most of the cards in my deck are marked in some incidental way or another.

Jack of Spades: drowned, burned, torn in half. Three of Diamonds: Lassie

I started building this deck several years ago, in the late 1980s. I’d been having a stupid conversation with a smart girl– my roommate Mark Sterne’s sister Susan. Just smarter than snot she was– still whenever she visited and Mark was at work, she & I would descend into just the stupidest conversations. I never knew if she was doing experiments on me or what. The idea of collecting a deck of cards entirely from cards found on the street (or in a bush, in the bowling alley, or at the dentist—basically just found) came up after I mentioned I’d found this Jack of Clubs on the sidewalk earlier that afternoon. I took it out of my shirt pocket and offered it to her. She made absolutely no move whatsoever to take the card or even touch it. She looked at it with her eyes but otherwise didn’t move a muscle in her entire body, and instead just said without hesitation why don’t you start your own deck? She might just as well have said why don’t you suck your own dick or even why won’t you just kill yourself right now– either of which would have seemed no more absurd than suggesting I build a deck of found playing cards. I think she was kind of bored with doing her mind-control research experiments on me by that time.

Susan lived in the Mission District of San Francisco where the frequency of finding cards on the street might have been higher than where I lived in Seattle. But she seemed to think that if one simply put one’s mind to it and kept one’s eyes open, one could complete a deck within months. I couldn’t remember ever having seen a playing card on the street, and thought to myself that I’d actually have a better chance of sucking my own dick– something I’d of course already been trying for most of my life. But I’d never thought about collecting stray playing cards.

I figured I’d have to live in Reno or outside the Hoyle factory to collect an entire deck of cards, but I’ll be damned if once I’d committed to the project if I didn’t start finding cards! My old sociology professor Ted Smith used to call this an “axis of the earth” where you would create your own reality based on your perception. There are plenty of theories that basically say this same thing– theories of consciousness and manifestation. I got off putting this theory to the action test, keeping my eyes literally in the gutter.

The problem with this exercise, of course, is doubles. If you need the Seven of Spades to complete your deck, how many Ten of Spades and Seven of Hearts do you think you’ll find first? It’s like when we collected the KISS bubble gum cards in the late ‘70s. There were 100 in the series, and each pack of eight cards was 50 cents. The cards were numbered and came with a rectangular tile of that chalky punk bubble gum that you needed ten pieces of to even work up one modest bubble. Each card featured a rad picture of a band member in action, usually live shots from the ’77-’78 tours. The reverse of the cards made up a huge KISS puzzle, of course, and you had to collect every card in the series to complete the puzzle. I must have spent a hundred thousand dollars on KISS cards in 1979 alone, fifty cents at a time. And I never did get card #87.

I was pitted against a shrewd adversary in Gene Simmons, of course. I’m sure he never printed #87, knowing 13-year-old fatheads like me would just keep buying pack after pack after pack of cards, desperately trying to suck our own dicks.

At least I’m not paying for these playing cards…

1991