The Best American Essays 2014 (6 page)

 

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:

 

Seller offered best price, quick and secure delivery magical item.

 

My totem animal is the elephant. I love these guys.

 

Unique dragon, great service. Thank you!

 

Thank you I lost a brooch just like this & finally found it again.

 

Not sure what it is, but love it!

 

The beads do look like a rainbow.

 

Even the negative reviews sounded like they came from other magicians matter-of-factly shopping on eBay for tools of the trade:

Ring shattered within 20 mins of putting on my finger
, wrote one customer.

So sorry—will send you another one!!
Bergie replied.

Old but not “neat,” beads missing (a lot) on one earring
, wrote a customer with the user ID “ma2gical.”

Hi! That is the design :)
replied Bergie.

The person who outbid me on
Vintage/ Antique NECKLACE strange beads shells acorns DIFFERENT :)
wrote:
this was weirder than expected and not useful
—in his or her spells, presumably—which I found perversely satisfying. I was the rightful owner of that necklace and we both knew it.

 

By the time I finally worked up the nerve to contact Bergie, he had come to seem like a celebrity; when I saw his name on the reply in my inbox, I got that frisson you feel when you see a friend in person whom you normally only ever talk with on Facebook. In my e-mail I'd said I was a fan and frequent buyer of his items and that I wanted to write a story about the collection. The response, which came within a few hours, was not from Archie but from his wife—a cheerful young woman I will call Veronica. Her e-mail—and all her subsequent messages—were, like her thousands of listing titles, punctuated by smiley faces and multiple exclamation points.
I too am still totally shocked by the size of this guys collection and I have tried hard to get as much info as I can from him too but don't have a ton of “facts” ha ha
, she wrote.
I started selling this stuff off on ebay part time last summer and thought I would be done by now but it seems his collection is endless.
Her background was in real estate, she told me, and her husband had nothing to do with the operation; she only used his name on the account. His only involvement was to help her haul the heavy boxes she picked up every week from the mysterious collector. Yes, there really was a collector. He was a Hispanic man in his sixties (she referred to him as “elderly”), a retired jeweler who had lived in Mexico for twenty-five years and possibly also in Argentina at some point; she wasn't positive. He didn't speak much English, but Veronica happened to speak Spanish, so they communicated in both languages.

It all started at an estate sale in Altadena, where she and her husband went to look for art—and also, she said, she just liked looking at “neat old homes.” Some of the collector's family members were at the sale, and they suggested that Veronica meet their relative and check out his wares, which he was looking to sell off. She herself rarely wore jewelry, she told me, besides her platinum wedding band, but after viewing some of the man's collection, she happily negotiated to purchase the entire lot, paid in advance by the pound—and thus began her relationship, her conscription, with the collector. He knew she intended to sell the lot piece by piece on eBay, and that was fine with him. She didn't know anything about costume jewelry, but she bought a few books so she could start researching it. Every week, then, he began delivering the goods—hundreds of pounds packed neatly in huge, moving-size cartons. They conducted these transactions at a public park, Veronica said, because he did not want his neighbors to see him moving so many boxes out of his house. (She also believed he kept a storage unit—there was simply too much to fit in any house.)

Seriously, a park? Argentina? Drugs had to be involved somehow, but I couldn't quite work it out. Smuggling cocaine inside a . . .
Vintage/ Antique Brooch Pin teeny miniature goldtone mouse green gems one gone
? A fence operation made no sense either, unless there was a black market for 99-cent costume jewelry. Anyway, I could not believe someone as open and seemingly wholesome as Veronica would involve herself in such a sketchy business, let alone tell a complete stranger the details. And then there was the problem of posting the thousands of pieces of evidence online, in plain public view. Plus Veronica sounded as bewildered by her story as I was. She felt like Scrooge McDuck, she said, shoveling through the mountains of jewelry in her house, trying to keep up with the supply, get it sorted, photographed, labeled, listed, sold, packed, and shipped. Archie was growing annoyed because he kept stepping on pins and rhinestones. Her father was worried about her. Veronica had enlisted her sisters to help, but there was still no end in sight.
He just dropped 1800 pairs of cufflinks (matching sets with tie tacks) off Sunday
, she wrote me in an e-mail.
UNBELIEVABLE—I almost had a heart attack—no more room in my house ha ha It just keeps coming . . .

No matter how fast she worked, how much she sold, she did not appear to be making a dent. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, she might even have been making things worse.
Did I tell you he gave me 900 collectible old photo negatives of trains ships and trolleys?
she wrote to me.
And that he has over 200,000 collectible civil war time documents? We were supposed to have gotten to those by this summer but jewelry isn't ending and he hasn't said when it will! I ask him and he just exhales and laughs and says “OOHH LONG TIME MORE” . . . . . . . . .

 

Of all the jewelry I purchased from Bergie—I still think of Veronica that way—the
Vintage brass Made in India red and white mother of pearl bracelet
remains my favorite, though I've never once worn it. It sits atop a stack of Powell and Pressburger DVDs on my coffee table, an objet d'art keeping me company while I watch the 1947 movie
Black Narcissus
for the fiftieth time. The bracelet matches the movie's hyper-saturated reds and creamy, nuanced whites, colors the film's designers obsessed over and won Oscars for. “Vermeer was the sort of painter I had in mind on
Black Narcissus
,” the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said; he modeled shots in the film after Vermeer and Van Gogh paintings, which he liked to copy by hand in his free time as a hobby. “It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again,” said the contemporary director Alan Parker about the film, in 2009.

Based on Rumer Godden's 1939 novel,
Black Narcissus
is “a story about the disorientation of European nuns in India,” according to Wikipedia, which is like calling
Alice in Wonderland
a book about a girl who takes a nap and has some dreams. The escalating hallucinogenic beauty of the remote, half-ruined Himalayan palace to which the British nuns are sent drives each of them slowly mad in her own way. One secretly mail-orders a bright red dress and lipstick from the city, another is haunted by relentless memories of an emerald necklace and earrings she gave up years ago, and the no-nonsense sister in charge of the garden finds herself surreptitiously planting beds of exotic flowers instead of the vegetables they all need to survive.
There is no escape from beauty
, the film seems to say. “There's something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated!” exclaims one character.

I watched
Black Narcissus
for the first time in 2011 and quickly discovered that it worked better than any drug or therapy to break my mind and body out of their ever-constricting room of pain. All of Powell and Pressburger's films worked on me this way, alchemically, like great art, larger than the sum of its parts. I especially loved
The Red Shoes
, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a girl who gets her wish for magic shoes, then can't take them off and dances herself to death. “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by,” says her Svengali, Boris Lermontov, in the film, “but the red shoes dance on.”

I could so relate. In 2001, I was thirty-five years old with two published books and a tenured teaching job. I had never spent a single night in the hospital in my life. Then, overnight, it seemed, the warranty ran out. To quote Joy Williams's short story “The Route”:

 

A worn battery cable shorted out on the frame, setting fire to the engine at the same time an electrode from the spark plug fell into the combustion chamber, disintegrating the piston. The tires went flat the transmission fluid exploded the gas tank collapsed an armature snapped shooting the generator pulley through the hood the brake shoes melted the windshield cracked and the glove compartment flew open spilling my panties into the street.

 

In
The Red Shoes
I found a literal, practical kind of sustenance, watching perfect bodies move perfectly, knowing how much pain each had endured, tortured over a period of years in the interest of producing a bit of beautiful ephemera. “It was 1947,” wrote the
Red Shoes
director Michael Powell in his autobiography. “A great war was over and a great danger to the whole world had been eliminated. The message of the film was Art. Nothing mattered but Art.” There wasn't much else left to care about at my place either.

 

When Jim, my ex-fiancé, and I met, I was still in high school, and he owned and ran a successful comedy club and experimental theater—a sort of circus I hoped to run away to—but his true love had always been art. He attended design school before I knew him, and one of his last jobs before his death was at a Lucite studio, where he designed housewares and jewelry. By that point I was so busy working toward my imagined future that I had little time for his increasingly bitter phone calls, which seemed to come from my past. Now my body was failing and Jim was dead, the doors to both past and future closed and locked, and I was missing most of the present.

A few years before his death, Jim sent me a Lucite jewelry box he'd made for me—a simple, clear rectangular box with storage drawers, clean lines, nothing elaborate. Because I didn't wear much jewelry and already owned many other items he had given me over the years, and because I didn't know he was dying, I unthinkingly donated the box to a thrift store. It wasn't until I realized I was collecting Bergie's collection that I remembered the jewelry box and wished for it back, too late. Like everything else about Jim, the gift seemed prescient and miraculous—as if he had known someday I would need it.

“Cherish anything that wakes you up, if even for an instant,” Joy Williams once wrote to me, a line which brought to mind a poem by Rumi:
The door is round and open./Don't go back to sleep.
I still place bids on Bergbay310's offerings from time to time, surprised with each new round of listings at which items I win, which I lose. Like horoscopes, they are always uncannily, perfectly relevant. The latest shipment from Pasadena included a
Vintage/ Antique Pendant Charm Miniature mother of pearl clown.
For some reason I was the only one who wanted it—nobody else even placed a bid. Inside the package Bergie had added a tiny folded Post-it note that read:
To: The Home for Orphaned Clowns. Attn: Wendi.