Short Story: Bubblegum
A short story about some bubblegum cards
“Things without all remedy should be without regard: what’s done, is done”
I had all these bubblegum cards, but never really stuck with the collecting. Apart from the Batman one. I had the whole set. They were released in 1989, along with the movie. And I was obsessed with every aspect of that film. I loved Batman — for a start. I loved Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson, and Tim Burton. But maybe most important of all was that the soundtrack album was by Prince. With theme and score by Danny Elfman too. The bubblegum cards were just part of the surrounding hysteria — and I so I collected the set.
And I kept it. A few years back, we found the cards in a shoebox, while tidying up. We decided to list them for a laugh. See what we’d get. You never know, right? Well, next day it was listed as “Cool Auction” and was on the frontpage and was up to $200 or something like that. All from a modest $1 reserve. Katy was suddenly very interested in the Batman cards. They were going to make her $200. Suddenly all my years of being a pop-culture nerd were about to pay off. And when you write record reviews you are pretty happy with a $200 pay-off. That’s like six month’s earnings right there!
She turned into Lady Macbeth, stalking the house at night,unable to sleep, shuffling the cards and counting them, making sure the right number was still there. One Hundred And Thirty Two. Counting. And recounting. And this near demented chuckle. Scrubbing at the corners of the cards to make sure they were clean — “out damned spot!” We were rich. We were about to be rich.
But then.
O horror, horror, horror!
That incessant counting had made one card simply vanish! Gone from the pack. A stray. She checked. And then checked again. Woke me in the night. (“Sleep no more”).
I shrugged with all the nonchalance that had I learned in my “career” as a freelancer. The next day we looked under the bed and down the stairs and all around and through the house and then I sent a sad email to the auction-winner, explaining that we had lost a card. I set out a couple of options. He agreed to just keep his money. And said no harm done. We got to keep 131 cards, and lived with enough frustration to check the house again. (And again). No luck. It never surfaced. It was not in the bin, nor under the bed. It was not inside a shoe, or being used to bookmark a page in any of the non-fiction books that hadn’t been flicked through in an age. It was simply not anywhere in the house at all.
So I took the almost-full set of Batman cards to the dump. I stood by the open boot of the car. I threw out the clippings from the lawn and a few other things. A vacuum hose, the kitchen-bin’s collections of that week or fortnight, or whatever. I swear, in that second, I heard the music from Batman and dark clouds gathered over as I hurled those cards into the air. They hung there, some of them. A few dropped at my feet. I kicked those over the edge. They collected themselves all loosely together in the stench of everyone’s leftovers and failures and broken bits. I guess I like to think they lost another one or two from their number.
And there’s a moral in there somewhere, too. I’m sure. But we’d need to be sure we knew where to find that before starting any other auctions.
