When Pigs Have Wings

I’ll put a dollar down on anything. A lotto ticket. A raffle prize. A claw machine. It ain’t about the cheaply-made pig with angel wings. It’s about seeing the claw gently pinch it out of the pile—by a wing. Ascending above all the others, the pig with angel wings appears to be smiling. And in that precise moment, I know that God loves me.

I totally understand what goes through the mind of a gambling addict. Seeking that good dopamine rush. Every cell in the body wanting it. The ecstasy of perfectly-aligned sevens on a slot machine. Not even in it for the money. These are moments of beauty, when everything lines up on the center. Or when it dangles precariously by a single pig wing.

As a collector, I’m always looking for that big hit. An unpeeled Beatles Butcher LP sitting in a crate. A double telescoping Luke Skywalker action figure. A 1990 NES World Championship Gold Cartridge. Some people dream of traveling the world. Curing cancer. Marrying a doctor. I dream of running into clueless people without internet connections at a yard sale.

Like any habit, collecting can be expensive and addicting. eBay is like the designer cocaine habit of collecting. Meanwhile, the flea market is like a bag of crack rocks you get on the corner of Fayette and Mount in Baltimore.

This week, the flea market was a bust. Same old same old. Creepy people, sketchy stuff. Suburban dads whose wives have told them to clear the crap out the basement, which was just that—crap. Old men with gummy faces selling rusted tools and dirty appliances. Rednecks selling dented boxes of cereal and half-used jars of hand cream. The fingerprints of the last person to use it are still dabbed in the cream. The Asians selling knockoff sunglasses. Some guy in a faded NASCAR shirt is trying them on. Some people I went to high school with, looking overweight and tired, selling used baby clothes and a clunky-looking XBox. The clearly mentally-ill woman who spends all week filling her station wagon with stuff she takes from dumpsters. She’s always there.

I needed some new scenery. The local church up the street was holding their annual Strawberry Festival, which had a mini-flea market. Here, the folks were friendly and smiling. They weren’t worn down and tanned by the sun; they were basking in it, with 30 SPF sunscreen on, of course.

It was refreshing to be around humans, and not the mutants at the flea market. But on the collecting front, it was a whole lot of nothing. People were selling baked goods, their old Beanie Baby collections, a couple of Foreman grills, random crutches, headphones, and weird glazed dog statues.

I made my way towards the last table, where an elderly woman with a variety of knick-knacks and homegoods sized me up. Just your standard cute old church lady. I love ‘em. I’m a sucker for old people. They’re just so damn adorable! Except the mean ones. Nobody likes the mean ones.

“I’ve got a tennis racket,” she said. “And you look like a tennis player. You play, don’t you?”

She thinks I play tennis. CUTE. And hey, you know what, every now and then, the girlfriend and I do attempt to hit the ball back and forth at a tennis court. It always goes something like me serving it. She hits it. I miss. She yells. “THAT WAS AN EASY ONE COME ON.” Then I serve it again. She hits it over the gate and we argue over whose turn it was to go hunt for the ball. Her turn. She serves it. I hit it. She misses. I yell, “YOU MISSED IT ON PURPOSE.” When it’s hot outside, I take everything personally as sabotage.

“Yeah, I play sometimes,” I said to the elderly woman.

“I’ll give it to you for a dollar. It’s a real nice racket. Well made.”

I nodded, being polite. “I don’t think I need another,” I said. I was getting ready to call it a day, about to walk back to my car.

“It’s signed by somebody,” she said.

I stopped.

“By who?”

“Oh I don’t know, looks like it says Marty-something,” she said, handing me the racket to show me, where a name was indeed signed on the cover in neat cursive. Marty Riessen. Never heard of him. Marty sounded like a sixth grader whose mother warned him he’d better not lose his tennis racket.

“It’s probably a kid who put his name on it for gym class,” I said.

“Well, my husband used to collect that kind of sports stuff. He’s passed away and I’m just trying to clean up the house.”

“You should look it up on eBay,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“Someone told me about that before. I don’t have an eBay.”

Suddenly, it all began to add up in my mind. I could see the sevens lining up. A random old tennis racket. A signature. A dead sports collector. A woman WHO DOESN’T HAVE AN EBAY. All sevens, the glittery ones, the jackpot kind. And here I was, at a church flea market. It was really adding up to something altogether greater. It was God, who loves me, and in that moment, I knew it.

“I’ll take it,” I said, handing her the dollar.

I drove home, giddy with excitement. It was that good dopamine rush. This is what it’s all about. This could be the big hit. Marty Riessen could be my guy. I even began to convince myself I’d heard of him before. Yeah, yeah, the more I think about it, yeah. This thing could be worth at least twenty bucks to a sports collector. Maybe fifty.

Hell, a hundred. I bet this guy was huge.

And by the time I got home, in my mind, Marty had become the Michael Jordan and Johnny Unitas lovechild of tennis.

Well, he’s not quite. But he did rank as high as No. 11 in the world in singles on the ATP Rankings in 1974. That’s gotta be worth thirty bucks on eBay. So I listed it. And it’s been a few days, and I’ve got no bites yet. But hey, there’s another 12 hours left on the auction. I’m still hoping for an all out, sniping, last minute bidding war.

The anticipation is part of the fun. That moment when you think it’s not going to happen. When you think the claw is going to cruelly drop it back into the pile of the others. That pig wing just hangs on.