Pain Management

“Well, for one thing, we’re taking a risk.”

“What risk?”

He tapped his fingers on the counter, waiting patiently to educate me. “We have to buy the merchandise we sell. I mean, we pay cash for it. Then we own it. So we can sell it for whatever we want. But if we don’t sell it, we eat it. That wasn’t so bad, once. When sales were slamming.”

“So what happened?” I asked, picking up from his tone that those days were gone.

“The elevator cable snapped before the car got to the top floor,” he said. “Some people were smart enough to get off in time. And they made a ton of money. But most weren’t. It was wrong, anyway.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“Comics are about the . . . Well, it’s like music, okay? Melody and lyrics? Comics are about art and story. Not about how ‘collectible’ they are. It all went to hell when folks started buying comics like they were stocks—more like stock options, actually. Most people, they never even read them, just bagged and boxed them, and waited for them to go up in value.”

“But now . . . ?”

“Now that’s not happening. Oh, don’t get me wrong. You find me an early enough Superman or Batman, nice clean copy—with this stuff, condition is everything—and I’ll make you some serious cash. Quick. And it’s not just Golden Age material, either. The early Marvels, they’re good, too. But no way the current stuff is collectible. Remember the death of Superman?”

“I must have missed it.”

“Yeah, well, it was one of the biggest events in comics history. You had all kinds of people lining up to buy copies—with all the variants, too—for whatever the dealers wanted. But how is something ever going to be collectible when you sell millions of copies to start with?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not,” he said, with don’t-argue-with-me finality. “And it’s never going to be.”

“But didn’t they always print millions of copies? When I was a kid, they only cost a—”

“Printed? Sure. Survived? Not even a handful. Comics were printed on low-grade paper, stapled together. They weren’t designed to be collected. Most kids rolled them up and stuffed them in their back pockets. And nobody really stored them properly. Back then, we didn’t know anything about the effects of light, or temperature, or moisture. Nobody cared.”

“But you said that it’s going to make a comeback.”

“I did. And I believe it,” he said, reverently. “But the natural market for comics is people who read them. And that’s a pretty small, steady group—college kids, mostly. The new generation is more interested in computer gaming.”

I walked over to a floor-to-ceiling rack next to the counter. “Is there much of a market for this stuff?” I asked him, holding up a comic with a picture of two women stripped and shackled on the cover.

“Yeah!” He chuckled sadly. “Sure is. In fact, it wasn’t for porno, I don’t know how most comics operations would survive at all, anymore.”

“Pretty expensive, too,” I said, looking over the racks.

“It is. But the people who like that stuff, it doesn’t bother them.”

“You don’t sell it to kids?”

“Hell no! This stuff isn’t exactly Playboy, friend. It’s really hardcore. I’m as much free-speech as the next guy, but nobody underage even gets to browse that stuff, much less buy it.”

“Any of your customers have this kind of stuff in their hold?”

“They might,” he said, suspicion lacing his voice. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, I was looking at those prices. I bet a guy could easily run up a tab of a couple hundred a month.”

“Before, that was common. Now, if we had a customer with a hold that size, he’d be a goddamn treasure, I can tell you that.”

I nodded, as if I was thinking it over. “Not all the comics are done by big publishers. You said that before, when I was in here.”

“That’s right. There’s lots of people trying to publish their own. Not many as successful as Madison, but there’s always new players every month. They come and they go.”

“And some of those comics—a few of them, anyway—they could end up being collectible down the road, right?”

“It’s possible. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.”

“Not the farm, maybe,” I said, reaching into my pocket, “but what if you pulled two hundred bucks a month worth of those new comics for me? Or maybe a little less, and use the rest to put them in those protective bags. In a couple of years, I’d have a real collection.”

“You would. But so what? There’s no guarantee I could pick any winners. Or that there’d even be any winners to pick.”

“I’m a gambler,” I told him.

“A professional gambler?” he asked, like he’d heard of them but never met one in the flesh.

“Yeah. Let’s say you pull the comics for me every month. And let’s say I pay you six months in front, just so you know you’re not going to all that trouble for nothing. And so there’s no risk.”

“That would be—”

“Twelve hundred, right?”

“Well . . . no.”

“Is my math wrong?”

“No. No, it’s not that. It’s just that . . . Well, our best customers get special discounts; they don’t pay retail.”

“So I’d actually be getting more for my money, then?”

“Yeah. I can’t say exactly how much more—it kind of varies.”

“Sold,” I told him, handing over the bills.

“I’ll get you a receipt.”

“Nah, that’s not necessary,” I told him, keeping my voice light to take the sting out of what I was going to say. “I know where to find you.”

“We’ll be here,” he promised. “I took a long-term lease on this spot when things were . . . different.”

“Great. Now, as a valued customer, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind . . . ?”

The convertible Gordo and Flacco lent me was a bone-stock Mustang. It had been sitting around in the shop waiting on a custom paint job. I drove it through the strolls with its top down. The radio dealt out the new Son Seals cut, “My Life,” which was getting a lot of air play:

I’ve been so cheated

Until I was just defeated

But still I went and repeated

All of my mistakes. . . .

I didn’t see the Subaru flit by until right near the end of my tour. And I didn’t have any better luck with the girls.

“Tonight is satisfactory for you?” Gem asked.

“What does that mean?”

“To meet. As you asked.”

“Oh yeah. Your cop.”

“He is not my cop,” she said sharply. “Sometimes I do not understand where you