Molecular Matters
2005
I sold an ugly straight-backed wooden chair with a tattered cushioned seat for $500 yesterday. I know it seems unbelievable. There was nothing special about the appearance of this chair. It’s something that might normally be sold at a yard sale for ten bucks, if that. So how did it manage to command so much money?

It all started at a party a couple months ago.

Ben, my handyman, and one-time beau who now lives in an apartment over my barn, happens to have hooked up with the daughter of a very well-known politician in town over blood orange martinis one night. I often take Ben with me when I get invited to shi-shi events because his hunky, rugged small town charm, not to mention his huge hairy muscular stature, make him a most delightful conversation piece. I don’t know what it is, but socialites and debutantes go mad for the ape. And this particular famous well-bred gal went ga ga.

But alas, she also turned out to have a very short attention span. My poor Ben was left after just one month for an A-list movie star. Ben’s rugged exterior was reduced to a mere puddle of woe and torment. The poor guy was ravaged. I felt really awful for him. He didn’t even want to go into his apartment because, he said, everywhere he looked he saw remnants of . . . her.

Remnants of her. Remnants of a celebrity. My sometimes warped mind perked up. Remnants could mean trace molecules and molecular residue could mean . . . cha-ching, cha-ching. Time to cash in. The next logical step in celebrity exploitation, no? Selling their mere essences on the black market?

My mind raced. Ms. Famous spent lots of time in that barn apartment with Ben. Her molecules were surely all over the joint. Her fingerprints everywhere. Her cheek cells still probably on the extra toothbrush by his bathroom sink. Random hairs might surely be caught in dusty corners on the damp bathroom floor. Perfect hairs with nary a split end trapped deep in clogged shower drains. Sloughed skin cells perhaps living in all his furniture.

Really, we’ve been trained to think like this. We’ve ascribed such stature to celebrityhood, and such inferiority complexes to ourselves. We’re nothing next to the famous faces we see in magazines and on television. Those beautiful, glowing flawless faces with the perfectly plucked eyebrows and the clothes, shoes, and heck even underwire bras that cost more than our houses.

I thought about putting all of Ben’s belongings on ebay and seeing what the price of bachelor pad crap that had been graced by the presence of a celebrity fanny or finger was worth these days. But a couple peppercorn martinis later, I thought better of it. I started thinking about this world we live in, all full of swishing molecules . . . human, plant and animal molecules alike in the air, the dirt, our food and water. There can’t possibly be anything so special about celebrity molecules in the big scope of things. If we looked under a microscope, we might see that celebrity status doesn’t hold any biological secrets.

The idea of this molecular comradery began to feel comforting to me. Somewhere, floating around the planet was probably at least just one breath from everyone who had ever lived. Maybe I was breathing in a bit of air that was once in Mozart’s lungs even as I thought about it. Maybe a cell from the deconstructed body of a dinosaur or a dragon or Napoleon or a Greek God was somewhere in the fruit we eat, or in each cup full of ocean water that hits up against our designer bikini bottoms at the seashore.

In that context, celebrityhood didn’t seem so special.

And just as I was feeling deep and profound and nicely warmed by those martinis and my pseudo-intellectual concepts, a crazed member of the paparazzi came knocking on my door asking for something, anything that might have been touched by . . . her. He knew of a fan that would pay a thousand bucks for it. He would give me half. I picked the ugliest item I could find in Ben’s apartment and handed it over, knowing I had just turned celebrity molecules into cold hard cash.

Then I went and bought the most expensive underwire bra on Rodeo Drive I could find.