I don’t remember how the idea was posed to me. I was six, and it is in the nature of a Mocking Man to collect things. I started with matchbox cars, but there were far too many of these to get them all. Then I moved to books. I wanted books about magic. And I got about four of them, but magic was really a Char thing, and Rose was not wanting me to get involved with anything that he loved.
Baseball cards were fun for a while. I had this way of stealing them from the kids down the street, when I showed them a number on the back of the card I wanted to trade to them, and I would point out the number of homers the guy on the card had gotten. It was more like at bats or some easier stat like that, but then I would point to the number on their card that was smaller and say, this one only has (smaller number) home runs.
Like this, I was getting quite a collection, until my Uncle Wrath got furious when he saw I was keeping them all together with a rubber band. He made me put them in sleeves and I could never touch them and blah. Well that was no fun anymore, so somehow I ended up on coins.
I was about six or seven, probably six, and it was Christmas Eve. We always went to Grandma’s on Christmas Eve, but Mumble was really forgetful about stuff, because he was so excited about Christmas. So he would end up having to go back home for something and would miss out on some of the fun.
However, when we got home, Santa had come, and we would freak out!
So this particular year, Santa had really honed in on the coins thing. I opened present after present that had empty books in them.
A coin collecting book has rows and columns of holes in a cardboard page that is just a bit too small to be the size of the coin. The hole has a year under it, and that is where you push the coin in. The tension of the slot being too small holds the coin in place. I had penny books, nickel books, dime books, but the most important was the quarter. I had about three of these, and they had some that were worth some real money.
You also had these pieces of cardboard about three inches by six. Each three-by-three section had a plastic circle on it. You folded them in half, stuck your coin in that, and stapled it closed. This kept the coin safe from damage and showed off both sides. Here is where you put your most important coins.
Well, this is all fun and games, but what about coins? A kid my age finds coins very rarely, so what do we do about that? Well Santa, in his wisdom, had gotten me a one foot by one foot by one foot box reinforced with one hundred dollars’ worth of random coins.
Santa is pretty awesome that way.
I remember that Grasp was still an infant, no more than nine months, and Less was tied up in her Barbies, which she had gotten quite a few of, and I just had nothing to do but fill books.
Well, I went through every coin. I found some extremely rare coins that there was no way would ever turn up anywhere but Santa’s workshop. I filled two quarter books, two nickel books, three penny books, two dime books, and almost another quarter book. But I saved the best for last. Kennedy head half dollars were popular back then. You can’t find them now, but back then, they were still around. I filled a book of those. Had about twenty in cardboard sleeves, and a bunch of other coins in cardboard sleeves.
Now I’m not sure when this happened, but at one time there was in America a shortage of the metal they use to make dimes. The nation had no choice but to make dimes out of steel. These are extremely rare and can’t really be found anywhere now, but I ended up with three steel dimes in near-mint condition. Mint, of course, as you probably know, means they were perfect. When you are talking about coins, near mint means they have nothing wrong with them at all, except they have been touched by human fingers.
This leads into my next point.
I was given as a gift, from my Uncle Wrath, a set of mint 1976 coins. From the full dollar with Eisenhower on it, down to the nickel. They gleamed. They were white. Open air colors coins the colors we are all used to, but when they are kept air tight, the coin is white. Looks like white gold.
Any year that you can find a full set of mint coins is special, but this was the Bicentennial of America’s birthday. The coins all had some different quality to them. They were expensive. Already, they were expensive. This is in ’82. They were already about forty dollars for the set, mounted and perfect like they were. But the other thing that made these coins amazing for me is that ’76 was the year I was born.
I had been tarnished by Char that Christmas. He had his way with me, and I felt dirty all the time. Now I was looking at something as old as me that had never been touched.
When Uncle Wrath got back from the Army on leave, he took me to a coin dealer to get my coins appraised. Told the guy I had only been collecting for a few months and asked him what he thought.
“Few months, huh?” the collector said over the glasses perched on the tip of his nose.
“But I have decades worth of knowledge about this,” Uncle Wrath said. “So let’s not low ball anyone, okay?”
The man held his hands up. “Of course, of course. I would not think of doing that.”
The man sifted through it all. Said it would take some time to get a full estimate. And Wrath said we would wait.
The waiting was interminable. I could not sit in that store anymore. Uncle Wrath showed me every display, talked about all of it, and what it was worth, and what it would be worth later. Well, the guy came out of the back with all my books, and Wrath counted. Then the dealer looked at me and crossed his arms over his chest. He had two stacks of my coins. Most of my books were on the right. A few on the left with my mint ’76s.
“Well, it is hard for me to believe that this kid has only been collecting for a few months. There are some pretty amazing things in this collection. How did you get all of these coins so fast?”
“Santa brought me a hundred dollars’ worth of coins for Christmas. A lot of them were copies, but I had a lot that were originals, and so I sat for about ten hours and I sorted them out and I said, “Nope I have this one already, or-”
“Let the man speak, Jesse,” Wrath snapped.
I feel silent instantly.
“Well, the collection is worth about 200 dollars. So, Santa worked out. I have chosen a few pieces I can buy right now. They are just things I would use to fill out my stocks.”
“Nope,” Uncle Wrath said. He grabbed everything and gathered it up in his arms. “No way we are selling anything today.” Wrath saluted the guy and turned around. “We will see you in forty years.”
“Ten,” the guy said.
“Forty,” Wrath said as he shoved me out the door.
“Two hundred dollars!” I said. “Wow.”
“Hush your mouth. Don’t talk ’til we get to the truck.”
Once I had managed to crawl my way into my uncle’s truck, he turned and looked at me. “We do this again in ten years and see where we are at. But we do not sell. We do not sell a penny of it. And we don’t trust anyone with them either.”
He brought the beast of a truck we sat in to a roar and off we went.
“We have to protect them from fire and theft.” Wrath shook his head. “I can’t believe your mother has left these sitting on your dresser for so long. No.” He growled. “You have something now. You need to keep it safe while you build.”
We turned into Kmart’s parking lot. “Come on. We gotta get you a safe box.”
It took us about ten minutes before we were standing in front of metal boxes with a key hole front middle top. It was about fifteen inches by a foot, by nine inches and it had a handle on top. “Pick one out,” Wrath said. “And hurry, I have plans tonight.”
“Are you and your buddies going to rip it up tonight?” I asked. I was hoping to get a story about Bramble, but Uncle Wrath pointed at the shelf.
“You pick one, or I’ll pick one for you. And if you don’t like any of them, I will not buy you anything at all.”
I nodded. It seemed like such an important choice. Like which would keep my coins safest. I scanned the shelves and leaned in to see which looked stronger. I looked up at Wrath, hoping he was not getting mad, and he was smiling at me.
It came down to the gray one with a bit of a texture on it, or the navy blue one that was smooth. “This one.” I grabbed the navy blue. “It has to be this one for sure.”
“Why?” Wrath asked as he tossed it in the cart and headed for the counter.
“The other one is bumpy and this one is smooth, so it is thicker.”
Uncle Wrath laughed. “Yeah maybe, kid. Just maybe.”
I took it home and stuffed my coins in it, as Uncle Wrath looked down at me.
“Now the best thing you can do is forget about it,” Wrath said. “You see an interesting coin, set it aside, but otherwise, don’t think about this box at all.”
Well, I always listened to my Uncle Wrath, so I did. I forgot about them. I opened that box about four times in ten years. I never found another coin to add to it, but I never told anyone but Rose that I had them at all. It was my secret. And there was nothing to it. Nothing about it. Just a lump of metal in my closet floor way in the back.
Ten years later and I am sixteen. Few things have happened in coins since then.
Bicentennial coins are impossible to find in any kind of good condition. There simply are no more Eisenhower silver dollars. There are no more Kennedy half dollars, and we cannot find any steel dimes. They have just fallen off the side of the country.
I’m sixteen living in St. Robert, and Uncle Wrath comes to pick me up. “Grab your box. We are headed to Rolla.”
“What box?”
He looked at me stern, then looked at my mother. “He still has his coin collection, right?”
“Oh that box!” I said. “I forgot all about that.”
Uncle Wrath smiled and nodded. “Now we are talking.”
My mother had both keys, so she handed me one, and we were in his truck. Same fucking truck.
“Your mom has both keys for this box?”
“Yeah, she said she better hold onto them for safe keeping,” I said.
“Well if anything is missing, I’m taking it out of her ass.”
We drove up to Rolla and straight to a coin dealer. By this time, Uncle Wrath was a professional collector/dealer. His day job was being a nurse, but no, he was definitely a professional dealer.
“You let me do the talking. You just stand there. I’m gonna say it is my collection. That is because all of the dealers in Rolla know me and they know that they can’t mess around with me. I have bought a few of them out in the past, so they have a healthy fear of me. We get in there, you just stand back.”
“Got it.”
“They still how you had them?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you spend any of them?”
“NO!” I looked at him like he was crazy.
“That’s my boy.”
Uncle Wrath took the box and opened it. “Kinda small collection for someone like you.”
“Bought it off a guy. Gonna add it to what I have.”
“How much did you pay for it?” the dealer asked.
“Nope. I paid a sum of money for it. That’s all you need to know.”
He walked in the back and was gone for a long time.
“Whatever he says, we are not selling. Whatever he offers, he will offer more next time we come here. Remember how I taught you. He has to make a living, too. We can’t get what it is worth anyway, we have to get under that. So we are not selling anything today. You had a nice little collection last time we had it looked at, and we are gonna see how it grew.
“Jesse, I want you to take a look around. I have been trying to get you into collecting and selling for a while now. If coins are what you are interested in, we can see about getting you started. I might be able to help. We will see. Look around. See what you think.”
Well, the guy must have taken longer, but it didn’t seem like it. I saw some really cool stuff, and in the last ten years, I had really been paying attention to coins. I had, every now and then, thought about my collection. And what I was seeing now was so gorgeous. They were so gorgeous.
I kept calling Wrath over to see things.
“Look how many liberty heads he has. Those are beautiful. You just can’t find them anymore. And this is the three-legged buffalo. You told me about this coin a long time ago.”
“What did I tell you?” he asked. I was being tested, and most of the tests that I got from Wrath were no fun at all, but this one, I was excited about.
“Well the machine was broken when they stamped out these nickels, and the buffalo on the back came out with three legs instead of four. They are incredibly expensive. This one is not mint like mine.”
Wrath blinked. “You have a mint three-legged Buffalo?”
“Yeah, you bought it for me for my birthday when I was seven.”
Wrath looked at me with love. I didn’t often see that, and he nodded. “Having guaranteed money laying around at your age and doing nothing with it is not easy, Jesse. I’m proud of you for holding out.”
“I do listen to you, Uncle Wrath.”
He looked away and patted my shoulder.
“You have never lied to me, and you have never treated me wrong.”
“Yeah,” he said. He turned his back and looked away. “I just thought you didn’t like this kind of stuff.”
“It’s not that I didn’t like it. It’s just that I am too young, and I have distractions at home.”
“Yeah listen, Less is not always going to live there. And your mother is a woman you are going to have to learn how to handle. To stand up to. She is wrong most of the time and she is really—” He seemed to think really hard about what he was about to say. “Just be careful. She will take control of you if you let her. You have to be able to stand up to her if you believe in something.”
I nodded.
Guy came back. Same deal. Stack on the right. Stack on the left. But this time the stack on the left was bigger.
“I’m willing to make you a one thousand dollar offer on this right here today,” the guy said. He did not even place his hand on the stack. He just let it hover about four inches, as if what he saw when he walked back there was too sacred to touch.
I turned around. A thousand dollars. Just a portion of my collection was worth a thousand dollars. I knew right then that I would not sell. No way I would agree. I tapped Uncle Wrath on the back and he turned.
“Not selling.” My whisper was not even a breath, and he tapped my back.
“How much, all told?” Uncle Wrath said.
“A modest 1,800. There are some really rare coins in here, and I can tell it hasn’t been touched in a very long time. This box has not been opened in a very long time. Whoever had these either hated coins, which I seriously doubt, or they loved them and respected them.
“I am not interested in buying the entire collection. I have a lot of this in bulk. But this, I will pay a thousand for right now.”
“Well, I have a couple of other stops to make. I want to get these in front of a few other people and have them look at it. But we will keep you in mind.”
“Would you be more interested in selling if I bumped it up to 1,200?”
“Like I said, we will keep you in mind.”
We got in the car and we were silent for a long time.
“This is amazing,” Wrath said quietly. “You have really impressed me. I can tell you that in a few other stores we would go to, it would be higher. The real price we are looking at is closer to 2,300. Now, I can get you about 1,900 for it right now.”
“Got nothing to spend it on. It would just go to waste.”
“What about a car?” Uncle Wrath said. “You could buy a car with this money.”
“Yeah but my mom would find a way to stop me. No, let’s wait another ten years or so. What do you think we would be looking at then?”
“No way to be sure. It all depends on how the market goes and how the coin distribution is moving. I can’t say for sure, but I would guess that in ten years it could go for about 14,000. Especially if you keep adding to it.”
When I went home, I made a case for me having a copy of the key, and she argued me down.
About six months later, I was moving Less out onto the streets. I took her room and, while I was moving my things from the room I shared with Grasp, I found my lock box open.
A quick scan showed me that I had lost most of my mints. I had no more quarters, or half dollars, and my steel dimes were gone.
I screamed and I went crazy. I demanded answers, and Rose went to check the spot where she kept the keys and found that they were gone.
Grasp had broken into my box, was the final decision. What he left behind was a pittance. Nothing worth anything. I took it in and the guy behind the counter didn’t even take it back to the back room before he said, “Yeah, you just have a bunch of coins here. This is nothing for me to even really look at. They are worth market.”
Now, there is a precedent here. Aunt, when she was a kid, broke into Uncle Wrath’s coin collection and did the same thing. Rose took the blame and Uncle Wrath beat the fuck out of her every day for a year.
It ended up coming out in the wash that Aunt had indeed taken the coins, and no one has ever been able to get over it.
Rose tried to tell Wrath that it was fine that she forgave him for the beatings. He never forgave himself. Never had a close relationship with Aunt. And after years of feeling guilty about how he treated Rose, he finally ended up resenting her.
When I got back from having that collection appraised, I told Rose how much was there. I told her that Uncle Wrath said I could get a car with it if I sold it. She asked if that was what I was going to do, and I shrugged.
She finally did find the keys when she moved the couch to vacuum behind it.
I gave the rest of the collection to Grasp right before Guardian’s War.
It was worthless.
For more about the series Reality of the Unreal Mind, visit Amazon.
Jesse Teller 
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