COLLECTING

I had gotten off work early that afternoon and went to the Ye Olde Black Hound for a drink and some action. It was the first time I had entered that pub in central London. I walked up to the bar and greeted the bartender, who told me his name was Pat O'Bannon. I asked him for a double whisky, no ice. Pat poured me a generous measure and placed a paper napkin with the initials YOBH stamped in two colours next to the glass. I admired it for a few moments.

“Beautiful napkin. The old hound drawing is wonderful,” I told him.

“Yes, it is a classic. We have been in this place for over a hundred years. "

"Can I have another one? This one already got wet."

Pat handed me a couple more napkins, which I put in the pocket of my overcoat. While taking a sip of whiskey, I looked up and saw a man next to me having a pint of beer. Suddenly, he looked at me with interest and leaned over to speak to me.

"A collector, from what I can see ..."

“Yes, something innocent. I collect napkins from bars, restaurants, hotels. I keep them in albums, where I write down the place, the date, any remark. "

The man, in his late sixties, looked at me with his piercing blue eyes and said, “There is nothing innocent about collecting things. You become a slave to it. But if you buy me another beer, I'll tell you my story so you can write it along with your new napkin."

With that said, he gulped down what was left of his beer. I couldn't help but follow his suggestion.

He told me his name was Reginald Lester and that he was addicted to hobbies. A serial hobbyist, one hobby at a time, but temporarily. One after another.

He undertook them, succeeded in becoming a master in a particular hobby, reached the limit of the challenge and abandoned it to move on to another. He confessed that he never lasted more than six months in each activity, as if he had an internal clock that gave him that time to invest in it. Perhaps it was a test, that when he achieved it he lost his interest.

His first collecting activity was, like many other people, stamps, when he was a teenager, in the golden days of postage. People would send paper letters and put postage stamps on them, which were real little works of art. Within six months of starting this activity, he suddenly lost interest. He thought it was normal for this to happen to him at fifteen, when hormones were in full swing and sports, music, girls, and books were vying for his attention.

"Are you still interested in my story? Talking a lot makes me thirsty," he said shamelessly, as he showed me his empty jar. I finished my whisky and ordered another round for both of us. I settled in to continue listening to my drinking mate.

“I immediately started collecting cans of beer. I started with the most common, the ones you can get in any store. I had a hard time buying them because I was a minor, but I was content to pick up the used ones, as long as they were fairly clean and in good condition. When I found out, I had over five hundred cans from a dozen countries stacked on my shelves. And, again, I got tired of seeing them. I gave them to a scrap metal dealer to sell as aluminum and embarked on a new hobby. "

For a long time he continued to tell me about his life, marked by inexorable changes of hobby, at a constant rate: a new one every six months, two a year, twenty a decade. I realized that he should have had hundreds of different hobbies. At the same time, he graduated as an accountant - inevitable that he would dedicate himself to accounting -, he married, he had no children.

Around this time, he began collecting golf balls, even though he had never set foot on a course and had not even taken a swing at a driving range. He told me that he found it an interesting hobby, harmless, and presumably taking up little space. A golf ball is something rather small, almost insignificant. It wasn't like collecting bicycles - something he'd done in the past. But after making a display for the five thousand balls that he had treasured, his wife told him: "Either the balls or me."

He had to go to a bachelor's apartment with his collection, which he abandoned after two weeks anyway. He tried to return to his wife but she, alarmed by these changes of behaviour, closed the door and did not receive him again.

“They say that from then on she began collecting men, younger and more handsome than me. It was surely an expensive hobby, but she could afford it with the savings she had appropriated.”

When he got to this point in his story, I thought I saw him moved. But he stood firm, serene. He looked at me sympathetically and said,

“You are in time to give up your stupid hobby of collecting napkins. And enjoy the good things in life. "

We better not talk about me. I'm more interested in your continuing to tell me. I'm in no hurry. Would you accept another beer? "

Reginald Lester smiled the most genuine smile I had ever seen. Between drinks, he continued talking and I kept listening.

"Tell me more about your hobbies ..."

“I briefly thought about collecting stuffed birds, but found it difficult to obtain specimens that had died a natural death and that had not been slaughtered for embalming, so I gave up the first day. Despite my fixations, I have ethical limits. "

"And what did you do?"

“I started collecting moths. Brown, white, gray moths. I pinned them to cork sheets. Butterflies are too beautiful to deprive the world of just one of them, but moths look ugly. Although I acknowledge that they can be fascinating for their tiny peculiarities such as modified antennae and different types of hairs. But this fascination also came with an expiration date and did not last longer than the usual period. "

We toasted all the moths he had put on the pins, which he confessed to me were more than a thousand.

“So, I started collecting meteorites, you know, those stones that fall from the sky. There are all kinds of them, some really remarkable and valuable. I bought and sold, while I started to learn about them."

“One day, almost by chance, I bought a small meteorite for fifty pounds. It turned out to be a rare Martian meteorite and I ended up selling it a thousand times its original price. Since I had been dedicating myself to these stones for six months, I finished my hobby and with the money I got I bought two thousand hand-painted metal collectible cars. For a while I was happy with my little toys. "

Later he told me that he collected coprolites, fossilized faeces of ancient animals. It had some really unusual ones, from prehistoric crocodiles to dinosaurs.

“The coprolites thing was similar to collecting meteorites. After all, they were stones too. Luckily they didn't smell like fresh poo. "

I ordered fish and chips to counteract the image of a defecating Tyrannosaurus that had settled in my brain. And more alcohol.

Reginald went on to tell me about countless other hobbies that he dedicated half a year of his long life to each. He told me he collected fridge magnets, glass ashtrays, malachite pillboxes, electric basses, exotic fish, miniature turtles, human hair. From there, he went on to gathering autopsy reports from celebrities. He received reports of Marilyn Monroe, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, John Lennon, Lady D, Amy Winehouse, Einstein; until they offered him that of Adolf Hitler, who judged a scam. Then he decided to change his hobby again. He sold everything and moved to a bigger apartment so he could continue his activities with more room.

“For a few months now I have been writing stories. You know, fictions inspired by my personal life. I have a lot of themes that inspire me. I plan to send a short story to a magazine here in England, before I get bored of writing. "

At that moment, he told me:

"If you'll excuse me, so much beer forces me to make a brief visit to the bathroom."

I nodded. An instant later, I got up from the bar and went after him. He saw me arrive and exclaimed:

"I see you need to drain your bladder too!"

"No," I answered him.

While he was busy shaking his penis after urinating, I pulled out a razor and cleanly sectioned the vessels on his neck. His eyes widened as he gasped and fell to the bathroom floor with a thud, amid a pool of bright blood.

I took one of the napkins Pat had given me from my coat pocket and wrote: “Reginald Lester, Collector. Victim number 28 ".

I withdrew from the Ye Olde Black Hound with the satisfaction of having found one more victim for my collection.