The Golden Flea

January 13, 2020
In this thoughtful memoir, Rips (Pasquale’s Nose) recalls New York City’s Chelsea Flea Market, a legendary bazaar held in a two-floor garage that Rips visited each weekend for almost 20 years beginning in the early 1990s. “Many in the flea called me a collector. Those outside the flea, a hoarder,” he writes. Among the treasures he found there are the Romanian film collection of pornographer Al Goldstein, and many examples of boli, a type of African tribal fetish art. Over the years, Rips developed friendships with “the pious society of the flea and its people,” including Jokkho, the flea’s grumpy gatekeeper; Paul, an erudite haberdasher; and the Diop brothers, who sold African art and antiquities. Rips’s flea-market craze reached new heights when he acquired an unsigned and seemingly worthless portrait of a woman and became determined to know its provenance. His sleuthing revealed that the painting is an early work of postwar abstract painter and printmaker Sam Francis. He declares the portrait “a symbol... that the flea was something more than how others saw it.” Though some of this work is about the birth of a borderline hoarding lifestyle, Rips doesn’t suggest much about causes of his compulsion, nor does he offer more than a few obligatory quips about how his wife and young daughter live with it all. Still, his narrative is a wry and engaging ode to a bygone aspect of N.Y.C. culture.