For 4 a.m., the aisles were crowded with an interesting assortment of people. Euro trash, insomniacs, and a few better dressed New Yorkers like me. I recognized a few familiar faces working behind the tables at their crude little stands. Over the years, I’d grown to know some of these wandering salesmen well. Some, I might count as friends, but even those I knew best were probably mostly after my greenbacks. All of them, though, had told me how much they admired my impeccable taste. Little did they know.

I wandered for twenty minutes before coming to a table that I thought was abandoned until a chipped-tooth Native American forced his bulk out through the trailer door behind the table. I nodded politely and then put on my poker face to look through his merchandise, pretty sure that Chippy wouldn’t be hard to out negotiate if I found something worthwhile. I needed my poker face. Some of these vendors were con artists, and I refused to get ripped off by overpaying for a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine or a warped LP of Sing Along with Mitch!

Chip-tooth had two long tables sitting under his watchful eye. They were full of eclectic junk spread out cleverly without price tags. He wanted haggling room, which was fine by me. The smug look on the big guy’s face showed that he thought he had the art of the haggle down to a science, which was also fine by me. There was no way he was going to out haggle a psychometric. As long as I could downplay any real finds, I’d get a bargain and he’d be none the wiser.

I picked one end of the table to start with, took off my gloves, and began to run my hands across everything he had on display. A pair of wedding flutes. Nothing. A Legion of Doom lunchbox. Cute, but nothing either. A hideous collection of early eighties fast-food glassware. They didn’t trigger my power, but I knew they were valuable because the paint on them had turned out to be toxic. Still nothing. My confidence started to waver. Had I picked the wrong table? It had felt so promising.