kodachrom-lob4

It’s the mysterious Kodachrome slides that Anthony keeps flashing around our end of the bar. Up and down
they go, into the light and then back into the small holder now positioned temptingly close to my left hand,
which I notice I have begun tapping nervously on the bar.
I pick up where the bartender left off. “So . . . those slides. Can I see one?”
“Sure,” says my new friend proudly. “I think they are of old Montauk from the fifties. Some have dates. See
right here? 1956.”
After I take a peek, I put it in the bartender’s outstretched hand. He authenticates the scene. “Yep, yep,” he
says with authority. “This one here is the back of Gosman’s Dock, and this one is the Montauk Jetty, and this
one is of Lake Montauk.”
I can’t stop myself. “You know,” I say to Anthony, “if you got some of these shots enlarged, people out here
would buy them from you at a good price.”
“Really?” he says quizzically. “You can make prints from color slides? And you think they’re worth
something?”
“Sure,” I say. “If some rich New Yorker is willing to pay millions for a house on the ocean out here in Montauk
and the Hamptons, then what makes you think he wouldn’t pay a good price to put some nice shots of Old
Montauk up in his living room or den or office?”
I start to see glimmers in my new friend’s eyes and dollar signs circling above his head. He is beginning to
realize that maybe these old slides are worth more than a dozen fresh lobsters sold off the back of his boat
to summertime tourists. Sometimes good things come in small packages. I see his mind working toward this
conclusion.
Now I’m definitely not minding my own business anymore, I realize. There is no turning back. I’ve made a new
friend just by the mere fact of being here.
Many people call Montauk “The End”—it’s the last stop before the Atlantic Ocean. After Montauk, there is no
one else left to talk to. So we continue on.
“So what are you going to do with those?” I say.
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe you should think about selling them.”
“Right. To who, and for how much?”
I shrug. “To me.”
“You’d buy these?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“How much will you give me?”
“How much you want?”
“Five hundred.” Anthony is not a novice trader, I can tell.