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One Last Shot
Next up was a two-burner camping stove offered in Amherst, Massachusetts. Kyle took it partly because the trader, a craigslist devotee, begged for the little knob ("I HAVE to have it. It would be perfect for the top of my espresso maker"), and partly because Amherst was on Kyle's way to Manhattan, where he was meeting friends. The stove then went west with Kyle and his mom to Camp Pendleton in California where they exchanged it with a U.S Marine for a small gas-powered generator.By then it was late summer and the offers were petering out. Kyle had a generator he didn't need, a game no one wanted to play anymore and an amusing little experiment that was dead in the water.
He was ready to drop it in November, but decided to give it one last shot. He spent a night, as he put it, "hammering together" a blog, which he called oneredpaperclip.com. In it he announced he was trading from a paper clip up to something bigger and better: a house.
Within 24 hours of putting the word out, Kyle got 120,000 hits, a vast improvement over the 20 or so he'd been getting before. In webspeak, his site had gone viral. The trade offers poured in.
The list reads like a dadaist garage sale: 10,000 lifetime memberships to a date-a-golfer service, 1,000 Glow Stick Powered Basketballs, a 1974 fire truck, a tour of Air Force Two, a partly burned-down house in Newfoundland, ten pieces of tile from one of Saddam Hussein's castles, ten hectares of land in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a set of 14-karat removable gold teeth, a three-foot shark, a dozen quarts of homemade sauerkraut, one slightly used engagement ring, a herd of eight cows in Australia, and -- his two favorite strange items -- a total-body hair removal (available only in Tennessee and Kentucky), and a full-body tattoo.
By June, Kyle's trades had gone from the red paper clip, the fish pen, the funny-faced knob, the camping stove and the gas-powered generator to ...
A neon beer sign and a beer keg Kyle dubbed the One Instant Party kit. He traded it to ...
A DJ in Canada for a snowmobile that was traded to ...
A staffer at a snowmobile magazine that flipped it for a snowmobile trip in British Columbia to ...
An outdoor enthusiast who offered a five-ton truck that was handed off to ...
A record producer for a recording contract that was passed on to ...
A "bohemian geek soul" singer in Phoenix for a year's rent in her duplex to ...
A waitress in Phoenix who offered an afternoon with her boss.
Huh?
Now, her boss was Alice Cooper. That's right, the snake-handling, ghoulish, shock-rock pioneer who is a Phoenix resident and the owner of Alice Cooper'stown, the restaurant where the waitress worked. "I can't believe Kyle's getting me to trade myself for him to get a house," said Alice, "but it's just crazy enough that I couldn't resist."
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