2008 Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins today cracked open an old courthouse safe stuffed with a bunch of stuff belonging to 1963 Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade and all the best goodies had Jack Ruby’s name all over them—most notably, a goofy transcript where Ruby and Lee Oswald yeg it up about rubbing out the prez:

Lee: You said the boys in Chicago want to get rid of the Attorney General.
Ruby: Yes, but it can’t be done … it would get the Feds into everything.
Lee: There is a way to get rid of him without killing him.
Ruby: How’s that?
Lee: I can shoot his brother.
Ruby: You mean the President?
Lee: Yes, the President.
Ruby: But that wouldn’t be patriotic.

Classically clipped dialogue from some Spillanean characters—the nightclub sleaze and the commie traitor; perhaps I’ll do my own Krazy Kat and write Mike Hammer into Dealey Plaza. It’s most likely from a failed movie script about the Kennedy assassination, explains the article, which seems reasonable since there was a movie contract signed by Wade alongside it in the safe. But a little better are the authentic Ruby artifacts—holster and two brass knuckles; class class class—which remind me of my own possibly authentic artifacts, all three of which are right this second serving as non-specific utility shelves behind me: Jack Ruby’s coffee tables.

A few years ago, I read a great book about (among other things) the goofy but adorable rural counties where I grew up: Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink, an affectionate look at the least-American (in terms of chronological purchase) part of the lower 48 that includes a chapter where author Tom Miller visits the Ruby estate sale and bids (unsuccessfully) on the title item.

Sentimentally inspired, I typed ‘JACK RUBY’ into eBay—no romance, but that’s the 2000s—and what comes up but Jack Ruby’s coffee tables? They were clunky, squat and spotty on the brass, and I got them cheap, and when I went to pick them up (in like Glendale, if I remember) the guy told me the story. He was a slim grad student with the necessary glasses and furrowed forehead, and as his wife (or committed female partner?) listened on the couch, he explained: his dad had worked at Ruby’s Carousel Club before the ‘63 insanity and had been a good employee, but raising a family on the Carousel salary made for lean times and nothing for luxuries, and so when Jack did a club remodel, he felt bad for his good employee and gave him the pick of the abandoned fixtures.

So these Carousel coffee tables became family furniture, and after that November surprise, family dad figured these were something he’d want to hold on to—the tables that once held ashtrays that the man who killed the man who probably killed the president once stubbed out his probably Cuban smokes in, and through such delicate molecular alignments we get to experience history for ourselves.

But (as I would learn myself) the Jack Ruby coffee tables weren’t really good for anything. They were a weird size designed to fit between overstuffed (and ideally magenta) sofas so cackling dancer girls could knock knees when they went to set down drinks, and they’d get sulky in boring households and refuse to play fair with the feng shui. So dad passed them to son, and son went to grad school and met a girl and then wanted to get some more space in the house, and son put an add on eBay and the cosmos put a certain book in my hand and a certain search term on my screen.

He told me that he didn’t have a way of authenticating them, though he remembered a book with a photo of Jack and a girl about to knock knees before the same tables, but he didn’t have a copy and couldn’t remember the title. I didn’t mind because I didn’t plan to invite anyone likely to dispute the authenticity of my conspiracy-connected furniture deep enough into my house to ever see the tables, and they were kind of charming in their unwieldy way, so I chucked them in the back of my car (where they knocked legs every time I smacked over a freeway bump) and took them home and instantly found nowhere I could put them, so I stacked them in the closet and left them there. And when I moved I stacked them in a new corner and left them there, where they currently hold other things I don’t know what to do with—monuments each to impulsive decisions, all the way back to their original owner.

Tags: , assassination, conspiracy, craig watkins, henry wade, jack ruby, jack ruby's coffee tables, jack ruby's kitchen sink, jfk, kennedy, krazy kat, Lee Harvey Oswald, mickey spillane, mike hammer, tom miller