When Omid Yamini was a boy, the Iran-Iraq war was at its peak. His family had a lot of weapons in the house, including an Uzi and several machine guns, and they were always readily available. This was in Iran in the late 70s, and if you were a preadolescent kid the only thing to do for fun was collect bullets. "You'd go to your friend's house and check out his father's guns and get a shell casing or two," says Omid from his apartment in Brooklyn, "but the majority of bullets you'd find would be on the streets. I became obsessed with it, and by the time we left in 1981 I had cases and cases of them."
When the Yamini family arrived in the U.S., Omid was forced to turn to rock and roll and drugs to satiate his obsessive-compulsive need to collect. He gathered concert shirts and Runaways paraphernalia and then graduated to any kind of drug he could get his hands on. "I've always been an extremist, but the problem with being that way and partying is that you end up dead." After finally getting the partying in check, Yamini decided to focus on one tiny element of his rock and roll fandom, the Runaways. Under the eBay name Obsesso, Yamini procured tens of thousands of dollars' worth of Runaways merchandise: posters, records (each of the four records was pressed in 15–20 countries), magazines, tennis shoes, shirts, belts, even a corset worn by the band's singer, Cherie Currie, that she gave to Omid on his birthday. "Please don't make me sound like a psychopath when you write this up, but I'm the biggest collector of Runaways stuff in the world. It's not like I'm a hoarder. I want to share it and let other people enjoy it too. I've got a book in the works as well as an art show, and I've even talked to people about opening a museum here in Brooklyn. I think obsessions like this are just a way to wrap your mind around the endless pile of stuff that our lives have become. As a kid in Iran, collecting bullets was our way of imposing a sense of order on a world we felt was out of control. It was a little different with the Runaways. It was a way of imposing order on a life that I felt was out of control. So yeah, whether it's been bullets, drugs, or the Runaways, I always need to obsess on something or I'll get overwhelmed. Plus, the bottom line is that the Runaways fuckin' rule!"
YASMINE SAHNI
For more on Omid's collection check http://www.runawayssecrets.com/.
