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June 22, 2005
Meditations in a Thrift Store
Rupert Wondolowski
You are standing in front of a record display in a musty thrift store on the edge of the city. There is a drifting smell that moves on right before becoming disturbing. The wood pieces making up the record shelving seem massive and thick, like elementary school desks seemed to you as a child.
Next to you, feverishly flipping through the Ferrante and Teicher and polka albums is a thin nervous woman you once sort of knew almost twenty years ago. Little about her has changes. She still has that awkward but nervously energized adolescent-like presence that already felt too young for her all those years ago. She’s having a religious experience with these over-picked lps that feel like lifeless, dry taco shells to you at this time. You curse yourself for not having a coffee before coming in here or for coming in here at all. You suddenly feel the urge to be out in the woods away from all material goods, but the late winder sun is setting on slick gray streets outside and there’s always the Friday traffic to think about.
The store’s lighting has no personality, no nuances for you to gain some emotional traction with. It’s like a steady eye with no thought behind it, gazing and gazing at you.
The skittish woman next to you is now making gutteral moaning sounds and you see that she’s holding a Rick James album. Rick James, who was originally from Canada, was a R & B performer fairly big in the70s and 80s. It’s long been believed that the U.S. government unleashed him on American ghettos to spread the scourge of crack cocaine, processed hair and vile clothing, just as another Canadian performer, Leonard Cohen, was set upon the white hippies to deflate their revolutionary fervor and replace it with paralyzing romantic nihilism.
Even in the drab airless space of this culture graveyard, or maybe because of its drabness, Rick James’ processed hair jumps out from the record cover. It has a gellid, industrial squid presence that makes your stomach slide and your scalp itch. How did he maintain that chemical monstrosity through the day? How did it react to sweat? What foul marks did it leave on his coked-out lover’s pillow? Did it ever catch fire during a blurry marathon party, its burning smell like a cauldron of melted wax hobo feet?
A stevedore will tell you that the green bilge from the hold of a ship is the dirtiest substance on earth, that if it gets on your skin it crawls right through, but at this moment you picture the processed coils of hair gulping the bilge and sucking your flesh off at the same time, leaving you a quivering exo-skeleton.
It’s just as that earlier wrong smell starts to drift your way again and you start to wonder if it’s an olfactory hallucination connected to Rick James, that the nervous girl speaks to you. But when you turn to face her she has become that cute cheerleader from high school, the one from the other school in Howard County. She has the largest, most innocent eyes that shoot laser beams of goodness from behind large glasses that might have been at home on Wally Cox, voice of Underdog. She is holding an album of traditional Eskimo music and she asks you if you knew that Eskimos sing into each other’s throats. Your heart begins beating rapidly and when she turns to put the album back into the decaying wooden bin you notice she has the nicest ass you’ve ever seen. You blush, wondering if you’re evil for noticing such a thing about a young girl in a short, frilly pom pom outfit, but then you notice she’s around your age and that her smile indicates she can read your thoughts.
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
“Yes,” you answer. “I tried to eat at the Taco Bell earlier, but there was a huge fight going on about whose turn it was to the clean the toilet. It really brought me down.”
“Let’s go outside,” she says. “I’ve got something in my car.”
When you enter the battered VW buss there is a colorful spread of food waiting on the plaid couch covers, including steaks the size of catcher’s mitts and sparkling roasted vegetables.
As the two of you gorge on your feast you can see a carnival of red police lights flashing by outside and the bus sways as if on water whenever fire trucks come near.
Sometime during the double chocolate pudding the two of you decide that despite the over-chronicling of Paris in the 1920s, it was still the best place to be and that you would go there next.
“But first,” she says, ”there’s an out of control ice cream truck playing Grateful Dead music in Hampden about to crash into a backyard full of babies on blankets and I’ve got to stop it.”
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This piece first appeared in Shattered Wig Review #25. Learn how to get a copy.
Posted by Rock Heals at June 22, 2005 12:10 AM
