Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

(continued from Part 1)

Follow up:

I wonder if Hoarders was on the air ten years ago, would I have identified Brad and Jiggles as hoarders? A special kind of hoarder. Retail hoarders. Compulsive about collecting items, reluctant to part with items for odd reasons, assigning way too high a value on things most people would consider trash. The fact that each time they moved the thrift store, History Repeating, the new location was instantly transformed into the same junk heap as the last one. Yes, Brad and Jiggles were basically a troubled pair of hoarders. They had no clue about the value of things. The prices were so, so incredibly high that it became obvious why I had been looking at the same stock for years. They hauled around the same jukebox, the same wedding dresses, the same wigs, the same bondage gear, the same chandelier, the same bald mannequins, adding more and more stuff and selling less and less of it.

In the first Allston location, I once spent a tranquil Saturday afternoon sorting through a big file box. I was in back, the box had been underneath a table, and when I pulled it forth I sat alone on the floor, street sounds muted by hundreds of dresses and coats rising all around me and my island of dregs from another person's life. The box was filled with random papers from someone's desk. Leases and school papers and receipts and bills. Part of me was wondering, why am I sorting through this box? With grime on my fingers and dust in my nose, I think I was hoping for a big envelope of cash or an historical letter from someone famous, maybe just a personal love letter. Where had the box of papers come from? Had it been tossed out to the curb? Was this a dead guy's old receipt book? What has this to do with me? When I was done I realized I could have spent that time at home, sorting my own useless file box of receipts and bills.

It was just a bunch of junk.

History Repeating held a lot of cool stuff, of course. One might say that's the problem, the cool stuff was junkbound, and digging it out was not for the faint of heart, or the allergic. On the table above that box of useless old bills was a pretty decent record collection, if you liked Barbra Streisand, and a decent number of Cracked magazines. Oh, and this was a common theme -- even some of the cool stuff was junked. There was an armadillo purse made from a real exoskeleton of an armadillo. But it was totally broken, cracked along the middle and missing its handle. There was a cool dragonfly brooch, but missing a plastic jewel. Item after item, junk -- but that didn't stop Brad and Jiggles from trying to get a high price!

Every time I was there I witnessed someone new being sticker-shocked, that is, had there been any price stickers. Emo boy picks out a cheap-looking white belt, Brad says, completely seriously, that it's sixty dollars. Emo boy puts it down and walks out. Old guy from the foam store next door asks about the end table cracked in two and stained, and Brad calls it "antique" and asks for a shocking $300. I myself paid twenty bucks each for a pair of wall decorations. They were very ugly, chipped plastic things, but they had hooks for hanging, and my plan was to use them as base for some of the Sculpy clay sculptures I was then working. I was going to paint these two plastic things, work them with clay and turn them into a stylized comedy/tragedy pair. Only later I was like, "Did I really fork over forty bucks for these crappy things?" I never ended up using them, they later went out with some junk in a cleaning spree.

Perhaps most amazing about the high prices was that they needed money. They were constantly struggling. Walking through the alley after work, I'd spot Jiggles on the pay phone outside Rite Aid. That meant her cell phone got shut off, again. They were many months behind in the store rent, I mean all the time, but the way they would tell the story always seemed to paint the landlord with a crazy brush. The first time, you might believe the crazy landlord story. But year after year, landlord after landlord?

Actually I kinda tried to help. I did, I made suggestions about the prices and maybe some ways to organize. I stopped just short of actually offering to come and help do it. It opened up some interesting conversations, though. Just before their second Allston move, in a rush of good intention, Brad said to me that "Next time will be different. Next time we're going to pay our taxes. We're going to keep track of inventory. We're going to get up earlier..." Basically he was painting a picture of a clusterfuck, a mess of a business that was run more like a tag sale than a real business.

You can't ignore the taxes. That isn't quirky or creative, that's just a terrible business practice, and illegal.

Their store hours, which the neighborhood called "irregular," were so because they slept 'til all hours, not because they "cater to the night crowd" as one person said, but because they drank too much.

You can't be six months behind on rent, and you can't run a business without bookkeeping.

The lack of price tags on anything was just lazyness, and also because they'd make up prices willy nilly.

Or sometimes a price would not be named at all. In the second store location, I had my eye on this crazy cool doll, clearly a handmade rag doll, but not made of rags. Made by someone talented. She was dressed in fishnet stockings and a showgirl outfit, and I could so easily see her sitting jauntily in my room. LOVED the doll, exactly the kind of thing you thrift shop to find! When I asked for the price, Brad said he didn't want to sell her in the store. He wanted to sell her on ebay.

ebay? This came as a surprise, since I had been urging both of them to raise some awareness about the store (and offered to help) by getting on Myspace and befriending all the local bands. They had no money so a real website was out of the question, but I explained Myspace and how it was free and could do wonders for their traffic. From those discussions I had long ago learned that neither Brad or Jiggles owned a computer nor truly understood what "being online" meant. So...um...ebay? You want me to believe you've started an ebay store? And even if you ARE listing that doll on ebay, so what? I'm right here, in person -- I'll pretend to click the imaginary "Buy Now" button, I got cash, look, see? I'd have pressed the issue if I had, for one second, believed the ebay story. Baloney. He just wanted to keep the doll.

They briefly had this guy working for them, but they fired him for...well it was a long convoluted Brad story, but distilled through the benefit of hindsight and knowing now what I didn't know then: they fired him for selling stuff. He sold some shoes for $20, and when Brad told me the story, he sputtered, "Those were hundred dollar shoes!" I am so, so sure they weren't. I saw not one thing in that store worth a hundred bucks, except the jukebox. Maybe the doll.

By their third location, I decided, sadly, that they were beyond helping. They HAD gotten a Myspace page by then, but whatever friend put it up for them (Cheryl or Stephanie or something) wasn't actually monitoring it. I had sent a friend request, but never was...NOBODY was, and when I asked them about it, perhaps to offer to at least be their Myspace buzzmaker, Brad and Jiggles, astoundingly, still had no idea what to do to even get a look at their own page. It was like the concept of "getting online" was the same as "give me a ride in your time machine." The Myspace page only ever got about twenty friends, and hasn't been updated in three years as of this writing.

Despite that rush of good intention just before the second move, there was no "different" next time. They didn't lower their prices, they didn't do any inventory control, they didn't de-clutter the store, they didn't clean or repair anything, the cat situation was still out of control, and I'm sure they didn't pay taxes or "get up earlier."

I only stopped in that third location a handful of times. It was just too depressing. They closed again in August of 2008, and I didn't stop in to say goodbye. There wasn't a lot to say. Had they been able to draw a distinction between shit and shinola, Brad and Jiggles would have been owners of a store half as full and five times as interesting. People love thrift, vintage, gently-used. Keep the Bakelite, toss the towering stack of Boston Globes. Keep the gowns and costumes and jewelry, toss the swizzle sticks and broken appliances. They'd bounced back before, but how many times can you convince yet another landlord to let you cram their property with truckloads of pee-smelling, dusty crap that you think is treasure and therefore, effectively, can't part with?

I think about them a lot. Like whenever I pass by the fourth and probable last location of History Repeating. A consignment shop took over the space and has been thriving. I think about them when I'm further down Brighton Avenue where the third location was -- the wall was knocked down and the college bar that had been their neighbor expanded into where History Repeating used to be. I think about them even further down Brighton Ave, where the second location used to be, but there's been so much turnover on that end of the avenue that I have trouble remembering which space they'd occupied.

I think about them and feel a mixture of remorse, or maybe it's regret, and I don't know if it's regret for not sticking by them as they desperately performed their troubled dance of self-sabotage, or something else. Maybe simple nostalgia, for that very first location, back in Cambridge. Nostalgia for my own younger-self, even, walking home past the mysterious no-name store that I didn't go into at all. When the glittering beacon was as good as it could get, a stage set a split second before the overture begins, everything visible is shiny and waiting in the future, and there's only possibility.