Thursday, May 29, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Goldberg: Life for sale

By Tod Goldberg

If you've been alive for a considerable amount of time, you eventually wake up one morning and discover that your house is filled with useless crap. There are the wedding presents you never really wanted and then forgot to return, the cassette mix tapes comprised of songs about Gs being up and Hoes being down, the old magazines, the pictures of people you never really knew but who hung out with that girl, and books and pens and magnets and sweaters and nonstick frying pans and limited-edition CDs of Dramarama's first album and...well, you get the idea.

So it was for me a few weeks ago. I woke up that one morning, surveyed the mess of life and made a bold decision.

"Let's have a garage sale," I said.

"What?" my wife said.

"Get all this crap we don't use or want, toss it out on our lawn and make some serious scratch."

"People don't have garage sales anymore," my wife said. "They just put stuff on eBay."

"Too interactive," I said. "I don't want all that e-mail. Plus you gotta go to the post office. You know how I hate the post office. I'm gonna put an ad in the paper for next weekend and then you decide what size diamond you want from my earnings."

"You will make less than $200. Mark my words."

My wife had a good point about eBay--heck, there was some guy a few years ago who sold his whole life online and then went and visited his salt shaker in Indiana, his toaster in Montana, his toilet paper in Wisconsin. The thing was, I didn't want to have any contact with these people after they bought my fabulous collection of Blow Monkeys cassettes, I didn't want feedback on my timeliness or the quality of my product. I just wanted the stuff out. My experience with garage sales has long been that people like to attend them because it's fun to poke around someone else's stuff with freedom and then it's equally fun to barter the value of said person's life. There's no better form of degradation than offering someone 25 cents for a lamp.

After placing an ad in the paper, lining the streets with witty advertisements and collecting all the saleable items into the garage, I went about meticulously pricing everything. This garage sale would be more like a boutique. People would admire my selling skills. I'd get my own show on HGTV.

Promptly at 7 the next morning, I began hauling my stuff out.

"How you doing?"

I looked up from the Reagan-era boombox I was carrying to see a large cowboy-hat-wearin' man standing on my driveway. "Good," I said.

"This the garage sale?"

"Not for another two hours," I said. "I'm still staging stuff."

"I like to get in early," he said.

"I'm not open until 9."

"I'll wait," he said. He went back to his truck and pulled out a cooler filled with food and drinks and sat down on my front lawn. This is not good, I thought. I was pretty sure my HOA didn't allow garage sales; I was nearly positive it frowned on front-yard picnics.

I went back and forth for the next 30 minutes, bringing out clothes and books--what I thought were my glamour items--a few pieces of Target furniture, a stack of Tupperware my wife forced upon me, a pencil sharpener and a stack of old VHS tapes ranging from Basic Instinct (big Michael Douglas fan will sap that up, I thought) to The Last Starfighter (geeks love garage sales...). By the time I was finally finished, a good portion of my existence splayed across my driveway and priced to move, there were at least 10 other couples sitting on my lawn all chatting like they knew each other. It was 7:45.

"That it?" Cowboy asked.

"Yep."

The Cowboy whistled and everyone got up and started rummaging through my stuff. One by one they touched my old jeans, my tennis racket, the signed first edition of the Bible (a little joke on my part--and one my wife said would likely backfire) and one by one they set the stuff back down. Cowboy walked over to me. "Stuff is priced too high," he said.

"Really?"

"This toaster? You got it going for two bucks. I'd sell it for a buck. Same with that ladder. Books oughta be a quarter. Gotta know your market."

I nodded. It was only about 8:30 now and already it was getting hot out. In an hour, I'd have sweaty-ass syndrome. Cowboy surveyed the whole of my existence and exhaled. "I'll give you $150 for everything you've got."

"I was thinking $350."

Cowboy put his hand into his pocket and came out with a small wad of cash. "You'll be here two weeks before you see $350." He peeled off three fifties and handed them to me. "Deal?"

I thought about my collection of old Sega and Nintendo games. Would NHL Hockey '94 be safe? What about Tecmo Bowl? Would they get played? Did they even work anymore?

"Deal."