too good to keep for myself: California Goodwill and Abbey Road

three shots of scotch and this is what you get...‏

Don't act like you've never been there....these is down-trodden times....

So, I saunter into the Goodwill the other day like I own the place. I mean, I come from Kentucky, where you walk into a thrift shop, you see an old baseball card you know is worth $20, and you talk the 70-year-old woman behind the counter into selling it to you for 30 cents. It sounds cruel I know, but you only think so because I said she was 70. This is the way of the world though, and I'll expect no less when I'm 70, if I make it to 70.

Anyhow, my friend informs me that the way of the thrift-store world doesn't apply in well-cultured California, to where I recently moved -- the location of the Goodwill mentioned in the above sauntering.

So, I saunter into the Sacramento Goodwill. Of course, I am immediately bombarded with the smell of dusty old clothes and that sound of those plastic coat hangers with the steel hooks grating against metal as mostly women finger quickly through throw-away yellow and orange dresses from some recently deceased aunt's collection, looking for a find.
Looking for a find. Oh, I found my find -- mind you. And I was sure I had it cheap because I saw the store clerk behind that glass counter they put all those red and yellow shit-ugly bead necklaces inside -- like they're worth something.

I ain't even gonna waste your time with the "I ain't racist but" schpeal, because that shit is tired.

The guy behind the counter was a 70-year-old wrinkledly old black man with a raspy-voiced laugh that echoed harsh -- like you know he used to play a lot of poker -- but the dude was so old that I figured he didn't know shit.

So there it was. My find. Not much really I guess, but this is Goodwill, so you take what you can get. Things are supposed to be like $2. One gets excited easily.

Look it up on eBay. About $30 for an original, plastic-sealed, vinyl Beatles Abbey Road. I ain't even that much of a Beatles fan, but I know a find when I see it. (I already have one, just not in mint condition like this one).

So, it's got a $25 price tag on it. What, suddenly Goodwill got the Internet?? Is there that much difference in a mid-western Goodwill and a left-coast Goodwill (I heard that, "left-coast", on the radio today out here, bunch of wackos).

I called Old Smokey over and I'm like, "Is this an old price tag from somewhere else"???

To continue with the theme of sauntering, he actually did saunter over, with a swagger, kind of a bouncing on his hips in a dance sort of way to prolong the time it took him to get to the counter. He bounced enough to knock 20 years off of what I expected was his age. He did it just to make sure that I understood that he was no fool.

"Maaaannn....." he actually paused like this, the old shit. "Thaaatt's Abbey Raaaoooaaad."

What the hell, I said to myself. Why would a a crotchety old retired poker-playing black man know jack about the Beatles?

Well, he did. The find was done, and I was stuck while Kartika painstakingly slowly grated through those steel-hooked plastic coat hangers....Why, I don't know, but I bought one T-shirt that with a Camaro and a cop car that says "Smokey and the Bandit" on it.



~Sent to me via email from J March 2009