Moodswing - Sell Out Center

Unlike the usual gaggle of pussies who comprise my close friends — all of whom scattered like fruit bats at the first sign I might need help renovating my slum — I also have friends who are actual contractors. Take the very reliable Art, for example. If I need something done to a house, I usually call him and he is very reliable about coming over and telling me what is necessary for me to do it correctly. Then I’ll inform him that I have, maybe, $5 set aside to accomplish it all, at which point he very reliably falls over in a fit of gibbering laughter, pats me on the back and wishes me luck.

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Thus, armed with the knowledge Art has imparted, I’ll invariably set about slopping together a big, splinter-ridden Band-Aid of an attempt to follow his instructions, which in this case entailed the enlistment of my brother-in-law, Eddie, to come here and hammer on my rental house until it sort-of-kinda-quasi resembled, if you drank a six-pack and squinted your eyes, a house again.

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Take the kitchen counter. First, the former tenants must have used it to perform alien autopsies or something, because I have never seen anything so destroyed. It was cheap to begin with, just compressed sawdust cemented between two thin layers of laminate the color of bad cavities, but add to that the fact that somehow, I don’t know how, moisture had seeped under the encasement — and it must have been a lot of moisture over a long period of time — because all around the edges the counter was bloated, cracked and crumbling, as if the whole thing were lined with the tips of 10,000 giant-ass exploding cigars.

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“This will have to go,” Art said, tapping the counter, creating a cloud of escaping mildew. “No shortcuts here, Hollis,” he eyed me gravely. “I mean it.” His concern is warranted because he’s helped me renovate four houses over the course of our seven-year friendship, and I estimate probably half the work he’s done was dedicated solely to the undoing of various corners I’ve attempted to cut here and there, such as the time I figured foundation concrete would make a perfectly fine floor for my in-home office. So Art knew I was eyeing that counter as a beast to be circumvented, wondering if it couldn’t be fixed with some super glue and a stapler. Looking back, I must say I’m a little touched by his unrelenting crusade to make an honorable home restorer out of me.

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But I am who I am. So almost immediately after Art finished emphasizing the importance of accuracy when calculating the various corners of the counter, and how they’d need to be either cut professionally by a gemologist (practically) or come factory-cut in sections sold at Home Depot (both of which were options that would ensure the counter cost me more than its weight in cocaine), I hopped in my car with Eddie and proceeded straight to the Sell Out Center.

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First, I love the name of this place, as I never fail to find it apt as I approach it from across the parking lot, which is itself the size of a sovereign country but still not big enough to dwarf the gargantuan, seven-billboards-big sign announcing the Sell Out Center, which features the Mount Rushmore face of a ’50s housewife who is apparently orgasmic over the galaxy of salvaged furniture and appliances inside. The inventory seems to consist of anything that could be moved or pried loose from liquidated hotels, restaurants, industrial factories, disputed territories, religious compounds, Iraqi palaces and any other place that up and shut down suddenly under a shower of unrest, financial or otherwise. The couches are the kind you find in bank lobbies, each weighing as if they’d been stuffed with two or three concrete-encased mafia hit victims. Massive fixtures, mascots and signage hang from the ceiling on hooks like it was a butcher shop for dismembered Mardi Gras floats. Dusty, glassed-in shelves throughout the place showcase a gritty little population of kitschy oddities, which further gives the place a great, science-fair feel, like any second you’ll discover the fetus of a two-faced kitten in a jar of formaldehyde.

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I have never once bought anything there, and this day was no different, as everything they offer is so huge, and my need is never large enough to fit the inventory. Today, it turned out all the store had that could pass for a kitchen counter looked as though it came from the cafeteria of an old prison, and not even Eddie could have hammered that into shape. But still, I’ll use any excuse to go back there. There is just something about the place, the piled up pieces of other people’s worlds; the 50 identical armchairs, half with ripped upholstery; the rolls of putty-colored carpet as big as redwood trunks; the wardrobe mirrors stacked 20 deep, some broken, possibly having already unleashed an eternity of cursed fortune. It literally looks like a hundred little planets came crashing to stop in that very spot. I don’t think it hurts to become comfortable in a place like that, as you never know when it might be your world that will end up here. If it does, then that’s all right. Let people pick it over, let them climb the giant carcasses of your past. You are still who you are. You do what you need to do, day by day. You smile or you don’t. You sell out or you don’t.

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Hollis Gillespie is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”