Chapter Sixteen: Thrifting

The best vindication for being yourself is building a life with someone who’s a lot like you, too. As homage to George Orwell’s paraphrased position in 1984: if two people agree upon something, it basically becomes reality.

We’ve worked hard to build the weirdest reality possible.

Cheap self-indulgence is just the icing on the cake when it comes to thrifting. After a ravishingly successful morning of shopping for T-shirts (including one saucy red number emblazoned with “PUTO” in the same stylized script as the Puma logo—complete with leaping cat—which I solidly voted down), we wander to the next thrift store to look for slacks. Dress pants are like a treasure hunt; if you’re lucky enough to have a thirty-six-inch waist and a twenty-eight-inch inseam, paradise awaits. If, like us, you’re neither, then the quest for the Grail is on.

David homes in on a pair of khakis. He checks the label, and holds them out to me hopefully. I inspect the fabric, and find a bunch of schmutz on the front. “Sorry,” he mutters, and puts them back on the rack. His tendency to vibrate with joy from every victory—and yet, take every defeat so personally—is part of why I adore him.

Everyone thinks that thrift stores launder everything that gets donated. I think this myth arose from the same person who stood by a crate of relief-effort food in Africa, and when asked if it was all fresh, leaned closer to the box and covered the expiration date. It doesn’t bother me one way or the other; we have a perfectly good washer and dryer at home. What we don’t have is a budget that supports paying $40 for one article of clothing, when you can get six for that much. Considering our style criteria consists more of “Hey, I did remember to wear clothes today, right?” rather than “Shit, do Armani and Versace really go?”—it works.

Rifling through the size-forties, I find a pair of pants that looks promising. Then, I notice the “dry clean only” tag, and keep moving. Another set of khakis looks great from the front, but on examining the flip side, it appears that the prior owner had his couch upholstered in sandpaper. The fabric was so frayed and pilled that I could have been killed walking past a piece of Velcro. After the briefest of thoughts of shearing it with a fabric shaver, I put them back and press onward. Deep down, I knew that they, much like some past relationships, were one bend-over away from catastrophic failure.

I finally locate four pairs that look decent and don’t seem to have a lot of wear. Since this particular store doesn’t have fitting rooms, I take the safe route and look only for fits labeled “relaxed,” “easy,” “forgiving,” “roomy,” “comfort,” or “fat-ass.”

David looks with dismay at a pair of size-forty-twos; he’s used to wearing a thirty-eight waist. I lean over and whisper in his ear.

“When I graduate up to forty-fours, I’m going to hand-stitch ‘Juicy’ across the back.”

We wander through the housewares, which is always a magical section. Something incredible can be buried under tons of ninety-nine-cent mundane, and it pays to rummage. I find a nifty Kirby vacuum with a broken fan that sounds like a gravel truck when it’s plugged-in. David finds a Mary Kay coffee mug that seems destined to be an epic gag-gift.

Thrifting is a shopping experience unto its own. In many ways, it’s far better than standard retail. In Walmart, for instance, you can’t plug something in and test it out to see if or how well it works. Instead, it’s like Russian roulette every time: you drag the thing all the way home, and savor the joy of driving all the way back when you discover it’s dead-on-arrival.

With thrift stores, there’s no doubt. You know what you’re getting into before it even leaps into your hands and makes its way to the cashier. Plug it in, fire it up, turn it round, inspect it from every angle. If there’s a chip or a scratch or a stain, put it back. Or, if you’re feeling industrious: haggle, and try to fix it if they’ll mark it down.

Thrift stores transcend petty concepts like structure and organization. Every Walmart is very much like the next; I could blindfold you, spin you around, and send you off to get wheat bread and bike tires, and you’d know exactly where to go. In a thrift store, though, half the joy is deciphering the floorplan, and indeed, the offerings. I’ve been to coal mines that were more regimented.

Some stores are fairly consistent; they have gondolas of merchandise and racks of clothes. Others specialize in some things more than others—they might offer just appliances and widgets, and have no clothes at all. Still others are great dump-bins—they sell merchandise by the pound, and they chuck it all into huge, open, canvas-bordered tables, where people pick through it and select the choicest items, the way workers might sort through crab at a processing plant.

We swing by the grocery store on the way home, then I toss our treasures from the thrift stores in the wash. I extract them from the dryer an hour later, to discover that one of my black pairs of slacks has two tiny orange bleach spots on the left knee. I shrug, and get a Sharpie marker, and dot over the discoloration.

This is what we refer to as pragmatism, when others call it morphing into white trash, or losing your mind. Call it what you will, it’s great to be with someone who chuckles when I tell them about the marker trick. I once dated someone who was so disciplined when he did laundry that he absolutely collapsed if you inserted the coathanger from the top of the T-shirt and stretched out the collar on the way down. I pondered why you’d ever hang-up T-shirts to begin with. Weren’t casual clothes supposed to free you from the drudgery of caring how you looked? Weren’t bacon-collars, unidentifiable and indelible stains, and wrinkles-galore the defining characteristics of comfort and relaxation?

Oh, well. In all likelihood, someone out there is ironing and hanging his tube socks in neatly folded pairs.

Chores complete, David and I sat in the cool of the air conditioning, and contemplated life.

“Knowing what you know now, is there anything you wouldn’t buy second-hand?”

We thought about it at length, and decided that only food and undergarments still fit the “must buy new” category.

My parents mourn the transformation of the American dream from predestined prosperity to drowning-prevention. I shrug; I’m not so concerned with the threads of life, when the fabric proves much more interesting. So long as we’re able to find ways to reach the finish line, then I’m not so concerned if it’s on re-treads. I’m more concerned if the day arrives that we simply can’t afford the tires.

In fact, thrift-store raids have yielded the opportunity to experience a lot of items I’d never willingly purchase new. Miele appliances, digital dishwashers, high-efficiency gadgets, and vacuum cleaners that cost more than $300 on the showroom floor. Is the experience the same as opening the box and inhaling the intoxicating new? Maybe not, but it must be better than not having it at all. We haven’t been able to convince ourselves that having something new makes it truly our own. In our view, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Even better than the ability to afford previously unaffordable things is the chance to wander down parts of Memory Lane that don’t have a living counterpart anymore. I load our dirty plates into one of my favorite dishwashers from Montgomery Ward, and play outside with a washer from W.T. Grant’s. The latter never even existed in my lifetime, but the chance to touch and connect with these objects lets my imagination spin a sense of what it was like to have walked the aisles of places that aren’t even around to be explored again in fallow form, much less resurrected.

David and I eventually turn into bed.

“I like this bedspread. Where’d you get it?”

“The estate sale place.”

“Awesome. It’s light, but keeps you comfortable.”

“Yeah, I like it too. It’s so damned hard to find a bedspread, when everyone makes duvets these days.”

(#firstworldproblems.)

The most satisfying aspect of life is the ability to shape it just so. The median age of our grandmotherly collection puts us in our sixties, but I wonder how many people think that everything you find has to be new to offer its full value.

Good thing that’s not the case with us. I love anyone who loves me for dabbing my clothes with Sharpies, and I love that I have as much to offer in his eyes as I ever did, even though I’m somewhat careworn myself.

I’m not quite bad as those khakis, though. Seriously.