Skip to content
cheap adobe dreamweaver cs4 where to buy quicken 2010 buy windows 7 for cheap cheap microsoft office 07 when can i buy microsoft office 2010 windows 7 price upgrade autodesk mudbox best price buy windows 7 in bulk quickbooks enterprise 9.0 price cheap photoshop cs3 cheap adobe cs3 master collection 3ds max pricing buy microsoft office activation key buy fl studio 8 xxl cheap microsoft mappoint 2006 europe purchase microsoft expression studio 3 buy pagemaker 6.5 download wavelab download abbyy finereader 8 office 2007 price list purchase windows 7 upgrade student cheap microsoft office software cheap windows vista ultimate buy wordperfect 11 cheap adobe indesign cs4 adobe cs4 design premium download buy photoshop cs4 extended buy office 2007 key buy adobe photoshop elements roxio copy & convert 3 purchase windows xp media center edition 2005 buy microsoft office ultimate buy fl studio 8 xxl office 2003 for sale buy office cheap buy windows 7 tablet purchase windows xp professional 64 bit buy windows 7 new zealand propellerhead reason 4 mac price buy office 2007 licence online corel photoimpact download purchase windows xp sp2 turbotax 2008 discount download autocad mechanical 2009 best buy paperport professional 12 get parallels desktop 4.0 for mac windows 7 ultimate price uk cheap dragon naturallyspeaking 10 cheap windows 7 canada buy corel painter 11 microsoft office 2007 price singapore download adobe contribute cs4 buy windows 7 family license uniblue registrybooster 2009 price buy access 2007 only buy word 2003 buy photoshop elements 6 buy office 2007 standard roxio creator 2009 download purchase windows xp buy microsoft autoroute buy adobe font folio download streets and trips 2009 purchase microsoft vista buy office 2008 download burnaware professional price purchase windows 7 starter edition purchase archicad 13 download avanquest powerdesk pro 7 microsoft office price malaysia microsoft office 2008 discount coreldraw x4 mac windows datacenter license cost buy dvd ripper platinum 5 buy microsoft office 2003 pro where can i buy cubase sx3 buy streets and trips 2009 windows vista 64 bit purchase buy microsoft frontpage 2003 purchase vista 64 bit download dvd ripper platinum 5 buy windows 7 business cheap mcafee total protection 2009 abbyy finereader 9.0 express edition buy windows 7 as a student buy windows 7 for students price photoshop price tag tutorial adobe framemaker price adobe contribute cs4 mac autocad electrical 2009 download buy roxio 2010 pro windows 7 price australia buy adobe illustrator cs3 microsoft windows 7 price india windows vista price in rupees buy microsoft word 2003 download purchase windows xp disc sony acid pro 6 download buy acronis disk director suite 10 buy outlook 2003 buy matlab 2009b windows 7 discount nhs buy illustrator for mac buy pdf converter buy microsoft office professional 2007 buy microsoft office word 2007 product key cheap windows 7 home premium buy adobe illustrator cs2 buy windows xp for parallels cheap windows xp license coreldraw graphics suite x4 for mac buy cs4 mac windows 7 price point purchase windows 7 cd key buy office 2010 professional cheap propellerhead reason 4 mac windows 7 price list in india where can i buy ms office 2003 buy vista 64 bit buy windows 7 educational sound forge audio studio 9 price cheap adobe photoshop cs3 inventor lt 2010 download microsoft works download buy sony sound forge 9 download final cut express for mac buy windows vista dvd purchase windows xp license key windows vista download buy autocad architecture 2008 download microsoft mappoint can i buy microsoft office online buy adobe photoshop cs3 cheap cheap norton 360 3.0 quickbooks enterprise cheap purchase windows 7 now cubase 5 download photoshop cs4 prices cheap corel draw x4 buy premiere elements 7 cubase 5 buy online inventor professional 2009 download microsoft visio download microsoft office 2003 sale buy microsoft office professional 2003 buy windows 7 uae buy microsoft streets and trips 2010 windows 7 ultimate oem best price adobe photoshop buy uk pcanywhere price purchase photoshop cs2 best buy quicken 2010 adobe acrobat discount code where can i buy microsoft office cheap buy microsoft office student version purchase windows 7 upgrade family pack windows xp price australia windows vista business 64 bit sp2 buy windows 7 downloadable adobe soundbooth cs4 download purchase windows vista online best price adobe after effects for mac buy acrobat professional cheap windows 7 for students autosketch 10 download windows 7 discount for college students download cyberlink powerdirector 8 deluxe cheap windows 2003 enterprise buy sony vegas 9 buy windows 7 touch pack windows 7 64 bit best price archicad 12 cost buy adobe acrobat for mac buy microsoft office 2007 download frontpage express best price windows 7 windows 7 pricerunner purchase windows 7 canada cheap intuit quicken rental property manager 2009 buy deskshare videoeditmagic 4.3 master collection cs4 trial microsoft expression download buy windows vista os ms excel 2003 download buy powerpoint 2003 online navisworks manage 2009 adobe after effects system requirements download ashampoo burning studio 7 final cut express 4 cheap buy microsoft powerpoint 2003 buy windows 7 from china buy windows 7 licence windows 7 price mumbai where to buy streets and trips 2010 buy photoshop canada adobe master suite cs3 demo buy guitar pro 5 mac buy windows vista business buy microsoft office xp professional purchase windows 7 license buy microsoft expression studio 2 buy captivate 3 microsoft expression pricing windows 2003 enterprise license cost autocad electrical 2010 system requirements buy windows xp disc buy adobe creative suite cs3 buy microsoft vista online buy windows xp guitar pro 5 mac download where can i buy windows 7 basic buy photoshop for mac buy microsoft office project 2003 purchase windows 7 ultimate (32bit) download 3d home architect software buy quickbooks pro 2009 download autodesk inventor buy windows 7 download canada download powerdirector 7 microsoft money deluxe download best price photoshop cs3 buy windows 7 in pakistan windows 7 price increase buy windows 7 home premium (64 bit) purchase microsoft access autodesk autocad price discount parallels desktop 5.0 for mac can you buy windows xp anymore buy adobe audition 1.5 disable norton 360 cheap wordperfect office x4 buy ms sql server 2008 buy windows xp 64 how much does microsoft works cost buy windows 7 on sale buy microsoft money plus home & business buy windows xp home oem mathcad pricing 3ds max design 2009 download buy norton ghost 15 adobe captivate demo buy turbotax deluxe 2009 buy microsoft excel 2007 buy ms office 2003 pro adobe cs4 price in india download 3d home architect deluxe windows 7 price full version buy microsoft office 2003 student windows vista 64 bit price buy microsoft office 2007 online purchasing powerpoint buy quarkxpress 8 norton 360 download purchase windows 7 product key online cheap quark software microsoft visio 2003 download best price adobe indesign cs3 buy windows xp product key online price photoshop cs4 cheap windows 7 professional 64 bit buy windows 7 license key buy autodesk inventor 2008 best price quicken 2008 purchase photoshop 7.0 purchase windows 7 oem license where can i buy windows 7 cheapest buy quickbooks pro 2008 after effects cs4 download buy adobe creative suite 4 design premium cubase 4 download full buy windows 7 sri lanka buy corel photoimpact x3 buy roxio copy & convert 3 best price adobe photoshop elements 8 buy adobe creative suite 3 for mac purchase windows 7 microsoft buy microsoft money deluxe windows 7 price kenya acdsee coupon code buy cheap adobe illustrator buy smith micro poser 7 windows 7 price list windows 7 price in canada dvd moviefactory 6 plus buy visio 2002 windows 7 pro deals cheap windows 7 full cheap autocad architecture 2010 windows 7 home premium 64 bit oem buy windows 7 home premium full buy vista license key windows 7 price thailand buy adobe acrobat writer buy photoshop cs4 mac norton ghost 12 activation key windows 7 price comparison oil price vista gadget buy windows 7 nigeria buy deskshare videoeditmagic 4.3 buy vista ultimate product key buy ms office 2010 download symantec winfax pro 10.4 cheap pixologic zbrush 3 mac after effects demo purchase windows 7 product key adobe flash pricing windows 7 pro 64 bit price buy adobe indesign cs4 best buy archicad 12 buy avanquest powerdesk pro 7 windows 2008 enterprise download microsoft streets and trips 2010 best buy buy flash cs3 microsoft office discount coupon purchase powerpoint buy windows xp harvey norman buy windows 7 system builder buy ms visual studio 2008 adobe contribute cs4 for mac buy photoshop elements 7.0 buy adobe indesign mac buy microsoft office for windows 7 where to buy windows 7 australia buy windows 7 hong kong norton ghost price propellerhead reason 4 buy windows 7 price philippines acdsee photo editor download buy visual studio 2003 purchase windows vista licence cheapest windows 7 ultimate full version windows 7 price hk adobe cs3 design premium download purchase microsoft office home and student 2007 adobe premiere elements 8 cheap best price windows 7 home premium nuendo 4 download full windows xp price walmart cubase sx3 buy adobe cs4 web premium demo powerdvd 8 download buy office 2007 online download buy windows vista installation disc cheap windows 7 college cheap microsoft word 2007 buy quicken 2006 best price corel draw 11 mac buy microsoft project 2003 buy indesign cs2 buy windows vista singapore buy microsoft outlook 2007 online

Sundays at the Norton flea Market (Part one)

flea

By Chris Osborne/Citylights

 

It is the first Sunday of April, opening day.  I must get to the flea market before dawn.  If my car is not the first one in the parking lot, I feel I have already missed the best stuff.  I tell myself this is a ridiculous feeling.  It doesn’t help. 

In the dim light, I can just make out what looks like bears looting a campsite fumbling with furniture, and pawing through boxes. 

I park the car and pull from the backseat my broken-in black leather coat bought at Goodwill and the brief case with a sign “Maxfield Parrish Wanted” taped to the side.  Shrugging into the coat, I reach to flip my ponytail out from the collar forgetting I had cut my hair the week before, it still covers my ears but no longer falls to half way down my back.  I have been shedding the tribal regalia of the hippy life-style for a while now.  The coat, however, with its double breasting and epaulets, the military style ironically adopted by my antiwar generation, will be last to go.  I flop an Irish tweed cap on my head in an attempt to look countrified, although in the U.S. these caps are an affect of the Vespa crowd, and besides Norton is hardly the country.  Fifteen minutes from Taunton, Norton is a suburb, but I am a city boy and any more than ten trees looks like a forest to me.       

fleamarket-drive-iinJittery from several coffees poured thermos to mug, mug balanced on dashboard as I sped down route ninety-five, I grab my flashlight, and head to the last of the thirty or so rows where dealers who don’t have a permanent booth set up, providing the greatest opportunity for inexperienced new comers selling something for much below what it is worth.  I start with a quick run through to see who is back, who is new, and who got a good house call, all the while racing through lists of styles, categories, notables, and constituent parts, as though cramming for a final, starting with my specialty: illustrators.

Children’s book illustrators:

Pyle-Crane-Greenaway-Denslow-Parrish-Rackham-Nielson-Wyeth-Kent-Dulac

Magazine illustrators:

Phillips-Rockwell-Lyndecker-Anderson-Erte-Petty-Vargas

Poster illustrators:

Mucha-Livemont-Holvein-Bradley-Reed-Cassandra,

Furniture styles chronological:

Jacobean-William and Marry-Federal-Adams-Sheridan-Duncan Fief-Chippendale-Queen Ann-Gothic-Rococo-Renaissance-Aesthetic-Art Nouveau-Arts and Crafts-Bauhaus-Art Deco-Depression-Art Modern-Streamline-Pop

Types of Desks:

Tambour- kneehole-cylinder-roll top-“S” and “C”-Larkin-Eastlake

waldo-flea-marketNorton is a true flea market meaning that it is a mix of pro and semi-pro dealers, yard sales, retirees, hobbyists, part-timers, and cleanouts.  The last being someone with a truck who, for a fee, will cleanout an attic or basement, and stops at the flea market to sell some of it, before taking the remainder to the dump.  What they all sell, what they spread out on the tables, on the ground, on the car hood, or hang from the car mirror falls into generic categories and it all looks the same no matter where you are in the country.  The miscellaneous furniture: chairs, couches, desks, and tables; the mismatched kitchenware: dishes, glasses, pots, and flatware; the herds of miniature: cats, dogs, frogs, and penguins; the worn out libraries: books, magazines, records and tapes; the baby residuals: clothes, bassinettes, cribs and toys; the souvenirs of vacations, schools, holidays, and jobs; the crafts projects: paintings, pot holders, pasta wreaths, and popsicle stick lamps; the halfhearted New Year resolutions: exercise bikes, diet books, golf clubs and ashtrays; all evidence of a fervent Yankee-like frugality devotedly following that eleventh commandment “Thou shalt not discard anything useable.”     

impeach-bushThe difference between buying at an antique show and a flea market is that buying at antique shows is like shooting animals in a pen.  In the spring, however, fresh “merch” emerging from hibernation in attics and basements sniffs the outside air for the first time at flea markets.  Tracking down that which others don’t see, don’t know, or don’t recognize, competing with dealers over who totes the bigger gun of expertise and experience, this is hunting, this is rewarding. 

 I am looking for stock to sell at antique shows: Art Deco, the hip new collectable; illustrated children’s books, an expertise I picked up collecting Parrish; and of course, I hope add to my Maxfield Parrish collection. 

falling-fenceHow do I explain to people who don’t collect what it feels like to be a collector?  We collectors care for our collections and our collections take care of us, providing purpose and meaning.  Until they have experienced it themselves, non-collectors cannot imagine the gripping, tingling, drug-like rush of discovery, a spreading warmth comparable to returning home, encountering a lost love, or winning a fortune.  These comparisons may sound overblown, trite, and emotionally shallow in connection to a collectable, which is why they are so brief.  Once it is on the wall, resting on a shelf, or snug in a showcase, the tingling wears off, and we begin again to stalk the next trilling moment of discovery.  In the antique business we say, “Collecting is all about the next object.”

std-2I often think about how people accumulate, acquire, consume, collect, and just plain hoard.  I have rummaged in houses with narrow paths through mountains of stuff, stuff mortared with newspapers and buttressed with stacks of magazines, houses looking like the den of some burrowing animal or nest of some great scavenging bird.  I have been in shops that were little more than catch basins for the flotsam of some up steam torrent of household cast offs and the flea market provides an outlet for a bit of dross skimmed from the top.

Why do we want so much stuff?  Are we are responding to a misfiring synapse, filling voids in our personality, following a genetically imprinted primordial survival instinct, or over-compensating for a childhood of poverty?  I don’t know.  The nature of my own acquisitive virus is as yet undiagnosed.  But we fill the house, then fill the garage, then rent a storage locker and fill it, then forget to pay the rent on the locker, have a yard sale, or drop dead and it all goes cheap to someone who takes it to the flea market and sells it to people filling houses, garages, and storage lockers. 

I am twenty-five and I don’t know it yet, but today I will engage in one testy confrontation, experience one huge disappointment, and find one fabulous thing.  It will be a good day.

 

The Strange Nature of Lightning

 

th_treeName: Paul Horan

Years in business: 18

Name of business: J. Edmund August Antiques

Email address: teekphoto50@yahoo.com

Specialty: Antique photography, frames, Arts and Crafts furnishings, Art

 

“Own nothing that you do not believe to be either useful or beautiful” William Morris

 

The Strange Nature of Lightning

By Paul Horan as told to Chris Osborne

 It is a fact that in the antiques business, lightning sometimes strikes in the form of a fantastic good buy, and it is also a fact that we will test that law against lightning striking the same place twice and return to the spot hoping to be electrified by good fortune again. It was for this reason that my first stop, five AM, opening day I walked into a booth at Brimfield, a booth I had reentered numerous times since fortune struck there. At this point, I knew the proprietor’s name, John (not his real name);  he referred to me as “Rocking Chair” in honor of my purchase of a Stickley rocker from him, as though I needed to be reminded of that object sold to me at one tenth of value.

Scanning the booth for the umpteenth time, beginning to feel that a second strike was never to occur in this particular fishing hole, my eyes fell on a framed Curtis photo, “The Vanishing Race”, easily worth thirty five hundred dollars and an object well outside the jewelry and sterling John usually sold. Certain that I was about to land the score of the century, I attempted to get John’s attention precisely when, as though anticipating my request, he pulled the piece off the wall and to my surprise handed it to another dealer, saying in his thick Brooklyn brogue, “A nice picha of Indians,” as though offering him lemonade

The dealer said, “It’s a photo,” a little sleepy, a lot smug.

“That so?” said John

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S Curtis

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S Curtis

As the man inspected it, I tried not to press against his back peering over his shoulder at what was supposed to be my prize. Why did he deserve this luck, had he religiously returned to this site time and time again as I had?

I signaled John that I would like to see it next.

“Rockin’ chair, how ya’ doin’?” John greeted me smiling.

“How much?” The dealer asked, and I was afraid that all my return trips were about to be made pointless.

“Tree hundr’d ‘n fity,” answered John, again with uncanny accuracy hitting precisely one tenth of value. I clung to the remote hope that even though the person holding it was capable of distinguishing a photo from a print he might not notice the photographer’s signature beaming from the corner like a neon sign.

“Too much,” he said and my chest swelled, the fortune mine, and dutifully, pointedly, John pulled the photo from him handing it towards me, the dollar signs cascading before my eyes as I groped for it.

“The most I can give you is two thousand,” the dealer quickly added, the object pulled from my grasp, a gasp bursting from my throat.

John stepped back, blinked, shuddered, his expression nonplussed-plus. The dealer reiterated, “Two thousand is the most I can pay.”  More than I could pay, his offer brushed me off like a bug.

John replied slowly, precisely, as though speaking to someone who did not understand English.

“You_will_give_me_two_thousand_dollars_for_this?”

The man looked annoyed, even though his offer was low in comparison to the thirty-five hundred he thought he had been quoted; it was nevertheless in keeping with offers typically made at Brimfield and he appeared to feel his did not deserve to be laughed at. Testily he mimicked John.

“Yes_I_will_give_you_two_thousand_dollars_for_it_cash.”

John shot me a hard look that seemed to threaten the next ten generations of my family with watery graves if I said a word, then returning to his benefactor, John jolted as though touched by live wires, “Give me the money!” he shouted practically throwing the photo at him.

I watched the hundreds counted into John’s hand.

Later when I tried to overcome my disappointment at missing this sleeper, I soothed my feelings by ruefully dwelling on how the dealer screwed himself for not being awake enough, not having had enough coffee that morning, not paying enough attention to know when lightning was striking him. I also felt good for John; whenever someone makes a huge mistake, such as when John sold me that rocker, I think you have to be pretty mean not to feel just a bit guilty and seeing John come out ahead was as though he and I got squared. That it was at someone else’s expense was like, well, being hit by lightning.

 

 

 

Objects I Enjoy

171 By Chris Osborne/City Lights

My rule is this: three or more of something is a collection which means that I collect many things even though most of these collections started unintentionally. I bought a vintage plastic water pitcher at a flea market, round and deep red, and stuck it on a shelf in my kitchen. I later found a matching one in blue then one in green, yellow, light green, black, light blue, and purple. They line up on the shelf like a gaggle of chicks.

My tastes run to cheap because I don’t want to collect something that is a stretch to buy, I may feel compelled to sell when I need money, and because it is surprising when cheap objects have good design, as though the drudge at the factory whose job it was to crank out utilitarian designs suddenly had a flash of genius or a good day.

170 Above my collection of plastic pitchers, I have a collection of Czechoslovakian animal pitchers. I like looking at these although it has been ten years since I have found one I do not have, making them disappointing to collect.

Collections need to consist of things you can find; things so rare that years pass between discoveries will not satisfy most people’s impulse to collect.

As you might expect, as an antique lighting dealer, I collect lamps. I have a small group of modern-style lamps, a few stained glass lamps, and several “chunk jewel” leaded lamps I prefer to conventional stained glass because they are weird and macabre and resemble glowing coals.

174I collect Art Nouveau lady lamps, mostly American made. Unlike the realistic European lady lamps, which start out as sculptures by fine artists, American lady lamps are less artistic and, as it is with real women, a lack of sophistication is often appealing.

I also collect desk trays depicting women gracefully flowing with sensuous Art Nouveau curves.  These go well with the lady lamps, and I have always felt that there can never be too many beautiful women around.

Most people collect things at the beach: beach stones, beach glass, seashells, bits of coral, suntans, sunburns, and half-read novels. I narrowed my search to stones with a single contrasting stripe always looking for that one perfect stone with one perfect narrow line, I have one that approaches my ideal, it sits on my night table and gives me pleasure every time I look at it.

189Then there is my collection of Longwy porcelain, started as replacement parts for the porcelain components on 1880’s Aesthetic style gaslights, and now grown to more pieces than I will ever need. I have a group of glass by Maurice Heaton and brass statues by Frederic Weinberg, both picked up over the years with the intention of resale, and currently parked on shelves in my study.

I, like most antique dealers, sell things that appeal to me. What I buy, what attracts my eye, what holds my interest long enough to learn about it and all other objects like it, will have something in it I respond to; and if occasionally objects linger in my home for a while or longer, it is only understandable and unavoidable.

191There are objects in my home that have been with me for years, they may fade into the background, I may even forget I have them, thereby allowing me the delight of discovery all over again: a three-dimensional wood Dubonnet ad, a Frank Art striding figure ashtray, a poster by Livemont, an Egyptian motif domed glass desk thermometer, a lithographed cigarette tin, an oriental carved seashell lamp, a pair of Art Nouveau vases with women at a waterfall, all of which for me the pleasure of viewing never diminishes.

If I had to pick one object that surprisingly still continues to give me pleasure after all the years I have owned it, if you asked me to choose, and I made the choice without feeling guilty for making a poor choice, or fear of appearing naive, lowbrow, or unsophisticated, if I was not trying to impress you with my selection and only tried for a sincere response, I would have to say it is my glass boat lamp.

198It is a cheap dime store novelty, a single casting of glass representing waves and the hull of a boat, a slight remnant of red paint on the bow, a single chrome mast screwed to the top carries two cut out sheet metal chrome sails. The frosted glass has the texture of a Jujy Fruit, the color is a delicate pale blue, the cake frosting waves resemble a charging ram and dramatically carry the boat up and forward. When I look at this, I think about the person who designed it with, I assume, the intention of making several hundred if not thousands, although I have only ever encountered one other. I wonder, was its graceful design the product of the designer’s innate artistry such as those skillfully hand carved farm implements that hang on the walls of primitives shops or was there some feeling on the part of the designer that surfaced that day, resulting in his or her one inspired design of the thousands of uninspired designs he or she would execute in a lifetime, that moment of inspiration diluted by mass production, until time’s careless destruction left only one to be contemplated and appreciated and possibly understood.

It’s Not Just the Cats

img_6204Name: Jerry Gordon

Years in the business: 25

Shop name: Fun Antiques

Shop address: 2230 Mass. Ave. Cambridge, MA 02140

Specialty: Midcentury furniture

Focus: vintage watches, jewelry, musical instruments

Email: mnkbiz@yahoo.com

Web site: Not yet

 

“It’s Not Just the Cats”

By Jerry Gordon as told to Chris Osborne

 

House calls always bring the unexpected and this one confirmed my suspicions about what really goes on in the suburbs.

It was a Friday at Sadie and Company Antiques where Michael and I sublet space from the owner Elaine. We were working about as hard as two guys can sitting on a couch in the middle of the shop, chopsticks in hand, facing a coffee table covered in Chinese take out containers, when Elaine walked into the shop scowling at the realization that the first sight to greet any customer who happened through the door of her shop at that moment would have been the two of us kicked back on the couch blissed out on Kung Pow, a condition she had been exposed to numerous times over the last fifteen years but which she never seemed to become reconciled to.

“Jerry, come on, I got a house call and need a hand,” she said.

Over the phone, Elaine had negotiated a deal with Brad Hummer (not his real name) in Easton (moving to Vegas) for a bunch of Heywood Wakefield furniture. The only thing that would nix the deal would be if the pieces were not in good condition.

We arrived at a circa 1950’s ranch, two floors with a car port, and rang the bell. When the door opened the smell of cat pee, which must have been percolating inside for hours building pressure, rushed out at us, a smell so strong it made my eyes water. I had been in plenty of houses with over powering animal smells but this was the worst; it was making me light headed.

Brad waved his cigarette in the direction of the woman beside him, introducing her as his wife Sheri;  she waved her cigarette at us. Brad was short, skinny, mid-thirties, and probably always had thin hair and probably always made up for this by letting it grow long. He had one of those loose beards that just look dirty and strands of greasy hair ran half way down the back of his white tee shirt. Sheri had a good three inches and thirty pounds on Brad,  half the extra weight residing in two large breasts that were playing tug of war with the neck of her tee shirt: the shirt was losing. A herd of cats milled around their feet.

They invited us in and we all crowded onto the landing of the split level, stairs up-stairs down, waiting to be instructed where to go. The decision was made to start at the bottom and work our way up.  We marched down the stairs. 

Brad told us an uncle left him the house, contents, and a dozen cats, which got along just fine with the eight cats they already had. Brad informed us that the uncle had been a wrought iron welder and all the iron work in the house was created by him. A piece of the former owner’s handy work resided in the dining room surrounding the table and chairs with an ornate cage people like to refer to as a “Grotto.”

Stepping into the dining room my foot kicked something, sending the cats bounding after it, slapping and playing with what looked like a piece of hot dog but I soon realized was a dried up bit of cat turd.  The entire floor was covered with turds, and Sheri was clearing a path for us with her foot.

When I saw all the cats I anticipated that this was going to be a waste of time as houses filled with cats always have furniture either clawed to death or soaked in piss. The HW dining room set, however, was in good condition leading me to assume that all the cats had been inhumanely declawed. My true sympathies lying with the HW,  I breathed a sigh of relief in its direction.

On a house call, the people generally fall into two categories: those who are not ready to let go of their stuff and those who are. The Hummers fell into the second:  they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. They offered to sell us every object in the house: the grotto, the lawn furniture, the dinette set, and the dozen overflowing ashtrays.  Sheri offered one up to me as though it was dish of mixed nuts.

Satisfied with the dining room set we headed back up the open wrought iron stairs, also made by the former owner who had either died before its completion, or omitted installing a hand rail for aesthetic considerations. I hugged the wall, my vertigo increasing as the stairs curved up to the second floor.

The front room was enormous,  the full width of the house. At one end was an old Bell and Howell 16mm film projector and a screen. I like this early equipment and figured the old gent must have used it to bore guests with home movies, a stack of which still sat on the shelf underneath the projector.

“How long ago did you get this place?” I asked assuming it was recently and nothing had been changed

“We’ve lived here for about three or four years now,” Brad answered, causing me to wonder if the old guy would have been shocked at the way Brad and Sheri had turned his place into a dump.

At the other end of the room was a giant rear projection TV, a VCR on the shelf below, and a scattering of VHS tapes on the floor. In between these two generations of home entertainment was a field of mattresses.  Couches lined the walls facing the mattresses and prominently in the middle of the room was a tall undulating chaise lounge covered in orange velveteen. A ray of recognition slowly broke through the haze of cat stench clouding my brain and I looked again at the VHS tapes now recognizing their lurid flesh toned covers and, spinning around to the projector, I recalled the first 16mm films I owned. I stopped myself from blurting out “Orgy room!” Immediately images of Bert and Sheri entered my mind that I couldn’t get rid of fast enough. Suddenly I realized that Elaine had disappeared into the bedroom with Brad, her parting words being instructions to make sure the cats hadn’t “done” anything on the chaise, my concerns suddenly being what Brad and Sheri had done on it.

Sheri took me around the room, trying to sell me whatever I was willing to take,  flicking ash at the movie projector, the couches, the TV, the VHS films.  “You into those?” she asked. Her cleavage was winning the battle with her tee shirt, a little brown crescent signaling that a breakout might be imminent; I worried about where these offers were leading. I knew that Elaine wanted me to make sure that the cats hadn’t pissed on the chaise but there was no way I was going to turn my back on this woman or stick my nose into anything.

“How’s the chaise?” Elaine asked, finally emerging from the bedroom counting out the cash Brad had insisted we bring.

“Oh it’s fine yup, just fine,” I said. I’d caught a quick sniff when Sheri’s back was turned. I shifted my eyes side to side hoping to signal Elaine, who up to this point was completely oblivious to the room’s function.

“What?” she said screwing up her face, “its okay isn’t it?”

“Yes the chaise is fine,” I answered.

Elaine handed Brad the cash and she and I went back into the bedroom to get the set.

“It’s an orgy room,” I whispered as we picked up the bureau.

“Jesus, Jerry, is that all you think about,” she said.

“Check it out,” I insisted as we stepped back into the room. Passing through it Elaine got a good look around her eyes slowly getting larger, her lips curling in disgust.

Eager to get into breathable air and normalcy, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough, which even though the stairs had no railing and were more that a bit hazardous, we managed without killing ourselves.

Once everything was loaded, we said goodbye to the Hummers.

“Enjoy Vegas,” Elaine said.

“Oh I’m sure we will,” said Bert, “the swinging scene there is much better than it is here.”

Elaine hesitated, lost for words, I was once again chasing unwanted images from my head. “How nice for you,” she said with a warm smile, then getting into the van, “How nice for Vegas.”

 

He Who Laughs Best, Laughs Last

basket-of-lastsName: Robert Werner

Years in business: 18

Former president Antiques on Cambridge Street

Currently selling at: Bob Withington & Co York Me. and Acushnet River Antiques, New Bedford Ma.

 

He Who Laughs Best, Laughs Last

By Robert Werner

 

A few years ago my friend Rex E. Pough (also an antiques dealer) and I were driving from my shop to his workshop to pick up a particular type of socket wrench necessary to repair a cast iron table that needed adjusting.  On the way, we passed a lumber yard which was going out of business and sported a sign advertising a huge sale. There was hardly any lumber left in the building but in a corner were piles of wooden shoe lasts.  I inquired about the price and was told we could purchase the entire lot for $25 which we did.

Upon returning to my shop, we divided the lot.  On the following morning, I drove to southern Maine where I also sold my stuff in a small group shop.  I brought 10 of the lasts to that shop and the shop’s owner bought them from me for $5.  He said he would buy all I had for 50 cents apiece. On the next day, I mentioned this to one of my partners in our Cambridge shop and he also wanted the entire lot.  I sold him one bag of them containing about 50 lasts for $25.

wall-of-lastsA few days later, I set up at Brimfield where I thought I might be able to get $3 a pair however, I was only able to sell 22 of them for $1 apiece.  My Cambridge partner set up in a different Brimfield field the next day and didn’t sell a single last.  I called the Maine shop owner and told him I could probably sell him whatever Rex E. Pough, my Cambridge partner and I had leftover but now the price was $1 apiece.  He agreed so I bought my partner’s and Rex’s lots for 50 cents apiece, brought the entire lot, now containing 178 lasts up to Maine and the shop owner purchased them from me.

The following week, the Maine shop owner informed me that they were going to sell the entire lot to a dealer whom they called “the fat man” for $4 apiece.  A week later, they told me that “the fat man” would only pay $3 apiece for the lasts. Some time later, I was told that “the fat man” backed out of the deal completely so my Maine friend and his partner still owned them.  End of story!

 

How To Become an Antique Dealer: Collect Something

mpstars

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

I guess it was because we already felt different that caused the specific group of us to congregate on the Boston Common in the early seventies, most of us from working class families, and blue-collar neighborhoods outside of Boston. Some of us, as was my case, grew up on welfare. Whatever our origin, we came to the wide asphalt path that ran along Beacon Street to skate board, although not one among us would have been mistaken for an athlete. Mostly, we hung out.

It was here I met my first wife Deborah Johns. Deb came from the rough Italian blue-collar neighborhood of East Boston, wore only black, and made up her eyes Twiggy-like with dark shadows and drawn in lashes she called her “sticks.” In her high school yearbook picture, Deb’s long dark hair falls around her face, and she holds her mouth cocked in the skeptical smirk that I would come to recognize as her near permanent expression. That smirk and her constant use of the phrase, “Yeh, right,” were how Deb let you know that she never accepted anything on faith. Soon we were living together, and now domestically situated I needed to find a steady job, once again, turning to my old friend Chaunce.

At the time, Chaunce was working in a used furniture store in Brookline and, as we already had the experience of moving antiques together, I went to work with him.

The store overflowed with couches, chairs, dining room sets, and sideboards. Pictures of cow littered fields and thatch roof cottages crowded the walls, but among them was one that attracted my attention for its depiction of a paradise without manure and the possibility of farm work. In it, two large columns framed a view of a lake, rocky cliffs beyond. An attractive young woman lays stretched out on a patio in the foreground, a nude sexually ambivalent figure bending over her. This person might have been waking her up but the picture gave no impression that they really had anything important to do. Finding myself drawn to the picture I wondered why: there was a great deal of small detail which I liked, and deep rich color something I also liked, or maybe I had just been looking for something to become passionate about and found it in Maxfield Parrish. I bought the picture for three dollars.

It is a romantic notion that most people like to think of their lives as pivoting on a single chance event. The reality is that most of the people I know prefer to think of their lives as carefully planned. My life, however, has always felt like the result of the sorts of events that lead to the “what-ifs.” What if I didn’t take that job with Chaunce and never saw a Maxfield Parrish?

Chaunce pointed out an article in the paper about the guy who painted my picture, it said he recently died and the Vose gallery in Boston was selling the family estate.

I went to the Vose gallery. Seeing the oil paintings in the rarefied setting of a Newbury Street art gallery was somewhat intimidating although they were very nice to me and showed me their entire collection of about twenty-five Parrish oil paintings as though they thought I might actually be able to afford one. I should mention that the paintings, which sell for tens of thousands today, were as low as five hundred dollars, but then, gas was thirty-five cents, a Mustang convertible twelve hundred, and I typically lived on less than fifty dollars a week.

The gallery had a list of collectors of Parrish illustrations and among them was Horace Tailor in Brookline. I called and, like all collectors, he was eager to show me his collection.

Over the phone, Mister Taylor proudly told me he was eighty-two and when I arrived at the rambling Victorian house, a slight, energetic elderly man wearing a brown suit and bow tie answered the door. Fortunately he didn’t seen at all put off by my ponytail, long side burns, and informal jeans.

Inside, the house had the thick soupy smell of over-cooked cabbage, and from the hall, I looked into the living room, which was dark and brimming with heavy furniture, tall Chinese vases, and curio cabinets.

“That’s my sister’s room,” Horace said, then added as though it was all I needed to know, “She’s ninety.” I would never meet her, but at times, thought I detected her presence in the house.

Horace steered me around towards the dining room and into an entirely different environment, this one crowded with hundreds of stuffed birds. Like the final scene of Hitchcock’s movie when the birds stop attacking as mysteriously as they began, these birds sat silent and watching as I entered the room. In dense congregations, small brown birds watched from glass cabinets, large speckled ones spread wings on top of the cabinets, and other birds huddled together beneath the cabinets, tables, and chairs. I gawked like a tourist in Times Square. Horace explained that he was an ornithologist and during the Depression when he gave talks, rather than money he accepted birds as payment.

I was considering saying something clever like, “Too bad, you couldn’t eat them,” as I reached out to touch one.

“Don’t touch them,” Horace gently warned with a wink. “Some of the older ones are filled with arsenic powder and we don’t want to stir that up now do we?”

Dust covered everything in the room. I tried not to inhale.

Occupying the rooms along with the birds, there were old toy trucks, stuffed animals on wheels, and on the dining room table sat a huge model of a manor house constructed of hundreds of individual clay bricks, lintels, and arches. I wondered if I was observing a second childhood although once I knew Horace better it felt as though he had never quite advanced beyond his first.

Horace showed me around the house where evidently the family never threw anything out. Tufted, tasseled, crenulated, and laced, the sumptuous detailing of the Victorians was evident on every surface. Curtains thick as blankets hung from fat wood rings around speared end rods and on the walls, the faded cabbage roses were so plump they seemed to bulge. This décor, so reminiscent of ancient grandmothers, may have been where I detected the presence of Horace’s sister, in the chairs with rounded backs, their fringe brushing the floor, and in the threadbare upholstery, which, like psoriatic elbows, exposed a matrix of tiny veins.

In what I assumed was simply more pride of personal history Horace showed me the nursery where, “I and all my brothers and sisters were born,” but I think he wanted me to have my first glimpse of Parrish since, around the top of the wall of the nursery, in what was one of the weirdest product placements I have ever seen, was a Maxfield Parrish Fisk Tire advertising border, depicting a witch-like Mother Goose in a black cone hat, astride a goose flying through a tire. This design repeated about fifty times around the room. I was eager to see the collection.

Horace’s collection was in a small adjacent bedroom. Haphazardly piled on the floor, on the bed or leaning against the wall, the collection was neither displayed nor protected. Only a couple of framed prints actually hung on the wall.

Parrish painted in minute detail and used dramatic effects of color and light. He painted with so much deep rich blue that in the twenties people called saturated blues, “Maxfield Parrish Blue.” In the movie Top Hat, Fred Astaire says of someone’s black eye, “It looks like Sunrise by Maxfield Parrish.”

Parrish did one particularly blue picture called “Stars,” a copy of which hung on the wall of the bedroom, and was the first thing I saw when entering. At over two feet tall, it was one of the largest of the framed prints, and the overall impression is of only one color, deep blue. In the center, a nude woman sits on a rock, the rock jutting out like a hand gently holding her aloft. She holds her knees up to her chest. A still ocean is in the background and a pale horizon almost cuts the picture in half. It is the moment when the sun passes below the horizon and as they say, “the stars come out.” At the top of the picture are tiny brilliant white stars against the darkest blue sky and the young woman looks dreamily up at them. I found it romantic and sensual. I wondered what the men and women of the prudish twenties thought of it. I supposed, to the intellectual crowd of the time who would have been declaring allegiance to Picasso and Braque, this was just commercial piffle. I knew this would be the judgment of my artier friends, such as Chaunce. I guess I was more easily impressed, and because of the simplicity of the emotional message and composition, I became absorbed in the picture in a way no work of art had ever affected me.

Horace perched on a chair while I went through everything. He did not seem to care what I picked up. While I foraged, he kept up a breezy monologue of what things were, how he obtained them, and what he knew about Parrish and the gossip about his relationship with his model.

In that room were all of Parrish’s characters, the knaves and jesters, portly jovial kings and fawning attendants, beautiful women in flowing gowns and young men in jaunty feathered caps along with Parrish’s signature nude and semi-nude women beside streams, below foliage and under starry skies. As though attending a language immersion class in a foreign country, it was both thrilling and intimidating to me.

Maxfield Parrish illustrated twelve books, over two hundred magazine covers, and did ads for Der-Kiss perfume, Swifts Ham, Fisk Tire, Hires Root Beer, and Mazda Light bulbs as well as others. He did oil paintings, such as “Stars,” for publishing houses that reproduced the paintings and sold them as “Art Prints.” Parrish was paid commissions from the sales of these prints and “Daybreak,” that first one I purchased, was the most popular, it alone ultimately making Parrish over a million dollars in commissions. Horace had almost everything, some things in multiples.

The most extensively illustrated book by Parrish is a children’s play called “The Knave of Hearts.” Horace had enough copies to launch a production.

One advertising commission Parrish undertook was a series of fourteen calendars for Edison Mazda light bulbs. The calendars had the store’s name printed on them and came in two sizes, a very large one to hang in the store, and small ones to be given away free. Horace started collecting Parrish in nineteen-fifteen when he could order the large calendars through the mail and pick up the small ones at stores for free. He had two complete sets of the large still in their mailing tubes and fist-full’s of the smaller.

His collection included an unused Hires Root Beer billboard five feet high and eight feet long. This was folded in a mailing envelope and he had two of them. I think it is very likely he had the only two of these in existence.

The hard part for me was that everything in the room was for sale and I didn’t have very much money.

Over the next two years I made three trips to Horace’s collection and purchased some very rare things such as a Hires Root Beer window card since I had no place to display the billboard nor the three hundred dollars to buy it.

Part of the point of collecting, however, is to find things on your own, not to mention cheaper, and the competitive spirit that drives all collectors took hold of me. I hit the bricks or in this case, the muddy fields of the Norton flea market.

Something I Pulled From the Trash

img_6041 

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

When I was eight, my mother sometimes brought me along to visit a friend of hers in the Back Bay. While we were there, I would become bored, especially when I lost the attention of everyone in the room, and I would urge my mother to let me play in the alley behind her friend’s apartment. At midday the alley, running parallel between Beacon and Marlborough streets,  was dark, spooky, and magical, containing ancient ruins of brick walls and battlements, and decrepit sheds, like homes for trolls, in glades of sickly weed trees. Even the parked cars looked to me like sleeping dinosaurs. I don’t know what my mother thought I did in that alley, and probably would not have approved had she known, I spent most of the time smacking trash barrels with sticks, bringing the rats within up to the edge, where we contemplated each other with feral apprehension for a few twitchy seconds before they leapt and scurried off.

One time, when poking through the barrels I found the real bones of a complete human arm, the bones held together with nuts and bolts, the fingers strung on some kind of fiber. Staring at it with trilling apprehension, half expecting the rest of it to come looking for its arm, I reached in picking it up delicately between two fingers, then gripping it like a sword swung the bones in an arc, making swooshing sounds between my teeth, Sinbad slaying armies of the undead, the arm flopping and flailing. Slipping back inside the apartment I crept up on my mother and her friend and groped at them with my new appendage. Not frightened at all, instead looking curiously at this object, my mother asked to see it. I handed it over, my happiness that she appreciated my discovery quickly replaced with fear that she might not give it back, half its attraction being the sense that it shouldn’t be in my possession. Had I considered that my mother would not be any more likely to let me keep this thing than she would be to join me in terrorizing rats, I might have hidden it to be retrieved the next time I came, but I would have been wrong. She looked the bones over for I assumed remnants of rancid flesh, then owing to her tendency towards casual parenting, a tendency that allowed me into the alley in the first place, she miraculously handed it back. I marched off with the arm holding it high against unseen enemies, perhaps slightly disappointed by her approval of it.

I played with the arm and showed it off for a week or so until another friend of my mom’s offered me fifty cents to sell it to him. When I sold that precious object for the equivalent of two weeks allowance, for the very first time in my life I experienced the deep, penetrating, profound, and abiding feelings of loss, stomped under the jack-boot of cash. As I wrapped my fingers around those two shiny quarters, I was certain I had the better end of the deal and was eager to return to the alley to see what else I could find and sell. The first thing I ever sold I pulled from a garbage can.

The First Antiques I Ever Sold Were Stolen

img_4605

  By Chris Osborne/City Lights      

 

 

         The first antiques I ever sold were stolen. It didn’t feel like stealing at the time but looking back I have to call it stealing regardless of the circumstances. The incident occurred in my junior year at Brookline High School in 1966.

         My mom moved us to Brookline in 1958 when I was nine.  We moved from a cramped basement apartment in Boston and the new one was accessed not through the front door but by a narrow path to the back running alongside the old brick apartment building.  Owing to the steep incline of Summit Hill where we now lived, my bedroom windows were fifteen feet above the ground so it felt as though we had moved up in the world even though we were still technically in the basement.  The path continued past our place down a steep weed covered hill to the top of a twenty foot retaining wall, the only thing preventing someone from stepping right off that wall to certain severe injury was a pot marked concrete balustrade.  To the left a set of wide crumbling concrete steps led down to the base of the wall and an alley where the anemic light from an antique streetlamp made it a place you’d expect to find a body.

          This neighborhood was also cool because right across the street from us was spooky abandoned house.

            Its paint grey and peeling, the windows shaded, supported in the front by a tall double stair of fat round field stones, flanked on one side by a steep driveway to a decrepit carriage house in the back, the house looked bent, blind, and broken. I snuck into the house for the first time when I was in the eighth grade. By then practically every kid in the neighborhood had been inside and seen all the old stuff there, including the bowling alley in the basement. It wasn’t until I was in high school that a plan to loot the house took shape.

My accomplice in this would be my best friend Chaunce Huntington Powers the Third although the name never seemed to do him any good. I took Chaunce into the house and when I did, he got very excited about this old desk.

“Look at the grain and the detail on the carvings,” he said running his finger over the tooth of a carved lion’s head drawer pull, looking the desk over with a lust usually reserved for cheerleaders, adding, “These people had money.” Intuitively Chaunce had sized up the situation.  The house was big and had servants rooms, and he assumed the people who lived there could afford good things.  We wondered around the house for a while, taking inventory of the other furniture: a wicker couch and chairs, a big colorful rug, and a bookcase with glass doors.  As we were leaving Chaunce said something that had never occurred to me, “I think I know someone who might buy this stuff.”

Chaunce lived in the South End and hung around an antique shop owned by a dealer named Will Chandler. Every day Will’s shop on Columbus Ave spewed its contents onto the wide sidewalk in front from the mountain of junk inside. Rich white retail from Beacon Hill and the Back Bay would not venture into this mostly blue-collar and black neighborhood to buy from Will but the antique dealers did, because many of the townhouses of the South End were unoccupied and abandoned and scavengers brought Will the things they found in these houses. Therefore, among the broken furniture, chipped glass, and sweaty couches in Will’s shop there were often things of unexpected quality or so Will told us.

Chaunce told Will about the house in Brookline and the things in it and Will offered to loan us a van so we could bring him the stuff, guaranteeing he would buy it all from us at fair price. We would have to take his word about the fair price part. We all agreed that no one cared about the place or its contents so it would not really be stealing. Nevertheless a black man taking furniture out of an abandoned house in Brookline would attract attention, where a couple of white teenagers would not, particularly if we didn’t look suspicious while doing it. One o’clock in the morning seemed like a good time.

One Saturday, when my mother was away, Chaunce parked at the foot of the stairs in the alley behind my place. I’d put on dark jeans and a black turtleneck but was reluctant to put shoe polish on my face thinking it would be difficult to wash off. Chaunce arrived in light pants and shirt so I didn’t bother to ask his opinion on the shoe polish. We took the path everyone used to get into the house up a tree, across the kitchen roof, and through the window to the stairs. The desk was our first objective.

With great stealth and cunning, we carried the desk to the front door, opened the door, and tilted the desk it on its side. The desk drawer hit the floor with a bang loud enough to be heard in Methuen. I froze. Before I realized it, Chaunce was half way down the steps, me scrambling over the desk after him, sprinting across the street, ducking into the shadow of my building backs against the wall, breathing hard, listening for sirens.

When we were certain that no one in the neighborhood had called out the National Guard, we returned to the desk abandoned in the doorway. Replacing the drawer, we hustled the desk down the steps, across the street, along the path past my entrance, down to the wall and down the wide steps to the Mustang convertible parked beneath the street lamp in the alley. Mustang convertible?

“Oh wow man, this is, like, not very cool,” I said.

“Will couldn’t get a van,” Chaunce explained. “It’s his girlfriends’ car. He said we better not fuck it up.”

I wondered if she knew we had it.

The top was down so we flipped the desk over, legs in the air, and rested it across the backs of the seats. Chaunce may or may not have had a licence but I didn’t know how to drive, so I held the desk while he drove to the shop where using the key Will gave us, we dumped the desk.

The wicker chairs and couch went next, got delivered, and we returned for the bookcase.

We had been looking at the bookcase all night wondering what the chances were we’d be able to move it. It was about six feet long, five and a half feet tall, and had three sets of hinged glass doors. We heaved, but lifting it was about as likely as two beauty queens lifting a tractor. I snuck back to the apartment and got two screwdrivers to remove the glass doors. Sure enough, with the doors off it was much lighter and, humming that tune about the little green ant, we muscled the bookcase as far as the hall where, for all I know, it still sits.

We used the screwdrivers to remove a set of hinged windows with clear leaded glass that were high on the wall between the dining room and kitchen, then rolled up the Oriental rug, and headed back in town for the last time.

The sun was coming up when we got to the shop. We waited until close to twelve for Will to show. He took the keys to the car and told us to bring the stuff outside, which we did while he inspected the car tisking and rubbing at smudges in the upholstery. She definitely did not know we had it.

Our haul on the sidewalk, we waited while Will looked it over, Chaunce and I glancing at each other silently speculating what sort of fortune he would give us.

“Well the desk is nice,” Will began letting the “but” hang for a moment. “But it would be worth a lot more if it was a partner.” We looked at him. “They’re wider and have a drawer on both sides,” he explained. In which case we would have dumped out a drawer no matter which direction we tilted it, I thought. What we didn’t realize was that with this comment Will was dialing our hopes down. Years later, I would do the same thing because people always hope for more than they are going to get, so you have to find a way to tell them that the item is less than it could be.

Will looked over the wicker. In the sun I could see the pads were dirty and torn, the wicker broken;  they didn’t look nearly as good as they had in the house where they seemed to belong.  Will pointed these things out.

“Not nearly as old as the desk,” he said, pulling open the broken seam of a pad and fingering a snapped bit of wicker. “Now what am I going to do with these?” He asked picking up one of the set of four glass windows taken from the dining room. “They don’t fit nothing.”

We rolled the rug out for him. “Machine made,” he said.

Will pulled out a stack of bills and started counting. There is a saying in the antiques business that when you are making an offer, “Let them see the money.”

“I’ll give you one-seventy-five for the lot,” Will said, shaking his head as though he was making the biggest mistake of his life, “that’s generous, the desk’s the only thing worth anything. I won’t make much on it. I wouldn’t have bothered with all that other stuff.”

“How about we keep the rug?” I asked. It was big and red with a fancy medallion in the middle. Letting it go cheap just didn’t seem right.

“One-fifty then,” Will responded shoving the cash towards Chaunce.

I looked at Chaunce, “You can use it, too,” I said.

“No problem,” he said handing me my half.

Seventy-five dollars each was a lot of money even though we were disappointed it wasn’t ten thousand. At the time, an ounce of pot cost fifteen dollars although it would be another year before I would buy my first one.

The rug covered the floors of various rooms rented over the next several years. These were years I took a lot of drugs and had a lot of jobs as I tried to find the job that stuck. It would be nine years before I would open my store and the rug was with me for all of them, a constant reminder of that night.

I never entered the house after that, now it really was just a big old house looted of its contents. I suppose I didn’t want to see the evidence of my participation in this. A year later, some budding anarchist or sociopath in the neighborhood tested his design for a Molotov cocktail on the back of the house. It only scorched a wall but the scar was depressing to look at.

After graduating high school and moving away, it was ten or more years before I happened by the house again. Someone had put stucco on the outside of it, torn down the porch, and added a front entry in a sort of Spanish style. By then I was in a profession that preserved the past and would have automatically protested a desecration such as this. This, however, was more personal as it was a piece of my own history they had so thoughtlessly altered beyond recognition.

 

 

 

I Acquire More Stuff Not Paid For

img_4806

 

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

 

I was never much of a student so after high school I had no plans to attend college and instead took my education at the school of “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.” I minored in all three and majored in states of drug-induced psychosis, and in a few years graduated with a scholarship to Massachusetts Mental Health or as referred to by alumnae, “Mass Mental.”


A couple of years out of high school, I was crashing in the apartment of two B.U. students, customers of my small business selling uppers to college students for all night cramming. When I found myself temporarily without a drug supplier, I applied for a job unloading trucks at Morgan Memorial Goodwill Industries, or “Morgies” as it was commonly known. A philanthropic organization started around the turn of the century,  Morgies helped the “downtrodden” (their word not mine) and the disabled, soliciting donations of unwanted or broken things, employing the aforementioned to fix up the donations for resale. I don’t know if my ponytail, sideburns, and gaunt physique of an amphetamine abuser marked me as downtrodden or disabled but I got the job.


The trucks came into a building on Berkley Street in Boston’s South End, the collection and redistribution point for donations from all over New England. Over fifty 40-foot tractor trailer trucks came in every day filled with furniture, food, and appliances. After a week, they took me off the open air loading dock with the alcoholics, ethnics, disabled, and slow and hid me upstairs nights unloading into the sorting room.  Perhaps I didn’t fit their poster child image of a sufficiently unwittingly downtrodden individual.


At night the entire fleet arrived with hundreds of burlap bundles, donations from those blue boxes parked at supermarkets everywhere, the bundles unloaded onto a fleet of old railroad luggage carts, the steel wheels of these carts making a grating sound on the concrete floors, like a thousand nails scraping across a thousand blackboards, a sound I will never forget. Upstairs the crew I joined, usually about six of us hippies led by an aged mental defective who we both abused and felt sorry for, pulled the carts from the elevator and stacked the bundles in the center of an enormous room.


The room had a conveyor belt running around the perimeter. During the day, workers cut open the bundles we unloaded the previous night and spread the contents onto it. The downtrodden, stationed at points along the belt, pulled out fur coats, jeans, velvet, and usable clothing, as well as things like kitchen utensils, jewelry, books, and dead pets. At the end of the conveyor, whatever remained on it went down a chute to the first floor where a huge compactor pressed it into bales weighing half a ton. Morgies made most of its money selling mixed rag that was ground into pulp and used to make paper and cardboard.


They also made up separate bales of jeans and velvet. The jeans went overseas as foreign aid. Many years later, I found out that many bales of jeans, by virtue of bribes or a bottle of scotch to the night watchman, were rerouted to used jeans stores in every major city of the U.S. Likewise, the bales of velvet wound up in the hands of hippy entrepreneurs who found they could sell the wearable dresses, blouses, jackets, coats, and capes in these bales to budding flower children from the suburbs. When, in a couple of years, I was working in a vintage clothing store in Boston the owner, herself a rich middle-aged suburban flower child, sent me to a warehouse in New York, where I bought velvet clothing for the store all out of a bale skimmed from Goodwill.


This system of sorting, however, could not keep up with people’s desire to give. The room was full when I started working there;  in two years when I left, the pile towered ten feet above the workers threatening to crush them under a wave of goodwill.


Now try to imagine this: a pile of stuff over ten feet high filling a room the size of a basketball court. I am a pill-popping, pot-smoking hippy, with long hair, cut-off jeans, and a poor work ethic. I think all this old stuff is pretty neat, and the foreman doesn’t mind if I take a bag of it home every once in a while. So it’s like free, right? If I climbed to the middle of the pile and opened the bundles, I could find old things, things that had been there for twenty years or more, things I alone could appreciate, things I could stuff in an old duffle bag and throw out the window to retrieve on the way home, since two or three bags a night might bend the rules. Maybe I have to scare off a bum or two who find the bags and think finders is keepers. I take the bags home on the subway and fill my room, and it is all free.


I had hordes of stuff. Velvet jackets, silk scarves, Indian batik wall hangings and bedspreads, European tapestries, Middle East prayer rugs, Victorian paisley shawls, Chinese embroidered throws, beaded handbags, hundreds and hundreds of multi-colored silk scarves like Mick and Jimi wore, and jewelry, lots and lots of jewelry. I found a print by Maxfield Parish, and a full-length black velvet cape with black satin appliqués and fur trim. I dug out one of those tall fur hats from Russia and wore it with the cape to a costume party. The most valuable thing I ever found, and still have today, was a twelve-inch Viennese cold-painted bronze statue of a lion attacking a bull.


I covered the room where I was crashing with wall hangings and, when I moved, just left them there.  I rented a new apartment with two friends:  Dave a guy I’d known in high school who was shooting heroin and John, from New Orleans, in town to “check out the scene.”


In my room, I tacked up Indian bedspreads and long pieces of striped material so they billowed from the ceiling and draped down the walls. After a year, my Oriental rug had layers of smaller rugs covering it and my mattress disappeared under mountains of throw pillows. Miraculously I never encountered a single flea. I put a small steamer trunk in the corner and filled it like a treasure chest, with the jewelry, purses, carved figurines, animal bookends, any small thing that caught my eye as I rooted through the pile at work like a crazed pack-rat gathering scraps to feather his nest.


When chicks visited the apartment, they looked into my room wide-eyed as I, lounging on my mountain of pillows like a sultan, invited them to share a water pipe, and magnanimously offered them whatever they wanted. It never occurred to me to sell the stuff - that would be un-cool. Peace, man.

I Sell More Stuff Not Paid For

img_6205

By Chris Osborne/City Lights

It was nineteen-seventy and the love generation was in full bloom. My roommates John, Dave, and I smoked dope, balled chicks, dropped acid, took speed and downers, and lived on butter and sugar sandwiches and Hormel chili out of the can. Together we grooved on Hendrix, Cream, Lov, and Eden’s Children. At the club The Boston Tea Party, we saw Led Zeppelin and the Doors and on Sundays, on the lawn at the Cambridge Commons, local bands played free concerts, everyone there dancing as a mob to, “In Garden DaVita” and “Toad.” When it rained, we danced and slipped barefoot in the mud. If I thought about the future at all, it was formless, indistinct, and unchanged. Then I had an acid reoccurrence.

This might sound like a good thing; a tab of LSD that gives two trips for the price of one, however, the second trip is not like a second delirious round of sex in the morning, but more like waking up in a pool of puke. A reoccurrence has all the psychosis with none of the euphoria. Confused and distraught, I committed myself to Mass Mental where for three days they gave me Nembutal. Nembutal is a barbiturate with all the fun taken out of it. It keeps you docile and dull and gives you a wicked case of dry mouth. I was under observation for ten days but even after release, it was two months before I felt normal again. For all that time, I felt misaligned as though the normally seamless planes of my sanity had gone askew, allowing feelings of security and well-being to trickle out the cracks.

After that, I never did another illegal drug again. One month later, my sudden drug free condition saved my ass, and led to another incidence of selling.

When four cops in sports jackets arrived at the apartment, claiming to have a search warrant John let them in. They gathered John, Dave and I into the living room. It suddenly felt overcrowded. One of them took down our names on a flip pad while the others searched the rooms. He asked us leading question like “You guys got quite a little pot house going here, don’t you?” As we loaded on our denials, scrambling noises, like rats digging in the garbage, came from the other rooms.

The cops returned to the living room and one of them asked who had the room in front. Dave said it was his. They arrested him for drug possession, read him his rights, and slapped on handcuffs. They asked who had the room in the back. John answered and they paid him the same respect.

The one doing all the talking and arresting turned to me, “You must be the guru who lives in the middle room,” he said.

I nodded not sure what I was admitting to. “We didn’t find anything in there, you can go,” he said.

I suppose the honorable thing for me to have said would be, “No, I insist you take me with my friends, I am as guilty as they are,” but that would only have been possible had I not sprinted out the door the second they said I could. The next day I helped raise bail for John and Dave, and knowing that eviction was inevitable I found another place to live.

I rented a room in a townhouse near Boston University. Like many houses in the area, it had long ago been converted from what was once an elegant Victorian home into rooms for students. There were two rooms to a floor and we shared a bath but the room was large, ceilings high, and I had a bay window with a view of the alley.

I was out of work and my cash was running out. A few weeks earlier, Morgies had transferred me back down to the loading docks. Without my nightly scavenging, the job lost all its appeal so I stopped going to work.

In the old apartment when I was taking speed and experiencing sleepless nights filled with boundless energy, I decorated my room. Now all of that stuff just sat in the closet. A friend knew about the things I had liberated from Morgies and asked if I wanted to sell any of it. He came over, went through it all, made up a small pile, and offered me one hundred and seventy five dollars.

“Wow, man, sure sounds great,” I said with the sly cunning of a shrewd dealmaker.

I had no experience in the art of negotiation. I didn’t know that the first offer is never the best offer. I didn’t know then, as I do now after making hundreds of offers myself, that when I eagerly accepted his price he would be thinking, “I should have offered less.”

The following Sunday, filled with entrepreneurial zeal I packed two huge suitcases with the remaining stuff and took a subway out to the concert on the Cambridge Common.

A crowd was already gathering as I set up my display on the perimeter near where people watched the bands. People selling things did not typically turn up at these concerts so I attracted curious looks while draping the bedspreads, brocades, and embroideries over the back of a park bench. I displayed the scarves in the open suitcases on the ground holding them down with jewelry, beaded bags, and oddities like a set of “Thinker” bookends, a Victorian metal drinking cup that collapsed, carved figurines, and illustrated books.

I weighed about one-ten, had hair to my waist, and was often told I resembled Mick Jagger. Standing by my goods wearing a woman’s jacket made from a Victorian paisley shawl, I could not have been groovier if I took up the dulcimer. Although without the drugs to keep my weight down the jacket was beginning to get tight.

As always, the crowd that day watching and walking past, consisted of Harvard students and professors, high school kids and tourists, old rich Cambridge and the smart young newly rich. The young crowd taking style cues from the music scene appeared as British rockers and mods, American folkies and hippies. It was a costume party and to me even those not wearing a costume looked as though they were. The professor in the brown corduroy jacket with patch sleeves; the middle-aged jock in the letter jacket and jeans; the older woman still in her parochial school uniform, a white blouse and plaid skirt; I guess we all wear some kind of uniform I thought, feeling pleased with my philosophical turn of mind.

All those, however, drew little of my attention as it was the girls, young, buoyant, and willowy and brazenly wearing their new entitlements of equality and sexual freedom, I fell in lust with that day.

A scruffy Joni Mitchell type with dirty hands settled down cross-legged on the grass next to the bench and one by one scooped up my scarves gently placing them in her lap as if they were baby chicks. “Oh wow, are you, like, selling these?” she asked in a distant voice. I thought it was a bit early in the morning to be stoned and wondered if she needed a place to stay.

“Yeh, scarves are a buck, the other stuff’s ten and fifteen,” I pointed to a particularly nice Indian spread with psychedelic embroidery, “I want thirty five for that.” She had a long graceful face and wide mouth, I would have given it to her free if she came home with me but after watching her vacantly fondle the scarves for the next half- hour, I knew she would be melodramatic in bed and difficult to get rid of once we grew tired of each other.

A middle-aged woman in a Marlo Thomas flip and a blouse with a built in bow, dragged over a man in a crew cut and plaid sports jacket. “Do you import this yourself,” she asked, leaning in, as though I might be difficult to understand, her thin lips betraying her thrill of conversing with an honest to goodness hippy.

“No I collect it from thrift shops.” I said.

She leaned back, “You mean this is used?” She exclaimed tugging on Plaid Jacket’s arm.

He and I were checking out the full braless chest of the teenage flower child trying on one of my sashes over a gauzy floral print dress. Wrapping the sash twice around her tiny waist, she fluffed the fringe on her hip, and asked how much it was. I lifted my eyes from the game of peek-a-boo her nipples were playing behind the flowers of her top, greeted by a wholesome moon-face, a painted on daisy curving down one cheek, and cupid bow lips grinning as though pleased I’d noticed she wasn’t wearing the bra that was sure to be in her purse. The mom who bought and pressed the expensive looking Stevie Nicks outfit she wore would never have let her leave the house without one. I thought she might be underage and could get me in very serious trouble.

“Fifty cents,” I said as Flip and Plaid Jacket walked on.

The teen squealed and unfolded bills from a drawstring velvet purse, “Here keep the change,” she said handing me a buck.

Cute and patronizing, I thought.

More people stopped, looked, and began to buy. Many wanted to know where it all came from. I made up stories.

“I had a vintage clothing store in Greenwich Village. I just moved here.” I told a plump Janis Joplin lookalike. Unlike the teen whose crisp floral dress obviously came from a department store, the limp floral dress tucked in the belly folds of this “Janis” obviously came from Goodwill.

“Do you need a place to stay?” She asked her eyes wide and beseeching. “We have a group home not far from here. Everyone is welcome. We’d just love to have you.” Comforting and easy she was very appealing. Guaranteed she would have sex with me if only because she felt I needed it, then cook me a big breakfast. She rattled off the address and left swinging the mesh purse she bought, a little further on hooking up with a bushy haired Jerry Garcia lookalike. The fuzzy groupy-ness and gleeful sharing typical of communes had never been my thing so I did not attempt to remember the address.

It was a great warm day, in the background the bands hammered away on the Stones and the Who, and even though no chick followed me home, I got satisfaction in making bunches of money. I sold almost everything and grossed close to three hundred dollars.

Earlier in the day, someone asked me how I could bear to get rid of all this beautiful stuff. I did like it, I liked looking at it, and decorating my “Guru” tent with it but I also liked having the money. Hippy doctrine held that money only gives you a false sense of security, but I knew lots of hippies who grew up with money so I suspect they felt it would always be there when they needed it. I never had that expectation and, on that day, for the first time since being on my own, it felt as though I might be able to do better than minimum wage.

It, however, had not sunk in that this was a viable way to make a living, perhaps because I still was not paying for my stock. It would be another few years before I would start paying for things and five years before I made antiques my profession.

 

 

google