The east coast is lousy with old vintage shops and the old vintage shops are rife with junk. It’s not that I dislike antiques- I begrudge no one their velvet portraits and radioactive dishware. The trouble I have with the east coast is that these shops are laid out like the midwestern garage. There are no prices or descriptions, no method of organization. They are, without exception, owned by someone who vastly overestimates their memory of the store’s inventory and allows dust to settle on the books because each is wrapped in yellowed plastic bags. There may have once been a time when these stores offered the occasional gem of a find- that first edition hardback at a trade paper price but, now that we have the internet, the worth of old gray cards are no longer secret.
The saving grace of any antique shop that Shitholes suggests is that they tend to be sizable (though ‘Labyrinthine Vintage’ was a pain in and of itself). The smaller the shop, the more likely one is expected to pay for entry with snippets of their own life story and the outright spilling of the owner’s. I am disappointed, to say the least, when I arrive at ‘ANTIQUES’ and can guess, from the outside, that it is no larger than a room or two.
‘Considering the emergence of online maps and their literally-inclined search algorithms, one has to assume that the owner of ‘ANTIQUES’ (established 1943) is fairly pleased with their choice of name. We’ll see how the name fairs in the future but, for now anyway, the generation most likely to search for ‘antiques’ and to trust the first and most-capitalized result is alive and semi-mobile. The poor resultant reviews are mostly futile.
Judging by content alone, it doesn’t appear that ‘ANTIQUES’ has made any significant purchases in the last decade. Most shelves are bare and the items that remain are rotting, rusting, or generally succumbing to entropy where they rest.
The most important thing to know about ‘ANTIQUES’ is that it operates incompetently in most respects but sells no counterfeits. Assume the objects you find are legitimate and try not to dwell so long on the implications.’
The inside of ‘ANTIQUES’ is not at all larger than I suspected. It is a single square room, baking like an attic in the sun. At the center of the room is a man and his bulk is such that he fills the rectangular counter space there. The mechanics of his entry and exit into this space elude me. The man catches my eye once as I enter and he nods in greeting- the sort of curtness I can respect. Hector is asleep in the baby carrier but the man gives no signal that he notices or cares.
Much of what is on display consists of old wooden signs and rusted power tools. There are a few bins of old bottles and ceramic transformers. A chest of black and white photos. A box of comics that are no older than 1998. Several flattened board games.
I move my attention to the glass display counters and wait for the inevitable small talk but the man hardly notices me. Inside is a motely collection of electronics, some baseball cards in plastic sleeves, and a handful of political pins. I’m on the verge of leaving when one of these pins catches my attention. It says ‘Banner & Smith’ and features a small wolf in the corner where one might expect the traditional mascot of either mainstream party.
“What’s this?” I ask, and the man turns with great effort.
“What’s what?”
“What election is ‘Banner & Smith’ referring to?”
“Presidential.” He frowns. “1967.”
“That wasn’t an election year.”
His frown deepens and he hunches over. After some struggling with the glass, he pinches the metal between his fingers and stares at it, front and back.
“Misplaced.” He grunts. “Should be in the other room.”
The man nods to a curtain in the back where someone has taped an ‘No Entry’ sign.
I wait until the man loses interest in me again which is about as long as it takes me to walk over to the curtain. Peering between the frame and the cloth, I see that the next room is a near replica of this one- walls of empty shelves, a counter island at the center, and a fat man at the center of that. This near-cousin doesn’t look up when I slip inside and certainly doesn’t notice when I reel from a bout of nausea that may or may not be a result of simultaneously realizing that nothing about the new room makes sense.
There is another entrance, for instance, and several windows that appear to look out on the parking lot that I know, for a fact, is behind me. Either of the rooms on their own could easily fit into the space the walls suggest from outside but I had a look at the place from the lot and there is no way both rooms could exist in the structure I remember. This doesn’t even take into account a further curtained room on the far side of the new space.
The inventory of the new room is much like the last but a beeline for the pins tells me everything I need to know. There are several pieces from the ‘Banner & Smith’ campaign under the glass but none of the others are familiar- none of the races or slogans or candidates. ‘The Rest Are No Better Than Esther, 67’?’ ‘Trace Longfellow for PREZ?’ I’m on my way to the next curtain when I notice that the bolded brand name of a rusted chainsaw is also wrong. None of the items on the shelves are made by manufacturers I recognize.
The next room is the same, but stranger. The cards in the display illustrate a game that involves naked men. The tools are twisted and made of bluish metal. There is a stray ‘McCain’ pin under the glass- likely misplaced. The rest are all variations on the same single candidate: Benjamin Bryce. ‘Benjamin: Begin Again, 1945.’ ‘Bryce is Nice, 98’’ A horse is tied up outside and the windows buzz with saturating energy. A billboard outside advertises Benjamin Bryce’s current campaign: ‘No Choice but Benjamin Bryce.’
I buy ‘Bryce is Nice’ and hurry out when the man behind the counter stares a little too long at Hector. The last curtain shivers as I pass through it, disturbed by some crossworld breeze.
A week later the metal of the pin is tarnished and red. It slips free from the clasp and is lost to the Wayside.
-traveler
