With all the time I spend on the road, I usually find myself a year or two behind popular culture which means that I’m often out of my element at those Wayside destinations that hold celebrities at their core. Prop museums tend to display a few things from movies I watched as a child, so that’s something, and I appreciate wax museums for their eerie, liminal atmospheres, even if I only recognize a handful of the personas on exhibit.
‘The Divot Gallery’ is something else entirely. The museums tend to split their focus between the curios and the celebrities but ‘The Divot Gallery’ leans hard into the element of worship that is, admittedly, inherent in all of them. I show up unprepared for a rapid-fire series of questions and karaoke-style catalogs of celebrity names, ranked by fame. I go straight to the B-listers, knowing that anyone of historical significance and anyone currently trending will be well above my budget. The cashier must see me react- she hands me the C-listers.
This, I can afford.
‘There is no greater experience of entropy than that which can be purchased at ‘The Divot Gallery.’ It’s a motel, on the surface, consisting of just six rooms rented by the hour and a massive warehouse to store the largest collection of pre-owned couches and beds in the country. This furniture once belonged to the rich and famous, was thrown out bearing the imprints specific to its once-owners. The people at ‘The Divot Gallery’ saw an opportunity in that and, like a witch digging about for spare fingernails, they have built up their inventory from dumpsters, thrift shops, and bribed garbagemen with such efficiency that celebrities have gone on record claiming to obsessively destroy everything they now throw away.
This has not stopped ‘The Divot Gallery’ which has proven time and again that they buy their goods legally and stop just short of libel in their proposed explanations of otherwise mysterious stains.
Visitors might choose to spend the afternoon in the hollow embrace of their celebrity crush, might conceive a child on the bed of a rock star or get high in the recliner of a famous stoner-comedian. There are death beds, of course, but testimonials suggest that ‘The Divot Gallery’ as experienced on any furniture leans depressing. At it’s least existential, most people will find that the celebrities they once held on a pedestal are not much better than they are at keeping crumbs out of the nooks and crannies of a couch- are not so special at all.
At its most existential, customers sometimes recognize themselves in the massive, hierarchal network of modern America. They may realize they exist on a rung far, far lower than they suspected, that there are ways of living beyond their imagining and that lying prone on a used mattress is the closest they will ever get to bridging the truth of their existence with that of even a minor celebrity.”
Hector and I nap on a sort of rounded pad that once belonged to a famous dog. I sleep well enough, but I get the sense that Hector has some difficulty getting comfortable. Maybe it’s the smell of another animal. Maybe he’s just realizing he was never meant for the silver screen.
-traveler
