It's All Relative (25 page)

I remember when my parents' first washer broke down; it was a hand-me-down they had gotten from my grandparents when they first married. It was meant as an interim piece of equipment to get them through a couple of years until they could afford to buy a new one on their own. That washer lasted them twenty years, until I was in high school. For weeks after it broke down, my dad tried to cobble
the original back together with duct tape and tube socks. “That should hold it for a while,” my dad would say. “I've saved us a pretty penny. I don't think we really need a new warsher, do you, hon'?” he would ask my mom, who would be on her hands and knees mopping up water.

Then my dad would open his checkbook and stare at it as if it was a crystal ball, waiting for a sign only he could interpret that would grant him the go-ahead to spend the cash. He would mope around for days, poring over issues of
Consumer Reports
, yelling at the dog, not giving me my allowance, until he finally came to terms. When it was time to buy, he scoured every appliance store in a hundred-mile radius looking for the best deal. He would barter and beg, lie and charm, ultimately pitting rural appliance salesmen in white, short-sleeve dress shirts and polyester ties against each other so he could get the biggest bargain. He actually cost a rural appliance salesman part of his paycheck for getting the washer below wholesale. The salesman called my father and told him that his manager was forcing him to kick in part of his paycheck if he couldn't get my dad to go up seventy-five dollars to the break-even price.

“A deal's a deal, hon!” my dad yelled into our giant red rotary phone. “Ain't you never watched Monty Hall?”

When the new washer finally was delivered, my parents steadfastly refused to use it, leaving the tags and instructions on it for weeks, my mother washing all the clothes in the sink, afraid to spoil the newness of this rare gift. Finally, once my parents broke down and used the new machine, my dad would firmly announce, “That's the last family expense for a while. Everyone get ready to buckle down! Times are gonna be tough!”

I guess this is why it was difficult for me to part with any of my belongings my first Labor Day garage sale with Gary's family. I wanted to mourn my stuff, while Gary just coldly and callously piled it in the living room.

“We are going to make a haul!” he said, dragging my old clothes, broken toaster, and malfunctioning microwave out of the basement.

“I can't get rid of that!” I'd say, pointing at a size 44 mint-green suit I wore when I was not only fat but obviously myopic. “Or
that
!” I'd yell, grabbing a recycling bin I used as an end table, or a blender that could no longer puree water.

But Gary was undeterred. “You're not fat anymore. You're not poor. You have clothes that fit. And an end table.”

I looked at him skeptically.

“And you're not your father. You're a different person than you were growing up.”

We arrived at Gary's parents' a day early, because holding a garage sale in rural America takes as much care and planning, it seemed, as staging the Super Bowl.

Upon arrival, I was first immersed in family strategy: Flyers and signs were made and then posted, strewn and planted around town. Balloons were blown and attached to anything that could move. Phone chains were enacted as if a natural disaster was imminent.

In order to keep track of the money, each person with merchandise for sale received his or her very own specially colored Magic Marker—Gary was orange, his mother red, his father brown, and I was given green—in order to make price tags out of masking tape. As items were sold, the tags were removed and stuck onto notepads, the color-coded sales calculated at the end.

We woke Labor Day Saturday at four
A.M
. to begin setting up.

“This is insane!” I said, bleary-eyed.

“Just wait,” Gary's mom replied.

The hard-core buyers began showing around five, while the streetlights were still casting an ominous glow.

And by hard-core I mean hundreds of people, some still in pj's or robes, descending in droves upon us like locusts on helpless townsfolk.

As I sipped coffee in a cool garage in the middle of the night, I
felt a bit like Jane Goodall studying apes. I watched these hideously magical creatures crawl out of their cages at sunrise to gather at the local watering hole.

By five fifteen
A.M
., the apes were animatedly fighting over the merchandise, the stronger animals able to pull pee-rusted bathroom magazine racks and half-melted cookie cutters from the arms of weaker prey.

And then they began to approach us, their fangs bared, ready to barter. And Gary's family was ready, ready to fight in order to protect their lair.

Though my career was in public relations, I couldn't locate my inner media man this early in the morning. I couldn't summon the strength to deal with this group of bargain hunters looking to fill
their empty lives with junk, so I instead channeled my father and, as a result, my conversations were considerably more direct:

Some fourteen hours later, around six
P.M
., we pulled the signs, closed the garage door as best we could, and ordered a pizza.

Gary's family energetically gathered their masking-tape receipts, pulled out a solar-operated calculator the size of the sun itself, and began hunting and pecking.

Grand total earned: $304.75.

They jumped and screamed and hugged as if they had just gotten off the phone with Warren Buffett and discovered he was dying and they were his sole heirs.

I began to do my own mental math:

Ad in the newspaper: $50

Lattes to keep us alert: $30

Signage on all the street corners: $25

Hangers for stained clothes: $15

Wide variety of colored magic markers to ID the items: $10

Having crazy people inside your garage and children peeing in your yard: priceless

Sum total, the net gain was really about two hundred dollars for twelve hours' labor divided among the participants. That rounded out to a little over four dollars an hour per person.

I could've earned more cash and respect begging.

And then, just as we were cracking the garage door to retrieve our pizza, two sturdy country men with steel-gray mullets came storming into the garage eating a carton of donut holes.

“I'm sorry. But we're closed, fellas,” I said.

Then I noticed the fellas had breasts.

And mustaches.

The gals beelined to the clothes in the back of the garage, directly to my old size-44 men's fat suits, which, naturally, had not sold.

“Please. Please. Just a minute,” they begged.

Then they whispered to one another, pumped their fists, and bought all ten of my men's fat suits for five dollars each.

“Easiest fifty bucks you'll ever make,” Gary said to me.

I helped the gals out to their rusting pickup with my clothes, and they continued to whisper to one another nervously. Finally, the one who looked like Charles Durning turned to me and asked if I would “give 'em a ring” if I was ever back “in these parts” and had any more “fancy fella suits” for sale.

And then the other one, the one who looked like Dom DeLuise, asked, “You live in the city?”

“Umm … yes,” I said.

“Is that guy in the garage … your … you know … 
friend
?” she asked.

“Umm … yeah,” I said.

“Are those his parents?”

“Yes.”

“What's it like?” she asked.

“Well, St. Louis is a pretty big city …” I started, not following her lead.

“No,” she said nervously. “What's it like to … to … you know …”

“To have a … 
special friend
?” I answered.

She leaned into me and whispered, while hugging one of my fat suits. “No. What's it like … you know … to be … yourself?”

I felt as if I'd been punched in the gut.

She waited for my answer, literally standing on her tiptoes for me to respond, her friend looking around nervously as though the gay police might pull up at any time.

It took me a moment to respond because I kept hearing the distant but very loud backbeat of a trombone ringing in my head this Labor Day.

“You know what, I'm just finding that out,” I answered, as honestly as I could. “It's taken a long time.”

And then the two “friends” got in their pickup, hauling away ten suits and a lot of my old baggage, and I stood in the driveway outside the garage sale, waving good-bye to the truck, to my stuff, to the boy I used to be, and the man I had too long feared of becoming.

“Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut, and no other girls can say anything about it.”

–LINDSAY LOHAN,
MEAN GIRLS

T
here used to be a girl near my brother's age in school who dressed as a cowgirl every single year for Halloween.

She wore boots, a brown suede skirt with country stitching, a denim shirt, a cow-print vest and a cowboy hat, and she carried a lasso.

After a few years the costume began to look worn, yellowed, dirty, and by the time she reached middle school, the girl had developed a paunch and a slight mustache.

Being a cute little cowgirl just didn't work anymore, especially since she looked like Hitler.

Worst of all, a few mothers in town would whisper viciously about the cowgirl's mother.

What kind of mother would send her daughter to school in the same old costume every year
? was pretty much the running theme.

Any good mother worth her salt made her child's Halloween costume in the 1960s and '70s. A great mother, in fact, knew the endless possibilities that an old bedsheet, empty egg cartons, wire hangers, and her makeup could provide.

In small-town America, the pressure to achieve Halloween perfection was even more intense because everyone trick-or-treated at
everyone's house, so everyone knew which mothers could sew and, therefore, deeply loved their children, and which neglectful moms covered their kids' left eyes in duct tape, called them pirates, and sent them out with a steak knife.

Halloween presented an ethical dilemma for my mother, an educated woman who worked full-time, watched the evening news, and had the gall to question what she read in the paper. My mom was a nurse. She stitched people's wounds. She didn't hem.

While she enjoyed Halloween, I think she felt it was frivolous, wasn't as important as, say, saving a life.

I always had nice costumes, considering my grandmothers were both accomplished seamstresses—I made an adorable little green bean as a baby and a passable vampire—but my costumes always lacked a certain Ozarkian je ne sais quoi. Which is perhaps why I yanked on my mother's bloodstained scrubs one fall evening when she got home from work and begged, “You have to make my costume this year!”

I think I knew she needed the challenge and that I needed to take more of a risk.

Now, I was certainly a boy with a high sense of drama. I mean, I gasped when a classmate misconjugated a verb. But I also felt as though—for a boy with a tendency to wear too many ascots and starched pink oxfords—it was my responsibility not to stand out too much in a part of the world whose people, food, and houses tended to be a bit too gray for me.