I got up during the wee small hours of the morning on Garage Sale Day, sucked down a few quick cups of coffee and a cruller; and after applying the most scant amount of vanity makeup, my mother and I immediately went outside to begin hauling boxes and bags and clothing out of the garage and into the yard to place on tables and clotheslines.

I have to add that our clothesline setup was among the most ghetto-riffic device that has ever been jerry-rigged. Initially I tried to ram a hook into the side of our old, huge tree (because I am a tree-killer, not a tree-hugger), but I soon discovered that THAT would require super-human or at least very manly strength, which I certainly do not possess. Thankfully we already had a large hook rammed into the side of our back garage by the previous owner, who did possess the sort of strength I so needed. Still, I needed another hook, and since one apparently wasn’t going to drop out of the sky, what was I to do? Simple. I simply tied the clothesline around a very tall, very thick branch, and let it sort of hang down so that it would reach the garage hook at a 45-degree angle. Not ideal for hanging clothes.

Then we got the idea of running the clothesline through a pool cleaner pole so as to stabilize it and make it run parallel to the ground. (I wish to God I had taken a photo of all this.) We couldn’t get the clothesline to run through the hollow pole without bunching up, though, so we tied a washer to it, held it upright, and sort of rammed it into the sidewalk, praying that the weight of the washer would pull the clothesline downward.

This amazingly, eventually worked.

You’re probably not interested in any of this, but I think it was funny, so Neh.

Anyway, just imagine a heavily-knotted clothesline running from the garage to a giant tree with a big pole on it, careening at an odd angle, tied all to hell with knots they certainly never taught you in the Boy Scouts.

For the record, it worked fine.

We had about four hundred hangers worth of clothing, a lot of which was hung on the large iron swing-set that my dad welded so many years ago, some of which was hung on the clothesline. We also had about six large tables full of folded clothes (WHY do people fold clothes when hosting a garage sale when the heathenous masses are just going to rip through them anyway? I don’t know.) and mountains of shoes.

Then there were the toys. Piles of stuffed toys, staring with glass eyes from wagons and boxes and bins. Princess castles and Barbie houses (from my cousin, not J.). Radio-controlled cars and a Spiderman that really punched and kicked that every single grown man who came to the sale would pick up and play with but not buy.

My mother had glass doodads and vases and trinkets and salt and pepper shakers from every state displayed on racks. I had candles, candles, candles, melting in the hot sun.

We got done setting up at about eight-thirty, and people had already begun to filter in.

You just can’t get rid of early birds. People believe that they are getting the jump on the crap and are therefore superior to the rest of the human race. You could even sense a bit of smugness on their faces. I don’t get it, and I never will.

My elderly aunt and uncle arrived, she with her Sobe water and glittering ankle bracelets, he with his oxygen tank, and prepared to take the money.

For the first two hours, we got pretty slammed. I even had a woman spend a good fifty dollars on a huge pile of the J-Man’s clothes and shoes. Things looked promising. People were looking at furniture and saying they’d be back. As an eternal optimist, this made me happy. They’d be back! They would surely buy!

I am so deluded, and they were so full of shit.

Things slowed to a screeching halt at about eleven o’clock, and we began the useless acts of re-arranging tables, telling each other that people would re-appear after the lunch hour, and eating junk food to soothe our wounded egos.

Inwardly I was seething, because no one was buying my clothes. I had about a hundred and fifty well-taken-care-of items for sale at ridiculously low prices, including several dresses I found a sin to even let go, and no bites? NO BITES?

I was filled with chagrin, but I was polite and welcoming; so welcoming, in fact, that I was relentlessly teased every time we had a customer.

I’m a friendly person. It’s the Midewesterner in me. I’m a hugger, I’m a talker, I’m'a make sure I learn your name and make you feel welcome in my home. As far as I’m concerned, this even goes for garage sale customers.

So maybe I’m a little weird to my strangely reticent family, who doesn’t believe in talking to strangers, but I don’t care. I said “hello” and “how are ya” and “can I help you find anything” to every person who came into the backyard, and they started to mock me mercilessly.

Jerks.

A slow trickle continued on throughout the blazing hot afternoon, and I had to come in and cool off. I immediately had a fucking seizure, but thankfully it was relatively minor. When I say minor, I mean that there was no head-bashing involved. Still, I was banished from the yard for a one-hour penalty, so I chilled for a while before returning.

I’m not really supposed to be in the sun given the fact that I’m on more pills than everyone booked into the Betty Ford Clinic put together, but sometimes I am stupid and go for it anyway.

By about four-thirty we started packing it up. We had a few stragglers, but no one was buying much.

We dropped prices to ridiculous lows. Do you have a penny? TAKE THE SHIT.

We packed for about two hours, and wound up with about fifteen large garbage bags of clothes and shoes for Amvets and about ten boxes of crap that we just chunked out into the alley for the garbage pickers to rifle through.

Sout’ Side garbage pickers are intense. You can put something, anything, out in the alley, and it’s gone in an hour. Anything.

Perhaps we should have done that to begin with.

Anyway, we made about three hundred bucks, which is neither awful nor great.

I’m going to post the rest of the big furniture on Craigslist and put the small stuff in the alley. Simple dimple.

And how was YOUR weekend?

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