It was a dark and stormy night. Nah, it was a weekend garage sale - where you find yourself haggling over a $1 difference for some trivial piece of crap. (And feel victorious if you get your way.) Saturday is 88 degrees and we are sitting in plastic stacking chairs, slowly sweating our lives out.
Enter the magical Phillip.
Beers appear; laughter appears; a whisky & coke fer mommy. The hot neighbor, wearing a black t-shirt so tight we can see HIS nipples comes over and, though refusing our beer, drinks his coffee (refusing our offer of Bailey's for it) and shows no sign of wanting to leave. (His wife has just taken off for the weekend.)
Phillip is "supposed" to leave at noonish. This does not happen - he gives up looking at his watch by mid afternoon.
Phillip and mommy start explaining to sober people who show up the long histories of the p.o.s. (piece of shit, dear reader) they might be glancing at. In great detail. And completely made up.
And then they start telling people how these items will improve their lives; that they "need" them. They also start offering people beer.
Phillip and mommy are banned from talking to the customers.
The beering continues. Mommy gets a "freshen up" whisky & coke; we make our way through Oberon; Sleeman; Moosehead; and into Canadian. Hotness neighbor wanders back home but comes back for another extended stay. He brings gin & tonic over for all. I ponder keeping him at our sale as a prop - most customers are female & my neighborhood is also chock full o' gay men. Can't go wrong!
But eventually his neighborly hotness must go home as he has company coming over. He's served his purpose anyway: prop; purchaser (he bought $20 of stuff -including an exBF's Xmas gift - SWEET!); and visual entertainment.
Phillip picks up on the exBF theme - "just how many items here are from exes?" he asks. My survey of the table reveals three exBFs are represented. Including one I broke up with over 20 years ago!
And this is how the afternoon plays out. If we aren't making fun of the people buying my crap we are making fun of each other. So much so that while the sale ended at 4; we are still sitting around after 5.
We end the afternoon on a high - the last customer who wanders into our mirth with his too small camo cap can't tell us what he did in the Army before he retired (can they ever?) but as we get through military secret discussions into bizarreness, voluntarily displays the CCW pistol on his hip. A sober me might have wondered if he meant to rob us. Ah, but a drunk me is a thing of innocence and unicorns. So instead, I ask him the caliber and where/how often he goes for target practice.
And all ends well.
No comments:
Post a Comment