It was one of those days in Monroe at the Fairgrounds when
the sun would peek out behind the clouds just enough to give one hope, then
dash it with a blast of rain. The
overflow crowd trudged through the sprinkles from the far parking lot through
the underpass into the main lot, even then full of cars for sale. It was the annual Automotive Swap meet on
Saturday morning, and the underground economy was in full swing. All the indoor spots were taken up, as usual,
by the long-timers with the same old stuff, the trinkets and gubbins and
gewgaws, so the action was out in the parking lots and the grassy areas along
the fence where the newbies and the latecomers are sent. That’s where you’ll find the guy who just
wants to get rid of stuff, as opposed to the inside guy who’s trying to make a
living.
The thing is, when you stumble across something worthwhile
you have to recognize it and bite down hard and fast, because, if you look
away, it will be gone. So it was with
the matching fender set off an early ‘90s Harley Davidson Heritage Softail that
I spotted laying in the grass alongside some yard tools and other junk. I could see they were in pretty good shape,
even had the Heritage script intact on one side of the front fender, so I asked
the guy who was on the spot, “How much you want for them fenders?”,
pointing. He got a big ol’ grin on his
face and said, “Ten Dollars!” “Each?”
says I. “Nah, that’s for both of them.” He
says. “I told that son-of-a-bitch they weren’t
coming back this time, no way, nohow.
Ten dollars!” ”Done!”, I said.
I peeled 10 dollars out of my wallet in record time and scooped
up the fenders and beat feet out of there, in case the son-of-a-bitch was
anywhere on the grounds. Just for the
record, I sold them later on EBay, quickly, for $285 with free shipping. It turned out they were a matching pair, in
Vivid Black, and all the trim was in place including the lights on both tips,
along with the factory paint and hand pin striping, and it was all in excellent
shape! And that, my friends, is a
score. That’s why we play the swap meet
game, and the Craigslist game, just searching for that oh-so-sweet moment when
the adrenaline rush lets you know you’re on to something and your fingers start
to twitch as you reach for your pocket. It’s
the payoff, for all the years of mistakes and lost money, and learning about
the subtle differences between the various years and models, and what fits
what. It’s what Carl Sandburg was talking
about when he said, “I seek to make my vocation my avocation.” For most of us, we have to “retire” to do
that, so, when you find yourself in that position, count your blessings. Pity the one who doesn’t recognize the point
of departure when it comes, and continues to slog away in harness until he
drops to the earth, spent.
But for those of us who have freed ourselves to enjoy the
pursuit of the score, be it on a gaming table, an ad in the Little Nickel, or
on the ground at the swap meet in the rain, the undeniable thrill of the
occasional unexpected single item score pales when compared with the one you
get when you stumble across a pile.
And that’s the second thing.
Every pile has a story attached, for good or bad, and sometimes the
story lingers long after the pile is gone.
One in particular remains fresh in my memory.
It was early Saturday morning, and I was cruising Craigslist’s
motorcycle section as usual. I have
learned that you need to check in every day to catch the hot ones, the earlier
the better. This one read, “Harley shop
going out of business, leftover stock for sale today.”, with an address in
Tacoma. I hemmed and hawed for a few
minutes, then gathered up any loose cash I could find in the house and headed
for Tacoma from Renton. I even hit the
cash machine for $300, just in case.
When I got there, at a strip mall on the road to McNeil Island, I found
chaos. The building was newly constructed,
and consisted of bare concrete floors inside a steel and glass building that
could be upfitted to be a Chinese restaurant, a massage parlor, or a Shucks
Auto Parts, depending on your needs. In
this case, the space was occupied by a church.
They were raising funds to turn their space into a sanctuary by selling
off a number of donated piles of stuff that one of their members, who ran a
storage lot, it appeared, gave them. I
looked one way, past the two nice ladies at the picnic table with the cash box
and receipt book, and saw a pile of flooring, another way a pile of household
goods, over there a bunch of TVs, and there, on the floor surrounding the
center post of the room, a large pile of Harley parts.
I saw a hardtail frame, a couple of front ends, I saw
wheels and tires and boxes of new stuff.
I saw gas tanks and carburetor parts, lots of S&S stuff. I saw bins full of odds and ends, the type
that accumulates when you run a shop and you need an axle spacer, say, so you
order a dozen of them in various widths, or those special bolts you need to
mount a starter on an open belt drive on a Shovelhead, and then you need a
system to keep track of all that stuff, plus takeoff parts and mistakes and
spares, lots of spares. It was all
there. I went looking for the person in
charge. I found him near the back,
harried and hurried, with several people demanding attention at the same time,
and maneuvered him over to the pile. “How
much would you like to get for all this stuff at once?” I asked. He looked over at the pile, his face
betraying the obvious fact that he had no idea what Harley stuff was worth in
those days, and said, “I don’t know, you think it’s worth $500?” I gave him the spiel I have used successfully
in the past: Reaching into my pocket, I
pulled out all the cash I had on me at the time, which was around $385, held it
out to him and said, “Easily. It’s worth
a lot more than that, I’m sure, but all I have on me right now is this, and I’ll
give it all to you for this pile right now.”
He hesitated, and I added, “and if I do real good on this pile I’d be
happy to make a donation to your church later.”
That turned out to be the magic words, and the deal was sealed. I asked him, before I stuffed my Chevrolet
Astro Van with the seats removed to the gills with all the plunder, what
happened to the shop in question, and he didn’t know too much. After I broke $1500 on that pile of parts I
sent the church a $200 donation, upon which they hounded me for years
afterward, just in case. It was only
later, after most of the pile had been sold, that I heard the rest of the
story.
I knew the name of the shop that had gone out of business
from paperwork that was in with the pile of parts, and one day, a couple of
years later, I saw an ad on Craigslist for one of the custom choppers that this
particular shop had intended to build and sell as part of their business
plan. I sent an email asking if there
was any connection to that shop, and it turned out the seller was the guy who
had owned the shop! As I learned, this
guy was an Army Ranger, a Special Ops guy, and the shop was his own retirement
avocation. But in the heat of Iraq, the
guy got called back for one more tour of duty, so off he went, even though he
was supposed to be retired soon. He told
the landlord about the callup, and was promised that, no matter what, that shop
would be there waiting for him when he got back from Iraq.
But then he got injured, bad, a roadside bomb or something,
and wound up spending the next year or so in rehab and recovery. And the dirty bastard of a landlord evicted
the business from the shop and turned whatever survived over to the church for
disposal while the soldier was in the hospital in Germany. By the time he got back it was all gone, and
I had made a pile off the last of it. I
felt kinda shitty about that, as you would imagine. I gathered up most of what was left, bins and
gubbins and paperwork and stuff, and took it back to him as a token recovery,
and told him what happened, and how it went down. I hope he sued the shit outta that landlord. I can’t think of too many animals lower than
a landlord who would screw over an injured Ranger who put his life on the line
for the powers that be, and I hope he gets what’s coming to him.
And I hope there’s another pile out there with my name on
it, with another good story attached. The
one is worth as much as the other. :-{)}
