By the time we got to the Mt. Airy Lodge auction, La Rubia and I got numbers 1107 and 1108. Hardly the early birds. One reason was that she had left work at a major national newsweekly something after 2 ayem, thanks to the BTK killer, and gone to sleep at 4. I too had been up until 4 or so, but in my case it was a book rather than The Magazine. When we finally got on the road, bearing the directions I had cleverly ordered up from the website of Teel Auctioneers via MapQuest, it was a beautiful midday. It stayed beautiful til we found ourselves at Teel's warehouse rather than the Lodge, which proved to be a half hour or so away. After screaming at La Rubia, who was on the phone to Dangerman, who was guiding us from his computer, we found our way to the site in Mt. Pococno.
They had auctioned off the golf carts, the Engelburt Humperdink room fittings (tacky, tacky and not worth nearly $2000), the pink paddleboats. The auctioneer's platform was hovering near the 60 heart-shaped bathtubs that eventually would go for $300 with a tiny red sink thrown in free.
Those bathtubs (fiberglass, I think) looked kind of scuzzy, especially the dirty-white adhesive-tape nonskid strips. The fact that one couple had been boasting about how their son was conceived in one of the tubs a couple decades back likely added to our distaste. The hot dogs outside were pretty good, but the truck bed was empty when we left.
We soon fixed that with a series of stops at antiques malls, fako Indian stores, discount cigarette marts and shopping strips. I scored cheap Diet Pepsi, beer and cigarettes—"the cornerstones of your existance!" La Rubia pointed out—and we hit the road back to the Big City just in time to find the skyline molten gold from the setting sun. It felt like we were reenetering a magic land, more magical than the Podunkanos even in their heyday can ever have been. And the people here are much thinner.
fair warning: on block island or manhattan or in missouri, we can be a little salty
4 comments:
so no heart shaped bathtub for my wedding night....bummer. Better get that house built, puffmama, the calls are ringing in.
So beautifully described. that was our day. that skyline, shimmering, burning. Will I ever forget?
One fix, however, only because it will help explain my giddiness. I left work after 4 am and didn't get to sleep until 5:30am. That is my excuse for being nutty that day.
PS Fluffy O'Hara and I have started calling these types of ideas, like buying heart-shaped bathtubs, which are better in concept than in reality, "gorilla suits." One of her ideas was to rent a gorlilla suit for various pranks--a notion later discarded.
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