It had been seven years since my brother Loyd had come out to stay with me. He had stopped to see me a couple of times since then, but they were usually quick visits. October of 2000 was the first time I'd seen him since his heart attack. He was moving back to New Mexico and had some spare time on his hands.
Things had changed a lot for me since his last extended visit. I had a well-paying job, my own apartment and a properly working vehicle. He had none of those. I mean, his car worked okay, but he was always concerned it could give out any minute and it had been rear-ended in an accident. He also had all his belongings on a trailer. One thing he had that I didn't was a laptop computer.
One of his goals during the visit was to have a yard sale and get some money for a lot of his stuff. But my apartment complex didn't really have a yard. I figured that the next best thing to do was to rent space at a swap meet. They had the Kobey's Swap Meet every weekend in the Sports Arena parking lot. I'd always despised that swap meet, because if I wanted to go to Tower Records on the weekend while it was going on, there were no parking spaces available.
Getting in was relatively easy. We just went to their office, which was a few blocks away from the Sports Arena, fill out the paperwork and pay about $30. We were then given specific instructions on what time to arrive and where to go.
I had never been to this swap meet, so I did not know what to expect. I thought we were going to park in the main parking lot and have to carry everything he wanted to sell to our assigned space. We got there at 6:30am. We got to drive his car and his trailer directly to our space. I wasn't expecting this, but it was great because it meant we weren't going to have to carry a lot of stuff back and forth.
Our designated area was actually two consecutive parking spaces. We parked the car in one and put the trailer in the other. We started unpacking stuff. (I should add that we did not organize beforehand. There were things on the trailer he wanted to sell and other stuff he wanted to keep, but we didn't think about sorting this out.) Suddenly, about 20 people came up, grabbed things out of the trailer and asked us how much we were selling them for. The swap meet hadn't even opened to the public yet. We were NOT expecting this. Loyd had to quickly determine how much he wanted to see each item for, because this was also not planned ahead of time. We're still trying to unload everything. Loyd didn't want to waste these opportunities to suddenly sell his stuff, so he catered as much as he could to everyone.
I wish we had known this was going to happen. I didn't realize at the time that the people who swarmed us were other sellers, looking to take advantage of our (apparently obvious) naivete. They likely bought stuff from us and then sold them at their spaces to make quick profits. A little foresight would have helped us tell everyone to back off because we weren't ready yet.
Things got a lot calmer after that. We were able to unload and organize the rest of the stuff. Loyd was hoping to clear at least a couple of hundred dollars that day. He was also hoping that someone would be interested in buying the trailer and taking it off his hands. He really did not want to drive all the way to New Mexico with that.
Throughout the morning, we would have occasional visitors to our space, taking a look at our "selection." Loyd would play his guitar and sing to help attract attention. (He wasn't selling the guitar, but several people asked about it.) Around 11am, Loyd decided he'd made as much money as he was capable of and we decided to leave. This was even though there were four hours left in the swap meet. When we started setting up the trailer to drive off, other sellers told us we shouldn't leave yet. We still left, but we had to drive very slowly out of the parking lot so we didn't hit anybody in the crowd. It was weird to drive around where there's supposed to be strictly pedestrian traffic.
We wound up in a bit of a routine the next few weeks. I would go to work, come home, take a nap. Then we'd watch my favorite TV shows and often go out and see live local music performances. We also found other activities to take part in.
On Halloween, I thought I was going to take part in a poetry reading at Lestat's, but it was canceled without me being notified. I was shocked to arrive to see a country-folk band setting up. We then went over to Claire de Lune to take part in their open mic poetry reading. What I was going to read at Lestat's was going to take about 20 minutes for me to get through. But the slots were only 10 minutes each. I asked Loyd if he would follow me and read the second half of my presentation. He said he wanted to do his own material. I hadn't brought any of my other poems to read, so we just left. (At any rate, we were so far down the list that we probably wouldn't have gotten to do anything because they cut off at a certain time. It was better that we didn't wait to find out we weren't going to get to go on stage.) I don't remember exactly what we did the rest of the evening. I just know we didn't go back home because we'd run out of candy for trick-or-treaters.
But the most unusual thing we did involved the 2000 Presidential election. I'll get into that tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment