Ridin’ Dirty
So if Friday’s theme was Ridin’ Solo, then Saturday’s theme was Ridin’ Dirty. And not just because of the “adult content” I uncovered…
The first sale Adam and I went to was at a house in Dearborn. The pictures looked good but had I been paying attention to the company name on the listing, I would have never stopped there. It was being run by the same people who ran the hoarder sale Erin and I went to a few weeks ago. These kids must be in their mid-twenties, and I swear it’s almost as if they find abandoned homes and just go in and sell the contents. The stuff at their sales is so grody and dirty and SO incredibly overpriced. I paid $3 for a box of unused vintage Christmas cards, but they were all dusty and musty. Considering the fact that I got two giant bags of them at a later sale for $4, I should have known better!
Anyway, the next sale we hit up was decent, but again, stuff was seriously overpriced. At least the stuff at this sale was half off (rather than fifteen percent off!)
It was sort of picked over but it was an interesting sale. The person had a lot of marionettes and a lot of salt and pepper shakers. I ended up with a set that in retrospect, I wish I had looked more closely at. They’re crappy and nobody is going to want to buy them. (This is one of the reasons going with Erin is better than going with Adam. Erin would have pointed out how crappy they were. Adam didn’t know. However, the benefit of going with Adam will be revealed in the description of the last sale.)
I found an old Raggedy Ann puppet for $2.50 that might resell, and then this collection of Disney books for $20. If it doesn’t resell, I’ll keep it because it’s pretty dope.
One of the things I wanted from this sale was an old E.T. that I saw in one of the pictures. Adam found E.T. but he was in rough shape. His weird leathery skin was all cracked. It looked like someone loved the crap outta that thing. Which is good for E.T. But too much lovin’ on an item can make me sort of grossed out. Anyway, I passed on him. Then, on the way home, I caught Adam frantically rubbing his hands on his jeans, and I asked him what the heck he was doing. He said, “I got E.T. on them!” I asked him why–had he been rubbing his hands all over E.T.’s leathery body while I was in another room? He got defensive and said that he had touched E.T. gingerly but E.T. was disintegrating so badly that his alien skin just started coming off immediately. Good thing I didn’t buy him.
The last sale of the day was all the way out in Shelby Township, which is over an hour from our home. This was the porno sale. I’ve gotta refer to it as that because it will be forever stuck in my mind as such, even though I found plenty of other wholesome items there (including that lot of cards and many vintage children’s records). Anyway, this sale was full of “firsts” for us. The first first was that when we arrived at 3:30 p.m. (it closed at 4), there was a line outside, and you had to go inside and get a number from one of the surly women running the sale. Here is a picture of the front door that I took while highly agitated and freezing my butt off. Way to taunt us with that sign, jerks.
WTF?! It had started the day before. The line was completely unnecessary! They claimed that it was too crowded inside. We got in there and there were probably 15 people in there. I think they need to toughen up.
When we finally got inside, we found a lot of cool stuff. Adam scored this gem for me:
If you know me, you know that I am fairly obsessed with Ernie and Bert.
And I found this, which I love, because when Erin and I go to the casino, we often play video poker machines (so does my mom):
Too bad it doesn’t give you money like the ones at the casino do. Actually, they take your money so forget I said that.
So, finally, let’s talk about porn. I remembered reading in the listing that the sale contained “vintage men’s magazines,” but as I suggested earlier this week, I had no idea what I was in store for. I figured they meant that there were some vintage Playboys, which can actually be sort of valuable sometimes. When we got into the basement, I told Adam to look out for “men’s magazines” and about 15 minutes after being down there, he called me over. There was a large printing paper box filled with various issues of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler from the mid ‘70s to the 2000s. But there was another box that had all of these smaller magazines (about the size of old TV Guides), and man, are they weird. I bought a handful without really looking at them, but part of me sort of wishes I had, because they’re really creepy and I probably wouldn’t have bought them. My mom said to me, “Aren’t you embarrassed buying stuff like that?” I told her no at the time, but considering now that I know what’s in them, the answer is yes. At least they’ve provided Adam and I with some good laughs.
I’ll leave it at that, but close with another ad from one of them:
Stanley is actually wrong.
-Sarah