Thu, 19 May 2005

on haggling
I’ve never been able to get too hopped up on Columbus day pro or con, as all it’s ever menat to me was half-off sales at Carlo’s Insanity Furniture, and I can’t even remember the last time I bought furniture for myself except for all the Pirateland surplus I bought up when they went out of business, so that now everything in my apartment is set up for swashbuckling and walking the plank, though my landlord frowns on my use of the plank, as those who walk it end up in his compost heap. My mom, however, was like member number one of the Carlo’s Insanity Furniture discount buyer’s club, so every Columbus day her and I were down there (my dad had the good sense to start drinking heavily just after the beginning of October) sifting through the Remainders room, apparenlty off-limits to “regular customers”, while my mom did math in her head and tried to figure if it would be possible to get a sofa for less than ten dollars. Carlo, who did all his math via an abacus-armed autistic mute he met “while inside”, he’d whisper to my mom, who loved all this gray-market nonsense, and while he’d love to give my mom a deal (among other things), Malthus the Memory Magician brought the hammer down and fifty bucks was the best he could do, at which point Malthus would cross his arms across his chest sternly and glare at my mother as though his children would now go hungry to satisfy her endless lust for discount furniture. My mom loved this, but I cared not for sofa haggling, and Carlo’s Insanity Furniture was so far down in the haggling district that even buying a dime’s worth of gum was an hour-long process, so I’d stand by the chain-link fence and throw rocks at a nasty shovel-headed dog chained behind Vaccuum Repair Paradise for no better rason than a child’s natural tendency to goad certain death until my mother grabbed me by my collar and pulled me to the car, where Carlo and Malthus fought physics and common sense by trying to load my mom’s new thirty-dollar sofa (my mother, obviously, was no spring chicken when it came to negotiating, and a promise of highballs with Carlo later in the week probably didn’t hurt) into her ‘58 Fairlane. So yeah, nuts to Columbus day, that’s what I say.
(12:25.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #