The salvation army store down 96th, near west end avenue is a small place, and somehow beautiful too. Parked outside, from Monday through Saturday is a large truck, two workers stuffing its back as tightly as only possible, flinging the bags with clothing towards the transparent ceiling, building a soft mountain of worn out love. The truck does not have to go far, I think, there is this main Salvation army building on 46th Street, a huge operation, this is where the clothes are washed, some starched and equipped with various colors of tags, to be sold back for amounts between $2 and maybe $7... (This is the place where I sometimes get my most sophisticated of shirts, those with most elaborately constructed collars and mother of pearl buttons so thick that they barely fit through the hand sewn button holes... not all the stuff is of this quality, but some actually is... )
The store here is much smaller. One does not just walk into it, one barely fits through the entrance, as there are large boxes with clothing and some very oddly constructed office on one side and this wide glass island for the sales person on the other. The feeling of going in there is a bit of a crawling back into a warm place, like one that we normally have to leave for good.
There are shelves with books, and glasses and small home appliances on the ground floor, smelling of acid and dust and tape recorder oil. Much of what is sold in this tiny portion of the store seems to have been born in places that supply companies with objects designed to extend their gigantic international brands. One finds drinking glasses celebrating some walk for some cure, sponsored by somebody who's name has been inflated and then boiled down to be just massively designed initials. Some of the books are brittle, vertical piles of dry brown paper, filled with words which have not been seen by a human eye for years. Some titles are intriguing though, of course, some of the books do not stay here for long, this section of the store tends to be packed with those looking for "love and lust" and "power of politics" not the free catalogues and instruction manuals that linger rather embarrassed in piles bending the shelves in the corners of this literary labyrinth.
Above the book area is the clothing paradise, a half floor, a gallery, a location with a view. One has to walk up stairs, another passage way, this one decorated with bleached out posters of sunsets, puppies, kittens and some other quite incredible art related objects made by the human kind. The upstairs can't help but smell like oily flakes of old shed skin, like cut fingernails, like the inside of a forgotten laundry hamper. All of the clothing here is clean and beautifully organized, it just appears that the fabric of some pieces does not want to let go of the memories of some of its probably long gone owners. Some of the clothing really looks and feels like somebody's skin. Some pieces feel like something that was not only picked out with a very focused love (and be it self-love) but then witnessed love and passion, and views and sights and locations we will probably never even know of. Some of the jackets must have been to weddings, some to funerals, some were not allowed to the last one, were later discovered by those left behind, thrown into bags, thrown onto the back of that truck outside, taken to 46th street... and then...
It is one thing to look at this clothing and to imagine its future, but it can definitely be a very inspiring activity to browse through the layers of fabric and to imagine its past. Some shirts are so worn out that they will never find another owner, or who would like to have their neck surrounded by a large yellow stain left behind by what must have been slowly sucked in sweat? Is the tiny brown speck on the back of this Christian Dior shirt really blood that does not want to go away because it knows some secret nobody cares about anymore? Why is only one french cuff on this quite interesting multicolored shirt worn out so badly as if it had spent its life polishing a heavily ticking watch?... and where is this watch now, to present the other part of the story?
Some shirts have initials stitched onto their cuffs, some still have their emergency buttons. Some shirts have nothing but their collar stapled ticket, in some bright color, at this point meaning "buy me at half price."
The clothing floor also has its "unwanted and never used" area, of course, here we find mostly t-shirts promoting some bizzarre places and events, designed by either incredibly frustrated designers or those who were trying to find the cutting edge in some completely, hideously wrong places.
I did not go upstairs yesterday, only to the third area of the store, the very back, the living room, the machine room, the gathering of large objects. This is where sofas meet cabinets meet tables meet computers.
The manager moved one shy macintosh LC to the side, so I could spread out what used to be my most trusted equipment for years. I came here twice the load was really major, Macintosh desktops tend to have a metal gut and CTR monitors are built to stand their ground as well. I managed to organize all the equipment into two computer scenarios as complete as I could only imagine. I really imagined. I hoped that there would be a glowing moment, right when the person who connects all the cables finds out that the intentions here were good, that the equipment was not thrown out but prepared and adjusted, massaged so it can run like a well trained athlete for another ten years or so.
I bought a laser printer in the GoodWill store on 79th street once and had exactly this experience. Not only was the laser writer select in an incredibly good shape, somebody had actually equipped it with a new toner cartridge, one that I never even got to change, because of its quite spectacular capacity. It was amazing to see that the salvation army store can be a bit like the anti eBay, where features of equipment are hidden, not searchable, an encapsulated surprise. There was no paypal here, no pretty doctored pictures, no blinking ads for Spam Killer. This was real people, not traffic, a mix as diverse as on the subway, not on the server, looking for real things, not clicking on underlined blue links.
As much as the clothing on the upper floor was able to reveal some and hide some of its stories, so did the computer equipment here. The mouse pointers on these machines have been to places, have moved tons of pixels, have touched OK and SEND and OPEN so many times... the l, the o, the v and the e keys have been pressed on these keyboards in full intent, from the heart, so many times. The mouse buttons had a smooth surface in some places, stroked softly between the millions of clicks, and drags and clicks...
An older lady looked at the machines as if they were the one single answer to hundreds of her years of silent questions. She wanted to "learn all this". She wanted to "know if she will be able to". She wanted to know if the equipment was "good". She then wanted to know if she would be able to "record DVDs", and I had to say that she would not be able to do just that... but that CDs would record just fine. This was the moment when another lady walked by, not even looking at us through her heavy glasses. Her statement was dry, shared in a very monotonous voice: this was all old stuff and that there are new computers at CompUSA. Hmm... oh well... : )
An older gentleman, of whom I at first thought as one of the people employed at the store kept asking me if the machines were those "Macintosh" computers. And yes, they were, even after the fifth time he asked.
He then told me that he was "not yet experienced enough to work on a Macintosh", that he was looking for a "PC for now"... I did not really know what to say to that...
I wonder if the macs found their new owners yesterday. Maybe I can walk by the store on Monday, if its open, maybe connect all the cables, maybe set up the systems, turn them on... Maybe I will just find out that somebody only bought the power cables, that it was all they needed, for now...
I will then go upstairs and find little stains on shirts, or browse through the brittle yellow pages of an old romance novel, looking for a good sentence to make me smile... and there certainly will be many that will...
