Corporate Thrift Store, Continued

Some friends write: "Why should you care?" Well, for several reasons.

When I was in high school, and even well on into university, CTS was the book scouting resource for anyone who took their trade seriously. Gavin, my old friend and manager at Book and Comic Emporium, took pity on my lack of scouting savvy one day, informed me that I was buying him lunch in return for his time, and loaded me onto the #9 bus. We went to the big CTS on East Hastings, not so far from the location of Jeff Wall's Milk. Gavin stationed himself beside me as I worked through bookcase after bookcase of potential purchases. "Take that one." "Don't take that, it's water-damaged." "That's overpriced." "Check that one, it's a PBO [paperback original]." Lots of other scouts wandered past us; they all seemed to know Gavin, and to be vaguely amused by me and the selections stacked in my red plastic shopping basket. I felt like I was being initiated into the Freemasons, or some other secret society.

Every time I walk into CTS, with its big bright trays of fluorescent light and the smell of freshly-laundered clothing, I experience a brief but potent pang of nostalgia for the scouting trips I took by bus, c. 1990-95, to the far ends of Vancouver and suburbs: Victoria Drive; Edmonds; Langley; North Road. This was not a particularly happy time in my life, and these trips always made me feel better, even when they were conducted in the snow, or the pouring rain.

In 1999, having determined that I was probably going to kill myself if I had to keep working at the UBC library, I cashed out my RRSP [Registered Retirement Savings Plan, the Canadian equivalent of a US IRA], and booked two weeks of holidays and an extra week of unpaid leave for early April. I rented a Toyota Corolla and drove south by southwest from Vancouver, passing through Boise, Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Fe, Colorado Springs, Denver, Boise [again], Portland and Seattle. I visited approximately two hundred different thrift stores, including many CTS franchises, and filled the car six times. Gavin had told me I would need approximately 10,000 different titles to open a used bookstore of my own, and I tried to come as close to that total as I possibly could.

Stepping over the threshold of CTS -- any CTS -- always reminds me of that three-week trip, and the alternating sensations of giddy elation and near-suicidal depression that accompanied me. "You burn your bridges pretty good," D. observed last week, as we labored up the side of Mount Strachan. Well, yes, and on that 1999 trip I was very conscious of setting the fuses and lighting the matches, and also of how few matches were left in the pack. But there were also brief moments of happiness that will stay with me my whole life: the huge, half-pound bean and cheese burrito that I bought from a Mexican taco truck in a CTS parking lot in suburban Tucson; the sidewalk ice outside the motel in Cortez, Colorado; and the music on REM's lovely and totally neglected album Up, which was always on in the car, Michael Stipe's sad resigned voice a constant comfort as I crossed and recrossed the high plateau country in the thickly falling, weirdly unseasonal snow that began in eastern Oregon and didn't let up until Phoenix.
- posted by cjb @ 9:11 AM