He turns out to be not so cranky once you're buying trifles from his back yard mess-a-thon, and he does manage to have some queer, little-to-be-encountered items amongst his collections now on offer.
He lives a few doors down from our town house in the Yammer-glorified tiny city full of antique shops in which we have summered and sometimes wintered for several years now. Our town house is in a less respectable corner of the city and that is one of the things I like about it. The little girls living with their single moms in rented rooms on the corner run back and forth screeching and playing in the dirt. No one really cares if I get around to mowing the weeds on the sidewalk median in front (my plan is to eradicate them entirely and replace them with yet more stone or gravel). And there is Cranky Guy.
Cranky Guy is always working on a beaten-down car, shouting at someone to "turn it over" while he checks the timing; or his sunburned, gangly form will emerge from beneath one of these hapless conveyances cursing and besmirched with stains of dark oozing fluid. An almost permanent feature of his front "yard" (so tiny as to be nearly nonexistent) is a battered cardboard sign that says "FREE" and beneath it there is usually a much-clawed and battered child's car-seat or a hooked rod or a diminutive bald tire perhaps from a dirt bike or lawn tractor.
What caught my eye was that this spring his yard sales (which are frequent) began to feature a small army of Christmas-Claus figurines decked in red and white and sprinkled all over with sparkly "snow". I'm not interested in those but I figured there must be something of interest behind the crazily sagging gates, now thrown open to the public.
I was not disappointed. His yard was a treasure trove of oddities. And had he not suffered from the improvident supposition that book jackets are to be discarded, I might have bought some first editions. On the most recent visit I ended up coming away with a JFK tribute album (50 cents), two beautifully blue old unlabeled Milk of Magnesia bottles (@ 50 cents) and wicker baskets that appeared quite unmolested (2 dollars). I found all these to be reasonably priced.
His merchandising skills are not infallible, however, as suggested above regarding the book jackets. Also on offer was what may have been an ancient tricycle or other tyke's conveyance but its rampant rust and decrepitude had rendered it less an antique than a twisted filthy wreck quite unrecoverable from the slag heap and he wanted seventy five bucks for it. And out front he had a smudged lawn tractor marked down from five hundred to four hundred dollars. A brand new one of the same type at Tractor Supply will cost not more than nine hundred and possibly less.
One supposes a key element separating the professional dealer from the amateur is some sense of merchantability and pricing. But I find myself rarely buying from the professionals--they have calculated market value and I am only interested in laughably low prices and enormous values. These kinds of bargains are only to be found by picking amongst the dew-moistened bins of amateurs like Cranky Guy.
