Wooden Nickels
I bought stereo speakers from a guy in a white van long before doing so was a punchline. Talk about your wooden nickels!
To be fair, I think they were pretty good speakers. I couldn’t say for sure, though, because I never plugged them in to my stereo. I couldn’t bring them home because I was supposed to be saving money for college and my mom would have hit the roof.
I drove from the Winchell’s parking lot to the bank and withdrew $200. I had to walk inside a branch of Rainier Bank because the ATM had not been invented yet. This was 1981.
The guy was waiting outside and he took the speakers out of the back of his van and set them in the parking lot. He counted the money like a pro and then without another word, he got back in the white van and drove away.
They were new, still wrapped in plastic. I don’t remember the brand. He said his boss at the stereo store had ordered too many pair and he had to get rid of them so he was selling them for way less than what they cost on the floor. I don’t recall that price. But $200 was a lot of bread in 1981. Of course they were hot, duh.
I put them in the backseat of my ‘71 Impala and drove to Larry’s house. He wasn’t saving money for college and his parents may not even have realized he was still living there at the time. Larry was the youngest of five kids and his folks were pretty much done hitting the roof about much of anything by the time he was in high school. We agreed that he would be merely fostering the speakers, but of course I’d never get any closer to plugging them in to my own stereo than I was right then, leaving Larry’s parents’ house in Redondo.
I used to set my beer down on them whenever I’d go over to Larry’s apartment years later. He had a nice stereo that sounded great with the speakers. They made good end tables for setting your beer on or else the white gnome-shaped ceramic bong that we referred to simply as ‘the gnome.’
We listened to a lot of Rush through those speakers, but Larry & Scott were into reggae too, and also the second Peter Gabriel record with ‘Shock the Monkey’ on it. That song sounded really good coming out of my speakers after an hour with the gnome.
Larry moved a lot. Like pretty much every year he would just move, seemingly for the sake of moving. His job never changed, nor did his roommates. He wasn’t moving up or down, rather he just seemed to be moving. I’d usually help him move and I guess I must have carried those speakers up some flights of south King County apartment stairs a few times while Larry was setting up his waterbed. I don’t think they let you have waterbeds in apartments these days, but this was the 1980s. Ed smoked tobacco inside, too-- it was like the wild west…
I don’t know why I bought the speakers. I obviously got sold hard by some slick fencer, but in my secondary ring of logic I don’t know what the fuck I thought I was going to do with the speakers. I had another year of high school and then planned to do two years at Green River Community College earning an AA before transferring to Western Washington University. I’d be living at home during the first two years and just because I was in college and just because I was an adult and just because I had worked in restaurants since age 15 and had my own money didn’t mean I could buy a $200 set of stereo speakers! It was just out of the question-- an unwritten rule. It was like a household code, and I knew it wasn’t worth the shrill hassle even though my regular speakers were so shitty. Nothing was more important to me at that time in my life than music, yet I suffered with my shitty stereo almost as pre-penance for some future sin I was certain to commit once I finally saved up all my tips and got to college. How perfectly Calvinist.
The home speakers I had in my car were so shitty they made the speakers in my room sound like the speakers at Larry’s. They took up pretty much the whole back window, these shoebox sized grocery store speakers, mounted to the rear deck behind the backseat. I’m sure it’s illegal to block your back window with home stereo speakers these days, just like sleeping in a waterbed on the 2nd floor or smoking inside. But again—a different time...
The top of that back deck was also covered in gold shag carpet just like every other surface in the car that wasn’t a seat or a dashboard or a headliner (though I did try to get it overhead). The carpet had come out of the living room when my mom had new berber installed, and during the 3-night simulcast of the Rolling Stones October run at the Kingdome, I pulled the seats out and laid the shag carpet in the Impala. The car had been sitting in the driveway for a year before I got my license and there were mushrooms growing in it. So I pulled the seats and peeled the stock carpet and scrubbed every inch of the metal chassis with bleach before cutting in the gold shag and bolting the seats back in. I thought I was going to be like a white Cholo, but ’71 was too late a model for hydraulics and my mom wouldn’t let me buy mag wheels or tires with raised white lettering anyway. So I just put the used house carpet in instead.
I didn’t care much for the Rolling Stones at the time and remember thinking that they were so old and irrelevant. Some friends were going to the show and I thought about it for about a minute before deciding to stay home and work on my car. But I did listen to KISW’s simulcast, in the garage with a bottle of bleach and a toothbrush. Of course I was wrong about the Stones and dearly would like to go back and confront that decision again. The Tattoo You tour, fucking god. But even Lester Bangs famously proclaimed them dead after Let it Bleed, so I suppose everyone guesses wrong sometimes…
Larry helped me move a lot, too, once I finally did get that Associate’s degree and transfer to Western-- right on schedule. So even though my moves were of a less recreational variety, they were still moves. And they weren’t two-milers, either-- rather grueling marches up-and-down I5, usually capered in the middle of the night after several hours of load ‘n’ gnome. I had a waterbed, too, and in those days it was still legal to sleep in it on the top floor of a 100-year old 4-story house on a hill in Bellingham. So Larry and I were both moving yearly, breaking down and subsequently re-assembling waterbeds each time.
What I did have that Larry didn’t were dozens of ticket stubs and 2” square pictures of Nikki Sixx and Phil Taylor clipped from pages of Kerrang! magazine taped all over the walls of my room, filling in the gutters between posters and record flats. And sometimes Larry would arrive to load me out and not only would I not have drained my bed yet, but I wouldn’t even have started taking down the wallpaper. Carefully, I would start to peel off the scotchtape loops on the back of the thin paper squares so that I could put the pictures up again in my next room. No wonder it was midnight before we ever got on the road.
Larry drove a little red Mitsubishi pickup. Many years later—at the beginning of a real move, from Washington to California—he would drag the truck all the way from Kirkland to Federal Way, ‘towing’ it behind the U-Haul but with the parking brake on. So, you know, new tires in FW! But long before that, on one of our midnight drives south from Bellingham, my knee itched. Larry and Scott are big guys, each 6’+, so I was always stuck in the middle of the bench seat when the three of us rolled in the Mitsu which was fairly often. We were listening to Peter Tosh and smoking pot like it was going out of style, which, as it turns out it wasn’t-- but we couldn’t have known that at the time. Here we were, these three honkies car-trodding down I5 in the middle of the night with all my stuff in the open bed of the pickup and my right knee is still itching even though I had already scratched it. I’d scratch it and then forget about it but then eventually it would occur to me that it still itched. I started to worry that I had smoked so much ganja that I was becoming paralyzed, so I wiggled my toes and was relieved to find they still worked. I tried scratching my knee again.
“Why do you keep scratching my knee?” Scott laughed, and I looked down to see myself scratching Scott’s left knee. This is something we used to call stoney baloney.
I don’t know if I thought the speakers were a good investment or what. Even if they were a screamin’ deal (I’m sure they weren’t) it wasn’t like they were going to appreciate in value like a traditional investment. Like if I paid $200 for them on a Wednesday afternoon and by the time I got them to Larry’s they were worth $207? If Larry kept them long enough and we didn’t spill too much bongwater on them I’d be able to sell them someday for half-a-million bucks? Unlikely. While it’s true that with the escalating wealth disparity in this country, the ponderously rich are buying wine they don’t intend to drink and comic books they have no interest in reading as ‘investments’ because they’re so fucking bored trying to spend their money conventionally—these speakers would likely never be seen as conventionally collectible.
Talk about your wooden nickels…