Episode 40: Epilogue / Goodbye Dirt Mall
On January 6, the third anniversary of the insurrection, I found myself, by default, back at the dirt mall.
Several months prior, following a series of increasingly frustrating strikeouts, I had told myself I was never going back. But “never” is a shifty, slippery word, the currency of fools who think they’re stronger than temptation – stronger than the last stale macaroon in the post-Christmas cupboard, stronger than Mario’s stale record stall at the Streetsboro Flea Market – and there I was, back, flipping through the same LPs that had lived there for the life of our acquaintance, searching for something, as this game goes, that I did not know I was seeking. But mostly I was lonely and avoiding my to-do list. Erica and Magnolia were in Hawaii, wedging in a visit to our sister-in-law and nephew before the Air Force shipped their military family to the inverse-bucket-list Abilene, Texas, and sitting before me was a blank slate of alone time – eight days and eight nights of it – and at the outset I had aspired to tear through a variety pack of hedonistic pleasures and deep-focus domestic tasks. By the end, I had crossed a few off my list and outright abandoned others, but the big one – cleaning and rearranging the garage – was still glaring at me as the clock ticked on my people’s return. Did I dig in at the zero hour? Eventually. But first I hopped in the truck and crossed the county line to dig through records.
No matter the time of year or your particular temperament on a given Saturday, the scene at the Streetsboro Flea Market is reliably the same, and the characters – colorful and abundant – are straight out of Central Casting. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear the same chainsmoker was permanently stationed outside the entrance, forever halfway through a cheap cigarette, waiting to greet you with an obligatory, if slightly strained, nod of the head. Inside to the left, the same woman at the same table in front of the snack counter barks grievances about anything and everything to anyone and everyone, while the comically-loud TV above the counter shoots ribbons of cable news into the stale, griddle-perfumed air. An all-beef hot dog runs a buck-fifty, add chili and cheese for only fifty cents more (watch your back, Costco). You can get breakfast, too, with the lone item under the morning menu (AVAILABLE ALL DAY!) consisting of a sausage, egg and cheese biscuit. At one point, presumably, there was a second breakfast option, but whatever it was is now obscured on the menu board by the jagged scribbles of a black magic marker.
Moving deeper into the labyrinth, away from the din of the TV, your ears are deluged with competing speakers, tinny and muffled, projecting a chaotic mashup of background noise. There are too many vendors to count, and most of them, even the ones who aren’t selling music or stereo equipment, blast mothballed FM favorites or AM talk radio from their stalls – just in case the mounds of stuff engulfing you weren’t enough stimulation for your senses. “Collectible” is a subjective term, and at the Streetsboro Flea Market, most everything under that vast and nebulous umbrella is represented: vintage toys and board games, video games, costume jewelry, comic books, sports cards, basketball shoes, lunch boxes, movies, model trains, action figures, knives, neon signs and, of course, records, along with other orphaned audio formats – even books on tape and CD. Time stands still at the dirt mall, and not just in the stall with the grandfather clocks and their stationary minute and second hands; the clocks may have stories, but as far as utility is concerned, they tell us nothing. Ditto most of the items ostensibly for sale: Despite myriad boldface signs advertising NO REFUNDS OR EXCHANGES – as if you need a reminder the dirt mall is a one-way street – price tags in this mega-mart of curios and curiosities may be the rarest thing you’ll find. The lone item I did encounter with a tag was a sagging Trump 2020 flag pinned to a drywall partition, the flag’s desperate, cockeyed appearance further exaggerated by the rolled-up rug leaning into it. The name-tag sticker affixed to the bottom of the flag declares, in obligatory boldface, NOT FOR SALE. Welcome to flavor country.
For record collectors, the dirt mall has two vendors specializing in music, plus the occasional pile of trashed, overpriced LPs in one of the numerous yard sale-style stalls. It only took two trips to cross one of the music guys off the list; he may reside on the sunnier end of the merchant spectrum, quick with a smile and a demonstrated comprehension of customer service, but the thousands of records he’s selling are excruciatingly disorganized, filthy to the touch and nearly comprehensive in their subpar musical quality, the most common of the common castoffs from the first century of recorded audio history. (Were I to describe these records as “thrift store staples,” most collectors could paint the picture.) Mario’s stall, relatively speaking, is a shining beacon. The records, while hardly a grail, are titles thrifty collectors would snag at the right price: mostly second-tier Sixties, Seventies and Eighties rock, pop, R&B and country, with just enough outliers to maintain intrigue. Though not lacking grime, they’re playable, organized by genre and loosely alphabetical – there’s a bin card for every letter, but that’s the extent of his filing protocol. Time is money, after all, and Mario is the dirt mall’s de facto or actual manager, I’m not quite sure – he’s something like the mayor, in any case – and usually he’s on the opposite side of the building in his carpentry workshop next to the wholesale furniture. Fifty-ish, ponytailed and possessing a vaguely European accent I cannot place, Mario is one of the more laid-back and socially adept entrepreneurs at the dirt mall, even if he’s painfully difficult to track down. He sort of has proxies to watch over the stall in his absence – which in my experience has been most of the time – but his helpers are usually occupied with their own commerce or conversations of deep import with fellow vendors or hangers-on. On this day, I honed in on one of their discussions after hearing this intriguing nugget float into Mario’s unmanned stall, delivered with the same authoritative air of a grad-school lecturer: “Jabba the Hutt was one of the last of his kind.” I then learned that before his death Jabba was one of about 30 surviving Hutts, that Boba Fett took over the intergalactic smuggling ring after Leia killed Jabba, and so forth. It went on like that for five minutes, and the conversation was still ramping toward light speed as I walked out of earshot and straight into a gripe-cloud about “another school levy” and those “greedy” schools “always asking for more.” (Sample quote: “I haven’t voted for a school levy in 30 years.”) While we’re painting pictures here, Trump won Portage County in the last two presidential elections.
Once again I went through every record in Mario’s stall, and once again I didn’t buy anything. Don’t get me wrong – dreams do come true at the dirt mall. On our maiden voyage, while my brother and his family were here from Boise during the summer of 2021, Travis walked away with a grip of Pablo Records jazz LPs feeling quite victorious, while my thrill of cheap conquest came in the form of a five-dollar 12-inch, Cudy and the Bink Band’s “Home Boy,” an obscure electro-rap banger from 1983 that I did not know existed until I rescued it from a stack of random records on top of a milk crate. It’s now been more than two years since I made a purchase at the dirt mall, and Mario’s inventory, based on my observations, has not refreshed in that time, despite his long-ago promise of new wares forthcoming. During that first trip in 2021, while I settled up for the “Home Boy” 12-inch, Mario pointed to a heap of U-Haul boxes next to his stall – recently acquired inventory – and suggested coming back in a month, at which time, he indicated, the records would be ready for browsing. I returned three months later and the boxes – slowly collapsing under their own weight – had not been touched. A few months after that, still nothing, so I tracked down Mario and asked about them. He responded, “What are you looking for?” And I replied – nearly pleaded, to be accurate – “I want to look at those records!” It was the last time I spoke with him. This time around, having tasted the cold defeat that accompanies loneliness and a failed post-holiday retail therapy session, I didn’t bother searching for him. With itchy eyes, dry throat and visible residue on the tips of my fingers, I proceeded to leave the dirt mall for the last time – the last last time. I was feeling low, mourning late-stage humanity and missing my family, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the merciless reprimand some Roseanne Barr-esque mother had just unleashed on a pint-size kid for stretching his tiny arm toward the eye-level treasures she kept yanking him past. It’s easy to discern the anger and bitterness on the surface of our republic, and it’s even easier to overlook the sadness and despair in the cracks. I don’t have a Founding Fathers fetish like so many others, but I do often wonder what those wiggy, powdered-wig freaks would think if they took a guided tour through the shadows some 250 years into their experiment. Writer Henry Miller, who hated this country, once referred to modern America as “the air-conditioned nightmare,” and stepping back and taking it all in, even from (especially from) a place of obscene comfort, indeed it looks so cruel and terrifying, so beatdown and tired. It’s a bittersweet symphony, this life.
I meandered to the exit by way of an aisle that parts a sea of drab puffy couches, and sure enough there was Mario, kneeling on the floor and aggressively twisting a screwdriver into the underside of a bench, ponytail askew, his easygoing veneer obscured by the strain of a battle he looked to be losing to a stubborn piece of secondhand furniture. For a split second I considered interrupting him and inquiring, once again, about the record boxes, but I didn’t bother; I already knew the answer. When I stepped outside, it was 33 degrees and drizzling, the type of dreary Midwestern weather that shivers the soul and sends affluent natives fleeing to Florida come retirement. Ten minutes later, I was back in Hudson and the sun graciously emerged, so I decided to take a walk around the block. But no sooner than I had closed the garage door behind me a gray-black cloud swallowed the sun, because January in Ohio. No matter; fresh air is fresh air, and it was a welcome refresh after circulating dirt-mall particles through my lungs for the worst part of an hour. As I walked, I thought of the struggles and loose screws inside Mario’s kingdom, of his useless reply to my long-ago query and the low-key lack of impulse control that led me back into his orbit on a lonesome winter Saturday. And I asked myself: So what am I looking for?
It’s a fair question, and whatever it is, I didn’t find it at the dirt mall. Nor have I found it anywhere else in my homeland since we made our pandemic escape – not that a deep soul search was the catalyst for this hard reset. Like many during the shutdown, we saw a pearl of opportunity within a crisis and seized it – however strange the circumstance – to clear the hurdles that Boise kept dropping in front of us, to come unstuck instead of coming undone. But moving back to Ohio never looked like a finish line. Life in Hudson is not particularly terrible or terrific — there are far better and far worse places to be – but like every other suburban abyss I’ve encountered, it just is, it’s just there, and right now I’m right here with it, in a holding pattern en route to destinations unknown. I’m incredibly grateful for what we’ve torn down and rebuilt, I love our spaceship and its proximity to family and friends and certain pizza, but if there’s one takeaway from my time here thus far, it’s that I’ll never outrun the unease that follows me – no matter how fast, how far or how often I flee – and four years after “RUN AWAY,” I still feel like I’m living on the moon or floating through a dream state, and I doubt that feeling will ever go away. Maybe it’s a byproduct of the pandemic, a new strain of emotional isolation. Can you relate? I suspect, to some degree, you can. But I can shadowbox unease – I’m a hardy Midwesterner and I’m hardwired for this shit – and I’ve discovered an odd solace in detachment, which has allowed me to grasp a little less, to walk through life with a little more grace, to frame moments in time that in past lives passed by without so much as a snapshot: the chorus of frogs in the culvert on a cool spring night, the first birdsong of a summer morning floating into my bedroom window, the backyard pines slow-waltzing with a warm autumn wind. Knowing there’s a time stamp on this period of our lives, indeterminate as it may be, I feel an unfettered freedom of movement, the ability to shift gears and floor it in any direction whenever I want, whereas in Boise, not unlike New Hampshire circa 2005, I felt stuck in neutral. Stillness by choice is an entirely different vibe, and most days I’m able to lean into it, but it’s a dangerous line to tow in an environment that inoculates one to stop moving, to stay put, to settle.
My mind returns again and again to the turnpike that cuts through the middle of town – all that open road and the urge for going, as Joni once sang, that I can’t seem to shake (and likely never will). Restlessness may ride shotgun, but I don’t mind the company – it’s reassurance that I won’t settle for settling, or worse, resignation. Life is TBD, and I’ve resolved to sit back and let it all wash over me — joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, success, failure, birth, death, rebirth — without looking too far ahead (or too far behind). Right now I’m not going anywhere, and that’s the most attractive destination.
Enjoy this week’s episode? Support independent writing and consider contributing to The Suburban Abyss tip jar, sponsoring an upcoming episode or telling a friend. Thank you for being here.