Fred went to prowl for vinyl. Audria was a frequent flyer who lasered in on collectible china. Aude and her husband had the eye for mid-century modern in the midst of cheap motel room castoffs. I was fixated on classroom globes from the USSR era.
We weren’t a group, but almost every weekend we were regulars at The Bins, the unofficial name of a long gone Goodwill store on Steves Boulevard. The Bins has since migrated to Route 66, and that place has no story for me. But when I moved to Flag in 2005, I made my way to The Bins on Steves to do some thrifting. There I found not just a treasure hunt, but a kooky cosmos that I wholeheartedly joined.
The Bins had a recurring cast of oddball characters who orbited there on the weekends and an unrehearsed element of experimental theater. The first time I went, a group of high school boys found a cache of gaudy ball gowns, put them on over their clothes and continued shopping. A woman and her children sported witches hats. Someone was wearing a skirt made out of AstroTurf. Okay, I thought, so this is how we roll in here. I put on a gold lame jacket and a tutu. Kids swarmed, a scratchy radio played KAFF country tunes, and workers rolled dollies of fresh goods in and out of the room with purpose and oomph. The place was an ant farm, a blend of vaudeville, chaos and costume party. And it was like that every time I went.
The Bins was a thrift store by definition. It had the usual flotsam and jetsam of discardable contemporary life: obsolete electronics, books of all stripes, dusty textiles, kitchen gear, toys, tools, furniture. But instead of arranged into clusters of similar goods—the standard taxonomy of most thrift stores—The Bins trafficked in surprise, weird juxtaposition and heaping piles of stuff. A mask and snorkel beside a three-ring binder of someone’s vacation slides from Venice on top a Twister game beside a Weed Whacker with bent blades on top of a picture frame adorned with elbow macaroni and glitter.
John was the usual Saturday cashier and shop wrangler. He cinched his oversized khakis above his waistline with a wide belt and wore a tattered baseball cap. When he wasn’t weighing and ringing up our purchases, he walked through the store with a beatific smile, as if he were beholding an arcade of wonders. He clucked over the items that had spilled onto the floor, and pinched them back into a bin with his cane-sized grabber.
Another Saturday regular was Vampire Guy. He looked to be in his early 20s and wore a black cape with a stand-up collar. He colored a widow’s peak onto his hairline and sported black lipstick. Sometimes he wore horns; sometimes he had a magician’s cane. He stared into the distance as he strolled the aisles imperiously, flicking his cape when he found something interesting.
One Saturday as I unearthed a bundle of slips and brassieres that looked like the undergarments my grandmother wore, I heard a faint rendition of “My Way.” An elderly woman, a regular, wore a pink, plastic crown and cradled a cassette tape player that she had plugged into a wall socket. As she held the machine, she sang along with Frank Sinatra. Quietly at first. She continued and gathered volume and an audience. She sang the song through with gusto. At the end, we whooped and applauded. She curtseyed, and we returned to our hunting and gathering.
I have been to The Bins on Route 66, hoping that the alchemy could be replicated. But it’s not there. And these days most Goodwill stores have modeled themselves after their retail brethren that sell new things. Goodwills are now slick, clean and organized. Departments announce themselves with cheerful signage: Household Goods, Men’s Pants, Shoes. Dressing rooms have mirrors. Clothing hangs on racks. Music purrs from the sound system. Everything has a price tag.
When I reflect on why my nostalgia for The Bins is so pronounced, I know that I was new to town, happy to be here but dislocated. I went to look through all that stuff for things that delighted me, and what I found was an unexpected social experiment that moved me. The Bins was a store where we all gathered to search, yes, but something larger was found in there. An unlikely lot of us created something without planning to, or maybe it had been there all along, and I had serendipitously stumbled into it. But it felt to me like I was part of making something there. Part of making a place where we didn’t judge. Part of making a place to play, a place where the silly was accepted, and the spontaneous was courted. This, I have come to know, is a rare and fleeting thing.
