Big Deals at Small Prices

My childhood was lived in department stores. That's how it seemed, anyway, because my mother had a love for shopping that ranked just shy of her love for my brother and myself, and well above her care for our pets. The everyday memories of my mother do not take place in parks or at Bingo halls, but rather among racks of moderately priced kitchen textiles and aisles of crafting supplies.

While other children were off learning about the rules of baseball and football from their fathers, I opted instead to hang out with my mother. And so, while I cannot tell the difference between a field goal and a grand slam, I can find my way around a Walmart or a Target like nobody's business. If one of my friends in grade school had suddenly come up to me and said, "I wonder where I can find some glass champagne flutes at Big Lots," I could have directed him with ease. Or if one of my teachers sprang a pop quiz on me, asking me to close my eyes and describe the interior of a Value City, I would have passed with flying white and brown colors.

If anything, I might have considered myself a navigator of retail, something akin to a seaman and his frequented waters. Except my boat was a shopping cart, and my sails were made of plastic shopping bags. Had the other kids my age been competing with me for the title of World's Best Retail Expert, I would have feigned congeniality but secretly told myself, "You're the one, you're the one. You're a shoe-in for this. This is what you were born for. You know where the highest thread-count sheet sets are, and you can get from there to the paper towels in no time flat." If I couldn't join in a conversation about the St. Louis Cardinals, then I could at least convince myself that I might impress someone with my knowledge of department store floor plans.

By the time I was eight I was off exploring on my own. The toy department became my destination of choice, and every time my mother and I would go somewhere we would part ways. She would go through her lists and stashes of clipped coupons, looking for basics like toilet paper and detergent. She'd then make her way to the grocery sections to stock up on cans of peas and pork 'n' beans to join the ranks of other canned foods and gallon jugs of water waiting in our basement. Meanwhile, I would drool over $40 Lego sets and Star Trek action figures, oblivious to the coming nuclear armageddon intimated by my mother's cache of food and water. I found myself so enraptured by the toys that my mother would have to come find me when she was ready to leave, prying my fingers off of a set of miniature plastic spaceships or a Batman doll with a working utility belt. "Come on," she'd say. "We...have...to...GO."

The first time my mother didn't come to find me was an experience, and a real eye opener. We were in a Target store and, somehow, I exhausted my desire to browse, so I set off to find my mother, thinking, I guess, that that would be the end of our stay there. As each department came and went with no Mom, a growing panic took hold. It's funny how rational though can escape a person when their age is eternities away from double digits and their height's rivaled by a yardstick. Oh my god, I thought, my mother has abandoned me. She finally got fed up with my neediness and my always wanting that Space Enforcer Lego set and she's taken off, and now I'm going to have to live in this Target store until I'm old enough to hitchhike back home.

After what felt like anywhere from three to seven trips around the store, passing families with their kids in tow, I started to reevaluate my pride in thinking I knew how to make it on my own in places like this. Sure it was nice being able to go look at toys I wouldn't be able to afford until I was well into my twenties, and it was something of a relief to say I had a skill that few of the others my age had (even if that skill was at finding discounted hand towels and dish soap on clearance endcaps). But what was it worth when you couldn't find the one thing that mattered?

All the dish soap and towels in the world wouldn't do me any good, and neither would Legos unless I could somehow build a giant, pedal-powered dune buggy that would drive me home. But, judging by how long it took me to follow the step-by-step instructions for sets as simple as the police station or the underwater sea lab, my Lego idea was a no-go.

Ultimately, by the time I came around to the toys once again, I was on the verge of tears. The thought of going up front, of asking strangers for help, made me lightheaded. It was the last option I had, and I was just about to take it when I saw my mother turn a corner up ahead and start making her way toward me. The weight of my relief felt like a quilt, heavy on my chest, and I walked, nearly running, to her and the fully-laden cart whose plastic bottom sagged like an overweight dog.

With a cursory once-over to make sure I wasn't bleeding or clutching something I hoped she'd buy, she said, "Well, I think I'm about ready. Did you see anything you liked?"

I started to speak, but I couldn't think of anything I'd looked at. Instead, I just said, "Not really," and, pressing myself close to her, we made our way up front.

Toy Story

Although I’m nearly halfway through living my twenties, I have yet to grow up. I say this because, as anyone who knows me can attest, I have few of the qualities that grown men exhibit. Not only might I reach my middle-age living out of the same bedroom in which I grew up, but the majority of my income goes not to health insurance premiums or electric bills, but rather to things that entertain me.

Aside from the standard fare of movie ticket stubs and video game discs, my purchases occasionally can go a step further into rather embarrassing waters.

Take, for example, an instance not long ago when I was walking around a department store. I’d originally gone to pick up replacements for several tattered pieces of clothing with split seams and stains I’d somehow convinced myself were still good enough to wear. I walked in with every intention of marching straight to the men’s department, but thanks to my cat-like curiosity and the insatiable need to look at things I have absolutely no reason to buy, I wound up snaking my way around the store, ending up in the toy department.

It was a couple months before the release of the Star Trek motion picture directed by J.J. Abrams, and the merchandising was out in full force. Not only were there colorful graphics placed above the aisle sections dedicated to tiny plastic phaser-wielding figurines, but entire endcaps had been erected in honor of what had been one of my all-time favorite childhood shows.

As a youth, I would fantasize not about scoring a winning touchdown in a Superbowl game, but rather I’d imagine myself commanding a spaceship, fending off an alien invasion and saving a distant planet. One of the main elements of my dream future was the spaceship, and so when I stood before the endcap and saw that there was a plastic replica of the iconic spacecraft from the movie, I had to have it.

Picking it up, however, I only stood there, considering myself. Here I was, standing in a toy department, well into my twenties and about to buy a toy rather than some much-needed clothes. Was I crazy, I had to wonder, for being stuck on such a choice?

My friend Michael shares a passion for collectibles, especially those of the science fiction kind. He once told me that, upon finding a toy that caught his eye, he decided to buy it. When his cashier bagged the item up and announced his total, she asked, “Did you need a gift receipt with that?”

“No,” Michael answered firmly, as if he were making a stand. “No, I don’t.”

I thought about him as I worried the box with my hands, wearing away at the edges of the packaging like a nervous thief. My feet shuffled back and forth, as if toeing an imaginarily line between justification and utter madness.

So what? I thought finally, and I walked up to the checkouts.

To this day, I have nowhere to move. I have no savings to speak of. All I have is a plastic light-up spaceship sitting on a bookshelf. That, and the hope that, if I can’t one day fly through space, defending alien civilizations, I can — at the very least — grow up.

Big Spender

It’s not a recent occurrence, but money, much like boyfriends or good hair, never has a way of sticking with me. I’ve never been able to hold onto a bill of currency for more than a week — and that’s if my internet’s out or I’m in a coma — because once I have my hands on it, I start thinking about all the things that I’d like to have.

The list of offenses is a long one. If these things were necessities, then, sure, I’d say, why not? But as it turns out, each time I get a craving it’s for something that I neither need nor have any real use for: the new leather laptop bag for when I take my trips to nowhere; the full-sized digital piano awaiting the day it plays an entire song. Some of the lesser examples include armies of barely-used computer mice, each one just a little more stylish or feature-laden than the one before.

Ever since I was small, I’ve been prone to this kind of thing. I’ve always liked the rush of buying, the feeling of trading in those raggedy dollars for something new and shiny. And still, even now that the pocket-wrinkled bills of my youth have been replaced by little plastic cards, the desire remains the same. At the age of seven, I remember, I pleaded with my mother for the go-ahead to buy a Spider-Man action figure. “But I really want it,” I said, tugging at her hand as she tried to pull me out of the store.

“Don’t you already have one like that?” she asked.

I did. Wanting another didn’t make sense, but the six dollar bills in my pocket were screaming at me, a far cry from the earlier whispers that had first given me the idea. I’d gotten the bills from little chores done around my great-grandparents’ house, and though not inherently sentimental, the money, my mother thought, should have been kept and used for something like, I don’t know, feeding starving children or starting my own college fund.

In the end, though, facing a teary, blubbering child and store clerks rolling their eyes at a scene they’d witnessed more times than they could remember, she relented, and the elation I felt on the way home, tearing open the packaging like a starving man might rip through a sandwich wrapper, gave way three days later to the wish that I had some money for a new toy, a better toy. Something that would kick these twin Spider-Men’s ass.

When my brother, Matt, grew to be the age where he could start wanting things, I thought that together we might be unstoppable. The combined power of our desire to buy would overwhelm our mother’s defenses and render her powerless against us. Much to my surprise and dismay, I discovered that my brother was, in fact, a saver, the equivalent of a safety deposit box guarding its money, while I was a broken automated teller machine belching out dollar bills.

Long before he was able to get a job my brother would stash away his weekly allowances and the random, generous spurts of income our grandmother would grant us. Surely my parents, my mother in particular, thought this was spectacular. Finally! she must have thought, sighing as if heaving a heavy burden from her shoulders. Gruesome fears of taking me into a toy store gave way to dreams of Matt someday becoming an investor, of playing the stock market twenty or thirty years down the road from the stashes of dollars and change he kept beneath his bed or in his closet. “That’s good,” I would hear her coo when Matt told her about wanting to save up to buy something big. “Or I’ll just keep it,” he would sometimes say, “for later.” And I would watch as my mother melted.

To this day, my brother has an uncanny ability to keep himself from splurging, whereas I will find myself willingly setting down a much-needed tube of toothpaste in favor of a set of collectible Japanese Domo-kun figurines or a rhyming dictionary for when I one day pick up writing poetry. I can say, though it shames me, that I have gone without deodorant for the sake of a DVD box set.

There would be times, growing up, when I would look at Matt and wonder why he was saving up. Was it for the latest game console? No, he’d gotten that for Christmas. Was it a new TV? No, the one he had was fine. Was it some upcoming financial disaster I knew nothing about? Maybe, though it seemed both unlikely and unsettling that no one would have told me. Not knowing drove me insane, and so I began plotting ways to beat him at his own game.

In my college years I discovered the trojan horse of credit cards. It was nice being approved with my virgin credit ratings for what seemed like an instant surplus, a savings without the pesky detail of having to deprive myself. Three years later, under a mountain of debt and with nothing much to show for it aside from a pair of stonewashed Ralph Lauren jeans and a cozy country-style bedspread, I watched as my brother used cash to buy his own computer. Then, later, his new twenty-six inch flat-screen TV arrived, a nice addition to a bedroom already accented with video game systems bearing brands like Microsoft and Sony. As month by month I chipped away at the bills coming to our house like letters from an obsessive fan, I grew to envy him and the seeming ease with which he had it all.

When he was away at work or school, I would ransack his room, overturning his mattress and rifling through his desk drawers, looking like a madman for his cache of wealth.

It has to be here, I thought. Where is he keeping all of it?

I didn’t know what I would do if I found anything, though I was fairly certain I just wanted to see his money, to find out if he really was saving or if it was through some kind of magic that he was able to get all of this stuff. But, after what felt like hours of searching, I found nothing. In my mind I saw his wallet, then, stuffed beyond its capacity, his back pocket bulging like a tumor. Of course he would keep it on him. Angry and bitter, I returned to my room to tally up how many payments I had left before my seldom-used stereo system and the notebook computer with the failing keys were paid off. The answer was months, and I wondered how many other things my brother would be able to buy before I was able to scrape up enough dough just to put my car through a much-needed oil change.

By the time I was free from my debts, my brother was swimming in money, spending sixty dollars a pop on video games and, a few towns over, singlehandedly keeping a small paintball gun shop in business, while my car stubbornly refused to start on most days and I was forced to take out a loan to get a new one.

On the way home from the dealership, the weight of my financial responsibilities just starting to sink in, I rode with my father in silence. We had exhausted talk of the new car’s details — gas mileage, style, its little features — and now we concentrated on our respective roles: my father focusing on the road, and me thinking, How the hell am I going to pay for this? I might be able to turn tricks downtown if I were just a little more in shape, I considered, watching a string of fast food restaurants pass by. My stomach rumbled, but I told myself the hunger wasn’t there. Besides, the sooner I was out of the car, any car, the better.

At home, back in my room, I sat surrounded by the things that were finally, truly mine. I listened to the sound of my brother playing his video games, and as the sound of explosions rattled my walls, I took out a piece of notebook paper and jotted down the amount of the loan. Making note of my income felt like admitting I had some terrible illness; it left me feeling hopeless and, worse, poor.

Sitting there, portioning away paychecks I’d not yet received, I had to consider my ways: the gratuitous spending, the petty need to compete, and the consuming jealousy blinding me to everything I did have. I pushed back from my desk and looked around. Could this be enough? I wondered. And I told myself it was. If my bank account was any indicator, it would have to be.