Does anybody else remember grab bags?
I hope not, because if you do it means that someone took you to garage sales as a kid, which has to be one of the worst environments for a child. It’s so confusing because it’s the first time in your life you can afford anything, but you really don’t want any of it. OR, there are a couple things you want, but those are usually the things your mom is not too hot on you buying, like a gigantic one-dollar sombrero that has the top blown out and mysteriously disappears from your house within a week.
One of the better scams at these garage sales, second only to selling hot chocolate made by kids who have never even poured hot water into a container before, was the grab bag. This was a paper lunch sack, usually held closed by a staple, usually for sale for a dollar.
The trick was, you didn’t know what was inside until you bought it.
A smart child, a child with any sense, would look around. He’d see the terrible items scattered up and down the driveway. The shitty exercise machine missing a pedal. The action figures missing all clothes, guns, and everything else that separated them from Ken dolls at a nudist colony. The dishes, god forbid the dishes. A child who ever thought about things by using a brain would look at these desolate surroundings, and perhaps consider buying a really shitty bicycle if it carried him all the way home.
In case you’re not sure, I was not one of these brainiacs. Instead, I figured that they must have their BEST stuff in the grab bag. Sure, maybe not every bag, but one bag was likely to be filled with money. Or Game Genie. Or action figures with a higher percentage of their clothing present and accounted for.
Why I thought this, I can’t say. I think it was part of that stupid childhood thinking where you say to yourself, “These people are adults. They must be governed by rules that prevent them from putting screws, washers, used erasers and old ink pads into a bags and selling them to children.”
8 or 10 bags later, I did learn my lesson. Either the bags were filled with total shit or they were saving the really good bags somewhere deeper in the garage. And when you consider that the ten bucks would have gone to poisoning my organs with Astro Pops, those bags may have saved my life. Or at least the last twenty minutes of it.