Hipsters must love garage sales: All sorts of useless, cheesy crap on sale for peanuts, perfect for ironic consumption. It was a natural, then, for Dirk Vermin's hipster hang-out art gallery, Gallery Au Go-Go, to celebrate its reopening after months dormant with a garage sale. Never mind that the gallery (adjacent to Vermin's Pussykat Tattoo Parlor at Tropicana and Maryland) doesn't actually have a garage, or that the sale was at midnight instead of at the usual crack of dawn. Rob Ruckus, member of approximately half the local bands in Las Vegas, spun some tunes, Vermin presided over the affair like a benevolent, heavily-tattooed uncle, and most people seemed to spend more time sitting around looking cool than actually making purchases.
The sale was, however, full of things that no one would want to buy unless it was for irony value, and even then only if the cost was less than $5. There was ugly furniture, bad movies (on VHS, not even DVD), dog-eared self-help books, toys of obscure comic-book characters (Wetworks, anyone?) and an off-white Dodge Dart (only 1,200 bucks). I spotted a baby, but it appeared not to be for sale. Everyone pawed through boxes and wandered around. The toys seemed to diminish, but I never noticed any money changing hands.
Looking through the overpriced bargain-bin boxes of CDs ($5 for anything by a third-tier mid-'90s alt-rock band is too much) I noticed that I own at least seven or eight of these discs, including a few that I didn't even get for free. My friend considered getting a retro alarm clock but balked when she discovered you have to wind it. "You can get the same thing at Target," she said. Those ones you don't have to wind. Somewhere, a hipster wept. Later, she considered a life-sized Elvis photo and a painted Elvis tapestry. "It doesn't even look like him," she said of the tapestry. Of course, that was the one she really wanted. Not, however, for $20.
After an hour, it was clear that no one I was with wanted to buy anything. Nothing, that is, except beer at the House of Brews across the parking lot. Walking away, I finally witnessed one quintessential garage-sale moment: Looking over a table of worn glassware and other tchotchkes, a scraggly guy spotted something he liked. "Honey," he called out, "can I have some money?"