Rusty was a good fish. He—an African cichlid—came home with Dan Schott four years ago. Back then, he was the size of an ice chip. And yet, without preamble, he was thrown into the crucible of the wild sea in Schott’s living room.
“I tossed him into the tank with a dozen other very aggressive fish,” Schott says. “It was a little heartless, but I grew up in the ’70s on episodes of Wild Kingdom.”
At once Rusty began to assert his dominance, even among the formidable fish several times Rusty’s size. Soon, the aquarium became his undisputed domain, and he swam about it with the solitary air of a tyrant.
It was that spirit—indomitable and ambitious, attractive in both fish and men—that had made Rusty such a beloved pet in the Schott household. And, therefore, that made it so tough to part with the cichlid earlier this month, when it was his time to go.
“My four children love Rusty,” Schott says. “However, we now have nowhere for Rusty’s tank to reside.”
According to Schott, his wife charged him with the responsibility of finding Rusty a new home.
“It’s not like I could eBay Rusty,” Schott says. “And I didn’t really want to profit from his departure.
“The newspaper has an audience,” he continues, “but I’m not about to blow 20 bucks to pimp out Rusty. So I gave Craigslist a try.”
It was Schott’s first experience posting on the site. Under the For Sale section on Craigslist Las Vegas, there is a Free category, and that’s where Schott posted this ad on August 7:
FREE FISH AQUARIUM, ACCESSORIES AND AFRICAN CICHLID
The tank is 30+ gallons in size. There is a pump, heater, lid and lamp, gravel and one very aggressive white and orange Cichlid, measuring about six inches in length. We love Rusty, but he must go with the equipment to a good home.
Schott, who works for a branding and design company in town, had posted the offer after he returned home from work that Tuesday. On Wednesday morning, when he plugged in his laptop, there were 58 messages awaiting him from people who wanted Rusty.
Schott sifted out a short list, and in the end he settled on a woman he thought would give Rusty the best home. “I provided her some ‘informed consent’ info on Rusty,” Schott says. “I wanted to make sure she understood Rusty’s disposition toward other living things before she brought him home to a sensitive 4-year-old girl who might not yet understand that some fish kill.”
His own daughter, he says, had a complete and utter breakdown when the reality set in that Rusty was gone for good.
“Now she wants a kitty,” Schott says.
If he looks, it’s probable that Schott will be able to find one for his daughter in that same Free category on Craigslist soon enough. For you can find all sorts of stuff—sundry, unexpected, sometimes wacky, miscellaneous stuff—through that unique convocation on the web. Trees, car shells, bikes, boats, children’s ball pits, Braille Bibles, cooking classes, diet dog food and even kittens and African cichlids: It’s all there.
Like AOL, Google, MySpace and YouTube, the website Craigslist has not taken over the world but has changed the way it works. Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities that sprouted out of San Francisco a dozen years ago and which is not just national now but universal, and at its core it is a mere online bulletin board. Like those other pivotal Internet sites, it has been employed by hundreds of millions of people across the globe as a tool to connect to one another in an efficient and comfortable way; yet, it has altered unlike any other site the way commerce is done throughout the world.
Through Craigslist individual people can connect, exchange, do business with other individual people with no outside interference. It’s an inexhaustible medium for classified ads. In Las Vegas it is absolutely free to post those ads, just as it is in 443 of the 450 cities served by Craigslist. And nowhere does it cost money to look.
On Craigslist people can find pets, cars, jobs; escort services, legal services; new homes, new roommates, new partners; old automobiles, used gadgets; fellowship, or discussion on more than 100 different topics ranging from women to transgender issues to local politics to the rules of etiquette.
And in the midst of all that, there is a category on Craigslist in which people can find free goods and services. And they do.
Here in Las Vegas, this summer, free stuff on Craigslist has been abundant, in both quantity and variety. In June one woman was offering an ice cream maker and an exercise bike to go along with it to “anyone in Las Vegas with such needs,” and someone snagged it up before the day’s end.
Two guinea pigs who had lived together their entire lives were put up on Craigslist under the condition that they not be separated, ever, and so they went. Later in the month a man offered a turtle and its 20-gallon water tank. And then Melissa Hernandez posted an ad in the Free category on Craigslist for five kittens—four black males and one calico female.
“We had enough room in our hearts but not our house,” says Hernandez, a single mother of two girls. “I thought if I put them for free they could make another child very happy.”
In July there was a post for a free cooking class for couples, and another post for four 13-ounce cans of W/D diet canine food. “My dogs won’t eat it,” the owner says.
In August someone offered prerecorded VHS tapes—hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them—and another someone in town offered just as many CD cases, but without the CDs. The subject line of one post stopped those perusing the site dead in their tracks, as it read:
FREE CASIO BABY G
It was a black watch, less than a year old, with a retail price of about $80. The young woman who put it up for free on Craigslist, Sheila, said it had been a present given to her by her ex-boyfriend. She says, with unmitigated rancor:
“He copied the idea from that movie Black Moan Snake, where Justin Timberlake gives his girlfriend a watch before he leaves for the army and synchronizes it with his watch, the same kind, you know. Anyway, [my boyfriend] turned out to be a real asshole. So not only was he cheating on me behind my back with a slut, but I found out he gave her a watch, too! I was about to throw it away, that way I’d never be reminded of that asshole again, but then I thought I would give it away for free on Craigssite, just to insult him a little more.”
God’s goods don’t appear to hold much value on the marketplace, and thus wood, trees, plants, rocks and dirt can be found in the Free category on just about any given day.
Babies grow out of their paraphernalia, and so there is always a glut of baby food, baby walkers, baby pools, baby diapers, baby bottles and baby bottle nipples to give away.
Other evergreen posts include those offering forlorn furniture and various household appliances in various states of obsolescence.
At times, the posts from this summer in Las Vegas indicate, people can take the old axiom that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure to the extreme: potsherd, soiled diapers, broken glass, raggedy clothes, mattresses with the springs sticking out.
Yet at other times the Free category can be a hot spot for handymen who approach fixer-uppers without reluctance.
On the same day in August—Sunday, the 4th—there were postings for a near-working-condition spa, a washer in need of one critical part to work, a stove, a Baja Bug shell and, if you can fix it, a boat.
The irony about the Free category on Craigslist, though sad and uncomical, is that those most in need of hand-me-downs—the people who can’t afford anything more: the poor—oftentimes do not have computers to catch the posts for free stuff as they fly across the sidereal skies of the Internet.
There are, nevertheless, many cases of lives which have been enhanced on account of the goods they received for free from people on Craigslist and which would not have been enhanced otherwise.
For example, a mother named Dalia came across a post for free play balls. They made for a children’s ball pit, and Dalia had a toddler son no different from most children with his need for entertainment. Her son—“Andy Roo”—loved the balls.
Dalia was moved. So much so that she posted a public display of her overrunning gratitude, which read:
Thank you so much to the couple that gave away the free balls, my baby is having a lot of fun with the ball pit. God bless you.
The post came complete with a picture of “Andy Roo” in the pit.
Another post offered a Braille Bible. “I don’t want it to go for resale,” its owner says. “Whenever we come across Bibles we give them away to someone who needs it.”
And then there is Sandra Leier, whose son, a special-needs child, passed away last January. It was the 30th, a Tuesday, and he was just 11 years old.
“I’d hate for his stuff to just stay in my garage when there are so many kids out there,” Leier says.
So she started posting on Craigslist.
It is the seventh most popular English-based website on the planet (falling just behind AOL, Google, MySpace and YouTube, among others), and nationwide it receives more than eight billion page views per month. Make no mistake about it: Eight billion, per month.
Las Vegas is one of the 450 cities it serves, and even 1/450 of eight billion was enough for Leier to offer her son’s goods to the Las Vegas online community, to see that they survive her child.
“I would like my son’s stuff to go to parents and children who would benefit from it,” she says. “I have thought about giving it to hospitals and thrift stores, but I like the idea of children getting it [directly], so that their lives will be easier.”
Her post on August 7 offered a wheelchair, with full support, from head to toe; diapers for a child 60 to 70 pounds; nebulizers and suction machines; and a vibrator for the lungs.
She received numerous responses.
“It seems everyone has a special-needs child,” Leier says.
Las Vegas, of course, is a transient city, where people flux in and out in droves and often in great haste. And so, whereas items that could not be crammed into the back of a car were tossed into apartment complex Dumpsters a decade ago, they are now laid out on the lawn, and an ad similar to this one from August 8 is posted on Craigslist:
MOVING. JUST COME AND TAKE. MARYLAND AND DI
Come quick though. First come first serve. Don’t email. I will not hold anything.
The divested goods—sofas, chairs, tables, bikes—were gone within a half-hour of the posting. So that, an hour after the original post appeared on Craigslist, a postscript was added to it:
SORRY ALREADY GONE
Mass giveaways like this one, more than any other type of posting, ignite high-octane races throughout the city.
Roommates Larry Phillip and Lawrence Simms were two of the many who showed up for the Maryland Parkway and Desert Inn Road post—though to no avail. On their days off from work, the two bachelors wait by their computer to catch, midair, a new post flying across the Free category page. And then they speed to the given location as fast as the laws of the road will permit them, they say.
“Hell yes!” Simms says. “It’s competitive as hell. On busy days we keep the engine running in the car outside.”
Phillip tells of one “sly son of a bitch” who used to countermine a posting for mass giveaways by posting a false one—at a delusive location—right afterward, to derail the competition.
“You see a lot of the same people time after time,” Simms says. “If you don’t live near, you got a better chance of hitting Megabucks.”
These races come as no surprise in a nation of immoderate consumerism and in a city fueled on the hope of striking it rich, even if only by a secondhand sofa or coffee table.
Such was the kind of race that gave birth to an interminable drama that has unfolded on the Craigslist Las Vegas Free category page this past month. On August 6, at 10:25 p.m., a common tagline popped up:
MOVING—FREE STUFF
The post read: If you can move it you can have it. Beds, tables, sofa, 3 big screen tv’s (1 not working), pool table, kids motorized car, lots of old toys, bikes, basketball hoop, workout weights, fishing poles, heavy safe, 4 big mirrors, and a lot more. From 9 am to 7 pm, at [address withheld by the Weekly]. Southwest area. Tropicana and Buffalo. First come first served.
At 8:50 the next morning there was a line two-dozen deep at the given address’ doorstep, as there were no goods to be found out front. The people who had raced down to that Southwest residence were antsy, mumbling, petulant. Then the owner of the house came out, confused, and said that nobody’s moving, that there is nothing to be gained here, that you all are wasting your time, so please leave, thank you, and then shut the door.
Most people left, shouting scam. (One said he thought the people who came out were owed something for taking the time to make the trip out there.) But a few, as if stunned by their disbelief, remained. At 11:01 a.m., a neighbor posted a note on Craigslist stating that someone with a white Ford Explorer, apparently unwilling to accept that nothing would be given away for free that day, took a bike, skateboard, leaf blower and hedge-trimmer from a neighbor’s yard and packed it into his Explorer. The post provided the license plate number of the Explorer and then concluded with this reproach:
And if you are the guy that took these peoples things, you should be ASHAMED of yourself ... YOU THIEF!!!
The Craigslist Las Vegas community rallied. For the next three hours people posted notes that bemoaned all the scumbags and burglars in this town, that encouraged the cops to catch those scumbags, that lamented the absolute and confirmed deterioration of this city. One person posted this message to the supposed culprit of the theft, as well as to the individual behind the misleading post that started the entire ordeal:
ELOHSSA UOY KCUF<
Then someone tried to put things in their proper prospective with this post at 6:26 p.m.:
This is an unfortunate thing that happened. But we all have to look at the situation, it could happen to any one of us. When we post an ad for free stuff, well of course you will get a response. For the person who took the items ... I don’t know if you did it purposely or NOT, but I would give the things back then pray for gods forgiveness no matter if it was done purposely or not. The Lord knows your heart.
The homiletic might have worked, because two hours later a post appeared on the Free category page stating that all the items had been returned, because I don’t need any bad karma; and soon thereafter another post, apparently from the victims of the theft, confirmed that it was true, they had received their items back.
Then the real drama began.
The next day a woman posted the following:
Hello everyone. The gentleman that has been called a thief, is actually a true gentlemen. Last week there was a posting for a free dresser. Off I raced in hopes that the dresser would still be there. It was. But it was large and heavy. I stand 5 ft. 4, and weigh 125 pounds. This person in question did not even let me struggle with it. [I beat him to it] and he still lifted it into my truck for me. He was incredibly decent, well spoken, and a gentlemen, and believe me, there are not a ton of them left, now are there ladies? As I just had rather large surgery performed, you cannot even begin to imagine how much the help was appreciated.
Soon thereafter, this was posted:
If you only weigh 125 pounds and just had a “rather large surgery” performed, what the hell are you doing going and trying to load up a dresser for? I call B.S.
And then, another:
Geez people, you have to get a hobby or find something better to do with your time. Get a life. Better yet, get a job so you won’t have to chase other peoples free junk.
The fun continued, unabated, for three days straight. And then the woman who had defended the man with the white Explorer returned. She posted:
I, not too long ago, lost every single thing I owned to Hurricane Katrina and was displaced with my children. The insurance check for my home never came because my insurance company went belly up. Many of us that went through the hurricane not only lost our homes but also our jobs. While we were struggling to get our lives back our credit begin to go to shit because we had no income.
When my kids and I got to Vegas we each had a suitcase of belongings, that was it. Nothing else.
I had lost everything I had worked my whole life to get, and 2 years later I’m still struggling to get back on my feet. People don’t stop and think about the little things that make our lives so much more manageable, even things like hair bands and waste baskets, everyday things that don’t seem expensive but add up and that people like us have to replace.
When you are trying this hard to survive and get your life back, you will find the strength to do things you did not know that you could do. My kids needed a dresser desperately, I am their mom, it is my responsibility to do whatever I have to do to take care of them, so when I saw the ad for the dresser I certainly was going to try. I didn’t know how heavy it was going to be.
You never know what it is that other people are carrying on their shoulders or where they’re coming from. NOT ALL OF US ARE GREEDY, SOME OF US ARE JUST TRYING TO GET OUR FOOTHOLD BACK IN LIFE.
Worldwide, Craigslist hosts some 20 million new ads per month. That’s 20 million new opportunities for people to connect, directly, person to person, to exchange resumes for jobs, friendship for another’s, money for a car or pet or apartment, gratitude and sometimes even bitterness for free goods and services. Per month.