A wheel story

Let me tell you a story about soapbox derby wheels and art. It starts with a memory that I’m not sure about anymore. It was the late 1990s and I was in a salvage yard in South Berkeley or North Oakland. I’m pretty sure it was on San Pablo Avenue, a street that has both an Oakland and a Berkeley stretch. It was definitely on a grittier part of San Pablo and that’s how I know it was either South Berkeley or North Oakland. It’s been a long time, and I don’t know if the particular salvage yard is still there. I also don’t know if San Pablo is still gritty. It was back then. At least in that particular area. But a lot can change in twenty odd years even in a city as big as Oakland and/or Berkeley. Are salvage yards a stable industry? I’m not up on the economics of salvage, although given the monumental volume of extraneous odds and ends that our society produces, it would seem that if you went into salvage, you’d never be short of supply. The problem might be on the demand side, though. A lot of people see salvage and think, “That’s just junk.” That’s at least a marketing challenge right there. I had a friend who would have made a good salvage yard . . . . What’s the term? Salvage yard boss? Leader? Owner? Curator? No, that’s asking too much of curation. Probably owner. When in doubt, go with property rights. He was always finding stuff. Sometimes it was big, like a surfboard or a cage where they had kept rats for experimental purposes. Other times it was small stuff like cool old-timey buttons or Spanish doubloons. Not real ones of course. Theatrical ones that had been designed to look like real ones, so you could use them in a play or a musical like The Pirates of Penzance and not have to buy an outrageous insurance policy because your production was using real Spanish gold coins from the eighteenth century and if you lost one or one of the actors had sticky fingers you’d have to pay someone who was richer than you a lot of money and your production would go bankrupt and your attempt to redefine Gilbert and Sullivan’s signature comic opera for a post-truth age would die in its (uninsured) crib. Fakery has its benefits. I know his penchant for finding stuff wasn’t just luck and timing, although I’m sure that both had something to do with it. I mean, if you want to be the finder of a rat cage whose occupants played a role in creating a life-saving medicine or, at the very least, a cosmetic treatment that relieves anxiety about aging, you’ve got to get there pretty much right after that cage hits the street. That’s gonna go fast. No doubt about it. It has real reuse value. It’s a tool for influencing cultural narratives too. We still primarily associate rats with plague and pestilence and don’t appreciate their contributions to things like medicines and beauty creams that make our lives immeasurably better. Displaying the cage as a memorial to those helpful rats could help nudge that narrative in a different direction. If you have the room in your home. Or you could use it for your guinea pig. See? Super useful. Gonna go fast. Yet timing and luck couldn’t explain it all. He had real talent. An eye for the not quite so obvious. The almost hidden. I know because there were plenty of times when I’d be walking down the street or driving in a car with him and all of a sudden he’d stoop down and pick up something magical or he’d pull over the car, crossing multiple lanes of traffic, and hop out and hold in his hands an object that was worth violating traffic laws to hold. I mean, I’d been walking down the same street or driving through the same landscape, and I hadn’t seen what he’d seen. Not even close. I was always completely surprised to see what he had discovered. Where did that come from? At times it was so extraordinary, I wondered if he just had a different perception of spacetime and could see the wrinkles in reality behind which cool things like to hide. That’s probably going too far. I think that if he had walked and driven around the Bay Area for a year, he could have put together a pretty impressive salvage yard inventory. But would the customers have come? I would have because I was looking for some soapbox derby wheels to use in an art project and that’s just the kind of thing you hope to find at a salvage yard which is why, as I remember it, I was in South Berkeley or North Oakland in the first place. How about other customers, though? Hard to know. Anyway, he wrote a dissertation about Joyce instead. And someone else got my money for those wheels. Everyone makes choices.