Harmonics. Rhapsody. Savers.
’Cause of my postcode, I’ve been living under level four for so long that when I come across a meme featuring Chuck Tingle’s bizzarro-erotica short story, Slammed in the Butthole by my Concept of Linear Time as relevant to our current situation I laugh, but in a small part of my mind, it is also disturbingly relatable.
My whole life is house. I feel like a housecat, like my housecats, who I allow supervised visits to the back garden. I am allowed one (1) walk outside my house per day. I take the same path that goes through the dog park, and loops around to come back through the dog park. I need to see other people’s dogs. If the dogs bounce with joy at any stage, it’s like a shot. I exhale as the pure happiness playing out in front of me enters my veins, rinsing that hot, sweet feeling through my body — but from my eyes and not the crook of my elbow. My muscles slump and relax at last.
I need to see them bounce.
I don’t really care about most things opening. Like, I was never going to go to a nightclub anyway and can only go to gigs with seating because I’m fucking old and my body hurts. I quit drinking, so I don’t really like pubs, but I’d go to meet a friend now and then. Same with cafes. Like, I’d love for the museum and the gallery and the Wheeler Centre to open again, cause I could always drag myself along to those when something cool or special is happening. But there is one thing I need to know about, need to know when it will come back.
When will Savers be open again?
It’s not just Savers, of course. It’s Red Cross stores. Sacred Heart shops. Vinnies. The next tier too, the pricier vintage stores for special treasures once in a while. Any place where someone else’s cast-offs could become mine. I need it. I miss junk so, so much.
(I love Savers so much that I’ve thought very seriously about applying for a casual job there even though I am highly allergic to dust and end most op-shop visits sniffly, sneezing and red-eyed.)
I used to travel to the US a lot and the first thing I’d do when I arrived in any given area was look up all their second-hand stores on Google maps. There’s Goodwill, Buffalo Exchange, the obscure regional chains of charity stores in out of the way places like Raleigh, North Carolina and Lawrence, Kansas. The more upscale vintage stores where I’ve found truly precious treasures: that strapless leather dress in New Orleans! Exquisite vintage lingerie in NYC! Those thigh-high leather boots in the store in Olympia, Washington, that stood right at the entrance and were exactly my size and only sixty bucks! My first full day when travelling to any new locale is a circuit around these stores, gathering slightly battered and wholly unique items to my chest.
Magic happens in second-hand stores. I’ve had many dazzling moments, walking in to find something so perfect, so appropriate, and so within my budget. For a very important awards presentation I went into a vintage store with a special budget of eighty whole dollars, preparing for frustration and disappointment, but in one single minute, sixty seconds, I found a black dress with a circle-skirt from the 60’s, long-ish but still the perfect length to not swamp my five-foot frame. It fit perfectly and was sixty dollars. I paid and later spent the change on booze. Some vintage numen smiled down on me that day. I felt like it was a reward, or a sign (and maybe it was because I did win that prize.)
Pricey vintage shops aside, their poorer cousins the op-shops will always have my heart. On any given day, what I’m wearing is usually at least 50% op-shop gleaned.
‘I like your top!’
‘Thanks! It was six dollars from Savers!’
In the same way that someone might feel pride in, or boast about the priciness of their clothes and accessories, I take pride in how fucking cheap I am. ‘Four dollars,’ I say, beaming and twirling a little to show off my ‘new’ skirt.
Coming from a pretty broke family, op-shops were my only access to self-expression through clothing. Fifteen, buying ‘grandpa’ pants with my friend Haely to pair with our band t-shirts, little 90’s alterna-babes we were (or were trying to be.) Digging through dusty boxes white slips/petticoats to find one in my size to tye-dye. Short black skirts and two-dollar mesh tops I could tatter without feeling guilty when I gothed out. The utterly magical pair of knee-high leather motorcycle boots, zippered and buckled, size six, that I found in a cheap vintage store in Port Macquarie when I was seventeen.
‘Oi,’ I whispered to my friend Nick as I fingered the single five-dollar note in my pocket. ‘Lend us twenny bucks.’
‘No!’
‘Come on. I need these.’
I was serious and Nick knew it, and he did give me the twenty bucks. I probably never paid him back (the first in a line of almost two decades of me not paying Nick back for things, sorry dude), but those boots helped me to show the world who I was or who I wanted to be for years.
When I moved to Melbourne, I discovered my local Savers, and the combination of homewares, shoes, books, and clothes just raptured me. So much junk! I want my op-shops to resemble airplane hangars, and I want them filled to the brim with a jumbled array of assorted things. Trea-sure!
That’s the magic of op-shops. Lots of visits are duds, but one day I could walk in and there’d be something so right, like it was put there for just exactly me at that precise moment. I don’t know why this feeling is so potent, but it is. It’s harmonics and rhapsody. Like all the tiny decisions made by so many people, all the luck of the draw and the randomness of the timing tuned in perfectly just so I could find something that embodied all the things I wanted to present about myself to the world. And in my size! That fit the proportions of my ridiculous square body and made it look good! That was only slightly worn and battered, just enough that it looked lived in and loved.
Everything in op-shops is a little off, it’s a little worn and battered, but it’s still precious to someone, still worthy of love. (And you are too.)
Remember when restrictions eased… sometime in the past? In that inky void between March and now? I went to a local op-shop that had just reopened (and was soon to close again.) I was nervous. I wore my mask and a pair of gloves because I was going to be touching lots of things, doing that op-shop-sort, the practised quick ‘click click click’ of hangers as I inspected each item in a half a second, scanning for specialness.
I didn’t have to sort though, because hanging on the wall, high and to the left, was a dress. The dress. It was red, with ribbons like fringe down the front, and very long. I don’t even wear colour! And I certainly don’t wear anything long. But I knew this was the one. The dress. I asked the woman to take it down, shut myself in the fitting room and slipped it over my head. It fit perfectly. The high neck, loose fit and length made me look like a cult member, but I could see it in my head hemmed into a mini-dress. It was perfect. When I posted a picture of it, mid-alteration, writer Laura Mcphee-Brown responded in amazement: ‘That was my dress!’ She sent an image of herself in it.
Now it was mine, and I wore it to the launch of my fourth book. Harmonics. Rhapsody. All those little decisions and surges of luck and timing. I wonder if it had been the same when Laura found it. I wonder if it will be the same when I pass it along.
It feels all very white-working-class to worry so much about being able to shop for second-hand goods in the middle of this flux and slow-burn chaos. Privileged. I know, and I’m sorry. I want the fucking massive ills of society and these times of uncertainty to ease, especially for the most vulnerable of us.
And I’ll wait, of course, for the safety of other people. But one little, tiny, greedy thing I want want want, all selfish and for myself, is Savers. Or Vinnies or Sacred Heart, I don’t mind. The whole world is going to change, I know that. It’s just that I could use a treat right now, a little joy. I could use to lose myself in junk right now. It’s a stupid, simple thing, but I love it and I want it back. I miss it like I miss the world.