A Mixed Bag

A long day deserves a good beer. After six hours of running up and down stairs, balancing over-portioned pasta plates on huge wet trays, and fetching glass after wine glass from the bar for the downstairs patrons, I finally clocked out and dropped myself onto a stilted barstool. My friend Brian, the bartender, saw me sit and within seconds had poured me a frosty pint of Switchback ale, which I gratefully nursed at as I watched the late diners file out of the restaurant. As Brian and I caught up over the mixed noise of kitschy Italian dining music and the scrapings of servers putting up the chairs for the night, my friend Chris from the kitchens joined me at the bar. Dropping a newspaper onto the bartop, a beer swiftly found his hand, and quickly returned to the sticky bar surface half empty. We continued our conversation as Chris peered his way through the classifieds, as the night settled out around us.

“Oh my god,” Chris interrupted from his silence, and almost fell off of his bar stool laughing. As we looked on quizzically, he managed to control himself for long enough to push us the paper and point out an ad halfway down the page: 

ADULT VHS
$20 mixed bag
Call ###-###-####

Chris and Brian will probably not let me live down the fact that the first thing out of my mouth was “GIVE ME THAT NUMBER,” but I maintain that the practical joke potential of that number is a gold mine. And what’s better than grainy ole, hairy ole VHS porn, especially when bought out of a local classifieds? That has a sketch quotient higher than Craigslist blind dating.  For the next twenty minutes, the three of us hit every octave between giggle and guffaw as we entertained ourselves with the posting and other classifieds.

“Look,” Chris pointed to another posting, “here’s another – ‘Contents of 3 Car Garage, $500 OBO.’ What, so just whatever shit’s in there?”

“It’s a 3-car garage, Chris,” I explained patiently, “so there’s probably 3 cars in there. That’s a great deal.”

“It’s probably the same guy who posted the VHS tapes. That’s where he stores all his tapes.”

“A mixed bag for $20, or a 3-car-garage-full for only $500? Now that’s a bargain.”

“ ‘Mixed Bag’ is probably the name of one of the tapes in the collection – I’m thinking 80’s interracial gay orgy,” Brian mused from behind the bar.

“Look at this,” Chris laughed as he kept browsing, “why would some people put out an entire ad for this? ‘One Piece Lavatory’ – ‘Free Barbie Clothes’ – ‘Sunbeam Flat-Iron, $10?’ I don’t even know what that is.”

“Ah,” I volunteered guiltily, “that one’s my personal ad. ‘Sunbeam Flat-Iron’ is my street name, back from stripping in ’86.”

“No, it was ’83,” Brian corrected me solemnly. “I’ve got the VHS.”

Another ad caught my eye. “Look guys,” I laughed, and circled the two postings: “For $20, you could either buy an adult VHS mixed bag, or you could buy an entire children’s DVD and VHS collection - $20 for the lot.”

“Only got $20,” Brian sighed. “What to do… what to do…”

“It’s too bad we don’t have $40,” Chris laughed. “We could get both and have a movie marathon.”

“Plenty of options,” I agreed, and we all laughed heartily at the absurdity of the classified ads. As our chuckling died down, my eyes strayed across the page, and then I stopped. My laughter died in disbelief as I stared at the paper in shock, switching from circled ad to circled ad to confirm what I’d thought I’d seen. And when I saw it, I almost fell off my chair, screaming in incoherent laughter.

Not seeing it? Look a little closer.

Now there are many facets to what is both hilarious and deeply wrong about this photo, but to me, the part that stands out the most gloriously is this: for twenty dollars, this man is offering his entire children’s DVD and VHS collection, both a current and outdated technological style, suggesting a smallish collection of movies, even with the added ease of being able to choose DVD or VHS. And yet for the same exact price, he has enough of a comparative magnitude of adult VHS tapes – a completely archaic and unused system – that he can afford to offer not his entire collection, but a mixed bag, a selection of styles and genres offered up like a cheese plate. For the same price, you could wipe out his entire children’s movies collection, or you could just scrape the surface of this connoisseur’s library of VHS porn. I mean, good lord.

Perhaps that was his 3-car garage, after all.