Auction Day

People in winter coats and boots stream in to a large warehouse, some tugging semi-resistant children behind them, murmuring to each other. They are filing in from the gravel parking lot, which is full of old pick-up trucks and minivans, as well as sport utility vehicles with small cargo trailers attached. Once inside, everyone stomps the snow off and strains to see past the doorway and into the building. As the space is only heated enough to keep the pipes from bursting, coats are kept on. No one pushes or shoves, but the sense of anticipation is palpable; it is generally considered poor form to dick around in line, so having your gloves off and writing-hand ready is the proper etiquette.

There is a middle-aged woman at the door seated at a card table, who asks each person to write their name and phone number on a sheet of lined paper. After they do, she hands them a piece of cardstock with a number on it. Her fingernails are long and fake and fuchsia, and her hair is a shade of blonde which is, frankly, a bit of an insult to real blondes everywhere; her couture is best described as late-70s Urban Cowboy. She calls everyone “hon,” as in “fill this out hon,” “thank you hon,” and so on. She smiles at me as I walk in, and in doing so, makes me feel like a jerk for having just harshly assessed her Lee Press-Ons. This feeling is quickly extinguished, because as I walk into the warehouse proper, I am inundated with the sight of a sea of rectangular folding tables covered with stuff. This is Peck’s Auction House; this is auction day.

Auction day at Peck’s is a wonderful opportunity to see what happens when a consumerist culture vomits all over itself. The least-useful junk in the entire universe is for sale here, assembled from the picked-over remains of the earthly possessions of someone’s deceased relatives. Do you need a full set of the vinyl recordings of Jim Neighbors, only slightly warped? Do you need a suspiciously stained, threadbare recliner, rust in color? Do you need a box full of only moderately-used Avon samples? The answer is no, you don't need this stuff. Nevertheless, one Sunday a month you can find for auction these weird cast-offs from dead grandpas and crusty old aunts whose houses always smelled like Ben Gay and Sanka.

First is the period before the actual auction begins, when you can peruse the junk. The tables are set up in rows, the contents sort of grouped by category. Behold the boxes upon boxes of dented metal loaf pans, slightly rusted colanders, chipped stoneware dishes. Frying pans which were cheap 25 years ago are here for the bidding next to kitchen gadgetry from the 70s which is, inexplicably, offered in its original packaging (it takes serious foresight to save the box your electric can opener came in); plastic tumblers, plastic bowls, plastic containers, plastic anything; the sheer number of ice-cube trays is staggering.

I look over these things with a keen eye; I don’t want a full set of New Kids on the Block glass tumblers, do I? The woman on the other side of table from me is picking through the junk with a similarly deft touch; we’re moving at the same pace, each touching or turning over an item and then, almost as if working in tandem, putting it back down and picking up whatever the other one just had. I am almost ready to wander away when I notice, out of the corner of my eye, a cake pan in the shape of R2D2. My eyes dart to my mom-jeans doppelganger across the table; has she seen it too? Does she want it? I begin to imagine a back story for this woman: she is some kind of shabbily-disguised eBay superstar millionaire, here to cull all the cool weird crap and sell it to annoying hipsters for a 400% markup. I glide, cat-like, to the end of the table, trying to act natural – I don’t want her to think I’ve seen something she might be interested in, so I pretend to look at a set of yellow Tupperware measuring cups with great interest. She is still poring over a box of Corningware baking dishes (and I don’t blame her, Corningware is very durable, people), and I sense that it is time to make my move. The cake pan, which is stamped “1977” on the back, is so utterly, wonderfully, pointlessly perfect (it reminds me so sharply of my girlhood that I can almost smell my mother’s cigarette smoke and Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific shampoo) that when I pick it up, I actually smile at it, child-like and wondering, before casting a final, furtive glance at my opponent. She has yet to even look in my direction. Nevertheless, in my imagination, she and I now grudgingly respect each other as equals in the game of auction finds; but still, to the victor go the spoils. I walk away, dreamily, clutching the cake pan. Five minutes later, when I remember that this is an auction and not a garage sale, I nonchalantly return to that table and replace the cake pan. Don’t worry, though, I did actually win the pan later on; I was the only bidder, paid $2 for it, baked one cake in it, then sold it on eBay to an annoying hipster for $35, which is the approximate cash value of my childhood memories.

The auction part is when Ron Peck, owner of Peck’s Auction House, strides into the crowd to begin the bidding. He walks around the tables with an assistant, who carries the speaker part of a battery powered microphone/speaker unit. Looking at Ron Peck is like seeing a mosquito in amber; he is an absolute time capsule of upper Midwestern culture from about 30 years ago. His face is like a dried apricot, if a dried apricot were to grow a head of hair and then proceed to pomade the fuck out of it. He is wearing a similarly Western-themed get-up to the woman at the door; I can’t remember if that’s his wife or daughter or if pearlized buttons and belt buckles are just really, really popular amongst the professional auction set. He’s very scrawny and talks entirely through his nose. People stop talking and form a small group in front of him.

Peck informs us that the stuff on the tables will go first, then the furniture which lines the walls. He stands about three feet away from us, the crowd of people who move silently with him up and down the rows in an orderly fashion. You, were you to go to a Peck auction, might ask yourself: why does he need a microphone? We’re all right here in front of him! My answer to you is: don’t ask questions. Just go with it.

A few things about Ron Peck are immediately apparent to the casual observer: first, that any piece of electronics produced after 1984 is utterly unknown to him, and second, that he is unbelievably sexist. These two characteristics are promptly exhibited in the same sentence: “now here we have some kind of a gadget – looks like something you might use in the kitchen to shape hamburger patties, ladies – let’s start the bidding at five dollars.” It’s a plastic CD carrying case. I shoot him the darkest look I can muster, but I don’t think he can actually see me through his giant tinted gold-framed eyeglasses anyway.

Here’s what it sounds like when he auctions stuff off: “Heyyyyyyyyyyyyy blubbll blblblblblb lblblbllblb FOURTEEN blblblblblbllblblblb fourteen fifty blblblblblblblblblblblblblb Fifteen? Fifteen? SOLD, fourteen fifty.” The guy with him, the speaker-carrier, yells “HUP!” and points to people when they hold up their little numbered card to bid. I don’t actually want anything except the cake pan, but I stay in the little crowd anyway, because it is a fascinating study of human behavior, and also because the rest of the warehouse is overrun with boogery-nosed little kids and rheumy-eyed old people. Frankly, I only really like my own kids, and everyone else’s kids seem loud and dirty and annoying. I’m generally neutral on old people, unless they try to hand me a wadded-up Kleenex to throw away.

So I stay in the cluster, careful not to move a muscle when the bidding is going on, lest I accidentally buy a foot bath or a fake black lacquer end table. The crowd stares, shovel-faced, at Peck, some jaws slack, others held firmly closed, cheap Walmart t-shirts under their cheap Walmart coats. I say this with affection, as a shovel-faced Walmart aficionado myself. We schlep from item to item, either waiting for what we want or, like me, just watching the whole thing happen.

Every once in a while, if you wait long enough, it happens: a bidding war. In this case, it’s over a snow-blower, which is not surprising, since snow removal comprises roughly 35% of the average Iowan’s life in the winter. First, it’s three men, then two. They don’t look at each other, but the crowd looks back and forth between them, the anticipation building. Who will crack first? Who will win this auction-house Battle of Verdun? The guy in the green John Deere cap nods curtly at each turn; the guy in the red International Harvester cap seems less sure, rocking on his heels, his arms tightly folded. They trade bids back and forth, the tension gripping all of us together in a vice, until finally International Harvester shakes his head no. The crowd exhales, and International Harvester has somehow become less of a man in their sight; he slinks to the back of the building. Or, he got hungry and went to get a maidrite from the lunch counter. I prefer my interpretation.

Eventually, all the stuff is auctioned off, or not; some of it is simply too crappy for even the most fervent crap-lover to want. People walk out, hauling their junky finds, wives and husbands and brothers-in-law strapping twin beds and floral couches to truck beds or trailers. Little old ladies totter out with boxes full of nearly worthless stuff that only recently belonged to other little old ladies; stuff that will likely end up being auctioned off again in a few short years.

I get back into my van with my R2D2 cake pan and drive home. Peck’s auction house is like a museum of a way of life that doesn’t really exist anymore; the unique, slightly tacky, slightly wonderful rural Iowa I knew as a child. Among all the old stuff and the people who, a generation ago, would have been farmers, but who now work at ethanol plants or large-scale hog lots; people who eat those maidrites from the lunch counter in the building, and drink fountain Pepsi with no ice out of a paper cup – somewhere in there is an echo of a thing that I can’t exactly put my finger on. Even Peck himself, with his polyester outfits, shellacked pompadour and goofy voice, represents a different time, a distant era.

I know why I go to these auctions, even though there’s never really anything up for bidding that I actually want: to visit those old threadbare, dead grandpa recliners and hideous cardboard “art” prints of boats or sad elephant clowns or whatever; to breathe in the musty-sweet smell, and kick the tires of memory.