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Kitsa Kitsa is offline
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Old May 23rd, 2011, 11:17 AM        A truly creepy individual
So one reason I hate having garage sales is that you're just a sitting duck for every bargain-seeker with issues. You're trapped behind your little impromptu checkout and targeted by every evangelist, emotional vampire and psychopath who has access to craigslist or a newspaper.

Some years are heavy on the evangelists. Last year someone handed me something that looked like a folded hundred-dollar bill, saying "I hope you make some BIG MONEY today". Then after you unfold the fake bill, there's a tract inside that says YOU ARE A FORNICATOR. I don't know how they pegged me as a fornicator, but my mom got one that said YOU ARE A LIAR.

This year was heavy on the creepies. It may just be that I've been watching too much Dexter, but one man in particular set off the serial killer alarms. He hung around us for what seemed like forever, taking photos of items inside the garage with his cell and giving us several stories as to what he did for a living (painter, welder, farmer). Like, in-depth stories. Then he went through the men's clothes we had for sale and asked who they belonged to. Why was it any of his business? Isn't that a weird and slightly inappropriate thing to ask?

Before I realized how creepy he was, I made what I thought later might be a fatal mistake. He picked up a plaque of St. Cecilia and, thinking of him as a slightly hipsterish and intellectual type, I joked, "She was beheaded in her bathroom. Just some anecdotal history there." Later, I was thinking, shit, now he'll want to behead me in my bathroom.

Minutes after the St. Cecilia joke began to seem like not so much of a good idea, he walked up to my brother's girlfriend with a pair of fishnet hose and asked her how she thought he'd look in them. The look on his face was one of utter seriousness. She stammered that it was a personal choice and she wouldn't judge. He said he wanted to use them for painting. I think she took that to mean that he was going to soak them in paint and blot them on canvas for texture, but the picture I got was of him in a Silence of the Lambs type basement, wearing only the fishnets, dabbing someone's blood on a canvas.

He ended up buying a table, some chairs, the plaque, and some clothes. My brother's girlfriend carried the table to his truck and I carried the chairs. As he lifted the topper window and lowered the gate, we saw that the inside of the truck looked like a rat's nest. He said, "Looks like a psychopath lives in here! Hee-hee-hee-hee!" (that latter part was a bloodcurdling high pitched giggle). Then he began to move stuff around and talk to himself. But the best was yet to come.

He came up with a random chunk of welded aluminum and said, "Ah, here it is" like he'd been looking for that all along. That was when I became seriously alarmed. I thought he was going to clock one of us over the head with it, stuff us in the back of his truck and be on his way. Then he insisted that each one of us HOLD THE CHUNK OF METAL. We were at a loss. We each picked it up and said "Uh, ok, that's pretty cool, uh, so here you go" and handed it back. He seemed to be watching us for a reaction. I thought that if this were a movie, he would get off on making girls handle the chunk of metal before he killed them with it.

He finally left, but I remain weirded out to this day. Mr. Kitsa says that he handed us the metal so our fingerprints would be on it. It's a possibility that he's been watching too much Dexter, too. Still.

The guy sort of reminded me half of the Silence of the Lambs guy and half of Otis. Dressed in husky hipster clothing.

Your take?
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