“You see how picky I am about my shoes,
and they only go on my feet.”
CLUELESS (1995)
With the rise of social media, it feels like it’s easy to see what tax bracket the people you follow are living in, and it’s upsetting to me when the twentysomething influencers are driving expensive cars and living in high-rise city apartments. Am I jealous? Unclear. I have come to learn that, many times, people are bamboozling their followers into thinking they are wealthier than they are, showing off designer brands while living way above their means, so it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on inside their purse. Regardless, my twenties were all about saving and scraping by with the bare minimum. In college, my friends and I would save up to go to a buffet that was $3.75 for a huge dinner plate of food every Thursday. On more than one occasion, we would order our meals, sit down, and find a stray quarter in our lo mein. It happened more than once, and we still kept going because it was so cheap and filled our bellies for the day. So many students on campus would pay the $3.75 in all quarters that the establishment had loose change everywhere, including their food. I ate about $1.75 in quarters throughout my time on campus.
In my early twenties, I moved out of the dorms and into a condo with my older brother Bryan. He had a steady income, and the place was big, with an empty loft, so he was kind enough to let me live there for free while I went to school and interned at a Cleveland morning talk show—where I was hired to get coffee for guests like Uncle Joey from Full House and a funeral home director who paid to come on the show once a month. The hosts of the show would be cooking with a local restauranteur to open the show, and then after commercial, they would sit down with someone to talk about cremation in a sponsored segment. I loved it. Anyway, although I was working my ass off, none of it was paid, so I couldn’t afford things like furniture. My brother let me crash, and my parents had an old bed for me, but there was a large space in the loft that needed a couch and some tables.
After moving in my stuff, my mom saw how empty the space was and offered to take me to look for couches. First up was the garage sale circuit, where we couldn’t find anything. Garage sale-ing in Ohio is a sport and the season ends around August, so we were at the tail end, and nothing good was left. Next up we went to the budget stores. We walked into Big Lots and immediately went to their furniture department, which was limited in its selection but did have a pleather sofa for two hundred dollars. When I say pleather, I mean it was some slippery shit. Like a fresh trout, no matter what you were wearing, you would immediately slide off it as soon as you sat down. I think back to my youth when kids would have birthday parties at places like DZ Discovery Zone, where I would try to make it down that roller slide, injuring my butt along the way or getting my oversize hip-hop Bugs Bunny shirt caught in the wheels. No one ever slid easily. If the owners of that place really wanted children to move, they should’ve made a slide that was just one giant pleather couch from Big Lots. Even though the couch was cheap, I didn’t care, and to be honest, I didn’t even understand at the time what the difference was between real leather and whatever this was. My taste wasn’t as refined as it is now. Still, I wanted it and it cost $200, which was the absolute max I had to spend, so the employees wrapped the piece in plastic, and we put it on our truck bed to head home.
Back at the condo, we drove in and noticed my oldest brother, Junior, was parked in the driveway. Junior is like a straight, Italian version of Christopher Lowell. He has impeccable design style, and he’s a decisive Taurus, which is helpful to my Libra-ness, so I’ve come to rely on him for decorating tips. When he saw that I had purchased something, he immediately unwrapped the cheap, black couch to survey our choice.
“You can’t keep this,” he said without missing a beat.
“It’s fine for him,” Mom countered.
“It looks like shit and it’s pleather.”
“He isn’t made of money, it’s fine.”
Mom and Junior argued in front of me about how shitty the couch was that I just spent all my savings to purchase. It was as if I weren’t even there.
“He’s better off having nothing than this. It’s a waste of two hundred dollars!” Junior said.
I started to see that maybe this was not the right fit for my very first non-parent/non-dorm living space. Junior was right, and now I was not only regretful about the ugly-ass sofa, but I was also devastated that I wasted all the money I had on something widely regarded as hideous upon seeing it for the first time. Even my mom admitted it was crap and that she was just being nice when I opted to buy it.
“C’mon, get back in the truck. I’ll drive you and we’ll return this piece of shit,” Junior said.
Without even unloading it into the loft, I got in the car and we made our way back to the store. He is a much faster driver than my mother, so we made it there in record time. However, I did notice when we were on the freeway that a lot of people were honking at us, but I chalked it up to his speed.
Junior pulled into the front of the store, and I ran inside while he waited in the truck. There was no reason for him to go in with me because I knew I would have to first talk to the cashier and convince them that it was an acceptable return.
“I’d like to return a couch I just I purchased,” I said to the young employee.
“What’s the reason for return?” she asked.
“I literally just got it about an hour ago. Made a mistake,” I said.
“Okay, pull around to the back dock. I’ll meet you there with the return slip you’ll have to sign,” she instructed.
We pulled around, backing the truck up to the furniture dock. I hopped out and opened the truck bed just as the employee was coming outside and another was waiting with her. Junior put the truck in park, and he got out to help me unload it.
The four of us looked at the couch at the exact same time, but my brother and I noticed something a split second before the employees. The cushions were no longer on the couch. It seems we may not have properly wrapped the return after all, and the people honking at us on the freeway were doing so because giant pleather cushions were falling one by one out of the back of our truck bed as my brother drove with the fervor of my old friend Roberta on her disability scooter to the discount furniture store.
My mind was racing. There was no way we could retrieve three cushions from a busy Cleveland highway, but I also couldn’t afford to be out of the $200 it cost to buy this piece of junk. I had to think fast.
“There are no cushions on this thing,” the employee said.
“I KNOW! None,” I replied, confirming.
“What happened to them?”
“It didn’t come with any,” I lied.
“What?” she asked.
“None. No cushions on the couch. That’s why I’m returning it.”
“But—”
“I can’t have a couch with no cushions!”
“You just told me in the store that it was purchased by mistake,” she said.
“Right, I forgot to mention that it was sold to me without any cushions. I would’ve never bought it if I knew.”
Junior’s face turned bright red, and I could see him biting the inside of his mouth to prevent laughter. I get that he thought it was funny, but I couldn’t afford to screw this up. I shot him a look that said, “Get in the car and pull it together,” so he went back into the driver’s seat and let me handle the store employees.
“So you want to help me pull this thing out?” I asked the employees.
They were flabbergasted. I assume no one had ever tried to return a sofa before this way, and although I was lying, it seemed like such a far-fetched lie that it had to be true. We unloaded it while my brother sat in the car and giggled like a schoolgirl.
After it was unloaded, the only thing left to do was sign my return slip for the money to be refunded back onto my credit card and scurry out of there as fast as possible. Signing my name never felt so nefarious. I was a fraud. An outlaw. Looking back, I very much regret doing what I did. It’s one of only two regrets I have in life, the other being my freshman year of college when I wore a cell phone belt clip. No wonder I wasn’t having sex in college—my cell was on display and protruding out of my waistline, but that’s a tale for another time. It was completely inappropriate of me to lie and bamboozle this store out of two hundred dollars, and I knew they wouldn’t be able to resell it in the shape it was in. Who is going to buy a couch with no cushions? Even so, I signed and got the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
“Thanks so much! Hope you find the cushions,” I said to the employees as I got into the passenger’s seat of the now-empty truck.
“Go, GO, GO!” I told my brother as if he were a getaway car and I just robbed a bank.
We drove back to the condo, and the whole way, I looked out the window for those cushions, eventually seeing them in the middle of the busiest section of the freeway. For a moment, we considered stopping on the side of the road to pick them up, bring them back to the store, and confess my sins. It would’ve been incredibly dangerous but perhaps still doable. Instead, we kept driving and I waited on the edge of my seat for the refund to officially post to my account, worrying that they would change their minds and call to tell me to come collect the cushionless furniture. Years later, when I was more grown and financially stable, I would decide to start donating to the Brain and Behavioral Foundation, a fantastic mental health charity. One particular year, I made a donation on behalf of that store as a way to repent. I figured it was the least I could do, and while it might not have been as appropriate as paying them back the two hundred dollars, it felt like a start. Donating to an organization that does brain research felt like the next best thing, since I mindfucked them so hard.