December 29, 1999

Today is the day I bought my chair. I walked into Macy's, took escalators up to the 9^th floor furniture galleries, found the nearest available sales rep and said "I want to buy the Buckskin Mission Recliner."

On the way up to the 9^th floor, and on the way back down afterwards, I smiled almost all the way. It would take a lot to explain why this single event was so very satisfying. Why I circled Macy's a half-dozen times before going in, and a half-dozen times after leaving.

Macy's is the first thing I remember seeing when I got off the train from Tampa at Penn Station on the morning of October 21, 1990.

All I knew of Macy's was its name and that for whatever reason it was my idea of a "big city department store," meaning that it was big and in a big city. We didn't have a Macy's in Tampa, and at the time I didn't know that any city except New York had one.

That Christmas there was a Macy's Christmas gift magazine in the New York Times, and I said to myself that this was part of the holiday tradition around here. Big-ass gift magazines with Sears-catalogue-esque women standing around in their underwear and luscious leather wallets laid out to pasture.

Over the years I had extreme difficulty making purchases at Macy's. In fact I can't remember what, if anything, I ever bought there until today (except for breakfast at the 8^th floor diner).

Attempts to purchase things at Macy's were always fruitless.

One time I marched down to the Macy's Cellar, found the perfect clothes iron, and took it to the counter. It was the last iron available in the whole entire store (or so a nearby pissed-off Macy's employee said).

The cashier took the precious clothes iron from my hand, very slowly placed it behind and under the counter, and walked away. I waited 10 minutes for her to return, but she never came. She had placed the iron completely out of reach, so I could not take it to another register.

I walked outside, crossed 34^th street and walked into Walgreen's, where dozens of the exact same iron were available (for $10 less), and I purchased the thing within seconds. *SECONDS!*

Oh, I wrote a nasty piece of shit letter to Macy's about that ridiculous experience, and to their credit they responded saying that "We take your comments very seriously" and blah blah blah.

Over the years I bought my luscious leather goods at Bloomingdale's and Coach, clothes at Aeropostale, kitchen utensils at Crate & Barrel, furniture at assorted neighborhood places.

But I wanted to crack the Macy's code. I wanted to experience this elusive act of purchasing something there. I didn't care about the magic, I just wanted to walk in one day and do it. Making a purchase at Macy's has become one of the insurmountable tasks of living in New York.

And today, I did it. Fuck, it was good. 9 years in the making, today I bought a chair, and having it delivered next week.

The best part of it is that today's purchase was connected to what I refer to as my "change situation."

Would you like to hear about my Change Situation?

I throw my change into a bucket at the end of each day. It is a good-sized car-wash-capable bucket. Holds a lot of change.

Over time the bucket became too heavy to lift. It became too heavy to move. It became too heavy to think about. Coins are heavy shit, and this bucket was filled to the brim.

I always assumed that my piles of change were never worth as much as I imagined them to be worth, so without counting up the value of any of the coins I could never justify the expense of a change sorter. At $40-$50 it just seemed to deplete the value of my bucket-full.

Sometime in 1997 I got a change sorter at Walgreen's, and dutifully spent full days of my weekends dumping coins into it. The change sorter was cheap, though, and it choked.

So I sorted one coin at a time into paper coin wrappers. For weeks and months I sorted and sorted and drank beer and listened to CDs and sorted until the bucket could at least be moved from one side of the room to the other, where I could sort in more comfort.

Well, to make a long, obsessively-compulsive story short, I stopped sorting at $1,027.54. That is a buttload of change, and getting it to the bank was a 2-week chore which I think endeared me to some of the tellers at my bank who exchanged grin-heavy glances every day at 2:00 p.m. as I appeared with my backpack full of coin rolls.

That chunk of change contained pennies and dimes which have been sitting in my closets since 1984. This was Old Money. It spanned so many years, and so many times in my life, and once I got it in the bank I knew I had to save it for a momentous purchase of some sort.

Thus, the chair. Today's chair. The chair I saw and slobbered over in October, 1990, when I first found the furniture department at Macy's. The chair I looked at and sat in and said "Man, there is no fucking way I'll ever be able to afford this." I fell asleep in the chair that day. It's the only chair I've sat in where my ass doesn't feel like a falling bomb.

In those days I had no idea how hard it would be to purchase something at that store. All I knew was that I had no money anyway, and would not have any for years to come, so I could press my nose to the glass as long as I wanted.

I don't like sitting.

I savored every moment of today's purchase. I sound vacuous saying so, but it is true.

This afternoon at about 2:04 p.m. I stood at 34th Street and 8th Avenue and looked up at the big, gray Macy's sign that hollers out at the south-west side of Manhattan. Unlike 9 years ago, I noticed the clouds passing, and the sky overhead, and the clamor of the people on all sides, and the grip I had on the money in my pocket. For once since high school I stood in one spot while the rest of the world hustled past.

If you were here I'd invite you to get up and dance dance dance. For now, I'll try it by myself.