The Johnny Northside Social Network In Action (Jeff Gets A Third-Hand Bed With A Colorful History)

Photos By John Hoff

I introduced Jeff Skrenes to Connie Nompelis, who I met because of my blogging, but now I think Jeff probably knows Connie better than I do. Last week...

...Connie was trying to get rid of a bed at a house she owns. She listed the bed on Craigslist, but also fired off an email to the two most eligible (and relatively furniture-free) bachelors in Hawthorne, me and Jeff Skrenes.

So Jeff needed the bed, but he also needed my van ("Chick Magnet 2") to get it. We swung by the hardware store on Lowry to buy some twine, so we could tie the mattress to the roof. Connie told us she originally got the bed from Craigslist, so she was just casting it back upon the virtual waters, as it were. In fact, Connie said she gets all her furniture to "stage houses" from Craigslist.

"Stage houses?" I asked. I didn't know this piece of "real estate lingo." But I sort of figured it out on the fly. "Oh, you mean you put furniture in the house so people who might want to buy it can picture it with furniture!"

Exactly.

I thought maybe a few dirty diapers and some dishes in the sink might make the domestic illusion more realistic, but I refrained from saying anything...just then. This was when Connie blurted out, "I know it's a good bed, I got it from a couple of swingers."

Oh. Oh. Tell me more, I begged while me and Jeff worked on restraining the box spring with twine and creative knots. So Connie told me she'd found the bed on Craigslist, and the email address of the people who had it was--well, I'm not going to say the exact address, but it was something about a "cute couple" being locally available.

"What kind of stupid email address is that?" Connie asked her husband, who answered, "Oh, they must be swingers."

Connie was, like, NO WAY. But her worldly-wise husband Googled the email address and quickly turned up...well, PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE.

So the bed has apparently been vigorously tested, and it was a good bed. It wasn't STAINED or anything like that. It just had a wild story to go with it. Life should be like that. We should be environmentalists obtaining FREE USED GOODS FROM OUR FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS, goods which come with their own INTERESTING LEGENDS. I've written about this in my two critically-acclaimed books on the subject of dumpster diving.

Hey, heaven knows a lot of our HOUSES come with layers of history and legend, the most recent often involving mortgage fraud.

Anyway, we tied the box spring to the van roof and I told Jeff, "Stick your hand out the window and keep it on the box spring. If it starts to shift, say 'PULL OVER.' Don't preface it or anything, just say 'PULL OVER.'"

"So," Jeff said, with a smirk. "We've got ourselves a SAFE WORD."

Yet another example of how the Johnny Northside blog is forming social networks, and encouraging the oh-so-green redistribution of material goods.