In order for you to fully appreciate “The Thing,” I need to offer some background:

The championship in this year’s Agitator.com fantasy football league came down to yours truly and “Hoey” Robbins, a law school pal and one-time guest blogger on these pages. He emailed me suggesting a wager. Loser buys the winner something “odd” in the $20-ish range. Well, he beat me, thanks in large part to a poor performance by Brett Favre. Can’t complain, though. Favre treated me pretty well this year for a fourth-round QB pick.

Fast forward to last week. Everyone we talked to in San Francisco said we should check out The Mission, which we were told is an up and coming, slowly gentrifying area with lots of ethnic spots, quirky stores and such. Great, I’m thinking. Maybe a little like Washingto, D.C.’s U-Street, only more San Francisco-y.

Not a big fan of The Mission. There are some trendy art galleries, boutiques, and holish restaurants that look like they might have been good finds, but the place is largely a dump. I personally witnessed four drug transactions over the course of a 20-block walk, with a dude with his face cut up, and some seriously sick-looking, open-sored prostitutes thrown in for good “creep out the tourists” measure. Also passed more than a few shady figures who eyed every passing, moderately attractive woman as if said shady figure had just spent six days trudging through a blizard without food, and said woman were an open-faced meat loaf sandwich. These weren’t “hey baby I’d like to see you naked” kinds of looks. They were more “hey baby, I’d like to wipe your innards across my walls, and make lampshades from your flesh” kinds of looks.

Perhaps it just needs a little more gentrification. But I didn’t find The Mission all that charming.

At any rate, we did find a place called X-21 Modern, which near as I can tell is a place that sends its workers to thrift shops and garage sales, has them find stuff that’s cool in a useless, hipster sort of way, then brings them back to X-21 to sell at a “vintage” premium. The guy on duty that day was almost exactly what I’d picture if you had said to me “I know this guy who works at a hipster vintage store in San Francisco.” He had long, curly red hair down to the middle of his back. He wore eyeglasses with lenses tinted to a graded, funky ’70s brown, all set in a snakeskin frame. Velvet brown jacket. White shirt with ruffles. Brown pants. And bright pink low-top Puma sneakers. He looked a ’70’s TV villain, maybe a coke dealer that Mannix might rough up over the course of solving a case, maybe because he gave Mannix bad information to throw him off the scent. He was also eating the hugest order of nachos I’ve ever seen. And given that he was halfway through, the nacho toppings had congealed into this tannish-grayish mix of guac, sour cream, cheese, and meat, of which he’d take heaping chipfulls between answering our questions about how much this or that piece of junk vintage treasure might cost.

But he was very nice. Quite helpful. I didn’t get his picture. But here are a few snaps of the store:

I mock, but the place was awfully fun to look through, if outrageously expensive. Being cool ain’t cheap. For example, I saw a desktop-sized cross-section of a tooth for sale — the kind of thing they used in elementary school to teach you all about your enamel, dentin, and such — and thought it’d be a great fantasy football championship prize. Alas, a hundred and fifty bucks!

But I did decide I’d find my fantasy football trophy at X21.

It wasn’t until I wandered down to the basement that I found The Thing. It peered up at me from atop a stack of four-inch by four-inch Motley Crue stained glass squares, just behind the Snoopy board game with missing parts, next to the diarama of a fat woman naked behind an open robe, looking lonely in an empty roon that, according to the attached tag, won honorable mention at a Bloomington, IN art contest. The diarama cost $100. The stained glass Motley Crue squres were eight dollars each, if memory serves. Can’t remember what the Snoopy game cost.

The Thing is made of wood. The frame’s shape, design, and markings are reminiscent of a 1940s radio. Inside the frame sits the portrait of a uniformed man, who doesn’t look to be older than thirty. I’m not exactly sure what kind of uniform he’s wearing. My first guess was that he’s military. But he could just as easily be a cop, an armored truck driver, or a milkman. What’s odd is that the portrait is carved from wood. The jacket and tie are three-dimensional, as is the hat. But the face appears to be a photograph somehow transfixed to the wood. It’s two-dimensional. I also just discovered today that the portrait of the man can pivot within the frame, though not all the way around. There’s no writing on entire piece, save for the number “482″ etched in pencil, and a “MADE IN MEXICO” stamp — both on the bottom. Here are two pictures of The Thing. One is next to a tennis ball to give a sense of proportion. The second shows off The Thing’s swiveling property:

Finally, click “more” to see my recepit for The Thing. Note that The Thing is so indescribable, hipster guy hadn’t the slightest idea what to call it, and so listed it on the receipt as “1 Thing,” for $24.

Enjoy The Thing, Hoey, and congrats on your well-earned victory.

It’ll go in the mail tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 20th, 2005 at 6:14 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.