The Objects of My Desire- part 1

   Light bulbs and bubble wrap.  Mannequins and long-neglected, antique display racks.  These things and more are left to rot in the rooms throughout the dusty fourth and fifth floors.  Items once inventoried, now forgotten, shuffled off to the upper reaches of this century-old downtown relic.  The main display floors, beginning with the sidewalk-level ground floor and up through the third, offer furniture, clothing and accessories no one will ever buy.  Perhaps in previous decades, but not these days.  “How does this place stay in business?” I often ask myself (as many other people do, I’m sure).  During my shifts I see few shoppers.  I roll my janitor’s cart through the different departments, wondering where the paychecks even come from. 

     The upper floors are haunted, I’m sure.  The building used to house a hotel, and the tarnished brass numbers are still mounted over many of the doorways, the smooth, dull finish on the well-worn oak looking much the way it did a hundred years ago.  A downtown staple, Winthrop’s is a destination for old ladies, mostly.  No young person in their right mind would shop here now.  This place is a throwback to another time, a dinosaur.  The few young girls that work here- some hot, some not so- are snotty, and offer better customer service to their cell phones than their customers.  My camera- my phone- fits perfectly in my shirt pocket, well-hidden.  They don’t know they’re the subjects of my project, the objects of my desire. 

     At home, in my little rented room down Main Street, safe from people and trouble, I log onto Walmart’s photo site and create their life-size faces.  All of them.  Even the old ones that have worked there since the forties and fifties, the smelly ones that still douche and wear the perfume that the stinky old ladies wore decades ago.