PrettyFakes

Two Saturdays back I call Jaxxie: “I need breakfast immediately, or otherwise I may actually die.” “I’m at Shoney’s with Jaysus and the Giant—come meet us!” she says: verily, the siren call of the Jaxxon faithful.

Nine pounds of eggs later, Jaysus leans across the table and stage-whispers “follow us down the road—we’ve got something to show you. It’s a secret,” he adds, and I genuinely have no idea what it could be.

We turn a few corners, ease through a gate, and wallah! We’re at . . . a bunch of storage sheds. WTF, man. I’m thinking they better have a bunch of Led Zeppelin bootleg vinyl or maybe stolen artwork or, I don’t know, porcelain dollheads but there better be something awesome, because Breakfast Buffet on top of last night’s drunk + low-90’s “fall” weather = I’m about to throw up and start crying at any moment.

Jaysus grins and raises the door of one of the sheds:

“Hey. Hey, man,” I manage—“dude, those are . . . Jaysus, that’s like, eight million Eames chairs, my friend.”

He grins; the Giant grins. I start to smile, and then: mentally scanning my checkbook, thinking about maybe selling that Faces boxset to help make the gas bill—“I’ll give you a hundred bucks right now, cash, for two.”

Jaysus keeps grinning.

“Dude, where did you get these!” I laugh, and he laughs, and Giant shields his eyes from the sun, it was way too many Redheaded Sluts for that boy last night. “And—are they what I think they are?”

Jaysus peels a label off the bottom of one of the chairs:

And underneath is stamped HERMAN MILLER, and then there’s a listing of all the various patents involved in molding fiberglass to fit the Modern American Rear. “Is this vinyl? You don’t ever see this—does it come off?”

“Near as I can tell, these are Eames side chairs, with the optional vinyl covering and padding. They’re all in okay shape, but some of them are pretty shot.”

So I spend the rest of the day helping the guys categorize and catalog the chairs—B for missing a bolt, K for missing a shock, G for a lost glider, I for pen marks on or rips in the vinyl—green back beige vinyl, yellow back brown vinyl:

And I burn a few squares of film at the gently rusting Bonneville next to the shed. Jaysus brings a couple six packs over and a few Sparks and I get to handle what I can only think of as treasure.

Those perfect spindle legs, the ivory-white threads tangled through the shells, the colors still so vivid thirty-six years later. I love these chairs so much because they’re not from 1970, they’re from alternate-earth 2007, that magick and far-off place where they travel on moving sidewalks and strap into plastic jetpacks to head to the office, mash a single button for dinner. These chairs are what America was supposed to be in the future, not the pasteboard modules of Wal-Mart, but a land of enlightenment.

NOTE TO JAXXONIANS: If you want to purchase one or more, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll send it on to Jaysus. Here’s the gig: there’s 28 chairs left. The price is $40 for one chair, but if you snag two it’s only $60; four are only $100. That’s $25 a pop! You can barely buy a brand-new, non-awesome, un-legendary chair for that!

Update: The chairs are all gone, scattered throughout Jackson.

A modern version of this chair—with a different base—can be viewed at hivemodern.
The bases on the chairs Jaysus has—which I call the Zeus chairs—are the 4-leg base you can view on this armchair. The bases are interchangeable on many of these chairs, so you could get the noble Eiffel base or perhaps even the lovely rocker!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 7:56 am and is filed under Gorjus, In Mississippi, Polaroids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.