SHOPKEEP: A Stroll Down Saluda Ave Changes My Life
A Lunch Hour After Which Nothing Will Be the Same
In honor of the 29th anniversary of Loose Lucy’s in Five Points, here’s an excerpt from the memoir about a moment which changed everything. Enjoy.
At back-to-school time in August 1992, I’m out for a stroll in Five Points one afternoon after lunch. As I don’t punch a time clock I’m often in the office before eight, which allows me to either stretch out these lunches, or simply get out of there early. Office workers the world over, especially the windowless kind like me, will understand.
Five Points, Columbia, SC, USA
Since completing my degree and beginning a career in the university media archive, the college ghetto and first suburban commercial corridor outside Columbia’s traditional downtown area has held far less interest. The era when I’d stand outside the front door of Group Therapy until three in the morning, on a hit of acid and with an endless stream of beer going down into my gullet, are several years in the past.
More than having ‘grown up,’ but less than actually getting alcohol treatment or following a program other than sheer magical will, two years before I had detoxed in anticipation of our impending marriage, and had stuck to the program, such as it was.
The literal conversation I had with myself: if I cannot make this commitment to myself alongside the one to my future wife, I shouldn’t do either.
Needless to say, I get off the sauce (for the first time) and anything heavier than a few bong hits, but those also sometimes feature deleterious effects. A squirrelly feeling, as I put it, often verging on a panic attack, which I suffer on occasion because of the PTSD.
Wearing the corporate-casual slacks and button-down shirt that serves as my uniform, perhaps I’ll look out of place in the little hippie shop I’ve discovered down on one end of the retail block of Saluda Avenue.
“Loose Lucy’s,” I say with wonder, looking up at a hand-painted sign with a jaunty, colorful logo backed by cosmological signs like stars and ringed planets before charging through the door. The shop seems to have sprouted out of nowhere.
Like untold thousands more in the decades to come, I squint into the dark interior and smell burning incense. While Five Points already has its share of flare, it hasn’t offered a straight-up head shop in this neighborhood in years. Not in the Reagan-Bush era; not since Joyful Alternative traded in most of its tie-dye fashion and bong-ware for trendy boutique wear, the bread and butter of a college neighborhood serving a university with a powerful Greek system full of sororities and frats.
“What the hell is this? A Deadhead shop?”
“Oh—hey!” Liz, a friend from some of those raging party days in the 80s, stand behind the counter with a bearish dude in a ball cap and a screen printed Loose Lucy’s shirt featuring a hand-drawn version of a psychedelic flying eyeball. “I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Right? Last time was that Robert Plant show—man, we dosed and stayed up all night!”
Both Liz, and the guy I will come to know as Mike, look stricken at my outburst. They shoot glances back to the T-shirt room where a kid browses two large racks of Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic and other shirts. He hasn’t heard me, not with the Dead audience recording playing on a wooden cabinet speaker behind the glass counter stocked with patches, stickers and jewelry.
“Cool it on that talk,” the proprietor says. “Okay?”
“Of course.” I nod and understand. Discretion. This isn’t outside a show in the parking lot—it’s 5 Points, in broad daylight. “sorry.”
Six tickets from the cancelled Fall Tour 1992.
Despite my mild indiscretion, it’s a relief to stand in this store right before I go back to work for the afternoon. I identify more as a Deadhead than a media archivist, or even a writer, at least at this moment. I’ve seen twenty shows this year, but moping with deep sadness over the fall tour have been canceled so Jerry Garcia could recover from a bout of bad health, indulgence, and likely ennui with the endless grind of the road. Finding a Deadheady shop only blocks from my office feels like a small miracle, a light creeping through a crack in the wall. A focal point for the tribe. A place to meet people to trade tapes, in the those analog days the hands-on networking often necessary to score low-gen copies of the sweetest recordings and rarest shows.
“It’s great to see this place here,” I continue with enthusiasm. “I heard about the one down on Hilton Head.”
“Yeah,” Mike says. He’s a ‘cool’ interviewee, indifferent to my questions, keeping his eye on the kids in the back. He has a stoicism leaning toward stoniness in work situations, although a much more fun persona outside of work. “That one’s ours, too.”
I dig his vibe. Prideful, but low-key. And a bossman, no question. I will relate—I am soon made department head of my little preservation fiefdom in the media archive. They already look to me as the leader, and soon it will be official; but it won’t be a promotion, not on the spiritual level.
Twenty years later, however, I will write an epic novel about the bossman archetype, in part thanks to the life I live, as well people like my friends I come to know so well, these good folks who opened a hippie shop which would change my life, along with many others.
Urgency; I’m gripped with sudden urgency. Forget the office, I need to call home, let Jenn know about this place. Or, should I buy her something? I will not recall, years later, if I do or do not make a purchase on this day.
Of more importance: “Do you guys trade tapes?”
Somebody else’s tape collection. Mine was far larger in scope and remains that way, albeit reduced to irrelevancy by digital media access.
They say they do trade tapes.
“I can’t wait to bring my wife in here,” pointing to all the sundresses and tie-dyes and other hippie accoutrements hanging from racks. “She’ll lose her mind—she’ll love it. You’re gonna see a lot of us in this store.” Prophetic words.
The man I will grow to know as a brother replies, well, look around and let us know if you need any help. And he goes back to tagging a stack of merchandise, which Liz places onto hangers for showroom floor display. Thirty years later, a few moments after I write these words, I will be standing in a similar spot on the same piece of plywood doing the same work.
And it will feel like being in heaven.
As I leave that day to trudge back to an office job at which I’ll stay for the next five years, little do I know how prescient Mike’s standard line from the playbook of retail hospitality will turn out, especially after we meet his wife, bubbly, cute Susan, which happens soon after. I will not recall what goes on the rest of that day back at my chilly office in the basement of a building on campus, nor the call I made to Jenn, but all I can say now is that while it may not seem so dramatic at the time, this serendipitous discovery of Loose Lucy’s, my life has been forever altered by this meeting, one of those indelible moments in which an entire reality shifts into a new phase. I may not know it now but I will later; it will become undeniable; and as I look back with wonder and gratitude, that’s when this precious knowledge will count the most
“Mom” hard at work managing her thriving shop.
More excerpts from Shopkeep will be posted between now and the publication of the book in late 2022. Thank you for reading!
About dmac
James D. McCallister is a South Carolina author of novels, short stories, journalism, creative nonfiction and poetry. His neo-Southern Gothic novel series DIXIANA was released in 2019.