My friends, the fact that I’m here to write this column today is nothing short of a miracle. I have been inside the combat zone, a place of flying fists and gnashing teeth, yet I’m still here to talk about it. Now there’s something for which to give thanks when you’re sitting around the table with your pants unbuttoned.

The place is called Buy the Pound Outlet Store and it’s run by Goodwill Industries. I know what you’re thinking: Stop rolling your eyes, young lady, and keep your elbows off the table.

You’re thinking that I went shopping at Goodwill, so what’s the big deal? Fool! If you’ve never been to Buy the Pound, you don’t know, man. You don’t KNOW. BTP is a place where they continuously toss out fresh meat for the lions, rolling out table after table of fresh merchandise every 45 minutes or so and letting the shoppers fight it out.

The changing of the tables is a glorious event, akin to a Black Friday shopping frenzy in a year when there is one special toy that absolutely must be had, no matter how much biting, cussing and body-slamming it takes. 

At BTP, you load up massive carts with whatever merchandise you can wrestle away from other shoppers, most of them dirty cheaters who won’t hesitate to use trickery or judo to outwit a naive lad like myself.

At the end of your shopping trip, before you head off to the emergency room, your cart is weighed and you are charged mere pennies on the pound. There are some seriously good deals to be had for those used and slightly damaged goods, but you’ve got to have street sense and the speed of a jungle cat to get them.

Note the rules, prominently displayed at the weighing area near the front of the Gorham store. They are: “No hair-pulling. No biting, bitch-slapping or knees to groins. No eye-gouging except on the first Wednesday of each month. No Crane Technique allowed, unless the item being fought for comes from L.L. Bean, in which case, sweep the leg!”

OK, those aren’t the real rules; they’re the rules as I interpret them. A real list can be found here. See if you don’t read between the lines as I do. Take note the Type I and Type II violations. Those rules aren’t there for no reason.

And so it was shopping time, only I wasn’t there to shop. I was there because a certain wife insisted she just wanted to look around “for 15 minutes or so, I promise.” Which of course translates to three and a half hours in wife time, so I browsed the tables just to kill time while weeping softly for my lost afternoon.

My first thought: It’s the Island of Misfit Toys all up in here.

Behold, a stuffed dog with matted fur that used to loudly yip and yap and do a somersault in its glory day. Now, when you wind it up, it faintly croaks, its tail twitches in a death spasm and then it just sits there staring from its one glass eye.

A yo-yo with a missing yo. A wide-eyed doll minus a leg (sure, I looked up her skirt, but that’s how you check the value of these things.) A stringless guitar, a xylophone with two missing bars, a Mr. Potato Head who looks like somebody actually tried to bake and butter him.

I passed all of these with a weird sense of childlike sadness and began to focus on other assorted items, strewn across the tables like the aftermath of a plane wreck. I spotted something of interest and it was like dripping blood in a shark tank.

A burly woman with serrated elbows sprang out of nowhere. She brushed by me and lunged at the table like she was diving in to save a drowning infant. Only, instead of a infant, what Ellen McElbowson was after was a full-sized Maglite that I had been about to reach for. How she knew I was interested in the Maglite is beyond me.

I think when you work the tables often enough, you develop a sixth sense of sorts, one that alerts you when some skinny interloper is about to lay his bony hands on an item that you might want for yourself.

She picked up the flashlight and kind of glowered at it. She looked up at me with her lip curled over one gleaming incisor. I swear I heard a low growl. I cowered and shrank back. I put my hands up in a submissive gesture. I don’t want the Maglite, lady. You take it. Here! I’ll take this bag of assorted chess pieces! Can’t we all just get along?

At a regular Goodwill store, people shop at leisure, bantering with one another, laughing and discussing the great deals to be had. At Buy the Pound? Not so much. Here, one shops in single-minded silence, employing complex strategies and adjusting them from one changing-of-the-tables to the next. Here, you are that jungle beast and there isn’t enough food to go around.

Frightening, yes. And yet thrilling, too, because there ARE fantastic deals to be had and to get them, one has to be fast and committed to his cause.

By the end of the shopping spree (ended only because it was closing time) that wife had more than 20 pounds of loot stacked high in her cart. Two pairs of boots, a pair of L.L. Bean raincoats, a child’s tent, a stack of multicolored nesting bins, some scarves and — hey, what do you know? A normally very expensive flashlight with its own battery-charging system.

More than 20 pounds and by the time all was said and done, she paid only $14 for the haul, not including the price of the moving van required to get it all home.

Buy the Pound is a microcosm of the way the world used to work, with a limited supply of resources and a demand that only the craftiest and most fit can get what he or she needs.

Just don’t ask me how I ended up with the Maglite. To get it I had to … do things for which I’m not proud.

OK, I’m a little proud.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Only the craftiest and most fit should email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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