Alex Wright

Flea-bitten

January 3, 2004

One of my favorite places is the Antique Center and Flea Mart in Richmond, VA, down at the corner of Hull and Belt Boulevard, in the low-rent avenue district of old Southside.



I grew up spending adolescent weekends here, hunting down old $2 LPs, cheap paperbacks, comic books, and a succession of shoddy and chronically tuneless musical instruments. This is where I bought my old CB radio, and sold my portable 8-track player (for a lousy $15).

Though I haven't lived in Richmond for almost twenty years, I try to come back and visit the Flea Mart whenever I can. I almost never buy anything. I come mostly just to confirm that the place still exists, and to marvel at its mystical state of pristine dereliction.



Push open the long-since-busted electric front door, wade through the nacho cheese scent wafting from the snack bar, and the flea market unfolds before you like a low-rent Turkish bazaar: Batman clocks, Chewbacca figurines, original posters for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Dukes of Hazard coloring books, cone-top Schlitz beer cans, and a Plaster of Paris reproduction of Michelangelo’s David standing high atop aisle 8, cattycorner from an oversized plastic replica of Ronald McDonald’s head spinning on a platter.



Elvis - like the song says - is everywhere: on posters, paintings, mugs, ceramic statues and plastic busts, paintings and album covers, tapestries and pillows. When my friend Whit got married, this is where I found his wedding present: a guitar-shaped electric Elvis clock (a gift for which his wife Carol has never stopped, ahem, thanking me). Like an icon or thangka, Elvis' likeness is the one fixed image in this constantly morphing pop culture panoply.

Of course, there are untold hundreds of other flea markets, junque shops and swap meets where you might find the standard-issue memorabilia: TV lunchboxes, movie posters, old 45’s and 1940s pulp magazines. But there’s more to the Richmond Flea Mart than the usual tired old Americana.



Richmond being Richmond, the fallen Capital, we have our own ghosts to contend with. In one corner, Black Sambo peers playfully out over a portrait of Elvis. In another, Aunt Jemima stands there projecting her righteous good humor just around the bend from a booth stocking Gone with the Wind posters. General Lee and his horse Traveller appear trapped in spectral lithograph beneath the glass top of a bruised wooden coffee table.

And in one small booth, resting inside a glass case, we find a relic of Richmond's not-all-that-long-ago-past displayed, as though in a museum, with unapologetic dispassion:

File under: Personal

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