RFI - Part Three
Bisbee, Arizona is a drunken old man with a broken back. Its narrow twisted streets hunch over the mountainside it rests on. Strewn about these back alleys lie antique stores, artisan shops and the city’s illegitimate children who haunt the place.
Bisbee leered back at me through my viewfinder as I captured its crumbling facades and urchins clogging its crooked veins. I ducked in and out of cluttered stores and climbed steps to nowhere, all in search of the perfect shot.
I was at the dead end of one particularly broken street when I happened upon the most interesting thing I’d seen all day. I stood staring at a curiosity store that looked more like some kind of temple to the strange. The building was painted in cobalt blue and was encrusted with a mosaic made of thousands of rhinestones and pieces of ceramic tile. The top of the building was crenelated with hundreds of what looked to be cast iron forearms and hands, all raised to the sky. The windows were filled with a strange assortment of nude mannequins, suspended sheets of aluminum foil and hanging galaxies of crude planets fashioned from paper mâché. Finally, above the door was an enormous mosaic eye, made from plaster and inset into a pair of eyelids which bulged from the blue facade. Below the eye hung a hand painted wooden sign that read “Blue River Curiosities.”
Stepping into the store, I immediately left Bisbee and found myself in someone’s dusty attic, filled with a hundred years of conspiracy doctrine. The shelves and floor were piled with books and trinkets devoted to the Illuminati, Freemasonry and everything paranormal. The sparse lighting and the music of wind chimes only added to the atmosphere. I strolled slowly through the store, perusing the items on the rickety shelves and as I reached the back, I met the person responsible for this garden of earthly bric-a-brac.
The man behind the counter was dressed in a hooded crushed velvet robe, covering a black tee shirt. His face was completely shaven including his eyebrows and he was so pale he could have been dead. He was speaking to someone on the phone about a book and gave me a sidelong glance with some very bloodshot eyes. Behind him, in another room, I heard someone rummaging through boxes and paper.
The man ended the phone call and I began one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had.
September 13th, 2008 by rob