Elegy for a Sporting Goods Store
It wasn’t difficult to get a job at Farrier’s Sporting Goods. There were only two rules: You had to be a boy, and you couldn’t play sports. The first rule you could chalk up to old-fashioned sexism. The second one was practical: The jocks were at practice during the store’s busiest hours, so they only hired non-athletes. The result of this was that the place employed a revolving door of teenage boys lacking the key formative entry point to the world of sports, namely fathers. The kids who worked at Farrier’s had them all: absentee fathers, deceased fathers, workaholic fathers, fathers who just didn’t really give a damn. None of our dads had played catch with us in the backyard, let alone coached our little-league teams, so none of us ever developed a taste for it. Bud was the owner and Billy the manager, and they took us in and taught us how to shave the scraggly hair on our teenage faces, how to tie our ties, how to throw our spirals, how to drive, how to change our tires once we got our licenses. They picked us up from jail after our DWIs and paid the fines when we couldn’t. They bought us liquor to take to parties and drank a shot with us before we went, showed us how to down Johnnie Walker Red without cringing, just to prove we could do it. They gave us stacks of albums—KISS, Black Sabbath, the entirety of Led Zeppelin—and they quizzed us on the details of, for instance, what city Ozzy Osbourne was in when he bit the head off a bat (Des Moines). Our cultural literacy came from their refusal to let us out into the world without this apparently vital knowledge.
They taught us about music and history and politics and TV, but their favorite subject, inevitably, was women. We’d get dumped, and they were all too happy to weigh in, letting us know when we were feeling sorry for ourselves, when we were in the wrong. They kept us from becoming resentful when our high-school girlfriends cheated on us, commiserated with us when we didn’t deserve it, and made sure we took accountability when we did. Heartbreak after heartbreak, the boys of Farrier’s would come in to work an afternoon shift or a busy spring Saturday, and in between customers we’d toss around our sob stories while Bud and Billy shouted advice to us literally from across the store so that all the customers would hear. No matter who we’d date, Bud would point out, “She ain’t no Bethany Bellulavich,” about our respective girlfriends. None of us knew who this person was, but Bud held her up as the end-all-be-all measuring stick with whom no woman could compare. Billy’s advice was more practical. “She’s geographically undesirable,” he’d tell us if we dated someone who lived too far or too close. “Rich girls are trouble,” he’d tell us when we dated outside our class. “Girls are more resilient,” he’d say. “They’re out there living their lives, and we’re stuck crying into our beers.” We didn’t question whether they were right. We scribbled down these idioms in notebooks like they were scripture, and if we didn’t we may as well have.
They had kids: Billy had two daughters and Bud four. The store closed for a week during the Fourth of July each year, and Billy saved up for twelve months annually to take his girls to Disney World. Bud’s wife, Dolores, would drop his four girls at the store sometimes to run around and wreak havoc while she ran errands. Often, Bud would send us to his house as impromptu babysitters in a pinch. They were dedicated fathers, they lived for their girls, we could tell, but we also got the sense that they liked the surrogate role with us they’d half been thrust into, half brought on themselves, in the land of fatherless sons and sonless fathers.
*
When politicians talk about small businesses, they’re talking about Farrier’s Sporting Goods. It was founded in 1964 by brothers Bruce and Arnold Farrier. The last name led to a lot of confusion when they first opened (even when I was working there, we’d get calls asking whether we sold horseshoes and equestrian gear). They started up in a little strip mall that held a laundromat, a convenience store, and a deli, on the border of Midland Park, where I grew up, and Wyckoff, the wealthier town next door. In its first years, it was the kind of mom-and-pop place that stapled suburban communities in the mid-twentieth century: low inventory, talkative guy behind the counter, fluorescent lights, neon orange price stickers, giant glass front window painted over by some local artist, wood panels, two hundred square feet total, if that. Word spread, the foot traffic was fruitful, and soon all the middle and high schools in the surrounding areas were going to Farrier’s for their cleats and pads and helmets, the middle-aged parents going there for running shoes during their mid-life crises. By the 1980s, nearly every baseball, soccer, and football jersey in Bergen County’s school districts was produced by Farrier’s, the vinyl letters and numbers ironed on by hand, one shirt at a time.
It was around this time when Bud bought the place. He’d worked there as a teenager in the 70s for extra bread after school. “I was so good,” he’d tell us, “I could sell cleats to a baseball player!” (“Good,” we’d say, “wasn’t that your job?”). Bud was the first of our kind, a local boy brought in to man the register and fit kids for shoes and just generally make the customers feel tended to as the store’s reputation grew. When he graduated high school, he increased his hours at the store to afford tuition at Bergen Community College, where he studied business before dropping out when he realized Bruce and Arnold had aged out of their roles as store owners and would sell the place to him, practically for nothing. “They almost paid me to take it,” Bud would later tell us. “I should have known what a headache the place was just from that.”