Everyone knows that Craigslist is a great tool for soliciting weird sex and conducting prostitution stings. But beneath that, it’s also a lively classifieds forum for local commerce and employment.
Proponents of the Slow Food movement express the desire to know the story of their food—to have face-to-face interaction with the person that grew their avocadoes, or whatever. When you use Craigslist, that kind of experience is forced on you. You could have pulled a PlayStation 3 off the rack at the local corporate megastore, but instead you’re knocking on the back door of some dude’s van behind the Olive Garden hoping that “PlayStation 3” isn’t Craigslist slang for “rape fantasy.” Or maybe a nice old lady greets you with freshly baked cookies when you show up to inquire about a free bookshelf. It’s that human element that makes Craigslist anti-Internet. In my layman understanding, the Web was invented so that we could anonymously deride one another’s religion and sexual orientation on YouTube message boards; Craigslist coaxes us to give up that all-empowering anonymity, to become human ambassadors for our online identities.
A few years ago, my roommate and I drove to Holly Springs, about 35 miles south of Duke, to check out a car listing. (The impetus was that he had promised his militant girlfriend to sort out their trip home for Thanksgiving but was not in possession of a functioning vehicle. When he saw the last-minute prices for holiday flights to New York, he exclaimed that it would be cheaper to buy a car, which was consequential word choice because here we were.) From what I could tell, there was a decree in this part of North Carolina that everyone must live in a trailer and decorate their property with an auto part graveyard.
When we found the address from the Craigslist description, a kid around our age met us out front. He led us over to the fully rusted ’87 Crown Victoria that we had seen in the picture—an old police edition. It looked like a scrapped-together Frankenstein, like the sad ghost of a tortured American car. Our host banged his fist down on the trunk and it creaked open.
“See, it’s got the gun rack already in there. That’s 20 bucks you save off the bat.”
My roommate looked over at me and shrugged.
“We won’t even have to buy a gun rack!”
Curtis, as he introduced himself, lectured us on the finer points of the vehicle. Most strikingly, it was missing a fuel pump. His big brother would be coming by after work to remedy that situation, but until then, Curtis was more than happy to show us how she ran in neutral. We helped him push the Crown Vic up to the top of a hill on Old Mill Lane or Wheelbarrow Road, or whatever the streets were named. The backseat was littered with empty weed bags, blunt wraps and pages ripped from car magazines. As expected, the car ran pretty well in neutral, but neither of us was sure about the criteria for that.
My roommate asked to use the Internet inside the trailer. While I counted the porcelain Virgin Marys on the mantle in Curtis’s mom’s bedroom, my roommate checked the VIN on CarFax. Stolen once and three counts of odometer fraud. Curtis eagerly knocked the price down to $800, but I managed to convince my roommate that an eight-hour journey in this wreck was a deathtrap.
We left Holly Springs empty-handed but reflective. Craigslist, we realized, is extremely effective at introducing you to people that you never want to see again. But meeting Curtis and knowing that he’s probably still spending his days hawking stolen cars in a trailer village is constructive toward my own identity as a privileged Duke student. In a sad way, I feel vindicated by our differences.
Craigslist forces you to acknowledge parts of the spectrum of human experience that you either forgot about or never knew, and, in the process, become more attached to your own circumstances.
A small church recently closed down in East Durham and posted a Craigslist ad to sell off their wooden pews. My roommate and I envisioned sawing one in half to make a dinner booth for our apartment. As I examined a 15-foot pew, Stan, the jovial preacher, asked if the two of us were starting our own church. Outside, my roommate was busy backing a U-Haul truck directly into another car; how could Stan think we were competent enough to found a house of worship? I hid the handsaw behind my back and answered that we were not currently considering that option.
On Craigslist, I’m a tourist. I peruse the listings and then I travel around to appropriate objects from other people’s domestic lives. The older black preacher sees two white kids from Duke buying one of the pews from his defunct church and hopes that we have some greater purpose. But we’re just tourists and the pew will join the other things in our apartment that primarily provide somewhere to sit but secondarily remind us who we are in opposition to their former owners. Craigslist offers some loose commercial pretext through which to experience and relate to the Durham outside of Duke.
I thought I had this all figured out. I was happy being a tourist. But then, last month, we decided to buy a sofa.
In a borrowed minivan, my roommate and I veered onto a dead-end gravel road. The listing hadn’t given an address—it just said to follow this road to its end. When we got out of the car, my roommate and I exchanged glances. This house was a crack den. The walkway to the front door was a jungle of weeds and broken glass. A decrepit black car with tinted windows sat on towers of cinder blocks along the side of the house. The screen door was slashed down the middle.
A full five minutes after we first knocked, a woman answered the door with a wide, nervous smile. She was in her forties, and she sported big, frizzy hair poorly restrained by an elastic band and cartoon pajamas. Always fidgeting, she invited us in to see the couch. It was white with brown stripes and the pillows were ripping at the seams. My roommate nudged me with his elbow. “The crystal meth burn spots are a nice accent,” he whispered. We tried to barter down the price but she held firm.
“You boys aren’t going to pull one over on me!” she announced. Her laugh sounded extra crazy. Her bony fingers clutched my shoulder, almost threatening. I just wanted to leave with the couch before she started freebasing my T-shirt. We handed over the cash, pulled the minivan around, and hoisted the couch in through the back. When we were ready to leave, she noticed our bumper sticker and her eyes widened.
“You boys go to Duke?” We nodded politely. “I went there! What are y’all studying?”
“I’m an English major,” I answered slowly.
“What in the hell are you going to with that?” Then, before I could respond: “Just kidding—I know exactly how it is! I graduated in ’87. B.A. in Slavic languages. Let me tell you boys: It is a hard world out here. But hey, at least I got to study what interested me, and everything turned out OK! Do you crazy college guys need any more stuff? I can sell you a VCR, a toaster—”
“Just the couch, I think.”
“All right, well enjoy it! This is great. I really needed the cash.”
She nodded a lot, twirling the wad of bills in her fingers. We pulled out of the driveway.
“Let’s go Blue Devils!” she shouted from the stoop.
We were no longer tourists. We drove back to campus in silence, the fear of God in us. Craigslist, I thought we understood each other.
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