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sketching his Kilroy quickly, before
    anyone saw.
    The photo of my Dad posing sent me whirling through time to Toronto's Muscle
    Beach in the east end, and hearing the tinny AM radios playing weird psychedelic
    rock while teenagers lounged on their Mustangs and the girls sunbathed in
    bikinis that made their tits into torpedoes.
    It all made poems. The old pulp novels and the pawn ticket, when I spread them
    out in front of the TV, and arranged them just so, they made up a poem that took
    my breath away.
After the cowboy trunk episode, I didn't run into Craphound again until the
    annual Rotary Club charity rummage sale at the Upper Canada Brewing Company. He
    was wearing the cowboy hat, sixguns and the silver star from the cowboy trunk.
    It should have looked ridiculous, but the net effect was naive and somehow
    charming, like he was a little boy whose hair you wanted to muss.
    I found a box of nice old melamine dishes, in various shades of green -- four
    square plates, bowls, salad-plates, and a serving tray. I threw them in the
    duffel-bag I'd brought and kept browsing, ignoring Craphound as he charmed a
    salty old Rotarian while fondling a box of leather-bound books.
    I browsed a stack of old Ministry of Labour licenses -- barber, chiropodist,
    bartender, watchmaker. They all had pretty seals and were framed in stark green
    institutional metal. They all had different names, but all from one family, and
    I made up a little story to entertain myself, about the proud mother saving her
    sons' accreditations and framing hanging them in the spare room with their
    diplomas. "Oh, George Junior's just opened his own barbershop, and little
    Jimmy's still fixing watches. . ."
    I bought them.
    In a box of crappy plastic Little Ponies and Barbies and Care Bears, I found a
    leather Indian headdress, a wooden bow-and-arrow set, and a fringed buckskin
    vest. Craphound was still buttering up the leather books' owner. I bought them
    quick, for five bucks.
    "Those are beautiful," a voice said at my elbow. I turned around and smiled at
    the snappy dresser who'd bought the uke at the Secret Boutique. He'd gone casual
    for the weekend, in an expensive, L.L. Bean button-down way.
    "Aren't they, though."
    "You sell them on Queen Street? Your finds, I mean?"
    "Sometimes. Sometimes at auction. How's the uke?"
    "Oh, I got it all tuned up," he said, and smiled the same smile he'd given me
    when he'd taken hold of it at Goodwill. "I can play 'Don't Fence Me In' on it."
    He looked at his feet. "Silly, huh?"
    "Not at all. You're into cowboy things, huh?" As I said it, I was overcome with
    the knowledge that this was "Billy the Kid," the original owner of the cowboy
    trunk. I don't know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.
    "Just trying to re-live a piece of my childhood, I guess. I'm Scott," he said,
    extending his hand.
    Scott?
I thought wildly.
Maybe it's his middle name?
"I'm Jerry."
    The Upper Canada Brewery sale has many things going for it, including a beer
    garden where you can sample their wares and get a good BBQ burger. We gently
    gravitated to it, looking over the tables as we went.
    "You're a pro, right?" he asked after we had plastic cups of beer.
    "You could say that."
    "I'm an amateur. A rank amateur. Any words of wisdom?"
    I laughed and drank some beer, lit a cigarette. "There's no secret to it, I
    think. Just diligence: you've got to go out every chance you get, or you'll miss
    the big score."
    He chuckled. "I hear that. Sometimes, I'll be sitting in my office, and I'll
    just
know
that they're putting out a piece of pure gold at the Goodwill and
    that someone else will get to it before my lunch. I get so wound up, I'm no good
    until I go down there and hunt for it. I guess I'm hooked, eh?"
    "Cheaper than some other kinds of addictions."
    "I guess so. About that Indian stuff -- what do you figure you'd get for it at a
    Queen Street boutique?"
    I looked him in the eye. He may have been something high-powered and cool