I was curious to see if they were still open. Apparently they are. I could have walked there from where I live, but I checked the computer and found this on Yelp.

These people do not deserve the business of anyone who is female, a person of color, LGBT, or any other community that is now under threat. They also took money from my friend's mother with dementia and when asked if they would allow the return of the item  by her family  they refused. Do not shop here unless you want to deal with people who will cheat you and steal your money. They don't care who they hurt or how they do business.

I was with a friend and his wife as well as my girlfriend when we stopped here years ago. We were on our way to the Arts Festival in the park. It was typical of our friends to show off the money they had that we certainly lacked at the time. They lived in a house so full of things that it was a challenge to walk from room to room. They found two corner pieces for their dining room, got a discount for buying two and arranged for delivery. But they asked to hold off on the delivery for a few days because they had to clear a space for their new possessions. Not that they explained that.

Years later, after his wife died and my girlfriend suffered a psychotic break and ended up living with her mother, I moved into his guest house to empty the place and supervise other work. Soon it became apparent that as one room emptied another began to fill. It was partly the wife, but not entirely, because the wife was dead, but the filling up continued. I stayed there for almost four years.

One day he came home with a bagful of things meant to earthquake proof the house. Among them were two cables meant to secure the corner cabinets in the dining room. I asked how he wanted me to use them. There was nothing to attach them to. It was like trying to attach an antitheft cable to a bicycle with no spokes and no gaps in the frame. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, “Drill holes in the back.”

A few months later he came home fit to be tied. He told me that I had cost him thousands and thousands of dollars in damage to his priceless antiques. I asked which antiques he was referring to. He has lots of junk, some of it expensive junk, but nothing even remotely antique. “The corner cabinets,” he yelled. By drilling holes you completely ruined their resale value. I said, “I did what you told me to do. I drilled holes in the back to keep them from falling over in an earthquake.” Well, he would never say such a stupid thing. “These are collectors items,” he insisted. “These are late 17th Century!”

Shakespeare’s First Folio was published in the first quarter of the 17th Century. The cabinets would be only about sixty years younger. If you’re using your fingers and your toes, that’s about 400 years. Well, he got very angry when I explained that his cabinets weren’t that old, that I was with him when he purchased them, and that having the word “Antiques” in the name of the store did not mean everything they sold was precious and truly antique. I though maybe he would pass out he was so furious.

Anyway, I found the above photo on the computer last week. I put a small digital camera inside and pointed toward myself. I found a backup tag attached to the inside. The holes I drilled were through plywood. Plywood came into its own in the 20th Century. The shelves were plywood, held up with shelving plugs placed in machine drilled holes along the inside of the cabinets. And the whole thing was held together with small, dark colored Phillips-head screws, an invention of the 20th Century. And after all that time, the cabinets still had the distinct smell of stain. In other words, they were copies. New copies, made in Indonesia. Asking price $1,495. Purchased at a discount.

I’ve known lots of crazy people in my time. I knew this person for almost twenty years before it was necessary to draw the line. He was always odd. Hell, I’m odd myself. I'll owe up to that. But I have never stepped so clearly or with such abandon over the edge from which he fell.