Reporter
Dream for Sale
Buy your very own W TX town! 4 houses, 128.8 acr., 2 gas pumps, 1 cafe. Loaded w/upgrades! Serious buyers only. $1.3 million. Contact May Carson, prop.
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When she looked up from her labors, she saw the RV park, picnic areas, the refurbished overnight, and an additional one hundred acres that she had bought behind town, but never the diesel-pump truck stop it had all been meant to complement. She'd been too busy running the cafe: "Good help is hard to find out here. Business is mostly truckers and tourists, and ninety percent male, so if you have a girl working in here, things go awry pretty fast, especially when those nice-looking Wal-Mart drivers come in in their starched white shirts. I call 'em the 'elite fleet,' and the girls will be all over 'em." The only employee of any meaningful tenure, sweet, silent Josefina Vasquez, has worked in May's kitchen for ten years, her stay no doubt enabled by the fact that she won't learn English and May won't learn Spanish. But even with Josefina and Don Ziler, the Dell City hairdresser who moonlights two days a week for May when he closes the only beauty shop in Hudspeth County, May never had the free time to make the dream complete.
IN AUGUST, MAY CALLED J. P. KING, THE Alabama-based luxury real estate auction house, to inquire about selling Cornudas. The King people wanted $80,000 up front for advertising and a 10 percent cut upon sale. "If I had eighty-thousand dollars," she said, "I'd put a grocery store in here, not give it to them." The point of selling the town was not to go broke. "So I started wondering about eBay. I'd never seen it before, but I'd heard they sold all sorts of things off of there. Then I saw that they were selling Amboy, California. Hell, I've been to Amboy a lot of times, and I got a lot more stuff than they got there."
She approached Samantha Proffitt, a nineteen-year-old equine-science student taking a semester off from Tarleton State University to help out on her dad's Dell City ranch. Sam's dad had bragged that she was a computer whiz, and inasmuch as she owned her own laptop, she was Cornudas's Internet guru. But May's $1.3 million price tag, based on a mid-nineties appraisal plus the price of the extra one hundred acres and the Palm Harbor home, presented high enough stakes that Sam wanted help. She called another cafe regular, J'Nette Allred, who'd just left a Dallas developer's office to move to her friend Louis Hegar's ranch, near Guadalupe Peak. J'Nette had already been envisioning a new business brokering items on eBay for ranchers unversed in the ways of the Web. Noting the limited reach of area papers, J'Nette agreed the auction site would be a smart venue for Cornudas. The two met with May and signed on to broker the deal for a 6 percent cut.
Except for one unfortunate conference at Louis's ranch, when some of his goats jumped up and down on the hood and roof of Sam's car, the two women worked well together. They took pictures of the grounds and most of May's possessions, which May had decided she'd include in the sale, and posted them on eBay with a testimonial on the many and varied wonders of Cornudas. In addition to the land and all the buildings, they spotlighted photos of famous people who'd actually stopped in, like Ronald Reagan, Anthony Quinn, Morgan Fairchild, and Bruce Babbitt; more than four thousand gimme caps hanging from the cafe ceiling; a piece of the Berlin Wall; a rare adult potty seat; May's collection of native American pottery, prints, rugs, and numbered kachina dolls; the overnight's six cabins, each now with its own theme, including ones honoring John Deere tractors and Harley-Davidson bikes; and Cornudas's crowning glory, a pencil drawing of John Wayne autographed by the Duke to "a great American town." Then they fielded calls from the media and waited the long month for a buyer to emerge.
ON THE MORNING OF THE AUCTION deadline, the cafe crowd looked like it usually does: two tables of bikers, another of those sharp Wal-Mart haulers, some area ranchers, plus Dick and Jenny Finney, friends from Granbury who'd braved a blown engine on a flight out of Dallas to make a one-day visit and witness the moment. Table talk was a subdued yet incredulous discussion of the sky-high price of cattle ("My God, $1.08 a pound for fats?"), punctuated by excited shouts ("Five minutes to go!") from the ladies gathering around the gift shop computer with Sam and J'Nette, now operating under the informal title "sheBay."
Back in the kitchen, May grumbled about having to cook orders on a hot plate because she'd run out of propane. Typically she goes to El Paso on Mondays and picks up the week's supplies, but not on a day as big as this. Her daughter Terri and grandson Jeff were in from California, and they waited on diners, while May's 91-year-old mama, Pauline, who'd been down from Oregon the past three years to help wait tables in the cafe and change linens in the overnight, sat quietly with a scrambled-egg sandwich. They all acted like nothing big was happening. But the Granbury Finneys, thrice-annual visitors here since making a random pit stop ten years ago, couldn't keep from dreaming aloud about their plans to migrate way south with May. Dick has a standing offer for his business back in Dallas, David's Mattress World, and all he's waiting on is a buyer for his house and one for Cornudas.
"We're going to go to the Osa Peninsula in the southwest of Costa Rica," said Dick, "where it's rain forest right up to your yard. Monkeys everywhere, and loads of toucans. Down there you can hire a husband and a wife, and the wife will"—he started ticking chores off on his fingers—"cook every meal, do all the washing, clean your house. And the husband, he'll do your yard, make you a garden, whatever you need, and you'll get the both of them for fifteen dollars a day.
"I told my wife that when we get down there I'm going to take up bird-watching. They've got the most beautiful double-brown-breasted, long-legged bed-thrashers in the world."
"And I told him," said Jenny, "that he'd better be careful. He's not wired for 220."
All talk ceased when J'Nette announced that the bidding was over. Of the four hard offers, two had met May's minimum bid, and although real estate offers aren't final on eBay (one bid had already fallen out when it turned out to be from a college kid who thought the whole thing was a joke), these bids looked solid. The high was $1,300,200.
May walked around the counter from the kitchen wringing her hands, not sure what to say. Somebody hollered, "May, you're rich!" and she started giving out hugs, one for everybody in the room. As tears welled up in her eyes, not a common sight in Cornudas, they showed up in the bikers' and ranchers' eyes too.
"May, come back here and let me show you your high bidder's eBay history," said J'Nette. "These are his Feedback Reviews from other people who've sold to him. 'Payment received within an hour of auction end.' My God, May, what if you got paid within an hour?" Then she read aloud the next review. "'Fast payment, good eBayer! Enjoy your GlowSticks!'"
May was shaking too much for any of that to register. J'Nette held a small press conference. "We've just sent an e-mail to the last bidder, and we've informed him, 'Do you realize you've just bought a town? When do you want to close and where do you want to close?' Now, by eBay rules, he has seven days to contact us."
A Harley biker named Henrietta asked if that was "seven business days or seven count-'em-on-your-finger days." J'Nette said seven days is seven days.
And if it doesn't pan out? "One option would be to simply re-post on eBay," said J'Nette, "and we are prepared to do that. Another idea I've had would be to move the campaign in the direction of talking to the CEOs of travel-stop companies like Flying J and Truman Arnold's and see if we can't get something on their desks in the way of an on-paper description of what Cornudas is all about." May, still taking it all in, went quietly back to work. But as she delivered a round of burgers and fries to the Wal-Mart drivers, she started to perk up: "I want to ask you something. If you'd just made yourself a million dollars, would you be cooking a burger for someone and bringing it to them?" It wasn't clear exactly what she was asking.
A week later, there was still no word from the high bidder, and both Flying J and Truman Arnold's had passed on the chance to acquire Cornudas. But J'Nette had started shopping it to mom-and-pop operators and the town was back up on eBay, again at $1.3 million. May's dream was still alive.
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