Patron of the Arts

[mallorys_camera]

Ernesto’s turf war with the Bozos is escalating. He wrote a long complaint to the Cannery Row Company: by using pre-recorded karaoke music for her extended jazz sets, Fumani is violating intellectual copyright agreements. This is true, of course, but the letter made me suspicious: Ernesto is not such a simple man of the soil as he presents himself. More likely he’s the scion of some rich Peruvian landowner who exploited peasants. He was sent to university in the United States where he fell in with the wrong crowd (sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll) and so never got around to applying to law school.

Ernesto’s band is called Friends of the Andes. On weekdays they squat under a tent in the middle of Steinbeck Plaza. Sometimes they play music. Most of the time they stand around smoking. This is a pain in the ass. Retail etiquette and the science of sales dictate that I have music playing in the store at all times, Alison Krauss in the mornings and Cuban fusion in the late afternoons. But it’s hard to monitor the music flow if you’re never sure when “I’d rather be a hammer than a nail,” is going to erupt outside your doors. Alison Krauss’s twangy soprano makes for a singularly disturbing cognitive dissonance played out against the Pipes of Pan. I’m afraid that potential customers will start having epileptic seizures in my aisles. Or slip through some vortex into a black hole in time and space. Either way, they won’t be buying hot sauce from me and that’s what it’s all about.

So yesterday, sales were going like gangbusters until 2 PM or so when the fog drifted in. The hotter it is in the valley, the grayer and more miserable it is here by the shore. Financial insecurity, of course, is my constant companion. We stood on the balustrade overlooking the sea wall and watched the fog come in together. Over by Mount Tauro the sun was still shining brightly and this gave the immediate scene a kind of weirdness, as though we were trapped inside a bottle with thick glass walls.

Ernesto sees me and wanders over. He offers me his limp fish hand to shake.

(When I complain about this later to Ben, Ben tells me, “That’s how all South Americans shake hands. They save the heavy digit action for firing submachine guns.”)

“So, you making good money?” he asks.

“We’re doing okay.”

“You’re minting it!”

“Well, not that okay. But we’re breaking even which is where I wanted to be at the end of the first year.”

“Breaking even,” sighed Ernesto, shaking his head. “That’s shit. Man, if I just broke even I’d be in big trouble.”

That’s because you, sir, are the musical equivalent of a migrant farm worker, I longed to tell him. Whereas I am a capitalist ever increasing the value of my assets. But I shut up.

“Big trouble,” Ernesto repeated. “You pay the bills, you gotta have something left over. So you like those weekend guys and their Muzak?”

I smile and shrug.

“You could write a letter and complain. You could write a letter to the Cannery Row Company.”

I smile again and make a vague motion with my head. Let Ernesto interpret that any way he likes.

“Breaking even,” says Ernesto. He sighs again. “Anyway I got a business proposition for you. Invest in the Friends of the Andes.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“We’ll put your name on our next CD. In the acknowledgements. They see your name on the CD, they come into your store. Become a patron of the arts! You think anyone will remember you fifty years from now? They remember us. They remember art. But if you support us, they remember you too, like they remember Lorenzo Di Medici –“

Now this was the lamest hustle I had ever heard. For a moment I thought he was joking. But no, no, he was serious. He was calculating. This was the surest way, he figured, to tunnel through personal insecurities and get inside my wallet.

For a moment I wished I had a penis. I would whip it out, I would piss in his face.

Instead I just laughed. “I already support the arts, Ernesto,” I said. “My art.”

I turned around and went back inside my store.

The rest of the day was like pulling teeth. People would poke their heads inside the store, take one look around and then quickly retreat. I figured it was me. I was pathetic. I was personally repulsive. I was not a patron of the arts. When I did make a sale, I figured it was because the person buying the hot sauce or ceramic chili kitsch was blind to spiritual nuance. A man in an NRA teeshirt flew into a fury over the Bush cards I’d made a centerpiece to SLOW Burn’s Tribute to the Election. “You’re a Bush basher!” he screamed. He stalked out, sputtering about complaints to management.

I am management, you dumb Charleton Heston-loving fuck! I wanted to scream. But this was to be a day of repressed come-backs.

Then around 8 or so a kid in his early twenties came in. I recognized him. He’d been in before. In fact he’d spent the better part of an afternoon here once, wandering up and down the aisles, looking at the shelves with the rapt attention Leo Castelli might have brought to his first perusal of Jackson Pollock canvases. This time he brought a whole battalion of friends including a very cute girlfriend who was obviously bored and kept sticking her tongue in his ear trying to distract him. But he was not to be dissuaded. He knew all our sales pitches by heart.

“This is the hottest hot sauce in the world,” he said, picking up Mad Dog 357. “But see, that’s a technicality. If it were hotter, then it would be a food additive.”

The girlfriend’s eyes were doing the glazed doughnut thing.

“This place is better than Disneyland,” said the kid. His eyes were glowing. He wasn’t joking. “This is the coolest place on the planet, man.”

He left an hour later. He only bought $20 worth of sauce, but that $20 got us up over the $400 mark. We’d met our sales goals for the day.