(no subject)

[mallorys_camera]

Lotta dead goldfish in the week after a county fair. Some of them die of at the hands of whiney children and drunken teenagers; many more are flushed down the toilet by the operator of the ball toss concession who doesn’t want the hassle of transporting them down to San Diego to her next gig.

“They’re gonna die anyway,” she tells me half apologetically the next day when she comes into the store to buy the PETA – People for the Eating of Tasty Animals – teeshirt she didn’t have time to buy from me at the Monterey County Fair. “I mean they’re bred as food for tropical fish predators.”

True, but I can’t help wondering about the karma of the whole situation. Will a rise in B&E’s or bacterial contamination of the local beaches attend the flock of vengeful goldfish ghosts as they ascend into heaven? They shouldn’t make the ball toss so easy, I think. Waste five bucks and you’re practically guaranteed to walk away with a goldfish or three. And then what?

Anyway, the Fair was a modest success for us, meaning we netted well over a thousand bucks plus an ancillary harvest of locals who hadn’t heard of us before who’ve been wandering down to the store ever since. Grueling but also fun. I got to catch up on the latest hip-hop fashion trends. The ubiquitous “Sean John” scrawled over polyester sweat pants (Puff Daddy’s signature clothing line, I’d read about it in the National Enquirer but had actually never seen it before.) Plastic bags over patent leather basketball shoes. My favorite were the flashing neon-brite Binkies which Max informs me loftily are a holdover from raves –

“See, when you’re doing E, your mouth gets dry and funky –“

“And you know this how exactly… ?”

“Beau” – MaryAnn’s son, Max’s stepbrother – “just spent 18 months in rehab, Mom. I know everything there is to know about drugs.”

Somehow I doubted this but I just smiled. Quelled the impulse to say, “In my day when our mouths got dry and funky we just went with the flow. Or lack thereof.” Did we really walk five miles through the snow to score windowpane? I can’t remember.

We had a good location on the main thoroughfare between the Midway and the kiddie rides and this made all the difference. To our right were the ladies of Creative Cakery, the skinny mother Rosemary and her two fat, jolly daughters, Candy and Shannon. To our left was Frank, a Chinese artist, fifteen years out of Shanghai. Frank did not have a particularly good fair. He’s very talented, trained in the old tradition of itinerant 19th century portraiture when artists used to roam the plains, knocking on farmhouse doors, sketching pictures in pastel chalks in exchange for meals and a few pennies. The camera killed the tradition here but I guess it survived in China. Frank is very meticulous, does not paint exactly what he sees but subtly romanticizes it. The problem was that a few tents down someone had set up a Photoshop Kiosk that does exactly the same thing, and as with all facets of the industrial revolution, the automated results were cheaper. Frank charged thirty bucks for a quick black and white pastel sketch but the machine charged ten.

Frank was philosophical about it. “Some places you make money, some places you don’t. You like to take photographs, don’t you?”

“I love it,” I said. “I’d give anything if I could draw.”

“It’s not so hard,” he said. He frowned down at the camera in my hand. “You treat your camera bad. You shouldn’t spray that stuff” – lens cleaner – “on it. It doesn’t matter if it’s smudged at the edges. You only care about the aperture. In China a camera like this cost three years of wages. Three years of your life!”

“Is it worth it?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. It is worth it.”

On Sunday, jolly Candy brought her fart machine. “We can have some real fun with Homer and the fart machine,” she told me.

Unfortunately, five foot tall singing, rapping Homer Simpsons are made from plastic. All their gears are plastic. All their delicate interlocking parts are plastic. Thus if they sing and rap with any degree of regularity, they have a finite life span. We’ve gone through three Homers already, and I’m desperately afraid that the supply of five foot tall, singing, rapping Homer Simpsons is gonna dry up. We savage the old Homers for parts and the Homer we had at the fair was a pale shadow of the robust (and mostly, these days, unplugged) Homer we keep at the store. His head was fastened on with duck tape and a little later on Sunday morning, a roving band of feral children – clutching plastic bags filled with dying goldfish – knocked it off.

“Fucking little monsters,” raged Candy. “I swear, I wish Planned Parenthood made housecalls. Retroactive abortion! An idea whose time has come. Well. You wanna try and put him back together?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “The first stage is anger. The final stage is acceptance.”


“Oh, shit,” said Candy. “See that guy? He’s the head of the Pacific Grove Police Department. I hate that fucking guy. He’s the one who gave me my second DUI. I was parked at the curb, minding my own business, drinking a beer and he nails me. Can you fucking believe it?”

Candy and her sister work for their mother for five bucks an hour. Rosemary is the entrepreneur in the family, two-time winner of the PWN – Professional Women’s Network of the Monterey Penisula – Woman of the Year Award as well as numerous accolades from the Chamber of Commerce. She must be in her late sixties but looks to be my age, a lovely lady with a mostly unlined face and not the slightest hint of crepe neck who kept wandering over to offer me paper cups of Sutter Ranch red from her seemingly bottomless store. “I don’t like to drink alone,” she told me. Since these kinds of events are much better with a buzz on, I gratefully accepted.

Rosemary once owned the signature bar on Cannery Row, Doc Ricketts. She sold out just before the twenty year lease with the Cannery Row Company expired. Burt and Ted jacked the monthly nut up to $8000 a month, thereby bankrupting the new owners; Rosemary and her husband retired to Midland, Texas.

Then Rosemary got bored.

“He started playing golf,” Rosemary complained. “And hunting. And buying oil wells. And all day long it was production goals and output. And I started spending weekends in San Antonio – I was born and raised in San Antonio.”

“San Antonio is a nice city,” I nodded. It didn’t bother me that I’d never been to San Antonio so it really shouldn’t bother her, I figured.

“And then I started spending weeks in San Antonio, and then I came out here alone to visit the kids and I thought: this isn’t how a marriage should work. So I divorced him.”

How Rosemary got suckered into buying the maiden franchise of a bakery business that should never have been franchised (lacking any claim to either innovative industrial design or marketing splash) is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that the business has been struggling but that she is successfully steering it away from the consumer market – which, let’s face it, is the capitalist equivalent of sharecropping – to the more lucrative b-to-b biz. “We just got a contract to do all of Highland Inn’s wedding cakes,” she sighed. She picked up the over-sized Sutter Ranch bottle. “Here. Would you like some more?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said although I was already quite giddy. “The Highland Inn! That’s fabulous. Very smart. Hotels are the way to go. You know we live in the shadow of the rich. We should use that shade to make sure we don’t get burned.”

“Ain’t that God’s truth,” said Rosemary. We toasted each other. “You know, you should join the Professional Women’s Network.”

“I’d love to,” I said.

Eventually Max and Ben showed up to start pulling down the tent which left me free to wander. The airbrushed tattoo guy had run out of customers, which left him free to pursue his first love: lip synching to old Frank Sinatra songs. “Come fly with me!” he warbled. The teenagers in their Sean Jean sweat pants and flashing pacifiers cut a wide path around him.

Then I found myself back on the Midway where I had one of those odd, seemingly profound alcohol-fueled epiphanies: I was never going to find nirvana, I was too interested in storylines and what is narrative if not the ultimate imposition of ego?