Mallory's Camera

Ted Balesteri – Tony Soprano look-alike and part owner of the Cannery Row Company – wanders into the store yesterday with a bunch of guys in suits and ties. This is just after we've finished taping the acoustic ceiling tiles back together, weighting them down with ancient science fiction paperbacks so they won't blow down and hit people on the head. Ben's version of the fix: it's been very windy recently here on the quaint and scenic central coast.

"So what happens the first time a customer wanders into the store and gets hit on the head by Martian Time Shift?" I ask.

"He'll discover Philip K. Dick!" says Ben. "It doesn't weigh much, it won't hurt him. And anyway, that won't happen. Trust me."

Trust Ben. There's a concept.

Since I'm Italian, I'm allowed to indulge in racist stereotypes here. Ted Balesteri is guinea to the max – flushed florid face straight off the Dean Martin: The Golden Years commemorative medallion series, 5 caret pinkie rings, blood pressure higher than his IQ. Squinty little eyes.

"This is one of our more unusual success stories," he tells the suits with a wave of his hand.

Fortunately the vicissitudes of my life right now are such that I've lost the habit of laughing out loud. Slow Burn! A success story! I'll remind the Cannery Row Company of that in a little note written on heavy-weight 25% cotton paper next time the rent is late.

In truth the store didn't make its numbers in May. We did just under $10,000. Down 5% from last year. And the numbers so far for June have been even worst. Last weekend we did under a thousand bucks. Under a thousand bucks! How is that possible for a summer weekend? Summer is supposed to all about the good times rocking and rolling.

"See the way they got the sauces?" says Balesteri. "They got them arranged by heat. On different shelves. Clever, huh?"

These suits must be the financial muscle for one of the investment firms underwriting the big new luxury hotel that's going in next to the Aquarium. Just what Monterey needs! Another luxury hotel. This one's permits were 20 years in the wrangling. They tore down a lot of the old historic wooden lean-to's and shacks, left a big gaping hole in the middle of two blocks, which they tried to camouflage behind badly painted murals. Turned the remaining historic buildings into Disneyland.

The one building on Cannery Row that isn't behind signs with adorable otters or leering John Steinbecks, oddly enough, is Ed Rickets' original lab, a plain, non-descript, brown shingle building.

I can't imagine what the business plan for the new luxury hotel looks like. How do they plan to make money? Why would a rich person come to the Monterey peninsula to stay on Cannery Row – Kitsch Central – when he could stay in Pebble Beach?

But then clearly I know very little about making money.

On that last note, I have decided to just drop the Bartleby job. I was thinking I'd give them two weeks notice but fuck it, I can't make all the phone calls I need to make, write all the press releases I have to write, fax all the pages I have to fax and track it all if I'm sitting in that dreary little office eavesdropping on the lifers –

"Maybe I buy toast in the cafeteria once a week," says Jesse.

"It's expensive," says Vickie

"It sure is. A dollar and a half for two slices of toast. Now I can go to the commissary and get me a whole loaf of Orowheat for a dollar. It's four dollars in town –"

It's a job through a temp agency for God's sake! Badly paying, no benefits. The one advantage to temp agency jobs is that they're supposed to offer flexibility though this one didn't even offer that, just out-sourced drudgery.

"If you doin' too much work, you workin' youself straight out of a job," Jesse tells Vickie. I missed a connection somewhere. I don't know how they've progressed from Orowheat to labor elasticity and production functions. But hey! Bread is bread.

Suddenly my life has become madly social. Of course, madly social for me means anyone outside of my husband, children, dogs and strangers who barter dead presidents for hot sauce (52 sales yesterday, 850 bucks – not bad.) Throughout the long, bleak winter my social life consisted of looking up people on the Internet whom I once knew well and comparing their fabulously successful lives with my miserable, pathetic own. I should have worked a little harder to woo Gary David Goldberg away from Diana Meehan thirty years ago – he went on to invent bad television (Family Ties, Spin City) and is now a prominent supporter of liberal Hollywood causes. Damn it! I knew Ubu when he was dog, not a production tag! I should have taken up Jack Kelley when he offered me that job at People Magazine's Los Angeles office. Right now I could be sifting through Angelina Jolie's garbage, looking for Brad Pitt's used condoms!

Ed called me Friday at Bartleby Inc. We chatted convivially for half an hour or so. He's still in retrograde, likely to be so for the rest of his life, I suspect – but of course, did not say. The ICM experience seared us both – we flew too near the sun and we got burned.

"So, you know, I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up," he told me.

"Ed," I said gently, "I have bad news for you. Or maybe it's good news. I don't know. You are grown up."

He's still officially with the boyfriend I met last year in Monterey although Daniele is back in Milan now and only visits the States sporatically. And Ed's back in touch with Maria. They walk their dogs together in a park on top of Mulholland Drive. She looks older, says Ed. (Crepe neck?) She drops maddening hints of her professional involvements – she may or may not be working for James Cameron – and every once in a while dangles job prospects in front of him just for (sadistic) old times sake. She's still married too. The Cuban boy-toy has changed his name from Chris to Fernando Miguel and spends most of his week building airplane models in the high desert. Next, he will go to law school.

"They have so much money, they don't know what to do with it," Ed sighs.

And of course I am tempted to snap, "They should give some of it to me!" but that is cheap and juvenile and not particularly funny.

"Do they still have sex?" I ask.

"What an interesting question!" says Ed. "Well, I would imagine. On weekends. Why not?"

Then Friday night I drove to Santa Cruz for Susie's birthday party. Of course at the last minute I didn't want to go and this precipitated a minor shouting match with Ben.

"What else are you going to do?" he yells. "Go to bed and watch Law & Order reruns?"

"Well, there are a lot I haven't seen," I reply defensively. "And even the ones I have seen deepen with the knowledge of the Olivia/Icy Blonde DA Sapphic subtext. I'll take my vibrator to bed with me. You stay out of the room."

"You are going to that party and that is that," he snarls from between clenched teeth.

The party theme was actually quite interesting: Memento Mommy. (Susie's mother died a few months ago.)

On the invitation, Susie had written:

Please bring:

* a food that your mother would enjoy

* a drink your mother would never refuse

* your mother's name

* a story about your mom I've never heard

* a present, or a picture of a present, that your mother would give me

* a song your mother loved

On my own calendar, of course, we are approaching Death Alley, that corridor of the year in which not only did my own mother die but also my best friend Tom Mandel some years earlier. It's funny – for years after Tom died, I felt something. What? His disembodied spirit? A benign aspect of the Universe disguised as the memory of his voice? Anyway, there was this sense that something was looking out for me and it had everything to do with our friendship. When my mother died, there was nothing. Nada. Niente. As though her life lessons had been so poorly learned she'd had to be reincarnated immediately to repeat the class she flunked, a kind of Karmic summer school.

A food that your mother would enjoy… Hamentaschen. Emblematic. In Manhattan where I grew up, there were bakeries on every corner and they baked hamentaschen all year round, not just at Purim. On Saturdays when I was very young, my mother would always buy a couple and then we'd go for long walks, from our apartment on West 74th Street down to the Village, nibbling little bites from our white bakery bag. Of course, hamentaschen are impossible to find in California and the few times I've tried to bake them myself, improvise the recipe, the shortbread did not turn out. When I sprinkled my mother's ashes in the Hudson River four years ago, I crumpled a hamentaschen in with her cremains. "Now, you'll finally see Europe," I told the mingled crumbs and human ashes bobbing in the murky water. But of course the sea gulls got them first.

A drink your mother would never refuse.. That one was easy. Coffee!

Your mother's name.. Lynn Ward Vogel.

A story about your mom I've never heard… That one was hard. The only story I could think of was not one I felt comfortable repeating in mixed company because it casts her in such a negative light. When I was about 11, and very – uh – shall we just say physically mature for my age, a guy jerked off into my hand one day on the subway. I had no idea what was going on because though in some ways I was quite advanced for my years, in others I was almost stubbornly, determinedly ignorant. I went home, described the incident to my mother. She just looked at me coldly. "Wash your hands," she said. "Wash your hands." And we never mentioned it again.

A present, or a picture of a present, that your mother would give me… I brought the poster-sized photo of my mother with her violin. "My mother would want to play you a song," I lied to Susie because actually my mother was quite ambivalent about playing the violin (although she played extraordinarily well) as she was about all things she loved. Meaning she hated in measure exactly equal to her love. In all things. I was so late to Susie's party that the eating part was already through, the story-telling just about to begin. There were thirty or so people sitting around Susie's living room. "You look just like her!" several of them marveled as I propped the photo up on Susie's piano and all I could think was no, no, no! Anything rather than looking like my mother! Don't you see my profound resemblence to Adolf Hitler & Paul Wolfowitz's infernal love child?

A song your mother loved… Album, really. The Gypsy Kings. Love & Liberté.

What happened next was that the thirty or so people in the room each began telling the story of his or her own mother's life. It went on for four hours. The stories – upbeat, sad, funny, solemn – were incredibly moving because each mother, each one of these women, was truly seen by the people in that room, almost as though they'd been conjured. And perhaps thay had been. I cried. And ended up happy that I'd gone.

Fascinating piece in The Christian Science Monitor this week on women entrepreneurs. It seems the majority of female small business owners in this country are immigrants – by twenty-five percent. Many of them trained in professional fields in their native lands, as doctors, lawyers, academicians. Granted, there's a self-selection factor operating in that only the most enterprising women (and men) will be moved to moved to abandon a familiar culture to seek opportunity elsewhere. But still. What's going on with that?

"I think it's that they're willing to do whatever it takes," said Nancy over the phone. "Scrub toilets, wake up at 4 AM to deliver newspapers. Somehow scrape that second income together until the business can float itself."

"No sense of entitlement," I agreed absently.

Nancy is one of my vendors, an artist whose sidelines are soap and porcelain body parts like something out of Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête. I've been a big fan of hers since long before I opened the store, but have only bought a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff from her over the years because (sadly) the Cannery Row tourist crowd is just not into the type of post-modern irony it takes to appreciate cunningly molded soap Buddha heads and sushi. They don't sell; I end up giving them all away as Christmas gifts. That she would bother to call me up in the first place spoke to a certain degree of desperation – I can't be one of her bigger accounts.

"I can't order till spring," I told Nancy gently, knowing full well that when spring rolled around, I wouldn't be ordering from her. "Business has been scarily slow."

"All the stores I sell to are telling me that," Nancy sighed. "I wonder what's going on there?"

"Times are tough," I said. "Much tougher than you would know by reading the Wall Street Journal. The price of gas has had a huge impact on the tourist trade. They'll spring for hotels, splurge on a fancy meal. But they have no money left over for souvenirs. You have to package what you sell as essential in some way, it can't be whimsy. You know what the best-selling item on Cannery Row is?"

"What?" asked Nancy.

"Cheap fleece jackets, made in China, with Monterey insignias. And do you know why they're the best-selling item on Cannery Row?"

"No," said Nancy. I heard defeat in her voice.

"Because it's always freezing here. We're in the fog belt. And none of the tourist guides tell people that. They make it seem like it's a beach paradise. When people get here and realize that all that stands between them and pneumonia is a fifteen dollar sweatshirt, they'll spring for the sweatshirt. And maybe a candy apple. But they won't buy anything else."

Actually, though, from a business trend point of view, things are picking up. Sales this month rose forty percent over sales last month – and about twenty percent over what they were this time last year – although with no big holiday weekend looming on the horizon, I'm not sure how that will play out by the month's end. Business prospects would actually look encouraging if only I had the deep pockets to float the store for a couple of years. Alas. I don't. So it's scrabble, scrabble, scrabble. I've always been a stranger in a strange land, but my sense of entitlement is strong. I'm better than this, I think. I rage against a non-existent God: make me win Lotto, dammit! A waste of valuable energy. It is what it is.

Had a major epiphany on the scut job front this week. There are quality control people who check every bit of work at Bartleby Inc. because the Department of Defense in its infinite wisdom has decided that the absence of typos in outgoing reports is more important than their timely reception in the hands of people who actually need the information they contain. This is beyond stupidity but hey! it's the government and these are your tax dollars at work. Anyway, one of the QC'ers had taken a strong dislike to me. I figured it was because I am old and white. But no, it turns out it's because I'm doing too much work!

"Your job security is all those folders on that shelf," Latoya told me. This was after I'd marched into the supervisor's office to complain about her, been told – in polite bureaucratese – to fuck off, and then turned around and marched into her cubicle to complain to her face: "You're rude to me. I'm having big problems working with you."

"You work too fast," she told me. "It makes the rest of us look bad."

All righty then! A nice prison yard conversation. So Big Bertha tells Martha Stewart: stop with the dandelion centerpieces on every table in the cafeteria!

No problem. Already I'm spending six of the eight hours I'm there reading every link on the Drudge Report, but hell – I can do even less.

I left LaToya's cube a changed woman. Now we're bestest friends.

The only snag being that Yossarian was right – boredom prolongs your life immeasurably. I'm already older than the most ancient black hole in the universe. Where do I go from here?

It took me four weeks into the scut job to realize: nobody actually works here. People sit at their desks writing emails, playing computer games, or they wander the halls flagging coworkers for long, inconsequential conversations about what they watched on television last night or what they're going to buy in the cafeteria for lunch. The more brazen among them actually leave the building and drive to the far outreaches of Salinas on errands.

This revelation was both freeing and horribly depressing. On the one hand if I were disciplined enough, I could actually spend four hours a day there writing my novel and nobody would ever know the difference. On the other hand, it is chilling to think that this is what life is all about, the slaves' endless subterfuges against Massa's cashbox, repeated endlessly throughout history and across national boundaries. This is what happens when you divorce livelihood from actual labor.

I was in a melancholy mood all day yesterday, separate and distinct from the low-level panic about the business that is my constant waking companion. I've been feeling very isolated and trying to come to terms with that. "You have a lot of friends," says Ben. "But they don't call you because they figure you're too busy to talk to them. Why don't you call them?"

"Because they don't call me, " I say sullenly.

Ben laughs. "NASA researchers say they've found evidence of life on Mars!"

"Really? Fossilized remains of little green men?"

"No, silly. Methane signatures. Chemical bioreactors. I'm thrilled. This should drive a nail right into those stupid creationists' coffin. If there's life on Mars, there is no God."

"And why would that be?"

"Well. No Adam and Eve at any rate."

Trust Ben to find solace in the sky while the house is falling down around him.

Being a kitsch retailer in a tourism market is a little like being a farmer, I guess. The weather is always a preoccupation. It's supposed to rain this weekend – the big holiday weekend – and that is bad. It didn't rain yesterday, and that was good. By the latter part of the afternoon, frustrated clouds were looming three-dimensionally in the heavens (rare for this particular locale where clouds tend to be a blanket cover of fog) and when I looked skyward I could see phantasmagoric continents, a whole faery geography, and the most spectacular double rainbow. Covenant, I thought. But there are many more commandments in the Old Testament than the ten we're most familiar with, and most of them involve slaughtering & ritualistically dismembering small animals, burning their carcasses. It's an antiquated contract, this binding agreement we have with the non-existent God.

The dogs frolicked on the beach. Xena found a dead crab and ate half of it before I could make her stop. Milo found a whale vertebra – it was huge, I considered adding it to my sand dollar collection before I threw it back into the ocean. He fetched it back four times before I could convince him: this is not a game. A curious otter watched from just before the wave break.

When I got back, there was a big package from Annie in the mail. No note, just four copies of the National Enquirer. I don't forgive you, I thought and alarmed myself with the venomousness of the thought. Is it genetic? My Sicilian blood? Or astrologic? My Scorpio moon? I hold grudges forever. It's the part of my personality I dislike the most, and yet I don't seem to have very much control over it, it's impossible to let go.