Mallory's 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.

We got our first Internet order from someone who isn’t either related to us or knows us well enough to feel sorry for us. Pretty darn exciting if you ask me.

Otherwise, the Pro-Am fallout never made it down to Cannery Row but the weekend went okay, constant dribble of customers at around ten bucks a pop. We cleared a little over $500. Very cold but the sun was shining. The ocean, at high tide, lapped almost to the seawall and I worried that some of the tourist children cavorting carelessly on the rocks might get swept away by a maverick wave.

Around noon, during a lull, I had just figured out a major accounting glitch that had had been plaguing me for weeks and was furiously paging back through the Quickbooks accounts, retroactively applying it, when Ernesto stumbled into the store. He offered me his hand and flashed a smile. Hand like the proverbial dead fish.

“Will you do me a favor?” Ernesto asked.

“That depends,” I said.

I looked Ernesto up on the web once. At the height of the world music thing, he was actually pretty well regarded, traveling all over the country to perform at festivals. This was in the late eighties and early nineties. Then the world music thing fell apart.

Ernesto gestured to outside the door where a little cart sat with his canopy and his instruments. “Will you keep an eye on that for me for a while?”

“No can do, Ernesto,” I said. “I have to keep an eye on my customers.”

“Just for a little,” he said. “Just while I park the car –“ He glanced over at his maroon Nova. The maroon Nova had seen better days, when it wasn’t being stranded in a red zone alongside of which a very happy and triumphant meter maid had just pulled up, reaching for her ticket book.

“Holy shit!” said Ernesto.

And he just ran.

Leaving me with the cart.

I thought of dumping the instruments one by one over the seawall. Maybe they’d hit one of the tourist children on the head. This would not be good for business.

Instead I dragged the cart rather laboriously behind my sign. One of its wheels was almost flat. The entire thing lurched precariously to one side. It was a bitch to maneuver.

I was partly pissed and partly bemused. About a month ago, Ernesto had come into my store one day and hit me up for a hundred bucks so he could lure some real musicians down to the plaza to play with him. “A real salsa band,” he said. “Good for business!”

I shook my head. “Wrong time of year, Ernesto. It’s too cold for people to sit out in the square and listen to music.”
What I didn’t tell him is that we were struggling to make the overhead and anyway, even if we weren’t, I have my own band of starving musicians to play Lady Bountiful to. Plus I am really sick of El Condor Passa.

“I thought you went to Miami in the wintertime, Ernesto,” I said and he sighed, his face lost the happy mask just for a second.

“Not this year, baby. Not this year. This is a bad year.”

“How do you make money anyway? If you don’t mind me asking. Do people give you donations for playing?”

“No, I sell CD’s,” he said. “But this year, people aren’t buying. I stand out there, I play for six hours yesterday. I sell two CD’s. Sixteen dollars for six hours work.”

Yeah, yeah, times are tough all over, I’m thinking, but the thing is I kind of like Ernesto and he really is a talented musician. Sometimes towards the end of the afternoon when he breaks away from Brazil and the Shadow of Your Smile and begins riffing jazz or Delta blues, he makes the sunset really magical.

“You know if you want, you can give me a bunch of your CD’s and I’ll sell them for you out of the store. I won’t charge you a consignment fee.”

He flashed me a mournful smile. His teeth are not in great shape. “No, no. It’s okay. But, you know, I hate this stuff they want me to play. I want to play real music.”

Nobody wants you to play that other stuff either, I think but I forebear utterance. And, besides, that’s not exactly true. The tourists love that shit. “You’re so lucky,” they tell me when they come into the store. “The ocean, the beautiful music –“

When Ernesto wanders back an hour or so later, I’m having a mini-stampede at the cash register so I have an excuse not to listen to his apology. “This has not been a good day,” he tries to tell me. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong.” But I just flash him a smile, go back to the guy in the Raiders jacket: “See the difference between Marie Sharp’s and Susie’s is that the Susie’s has a lot of vinegar. And the vinegar traps the heat in your mouth. But the Marie Sharp’s is actually hotter –“

After Ernesto leaves, I close one of the doors and turn Alison Krauss up loud on the CD player.

(And this would be the natural ending point if I were writing a David Sedaris-type short story. But this ain’t no short story. This is my life!)

An hour or so later, a well-dressed blonde woman staggered into the store. Younger than me, but her skin had the leathery look of a vintage alcoholic. She was very drunk. “Hot sauce!” she cries in a deep Texas accent. “I just love hot sauce. I’ll buy every bottle of chipotle you got!”

“You don’t want to do that,” I said. The store was quite crowded at this point. The other customers were trying to ignore her.

“Baby,” sang Alison. “Now that I’ve found you –“

The drunken woman stood transfixed. “Who is that?”

“What?”

“The music. Who’s singing?”

She was having a Moment. Her and Alison Krauss.

“That’s Alison Krauss,” I said.

“Alison Krauss,” she repeated. “Alison Krauss.” She looked as though she was about to break into tears. “I’ve never heard anything so beautiful in my life. Sell me that CD.”

“What? No, no. I’m sorry. That’s not possible –“

“Why?” she said. “I’ve got money.”

She opened her purse and began pulling out hundred dollar bills. I felt like I was trapped in some horrible contemporary remake of Butterfield 8.

“You should put your money away,” I said. There were big red blotches on the bills where she had touched them, and then I noticed that the tip of her Fuck You finger – the one right next to the finger wearing the Diamond as Big as the Ritz – was practically sheared off.

“Oh my God! I’m bleeding,” she said. “I cut myself on that broken glass. That bastard –“

“You need to see a doctor,” I said. “Do you want me to call you a taxi? You need to go to the emergency room and get that taken care of.”

“That bastard,” she said. “You’re a sweet little thing to get all worried about me. Sure you won’t sell me that CD?”

“Put your money away before something happens to it,” I said.

“Got a band-aid, sugar?”

“No, but here –“ I fashioned a bandage from some cut-up paper-towels, taped it on her finger. “That is not going to hold,” I said. “You really need to get yourself to a doctor as soon as possible.”

“Write the name of that album down for me, honey,” she said. “Is there a CD store somewhere around here? And, here, why don’t you just take this –“ She tried to shove a blood-stained C-note my way. I had joined her and Alison Krauss in that Moment. The sun was shining, there were daisies on the grass and any minute now, a unicorn was going to wander over and proposition us: say, you babes look like you know where I can get some swinging, three-way, hardcore action –

“I can’t take your money,” I repeated over and over again. And finally got her out the front door.

Walked back to the counter.

Whereupon all the other customers in the store started to clap.

“You handled that really well,” said a man in an Eddie Bauer windbreaker. “Here. I’ll take three bottles of Marie Sharp’s. . And do you have a web site you sell from? I’ll take a card.”

The head Pipes of Pan guy’s name is Ernesto. Actually he plays the guitar. Ernesto’s become our new best friend. He pops into the shop between sets, offering helpful marketing tips – "Ya gotta build out that back area, man. Needs more stuff" – and relating amusing anecdotes about life on the Pipes of Pan circuit. When the rain starts in Monterey, he packs up his gear and heads for Miami.

"If the rain starts," I qualify balefully but Ernesto is not one to worry much about global warming.

"Miami, she’s a real party town," he says, chuckling and rubbing his hands together.

"Why not just stay there?" I ask hopefully.

"I got business here," he says.

I can only assume he deals dope on the side.

Ernesto’s a pretty decent guitar player, and it’s just possible he hates El Condor Pasa more than I do. He wears his sunglasses all the time. Without them he has that crazed, slightly cross-eyed look that was the epitome of high beauty to the ancient Mayans but these days indicate a gap in MediCaid coverage.

"Is that poor man blind?" asked a sweet little old lady after Ernesto left the store.

"Oh, you mean the sunglasses," I say. "Isn’t it odd how that goes with musical talent? Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and now, Ernesto. We do what we can to take care of him."

She buys a pair of adorable flamingo salt and pepper shakers.