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.

Summer on Cannery Row has been a bust. Oh, we're making money. Some money. But not a lot of money.

Of course, neither has anyone else.

Louie Linguini's, for example, must be hemorrhaging green. Laminated menus lay ignored on the big plastic tables alongside the faux New Orleans staircase; the pigeons shit on them. Likewise the canvas umbrellas on the outside deck - a spectacular view for the cost of an over-cooked, over-priced fish taco - are dripping with guano. I should note for the record that the seagulls and pigeons hereabouts are ridiculously well-fed, surviving on a calorie-rich diet of straggling tourist fast-food droppings and fryer grease which fact is reflected in their poop, liquid and plentiful, falling from the heavens like white rain.

Why have the tourists abandoned Monterey? Why does the ghost of John Steinbeck not intercede with the Great Retail Gods in their discount warehouse on the foot of Mount Olympus?

( Warning: Looong & really incoherant... )

Pissy mood these past few days. Morituri te salutamus, variations on that theme. Part of it’s the weather – hot dry inland air buffeting up against cool, moist air near the sea surface to produce that thick, impenetrable coastal fog. I don’t do well without full spectrum sunlight. Part of it’s the early April deathwatch. Three years ago, on April 1, my mother died. Ten years ago, on April 4, Tom Mandel died. Tom was my best friend, and my mother was – well. My mother. The only other real voice in the internal dialogue for many, many years since I grew up fatherless and essentially without any real family.

This year my fifty-second birthday coincides with Easter and it would be nice to think of that as a rebirth. But I’m afraid I’m too street smart to fall for cheap symbolism. There’s no rebirth. There’s only death and superstition.

In other news, the Cannery Row Company has finally got hip to isolationism. World music is just so nineties. These days we’re all hunkering down in our bunkers, watching CNN. Pass the Faith Popcorn, please! The condor has passed. In keeping with the times, management informed Ernesto, our resident Pipes-of-Pan impresario that he’d now be splitting weekends with a mellow jazz combo. Ernesto did not take the news well. He wandered into the store several times to complain.

"That bad disco shit," he muttered. "People don’t want to hear that."

More like bad wedding and bar mitzvah shit, I thought. But I didn’t correct him. I just nodded and smiled.

"And they give me Saturdays! Saturdays, you know, I got the band. I got to split the take. Sundays I did solo. I got to keep it all."

It’s almost painful to watch Ernesto do the one man band thing. He’s got a kind of harness that straps the Pipes of Pan to his mouth, and then he’s got the guitar strapped around him which he plays with his right hand, reaching over to a battered looking synthesizer with his left from time to time to adjust the drum-rolls or the fake brass crescendos. He’s very talented, of course. But it’s a little like watching a dog break dance.

The new Sunday band is called Son-set jazz. That’s how they spell it. Son-set. It’s a father from Fresno and his two sons. Bozo, Bozo Junior and Spawn. Bozo Senior does keyboard, Bozo Junior mans the synthesizer. The youngest does drums. "Yeah, Spawn was always my little pot banger," Bozo Senior tells me between sets. I’m taking a smoke break. We’re standing outside my store, shivering. I see the way he eyes my cigarette.

"Want one?" I ask.

"Oh. Say. Thanks. So how’s business?"

"Business has been better," I allow.

"Is the music too loud?" he asks anxiously.

"No, no. The music is good. You don’t know how grateful I am to get a day off from Ernesto. I mean, I like Ernesto, he’s really talented but when tall dark strangers in your dreams start singing, ‘I’d rather be a hammer than a nail –‘ you know it’s time to listen to something else –"

I’m babbling, I thought. Bozo Senior was pretending to listen but I knew that fixed smile and intense eye contact. Here was a man who got stoned a lot during the seventies.

"You taught yourself to play, didn’t you?" I said.

He laughed. "Am I really that bad?"

"Not at all –"

"Yeah, I taught myself to play. With a little help from my garage band friends and their seemingly bottomless dope stashes."

While the band took breaks, Bozo Senior’s girlfriend plied the crowd with bad Dinah Washington imitations. She is a stunningly beautiful black woman with amazing stage presence but a spectacularly off-key voice. "Memories always start around midnight, around midnight," she croons. "Haven't got the heart to stand those memories – "

Abruptly my eyes fill with tears.

Later on during my next smoke break, we make eye contact across the plaza and she comes over to introduce herself. "I’m Anaconda," she says.

"I’m Patrizia," I smile.

"What a lovely name!" she says, flashing her perfect smile. She works hard.

"Are you really the daughter of a Pentecostal preacher?" I ask.

"How did you know that?" Momentarily alarmed.

"Bozo told me."

"Well, yes. Yes, I am. I grew up singing in the church choir. I sang before I could walk."

"Are you still?"

"The daughter of a Pentecostal preacher?"

"No. A Pentecostal."

"I –" She hesitates. "I’ve rethought some of the church’s precepts. I wear pants. I wear make-up." And you live with a guy who smokes a shitload of reefer, I thought. "But my relationship with God is still the same. I love God. I believe God loves me."

What I really wanted to ask her was: how can you believe in God and Thelonious Monk at the same time? Doesn’t Jesus say something about how impossible it is to serve two masters?

But instead I nodded and smiled and backtracked the conversation into more neutral territory. And we were both relieved when, a few seconds later, it ended.