“To be sane in a world of madman is in itself madness.” - Rousseau
Article by Charlotte M. Art by Ciara Wiesner
There was a period, a period that lasted four years, when I would sell things under a tent in a parking lot. That is what a farmer’s market is: ex-convicts, undocumented immigrants, and morally corrupt hippies selling unregulated fresh food and expensive woodwork under tarps held up by rods. As though technological innovation doesn’t exist to combat this very thing. The average citizen seems to find the whole affair extremely romantic, as if buying salad at a place where there’s no sink is a very chic thing to do. As if selling mushroom extract under a hand drawn sign is a very stable way to live one's life. I loved the market, of course, the way any mother would love her worst child. It’s the home of my creative inspiration — what some call a myopic and offensive narrative style — and my favorite people in the world, who would generously gift me their handmade amethyst jewelry and pots made of local clay, or help me recover thousands of deli papers that I would lose to the dimmest breeze. My fondness for the people I met, however, didn’t mean that they weren’t profoundly unhinged. There was a professional boxer that sold ghee, a sewage employee that just loved fermented spicy carrots, a police-officer-turned-alcoholic-pig-farmer and a Japanese-political-refugee-turned-artisanal-tea-maker. There were a lot of affairs, overdoses, and knife fights. Many vendors were banned from more markets than they were allowed at. One need only remember the nature of the market, its nearly carnival presence, to recognize its participants as fiscal and spiritual outlaws. It’s no surprise then that four years amongst them robbed me of normalcy and rendered me good at nothing but navigating a freakshow. But it wasn’t just the vendors that changed me. A four-legged monster, set on stage as a wonderful attraction, sees a show himself: the people, the common folk, gazing up at him to bear naked their rotten souls.
Every day, we vendors would watch people of this great country cosplay medieval peasants, like Marie Antoinette and her model village, buying unwashed eggs that cost twice as much as they did at the grocery store. What was even more astounding, particularly to some of the Central American and East Asian refugees amongst us, was that this cosplay included even the most destitute American proletariat. One didn’t need a particularly keen eye to notice that everyone, from the homeless to the hipster elite of Silicon Valley, would place dirty potatoes into baskets. Made in Africa, but only if it's fair trade! I will never forget a starving man — pocked in sunburns so terrible I thought to give him my entire tent — refusing the free food I offered because it wasn’t organic. Didn’t he know, say, that the blonde lady selling ten dollar fresh-pressed juice just poured Tropicana into mason jars the night before? That the “authentic” food, sold by the charismatic Indian couple, was from Costco’s frozen food aisle? But that was the farmer's market: making one's way, not by reaping from what they so valiantly sowed, but by ripping off the poor souls — those patrons that have been so fortunately robbed from doing back-breaking labor themselves — who then refer to the farmer’s market vendors as something lost to the good ol’ days.
What may be of greater interest to you are the vendors that employed me and the business models to which I became an unfortunate participant. It might be important to note, for instance, that my first job at the market was for a Jewish deli, where I sold bagels and knishes. The shop was owned by an extremely forgiving but childishly reactive convict that used to be a psychiatrist. He had to relinquish the title some years ago after he “stole large sums of money from elderly patients to buy a vacation home in Cabo,” or at least that’s how the town gossip described it. Regardless of what gave the ankle monitor, this ruined but creatively talented doctor started a small business, which peddled heritage baked goods. The modest cash grab spun quickly into a fairly popular brick and mortar. That was when he needed me, an employee, to continue his venture in hospital parking lots across the county.
The Bagel Man, despite having made the reckless decision to hire sixteen-year-old Charlotte — someone who, at the time, had the work ethic and voice inflection of Paris Hilton — to run his business, was an extreme neurotic. He demanded aesthetic order, like the display board’s perfect symmetry on a soot-stained picnic table. He had admirably even eyebrows, sesame seed always had to be in line with cinnamon raisin, and so on and so forth, even as we wore flip flops and, I cannot stress this enough, were in a fucking parking lot. I respected these phobic tendencies, anyway, seeing as he was a reasonable boss otherwise. I think that Freud would have found the whole affair very hilarious, but I thought it dismal, waking up at dawn every day to answer the question, “Are they... doughnuts?”
One Saturday morning, two summers ago, I was arranging some bagels, poppyseed, everything, bialy, asiago, on a grimy board I had forgotten to wash. I was trying to concentrate on bread placement when I heard,
“Hi! Question.”
I looked up to see an ethereally cervine face, whose golden eyes made a person flinch with their likeness to a flirtatious doe. The woman had a bobbed bowl of velvet hair, which swung in a single movement as she spoke in a thick German accent. It was another vendor, I realized, the one that sold French crepes, and only approached those she needed for small tasks — or sex. “Can you work for me?” She batted her eyes cartoonishly, seducing me with this blunt question and ironic gesture. She was, and this is the best way to describe her, very European.
I said yes and would go on to spend the next two years splitting my time between a Jew and a German. My two bosses, as it turned out, had a complicated sexual relationship themselves, which I found neither romantic nor particularly interesting — seeing as it was not unusual for the Crepe Woman to be equally invested in four or five men at a time. She had moved to the US, in fact, to stray away from the "soft and ladylike” men of the European continent and find the chivalrous cowboy of her Western dreams. She soon discovered, of course, that these strapping buccaneers were long extinct, and so her little adventure in the states became nothing but an everlasting merry-go-round of trying to choose which man was the best of many evils, a circumstance that caused our entire working and personal relationship to revolve around the boy problems of a 35 year old sex tourist. Last summer, the main event of the season was her inability to choose between another food vendor, who had a beer belly and debilitating sex addiction, and a gang member with no shortage of face tattoos. Upon my council, she settled for neither, seeing as the food vendor had a written schedule of who he was to have sex with each day of the week — Crepe Woman on Mondays and Thursdays, which hurt her feelings — and the gangster, who during coitus, once said that his gang’s meetings were held at the local Roundtable, something that made her buckle over in second-hand embarrassment. Even murderers, she found, were really very unmanly and ridiculous.
This summer, I spent every waking hour either selling and describing schmear to wine-drunk tourists at 10:00 AM markets, or folding crepes for tequila-drunk locals at 10:00 PM wedding afterparties. The crepe trailer would get up to 120 degrees, and the batter would bake whilst still in the mixing bowl, making it impossible to spread with the whimsical ease which customers came to gawk at. Our perspiration would drip onto the stainless-steel floor, and at the end of the day, we would wipe away half-burnt cheese and the puddles of our own making, my sweat the odor of moldy rosemary mixing with the Crepe Woman’s exotic scent of expired oranges. It was so hot, this season worse than the last, and I spent it in passive delirium. I would sit with my eyes closed in the Crepe Woman’s Nissan, which struggled to pull our trailer over the hills of Bodega Bay, and listen to her rant about boys while Taylor Swift played on the radio. Despite her general intelligence, the Crepe Woman had the concerns and tastes of an NPC, reporting to me her genuine crush on Glen Powell, or a belief that the new Colleen Hoover movie was “so incredible.” She was, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, a true Capricorn, with unmatched competency and little artistic talent. She could only count in German, a quality that I found to be in poor taste. I was very touched, however, by what she stood for: that anyone could come to this great country of ours and hook up with anyone, regardless of creed, to the same banal and disappointing result, and moan about it to the employees of their small business, which brought worldliness to the ever-expanding makeup of the US. “God bless America!” I wanted to sing out from that sweltering trailer and across the gravel parking lot, suffering from heat stroke and what I thought was a very astute observation.
After a particularly brutal workday, I found myself sucking on a lime paleta in the back of a butcher’s white pickup-truck, watching him pack up some unsold stock, which was mostly miscellaneous bones and, oddly, cuts of premium filet. Earlier, a small child had run under my display table, causing it to knock over and every bagel along with it, to which the child’s mother simply cooed,
“Ale, what did I say about running away? Not nice…”
And so I was done for the day, having nothing viable to sell while the bagels baked further on the concrete. I loitered lost, from tent to tent, until the Butcher eventually invited me over. His shirt was off, revealing back muscles only possible when life consists of stringing up cattle corpses. We had briefly dated in the past, back when I could poetize his ostensibly honest life, until I realized that he never wanted to leave his dilapidated RV on the pasture. He was avoiding the responsibilities of contemporary existence, something that was at once enlightened and weak, and as I was made desperate by the brutality of his figure, I was left dissatisfied by the very declaration it made. I was a student, very talented in the modern games of societal esteem, and here he was, living like a rustic of antiquity. I complained about having to study Rousseau while he sorted eggs and gave me the practical advice that, if I didn’t want to read it, then I simply shouldn’t!
Humans are strange everywhere, but the two-way mirror, which so easily disguised itself as a particularly opaque window, had exposed a certain and unavoidable duality, where man was either a bratty prince demanding a good joke, or a traveling con-man selling from his decked-out wagon of mysterious potions. There were, of course, the occasional saints, who came to the market only for what they could not grow in their own plots of diverse squash, or even vendors that found some honest joy in raising lambs for slaughter, but these were the exceptions. By and large, customers of the market were coddled children of the first world, so far removed from true destitution that pre-industrialization may as well be magic, role played at a heavy price like a Bridgerton Ball, and the others were nothing but salesmen of some long-lost connection to a mysterious common root. A well disguised renaissance fair. The entire ordeal had me tight roping the nonexistent wire between audience and performer, rendering me a nihilistic carnival act who hated the patrons and vied for their throw-away pocket change all the same. We were Martians observing Venusians, or perhaps the other way around. Savagery and idealism ran rampant, regardless, and so there on that pick-up truck, I felt like the last serious person in this world. The market was a thing that Kafka, or possibly Dr. Seuss, would dream up and never write down; it was too ridiculous, too bizarre, to properly articulate, even with clever prose. To watch, as you might imagine, a woman buying unrefrigerated, unlabeled meat from another woman selling unrefrigerated, unlabeled meat, day in and day out, left me profoundly disillusioned. I compare the whole thing to warfare: a peek into the nonsense of human nature, and no one is really the voice of reason. I wrote this, then, in hopes that it might lift up the veil which so often clouds this disturbing phenomenon, the act of the farmers market, in illusive airs. As Nabokov once sang: “I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder,” and so I did my best to report what it was, as much an oddity as anything else.