Of flea markets and Elvis impersonators

Let me tell you about our flea market days. There we were, Peace and your humble narrator, hawking costume jewelry and people watching. Man, the people; let me tell you about a few of them. I’ll start with the landlords of the place, Tina and Vic. Tina first. Tina was a little Vietnamese woman of about forty and maybe a hundred pounds soaking wet. On our first day there I asked her how long she had been in the states and she replied, “fie year”. I then asked her if she ever got home sick for the rice paddies of Vietnam (wise ass like). She flashed me a quick glance and said, “course not, I like freedom”. Great answer. Vic on the other hand had none of Tina’s grateful immigrant charm. He was a tall, flaccid guy with one of the most intense Elvis infatuations I’ve ever seen. The flea market ultimately crashed and burned just after Vic’s “Elvis” promotion.

Memories
Pressed between the pages of my mind

One day, the relative tranquility of the market was shattered by Vic tear-assing between the tables, red faced and bellowing, “who does the van parked in the fire lane belong to!!? “That vehicle needs to be moved nowww!” Yes, he hung the OWWW out there for a while. It was too much for Peace and me. We looked at each other and began howling with laughter. Vic paused from his systolic smashing tirade to fetch us a nasty look. There is nothing in the world funnier than someone losing their mind over something as trivial as an a carelessly parked van. At that moment, with veins protruding and spittle ejecting, old Vic may have looked a lot like the king himself in those final moments on his Graceland throne.

On a good day the isles would be filled with shoppers of various shapes, sizes, creeds colors, odors and afflictions. Peace liked to muse that they came to the FM in every conceivable way: crutching, crawling, gimping, limping, rolling, and trolling. They came pierced too: nipples, navels, nostrils, tongues and who knows where else. And don‘t forget the tats: on arms, legs and derrieres, mostly indescribable and usually illegible. After a few weeks of the FM, I wondered if there was anyone left in the world without a tongue bob, tattoo or both.

Our brother and sister vendors were an intriguing cross section of humanity. There was Mildred who sold toys. She loved to involve anyone who would listen in her “disappointment” concerning her son’s affection for a busty black woman. In her exclamations, she paused using the “N” word only long enough to regroup and add other adjectives to illustrate her displeasure at the sainted son’s arrangement. I would nod, all the time thinking that the black chick was the one getting the short end of the stick. In a game of guess who’s coming to dinner, I visualized her parents reaching for the arsenic at their first sight of the snaggle toothed Casper look-alike, arm in arm with their Nubian princess daughter.

Then there was the old guy that sold junk of every grimy type. He became affectionately known to us as “Fred”. One day Peace and I watched in abject horror as a man bought a mattress from “Fred” that had one of the nastiest brown stains on it that either of us had ever seen. One can only fathom the origins of that grungy ectoplasm. It could have been afterbirth or, for that matter, after death. I bet the guy is still sleeping on that bed to this day; snoozing peacefully while, just on the other side of his mattress, a serial killer’s DNA remains hidden from detection. Well, I assume he sleeps on the non-stain side of the mattress.

I suppose we fit in pretty well in that potpourri of misfits and miscreants that made up the market; most of us claiming innumerable aches, pains and afflictions. There was me: widowed,
unemployed and floating; capable of little more than stringing beads together for tattered flea market snuff queens. And Peace: divorced, depressed and disgusted; just hanging on for better
days. But despite our travails, we never stopped laughing at ourselves, and we damn sure didn’t stop laughing at our fellow flea marketeers. The place was ripe for a couple of observant vagabonds such as ourselves.

As I said, jewelry was our game and we were doing a bang up business. After we had been in business a month or so, our supplier, my cousin Ken, talked me into making personalized accessories such as bracelets, anklets and necklaces-on site while the customer waited. Ken warned me that in the on site manufacturing game you had to “take the bad with the good”.
First, the good: On my first day with the newly acquired bead kit, I hung up a sign advertising my craft and instantly a shapely woman, probably in her early twenties, stopped by and asked if I made ankle bracelets. Absolutely, I replied. Within minutes I had her sitting in my booth with her shapely gam hiked up on my chair for some strategic measurement. Every eye in the place found its jealous gaze looking my way. After I finished making her accoutrement, she plopped her foot up on my chair once again and asked with perfect charm, “do you mind putting it on for me?” Who was I to refuse.

The bad: Same scenario, only this time the ham hock was attached to a woman that was pushing a deuce and quarter. To make matters infinitely worse, that veritable stump hadn’t seen a can of Nair or a Lady Schick in many a moon. Add to that dejection, the smell that emanated from a still undetermined anatomy part was blinding. Well, needless to say, the same crowd of gawkers were on hand for this austere performance. In moments such as these, witnesses seemed to show up like bounced checks. Owing to the general tenor of our clientele, I rarely encountered exhibit A; long, smooth and shapely; but more often was visited by exhibit B; short, fat and hairy. Ken was right. I had to take the good with the bad and bad was winning big time.

We’re caught in a trap
I can’t walk out
Because I love you too much baby

So the summer of 2001 was the year of the flea. And as I hinted earlier, the promotional efforts of the building manager would prove to be the swan song of the enterprise. Our boy Vic the red faced, blow-hard, anal retentive, Presley-file came up with the brilliant idea to host an Elvis impersonator’s extravaganza in the parking lot (One of the very worst sales days we ever had). Among the luminaries there that fated day was a short, fat Elvis, a tall, thin Elvis, and a lisping Elvis who claimed to operate an Elvis museum in the absolute middle-of-nowhere Georgia, featuring a wart allegedly belonging to the king of rock and roll himself. He claimed to have the royal verruca stashed in a jar of formaldehyde for safe keeping. “You can’t be too careful”, he said with a slight curl of the lip.

Well, there is always more to the story. There were the battered flea market princesses that invariably congregated to the soothing sounds of Peace’s deep, resonate voice. He should have charged them for the countless hours he sat patiently listening to their trials, tribulations and come-on‘s, and for the sage advice he imparted in his Barry White style. He became the father confessor for many of the old gals that worked or shopped there. They sought him out. All peace lacked was a couch; he had them hypnotized with his baritone. Now, they would exchange pleasantries with me: how’s the weather and the like, but with Peace they’d bear their souls and air their grievances. Time and again I overheard comments like “I could listen to you talk all day…or night.” Who knows what kind of action the old dog could have had…or may have gotten from our plunge into the abnormal subculture of the flea market. It’s a shame we had to give it all up and get real jobs.