I had a very curious Saturday, rife with GenPop encounters of both violating and imposing kind.
Well, first of all, let me set the scene.
Leif and I were at a flea market/craft fair attempting to sell some wares and make a few bucks. It was held in a medium sized Great White North town wedged between the reservation, the state forest and the Big City. Let that sink in a minute.
Yup. We had a very unique mix of hippies, yuppies, country bumpkins, and those who enjoy all sorts of technically illegal substances wandering about in all states of sobriety, dress and hygiene, often with a passel of smalls in tow.
But it was less a problem with the eclectic mix of patrons, and more with the other vendors and organizers.
First there was the lady in charge. And I used the word lady only in the sense that I’m pretty certain she was born with a uterus and later turned into and uncouth, impolite pie hole. Or should I say “gnathole.” For someone who’d been organizing this event for many a year, she seemed thoroughly clueless, far from organized, and every time she opened her gnathole in my proximity she engendered in me the barely suppressed urged to snort derisively and tell her where she could shove it.
Next, the venue was graced by the presence of the morality police. A massive woman in a moo-moo selling tiny Native American-esque bead work apparently found the giant framed print of Johnny Cash flipping the bird so offensive she had to summon gnathole lady and have the vendor selling it cover it up, despite the fact that the morality police behemoth was at a booth that was positioned so she couldn’t even see said print unless she wobbled and swayed her way down the aisle and around a corner. We all know mammoth moo-moo lady was the morality police because she had to smugly waddle along behind gnathole lady and simper and smirk as gnathole lady told the vendor guy to cover it up.
Then there was the creepy young man who was some sort of security/supervisory personnel for the building. Leif is a blacksmith, and was selling some hand forged items. This weirdo kept fondling all Leif’s merchandise and making comments about how various pieces could be used for nefarious purposes. I’m not really sure but, he might have been lamely attempting to flirt with me when he came by the booth when Leif was away and offered me a small box of candy. Sensing I was dealing with a borderline psycho, I resisted taking the offered box for a bit then, when I did finally take it, I discovered it was empty. I laughed and made some depreciating comment, assuming it must be some sort of joke, and handed it back, and then Weirdo-guy promptly began smashing it with one of Leif’s tools on display. When he wasn’t being creepy at our booth, he was doing double duty as the shadow of the merchant at the booth next to ours, a man who happened to be someone Leif knows from outside this little freak show and who told me he’s run into Weirdo-guy in previous years he had a booth at this venue. Apparently Weirdo-guy is fond of trailing him around, and the vendor made a funny show of proving his point. For a good three minutes the vendor wandered about stopping, backtracking, and just randomly moving about doing nothing in particular, and Weirdo-guy was always within three feet of him the whole time.
But the worst, creepiest and most irritating experience of all was with the vendor selling some stupid handcrafted kid toy right next to our booth. During any lull in business at his booth, he felt it necessary to impose himself on us. At first it was the harmless, ubiquitous, insipid chatter about slow business, other venues he’d been to, how far he’d traveled plying his wares, etc. However, later in the day for some reason he decided to regale me with some stories of how his wife was twice violated by different men and how he put out a contract hit on the second perpetrator. Yeah. Because I always show strangers pictures of my wife from some 30 or 40 years ago and describe in detail how they were brutally attacked then brag about how the hit-man gave me a discount on the price to have the assailant whacked. Definitely a case of TMI. I seriously felt like I needed a shower afterward. And a gallon of brain bleach. When I told Leif what had transpired he was pretty pissed, he’d thought all that while I kept shooting him looks of shock and horror while he was chatting with another vendor that I was just getting an averagely boring ear-full. But either the guy realized he crossed a line (doubtful) or just took his socially inappropriate small talk elsewhere after that as neither of us were accosted by him the rest of the afternoon.
You know, now that I think about it, it seems like the makings of a very artsy fartsy film noir. Maybe I shouldn’t scoff, but get writing. I could be the next independent film writing star.
Janie's Place 