Desesperación

Once again it's market day. We loaded up the car last night and we're heading out to a spot where we'll set up our canopy, table and a couple of chairs. We will be attempting to sell our stuff to complete strangers - Bess's painted rocks and my canvases. Usually that means it's Saturday and we're heading for Mission Plaza, but today is Friday and we have a pitch at the Desesperación Community Centre*. It's their annual peace market, as it's called, a three day event, Friday to Sunday with a 9AM start; and it's a benefit for the LGBT community. We haven't even got started and somehow it already feels like work, but we're telling ourselves this is simply because it's something different and we've grown so used to the set up at Mission Plaza.

Some people make thousands of dollars over the three days of the festival, we've been told. We usually pull in about forty at the Mission, and that's entirely my wife because no-one can afford my paintings, relatively cheap though they may be. Mission Plaza is on the south side, which isn't really where the money is, but I'm personally not too bothered. People seem happy just to see my paintings and that works for me; but it bothers Bess, which is why we're here at Desesperación, which is fancier and is therefore patronised by overmoneyed Alamo Heights types looking to offset their economic footprint with something cute, ethnic, and preferably hand crafted.

The street is closed off for the market. We park at the Bill Miller barbecue place, which is opposite the Community Center. It's still early and there are only a couple of other vehicles in the parking lot. They surely won't mind and we can move the car elsewhere once we're unloaded. Between us, it takes two trips, fifty yards between the car and the spot which has been reserved in our name, Bess and Lawerence scribbled on the curbstones in chalk, my name spelled with a vestigial e. The first trip is punctuated by some Desesperación official letting us know we'll have to move the car once we've unloaded because Bill Miller is likely to get pissy.

Yes, we know.

The second trip is more complicated. I'm carrying an easel and a case full of paints whilst pulling a wheeled carrier containing Bess's rocks, one of those things with an extending handle. I have eight house bricks piled precariously on top of the wheeled carrier and I'm pulling it along with great care over the uneven pavement so as not to dislodge them. We're on grass at Mission Plaza where everything can be pinned down with stakes so as to prevent it blowing away, but here we're on asphalt so we've picked up a stack of bricks from Lowes with which to weigh everything down.

I'm pulling the wheeled carrier along the pavement at the back of stalls which have already set up and I come to a power line, a thick length of cable duct-taped to the ground. I'm having trouble getting the tiny plastic wheels over the thing. Someone more important than myself, whose time is more precious, dances around me so as to get past, obliging me to manoeuvrer, spilling my house bricks across the pavement. There are eight bricks in total and three of them smash in half.

'Thanks a lot,' I call out to the important person. 'That's great!'

I lift the wheeled carrier over the power line, gather up the bricks and the pieces of bricks, and eventually get to where Bess has already got our canopy set up.

She heads off to move the car.

I bolt things together and unpack more stuff.

We're next to a guy selling bead jewellery similar to the Huichol crafts you see in Mexico. The guy opposite has silver jewellery. To our left is the end of the street where they're setting up a stage and a PA. Ours is the stall nearest to the stage. Somehow I'm having a tough time feeling positive about any of this.

Behind us is the building of the Desesperación Community Centre, some sort of converted warehouse. There are two floors and a number of rooms within, presently all occupied by other traders. Some of them have come from Mexico, places such as Malinalco and Oaxaca, and these are the people who reputedly pull in thousands of dollars over the weekend selling art, crafts, clothing, jewellery, and delivering what they refer to as Aztec Horoscopes - which I'm not touching with a fucking bargepole. I've spent a lot of time up to the eyeballs in the Mexican Tonalpohualli calendar over the years, and I don't like to see it repackaged as a money spinning one size fits all new age nick-nack.

As with Mission Plaza, we don't have to pay for our pitch, but unlike Mission Plaza, Desesperación wants a cut of whatever we make. Bess and myself had our name down for a ten foot street pitch, which means they'll want 35% of our takings at the end of the day, assuming we sell anything. Smaller pitches were available for a lesser percentage, but we needed ten feet for the canopy because we don't want to take chances with the weather. Indoor pitches will be obliged to cough up 40% of their takings.

This was explained to us during the induction which we attended on Tuesday evening. First we had to apply, showing examples of our work because they don't want anything too shit lowering the tone. Having been accepted, we came to the induction hosted by four of the organisers, three young women and an older one, a Matriarch in traditional Oaxacan dress. The young women were like of the kind who, you know, when they talk they're all like ermahgerd this and, you know, ermahgerd that, and they're all like giggling and stuff and like they don't know words and everything they say sounds like a question, which didn't inspire a whole lot of confidence. The Matriarch - whom I shall call Ermintrude for the sake of both convenience and insult - had horrible hair and nasty shoes, although it was Bess who noticed this second detail. She seemed officious and humourless, like an unforgiving school teacher. I hated her upon sight and immediately understood that this was all a terrible idea. She put me in mind of the definition of a false wise man recorded by Fr. Bernardino de Sahagún in the late sixteenth century.

The false wise man, like an ignorant physician, a man without understanding, claims to know about God. He has his own traditions and keeps them secretly. He is a boaster, vanity is his. He makes things complicated; he brags and exaggerates. He is a river, a rocky hill.

Ermintrude immediately struck me as a woman who makes things complicated. The induction rambled on for far longer than seemed necessary on the topic of how it was going to be. Here's what we were going to do. Thanksgiving was coming up so there would be all that leftover food, and maybe we could bring it along to help feed the volunteers. In fact, maybe we could just take a day out to fix tacos for them, and don't worry about making too many, and we should advertise the market on all of our social media platforms. Everything was about what we could do for Desesperación, rules we should observe so as to keep ourselves from getting in the way or becoming a nuisance, how we were to pay the money we owed at the end of each day, how to sign our contracts…

Never trust a hippy, I thought darkly to myself. Anyone who projects their inner serenity with that much emphasis is invariably overcompensating for something, usually their inner Heinrich Himmler.

Yet here we are, because they had us sign a contract, and there has to be an upside to anything with that much small print. Maybe I'll sell a ton of paintings.

I wander around before the crowds start to thicken, checking out the other stalls. It's mostly clothing and jewellery, some animalitos,  muertitos and the like. The art is mostly decent, but nothing I'd want to buy, nor anything which makes me feel uncomfortable about my asking for eighty dollars a canvas - price adjusted so as to account for Desesperación wetting its beak every time we make a sale. One stall has a typically inept painting of the Joker and his girlfriend, Harley Quinn on sale. So much for filtering out those who might lower the tone.

It's ten, and the crowds begin to arrive. A group from the Centro Cultural Aztlan are engaged in a ceremony at the end of the street, four of them in approximately traditional Mexican dress chanting, saluting the four cardinal points, greeting the sun, and asking Ipalnemoani to bless the craft market. They also mention Huitzilopochtli a couple of times, which seems a little incongruous given his famed penchant for human sacrifice on a massive scale. The incense burning in their censer is cedar rather than copal, as it probably should be, and it feels hokey. Next, a Tejano band start up on the stage, effectively drowning out any attempts at conversation we might make. Tejano is a traditional fusion of country, Mexican music, and Bavarian oompah bands with particular emphasis on accordion. In between songs, our accordion player introduces himself as being in some way related to Flaco Jiménez, a local Tejano boy made good who was won awards for his accordion playing in some peculiarly specific capacity like fastest, loudest, or most annoying. I have nothing against Tejano music, but I prefer narcocorrido - a variant which celebrates the deeds of various drug lords - and I'm not crazy about the volume. The band play about a million songs, all of which sound more or less the same to me, and then on comes our compère. She resembles a hybrid of Yoko Ono and a Hispanic version of Toni Arthur who used to present Play School back in the old country. She smiles like it hurts, and it seems as though she's addressing an audience of small children. She screeches and her speech is seasoned with ill-fitting phrases borrowed from rap. She introduces people as being in the house, asks that we give it up for them, and so on. She is exhausting to watch.

Now it seems that Ermintrude is in the house, so we give it up for her. Ermintrude repeats some of what she told us at the induction. The thrust of her speech is that as we approach Christmas, maybe we shouldn't be giving our money to the multinationals who are destroying the Earth, but instead opt to ethically spunk away all that lovely lolly on independent traders, such as those gathered here today. Desesperación raised a million dollars last year, and the city matched that sum with a further million, and now - maybe if we really make an effort - we can raise another million for Desesperación over the coming days. Ermintrude is kind of vague on what this money is for.

'We save buildings,' she explains. 'We campaign for preservation orders. You know, we have many beautiful historic buildings in San Antonio, and that's partially thanks to our campaigning work. Also, last year we fought the city when they wanted to raise taxes to pay for a new pipeline for the water system, although we lost that one.'

Given that San Antonio's water and sewage system is in famously poor shape, I'm not sure how I feel about Ermintrude's apparent attempt to preserve its state of historic disrepair; and a few more taxes to keep us from turning into Flint, Michigan doesn't seem an unreasonable proposition. Furthermore, I realise that in all this time I haven't heard a single fucking word about the LGBT community for whom we are supposedly raising funds. Mostly it's been about our money and how we can help out. At one point I go to take a piss, and pinned to the walls of the rest room are flyers with DONATE in bold letters.

Never trust a hippy.

The Tejano group is followed by a mariachi performance, a band backing an elderly female singer in flamboyant dress who prowls the makeshift stage as though about to drag one of those nice young men off into the bushes. Her voice is unfortunately a shrill screech and far from seductive.

Then there's another elderly woman wearing an unusual amount of makeup and lamenting mislaid love, after which it all blends into an endless conversation stopping racket which has made its home at the end of the street, punctuated only by further announcements of who is now in the house along with requests that we either make some noise or give it up for them.

I've bought my easel, oil paints and a freshly prepared canvas, because I had a feeling this was going to be one fuck of a long day, and it's not even eleven. Seven hours to go. I set to painting the tree on the opposite side of the street, incorporating elements of the revolving sign of the Bill Miller restaurant. Within minutes my view is blocked by people watching the band, but never mind. I do what I can, pushing paint around the canvas until it looks like it's in more or less the right place.

The mariachi performance is followed by Yoko Arthur screeching and telling us who else is in the house, then drawing a few raffle tickets. Each trader was asked to provide an example of their best work to be given away as prizes in the raffle. Bess gave them one of her painted rocks. I didn't give them anything.

The Centro Cultural Aztlan people are back, reborn as a rap group. This time there are two of them along with a woman playing a flute, rapping to a backing track of hip-hop beats. It sounds okay, and they're lyrically pretty tight; but as with the ceremony, it feels too much like an impersonation and not enough like that which it aspires to impersonate. Generic ad libs asking where my people be at? and the like don't really help.

We're right here, I suppose.

Next is a woman named Azul. She sings and plays vihuela, and is backed by an approximation of a mariachi group. She tells us her music draws from the traditions of Veracruz on the Mexican gulf coast. It reminds me of Tarascan music and is happily lacking the oompah of Tejano. It's the best thing we've heard so far by some margin. Of course, I still find something to annoy me - there's a woman sat at the front in a turquoise shirt, late fifties, bit of a spare tire with the face of a librarian. She is lost in music. Her arms sway slowly in the air as she snaps her fingers. Her head is back and her eyes are closed in rapture. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone look quite so smug. She is every social worker I've ever met, and only now do I realise she's been doing the chair dance all fucking morning, just sat there being a spirit demonstrably more free than the rest of us. I never realised there was a female equivalent to the dance famously done by dads at weddings, but now I've seen it with my own eyes.

I paint the tree and Bess sells rocks.

Yoko Arthur returns, now treating us to a full screeching half hour of what seems to be either a one-woman play or performance poetry which outstays its welcome. Her voice swoops up and down as she describes the trauma of childhood jealousy. She wanted the Commodore 64, but they gave her a ballerina doll seeing as how she was a girl and all. Gender stereotyping is a bad scene. Her brother got the computer, but she isn't bitter because she saw the alien. It was in her room one night, like the aliens you always hear about with the bald heads and big eyes and everything. It blinked at her and was definitely real, and that was better than having a Commodore 64.

'Who the fuck is this for?' I ask Bess.

She shrugs and sells another rock to someone.

Yoko Arthur concludes her performance and we give it up for her, and then for another poet who is now in the house. This one seems a little nervous as she takes the microphone and informs us that this is a poem about when she had uterine cancer.

Death sits at a desk and in my uterus, she explains, and I'm so astonished that I jot the phrase down in my notebook. It was actually the doctor who diagnosed her cancer sat at the desk, but that's poetry for you. This poem just keeps on going like a more depressing Energizer Bunny™, becoming bleaker and ever more bereft of light by the minute. It's all we can do to not laugh.

I purchase beer and tacos from upstairs, and the music resumes, more Tejano, more horseshit, and then the world's most efficiently workmanlike blues band. The bass player used to be in Question Mark and the Mysterians who had a massive hit with 96 Tears. This doesn't mean a lot to me because I preferred the Eddie & the Hot Rods version.

I paint.

Bess sells rocks.

The woman in turquoise is still doing her dance, such as it is, arms in the air, fingers snapping, moves requiring nothing which formally acknowledges rhythm.

'Now she is why people voted for Trump,' I tell my wife.

I come back to the painting from time to time. I can't tell if it's any good. Bess swears that it is, but then she usually does. It feels like we've been here for at least a week.

Yoko Arthur introduces yet more people as being in the house.

I paint.

A little girl goes crazy over a small canvas my wife has decorated with a mandala, first asking that my wife sign it, then to have her picture taken with the artist.

'Now that has made it all worth while,' Bess explains happily.

Hours drag past.

My painting begins to look kind of okay.

It gets dark and I still haven't sold a single canvas, not that I'm hugely bothered. I pack up my paints.

'I'm going to take this stuff to the car, okay?'

The car is in the parking lot of San Antonio College, not actually a whole lot further than Bill Miller.

I return and it's twenty to six. Bess starts to pack away her rocks.

'You can't pack away yet.' Ermintrude appears from nowhere to deliver the warning like we're naughty children. 'You have to wait until six.'

'Sure. Whatever.'

We wait until six, and I tell Bess to leave the packing up to me. She has to take our receipts to the office so they can work out how much we owe them, and the queue is already long.

I pack things away. Bess returns after about forty-five minutes. She is strangely quiet as we carry our stuff back to the car.

'Are you okay?' I ask.

'Fine,' she grunts. 'Tired.'

We no longer even need to have the conversation about whether we're coming back tomorrow. We signed contracts stating that we would, but the penalty of breaking the contract is that we won't get invited back next year. Boo hoo.

We drive to a branch of Jim's. We're tired and hungry.

Bess tells me that we took $130 - which was all her rocks. The Desesperación people looked at our receipts and reckoned it was $133, by which point Bess no longer cared enough to argue. They said that we owed them 25% of our takings because we had actually been given an eight foot rather than the full ten foot pitch. Bess said she wasn't bothered and that we'd signed a contract to pay 35%, and in any case she'd already written out a check for $53.20, that being 35% of $133. They said we owed $54 because they had rounded it up. Having stood in a queue for three quarters of an hour, Bess threw a dollar bill at the woman and told her to keep the change.

We eat and we leave a tip.

The knowledge that we won't be returning tomorrow, that we've managed to reclaim our weekend from Ermintrude and the forces of evil is a feeling so wonderful that it has left us almost lost for words.

Never again.

*: Names changed because I've no doubt they have some really mellow and tuned-in lawyer ready to destroy the lives and empty the bank accounts of anyone who might be legally proven responsible for a bad vibe.