FleaBay: City life, Part II

We were having our block’s annual fall flea market, and it was the perfect day. Sunny, slight breeze, few clouds, lots of residents participating; there were sidewalks jammed with eclectic piles of my-trash-is-your-treasure and a steady stream of friendly folks who would haggle, bargain and buy.

How many trips had we made up and down stairs, plundering basement and attic? We lost count, approaching exhaustion even before we got started. But it was one of those all-too-rare times lately when the notion of Neighborhood worked.

White, black, Latino, Asian — they came to buy, and to chat.

No dealers, we had decreed; rip-off artists begone. And so — except for one interloper from across town selling $30 vintage kids books and other yuppie delights — the market economy ruled!

Let me tell you about my neighbors. I’ve changed their names to allow them their private lives. This year, “Anna” her groom, “Drew,” and her sister, “Weezy’s” prices were so ridiculously low — a dime for this, a quarter for that — I had to drastically reduce mine. But my volume increased. And so I sold lots of two-dollar books, dollar stuffed animals, bargain furniture, and 25-cent bandannas.

Two young art students in paisley babushkas bought my Stickley bookcase for a song. Ditto the miniature antique globe I sold a septuagenarian who knew the history of everything. A lesbian humor columnist who works as a nurse bought my own book of literary profiles, cut-rate, for all her friends for Christmas. A Hispanic woman bought my trio of plastic Muppet collectibles for her clamorous little boy. A punkish male art student with dyed black hair and lots of piercings bought my Soaker water-rifle for a dollar.

Beats working for a living, don’t it?

Neighbors admired each other’s merchandise, and frequently offered it to each other, for free. From “Mila,” a retired kindergarten teacher-turned-theater student, I got a sky-blue fringed velour sweater, nearly new. From “Stark,” the chamber music conductor, I got a verdigris plaster Shanghai Empress lamp on an intricate brass base — no matter her foot was chipped; I could fix it. “Lenny,” the burly RN, ecstatically admired my mother’s mahogany-and-brass wall sconce, so I gave it to him, because it matched his grandmother’s lovely drum-table he had just gotten the day before. “Kiefer,” a red-haired, goateed 20-something guy who teaches at a charter school in the North Philadelphia ghetto, gave me a Native American polar bear amulet carved out of coral. On my block, it’s kind of a tradition — neighbors don’t let neighbors spend money.

Our flea markets are very social. We don’t sell hot-dogs or coffee — yet — but there’s a lot of conversational catching up that goes on.

“Ainslie,” the elegant, genteel dancer from the ballet, missed my dog. So do I.

“Jimmy,” the chef had a new dog (“Bonita”), was on five medications for his bipolarity, had found a community mental health center that would treat him for less money and a therapist who told him he was over-medicated. Believe it or not, he was in better spirits to celebrate his birthday next week than the last time I saw him.

“Thames,” a British architecture professor, was bemoaning the glut of words we are bombarded with.

“Stratton,” an Af-Am short story writer, was working part-time in the audio-visual department of a large university, studying dramatic structure, and planning to write screenplays.

“Donrad,” a kick-butt poet and lapsed Macrobiotic, had just bought a toy monkey and was carrying it around like a child.

An artist who lived in a nearby high-rise, “Susan,” was badmouthing her ex-husband … again, while showing off the Biwah pearl ring she had purchased last time and the amethyst and opal ring that used to belong to the girlfriend of the guy who just sold it to her a few minutes ago.

“Marlon,” a journalist, now an editor, with the city’s largest black paper, said that when he was in college at my alma mater, his professor told the class to study the celebrity interviews I was then doing, as a standard for technique. I was shocked, because his teacher and I worked for the same paper, and the woman had never spoken a word to me in my life.

Clad in a T-shirt proclaiming BEER NUTS, “Larry” works for a big banking corporation, but was badmouthing … big banking corporations. Pointing out the dating deficits of life as a relatively short man, he revealed he frequently heard voices. Besides that, he was tremendously enjoying helping people as a volunteer for Traveler’s Aid. What do his voices say, I asked, Buy 20 shares of Amazon.com? “No,” he said, “they just say DO BETTER.” Meanwhile, “Larry” informed me, three homeless people had broken down the massive front door to “Tom” and “Elspeth’s” Pine St. brownstone and squatted in the hallway. I should say this is right at the end of our block. When the landlord was noncommittal about replacing the front door — instead, temporarily shrouding it by a blue plastic tarp — “Tom” and “Elspeth” made a replacement front door themselves out of plywood last Friday night, complete with mail-slot.

My next-door neighbor “Alanna” — she of the exquisite wavy red hair — was explaining the animal rescue work she was involved in, besides her demanding job running a major consumer merchandise outlet, and advising another neighbor, “Ryan,” a graduate student, NOT to get a dog right now because it was like raising a child, and he was too busy with school to do anything other than neglect a pet.

Her husband, “Joel,” who had just gotten an MBA on top of an engineering degree, was saying that watching dressage at the Devon Horse Show was like observing a well-choreographed horse ballet.

Down the street, near the supermarket which for once had suspended unloading noisy Diesel trucks, “Lenny” the RN burned incense, wafting over us like a benediction, from a nifty, exotic $600 enameled censer that was NOT for sale. But many, perhaps too many, of his “horrid house-gifts” were. He had just survived a Near-Death Experience: the couple who had given him this revolting red ceramic bowl with an ugly coagulated-blood-looking glaze unexpectedly showed up, approaching his table like the monster in Jaws.

Fortunately, “Lenny” saw them coming, in time. Clutching his chest in anguish, as if warding off a possible heart attack — he’s really a hefty guy — “Lenny” fortunately had the presence of mind to quickly shove the bowl under his sweatshirt. He held it there while the couple made some flea-market small-talk like, “OOOOO, how positively adorable!!! Pet Passports, where did you EVER get those?”

And did it really matter that in hiding the bowl “Lenny” hopelessly chipped it? Wasn’t that what he really wanted, a legitimate reason not to display it among his cherished antiques? Tell them in case it comes up, I suggested, that one of his cats rubbed up against it and accidentally pushed it off the shelf. “Yeah,” “Lenny” said, “purring while she gleefully destroyed it.”

Later, I brought my standard party-taboule to the covered-dish supper at “Anna” and “Drew’s” house. There, “Belinda,” the art therapist-turned-meeting planner, received lots of appreciation for her terrific idea that we should all buy the round brass horns with red tassels and gilt-edged royal purple bows that “Stark” the conductor was selling, and put them up on our front doors as Holiday decorations for the Christmas season, even if they would get stolen by miscreants in ten minutes. “Let’s put little lights in the trees,” she said, “and show the world that people live here.”

Oh, you can have your eBay and your cyber-auctions. Ho-hum. That’s fine when you don’t want to catch a cold from your customers. Me, I’ll take flea markets, street sales, thrift shops, apartment close-outs. I like to see the merchandise up close and personal. Squeezing the Charmin should be a protected constitutional prerogative. I like to feel what kind of handshake a person has. I’ll take human beings, messy and unpredictable as they can be. Sometimes, it’s just nice to look someone, a real person, in the eye, and say, “Thank you.”