Bargain House of Fleas

by Tim Gilmore, 1/20/2024

The fleas wear top hats, white gloves, Windsor glasses with lenses blacked out. Their cartoon faces, to either side of wide red letters announcing “Bargain House of Fleas,” beckon you to step up.

Larger letters spell out “FLEA MARKET” in bold black, and though the concrete block wall to which the sign’s affixed is painted the yellow of Heinz Mustard and the steel poles that hold the cantilevered roof are ketchup red, you go into the building next door for hot dogs and hamburgers. The girl who works out here sells funnel cakes and snow cones and popcorn.

A sign says, “Hours of Operation / Selling Days Wednesday 6:00 AM – 2:00 PM Friday 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM Saturday 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM,” and the sign taped over it says, “Market Closed ~ Thanks for 48 Years of Business!”

A boy I know walks through these crowds 33 years ago the way he thinks a poet moves through the world, receiving representative impressions of widely varied life and human experience, a fully sensory ghost, all Jim-Morrison-and-Baudelaire, if not Parisian Prowler maybe Westside Wanderer, a streetcat, an owl.

He buys a snow cone, asks the girl if it’s a good place to work, not that he wants to work here, just can’t think of anything else to say, pays with pocket change, miscounts and gives her the wrong amount, less than actual cost, but she doesn’t tell him so. Not until much later. On her breaks, she peruses the vendors’ booths. She collects miniature bubblegum machines.

And 15 years prior to the boy talking to the girl, there’s Matt Skenes and Nancy Anderson, just 20 and 17 years old, soon to be married. Matt’s parents, Charles and Helen, run House of Bargains, one location on Normandy Boulevard, one here in the big yellow building on Blanding, opens in ’55 or ’56. Mother’s Day, 1958, they advertise a “large 12-inch” electric skillet, $8.99. Or, show Mom you really love her with a deep fryer, twelve 99. Bargain House of Fleas takes over and spreads out to fields beneath longleaf pines, October 25, 1975.

Early in their 20s, in Bob Mann’s “embryonic hippie years,” he visits his neighbor and friend Cheri, “when another longhaired dude” enters the room, and Bob and Matt recognize “each other as long-lost friends.” Matt’s “as laid back as ever,” never losing “his decorum,” the new responsibilities of running the Bargain House of Fleas “a natural selection.”

In 1960 or so, Bob and Matt first meet, Stockton Elementary School in Ortega Forest. Matt lives in a sprawling ranch style house on Water Oak Lane, a street that ends at the schoolyard. Bob lives in the new suburb of Ortega Hills, his father Southeast Naval Exchange commander. The boys watch trains in Matt’s back yard and swim and “hunt lost kingdoms” along the Ortega River in Bob’s jon boat. Then junior high follows elementary school and splits the best friends apart.

It’s a village here, Halloween 1990, and the oglers and the hagglers, the smugglers and finaglers, sort through two long open-air covered walkways, each with market booths facing inward from either side, feet tramping sandy grounds and two concrete footbridges over this tributary of Fishing Creek that crooks all through Wesconnett and Oak Hill.

A shorter covered market leads to the big yellow block building, the old House of Bargains, and all along the way are peaches and grapefruit, hammers and drills, sci-fi novels and biblical endtimes prophecies and velvet paintings of clowns and original Tales from the Crypt comics – “Locked…I’m locked in this mausoleum with … with this Thing!” – and early copies of Mad Magazine – “This Country is Out of Order” – and cassette tapes of Motown groups and AC/DC and Johnny Cash.

A breeze carries the frying of vegetable oil and cigarettes and stirs the flies off the fruit stands. It fans the smell from the Snack Shack, where Matt smokes beef brisket and pork butt and the smoke wafts across the market stalls as from the carnage of some Viking or Comanche warfield. And against the intimacies of collarbones and wrists, sunlight crackles in the summer like fry grease and eases diaphanous in the fall and spring.

To be young is but an afternoon.

The boy I know, all tresses and cheekbones and young (not so) manly sensitivity, about 16 years old this lifetime of Jesus ago, furnishes his bedroom – panelboard walls, formerly the garage, behind a pocket door and bead curtain – from the Bargain House of Fleas, with old blown glass blue and green and wine-garnet, handbills of Marilyn Monroe and Night of the Living Dead and many-armed Vishnus and third-eye Buddhas and plaster Jesuses and rosaries draped on candlesticks, bookshelves stocked with classical myth and The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Necronomicon. The orange safety cone and “Danger: High Voltage” sign, however, he’s taken from city streets.

Jerry “J.P.” Peterson shops here for cymbals and sticks, a drumhead or chrome snare, November 1978, between playing for the Northside rock band Ridge Road South and the Harley Huff Band, talks with Matt Skenes, fellow drummer, March 1983, about a new find, a vintage cymbal, and J.P. is here with Matt on the very last day, December 20, 2023.

In 1985 and ’86, Jay Humphrey and Jeff Reid, not quite teens, separately, they don’t know each other, ride their bikes up Blanding Boulevard to the flea market just to buy “Rambo knives.”

Carolyn Gill shops for school clothes with her kids in 1986. “It helps stretch a tight budget.” She’s here every Wednesday all the remaining years. She checks older friends out from “assisted living” facilities for the afternoon and walks with them amidst peppers and shoes and dolls. Vendors like Ms. Shirley pray for her friends when they can no longer come. Carolyn feeds the turtles in the creek and pets the dogs of friends and strangers.

In 1990, the hippies of the ’60s are 42 or 55 years old. The country folk of these exurbs are fine being country folk. The rednecks are angry and aggrieved, by definition, but not yet MAGA. Here come drifters and academics and antiques dealers and Vietnam War veterans and people rarely seen in other parts of the country like redneck surfers and Black Ku Kluxers. Everybody’s thinner, the average woman’s weight not yet by 2020 what the average man weighed in the 1960s, but heavier than him too, and every five men not an extra half ton yet but on their way.

And if The Bargain House of Fleas is redneck and drifter and hippie, it’s also indie-movie teenager cool, this third of a century ago, when Kurt Cobain is still alive, and the girl who sells the snow cones makes gawdy costume jewelry, all silver and aquamarine and amethyst, more valuable than diamonds, and the boy snickers at the collector’s case of eight-track tapes and eyeballs Vampirella comics, 1973 and ’77.

Memory, as that boy I know grows older, is no long road unwinding to distant vistas, but two points on paper that touch when the page folds.

Nancy works in the Snack Shack and scoops out boiled peanuts into Styrofoam cups and Matt registers vendors and walks beside bananas and surfboards and wrenches and old gold pocket watches and pickled beets and houseplants, deep-dark-eyed and big-bearded, talks about seeing the Allman Brothers Band up in Charleston.

The faded yellow signs in the middle of the rafters of covered walkways say, “Dealers ~ Merchandise Must Be Kept Behind Yellow Lines ~ No Pornography ~ No Firearms of Any Kind * BB And Pellet Guns Included.” In purses and pantlegs hide pistols, this being the South, shotguns in pickup trucks, 1985, but not yet all those semi-automatic rifles that can each kill everybody here in two minutes. “No Buying or Trading with Anyone Who Has Not Paid the Rent Fee ~ Please Read the Back of Your Receipt.”

The boy I know, 33:33:33 years ago, grows all Pre-Raphaelite for the girl selling snow cones, writes dripping maudlin teenage poems, one couplet calling her “beautiful and strange, / Like sunshine burning in the rain.”

Comes then tall angular young Brian with the long golden hair, groundskeeper, so quiet, never speaks, apparently unphotographed. The old Black women say they’re in love with him. As do the young white girls who also say they wish they had his hair. “The Lace Lady” sells antique embroideries. Tommy Laidlaw blows hot glass into swans and dolphins and fills them with water colored blue or green or gold.

Inevitably then, underneath open commerce, other economies operate. They do a brisk trade in urban legends: that someone sometimes sells sex, dime bags, fortunes told, charms and curses, an old tombstone, an Amazonian shrunken head.

And Mr. Kafka kills that couple in their early 60s as they cross Blanding Boulevard for the flea market that August morning in 2002. Comes into the strip club always already drunk. Kills Wayne and Nancy Fisher that morning, Kafka already hammered, loaded, wasted, plastered, blind drunk, license yanked after his last drunken car wreck. It’s the Fishers’ 39^th wedding anniversary.

At this picnic table, meanwhile, seated with guitar, Benjie Años sits where that girl 33 years earlier hands that boy I know an application, and Benjie smiles upward behind boxy big sunglasses, wearing his brick-red and black flannel shirt, hair in a kind of loose pompadour, not quite 80 years old, 60 years since he graduated Tarlac National High School in the Philippines. He strums his strings and sings ballads by the Beatles.

“There’s a real camaraderie among the vendors,” says J.P. Peterson, “especially in the B Building.” J.P. sells a few times a year. He’s a regular customer every Wednesday. Vendors plug in crockpots of pot roast, chili, chicken noodle soup to share amongst themselves.

And that boy I know, from all those years ago, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, is me. A lifetime of Christ ago, something inside him burns beautifully and truthfully. He wants to give it to the world, but he doesn’t know how. Dying on a crucifix seems too obvious and easy. He labors hard at bad poems.

Long gone is the old sign by the road that shows a flea in a tie and tailcoat. Paint chips off the hand-painted hamburger on the Snack Shack sign. Its lettuce now looks blue. A discarded cardboard sign says, “Need Bus $$$ to Leave Here God Bless.”

I try to eavesdrop, to listen through remembrance to just what those kids say, but the boy is gone now. The girl is gone too. The snow cones and funnel cakes are gone, and the innocence and imagined future.

Some people say it’s your relations with others that make you you, the kind of friend you are, the kind of sister or son or parent, that you’re you because of other people. Surely, though it contradicts that notion, it’s also true that you’re more you when you’re alone. When you’re unrelated. Unentangled. When everybody else has gone home. After hours. When business is done. When the flea market, for the last time, has closed.

“It’s a sad end to an era,” says J.P. “A lot of good people who connected here are kinda lost now.”

It’s a good place for stray cats, still is, always was. They live both well and still wild. Scavengers. They scale the sandbag embankments of the frothing creek and catch mice and toy with sleek black snakes beneath juniper and privet berries.

These cats stalk the place, decade after decade, before the sun rises and the dealers arrive, then reassess the scene at twilight. They’re the brokers behind the scenes. Town commissioners. “Unacknowledged legislators of the world.” They know the score. They keep the secret history.