Bob Bell Visits The the Coliseum Flea Market
The site used to be a drive-in movie theater, and spreads over many acres, now covered in tarmac. It takes its name from the Oakland Coliseum, a huge and aging sports stadium a half mile away, once the home of the Oakland Raiders, the Golden Gate Warriors and the Oakland A’s. The Raiders left some time ago for Las Vegas, and the Warriors are now in San Francisco. Only the A’s are left, and they are reported to be soon moving on to another city with a deeper purse. The drive-in closed decades ago, and for years now, the attraction has been the detritus of generations of the local citizenry, its cast-offs, and hand-me-downs, the no longer wanted and un-needed artifacts of a culture that has everything, in duplicate and triplicate. I have been coming here fairly regularly since I landed in Oakland over twenty years ago, mainly to look for records. The San Francisco Bay Area saw a huge influx of immigrants from the thirties, those dust-bowl years of migration from Oklahoma and Texas, and then during the war years when shipbuilding and defense industries employed thousands. And those folks wanted entertainment, so the area played host to bands and musicians ranging from country and Western Swing to blues, jazz and gospel, and so, along with Los Angeles, developed a huge entertainment industry. A lot of records were made and sold in the area, and flea markets are a good place to find them, the Coliseum being one of the best, open as it is every day of the week.
ALL Photos: Britt Hallquist
It is 8.40 am, and a long column of vans, pickups and cars driven by vendors wait to get into the Coliseum Flea Market. The line stops at the low building at the entrance, and one by one they pay the price of admission at the vendors' window. Around the corner at two other windows would-be shoppers, families with young children in strollers, a small handful of dealers, treasure hunters and those with nothing else to do stand waiting their turn to pay the $1 admission.
The vans have bicycles and tote boxes strapped to the roofs, the pickups contain landscaping tools, wheelbarrows, assorted garden tools and cardboard boxes, piled optimistically high, and the cars, fewer in number than the vans and pickups, are crammed with a wild miscellany of objects, one crammed to such an extent that the driver, a tanned and unshaven man wearing a greasy baseball cap and an Oakland Raiders T-shirt, has to keep his right elbow tucked tightly to his side, as the passenger seat is full of more boxes, bags, bits of fabric and odd items stuffed together, threatening to tumble over onto the driver. The dashboard is littered with empty coffee cups, pens, scraps of paper, a dog leash, and what looks to be a broken umbrella. The mountain in the passenger seat is secured by a strap that originates from the passenger side mirror, through a chink in the passenger window, and then disappears to an anchor point behind the driver’s seat. The rest of the car is jammed full of what might appear to the unknowing eye to be an indiscriminate pile of stuff, but to the driver, at the dawn of what he hopes to be a day of high finance, these appurtenances are goods and chattel of the finest quality. This dunnage is crammed right up to the roof … no way the driver is able to see out of any of the rear windows. One wondered just how far he had traveled that hour, slowly trundling through rush hour traffic, basically driving blind.
The pickup in front of this car is a very battered graffiti-spattered Toyota, its sides extended upwards five or six feet by homemade wooden sides, slatted, and the bed is filled with plastic boxes, cardboard cartons, lawn mowers, a washing machine and a scrambled array of oddments, one after the other stuffed into whatever available crevice it might fit. Two child’s walkers and a giant brown teddy bear, missing an ear, are strapped to the top of the cab, the teddy bear sitting in one of the walkers looking for all the world as if he is directing and overseeing this expedition, his authority not diminished a whit by the absence of an ear. Behind him, the remains of a blue plastic tarp try to give the illusion that it is holding down the contents below, but its short dimensions and tattered reality give the lie … it is more an ill-fitting yarmulke than a tightly tied head scarf. At the rear of the load, tight up behind the bent and broken tailgate that is secured by a chain and rusty padlock, are three or four bicycles, strategically placed between the wooden sides, extending to the topmost slats, successfully retaining the valuables therein. The driver of the pickup is leaning out of the driver's window, conversing with a lady in Spanish, counting his change, all the while nodding gravely. With a last emphatic nod, he engages drive and pulls into the grounds to find his allocated spot.
My wife, Britt, and I approach one of the windows at the front, and I push two dollar bills under the cashier’s window. ‘Two, please’, and the woman puts the bills into the till and hands me two scraps of paper. We walk around the building and approach the gates, handing the tickets to a short man of Mexican descent. He tears them in two and silently gives me back the two stubs, and we are in. The spaces for the vendors spread out in lines, a few under a huge permanent tent-like structure which is mainly reserved for fruit and vegetable sellers, but most out in the open, occupying rectangular slots delineated by white lines. The more organized vendors erect canopies to ward off the sun, but the majority simply spread their wares upon the ground, and if they are a little display conscious, arrange them neatly on a blue tarp, laid out between the white lines.
Others just pour their sad and battered goods out of totes and cardboard boxes into bewildering piles, leaving it to the customers to pick through small hillocks of tools, saucepans, books, dolls and aging appliances, and sit silently on the tailgates of their worn pickups, blank looks on their faces, tired and yawning in the pale early sunlight.
Nationalities of every kind wander among the stalls, but the predominant strain is South American, and Spanish the common tongue. I say South American, but really just American would be the really correct designation. I mean, these folks were the original inhabitants of this continent. Mexicans, Hondurans, Venezuelans, short Guatemalans, all brown-skinned and speaking in rapid-fire Spanish, rolling their rs and gesticulating wildly. Here a seller hollering ‘Dollar! Dollar! Dollar! Dollar!’, another silently bargaining by holding up five fingers and then shaking his head so violently that he had to catch the brim of his grey cowboy hat to prevent it flying off his head, and now here comes a short Mexican woman, pushing a stroller with a toddler in it and his older brother, all of four or five, hanging onto the side of the stroller with one hand, the other tugging at his mother’s skirts, all the while keeping up a fast and incomprehensible barrage of tearful pleadings which fall on the deaf ears of this woman, probably no more than twenty five, but seemingly wearing the dusty passage of centuries, so worn is she by the cares and toils of this life of endless birth, endless turmoils borne of sad and impossible responsibilities of family and survival, and she then stops beside two or three rows of trestle tables, all pile high with used clothing, ‘ropa $1’ says the sign, and wearily she looks at the older child and puts a finger to her lips, a plea for silence, and commences to sift through the clothes. Each table is about eight feet long, and they are jammed together in series of three, so each row holds twenty-four feet of clothes, a couple of feet high. An invisible cloud of stale body odor, faintly spiced with mildew, hovers over the piles. Women crowd between the rows, sifting through the heaps, holding up blouses, skirts, pants, shirts, coats - holding up an item to look for flaws, maybe taking a blouse by the shoulders and pressing it to their own shoulders, glancing at their partner with a quizzical look. Does it fit? One table has a pile of brassieres, all colors, all shapes and sizes. A very large older woman, dressed in black, is rummaging through them, a determined look upon her face. I wonder what color bra she will buy, will it be that one with pink flowers, or that other one, all grey and plain?
Across from the tables is a guy selling audio equipment, speakers, mixers and cables. The throb of Mexican music thumps from his speakers, a fast polka driven by a tuba at the bottom end, and then a lyric tenor voice glides over the rhythm, an impossible sadness and yearning in his voice, the line closing with a descending figure, his voice a mournful and dolorous vibrato. A little further on a man is selling new cowboy boots, neatly arranged in pairs upon a blue tarp laid out on the ground in front of his van. He is middle-aged, a neatly pressed Western shirt and an immaculate tan cowboy hat, and pressed blue jeans. Pointed snakeskin boots and a bolero tie and a pencil-thin mustache above an open and gleaming smile complete the picture … a seasoned vendor at ease in his natural habitat. I catch his eye, and he grins, a big wide open grin as if to say, ‘Yeah, this is how life is, this is what we do to just jeep on keeping on, and yeah, dig this guy, looks like I got one’ and winks his eye, as he turns to talk with a potential customer, a sharp young tattooed Mexican cat who is holding up a pair of black boots with embossed lizards on the sides.
Next is a woefully battered and dented Dodge truck, in front of which is an immense jumble of cardboard boxes containing books, plates, china, cutlery, compact discs, old video cassettes, all tumbled about the space in glorious disorder, the piles of stuff are overwhelming in their abundance, and so massive is the pile that it really forbids examination. Most vendors lay out their stuff in rows so you can walk through and view the items. This is just a pile, a huge heap. It is the diametric opposite of a sales display. This man is not a salesman, never in a thousand years. It’s as if he has just given up, basically saying, here is a load of junk. Sift through it if you dare. I don’t care … just gonna leave it lying right there if it doesn’t sell. He is sitting in the passenger seat of the truck, eating something from a paper plate, a small dog sitting hopefully at his feet, the dog’s optimism being the yin to the man’s pessimistic yang. Finishing his meal, he throws the plate to the floors of the cab and the dog scurries over to clean it. The guy surveys his hill of garbage and sighs, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. People walk by, no-one stops.
The next row is more orderly … these are folks who come here to sell regularly and bring canopies with walls, set up their wares on tables and hang them in rows from strings that stretch from corner to corner on the sides of the canopy. This one specializes in cell phones and batteries, and has cases of every size and hue, cables, chargers, batteries … indeed, the stall has a sign, imperiously commanding ‘Change Watch Battery’ … the next stall has shampoos, ointments, lotions, unguents of every description and application, all new and displayed in neat rows. At the end of the shampoo section, there is a neatly ordered line of used leather gloves, half a dozen ex-military caps and a huge brass belt buckle in the shape of crossed pistols.
And then there are the tools. If there is one overarching and predominant type of ware at the market, it is the category of construction tools, most especially power tools. There are stalls selling brand new Makita drivers, drills, saws grinders, sawzalls, all battery driven, all in new boxes, and the question looms, are they hot? Stolen? They are priced to sell, but then if one scours the internet, there is a vast amount of similar tools to be bought at similar prices. And so these stalls, and indeed, this entire flea market is not only a microcosm of American culture, but is also a mirror to it … there is stuff everywhere. A huge and staggering amount of goods, manufactured in huge and staggering numbers, really more stuff than anyone can really need or use. And so the flotsam and jetsam end up here and at places like this, laid out on the ground, picked over and through, sometimes examined and purchased, more often examined and passed over. Other sellers offer used hand tools, shovels encrusted with hardened cement, worn-out hoes, rakes with missing teeth, old hammers and rusty handsaws, wrenches, sockets, jacks, grease guns, battery chargers, used and worn-out power tools, heaps of used Makita batteries … all laid out on the ground in a paroxysm of optimism, a last gasp attempt to turn base material into gold, or at least the green of a dollar bill.
‘Chinese Doctor. ‘Frozen Shoulder, Sciatica, Sprain’’ proclaims a sign, under a canopy covering a couple of massage tables. Twenty dollars buys you thirty minutes of face-down massage and thirty will give you forty-five, three-quarters an hour of intense rubbing, pushing, manipulating, stroking and gentle but insistent pummeling, and you lie there and the world sort of goes into neutral, the hubbub around you settles into an undulating sonic drone, and for forty-five minutes you are the center of the universe. Britt and I know this because we have both done it, but today it is not on the agenda.
We walk past a guy selling PA equipment, big speaker boxes and amps. He has a Mexican radio station blasting, and the voice coming from the speaker is adopting an exaggerated - and very phony - bass voice. It is obviously his gimmick, for do not all radio personalities have to have some identifiable gimmick? One would hope that the gimmick would be their intellect or humor, or taste in the arts, but for this fellow, his taste and imagination have led him to this way of standing out from the crowd. And he is remarkably successful in an extremely jarring and annoying manner. As he is speaking in Spanish, I have no idea as to his subject, but given the means of delivery, it must be one of idiocy wallowing in a swamp of mediocracy, and I count myself fortunate that to my ears he is incomprehensible.
Under the permanent tented area are the vegetable and fruit stands, trays and flat boxes piled high with dark red chiles, prickly pears, ugly fruit, fresh peanuts and soybeans, Brussels sprouts, lemons, limes, string beans, fava beans, potatoes, heaps of cilantro, bundles of parsley, apples, melons, and then plastic bags of jellied mangos, multi-colored candies, and crispy looking yellow fried sweetmeats of indeterminate origin. Over half of the goods on display are unknown to me, appealing in their strangeness … just looking at them turns one into a would-be gastronomic adventurer, but today is not the day to explore these culinary byways, these tantalizing hinterlands of the cuisinary arts.
As always at the flea market, I am looking for records. 78s in particular. I hit the place two or three times a month, and usually come away empty-handed. But as in all things, the exception proves the rule, and the one time I do come across a stash sets me up for the next five or six visits when I don’t. And that is the challenge and the appeal of the place. Will today be the day I find a crate of old blues and jazz records, hopefully not too battered? Hope, coupled with blind optimism, is what drives me to this place again and again. Also, it must be admitted, a certain degree of compulsion, a compulsion borne of a lifetime addiction to record collecting. I am not the only collector who frequents this market. There are a few of us, although I really only know of one other who shares the same taste as I, which is wonderfully fortunate. The majority look for records from the sixties onwards whereas my tastes run more in the opposite direction. So I will pass over records by The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, while they will pass over things by Gene Vincent or Joe Turner. This is a Good Thing.
At the end of the row, an ageing Black man sits in a folding chair, nodding to the sound of Jimmy Reed coming from a dusty transistor radio, loud, distorted, but the wheezing shrill of Reed’s harmonica somehow a familiar comfort in the aural mayhem. In front of him is a plastic crate, full of LPs. I kneel down and rifle through them. It would appear that they have been stored underwater. The covers are wet, and stick together. The Ohio Players, Michael Jackson, Parliament, Whitney Houston … the sound of the seventies and the eighties… aha, here is an Elmore James on Kent, soggy and mildewed. I pull out the record from the disintegrating sleeve. It looks like it has been used as a farm implement, a harrow perhaps. ‘Records are five bucks’ barks the old gent. I smile and nod at him, while mumbling to myself, ‘Yeah, you gotta be joking’, and move on.
The market is open seven days a week, and the weekends are packed, with sellers marketing cheap clothes, packaged foods, toys, groceries … family goods aimed at folks on limited budgets. Those days are noisy, packed with people looking for deals on essentials, and are not the days to go looking for bric-a-brac, simply because the bric-a-brac just isn’t there on those days. Tuesdays and Fridays are the best days for junk, used goods and the occasional antique. Tuesday because Monday is the day that auction houses auction off the contents of storage units that have fallen delinquent. Thus sealed boxes of who knows what are sold off to hopeful entrepreneurs who haul them to the flea market on the next available day, which is Tuesday. And then they return on Friday in the hopeful expectation of selling off the balance, because that is what everyone else does on Friday, Friday being the next day that a decent crowd is guaranteed.
And so this is a place of great expectations, of hope and optimism, a place that is awash in articles that are unwanted by some but desired by others, it is an exchange of needs and wants for rejects and dispositions, and it is a place that is conversely peopled by those who on the face of it would have very little to hope for, a rather battered and tattered population of low-income immigrants, but who nevertheless are here to improve their lives with the purchase of a used weed-wacker, a hardly worn blouse, a dinner set of gaily painted plates, or perhaps a rather nice Chuck Berry 78 on Chess.
These acres, brought to life every day of the week, are a metaphor for America, the abundance of goods and people, new and shiny, worn and battered, joyful yet tired, but alive and vibrant, a thousand tongues yakking, laughing, shouting, yelling, and the cacophony of ‘Dollar! Dollar! Dollar’ … the only English word some of the sellers know, intermingled with strains of soul music and rap, mariachi and Mexican ballads.
As Britt and I walk out of the market after a couple of hours of enchantment, we find ourselves next to the tired-looking young mother with the infant and the four-year-old. She is now carrying the infant, to whom she is talking in hushed tones, her eyes alight with love, kissing the top of the child’s head, beside her the four-year-old is proudly pushing the stroller, which now seats a giant teddy bear with a missing ear.
The little boy is talking to the bear and laughing.
