I had invited all my friends to join me at this years Seattle Mushroom Show but since most of them didn’t RSVP (and the ones that did gave me one lame excuse after another) I wound up going alone. Don’t feel bad though because if you read this you’ll be able to relive the entire misadventure as I experienced it.
First of all where was it? Warren G. Magnuson Park formerly a navel station on the north-western edge of Lake Washington, now home to high-income businesses, low-income housing and abandoned buildings serving as very low-income housing. The Puget Sound Mycological Society rented out The Mountaineers Club at the north end of the park and was funneling show-goers through a ticket-tent just outside the front door.
Inside the tent I was given a choice of ticket vendors; the absinthian man to my left or the sweet old woman to my right? Though ordinarily I might have chosen the man, attending the show solo was just another reminder of how painfully alone I am, so seeking the comfort of the nearest female body I gravitated towards the old woman. The thrill was cheap, just $5.00 with student ID bought me a ticket and a ‘shroom-shaped hand stamp… I was in.
The other side of the tent was an open-aired bizarre where the low level sponsors had set up a shanty-town. This was the place to be if you wanted t-shirts, bumper-stickers, or other chachkies made for mush-rubes but I wasn’t a tourist; I was a road-hardened fungi-fanatic and I was on a mission.
I had decided earlier that morning to try being more sociable. In general I’m either disgusted by the opposite sex or too intimidated by their perfection to get involved and my resulting attitude is a kind of cold rigidity that keeps women at bay. The mission objective at the expo was supposed to be a baby-step toward being less unlikable and I was going to do it by making eye contact, or idol conversation. But the mushroom crowd had different plans… They always do.
These are strange people, weird people who sneak through haunted woods and enchanted hollows to steal psychotropics from gnomes & fairy’s. Making my way through the hustle & bustle of the market congregation I passed a thin, elderly man hunching over himself to hide a single tit clawing its way out from beneath his t-shirt, but the really weird people were the ones standing around him trying to pretend the tit didn’t exist. Setting my own morbid curiosity aside I entered the main hall and noted a crash of lesbians meandering from table to table. The fungi were exhibited in wood-framed tableau’s made to resemble their natural habitat and the lesbians had stopped to admire an exhibit of long-stemmed mushrooms with blushing pink caps. The sign next to the exhibit read please don’t touch but one of the lesbians just couldn’t resist and I couldn’t blame her; she wasn’t the first woman to give in to temptation and I hope she won’t be last.
Going stag I toured the tables pretty quickly. However, hoping to find more than mushrooms I started my tour over again by joining a group of people moving very slowly, listing very intently, to a curiously sweaty woman with gray hair and a strange lump bulging out of her lower back. She was talking about a species called boletus edulis a large golden-white mushroom with a spongy under-cap. Though she liked the taste, she confessed that fly’s preferred to lay eggs in the sponge-like material which meant that if the specimens weren’t collected fresh; they could be riddled with maggots. “They’re not much for flavor” she said “-but I suppose they’re good for protein.” She turned a sample over and sure enough it had turned dark brown with a crawling, pale patina of protein eating away at the caps underbelly.
Just then a fly landed on one of the other mushrooms in the box. It spread its wings and thrust its abdomen high into the air. Another fly gently circled down to it and instantly the two were coupled. I looked up and my eyes were paired with a girls on the other side of the table.
The girl was one of two, each standing in order of height behind their mom who was the master-template for the two blonde, homunculus versions of the matriarch. The girl was also my first opportunity to engage in flirtation and I wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass.
I gave a non-committal smile and raised an eyebrow just a bit, a boy with a cold-sore coughed into his elbow and hung a sickly arm around the blonde girls neck. I looked away.
The group moved on to another table. This time we were looking at something called amanita muscaria a tall, red-capped mushroom and according to our guide one of the most dangerous in the Pacific North West. She explained that it was also the most popularly depicted mushroom in art, particularly in folkloric & fantasy art. The amanita display was one of the first I looked at during my quick run-through so admittedly my mind began to wander and with it so did my eye which caught site of a lanky, ginger-haired woman, towering above the crowd of people she was making her way through. Ever-since falling in love with Patricia Tallman in Tom Savini’s Night of The Living Dead I’ve loved (briefly) every red-headed femme fatale I’ve laid eyes on since and this woman was no exception. I started thinking about what she’d be like in bed; deadly or homicidal? She was far from my group and moving farther away with every stride so I could only continue to wonder until a man intercepted her with a gift from the bizarre outside. He held out two, gilded-mushroom earrings to which the woman replied “I wanted the red ones.” Deadly? Homicidal? Poisonous. Besides… She was taken.
I wasn’t getting anywhere. In fact I looked around me and the group I was with had continued to another display, so I decided to investigate the inciting aroma coming from the cooking area.
Nearly everyone there was using a little plastic spoon to eat from a little paper cup. I asked a man with a baby harnessed to his chest what the food was and where it came from; he pointed me toward the right booth where I found one tray filled with little paper cups and another, empty. Taking from what was available but knowing it wasn’t what everyone else was eating I asked “When’s the next batch of morel & salmon?” Parting his cobwebbed beard and smiling sardonically the man behind the counter replied “In about an hour.” So, nibbling on my shiitake mushrooms & rice, I headed in to the auditorium to sit down and listen to a lecture.
The lecture hall was a high-ceilinged, soundproof room with a medium sized movie screen at one end. In front of the screen was a podium where stood a tall, nerdy version of Indiana Jones covered in pins & buttons from the Haight-Ashbury district in his native San Fransisco. I had entered just as the room was filling up and needed to decide quickly where to would sit.
This was the real mushroom crowd, an audience composed of rare specimens better suited for a ride on The Orient Express. Seated in the front row was a family of Mormons with big hair, just behind them sat the Sheik of Araby and somewhere, lurking in the shadows of the back row, was Vlad the Impaler. I was just about to make a move toward the Sheik when in walked the perfect woman.
She was magic… Brown hair, not to tall, horned rimed glasses and a floppy, over-sized apple hat from the 1970’s. Great woman always have terrible taste in hats. Don’t ask me why but it goes without saying that the uglier the hat the more extraordinary the woman beneath it and this woman’s hat had just lurched its way out of the same era that elected Nixon.
She sat down in a quiet corner of the room, near a wooden post and my heart sank noting that there was but one empty seat between her and an elderly couple with matching haircuts. I took the empty seat quickly and the woman turned to me & smiled. I smiled back and the lecture began.
I wasn’t paying too much attention; I was preoccupied with visions of my life after the lecture. I saw the nervous exchange of numbers between me and the perfect woman, our first date at Theater Schmeater followed by chilli dogs at Shorty’s. I even had a vision of my deathbed with her at my side & our nine children sobbing as I passed beyond the veil. Indiana at the podium was saying something about psilocybe semilanceata and the danger of picking ‘shrooms under the watchful eye of aged, orangutang-like Asian ladies when a little girl squeezed passed my seat and leaped into the arms of the magic brunette next to me. I looked around and a man in an earth tone beanie had just sat down behind me. The perfect woman tuned to wave at him and I heard the little girl say “mommy.”
I’m nothing if not a gentleman so I stood up & asked the man behind me if he’d like to sit with his wife. He thanked me and I graciously left the room resigned to the fact the perfect woman was just a figment of my imagination; because if she had been anything other than an hallucination I would be crushed.
Outside the lecture hall I found the right booth again, in search of comfort food. Once more I was staring at two trays, one filled with shiitake & rice, the other empty. I asked the bearded man behind the counter if there were anymore morels and this time, with sad empathy he said “Sorry pal. You just missed ’em.”
I guess mushrooms are like women. The good ones are already taken…
iheartmalthus 