ENDNOTE
Our intrepid reporter uncovers existential conspiracies
while trying to participate in a United Farm Workers march.

by Ian Blecher
he following is a series of negations, which, oddly enough, evolves into a narrative and even contains a small moral. This is the story of a story not told, of a rally not quite attended, of people unable to speak to one another, of a union that doesn’t (yet) exist, and of toilets nowhere to be found. The strawberry industry, especially Driscoll Growers, is booming these days. It’s not as difficult as you might think to make it in this business. Just listen to this fabulous offer from the Strawberry Workforce: for the incredibly low price of $7,999.99 a year, your very own worker will stoop 12 hours a day, inhale carcinogenic pesticides, and drink brackish water. And don’t worry: there’s no union included. If he tries to start one, simply return him for a full refund. High turnover and a low retirement age keep the industry anonymous and healthy. Those workers who want to speak out won’t be speaking English; most of them can’t even pronounce “Driscoll.”
Some of us in the consumer sector have begun to wonder whether cheap, delicious strawberries are worth the degradation of human life. To assuage our guilt, a friend and I drove down to Broadway’s most spectacular show last week: a United Farm Workers solidarity march on behalf of strawberry pickers, led by Dolores Huerta and Gloria Steinem, from 96th to 72nd Street.
By the time we parked and caught an overstuffed subway to our destination, we were an hour late, with no rally in sight. The road wasn’t even blocked off. A few cops were standing around smirking, proud to be keeping Broadway safe from mavericks like us. We were ready to give up and find a museum when the parade thundered down the sidewalk and enveloped us. In seconds, we were distributing pamphlets, wearing badges and holding signs. Close to 100 people marched below a bright blue Yale flag, singing, “We are the union / The mighty, mighty union! / Everywhere we go / People want to know / Who we are / So we tell them: / We are the union...” On the fringes, stone-faced old communists flashed us the People’s Weekly World. Displays spread out on both flanks featured ancient muckraking and conspiracy revelations in Grenada and Nicaragua. Employees at fruit stands gave us the thumbs-up and leather-clad bikers honked.
I was actually beginning to feel like “the union” when there, on 80th Street, shimmering in the heat mirage of the horizon, stood the Cats of gourmet food, Zabars. Even amidst the din of leftist chants, Zabars’s clarion public address system rang out: “Special on smoked salmon! Special on boccancini! Special on Guylian chocolate!” Through the window, I saw troves of rare olive oils and grizzled cheeses framing tables brimming with free samples. Throngs of satisfied customers squeezed their way to the registers in the front window to pay for their booty.
We figured we’d buy some hand-made food products and use an executive-quality washroom in time to join the tail end of the procession. Right away we snagged a ready-made snak-pak: fresh mozzarella balls soaking in sun-dried tomato sauce. I paid while my friend found the bathroom. The parade passed by as I sampled a few crackers and some tangy goat cheese, ignoring the “take one, please” looks of Zabars managers, who asked if they could help me between Spanish directives barked at the line of beleaguered cashiers. Seven “I’m just waiting for someones” later, I realized the UFW marchers were probably already in Jersey. I asked an olive oil representative where the bathroom was in ambitious though broken Spanish. “There is no bathroom, sir,” he said.
Egad! It all made sense. First the strawberry fields, now Zabars: cosmically connected by a mysterious lack of plumbing facilities. Customers and workers, our plights had at last converged.
But if using the bathroom in Zabars was an existential impossibility, where was my friend? I ran upstairs, aisles of high-priced cookware flying by like so many parade marchers—marchers whose parade I was missing more and more with every gelato machine I passed. I paged her. I asked two stock boys whether they’d seen her: “No.” Finally, a “take one, please” manager said, “You’re going to have to leave, sir. You’ve been here too long without buying anything.” He must have seen my UFW badge and mistaken me for a subversive conspirator.
I threw down my mozzarella indignantly, walked outside and kicked down Broadway, looking for other left-wing stragglers. Eight blocks later, I found the march, congealed on 72nd Street. Someone was finishing a speech denouncing Driscoll, and everyone was holding hands. My friend was there too, next to the big Yale sign. We sang some garbled folk songs, and talked about informing the world about strawberry workers, since the New York Times doesn’t write about these sorts of rallies.
In the end, the march became a sort of free-floating negation, a contagion that seemed to spread to everyone who involves himself in the strawberry industry. I didn’t read about it in the paper. I spent the entire day trying to talk to people who couldn’t understand me about bathrooms that weren’t there and a friend I couldn’t find. And in an infinitely more extreme way, strawberry workers deal with the same sorts of frustrations every day. They fight with growers, people who can’t even understand them, about the non-existence of perquisites most people won’t talk about: benefits, security, day care, toilets and unions.
So if you want to help strawberry workers, don’t eat Driscoll fruit. You can buy the gourmet version at Zabars during the next UFW march.
Ian Blecher is a sophomore in Davenport College.

This article first appeared in the September 5, 1997 issue of TNJ.