A businessman named Wallie, and the business of selling flowers in the park in winter.
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On a foggy winter day the houses, the cars, and the streets around Edgewood Park all appear gray and listless, indifferent to the changing traffic lights and gradually dimming sky. Alongside the park, the white box truck with the cracked windshield does not by itself attract attention —” to pass it at the wrong moment is not to see it at all. But at the right time of day the truck transforms, calling attention to itself with a large sign lettered with white bubble letters against seeping red marker, advertising roses.
Perhaps it’s just the desolation of winter, but the idea of roses in January strikes me as a strange and mysterious one. And indeed, although the truck itself never moves from its space, the rose seller himself is elusive. The first few times I inquire I am given vague, noncommittal answers by the employees who sit in the back of the truck, smoking cigarettes and pulling dead petals off of redolent flowers. Once I catch a glimpse of the proprietor as he replenishes his stock, but by the time I park my car and walk around the corner he has vanished, and the truck is closed.
Perhaps, he will theorize later, the owner of such a business is by nature itinerant, by definition mobile. It is a life that Wallie Weisser calls “the last frontier of the hobo.”
Weisser, 46, has lived in New Haven his whole life and sold roses since he was 20 years old. His employees over the years have included students, musicians, artists and vagabonds. Since he sets only rough hours —” the truck is normally open between 2 p.m. and 10 p.m. — and never fires anyone, the number of people he employs fluctuates. Currently he counts his staff at three, but by next week that number could change. “It’s not uncommon for somebody to say to me, “I want to fill in for a week and then be off doing something else,” he said, watching a distant point in the coffee shop air.
Weisser himself has traveled extensively, both within the United States and around the globe. Though his wanderings have taken him through Texas, Israel, and Eastern Europe, he has always considered New Haven his home base. “There have been times where I’ve been [selling roses] more successfully than other times,” he said, smiling. “If you try to make things happen they don’t always happen.”
The late ’80s, he said, were the high point of the business, when free-spirited groups of people sought out flower-selling as a way to avoid the restrictions of an office job. Now, “it’s hard to get people who are active to slow down and put time into it.” He linked this fact to the advent of the information age and its boundless offerings of new options, new opportunities, and new people. By contrast, he observed, “most of the people who work for me now want to be kind of alone.”
Weisser dodged my attempts at categorization, pointing out that his is a business like any other. His employees conduct the actual rose-selling, while he handles the administrative and supply aspects of the business; his own time at the truck is dedicated largely to maintenance. The romance of the roses, he said, should be seen in the buyers —” boys going on Friday night dates, old men who bring bouquets to their wives every week.
In some ways his job is a compromise. Although he always wanted to make money and initially ran his own cart, he never sought to become a full-fledged shopkeeper. “I used to go to Grateful Dead shows with flowers, just sell them in the parking lot. Usually I’d end up getting a ticket instead of money,” he reminisced with a grin. At other shows he helped to alleviate the stress of traffic jams by selling beer, water, and roses. There wasn’t much money in it, of course, but he met a host of interesting people and never regretted an instant.
“I ended up where I ended up,” he shrugged. A ranger of the last frontier.