The Garlic Festival runs like a well-oiled machine
– and that oil is sweat. This year, more than 4,000 volunteers
diced vegetables, toted trash barrels, guarded gates and shilled
beer, unpaid, to fill charities’ coffers and keep Gilroy’s name in
lights.
Gilroy – The Garlic Festival runs like a well-oiled machine – and that oil is sweat. This year, more than 4,000 volunteers diced vegetables, toted trash barrels, guarded gates and shilled beer, unpaid, to fill charities’ coffers and keep Gilroy’s name in lights.
Plus me.
In the name of Gonzo Journalism, I threw myself into six volunteer gigs in five sweaty hours, thanks to festival president Judy Lazarus, who assured me that if I wanted the Festival’s toughest jobs, I could have them.
Judy Lazarus, by the way, is a saint. At 9:30am Sunday, she personally hoofed it to each of my volunteer assignments, spoon-fed me the directions, then handed me off to Micki Pirozzoli, past festival president, to ferry me to my first job in the dust-blown parking lot. There, 40 stalwart teens in red T-shirts circled around Bill Headley, parking czar.
Tacked to the tent wall was an aerial photo, superimposed with an alphabet soup of lots, further detailed in immaculate, color-coded spreadsheets that divvied out the volunteers. Fueled by granola bars and shrink-wrapped jelly sandwiches, they spread out across the expanse, sans iPods, sans cell phones, to park more than 11,000 cars per day.
“It’s an intense job,” said Pirozzoli, chipper as she brushed dust from her face. “You’re on your feet. Dust, dirt, heat – you name it, they got it.”
Ten minutes later, waving cars forward, my forearm was sore. And it was hot. And I had a whole lot of very important reporter work to do, I explained to coordinator Jose Hernandez. Thus relieved, I skipped off, leaving scores of hardier souls in my wake.
Thwarted by art and math in one morning
Next up: Face painting in the Children’s Area. Stephanie Kurtz, whose hours support a Catholic mission to Mexico, handed me a guidebook with simple instructions for conjuring up a caterpillar, garlic bulb or ladybug on an innocent’s cheek. Simple, that is, if you aren’t attacking a moving target, and if you aren’t actually working with paint. A Pepto-Bismol-pink caterpillar merited a toothy grin; my chocolate ice-cream cone flopped. A 9-year-old girl proffered a tanned bicep like a pro, demanding an American flag, but refused my attempts at conversation. Tempera is not my medium. Also, children despise me.
I am an artiste. I can’t work under these conditions.
Before the shame overwhelmed me, I decorated my own arm with a busty mermaid, complete with a swirling, blue-green tail, then made my way to the ticket booth, where I rediscovered my ineptitude through math. Coordinator Margie Hemion handed me a laminated card that conveniently lists multiples of $12. On the other side of the peephole, a teen girl rapped her polka-dotted nails, impatient, as I feebly tried to make change. Somewhere, my alma mater hung its head in despair.
Hemion explained that this is the plum job, an oasis of calm at the festival.
“I have not let go of this area for a few years now,” she said proudly. “If you fill your assignments and do it right, you’ll get it back.”
Clearly, this was not the place for me. I sidled out of the ticket booth to pick up a borrowed pair of jeans from Judy Lazarus’ unlocked car. Lazarus loaned me her jeans and left her snappy sports car unlocked so that an extremely high-maintenance volunteer could try her hand at Gourmet Alley. There, a merciful volunteer stood sentry in front of a truck while I wriggled out of my shorts and into Lazarus’ jeans, then donned a plastic apron and elbow-length gloves to join the macho guys scrubbing skillets behind the pyro-chefs.
I gain a posse and a crown
“Aren’t you the Garlic Princess?” asked Robert Guzman, a Victory Outreach volunteer hoisting scorched, wagon-wheel-sized skillets sullied with burnt bits of scampi and garlic into three stainless-steel sinks, where muscle-bound Trinidad Montes and Brandon Maron doused them with water and scrubbed them spotless, sloshing water in sloppy, ecstatic circles. As the flames roared through the rafters, sending waves of heat barreling toward us, Montes and Maron whooped, shouting, “Fire in the hole! Drop it like it’s hot! Fire, baby, come on!”
I look nothing like Cherise Gowan, and my eyeliner has long since migrated south.
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I warned Guzman, and smiled, leaning over to scrape off a last scrap of red pepper. Hair slicked wet with sweat, Montes and Maron shimmied to the music as they worked. These guys have a blast, but they’re working hard: All three days, they worked 12-hour shifts in the blazing-hot sinks behind the pyro-chefs. At the first strains of ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ Montes hooted, dancing a reel, a phantom fiddle poised on his arm. A furry, neon green top hat somehow landed on my head.
“We’re the Pimp Squad,” Montes informed me, “but we dance for Jesus!”
Fifteen minutes later, I held the coveted title of Pimp Queen. I could barely tear myself away. Or get rid of that hat.
“This is the love that’s getting out there, to the people!” shouted Mike Mendez, another Victory Outreach volunteer – “Gilroy born and raised!” – when I finally pulled out my notebook. “Ain’t no festival like the Garlic Festival!”
Festival’s dirtiest job
Outside the beer tent, Chamber of Commerce volunteer Kurt Jacobsen nearly convinced me to help him overturn a Port-a-Let receptacle, urging me, “On the count of three!” Thankfully, he relented before gullible was written all over my shoes. Somewhere in the Midwest, my alma mater is reconsidering my degree.
Inside the beer tent, first-time volunteer Dave Silva and I compared foam-reduction techniques, tilting plastic cups under the Budweiser spigots. Clumsy with the tap, booze splashed onto my knuckles and knees. My mermaid was reduced to a gangrenous blue-green smear.
“Time goes by real quickly,” said Silva, doling out another cup of Bud Lite.
And it did. By 3pm, I was ready to betray my vegetarian principles and down a sumptuous bowl of shrimp scampi before joining the trash crew – a posse of teen boys, all Gilroy wrestlers, who welcomed me aboard their garbage-littered trailer, kicking aside a water bottle loaded with suspicious yellow fluid.
“Ew,” said Aaron Gonzalez, 13. “I sure hope that’s beer.”
We lurched forward at a breakneck pace, tractor wheels spinning faster and faster uphill, as the boys goaded the driver, 18-year-old Tim Caspary – “Cranberry” – to put the pedal to the metal. I gripped the railing, giggling, then slid forward, kidney-to-railing, as Caspary stopped abruptly to chat up a blonde hawking programs. Trash skittered across the floor.
“Is that your girlfriend, Cranberry?” asked 10-year-old Jacob Ryan Varela.
Caspary restarted the tractor, and kept driving. “No,” he replied. “Not yet!”
At each stop, the boys nimbly leapfrogged the railings to retrieve the barrels, which clattered angrily as we forged ahead. The boys love it. The dump truck lowered its grim, metal arm and we launched the barrels at it, a few scraps flying back like filthy souvenirs. Strawberry smoothie splatters Varela’s socks.
“After a few hours you don’t smell it – but your parents do,” said Gonzalez, adding, “I do it for my coach. He’s awesome.”
We circled back to the cook-off stage, where Cranberry stopped to relieve me of trash duty. Six jobs and five hours later, I have been baptized with beer, schooled in arithmetic, scorned as an artist, and even crowned Pimp Queen. There’s only one thing, it seems, that I missed.
“You didn’t get to the nasty part,” Gonzalez informed me, disappointed. “When the barrels are full of beer and stuff.”
Oh well.
