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James Fuller, Vendor of the Week.
Photo by J.P. Gritton |
“What brought me here?” James Fuller turns the question over, looking like it’s the first time it’s occurred to him.
“I was in Phoenix watching the Weather Channel.” The Weather Channel? I ask. Fuller nods and a flawlessly friendly smile grows on his face. “It was, like, 90 degrees at 3 a.m.”
Within a few days, Fuller had grabbed a Greyhound bound for Seattle, where he’s been ever since. And I got the sense, as our interview progressed, that Fuller’s trip to Seattle wasn’t the first time that he’d up and gone.
The list of places he’s lived is like some Southern-fried litany: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Houston, Phoenix, Denver. It stands to reason that Fuller’s a Navy man. He’s seen Mombasa, Melbourne, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Hawaii.
“The Navy says you get to see the world,” says Fuller. “The thing they don’t tell you about the Navy is that it takes three months to get from port to port.”
But Seattle, Fuller says, is home. He doesn’t miss the triple-digit temperatures of Phoenix, nor the thumb-sized flying cockroaches of Houston.
In Seattle, Fuller’s southern manners help him sell a lot of papers. He’s so popular with his customers that a few are known to bring out hot plates of food. Fuller had received innumerable Vendor of the Week nominations before I finally caught up with him a couple weeks ago. As our interview draws to a close, I realize I’m mildly disappointed — the guy is just kind of nice to talk to.
When I ask Fuller if there’s anything he’d like to tell his customers, at first he just says, “Thanks.” But after a second, he continues:
“Be safe and be happy. Be good to each other. And the woman’s always right.”
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