City produce

I’ve always been darkly fascinated by seedy super markets. I’m mesmerized by the character of the fleshy people glancing by me, by the crammed rows of generic boxes and cans, by the doors that open automatically  and electronically close you off, away from the hot summer street. I became the family food purchaser in the summer of 1973, when the family was just Barbara and me, just Barbara and me for eleven years, before hungry children. Only once did we go together to the Red Apple market on our corner of 70^th and Amsterdam. I would have been happy to stay there all day, watching the sweating, smoking store manager in his lofty perch in open offices above the cash registers, furtively spying for shoplifters, or negotiating the peanut butter and spices aisle with my shopping cart doing u-turns around cereal box displays. It was like a baseball field to me, so perfectly measured like the distance from home plate to shortstop, shortstop to first. A skilled athlete, like me, could push his cart in and out and around with no errors, squeeze through narrow spaces without knocking over cans of olives or displays of pantyhose. I saw immediately that for Barbara the Red Apple was a manic house of horrors, a place that one escaped before screaming, an odd place where grinning failed actresses with smeary red lipstick on line at the register purchased 20 cans of cat food and only that, where men with wire glasses painstakingly examined bruised fruit while we waited to pass on to the equally bruised lettuce, the damaged tomatoes, the wounded avocado. In the early days of marriage, these are the kinds of things one must learn, and fix. For me, the delights were in the simple, wonderful colors, and the texture of the sticky floors, and the low-hanging florescent lights, and the grey-green tile ceiling, and the big fat bodies, fat multi-colored shoulders banging past, pressing into you and a whiff of someone’s frustrated breath. For me, we were young, married life was grand, the city stank with porn and grit and poverty and rotten fruit and artists, failed and rich, everything transparent and extreme, it all was happening in the aisles of the Red Apple. The colors, egg plant and lime green and razor-yellow and blood, blood reds on the fingernails of the old ex-actress at the register buying cans and cans of cat food.  

For me, it was super. My whole life in front of me, ripe, and full of promise.