My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (14 page)

A husky man in a blue jumpsuit came up to the worktable and said, “Yo, Jerry, I’ve got something with your name on it.” Jerry kicked his way through the lettuce leaves, and the two men walked past the dairy case to the produce section.

The man in the jumpsuit was Michael Singleton, and he was delivering from Loi Banana/Global Tropicals of Brooklyn. Most of the produce at Sunshine Market, and at most supermarkets in New York, comes from Hunts Point Market in the Bronx, where the wholesalers gather every morning before dawn. Loi Banana/Global Tropicals brings citrus, specialty items, and a few things that Jerry doesn’t find to his liking at Hunts Point. Michael had deposited thirty cases of fruits in the aisle beside the produce section—Ruby Red grapefruits, Don Antonio’s Delight Quality Cantaloupes, Seald Sweet Oranges, Qual-A-Key Limes, and Bonita’s Pride Tomatoes. One stack was strictly bananas and tropicals.

Michael handed Jerry an order form. Jerry wiped his hands on his pants and took the papers. He had lettuce leaves on his shoes, strawberry stains on his jeans, and something green on the front of his shirt. When he read the order form, he groaned and said, “Twenty-three dollars for apples?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Twenty-three? You got no heart.”

“I don’t make the rules. I just collect the money.”

Bruce Mitchnick, the assistant produce manager, was walking past, advising a woman on how to peel a beet. Toney was following behind him, checking the seal on a bottle of Deer Park water for a nervous woman who wanted him to assure her it was safe. Bruce Mitchnick is small and solid and sometimes wears a weight lifter’s leather belt while he works, which when he is hoisting a melon or a case of tomatoes gives him the aspect of a gladiator confronting vegetables. For twelve years, Bruce owned a produce market in Kew Gardens. He started in the business as a kid growing up in Brooklyn. He loves fruits and vegetables. He is a fountain of produce lore. Once he told me, “Don’t wash anything before you eat it. That’s where all the vitamins are. If you wash the produce, you wash the vitamins away.” Another time he said, “People are afraid of broccoli rabe, but I know for a fact it’s delicious.”

Jerry was saying, “Hey, Mike, what I need from you is five
platanos,
ten bananas, one calabaza, three avocados, one wax yucca, one coconut, two apples, and three oranges.” He meant cases.

Michael pointed at the stacks and said, “Right here.”

Bruce stopped his beet discourse and said, “Jerry, take a look at these gorgeous strawberries.”

Jerry said, “I can’t look at strawberries. I’m too heartsick about these apples for twenty-three.”

The woman with Bruce grabbed his elbow and said, “Don’t leave me now. I’ve got the beets out of the water, and so now what?”

One unwritten law in supermarkets is that whatever is just being unloaded and is not yet marked and not ready to sell is exactly the thing that people want. Being boxed and waiting to be unpacked makes all products irresistibly attractive to shoppers. Within seconds, four or five people were circling the stack that Michael had deposited. A woman with glittering eyeglasses got hold of half a banana sticking out of the top of the crate. Jerry shooed her away. A moment later, a pear-shaped man in a peacoat grabbed it. It did not budge.

Michael said, “Jerry, sign off for me, because I got to get back to Brooklyn.”

The pear-shaped man let go of the banana, looked at Jerry, and said, “I have to tell you, I have a problem with this.”

Jerry said, “Mister, there are plenty of bananas out. There are bananas out you can get to.”

The man said, “No, I don’t want any bananas. I was just thinking to myself, Why doesn’t he ever play any Al Jolson here? Sinatra I hear plenty, but I don’t think there’s as much Jolson as I’d like, and I’m here every day.”

Jerry signed the produce order form, and Michael wiggled his hand truck out from under the boxes and rolled it away.

A WEATHER MAP
of Sunshine Market would show considerable variety. In the big walk-in dairy refrigerator, which is called “the dairy box,” the temperature is thirty-eight degrees. In the produce box, it is about forty and slightly damp. In the frozen box, in the basement, where the frozen food is stored, it is below zero and breezy. In the meat box, it is thirty-seven degrees. In the cutting room, where the butchers and wrappers work, it is exactly the temperature you would like it to be if you were going to a college football game in the Midwest and were wearing a sweater, corduroy pants, a muffler, mittens, and a hat. To the meat crew it feels absolutely normal. In fact, most of them can no longer stand ordinary room temperature; within a few minutes, they break into a sweat.

The butchers at Sunshine Market are Bill Getty, Richard Schindler, and Alfonce Spicciatie. Mariana Rivera is the meat wrapper. Bill, Alfonce, and Mariana started working at the store the day it opened; Richard joined them a few months later. The four of them have been working cheek by jowl in the cutting room, which measures twenty feet by forty, for a decade—a fact that, when I pointed it out to them, evoked this response from Richard: “I guess that’s true. Hey, whaddya know?”

Lack of sentimentality may actually be an advantage when you’re spending eight hours a day around carcasses. Once, Bill, who is the meat manager, was telling me what I thought was going to be a sweet story about a little old lady who approached him one Thanksgiving for advice on cooking her bird. His summation: “I said to her, ‘Hey, lady, you’re seventy-two bleeping years old. I’m sure this isn’t your first turkey.’ ”

The beef at Sunshine Market is from Iowa. The chicken is from Maryland. The pork, according to Bill, is from wherever you can find a dead pig. Richard is from Ozone Park, Queens. Alfonce is from Brooklyn. Bill is from Astoria. Mariana is from Ecuador. All of them came to their positions by the ordinary route—that is, they learned meat cutting right out of high school, because it was a good, solid trade—except for Mariana, who had been a housewife and a mother until one day when she was out shopping and someone at her butcher shop offered her a job. Mariana is trim and has a high-fashion rooster-style haircut and a taste for snug jeans and tiny, fragile-looking spiky-heeled shoes. At work, she is always dressed as if she could be ready to go to a disco at a moment’s notice. She told me once about how she got started: “When the butcher said this to me about a job, I said, ‘What, me work?’ He said, ‘Yes, you.’ I said, ‘Me? You’re kidding.’ It was really just an accident.” It was a pretty major accident: She has now been a meat wrapper for nineteen years. “I didn’t want any job. It was all just an accident,” she said again. As she was talking, she was flipping a plastic-foam platter of gooey pink veal cutlets onto the wrapping machine, pulling plastic wrap around it, and then pressing the package onto a flat plate at the front of the machine, which melts the wrap shut. The plate was the warmest thing in the room. She flipped another foam package onto the warm plate and said, “Then I joined the union, and now I’m in it for good.”

The meat people spend most of their time in the cutting room, which is in the left rear corner of the store. On occasion, they will step out to take care of some meat-related or personal concern, and when they do they rarely bother to take off their cutting coats, which are calf-length white smocks that snap up the front and are splattered and smeared with blood. Bill attended the store’s anniversary party in his bloodied coat. He is a big, tall man with considerable presence. In every snapshot taken at the party, Bill and his bloody coat loom. In some of the pictures, it almost looks as if a homicidal maniac had dropped in for cake and ice cream.

The meat people are separated from the rest of the market by their body temperatures, by their union (Amalgamated Meat Cutters), and by a swinging door leading into the cutting room. The door has a small oblong window. The butchers can look out on the market as they work, but the window’s shape and size and glassiness make the store look as if it were a show on television. Describing what they see going on in the store, the butchers sound as if they were discussing a sitcom. One day, they watched a shoplifter load five pounds of shrimp into a plastic bag and then vanish. “In my life, I never saw a person pick through shrimp in a more meticulous way,” Richard says. The next day, the man came back four or five times, neatly palming packages of boneless shell steak on each visit. The butchers marveled at his switch from surf to turf. Then they passed along their observations to Angel, who chased the guy out and lost him on the avenue but found the shell steak stockpiled in the Dumpster behind the store. The shrimp were never recovered.

ONE THURSDAY MORNING
,
Stephen C. Costa, who is the district sales manager of the Best Foods Baking Group, which is a unit of Best Foods, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of CPC International, which is a multinational grocery products corporation, had a new chocolate-chip toaster cake he wanted to bring to Herb Spitzer’s attention. Thursday morning is salesmen’s time at Sunshine Market. It used to be almost a ritual: On Thursday, the salesmen would stack up outside Herb’s office door, shuffling brochures and presentation folders praising New Liquid Tide, or Cycle Lite dog food with real chicken, or Redpack canned tomatoes, and he would usher each man in and sit through the pitch. When Herb was younger, he got a kick out of Thursday mornings, but ever since he turned sixty he has had a greedy feeling about time. More often than not these days, Herb has Toney tell the salesmen to send in their material and he will call them back if he’s interested. “I could spend my life up here with the salesmen, if I let them,” he says. “And who needs it?”

Stephen Costa, therefore, had got lucky, and he knew it. He is youngish, curly haired, bespectacled, beefy, and on the shy side when it comes to salesmanship. His district is Queens, and he oversees fourteen delivery routes. All told, each week he peddles forty-five thousand pounds of Thomas’ products—including Thomas’ English muffins and Toast ’R Cakes and Sahara pita breads. Forty-five thousand pounds sounds like a lot of dough to me, but Stephen Costa would like to sell more.

Herb tapped his pencil on a pad of paper and said, “Okay, tell me about it. You’re a pretty good guy, I’ve heard.”

Costa said, “You can discount the chocolate-chip toaster cakes if you want.” He swung his chair around. Shoulder to shoulder, he and Herb faced the little window that affords a view of the whole store. The lines at the register were three deep. Someone had just broken a ketchup bottle in Aisle 4.

“We’ll go regular price. Next.”

“Next, uh,” Costa said, stumbling. “Okay, next, uh, the following week we have Toast ’R Cakes on sale. The regular retail is one twenty-nine.”

Herb said, “Fine. We’ll come out at ninety-nine, and we’ll do an ad in our circular. Arrange for your route man to get it. Next?”

“We have a two-week window on Sahara pita breads again. White and wheat. We’d like it in the circular also.”

“We’re a small little operation here,” Herb said. “We can’t do a circular every single time. Is that it? You don’t have much ammunition for your presentation here, do you?”

“I’m kind of new. Let’s see, I do want to talk to you about another English muffin. The Thomas’ twin-pack.”

“What can you do for me?”

“Twenty cents off, plus another dime if you do a coupon. I’m not able to offer much more. I’m the new kid on the block.”

“I’d like to go at one ninety-nine, but if your price is one ninety-seven and a half, I’ll have to go at two oh-nine. At the lower price, you can have a dump display and move a lot of product.”

The intercom rang, and while Herb was answering it, Costa flipped through his papers for another muffin to flog. The call was from Toney, telling Herb that another sales representative was downstairs and eager to meet with him. “Tell him he’d be wasting his time,” Herb said into the phone.

There was a knock on the door, and someone called out, “Herb, it’s Ronnie from Pepsi. Key Food is going ninety-nine on liters.”

“Then so will I. Have your guy mark them.”

He didn’t bother opening the door. The transaction was completed through drywall.

Costa signed his paperwork on the muffins and stood up to leave. Herb glanced at him and said, “Nice job.”

Herb’s office is a narrow second-floor wedge in the back of the store, above the trash compactor and the dairy and produce boxes. The wall separating it from the trash compactor isn’t totally sealed, so the loud growl and crunch of the compactor is as audible as if it were in the office. The compactor runs, on and off, all day long. Conversations in the office that begin in a normal speaking tone often shift into a shout at some point. “Nice job” was a shout.

As Costa was going down the stairs, a man named Don Vitale was coming up. Don Vitale is the Mazola man. He is also the Skippy man and the Hellmann’s man. He and Costa don’t know each other, but, as it happens, both of them work for CPC International, which owns Mazola as well as Thomas’.

Vitale is a strapping fellow, and he was wearing a loose raincoat. He and his coat seemed to take up most of the office. The coat was brushing along the top of the desk. His head was brushing the ceiling. Taking his files out of his briefcase, he knocked a chair backward. As he picked up the chair, he said, “Herb, we’ve got a Mazola promotion to the Hispanic market. We’ve got these ballot boxes, and you put them with an aisle display, and we’re giving away bicycles and twenty-five-dollar grocery coupons and whatever. It’s a tie-in with the Spanish television show that Mazola helps sponsor, called
Sábado Gigante.
”