Bank Holiday Monday

I’ve been noticing recently that when you look very closely at my street and its corner with sixth avenue (a monstrous straight road that turns slightly to the left as it heads south but bolts like a runway north, a rectangle of light at the end of it, miles ahead through the buildings) there are quiet corners, little doorways that do not want to be noticed, places that are fatigued and have run dry.

On the ground floor of my building for instance, where there used to be an Italian restaurant, there is a mobile phone shop. They have the customary signs of the general phone shop, the t-mobile this and the at&t that, but the windows they have on to the street below are narrow and clouded with plants and grilles. They are often closed and do not invite customers in. I have, in my ten months or so living here, never seen a customer inside their shop, with its wooden floors and two un-sat-on chairs. I went in there once to borrow a key when I was locked out and everyone was charming, but the air was dead, the display cabinets locked, their keys probably in a mess in some drawer. So it has always been a quiet shop, but last week, it turned its back on commerce completely, locking its door at all times and putting up a small white handwritten sign that says, please forgive us, we are doing a major renovation, we have no prepaid cards. In other words, turn around, young friend, and walk away, there is nothing to see. I wonder what they are planning, whether the shop is dying or planning a rebirth, finished or a chrysalis, or whether it was ever really a shop at all, it certainly never sold anything.

And across the street, next to the diner and the laundry place and wedged in between a noisy basketball court where scouts come to find the next outrageous star, is a dead park. The Golden Swan park is always closed. It occupies a corner of New York City and has grown high green leafs and walls to make little spaces, close to its brown pebbled soil, that are quieter and damp in the rain. There is a bench visible inside the greenery but no one sits there, the railings are too high to comfortably climb and on the weekends are hooked up to the back of lousy colourful pictures of mountains and rings of fire, sold sparingly to those crowds that come past, by artists who have nothing to say. I don’t know who had the idea for the Golden Swan, it looks like a neighbourhood project left behind. It has survived sadly into the next community, who will one day just whack it down and pop in a new restaurant with a couple of flats on top. No one will know what to say in defence of the Golden Swan: it is a locked in patch of green it is protected from the people who need it. It has been so protected that no one knows how to use it or how to think about it, only to walk past it, perhaps only with a feeling of guilt at their dismay for an unused whirl of plants in a crowded city that is mainly stone, concrete and steel.

The other place which is cutting itself out of the crowds is Gristedes, the supermarket. And unlike the phone shop and the park, who have wearied or become afraid of people, Gristedes hates them. It is a supermarket that has never been burgeoning or clean. It has always been off-white, its aisles crowded in with annoying things like huge packs of paper plates, barrels of coffee that look good only for armies or protests. Now Gristedes is turning against us. I have tried to avoid it because of the capricious, random loathing of its vegetable prices – I once paid two dollars and eight six cents for a yellow pepper, and no one could tell me why, the teller advised me to shop in Brooklyn.

So I have always been wary of the place, taking what I know is safe – the unhappy strips of chicken meat, occasionally a damp handful of mince and two large potatoes, curry sauce. The other day, though, I was forced to pop in and I stood, waiting to pay, watching the place disintegrate. My cashier’s card reader wasn’t working so paying became Byzantine, the sort of process that might have found favour in a dying Tsarist government department. First my card went into the hand of the teller, who took my receipt and left her till to go to the manager’s desk to queue behind another teller who was similarly equipped with paper and card. Then a few minutes later, the swipe, the walk back, the cashback question, the re-walk back, the press and wait and print, and then back-back again for the signature. No pen. The borrowed pen. The standing still at the till, fingers rattling the pad with an infinite series of numbers, again and again, more and more, spelling pi, mega-maths, high speed water torture, the till refusing to open, the walk away, the borrowing of the key, the walking back, the opening of the till, the stalling, hand-outstretched-holding-card-and-receipt but not quite giving, because of the lingering doubt, the question unanswerable, had she done everything that she was supposed to do? Was I cleared to leave this place? This place where they stack the newspapers after the tills, so you always forget to buy one but by god will you never turn around, never, never will you never head back into this so-soviet system.

That was a few weeks ago, and bad enough. But Saturday night, late was worse. I was cooking fish with Coco, but we burned the bread so I went for more, first to the nice place but then when it was shut, to Gristedes, to buy a Portuguese hero roll, which are, I know, not part of the wilder range of goods. To the till, with some salt as well. I stood behind a well-dressed man with the bleached spiky hair and black-framed glasses of a forty-year-old production character on the make. He was wearing jeans and a very clean white long sleeved t-shirt, beaming happily and I thought supportively, at the cashier while she bawled at him because the last customer, a woman, had come to her with one box of cereal which were on a deal (two for one) and asked for her one box to be free, because all the teller had to do was “punch it in…”

“Punch it in!!??” The teller was saying to the man in white, “What the fuck, bitch! This is my job, this is how I pay my bills, I ain’t gonna, damn! She made me mad. Damn. You buy two, bitch…I ain’t gonna….”

The man kept beaming and she rang his stuff through – 17 dollars 83 cents. Meanwhile the next customer arrived behind me, loading up the conveyor with frozen goods, chops, pizza, chips, red tough bags wet with melting ice, blocky goods, white hard meat inside. And as we waited for the 17 dollars, it became clear that the white-dressed man was still beaming, and was he? He was just so slightly slumped against the conveyor belt, and his hand was in his wallet, reaching
at the speed of
this
to find one dollar after
one
doll-
lar bills…

It was heart breaking. It was awful. She looked at me and raised her eyebrows, deliver me, she was praying, deliver me from the demons. And then the man reached into his pocket and flopped, apologetically, a hundred dollar bill onto the belt and seemed to think better of it.

Uh huh.

But the teller grabbed it – “I’m taking this!” she said in straight terms and marched off for the change. We in the queue all got a grin from the bleached man. The teller came back and counted out the change like a stream of insults and banged my hero through the till. I was done soon and, as I walked to the door, she reached for the first hill of the range of frozen goods that had been building behind me.

As she beeped it through in a strong, two-armed gesture, the customer said, “No, give that back…!” By this point I was at the automatic door which opens slowly out on to the street. All I heard was the yell, the one syllable turned into two, “NE-!!!--XT!!!!”