My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere (10 page)

The people who shop at Sunshine Market are in touch with their needs. They march up to Toney Murphy, the store’s manager, dozens of times a day and express themselves. This candidness has inspired Herb Spitzer, who owns Sunshine Market, to declare that the grocery business is the easiest business in the world, because the customers will tell you exactly what they want: “The yuppie, the Hispanic, the Asian, everyone knows how to say, ‘Do you have . . .’ Everyone but the Irish, who for some reason don’t like to say.”

“I want birthday candles,” a sharp-looking blond woman in a sheared-beaver jacket says to Toney Murphy one morning.

“I keep ordering them, and they keep not showing up.”

“Well, okay,” she says, looking at her groceries. “I’ll make do with these.” In her cart are three green peppers and a half gallon of milk.

A husky woman with a florid complexion stops Toney, laying a meaty hand on his shoulder. “Toney, I want the Bounce without the odor. You promised to get it. The smelly kind makes my daughter wheezy.”

“Without the odor? I thought you said
with
the odor.”

“No, not smelly, Toney. You know my Cheryl.”

A man in a ragged windbreaker wants prayer candles. Aisle 8.

“Do you have sparkling cider?”

“Similac?”

“Aluminum foil?”

“Wasa Crisp Rye?”

“Salt? I mean, for the sidewalk.”

Toney knows everything. Toney even knows some things he doesn’t know, like Spanish. When the questions come to him in Spanish—half of Sunshine’s shoppers are Hispanic—he makes up a genuine-sounding answer and points toward one aisle or another. Doing so, he conveys so much kindliness and benign authority that he is probably forgiven each time he directs a tuna-fish shopper into the thick of the English muffins. He would like to get it right, but at the moment he doesn’t have time to take remedial Spanish. Anyhow, to be fair, given the neighborhood, he would also need remedial Korean and Hindi and Russian and Vietnamese. Irritated people with emphatic statements in any language gravitate toward Toney. A tiny woman with a puff of white hair lands on him one afternoon: “You owe me six dollars! I’m a cardiac and I don’t want to get excited! I want what’s due me! I know what I bought! I have evidence! I went home last night and called Washington to report this!”

“What did they tell you in Washington?” Toney asks.

“They told me to take it up with the manager,” she says.

“I am the manager.”

Now she freezes with surprise. He does look a little young and a little informal for the job. A light-skinned black man of thirty-five, Toney is slight and slump shouldered, with a foxish, fine-featured face, a wispy mustache, a slicked-back ponytail, and a daily uniform of blue jeans, old tennis shoes, and a beat-up semi-official-looking blue smock. However, this is not the time to point out to Mrs. Potential Heart Attack that Toney has spent twenty years with Herb Spitzer—ten at Sunshine and, before that, ten at Food Pageant, Herb’s previous store—and that he knows the store backward and forward. Instead, this is the time to expedite the encounter, because standing behind the woman now is a deliveryman with seventeen boxes of De An’s pork products on a hand truck and the look on his face of a guy who is double-parked and is due some money.

“Hey, Toney,” the pork man says. “Let me know when you have a minute for us lowly delivery guys.”

Toney counts out six dollars, and the woman leaves, trembling but not yet fibrillating. Watching her walk out, he mutters, “My first beer tonight is on her.”

Crazy people gravitate toward Toney. He is often accosted by neighborhood schizophrenics, who ask him to inspect their groceries for embedded alien messages or government-authorized concealed poisons before they risk the checkout line. In part, this is because Toney is very approachable. But it’s also true that crazy people just gravitate toward supermarkets, because even though supermarkets are private businesses, they provide a sort of semipublic sanctuary where anyone can do what a crazy person might want to do—that is, show up frequently, behave idiosyncratically, and spend untold hours roaming around. Supermarkets are complicated but simple, totally familiar but also strange, and full of big, orderly displays of discrete and interesting items—conditions particularly appealing to an eccentric mind, and ones that I found myself appreciating after spending several weeks at Sunshine Market.

Philosophically, Toney takes the position that the store has to tolerate things other businesses do not. In a place that provides something as basic as groceries, nearly every variety of customer and habit has to be accommodated. People who run supermarkets can, if they choose to, make something of this. They can attain a position of stewardship in their neighborhoods. Everyone knows them. Everyone sees them all the time. Everyone relies on them. They know weird details of everyone’s lives—who is on a diet and who has company for dinner and who has a fetish for Chuckles Jelly Rings. Everyone is affected by a supermarket’s failure or success: A neighborhood without a supermarket is on its way to not being a neighborhood anymore. Often the first places that people break into or burn down in riots are supermarkets—the rioters break in because supermarkets are full of desirable products, and they burn them down because grocery stores are so vital to a neighborhood that if they are run badly or exploitatively or meanly, they are manifestly despised. Toney and Herb are of the stewardship school, which explains Toney’s forbearance regarding nearly everything he encounters in the course of his workday, including messages from Mars in the groceries. “What are you going to do?” he once said to me. “Crazy or sane, everyone is entitled to have a grocery store.”

NORTH OF THIRTY-SEVENTH AVENUE
, two miles from Sunshine Market, is La Guardia Airport. Airplanes sometimes circle over the store as they make their final landing approach. South of Thirty-seventh, one block away, is the number 7 train, which runs on elevated tracks from Flushing to Manhattan, twenty-five feet in the air. Thirty-seventh Avenue is entirely earthbound. It is a main thoroughfare in Jackson Heights, but two people could play catch across it without getting winded. A cardiologist examining the avenue might recommend a bypass operation. There is a lane of traffic in each direction, a lane on each side for on-street parking, where there is usually a buildup of double- and triple-parked cars and trucks, and clots of pedestrians breaking apart at intersections and flowing into the street.

Almost all the buildings that line Thirty-seventh are squat, block-long commercial rectangles that were built in the 1920s. Except for a few blocks here and there that were leveled during the sixties and then rebuilt with largish modern structures, the buildings on Thirty-seventh remain pleasingly uniform and old-fashioned, but over the years they have acquired plate-glass windows and aluminum façades; grates and security bars; long strings of multicolored plastic flags; and neon, plastic, and cardboard signs in English, Hindi, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Chinese. The array is dazzling. On most blocks, the boxy buildings are divided into several little businesses, so they end up looking like those long eight-packs of assorted Kellogg’s cereals. Traveling on Thirty-seventh from the western edge of Jackson Heights (the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) to the eastern edge (Junction Boulevard), among the places you would pass are Subzi Mandi Indo-Pak Grocery, Top Taste Chinese, Pizza Boy, La Uruguaya Bakery, the Ultimate Look, Oh Bok Jung Korean Restaurant, La Gata Golosa, Luigi’s Italian Restaurant, Growing Farm, Chivito d’Oro, Different Ladies’ Fashion, Familiar Pharmacy, and a store that is called Hello Kids on one sign, Hola Bebé on another, and something in Korean above the door.

Sunshine Market is on the block between Eighty-fifth and Eighty-sixth streets. Next door is Kenny’s Fish, which used to be run by a young Korean family and is now owned by Pakistanis but has a sign out front advertising
PESCADO FRITO
. Two doors down is Anita Cassandra’s Botanica La Milagrosa—a one-stop religious shop that sells Blessed Spray, Good Luck Bath, and Double Fast Luck Spray with Genuine Zodiac Oil. Next to the Botanica is Crystal Furniture. Up the block are J. C. Appliances, which is owned by Pakistani immigrants; Gemini II bar, which has one little dark window, mostly blocked by a neon Budweiser sign; and Winston Bagels, which has been on the corner since 1960. Across the street are Quality Farm, a Korean-owned greengrocer; Pic-a-Pak, an Italian butcher shop; Cavalier Restaurant, which has been open since 1950 and offers
CONTINENTAL CUISINE AND ROMANTIC LIVE PIANO MUSIC
; Fermoselle Travel, which offers
DIVORCIOS, INCOME TAX, NOTARIO PUBLICO, INMIGRACION, TICKETS;
Charles’ Unisex Hairstylist, where you can get something done to you called “dimensional hair coloring”; and A. Wallshein, DDS.

Sunshine is the biggest store on the block. It looks like just about any grocery store anywhere: a big, unadorned, flat storefront, with two inset doors, divided by a thin metal handrail, and with huge plate-glass windows, which are always covered with paper signs advertising the week’s specials. One week, some of the signs said:

USDA CHOICE SHELL STEAK (WITH TAIL) $2.99 LB.

HARD SLICING TOMATOES “RIPE” 69¢ LB.

SWEET, RED WATERMELON 29¢ LB.

EDY’S ICE CREAM QT. CONT. ALL FLAVORS $1.99

FRESH PORK CALAS (PERNIL) 69¢ LB.

MAZOLA CORN OIL 48 OZ. BOTTLE $1.99

SCOTT PAPER TOWELS “BIG ROLL” 69¢ EA.

BREAKSTONE BUTTER QUARTERS, SWEET OR SALT, 1/2 LB. PKG. 78¢

Supermarket doors seem to have a magnetic field around them. At Sunshine, there are always a couple of people at the door, waiting for the bus, or looking for a taxi, or staying out of the rain, or thinking about going in, or thinking about coming out, or reading the bulletin board, which is along the outside wall to the left of the doors. The bulletin board makes good reading. This same week, there were notices for a lost pit bull (“Friendly Gentle 1-Yr. Old Male”), an available baby-sitter (“Señora Responsable Cuida Niños”), two tickets to Ecuador, and an entire collection of Bruce Lee posters and memorabilia for sale (“Includes Many Items Too Rare to List Here”).

One Monday morning, I got to the market at seven forty-five—fifteen minutes before opening time. There were already trucks from Polaner/B&G Pickles, Ingegneri & Son, Pepsi-Cola, Damascus Bakery, and Star Soap and Prayer Candle parked out front. The B&G driver, Wally Wadsworth, had started his morning at B&G’s warehouse in Roseland, New Jersey, and was delivering sweet gherkin midgets and kosher dills. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, had come from a warehouse in the Bronx with fifty cases of assorted groceries. Ronnie Chamberlain and Chris Laluz had started in Long Island City and had Pepsi liters. Jim Hazar had come from the Damascus Bakery in Brooklyn, with fresh pita bread. Manny Ziegelman, of Star Soap and Prayer Candle, had also come from Brooklyn. This particular morning, he had a mixed case of Miraculous Mother, Lucky Buddha, and Fast Luck prayer candles for Sunshine Market in his truck.

Traffic along most of Thirty-seventh was blocked. The delivery trucks took up all the parking spaces in front of the store. A solid line of cars sat in each traffic lane. Across the street, cars were parked at every meter, and a man double-parked in a piebald Mustang was reading the
News
in a state of leisurely repose; the cars moving down the street were forced around him, like a stream diverted around a rock. Another man was walking in the street between the parked cars and the moving cars, leading a scrawny, needle-nosed dog wearing a jeweled collar. On the sidewalk, five Asian kids were running toward Winston Bagels, which has pumpernickel bagels, garlic bialys, and five video games. Two elderly women were crossing from the entrance of an apartment building on Eighty-fifth Street toward the market. Both women were pushing Kadi-Carts—those fold-up rolling grocery carts that people in New York use, to make up for not having houses with driveways, large cars with trunks, or grocery stores with boys to carry the bags for them.

The man with a clipboard waiting for the deliveries at Sunshine was Bruce Reed. He has a silver crew cut and a poker face. Clustered behind him was a group of small Peruvian men. Bruce is the grocery manager. The small men are known among the people at Sunshine as the “Peruvian Army.” A few days a week, when Sunshine is receiving large grocery deliveries, the Peruvian Army is brought in to help open the boxes and put things on the shelves—to do what grocery people call “packing out.” Some Mondays, if the weekend was particularly busy, Bruce could use an airborne division.

On this Monday, Bruce walked over to the Ingegneri truck and peered in. Ronnie Chamberlain, walking past him with a loaded hand truck, craned his neck around his cases of Pepsi and said, “Hey, Bruce, help me out here. I got stuck with a million singles today. Everybody’s giving me singles.”

Bruce ignored him. Wally, the pickle man, walked over and thrust at Bruce a batch of papers to be signed, acknowledging acceptance of delivery of five cases. Bruce scribbled on the forms, said goodbye to Wally, who would be back next Monday with more pickles, and then turned to the Ingegneri truck and began glancing at his clipboard. Jimmy Penny, the Ingegneri driver, stood inside the back of his truck, looking down at Bruce. The boxes were stacked higher than his shoulders. He had one elbow resting on a case of Mazola and one on a case of paper towels. Finally, Bruce cleared his throat and said to Jimmy, “Well, well, well. Okay. Let’s go.”

As Jimmy started unloading cases, two more trucks pulled up—one from Coca-Cola and one from Wonder Bread. Jimmy kept unloading. The Peruvian Army moved into position. The piebald Mustang pulled out, made a U-turn, and disappeared down the street. The store opened. Two more trucks pulled up—Coors and Hostess Cakes. The Wonder Bread guy and the Hostess Cakes guy waved to each other. Jimmy kept unloading cases.