Johnny’s Foodmaster is one of my favorite places to go, because it is both a grocery store and carpeted. These are two categories of places that I have plenty of exposure to, but rarely in combination. I think you would, should you come up to Somerville, Massachusetts and walk down just the salad dressing and garnish aisle of Johnny’s Foodmaster, understand why I visit this store more than is probably necessary, and certainly more than I visit my parents, who I also love.
Back home in Texas grocery stores are, more accurately, supermarkets, large and modern and clean. I applied to work as a night stocker at a supermarket near my house one summer, and was given a job, despite being weak and inexperienced – I believe the store manager was impressed that I was planning on going to Harvard in the fall, and in any case was in somewhat of “a staffing jam.”
But low and behold! The jam fixed itself, and he was able to hire an experienced night stocker who was moving up from another Texas town, a town in which he had made a name for himself as a “good hire.” You might wonder why, if he was so happy and such a good worker at this other supermarket, did he have to come up and take my job? Good question, and one I am afraid I cannot satisfactorily answer.
He, the manager who had just hired me for the job he had subsequently given away, called me a couple of nights before I was to start work and told me I could now expect to work as a checker.
Let me tell you something about working as a checker: working as a checker is not as good as working as a night stocker. For starters, the pay’s worse, which should have been enough for the manager to know that he was going to have to sweet talk me – a Harvard acceptee, remember – into taking the job. But he didn’t. He assumed that I would take the job; in fact, he did his best to phrase it as if I were simply being repositioned. Repositioned, I think you will agree, is at best a euphemistic way of thinking about the thing at hand, and at worst a filthy lie, in light of the fact(s) that:
a) Night stockers earn more than checkers. Much, much more.
b) Night stockers are nocturnal, working late at night, from midnight to 6am, which is awesome.
c) Rumor has it that night stockers form a sort of brotherhood of the nocturnal and manually employed, a brotherhood that leads to all sorts of strange, fun shenanigans in the grocery store because after all, at 3am, the night stockers own the store. I feel that this would be a good point to list some of these shenanigans, but I have never actually been a night stocker, so I cannot.
d) Night stockers don’t have to wear uniforms, or deal with customers, or stand in one place for hours and hours at a time.
e) This is related to c), but it deserves it’s own spot on this list, a list that has already made me extremely sad all over again I wasn’t able to be a night stocker. Night stockers own the store. They tend to it, find specific items that have been put in short supply by consumer demand, and replenish as needed. Night stockers walk the aisles when nobody else can, when nobody else is even awake, and they straighten the boxes on the shelves, make things presentable. They, more than store managers, know the store. I am pretty sure they leave little jokes for each other while stocking, that they push their buddy’s favorite brand of detergent ever so slightly from the shelf so that it stands out, etc.
When the manager called me and told me about what had happened, I was polite – this was, after all, my boss – and said okay and said I would see him Monday. I called him the next day , Saturday, I believe, and told him that I would not, in fact, see him Monday, as I wasn’t going to take the job. I had been hired to stock, I told him. He cut me off: “Well, I’m sorry you wasted both of our time.” Sic, incidentally.
Oh, snap!
And, I think you’ll agree, unearned, but man, did that hurt at the time. Had I let him down? It seemed likely that he would have a hard time finding a replacement checker on such short notice, and, no matter how you sliced it, that inconvenience was on my head. In any case, I got a job at a movie theater – an art house movie theater, no less, and was very happy for working there the rest of the summer. But I never went to that supermarket again, despite its proximity to my house.
Anyway, supermarkets in suburban or quasi-suburban Texas communities, the supermarkets that will always be the benchmark for supermarkets for me, are large, clean, well-stocked and well-ordered. They are visited by certain clientele at certain times of day – for example, if you go to the supermarket my family went to before noon, you would encounter many, many retirees, who, having served our communities well throughout their useful years, now cannot for the life of them decide which brand of chicken broth they want. For fuck’s sake, it’s chicken broth. It’s juice left over from boiling a motherfucking chicken. These are two things I never think, when trapped behind a wall of falling-down flesh. Let alone say. What matters is that the same walls of falling-down flesh visit the same, or similar supermarkets all over where I’m from, like more depressing than usual clockwork.
While these places can come to have character – certain store managers run tighter ships than others, that sort of thin - the character is incidental, an accident.
Which is not to say you can’t find it. If you’re the kind of customer I am – unassuming, repeat – you can’t help but stumble ashamedly across the occasional genuine interaction between two baggers on break, walking in front of you as you head towards the parking lot. Or notice that one of the checkers, the tall one who, despite being like seven feet tall, is probably fourteen, is in love with the speech inpedimented redhead who unfailingly bags your bread with your bleach, perhaps for the sake of the alphabet. That sort of thing. The point is, whatever particularness, or community, you might dig up from these places of business are discouraged by the very hygiene of their design.
Foodmaster is character first, place of commerce second. I understand that it makes sense that neighborhood supermarkets serve as emblems for the neighborhoods they serve, like barbershops for black people in movies or coffee shops for white people on television. It stands to reason that this would hold even more true for a place like Foodmaster, which is in the middle of a fairly characterless and busy neighborhood, one of those sections of town that’s constantly walking the edge of the knife between working class and dilapidated. The kind of neighborhood desperately in need of thematic unity, in other words. You would think that, but you’d be wrong – a largely characterless neighborhood just seems to give Foodmaster license to develop it’s own - to use a word that makes me want to stab myself in the tongue - flavor, one that speaks only and loudly for itself, the neighborhood at large be damned.
Like all families, Foodmaster has Carl who Screams, a guy I encountered on one of my first visits. I was at the checker counter, patiently waiting for my peanut butter dinner to get rung up, when a guy started screaming, very loudly, in the produce section. He didn’t seem to be screaming anything in particular, nor was the scream all that expressive. It wasn’t an angry scream, or a scared one. More than any scream I’ve heard, it was a scream that stood for itself: I am a man screaming in a produce aisle. Catching my startle and not wanting any truck with the unfamiliarity it revealed, told me what was going on. “That’s Carl. He screams.” And she gave me a look, as if daring me to explore the manner beyond the explanation given, to presume with further questioning that there was anything at all extraordinary about it. Carl stopped screaming presently, and I left for home before he could start up again.
If you want hummus, you should go to Foodmaster. Foodmaster will pretty much set you up, regardless of your specific hummus needs.
I was coming home late one night at 11:30 or midnight, and I walked by the Foodmaster, as I did pretty much every time I walked home. Things close surprisingly early in Boston, and Foodmaster is no exception – at 8:45 they start herding you out, and none too gently. By the time I was walking by the store had been closed for two or more hours; all the day employers were gone and two men were standing outside the entrance, under the overhang, smoking and talking. You could tell by the way they held themselves that they belonged there – they worked there – and I realized as I walked on and saw a man sitting casually on top of the little conveyer belt usually used to move food from basket to checker, leafing through a magazine and swinging his feet so that they banged against the counter, that these were night stockers. A woman, behind another counter, ten yards in and wavy through the glass, was idly poking little holes in the veneer with store-owned scissors. I knew her – she wasn’t wearing her uniform, but she was one of the checkers. Evidently she was friends, perhaps dating or married to, one of the men who would soon be rebuilding the store.
I remembered wanting to be a night stocker, and I wondered what, exactly, the deal was with night stocking – did these night stockers resent having to do their work in front of the big glass windows that showed them to the street, a fairly busy street, as they went about their normally covert stocking duties. And then I continued past, because this was a community I was not part of, which is a pretty silly thing to say, because of course there are any number of communities I am not part of. I am not a doctor. I am not a cab driver. I am not gay. I will never drive a big rig. But the thing is, nobody ever called me to ask me if I would ensure a delivery of produce to San Diego before the end of the week, before Saturday if I can possibly swing it, then taken it away, changed their mind. And I don’t have to walk by a secret cabal of truckers preparing to drive cross-country and joking about the many failings of Smokey on my way home from my non-trucker job, a job I also love.
