The Weight
Luke Wiget on faith, fajitas, and finding himself while facing a Whole Foods in New York City.
I was stocking groceries at the Chelsea Whole Foods Market finding how fast my head turned on me during drag-out shifts where you’re dragging garbanzo beans forward on a shelf, facing the labels, to have those same cans drop in some dude’s Strand tote only to have to do it all over again a few minutes later.
No headphones on the sales floor, the shifties tell us. So no podcasts or punk records (read: AFI or Good Riddance, I’m not that cool). No cut-offs in the summer, either, like in the California Whole Foods. And no beanies in the winter, even if I’m loading a cooler with kombucha. I’m told by a shift leader who resembles one of the Manning brothers, Peyton or Eli, that it isn’t cultural for me like it is with some of the others, so I can’t wear a knit cap unless I’m breaking down pallets on the loading dock in the snow. And most everyone, they’re too terrified to talk to each other to help with the time we have stacked on top of whatever station the shifty chose to showcase his version of edgy or ironic or classic.
One night this white woman walks around the endcap and calls out. Can I tell her where she can find the fajita bread?
I pull a line of garbanzos forward, spin the front can around. It’s perfect.
Fajita bread? she calls again, slower. Where is it?
Fajita bread? I say.
Fah-hee-tah buh-read, she says.
Maybe it’s my bruised memory marbling this section of my life. I’ve just started a writing program in Greenwich Village after quitting a teaching job in California and playing music and touring the country to move to New York City to try to hump it into my thirties — to try something new. But this older woman, she seems to think I’m dim or more dim than I think I am. She says it again and maybe again. She’s becoming angry, disgusted even.
I’m stock still, depressed again. My dad’s been asking if I can pray when I’m feeling bad this way — try to find the good, violet part of the void rather than the violent, self-hating portion. (Read: half-thoughts on Buddhism mingling with fading evangelicalism — the former is residue from Kerouac, who I learn this same year in the writing classes and talking to people at the bar after the writing classes I shouldn’t care about and it kind of sticks, that he’s no bueno, until I take a workshop with Joyce Johnson, the woman Kerouac was dating when On the Road was published and she’s so cool and wise. She asks us to read Visions of Gerard, the most flickering and painful of Kerouac’s Duluoz books and the saddest novel I’ve ever studied closely. Johnson had taken time to come to conclusions about their past, and time, it’s on her side, not Kerouac’s. But in the last session she shares that maybe it was all the head injuries from football that made Jack act so evil toward the end of his life. She thanks us for being there and we leave and immediately I regret not asking her to sign my copy of her book: Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir.)
I start toward the woman, dressed a lot like Kerouac, I guess, or better yet, a guy about to be in debt for the next two decades — Redwing boots, Pendleton shirt, Levi’s. The woman (I try to recall) in Patagonia pastels, a little overweight, which is rare in Chelsea, where every few days Katie Holmes jogs down from her apartment upstairs, Lululemon head-to-toe, Suri and a bodyguard in tow as she shops produce alongside the mostly sculpted, tan, gay men.
I hook my hands on my apron and encourage the woman to follow. We pass the dry grains and dry beans, the quinoa, and goddamn that superfood is a source of holy meltdowns the year I’m there. We might not have your brand till Wednesday, I apologize again and again. We can’t hardly keep up with demand, and then there’s a Times piece and a Guardian article and subsequent NPR rebuttal about the perfect grain replacement and the people who grow it. After each story, a procession of guilty and redeemed Midtown men commend each other for feeling a catch in their guts for consuming something harvested and then sold by people who can’t afford to eat it themselves.
The woman and I turn a corner and pass the tortilla chips and in front of us the glorious half-aisle set of every kind of tortilla under the sun. Corn, flower, wheat, sprouted wheat, brown rice, gluten-free, locally made, imported — all red, brown, yellow, black bean and white corn tortillas, all such a precious sight. Heaven, after all, is unleavened.
And, God, we need choices. She’s digesting hers.
And I think I understand. I’ve gotten eggy about food. On tour in 2010, a street fight breaks out in an off-brand Kroger in Alabama or Mississippi between me and one of my best friends, the drummer. And it’s over three dollars of something one of us threw into our shared cart. We ruin days rolling through a couple states, agonizing over grocery shopping together, over some bottle of brown mustard or dill pickles or something or other because I’m homesick and he’s sick of me saying so and we both want what we want to eat.
Tortillas, I say, to the woman and wave my hand in front of the silver and white case.
Yes, fajita bread, she says and reaches for her brand.
I last until another weeklong inventory. It’s what finally breaks me down, that dead quiet and (actual) bean counting followed by weighing tons of beef and pork on a scale in the back. And I’m shaky to begin with. A week or two before inventory I convince myself a cyst in my groin is a hernia and a shifty punts me and a clipboard of paperwork to an urgent care around the corner where I’m weighed and then a rushed, Midtown doctor tell me, essentially, Man up, man.
There’s one redeeming bit of dragging soggy boxes of meat in and out of the walk-in freezer. It gives me time to get through Sentimental Education for a class. Unhappy, soaked in blood and guts, I listen to a story about the same. It’s a Flaubert novel a Brooklyn bookseller later tells me is so Williamsburg it isn’t funny. Choose any given night at The Levee, he says about the small, two-for-one hook-up spot by the river. And it’s perfect. All of it. The blood crystals forming on my jeans, his synopsis, the disciplinary write-up I sign because management claims I misweighed the beef, the hernia scare, old white women, and as always, and more. I’m not complaining here, I don’t think. I’m just shopping some ideas — talking about my life — and this is my brand.
The Weight originally appeared in Dinner Bell, an alternative (weird) food writing publication, available to order in print HERE.
Luke Wiget lives in Nashville. His work has appeared in Catapult, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Green Mountains Review, BOMB, The Rumpus, and as always, and more. You can find Luke on Twitter.
Kat Bawden is a photographer and visual artist in Los Angeles.
