Life on Aisle 2 Episode 29: Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer Part One
This blog parses the changes in my middle age–how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store–and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City, which is never dull.
First off, what happened to this blog? When we left off, I had just received my first negative test for COVID (I’ve had three others since), which was a huge relief since I thought I had symptoms (a friend reminded me that just because there’s a lethal pandemic out there doesn’t mean that the common cold has gone on vacation). Sure enough a few days of rest and beginning a new vitamin regimen had me feeling like I was ten years younger. Another great thing happened too. While I was away from Aisle 2 awaiting my results, a colleague from well, ten years ago, who now works at Huffington Post reached out to assign me an appreciation of Bill Withers, which I was delighted to write.
No other work at HuffPo came from that, but plenty did from other outlets. Unlike my primary writing outlet, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post doesn’t have a paywall, so suddenly my brand was ascending again, just as it did earlier in the year when I was on an NY Times podcast. Within weeks I found myself with an inbox full of assignments from new places like NPR and Wine Enthusiast among others. Retail had become a happy zoo of work with customers coming from all over the city to visit our beer aisle to buy beer that was once exclusive province of high-end beer bars, and suddenly, after several years of underemployment on that count, my writing work had become a non-stop medley of completing exciting assignments rather than proposing them.
It was only when I lifted my nose from the grindstone that the grim realities of 2020 hit me in the face. It wasn’t just the ghostly streets and the empty subway cars; friends and acquaintances and classmates all began dying of the virus. The grief only exacerbated the existential dread that underpins so much of my life, and it tempered the joy I felt over my professional success. Even so, the bullhorn in my head that greeted me as I awakened with screams of “you fucking failure,” vanished. The weight of unfortunate career choices, lessened. The medical emergency in which I carried on daily life, kept me focused.
The unrest that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis became a watershed moment in many, many ways. As someone who has had cops pull guns on me on multiple occasions I was delighted by the outrage and the protests. I didn’t take part because of my previous experiences with New York’s Finest, but I rooted them on and emailed links to some of my “work nephews” at the store, so that they could easily vanquish arguments from others at the store about property damage invalidating the agenda of the protesters.
I took all of this in stride; it was just another complication in an intensely complex year. Yet, my equilibrium was completely rocked when the editor of a famous sports and culture site when asked about the lack of diversity on his editorial staff told the New York Times “it’s not open mic night.” I had long grown accustomed to swallowing the pain of never getting a staff job at an established media outlet. I was usually told through contacts that “they weren’t looking for a diversity hire at that moment,” which I took as code, for “you’re way overqualified and our culture can’t deal with that right now.” One well known newspaper in the Midwest told me to my face that I wasn’t a good fit there because they needed someone who could work hard. When I responded that I was the son of two workaholics and kid brother of three others and noted that I typically worked six or seven days a week between retail and journalism endeavors, my interviewer shrugged off my contentions with the all too familiar, “you’re freelance; it’s different.”
I was taught to play the long game, and it worked for my father. University of the Chicago education notwithstanding, he worked in the post office for 15 years before landing a job commensurate with his skills. Upon his retirement, 25 years after beginning his ascent in corporate America, he was a senior executive at AT&T who was feted with a series of banquets across the country. I was 30 when I was told that I didn’t work hard. I figured just keep plugging away and good things would happen. Many did, but the big things weren’t sustainable, and the ones that were lasting were freelance gigs. Then post dotcom crash and Great Recession, media gigs became scarce and capricious. Suddenly, 40something journalists were getting buyouts. I gave up on the dream of a staff job and began focusing entirely on the arduous task of paying rent. Whether it was via work in cheese, craft beer, writing about music, cinema, basketball, it didn’t matter as long as I piled up enough dollars to meet my overhead costs. I’d pursue gigs when they seemed like a good fit, but I rarely heard back from the outlets and never was the news good.
“Oh, I get it,” I seethed to myself during the summer. It’s not open mic night.
As the summer wore on, things at the store began to feel somewhat normal again. Meaning instead of staring at empty aisles and figuring out how much less than usual to order, I began bouncing around the place, getting a bit of a cardio workout. Deliveries were still a primary source of business, and small armies of Postmates and Instacart shoppers dotted the aisles. It usually fell to me to show these poor miscast young people—many did not understand what “produce” meant and responded to product location directions for lettuce with blank stares– where basic items like milk and tomato sauce were.
One afternoon while taking a quick break from running to and fro, I checked my messages and there was one from a former media biz colleague. She was asking if I’d received her email. Well, no. I’d been running laps around an 18,000 square foot store often with a case of beer on my shoulder. I checked my email. In it she wrote that she’d mentioned me to a friend who was the GM at a key trade publication. He was looking for someone to edit their section dealing with culture, food and politics.
I responded to the text noting that I was a good fit, but not a perfect one.
She insisted that I contact her friend.
I mentioned that I was 60.
She repeated her insistence.
It was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon.
I knew what the first agenda item on Monday morning would be.
To be continued.
Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.
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