Blinded by the Light 05: Eviction Can be Fun

Blinded by the Light 05: Eviction Can Be Fun

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

Housing court in lower Manhattan played a big role in my life during the first two decades of the new century. In the mid-2000s, my appearance was seasonal; the guards and some of the lawyers got to know me, and we’d chat. At the time, a big chunk of my income came from writing analytics forward articles about the NBA for the short-lived broadsheet, New York Sun. Every summer, there would come a time, typically late July where my editor would point out that I’d just turned in 800 words on the fourth guard quandary facing some team that was nowhere near championship contention, and if that was news, then it might be best to give the basketball beat a rest until training camp opened in mid-September. My journalistic sensibilities understood even if the hiatus removed $500 a week from my paltry revenues. By mid-October, I’d be in housing court responding to an eviction notice, armed with a game plan to clear up my arrears since I’d resumed my basketball columns. This ritual was repeated two or three times, probably 2005-07 and was so casual, that I don’t think I ever particularly feared homelessness. Instead, I looked forward to chatting with the security people and lawyers about what could be done about the Knicks, a team going through an especially traumatic phase back then.

In late 2011, times were different. The New York Sun had folded. Initially I replaced the income by writing similar columns for an African American news and cultural affairs site called The Root. I was delighted. My passion for statistics had been fueled by my father who back in the ‘50s and ‘60s felt that the mainstream press wasn’t giving Black athletes their due. And my work was resonating! The Mexican fast casual place down the street from my apartment was a hangout for African American MBA candidates at NYU, and I was often treated to a margarita in exchange for a short discussion about my methodology and forecasts. Yet a new editor deemed my work too academic for the African-American audience and discontinued my column. In addition, my manager at Bedford Cheese Shop cut my schedule. So, I went into housing court penniless and reliant on a couple of shifts at a neighborhood wine shop for sustenance.

As if that wasn’t dire enough, the judge was a ballbuster. She was telling people with far better situations than mine to go home and start packing, the marshals would be there in a few weeks. I sat there in total panic, fearing that my colleagues who abandoned journalism after 9/11 and the dotcom crash were right. My thoughts focused on paring my stuff down, putting some of it in storage and leaving New York, when my landlord’s attorney arrived. He was delighted to learn that I was a writer. That was his ambition too before his parents insisted that he go to law school (I resisted the urge to tell him that his parents were probably right). He told me that I was entitled to a continuation and that by the time I returned to court perhaps things might improve. I did, and ten weeks later, things had taken a sharp upturn. I had been hired by one store to write their website copy, and another store hired me to build their cheese program and manage it. Both gigs paid professional wages (as cool and fashionable as food work sounds, much of it is minimum wage toil). I marched into court with a financial plan to satisfy the arrears, and marched out feeling as if the world was on my side again.

Six years later I was in a familiar hole. The new store had failed; writing income was still hard to come by, and due to an obscure clause in my lease, my landlord had bumped my rent to a market rate. What was once $795 a month in 1992 was now close to $2500. By this time, I’d lived in my East Village apartment for 26 years. I’d spent months turning out the lights and hiding when I heard footsteps in the hallway fearing it was a Process Server (this isn’t rational, but as any Republican strategist can tell you, fear often isn’t). I decided enough was enough. Preserving the apartment wasn’t worth the toll, and maybe I should adapt to the new culinary economy. In 2014, one of my presumed allies had told me to take a minimum wage job in the cheese biz, well, by 2018, I was working a minimum wage job in the craft beer biz and struggling to advance. I decided to give up the apartment. When I arrived in court and told my landlord’s lawyer(a different guy than before) that I would vacate, he vehemently objected. He eagerly encouraged me to fight the notice (I figured that he just wanted to bill my landlord for several court appearance fees). Even the judge encouraged me to fight the eviction notice. I wasn’t having it. As a high school student living in Dallas and spending hours listening to records in my bedroom, my dream had been to live in downtown Manhattan and write about music. I had done that. It was time to try new vistas. I took 75 days to vacate and moved to Brooklyn.

It turns out that my landlord’s lawyer and the judge may have known something. Less than a month after I moved to Brooklyn, the state legislature outlawed the clause that my landlord used to jack my rent. A few former neighbors came to see me at the store to see if I was going to sue to get my apartment back. I didn’t consider it. I wanted to move on. I liked Brooklyn.

In Brooklyn, I didn’t feel out of place. The church that used to be across the street from my East Village apartment was razed and turned into luxury condos. On the beer aisle of the grocery store one autumn afternoon, I met one of my new neighbors. He was enthused about his new place, a studio that was only 1.2 million. Said it was such a great deal! That was a potent reminder that the East Village of my dreams had entered the same dustbin of New York City history as SoHo as an artist’s colony, DUMBO as bastion of scrappy bohemianism and hipster Williamsburg. It was time to adapt and move on. I was now paying just over $1000, and though that was sometimes a challenge, it seemed feasible by comparison.

My place in Brooklyn didn’t work out, though. When my predecessor, a roommate “with benefits” returned to New York City, I was on the street looking again. A New School Professor who occasionally assigned episodes of a previous blog to her Urban Memoir students connected me to a friend who lived uptown in a spacious three-bedroom place and was looking to fill one of them. Her uptown colleague was a PhD candidate at Columbia and she and I had obviously been on opposite sides of the same room before as we had dozens of social media commons. Five minutes into the interview, she asked if I wanted to be on the lease. I moved in a few weeks later; my rent was less than it was in 1992. I rarely feel like a winner, but somehow, I won the New York City rent championship.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Tidal, Bandcamp, 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.

Blinded By The Light 04: Telling Your Boss He’s Wrong

We started getting customers; the next step would be getting catering clients.

Blinded by the Light O4: Telling Your Boss He’s Wrong

The store opened and things went fitfully. The staff consisted of only me and a sidekick, a woman who was a born cheesemonger but had significant other credentials. She had worked in food justice concerns in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill. She had a master’s degree in food science too. Nevertheless, her love of cheese was real, and she took an admirable deep dive, often listening to six cheese podcasts a week and reading tons of literature on cheese.

Still, there were two people and fourteen shifts to fill. Our bosses at the nearby wine shop figured they’d send some of their people over to close the gap. I was enthusiastic about this plan and envisioned happy hours discussing the difference between the pairing strategies suggested by noted wine author Jancis Robinson and cheese authority Anne Saxelby. Instead, we got a vegan who didn’t want to talk to customers, and a holy mess of a woman who neither wanted to learn about cheese, nor take direction or work her schedule.

This rickety structure really began to crumble when my sidekick got an offer she couldn’t refuse from one of her food justice colleagues. Suddenly, I was the staff. A Good Food Jobs listing, a Facebook posting, a bolt from the blue and 46 shifts in 49 days later, and we were sufficiently staffed again, but that was only one daunting problem. Our anonymity was killing us.

The store opened with the presumption that our wine shop’s internet clientele would provide us with a significant customer base. This didn’t prove to be the case. We received two or three internet orders a week. Meanwhile, our store lacked an awning or a sign to announce who we were. Passersby who noticed us quite reasonably thought we were a pop up; most people since zipped by without the slightest awareness of us. Yet as winter turned to spring, more people did notice us, and business picked up a little. In addition, I’d begun diversifying the inventory with estate bottled olive oils, amazing balsamics and even a few honeys from renowned Italian beekeeper Mario Bianco. I wanted the shop to be a hub of deliciousness and our inventory was getting there, even if large swaths of the neighborhood weren’t.

The turning point came as spring was turning to summer. Open Streets Columbus Avenue, a promotion where vehicular traffic is prohibited on Sunday afternoons, began, and to participate, we put a table outside our store sampling our cheeses. Suddenly people discovered what we already knew, Pleasant Ridge Reserve, Jasper Hill Harbison, L’Amuse Aged Gouda and Brabander, and others were jaw dropping delicious. People who might have shrugged us off as a dauntingly fancy, raced to our counter eager to get a piece of “that cheese, the stuff he’s sampling at the table.”

This confirmed something I was thinking about. For all of its stereotypes of pudgy bearded dudes geeking out over obscure hops, craft brewers want everyone drinking their beer. From 2014 to 2016, I did freelance work for Brooklyn Brewery as a brand ambassador, and there were assignments to go to the esteemed restaurant 11 Madison Park and to small grocery stores in run down areas of the outer boroughs. Denizens at each locale greeted the beer enthusiastically and knowledgeably. Every Sunday, we were doing somewhat comparable outreach for our cheese.

Then came another turning point. One of my staffers, an especially personable fellow, asked if the table could be presented other days of the week.

I didn’t see why not.

Suddenly we had a phenomenon. The table became part of people’s routines, whether en route to the gym, running errands or coming home from school. We began selling hundreds of pieces of cheese each week. Sales tripled. The numbers were great, but I had worked at Bedford Cheese Shop during its Brooklyn heyday. I knew what kind of numbers Williamsburg circa 2010 could put up. I was certain that the Upper West Side circa 2023 and 2024 could top that. In other words, we were moving in the right direction, but we had a long way to go.

Blinded by the Light 03: Can Cheese Work in the Concierge Economy?

The deliciousness was undeniable; it just needed an audience.

Blinded By the Light 03: Can Cheese Fit Into the Concierge Economy?

When I left the cheese business in 2014, I left angry. It was the very definition of a bad breakup. I had spent 30 years working on cheese counters and occasionally managing them. I had been featured in dozens of blurbs in the local culinary press as well as this cover feature in the NY Times food section and this eight page spread in NY magazine. While the owner of the store I worked at was dismayed by the coverage (fueling my suspicions that it was really a money laundering outfit), the response in the cheese community was mixed, which mystified me. The mystification turned to anger shortly afterward when I went looking for work and was told by one of the distributors whose cheeses, I plugged in the Times. that I should take a minimum wage job and work my way up. Another potential employer hired someone before interviewing me, mentioned it to me and chirped “we just wanted to talk to you because you’re so not the type!”

I left the cheese biz for the craft beer world and was a significant role player in the New York City craft beer boom. Having found equally pernicious glass ceilings in that demimonde too, I was about to launch a consultancy when I got an email from a woman in the wine world, who was a colleague from back in the day. She and I had been on the team that opened a short-lived wine bar in Harlem in 2009 (back when a wine bar in Harlem was a novel proposition; it’s now an obvious one). She was a buyer at an elite wine shop, and her boss wanted to open a cheese shop nearby, but there was one problem, he didn’t know any cheesemongers. Three conversations over coffee later, I was tabling my plans for a craft beer consultancy and rolling up my sleeves to open a cheese shop.

67Gourmet wasn’t going to be your usual cheese shop. It couldn’t be. It was too small to house the usual cheese counter with space for cutting cheese to order and slicing charcuterie. Instead, the store planned to draw on the wine shop’s voluminous internet traffic as its primary constituency. My staff and I were going to grab prepackaged pieces of cheese, combine them with orders of wine and send them off with couriers. This presented several challenges that I really liked. For one, I’d have to develop a world class inventory of artisan cheese that was already packaged, thus no Colston Bassett Stilton, no Herve Mons Roquefort, no classic English Cheddars, and no Rolf Beeler Gruyeres just to name a few cheeses that I’d turned hundreds—if not thousands–of New Yorkers on to. My work was cut out for me. I spent hours looking at leading cheese retailers and visiting major American cheesemakers websites. It seemed that I would have about 80-100 cheeses of top caliber available. That was fine. I was only going to carry 40-45 at any given time.

I also liked the challenge of reversing philosophical direction. For more than 15 years I’d held cheese classes, some formal such as those at the 92^nd Street Y, some pop up at various bars and restaurants on lower Manhattan and Williamsburg, some private (birthday parties for sommeliers were always a popular booking), and one constant was counseling people to buy their cheese from places that cut pieces from wheels to order. However, since the heyday of those events, the late 2000s and early 2010s, artisan cheese in New York had fallen on hard times. Several shops, including the one that told me “I was so not the type” closed, and leaders in the field had passed away without clear succession. Artisan cheese was in need of a revival, and this approach felt like a reasonable way up.

On a brisk but sunny January afternoon in 2022, we opened. To say we were flying by the seat of our pants was an understatement. I’d just hired my lone staffer, the shelves were not exactly teaming with product, and worse, partly by design, we were anonymous. I say by design because our wine shop partner did tons of internet business daily. Every time I was in the wine shop, it seemed like thousands of dollars of wines and spirits walked out the door via orders received on the store’s website. The assumption was that if that clientele found they could order artisan cheese to be delivered at the same time, they’d jump at the chance, and we’d been bouncing off the walls doing fulfillment.

It was a reasonable assumption.

I had my doubts. One of the brief diversions in my career in cheese was being the Sunday/Monday dude at a wine shop near my East Village apartment. At that time, the wine shop was opening a beer bar two doors south and that beer bar planned to have a robust cheese program. So, during my shifts at the wine shop, I’d sample some of the inventory that would soon be available at the beer bar. I quickly noticed that people who were fluent in winespeak were borderline hopeless when it came to cheese.

This didn’t worry me. Every day I watched affluent, sophisticated people walk by our small nondescript shop. I knew if the internet didn’t turn the store into a success, then I was confident that an old-fashioned plan b could save the joint.

Blinded by the Light 02: Well, How Did I Get Here? Pt 2

Columbus Avenue: The View from near the store

Blinded By the Light 02: Well, How Did I Get Here? Part Two

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awake every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

One morning, shortly before a family event, my niece asked me about the trajectory of my journalism career, “why did you choose to freelance?”

I smiled on the outside and grimaced internally and told her that it was complicated. She furrowed her brow. My niece has two master’s degrees, each from an elite institution and like most Black women, she’s run out of patience with her intellect being taken lightly. Twice she’s been hired in her field only to be treated like an intern. I knew I needed a better answer.

“Let’s just say that freelancing chose me.” She nodded, getting the gist of my answer. We shared a little laugh and returned our focus to the preparations for the event.

In reality, both answers are true. It is complicated, and at some level, freelancing chose me. You see, I’ve always wanted to be a journalist. Well not always always, but close; if ever a kid was going to pop out his mom’s womb reading the paper, it might have been me. I grew up with siblings a decade or more my senior, and in the late ‘60s, our kitchen table was a forum for my parents, aunts and uncles, siblings and various family friends to debate and discuss issues like Vietnam, Civil Rights, Nixon and the like. I thought it was the hippest place. Everyone sounded so knowledgeable, and I could tell they took pride in their intellect. That’s what I related to most. I was an excellent student and the elders in my neighborhood, Chicago’s Hyde Park/Kenwood, made it clear to me that big things were expected of me (like maybe going to the school down the block, the University of Chicago). I had been reading the newspaper since I was five years old; I followed the ’65 pennant race via the standings in the Sports section. So, it was no big transition to start reading the front of the paper too. It gave me a chance to participate in the cool kids’ discussion.

Even though the kitchen table was losing its swag by the time I was fully ready to discuss Watergate, I maintained my journalism addiction through high school and by that time had set my sights on a career in the field. I arrived at Columbia University in 1978 with one short term goal. Master the famed core curriculum? No, get a summer internship at New Times magazine, a sort of cross between New York magazine, the Village Voice and Rolling Stone; it was a haven for the New Journalism that had fueled my passions after the kitchen table discussions faded. Unfortunately, sometime while studying for my first semester final exams, horrible news arrived; New Times was folding.

I had discovered by then that Columbia was more than just some school in New York City; it was a ball buster of an education. I made studying—and getting high, it was the ‘70s after all—the focal point of my attention. Career ambitions could wait.

After graduating in the summer of 1982, the depths of a ferocious recession, I sent out dozens of resumes to little avail and took a job at a market research firm to pay my $180 month rent in Upper Manhattan. I interviewed at the New York Times where an HR woman looked at my resume, which in addition to an Ivy League degree boasted of journalism awards won in high school and told me that I probably wasn’t cut out for the field. It required hard work.

I was more mystified than angered by the response. It wasn’t until I heard the same comment about not being fit for a full-time journalism job since it’s hard work from numerous other media outlets that my anger began to simmer inside. Nevertheless, I was having a successful go of it freelancing. Within a year of walking into the headquarters of the Amsterdam News in 1984 and asking to preview an upcoming jazz festival, I was writing for Newsday, a suburban NYC daily making a big push into city limits as well as trading mail with editors at the Village Voice. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote regularly for Essence, Rolling Stone, and Vogue. I still wanted a staff job; all these successes still left me working in the food biz to make ends meet, but at least I’d proven that NY Times HR person wrong. I did belong. Less than 10 years after her dumb assessment, I had a long piece in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section, and I still regret not sending it to her. OTOH, I had heard that assessment often enough (occasionally from other people at the Times) to know that it was a commonplace view.

By the time a media outlet did offer me a job, it was 2020, and I was offered a Senior Editor position at a respected trade magazine, but the salary offer was for 50K and came with the caveat that I would have to give up my freelancing. I asked for more a little more $$, and it was the last time I heard from them.

But you know what? Who fucking cares!! At this point, there are very few 63-year-old staff writers at major media outlets and even fewer who cover the arts. I’m fine; I built a career while working six and seven days a week for four decades. I do regret the networking opportunities I missed out on and the prospect of a steady professional wage for several years, but I don’t regret falling into the bubble of thinking that working in a ~~dying~~ er, massively contracting field was my only ability. I wonder if those HR people understood that they were denigrating the son of two workaholics and kid brother of three others. They weren’t alone; many potential food business employers also questioned my work ethic.

So yeah, it’s complicated, but I’d say freelancing chose me. It’s hard, but it’s working out pretty okay.

Blinded by the Light 01: Well, How Did I Get Here, part one

Many people think of the Upper West Side as a quaint neighborhood full of brownstones. I think of it as another dystopian Manhattan locale.

Blinded By the Light 01: Well, How Did I Get Here? Part One

“It sounds like you’re living the dream,” chirped a customer one lazy spring afternoon at my cheese shop, 67Gourmet, which is located in New York City near Lincoln Center. I smiled while grimacing inside. I knew what she meant; I have two careers, and both are going well. The cheese shop is quickly establishing itself as a go-to retailer for artisan cheese, estate bottled olive oil, small producer cured meats and all kinds of other goodies. My staff and I happily regale our clientele with stories about the woman who quit her job as Editor in Chief of a leading Italian fashion magazine and bought an olive grove in Tuscany where she now makes one of the finest olive oils in the world or the graphic designer who grew up not far from the store, who left her job to bake ridiculously good brownies and cookies. Meanwhile my other professional life, music journalism, involves writing and reporting for the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Tidal, Bandcamp and other high-profile outlets. I get what she means; after years of feeling the stench of failure and pointlessness stalking me at close proximity, I now worried about moving forward not falling backwards, er, falling further backwards.

I broke my smile, looked the customer in the eye warmly, and said “I’m living one of the dreams. I went to college in New York City in the ‘70s, so I did a lot of drugs. I have a lot of dreams. The dream would involve working a lot fewer hours than I do.”

She nodded appreciatively and after a little more small talk; she gathered up her haul, three cheeses, a package of locally produced sliced Bresaola, a baguette and a small jar of apricot lavender preserves made by two young women in Paris whose products we’re especially proud to carry.

Before I could lean back and parse the encounter, another customer, a regular, arrived at the counter with his two kids, several cheeses, a baguette and an eagerness to discuss the Knicks. He was off to the great outdoors, and then another customer arrived eager to discuss Succession, a show I don’t watch, but because of my affiliation with a Rupert Murdoch owned media company, it’s a show I’m expected to be conversant in, so I read enough articles and plot summaries to meet my customer’s expectations. It’s not enough that I can explain the differences between double creams and triple creams, Alpine cheeses and cheddars; I need to know who Kendall Roy and Shiv are.

That much is fine by me. A good cheese counter is a social center. I think of it as a bar—and I’m a veteran barfly—except that instead of drinks for people hanging out, we sell nuggets of deliciousness for people to take home. It’s not just the social contact that is a dream; I’m paid something that borders on a professional wage. Three little words, “the gig economy,” are fashionable to toss around casual conversation about life in the 2020s where the pace of our devolution toward a feudal economy is blinding. But what’s not fashionable is the number of talented, smart college graduates who are making just above minimum wage as workers in this situation. As someone who is 63 and spent more than 20 years trapped in that economic straitjacket. I often commiserate my younger peers; I don’t know which is worse, having experienced better and expending every ounce of effort to find it again, or being 25 and knowing that “better” probably cuts off at choosing an industrial color for highlights in your hair.

It means I have lots of friends who are 30 and even 40 years younger than I am, and I’m thankful; I love their energy and insights. My tighter bond with this crowd is the solace we take in trusting our passions. My friends my age split into two groups: those who are still trying to figure out what happened to dial up modems, and those who are happily retired and doing interesting things with their lives. I love both groups. For one I like that successful people regard me as a peer, and for another, while I’m well versed in high-speed internet, there’s a ton of shit that I’m still trying to figure out myself.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 37, Leaving Aisle 2

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 craft 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, ever dull.

As the soft glow of autumn light in New York City was turning toward the opaquer winter brightness and default jackets were getting heavier, my career prospects, dim for nearly a decade were brimming with springtime warmth.

For one my writing work had skyrocketed like a dotcom stock in the days of irrational exuberance, yet it all seemed sustainable. Contacts, some old some new, were connecting me to editors who immediately became big fans of my work and acted as they had an obligation to keep an assignment, sometimes two in my inbox. I didn’t dare do the math to see if the writing income could enable me to leave retail. My financial standing was too fragile. I looked at it as a way to whittle down my credit card debt if not whack at it like a weed.

For another retail was looking better. I was thinking of launching a consultancy in craft beer, and an old friend in the wine business had put me in touch with her boss, who was thinking of opening a cheese shop. The first meeting with her boss went well then, the line went dead for a few weeks. I began engaging a first round of potential clients for my consultancy and setting up the administrative infrastructure. Then just as a matter of course I circled back to the wine shop owner, and he responded immediately. He had just signed the lease on his space after several weeks of contentious negotiations; could I meet tomorrow morning. That meeting went well as did another a few days later. During that meeting he said the five magic words, “what should we pay you?”

I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting the question. I guess I’ve had too many situations in my life and especially in my middle age where things that were going well didn’t get to that point. I doubled my retail number and to my ambivalent surprise he said yes immediately. I think I had undersold myself, but I put myself in position to march into the grocery store and give notice. En route home, I stopped at my favorite nearby craft beer bar and celebrated. I wasn’t planning on going back to the cheese biz, the wounds from the glass ceilings that I hit hard in 2014 still hurt, but it was an escape from the grueling world of a grocery store running with about 60% of the necessary staffing. I preferred to get my cardio on a bicycle or at the gym instead of getting workouts on a sales floor.

I began notifying my craft beer contacts telling them to stay in touch. The consultancy was still on my agenda, though it was no longer on my short term to do list. Also, I still wrote about craft beer for several major media outlets. I told my coworkers and gave out several business cards telling them that they could escape too, and to stay in touch. Finally, I began the sad work of alerting my customers of my departure. My finance bro and sis crowd shrugged it off and wished me luck. A few others wished me heartfelt goodbyes, one of them thanking me for investing palpable passion into what had proven to be a dead end job.

That touched me deeply. I’ve often felt that working for just more than minimum wage in chaotic environment was numbing. It was great to hear that it wasn’t *too* numbing for me to communicate honestly.

My final weeks were over the holidays in 2021, so time moved especially quickly. My next to last day was New Year’s Eve. So, it was a whirlwind until I tossed my coat for the last time as an employee of Westside Market’s East Village location and headed to the time clock and then the register with my final purchases. The finale didn’t feel momentous, which surprised me. I had arrived in 2014 because I had few opportunities and I’d made the most of this one, which frankly wasn’t much. Now I was heading to a scenario of greater opportunity.

It was a cold Sunday night in January. I didn’t feel like celebrating. Instead, I just wanted to go home, cook dinner and go to bed, so I could get up in the morning refreshed and ready to make the most of a whole new set of challenges. I wondered if age, I could see my 62nd birthday approaching, had beaten the euphoria out of me, but I’ve since concluded that my new possibilities still left me on a long road to where I want to go. I’ll hold a celebration when I get there.

I’m still the son of two workaholics and the kid brother of three others; I just wanted to get to work. That, probably more than anything else, a contentment with working, has been my saving grace through all the professional chaos of my life, and it still was. That was a satisfying thought.

So what happens with this blog now?

Well, I’m off of Aisle 2, but the long slow march from abyss of middle aged downward mobility continues. So the next installments of this blog will be called Life After 2: Hello Plan D. The series will begin in this space soon.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 36. Exit Strategies

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 36, Exit Strategies

As summer definitively turned to autumn in 2021, my mood darkened. It wasn’t seasonal affect or the news of a new COVID variant approaching. It was a sense of helplessness and of being trapped on Aisle 2 that began to color my thoughts. I had imagined this job to be a two to three year stint that would propel me into a job on New York City’s booming craft beer scene, yet here I was approaching my seventh anniversary at the store, and most light at the end of the tunnel was almost certainly an onrushing train.

I had tried, tried hard in fact to move up in the craft beer world. I had sent out more than a dozen resumes and cover letters. I interviewed for one job, where the executives of distributor spent 45 minutes asking me silly questions like how would I sell to an Irish bar. First of all, their portfolio consisted largely of fruity sours and farmhouse ales, not industrial lagers and pilsners, the lifeblood of your stereotypical Irish bar. Rather than doubt their competence, I told them that nobody sells to a building, you sell to Marie or Sean or Patrick or Kelly. And then I noted that every New York City Irish bar has a sports affiliation and spent a couple of minutes regaling them with emblematic stories from the championship runs of the Yankees, Mets, Giants and Rangers. I thought I’d hit it out of the park. Instead, they prattled on for the rest of the interview about the physical toll of the job and then hired an industry vet in Arizona to do the job via email.

That was the good reception. Otherwise, my resumes and cover letters were ignored. Brewers and brewery employees whomI had often hoisted beers with became silent when jobs were at stake. I visited one couple who suggested I give up writing, since it was a dead end, and open my own bar. This was interesting advice on two counts. For one, with a pandemic still raging, getting funding to open a business dependent on crowds in small spaces in New York seemed like a dicey proposition and for another, the writing had grown to a far larger revenue stream than Aisle 2 might muster.

If anything, that fueled my discontent. For years, I’d been able to maintain some sense of upward mobility in the food biz whilst being stalled in writing. Yet, in the 20 months between Spring 2020 and mid-Autumn 2021, my writing prospects had grown from clinging zealously to two clients, to proudly boasting of a roster with 11 and an inbox stuck on auto refill. I wondered why I hadn’t been able to duplicate my success away from my computer.

What bothered me further was that in each cover letter and at that dubious interview, I outlined a way for craft brewers to increase their sales markedly. There were market segments that were being ignored, and I was uniquely poised to exploit these inefficiencies in their sales footprint. Then it occurred to me that I don’t really *need* an employer to do that. I could launch my own consultancy and pocket the money myself. I would have to wait out the impact of the Omicron variant then hit the ground running. I began telling people that I wasn’t looking to the booming local beer scene for employment anymore. I was taking Shirley Chisolm’s essential advice, “if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

Then as I was strategizing and building up initial clientele, I got an email from an old friend, a wine expert with whom I’d helped open a wine bar in Harlem in 2008. She now worked at one of the city’s leading wine emporiums, and her boss was planning to open a cheese shop. He needed someone who knew cheese. Would I meet with him? I said yes immediately and sent him an email.

It seemed that after several stagnant years my food biz possibilities were beginning to blossom in ways that I hadn’t imagined. It made the stark grime of winter seem much more inviting.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Life. Episode 35: Four Little Words

The most popular item on this shelf is accessible only to those of NBA–not MBA–height

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Chapter 35: Four Little Words

Seven plus years of working in a grocery store has taught me many things, one of the funniest is that New Yorkers are deathly afraid of four little words, and they aren’t “the subway is delayed.” No, the four most impactful words that a New Yorker can hear is “can I help you?”

Yes, these are benign words and in many other cities these are words uttered often in the name of routine customer service. That kind of routine customer service doesn’t really exist in New York. For years there was a sign near the register at Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side that proclaimed that answers and correct answers came at a cost, but blank stares were free. The joke was that in most places–not Katz’s, however—that was the norm for customer service.

When I began shaping the craft beer aisle, I faced two stern realities. There were three beer bar/bottle shop boutiques near the store that could easily outflank us on selection. There were also two Whole Foods and one (now two) Trader Joe’s that could pummel us on price. We would have to win a clientele with great customer service. So, I cheerfully patrolled the aisle often offering samples, explaining the history of beer, and making recommendations. It worked; within a few years, both of the Whole Foods de-emphasized craft beer, and we’d become an internationally recognized destination. Yet, when I began to extend my approach to the rest of the store, I found a different response.

We’re a large store with items in either highly counterintuitive locations (for instance, the popcorn kernels are in the far corner of the produce section above the loose Brussels Sprouts) or merely high locations (the breadcrumbs are on a shelf about seven feet high), so it’s commonplace to see customers irksomely reading the aisle signs in search of something or another. At least three out of four times, these four little words, “can I help you,” doesn’t end their search. Instead, it makes them defensive, even abrupt.

“Oh no! I’m fine,” is the typical response, often with a retaliatory side eye.

It took me years to grasp what was going on: I’d pierced their aura of Gotham invincibility. New Yorkers like to think they know everything, or at least everything around them. I used to live in Brooklyn, and once a month, en route home, I’d see a passenger look astonished upon discovering that the train they boarded was Brooklyn bound and thus scaling the Manhattan Bridge and charging over the East River en route to Kings County, rather than uptown toward their destination. Yet, without exception by the time the train reached DeKalb Avenue, the first stop in Brooklyn, that passenger would have adjusted their demeanor to suggest that they intended to travel from Chinatown to Midtown via Brooklyn. Their faces gave off a self-satisfied vibe that suggested the jaunt over the East River was a lovely detour.

At least for the wrong way subway passengers, the view from the Manhattan Bridge is one of the nicest vistas for gazing at New York City; the majestic skyscrapers gleam in just the right light. For our customers, wandering up and down grocery store aisles offers no such consolation, yet they persist, ignoring or refusing offers of assistance for five, sometimes ten minutes, before giving up and barging up to a busy cashier and demanding a product location.

The exception to these encounters is the concierge service shoppers. This brigade of shoppers, usually young African men, seem to take learning the layout of fancy grocery stores as just part of grasping how Americans American. Usually by their second or third visit, the men have different questions. Instead of needing help with product location, they are curious as to why we have chips in six different spots (“boss, wouldn’t a single section be more efficient for the customers,” one guy very earnestly asked me one evening) or why popcorn kernels are in the far corner of the produce section, above those loose Brussels Sprouts (several of these shoppers have suggested putting them next to the bags of popcorn). It’s charming in its own way.

Sometimes these constituencies intersect. A few weeks ago, a woman who had shrugged off my offer five minutes earlier, was all but pacing the back aisle on her phone venting her exasperation for not finding the breadcrumbs. A concierge shopper, a tall, young-ish African dude overheard her and waved to her. Upon getting her attention, he said in a gentle but commanding, King’s English, “I just saw them myself, please allow me show you.” And with that they headed off to Aisle 5 where they are on a notably inaccessible shelf. They were still enjoyably conversating when I saw them in checkout line a couple of minutes later. I could only smile; it was the smoothest pickup line of the week, and it avoided those four dirty words.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Tidal, Bandcamp, 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.

In seven years at the store I never figured out why popcorn kernels and Brussels Sprouts belonged together.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 34 Life During the Supply Chain Crisis

Lately this exchange happens frequently on the craft beer aisle at the store

Customer: I don’t see any Corona six packs.

Me: I’m sorry they weren’t available from our distributor.

Customer: (voice rising with incredulity) You’re telling me you don’t have any Corona?

Me: I’m saying that it presently isn’t available. You’ve probably read about the supply chain crisis.

Customer: That’s bullshit. I’m going to Duane Reade (a nearby drug store).

Me: They buy from the same distributor.

(Customer leaves)

15 minutes later

(Customer returns)

Customer: It’s weird no one has any Corona.

Me: You should read the newspaper.

(Customer grabs a six pack of Modelo and says)

Customer: You should try and get some Corona. I bet it’s popular.

This kind of encounter happens often every shift. Sometimes it’s Corona, sometimes Pacifico, for about a month it was Modelo,. And it’s not limited to Mexican lagers. I don’t remember the last time I had Miller High Life and Miller Lite in the case. Bud Lite Platinum and Bud’s Lime-A-Rita series have gone through shortages too.

What’s frustrating about the outages isn’t the slights to my intelligence (those are so common that I brush most of them off); it’s that these kinds of sales are suppose to be easy money. I might spend five minutes chatting with the beer enthusiast who buys six cans of high end IPAs two sours and a pilsner or two (and I have many of those customers every weekend), the beers that have been affected by the supply chain crisis are the grab and go ones.

If only people would read the newspaper, but if they did, I’d probably not need to work in a grocery store to make ends meet.

Life on Aisle 2: This What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 33: The New Gulf Wars

An item of frequent pursuit at the store.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Chapter 33: The New Gulf War

These days I often judge my retail shifts based on the number of attacks on my self-esteem as encounters like this are commonplace.

Customer: Where is the hummus

I take a quick second to evaluate whether they just want hummus or if they are a devotee of a well-known brand like Sabra, Ithaca or somesuch. Due to reasons too arcane to describe here, the house made stuff is on Aisle 2, across from my beer section; the brands are in the labyrinthine produce section. Yes, one answer is easy; the other requires guidance. Usually before I utter a word, the customer will escalate.

Customer: Do you know what hummus is? Do you speak English? Does your brain function??

Yes, I’ve gotten the “brain” question a dozen times or so. At this point, a quick and simple solution is hopeless. I explain that yes, I know that hummus is a puree made mostly from chickpeas and tahini. And that we have it in two locations, let me show you to them.

Sometimes after being shown the products, the customer’s demeanor will change, sometimes not. I’m mostly angling to escape their presence.

The hardest part of these encounters is that I grasp their dismay and frustration. It’s a result of the food savviness of my coworkers declining precipitously in recent months. For years, the majority of the store’s staff were smart young people. They might not know what harissa tastes like, but they knew it was on Aisle 5 across from the kiosk with the Asian sauces. The store reduced to a skeletal staff during the darkest days of the pandemic, and when business increased as the city reopened, the staffing didn’t. The smart kids recognizing the exploitation involved and sensing better options elsewhere, asked for raises. When they were rejected, they quit and moved on to better jobs. Their replacements often send customers to the produce department in search of soy sauce or to the frozen food aisle in search of baguettes. Often by the time the customers get to me, they’ve been wandering around a fairly large sales floor—our store occupies half of a city block–in fruitless search of something that should be easy to locate for five minutes. Although I’d rather not endure it, I get their irritation.

We’ve often heard about food insecurity; many of my new staffers are the victims of growing up in areas with few food options. They direct customers to the produce section to pursue soy sauce because it’s like a dressing, something you put on top of food, so perhaps that’s where it is. What exacerbates the situation is that all of the store’s employees wander the aisles en route to or from the stock room/kitchen and the glaring food ignorance is an indication that for most of them rather than an orderly series of food, it’s all abstract expressionism. The East Village is definitely NOT a food desert, yet despite numerous options at the store and many inexpensive venues nearby, I often see my coworkers coming in from their half hour lunch breaks with bags from McDonalds which is four blocks away with meals that cost more than a falafel at the joint just around the corner.

There was a gulf evident. The question was what I should do about it. Frankly I don’t and can’t care about going all Michael Pollan on them about Mickey D’s, but I did begin using the encounters as teachable moments. I explained that Soy Sauce is Asian (Jennifer 8. Lee would likely be proud of the confusion), and that it’s with the sauces one might put on meats and chicken which are on Aisle 5. I detailed the history of hummus and the difference between “fresh” bread and loaves. In other words, I expanded my Mr. Peabody of Malt and Hops routine to the entire store. In the process I began building rapport with my new coworkers.

Then I discovered a new gulf. One Sunday afternoon, ahem, one NFL Sunday afternoon (pro football telecasts increase beer sales markedly), I was working alongside my relatively new stock guy, and I asked him for the six packs of a German beer which had been shelved alongside the Lagunitas brews. I wanted to move it closer to the Hofbrau and Weihenstaphaner and other Deutschland nectar. He didn’t understand what beer I wanted, so I said, “the beer next to the Lagunitas IPA, figuring that was a good landmark since those two words are in BIG letters on the side of the package. He pointed at the Victory sixpacks, “those?” I shook my head, wondering what was up. Then he pointed at the Founders six packs and asked again, “those?”

That’s when it dawned on me. This is why he hasn’t responded to any of my texts, nor does text me asking the prices of new beers (he just puts them on the shelf without prices, and sometimes when they’re not in the system confusion reigns at the cash register, and since some supervisors just charge $9 per can, far more than the real price, it costs us customers in the process). Although I remained outwardly calm, inwardly I was recoiling in horror. 2021 has been the year where my responsibilities began to grow exponentially at the store. First, I was asked to cover the fish counter and close it in the evening. Then I was asked to help cover the Prepared Foods counter for breaks and when they send the guy there on delivery. Now I was realizing that my stock guy was incapable of handling some of the basic functions of the job.

The logical escape route is to a brewery or its taproom (most grocery stores don’t have dedicated craft beer buyers, and none post it as a part time position), but at 61, slightly overweight and African American, I’m not the usual job candidate in the beer business. I still hear a potential cheese employer chirping “you’re so not the type,” seven years ago after telling me that they had already hired someone for the job I was notionally interviewing for. In many of my attempts to land a job in the beer business, I have been told the work entails moving quickly as if I’m hiding my rollator somewhere. Most of the time potential employers just ignore my inquiries, and hire someone who is the type, young and usually white, and then they send them to me to learn about beer.

Meanwhile, I started blueprinting my next bridge. There are a lot more gulfs than there used to be.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Zagat, 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.