Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like: Episode 20, Acclimating

20190518_153724 — Brooklyn just like I pictured it, brownstones and everything.

Life on Aisle 2: Episode 20: Acclimating

This blog parses the changes in my middle age and 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 2018 and 2019, which is never dull.

I moved to Brooklyn in late January after 40 years as a Manhattanite and 26 in the same East Village apartment; in the days and weeks that followed, almost all of my friends eagerly asked, “how’s settling in going?”

It was a tricky question. On the one hand, what settling in? I moved with an inbox so overstuffed that I wondered if I would have time to sleep. I often told people happily that I was staring into the same old computer screen all the time, so it all felt rather similar. Yet, it felt similar on many more tangible counts too. My neighborhood in Brooklyn, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, resembles certain phases of my previous one, the East Village, except that it is a mash up of many eras. For instance, on Flatbush Avenue, there are bodegas, beauty joints, Chinese greasy spoons, and laundromats—the stock in trade of many an East Village avenue in the ‘90s–rubbing shoulders with craft cocktail bars, boutiques, new bistros, artisan coffee houses and gastropubs (the commercial content of much of the East Village now); one moment you’re in EV 1995 and the next is EV circa 2018. PLG is a changing neighborhood; it’s a vista most New Yorkers know well. Certain adjustments that I had to make simply reflected the different demographics of the area. For instance, instead of after midnight high end pizza or ramen as I might find in the East Village, the primary choices are jerk chicken or some stuffed pasta that I might have waiting at home.

No, except for the lack of easy access to Citibikes in my new Brooklyn ‘hood—there are only three ports all at the northern end whereas it seemed like there was a port at most East Village corners– acclimating to the new geography was surprisingly easy. It was the emotional adjustment that is still very much a work in progress.

I spent many years, working myself to the bone and often beyond (in my early and mid 50s I suffered through years on a cane, a result of lower body injuries that have as one root an inability to hear my body say “enough for a moment”) in order to keep up with the ever rising expense of living in Manhattan. As my rent escalated vertiginously due to loopholes in the stabilization laws, my grip on my life there loosened. My dreams were of me in my late 30s, a savvy New Yorker moving about the city with ascending career prospects. My nightmare was of being trapped on an upper floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and having no good choices for survival. The reality was nowhere near either extreme, but it wasn’t a positive circumstance. I was a refugee from two failed careers, journalism and artisan cheese, scraping by—if that—while building a third career in the craft beer world, nurturing the tidbits of journalism work that remained, and looking to break into writing books.

The bullhorn blaring “YOU FUCKING FAILURE,” in the back of my mind was loud, but I had experience in tuning it out and focusing forward. In that way, my East Village apartment, the location of many of my rallies from moments of professional and economic distress, was a comfort rather than a financial burden. How would I tune out the bullhorn in my new location would be a big determinant in how I settled in.

As it turned out, it wasn’t a challenge at all; the bullhorn didn’t cross the East River with me. One of the first emails I opened after unpacking my computer was my primary journalism client notifying me of a raise. Then, work began to flood in from another writing client and a new journalism client came on board. My Brooklyn digs were less than half of what I paid in Manhattan, so suddenly I had gone from being months behind on my overhead expenses to cruising several months ahead. The back of my mind was suddenly quiet and calm.

I had always envisioned that moment being one of euphoria, the emotion of a team winning the title. Instead, it was a moment of pleasure and relief, but I felt determination rising in me. I had a long agenda ahead. I was now freer to assert myself into the world. I was also freer to create a better career. Writing gigs with paltry pay now but prospects of better pay down the road were suddenly feasible. Fellowships and grants were also possible. I hadn’t won the title; I had made the playoffs. The challenges ahead would be tougher but with them came the validation and increased confidence of recent success. I was no longer constantly stressed out that I wasn’t “doing this right.”

Most importantly I found I could be patient with myself. When I was living in a total 24/7 panic, everything had to be right now, right this second. There was a constant sense of red alert; the house was on fire and I had to both try and extinguish the flames and choose what to save. Now, I could evolve a morning routine with a goal of blogging for an hour each day and rolling out a yoga mat for 30 to 45 minutes. That I didn’t do it immediately wasn’t a problem. The impact of the fear that gripped my life didn’t vanish; it simply seeped out of my system.

One alternative to Citibikes that I found useful was just walking. After so many decades amid Manhattan’s ever teeming glitz, it was restorative to walk amongst my new borough’s blocks of brownstones and other buildings that didn’t aspire toward a postmillennial Langian Metropolis. I began to grasp what I’ve long called Brooklyn piety; this sense that it’s not a refuge for failed Manhattanites, but an improvement over New York’s signature area.

One important ritual that was easy to tweak was establishing a nearby watering hole. The East Village was full of them, and they were a key survival tactic. Workaholic that I am, home was usually an office where I slept and cooked rather than a focal point of relaxation and that was even more true as my life became a constant crisis. I quickly settled on Parkside, a craft cocktail bar around the corner from me, as I don’t know that scene especially well, and they almost immediately welcomed me as industry.

The music was often great, and it was nice to drink and not think about my work as a craft beer buyer. The sonic brackdrop typically ranged from contemporary French hip hop to ‘90s R&B and much in between. One night, well into my second drink, I found myself drifting away on an old Leona Lewis song and pleasantly recognized the parallel experiences from craft beer and wine bars in the East Village. Yet as her creamy voice dripped over artificial, pumped up beats, I realized I wasn’t thinking of a way out of my problems as was so often the case in the last decade or so. Instead, I was thinking about attending the Newport Jazz Festival for the first time or participating in New York City Body Painting Day. I was looking ahead without fear. Now THAT was new. I turned my gaze onto Flatbush Avenue and realized that I was settling in. And it would be a long, valuable process.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and cinema has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, 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.

20190406_001133 — This is what Parkside calls a Smoky Manhattan. It’s presented to you and you’re counseled to give it a few minutes to let the smoke infuse the beverage. It’s as good as it looks.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 19, Moving

20190128_221816 — Many things didn’t come with me from Manhattan to Brooklyn including this piece of graffiti art and those CDs

Moving from my home of 26 and half years was actually pretty easy; it’s what came after that was hard.

“This is so very Marie Kondo,” bellowed one of the two movers cheerfully as they moved my boxes, posters and clothing from my third-floor apartment to a van outside.

I had no idea who this Kondo woman was, but I got the gist. I had moved 88 pieces into my East Village apartment back in the summer of 1992, and now, in January 2019, I was moving 19 pieces into my new place in Brooklyn’s Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The move in required an army of ten friends; the move out required two guys around 30. They reacted to the fact that I was leaving nearly three times as much stuff as I was moving. I gathered that this Kondo woman was an advocate of minimalism.

I thought this was a key to the move. I owned well more than six thousand CDs and many hundreds of books. The Martin Johnson Archive of Recorded Music had become too expensive to maintain. I sold about half of it, first to Stooz then to Academy Records. I invited friends to come over and bolster their collections with the leftovers. I was happy; it meant that the archive would in good hands. I donated my two butcher block wooden tables to Housingworks. I was moving to a furnished room in an apartment where my roommate had every imaginable kitchen gadget, so the countertop grill, the crock pot, the juicer etc., all went on the landing as did dozens and dozens of books and posters and the like.

I deflected the emotional weight of the purge by creating a different narrative. I wasn’t fleeing Manhattan rents, though I was; instead, I was positioning myself for a productive decade ahead. In my 30s and 40s, I often applied for journalism fellowships and often just missed out. I stopped doing that in my 50s because what would I do with this expensive apartment and this cumbersome collection of possessions. By reducing to a few hundred discs, a few dozen books and the like (I would do that Zadie Smith binge I’ve been planning on Kindle), I was now agile in a geographic sense. If I got a fellowship somewhere far away from New York, I could just toss my stuff in a $200 a month storage locker and head on or I could reduce further and take them with me.

20190122_221357 — An emblem of my ’90s self. That poster was on the landing for maybe 45 minutes.

Something felt very modern about the move. No longer was I a stowaway living amid million dollar condos. I would be living amongst people like me who abandoned Manhattan to thrive in their creative pursuits.

I realized the change the Saturday after I moved. I was heading back to the old apartment to clean it out, and I stopped at a coffee bar on Flatbush. While I was in line, the baristas changed from a scruffy college aged guy, to a cordial, business prim, middle-aged woman. I perked up at the sight of her, feeling like she might be on Plan B or even C too, and she noticed and smiled back. What surprised me was that I didn’t retreat emotionally. Often in that situation I feel the stench of my failures—the bruises and scars on my psyche–too close to the surface and gently shy away. The line was too long to pursue anything, but at least my self esteem issues had been tamed. I walked along Flatbush toward the subway, sipping my iced latte on a January day feeling that much taller.

When I arrived at what was now “the old place” as I’d slept two nights in my new place, I realized immediately I wasn’t going to get it all cleared out, but I tried. Some neighbors pitched in lugging stuff to the trash porch, but even with a full day there, as well as all day Tuesday and Wednesday morning. There just wasn’t time to return the place to the clean, barren standard that I’d left my previous old place in 1992. The futility of the goal began to mirror in my mind the silly ambition of trying to build a writing income that would facilitate a Manhattan rental.

A wave of resignation swept across me, I had to sit down in my main room now surrounded by remnants of my old life. I sighed and realized that I was on deadline. This is what I love about writing on deadline, you have to separate the big picture into a bunch of manageable little pictures. With that I charged ahead clearing this corner or that corner. I angered Ms. Kondo by loading a few bags of stuff I just couldn’t leave behind. Finally, on Wednesday early afternoon, I was back from running vestiges of a much cooler me, a silver leather motor cycle jacket and a pinstriped suit among other things, to a thrift shop. I realized time was up. It was the 30^th and I had to be out by then, and even more pertinently, I needed to be in retail by 2. I packed my last bag of leftovers that I was taking to Brooklyn, and I looked at the place. It wasn’t how I wanted to remember it. I wanted to remember it for the good times but those were so long ago, yet powerful in ways that it made sense I held on for so long. Slowly, I went into each room and thought about the good times. Then I left, locked the door and went downstairs to post a letter to my neighbors thanking them for making the building such a gold standard for the concept of home. I didn’t really have neighbors but rather an extended family. That’s what was hard to leave. I taped the letter to the wall near the mailboxes and sat on the steps for a minute. The weight of it all was catching up to me.

I thought about a picture I’d seen from my collegiate graduation day. I’m with a bunch of classmates. Some look a little apprehensive about leaving the academic bubble, some are celebrating the moment of receiving an Ivy League degree. I’m looking dead at the camera, arms folded, smiling, with a confident air of “okay world, whatcha got?”

I have often worried about what that dude would think of my middle-aged self. There sure have been more bumps and bruises than I anticipated. I heard my 22 year-old self say, “this was an awesome chapter. C’mon, get up, let’s go write some more really great chapters.” I smiled, exhaled deeply and picked up my bag and headed for retail. My collegiate self was right, there was a lot more to do. Time to get at it. I felt so driven that I didn’t even look back on the old place when the door closed. I had work to get to, a new home in Brooklyn, and an abundance of possibilities to follow.

20190130_133255

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 18, Searching

a6b49-1kjdxktpyjbaxcm0mbraroa — This used to be my view of Manhattan as I walked to the store.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 18, Searching

In 1992, when I moved into my last East Village apartment on 12^th Street near Avenue A, moving was something like old hat. In 1988 I moved from NoLIta to 13^th and Avenue B, and in 1990, I moved from that spot to a nice coach house apartment on 14^th Street and Avenue A. Frequent moving was a ritual of young adulthood. Even though I had hoped to put down roots in my first two East Village haunts, it didn’t work out.

It did on 12^th Street, and that part of leaving it made it more daunting. The other daunting part was passing the interview. I’m good at charming and impressing strangers on the craft beer aisle of the store, and I was for decades on a cheese counter. But persuading someone that I’d be a good person to share their apartment with, was on a higher level. A much higher level. My fears spiked when I remembered how in 2016 in need of additional income, I poked around looking for bartending gigs at beer bars. I was seen as the hobbled overweight guy I’d become in my mid ‘50s, not the fit athletic dude of my late 30s. I felt my hobbled period was just a phase and the guy who routinely rode his bike over the Williamsburg Bridge in late 40s (I worked at Bedford Cheese Shop at the time) or the guy whose fitness regimen included two yoga class/spinning class doubleheaders when I was 51 was the real me.

I suspect that most of us have gaps between how we self-identify and how the world sees us. I wasn’t sure if I could narrow that gap—both in appearance and in the confidence that one projects from comfort within their skin–in the brief time between realizing that it was time to move and interviewing for new apartments. I had lost 25 pounds in the preceding months, but I wasn’t close to the fitness level I had at 51, at least not yet. Moving was something that would facilitate it. I decided that looks couldn’t be my ally. I would have to rely on what kind of roommate I’d be. It was simple, I wanted four things in my next space. A place to write, a place to sleep, time to cook and a place I could roll out my yoga mat. I wanted to argue that in going from a bigwig at Bedford Cheese Shop, where there were fewer than 20 employees to a team player at my current gig where there are more than 100 bode well in being able to contribute to a nurturing household culture.

“It’ll be a breeze,” said some of the same friends who counseled me originally that I was too old and out of touch to be someone’s roommate.

I cocked an inquisitive eyebrow.

You have such a large social network and an even larger network of friends, they reminded me.

This was true. My Facebook network had come to the rescue in 2014 when a six-month consulting gig suddenly ended after ten weeks; the gig ended abruptly on a Tuesday yet by the weekend I had my current gig. That would be my first stop. I posted my needs one Sunday morning around 10. By Noon, I had offers for a basement apartment of my own in Flushing, a floor of a Victorian house in Ditmas Park, and shares looming in Washington Heights, Carroll Gardens, and even one down the street from me on Avenue A. I went to retail at 2, fully confident that my relocation would go smoothly. The confidence grew during the shift when Lisa, my last cheese biz protégé texted me to tell me not to commit to anything until she talked to her friend in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. I had known Lisa for five years and I think that this was my first time experiencing an imperative sentence from her.

The places in Flushing, Washington Heights, PLG, and Ditmas Park were well within my price range. In fact, the Ditmas Park prospect was free, which seemed to good to be true, and it was. The Flushing place was nice, if a bit of a hike from Manhattan (it was in North Flushing, about a 15 minute walk from 7 stop at Main Street. I maintained it as a fall back. It took two weeks for me to see the place in PLG. During which time, I fell out of touch with the Washington Heights prospect, so I boarded the Q train one Sunday morning thinking that it was between it and walking in Flushing.

It was a cold December day and pouring rain to boot as I tumbled into the Union Square subway station to measure the commute en route to Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The trip was a breeze, the Q takes the concept of an express train seriously. I couldn’t imagine making it in the estimated 30 minutes yet 25 minutes after I hit the platform, I was opening my umbrella and walking toward Flatbush Avenue.

Despite the cold and the rain, a Boost Mobile store was blasting reggae and the fragrant aroma of jerk chicken emanated from two nearby restaurants. This certainly felt welcoming. I rang the bell for E5 assuming it was on the fifth floor, and I was pleasantly surprised to see Lisa’s friend and his shih tzu, awaiting me at the door across from hallway on the first floor.

He had emailed me the floor plan, so the nickel tour took only a few seconds. We slid comfortably into the interview. I’ve conducted enough journalism interviews to know that a good one is a conversation, and this quickly turned to that with only occasional touches on issues (my retail work schedule, my financial fitness, etc.). He described the amenities (laundry in the basement, better one on the corner, the location of the nearby supermarkets and that the Chinese take out place around the corner was really good).

Finally, about an hour into what I thought would be an hour interview, he asked about my previous roommate situations. I’ve had several, but I decided to dwell on hosting the actress and model Victoria Beltran for several months when she was 19 and I was 35. I figured that illustrated the age gap and my openness. Beltran is trans and I had talking points ready to discuss how much I admired her determination and ambition. I also thought that her comfort with a radical transition like that was a good guide for my late middle age transitions. As a teen, she handled hers with poise and aplomb that I could barely muster in my 30s. Small wonder that she’s in her early 40s and still on the runway.

I mentioned her name and Lisa’s friend brightened said “oh, cool,” with a shock of recognition and moved on to other topics before I could rattle off my talking points. A few minutes later, he mentioned that he too was trans, albeit in the other direction from Victoria. I guess he understood my reaction to Beltran. We were approaching the 90 minute mark and I started worrying about getting to the store in time for my shift. When he asked if I liked the place. I didn’t have to calculate much. My bedroom would be larger and have more natural light than my bedroom on 12^th Street. The place was bigger, way bigger, and my overhead would decrease by something in the range of $1300 a month. I worked hard to keep a poker face and said “sure.”

“Great!” He said. “When do you want to move in?”

We traded phone numbers and targeted January 15.

I walked back to Flatbush eager to grab some jerk chicken to go in celebration of my new neighborhood, but there were lines at each location. So, I compromised to some McDonald’s French Fries and nibbled on them as the Q zipped across the Manhattan Bridge back to the only borough I’d called home. This move was going to be something more than a rite of youth, but my friends were right. Finding a new place to live had been a breeze.

20190315_133110 — This is my view of Manhattan now on the walk to the store, perhaps a touch more realistic.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 17, Leaving.

cda11-1cUSQ_FPvFxI4HD0-AFz_5w — I used to live in a neighborhood called “funky” now it’s just called Manhattan.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 17 Leaving

The decision to leave came easily; it probably took about 30 seconds. The implementation of that decision took years.

The decision to leave happened some time in 2016, and it came so clearly and bluntly that it might have been a moment of clarity. I had lived where I lived for a very long time, since 1992 to be precise. That evening in 2016, I was home from retail, enjoying dinner and beer while in front of the computer listening to a podcast and probably following social media, when I looked up and scanned my apartment. I looked at the walls covered in floor to ceiling shelving containing CDs, books and records. I looked at a pile of old magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Skin Two, sitting inertly in another corner. In the bedroom were two tables piled high with clutter, computer discs from an earlier era, clothing items that were never put away then fell out of the rotation. My rent had just escalated to a vertiginous level. The competitor in me wanted to use the increase as urgent motivation to rebuild the journalism career—yes against all odds, but the odds are I were never on good terms anyway—and make the new number work. Then the voice of reason intoned loudly inside my head.

“You don’t need all this,” she said.

It may have seemed like an odd moment for an existential epiphany. I was sitting at home in a place that increasingly felt like more like a burden or at best a refuge rather than a redemptive setting of refocusing and renewal, but I was in the throes of Double Dry Hopped India Pale Ales by local brewers like Grimm, Other Half and Finback. The fact that they were only making me feel less stressed but not actually happy plunged me down a rabbit hole of introspection.

I knew what I wanted my life to be about and I knew what I wanted to pursue, yet increasingly those goals were taking a back seat, if not something far more distant to the simple objective of keeping a roof over my head. In short, I had prioritized *where* I wanted to live over *how* I wanted to live. I don’t know if that’s always a mistake, but it felt like one this time.

I began loosely probing around about other areas in the city to live while a book proposal that had it yielded a deal might have alleviated the financial worries failed to ignite any interest in agent world. The results of my investigation weren’t promising. One-bedroom apartments in accessible areas of Brooklyn and Queens were nearly as expensive as my East Village digs. Some people even wondered aloud why I was looking to move when I had “such a good deal.”

That led to a year or so of wondering WTF was wrong with me. if pounding one’s self-esteem to a pulp was a useful skill, then I would be Oprah level rich. I’d have written many books on the subject, opened institutes and held numerous endowed professorships to teach young people the best techniques. It isn’t, so as my journalism income dwindled for what seemed like 23^rd time in the not so new millennium, I pounded in the solitude of my refuge, sometimes medicated with craft beer sometimes just staring into vistas of the Francis Wolff photographs on my wall wondering with amazement that my landlord hadn’t dragged me into court. I began checking my mail only once a week or so as I wasn’t always able to deal with the news that time was almost up.

I forestalled the inevitable with an additional gig–yes a third job–doing sales and marketing for a small dairy farm that was making absolutely killer cheese in the Finger Lakes region, but local cheese retailers were too slow to take the cheese into their inventories and the farm was slow to adapt to protocols of New York City cheesemongers. Meanwhile my self-esteem got a much-needed boost when a bartender I admire seemed to take a liking to me. I began deciding that how I looked in my eyes didn’t matter so much if I looked so divine in hers. Yet by the end of 2017, the cheese gig and the infatuation were over. Another book proposal failed to attract any interest from the agent community, and I had to face facts. It was over. My life as an East Village resident earning an income from work at a fancy grocery store and from freelance journalism—my badge of identity for the last 30 years–was no longer sustainable.

I waited all winter for court papers. I assumed all footsteps in the hallway were servers with court summons instead of neighbors. Then suddenly a reprieve lurked on the horizon. For the first time in a decade, an agent took on a book proposal of mine and gleefully envisioned a big deal. By the time court papers arrived, I had a way that could rectify the situation. All wasn’t lost. At least not yet.

While the odds and I are not on good terms because I’ve beaten them repeatedly; book proposals are where the law of averages snaps back into place. You might think that a writer with 35 years of experience and a wide range of branded expertise from published works at the high levels of journalism could get a book deal. If you did think that, you’re wrong. I’m zero for seven in that pursuit as my agent giddily began seeking deals. I began thinking what if this new proposal fails to entice editors. That has been my reality, right.

The thought crossed my mind that I would throw myself in front of a moving subway train leaving my computer on the platform open to a document that screamed in 72-point type, “Are You Happy Now Motherfucking Publishers, I was dead to you all along and now, I’m…” But while many, many writer friends would empathize, this didn’t appeal to me. I had other goals. I wanted to rebuild my yoga practice to a level that I could spend a useful hour a day on a mat. I wanted to bike the East River bridges more frequently. I wanted to attend the European jazz festivals. I wanted to drive the PCH along the California coast. And, I wanted someone else to look at me like the bartender did, preferably someone like her whose gaze I enthusiastically reciprocated.

So, I began thinking what sort of New York City life could exist from my income at the store and the vestiges of my income from journalism. The answer was simple, a share of a place either uptown or in the outer boroughs. Friends warned against this approach. I was in my late 50s; to their thinking I was too old to relate to younger people. Yet, most of coworkers at the store are two, three even (gasp) four decades my junior and I relate to them great. Most of my customers are two even three decades my junior, and we go out drinking. Most of my bartender pals are, well, you get the idea. I looked at Craig’s List. Shares in my price range were abundant.

Sometime between the eighth and ninth rejection letter (ultimately out of fifteen, it wasn’t a bad book idea, not at all, some publishers were wary of my brand and others had similar books in their pipeline), I decided that my time in a Manhattan One Bedroom apartment was over. Even if I got a deal, I was leaving. I would miss my frequent contact with my neighbors, both the next-door ones and the baristas at the coffee bar, the bartenders at the beer bars, and baseball fanatics at my pharmacy. And yes, I’d be charging off into a region of the unknown, but sometimes when the known doesn’t work, the unknown can be very promising. I figured it was worth checking out.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, 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.

3d600-17T_ebWNZWt-KTmp86wkbGQ — Beers, yes, but also catalysts for existential inquiry

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 16, The Big Picture

From Sep 20, 2018

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like

Episode 16: The Big Picture

When I see unfamiliar customers on the beer aisle approach them with this introduction.

“Hey, how are you doing today? If you have any questions on our beers or ciders, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be happy to address them. I’m one of the buyers here.”

There’s a lot to unpack in the salutation. For one, it tells them that they don’t have to stand and stare aimlessly at several hundred craft beers and wonder which one is right for them. Two, in a big picture way, it offers to make the experience of shopping far more convivial than say ordering online. That’s something that nearly all of my coworkers on the sales floor are aware of, and so the guy in the Yankee hat gets asked about his hopes for the Bomber’s playoff chances; the woman in the Duke sweatshirt gets asked about friends in Florence’s way, and so on. I like to tell people that I no longer follow the NFL passionately, but I do keep track professionally. That way if I see a guy in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey on a Sunday afternoon, I can offer a quick comment about their stunning new quarterback.

The response to my salutation on Aisle 2 varies based on gender. A few women shrug off the offer as if it were a come on or worse I’m implying that women don’t know much about beer (which is far from the truth. I learned some about beer from Mark, Dave and Ray, but even more from Gina, Jen and Maggie. A lot of my networking these days involves Lila, Colleen, Holly and Ally). Most women recognize that the conviviality in the offer is genuine and a discussion often ensues about craft beer. On the other hand, many men curtly refuse the offer. It’s as if there’s this notion that their Y chromosome also comes with cicerone skills, when in fact I’m certain that the city’s leading cicerone, Anne Beccera (ahem, have you lost that stereotype yet about craft beer being a boy’s game yet?), would happily tell you that the beer scene is so fast changing that you HAVE to ask questions to keep up. A discussion ensues with some men, and a few hear the last part of the salutation and ask, “wow, what a cool job, what do you do?”

That’s a long answer. The short of it is simple. I meet with sales reps and place orders and email breweries and reps from boutique distributors and place orders. Piece of cake, right? Wrong, the hard part is knowing what to order. I run one of the best retail craft beer programs in the city. People come from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even Texas to shop here (okay the Texan is an airplane pilot and she shops only when she has overnight stay after a local landing but still). I keep my ear to the ground to stay on top of the latest developments. That means spending at least a half hour a day on Instagram looking at brewery’s pages and those from likeminded retailers. That means strategic bar hopping so that I can talk to buyers and managers of high-end craft beer bars in the vicinity, see what’s on their list and even peruse the kegs that are next. And yes, it means drinking probably eight to ten beers a week purely for research; dozens of bartenders in this neighborhood have fielded a request from me for a sample pour of something I’m considering ordering when its available in cans.

It’s a lot of work, and no, I’m not complaining in the least. It’s a really cool job, and I feel fortunate to have such a stimulating situation. Yet, I work 30–35 hours a week. There are no paid vacations. All that bar hopping is not on some company credit card. And, if I don’t match my paycheck from the store with comparable writing income, then I can’t pay all of my bills. So yes, I work another 30–40 hours a week either generating prose or researching outlets who might pay me for the prose I generate. There are fewer and fewer of those, which means that I spend more time looking for writing work than I do writing. And that means that the research part of the beer gig often takes on a medicinal angle.

Yes, it’s upwards of 70 hours a week of stuff I love to do, and I’m the son of two workaholics and younger brother of two others. I can handle this load. Still, there’s something profoundly negative that occurs from this situation. I lose the big picture sometimes. In NFL parlance, I become focused obsessively on first downs and forget about touchdowns. I have tended make the goal working 70 hours a week and getting the bills paid rather than working fewer hours a week, travelling some, going to yoga more often (or even more ambitiously resuming dance classes!), reading more, etc. In other words, I have made being solvent the goal rather than being happy.

I don’t think of it as a moral failing. It’s only natural that when you work so hard to survive, you forget that the object of this here game of life is to thrive. I had lost track of that goal, but it came back to me in an unexpected way recently. I was having a day where I was weary, not really 100% either though not truly under the weather, and I was looking ahead to several more hours of retail work. A regular customer came by to get some coffee and asked how I was doing. I heaved a sigh and said, “just hanging in there I guess.”

He smiled as he drew a cup and said, “well that’s the best we can do.”

My inner voice scoffed, and I said to myself “maybe that the best you can do, buddy, but I want to be doing well, doing…” and suddenly the inner copy editor and fact checker in me cut off that line of thought and offered a nice skeptical “really?”

I felt myself falling down a rabbit hole of introspection, which is not a good headspace for a retail sales floor, so I went downstairs to the stock room, ostensibly to paw around the milk crates of loose bottles to complete some six packs that had been reduced to five items. It was a good, mindless activity while I thought things through, and since I don’t speak Arabic, French or Spanish fluently enough to converse with the my coworkers based in the stockroom, I would likely be left to my own devices.

I thought about a longtime friend who lives in NYC. He recently told me he was going to hold his 60th birthday party in New Orleans and that I should make my flight reservations early since it would be around the time of the Jazz and Heritage Festival. I had to stymie the urge to yell at him; it felt like just the sort of thing that someone in the job bubble would say to shame someone trapped in the gig economy. I took for granted I would have to save my pennies diligently just to go to Eleven Madison Park or a comparable venue to celebrate his birthday. A plane trip, a stay in New Orleans? Are you freakin’ kidding me!

But, but…wouldn’t it be a blast to go to New Orleans? While the request bordered on tone deaf to my situation, if my finances can’t handle a trip for a friend’s birthday, isn’t there something wrong with my finances? Can’t I fix that? I began to wonder if my friend’s invitation wasn’t a vote of confidence that I could get out of this hole.

I decided that merely getting up to date on the bills, while an admirable goal, wasn’t setting the bar high enough. I needed a definition of fun that was more ambitious than enjoying new double IPA at a favorite neighborhood craft beer bar or an hour on a yoga mat. I needed a weekly dose of that while maybe saving money for a trip or too.

Otherwise, my customer was right. Just hanging in there *is* the best I can do.

I found a few bottles that would complete some six packs, restacked the milk crates, and I returned to the sales floor. En route, I decided that instead of grabbing take out on the way home, I’d pick up a salmon fillet, dust in a spicy rub and grill it. It would be a little dose of life. I tend to work hard so that I can work harder, and having a cool job makes that easier on the spirit. Instead, I needed to work hard so I can play hard, even if playing hard might require a little practice.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 12, On the Fringe

Episode 12: On the Fringe

Nope, not the usual grocery store craft beer.

When I took my current job, I thought I was moving from the fringe to the mainstream. For much of my culinary career, I’ve worked in small, off-the-beaten-path or at least unusually located boutiques. Now, I work at a bright, gleaming, 18,000 square foot store, easily the biggest place I have worked at since I was employed by a superstore in Dallas Texas during the Carter Administration. And it’s a five-minute walk from Union Square, one of Manhattan’s biggest hubs. To give you a sense of proportion, I think the produce department at my current store is as large as the first iteration of the Bedford Cheese Shop, which I worked at in 2004, when it was still inside the minimall, next to Spoonbill and Sugartown book store.

I was wrong. When it comes to craft beer, I’m on the fringe. Grocery stores, even fancy grocery stores aren’t supposed to carry rare and exotic beers and we’re especially not supposed to sell them in an enthusiastic, knowledgeable way and promote them on Instagram.

Um, sorry.

At least, once a month, I hear from a sales rep “oh that’s not really for you,” in response to an inquiry about an exotic brew. One brewer that we proudly supported early on restricted some formats of his beer from my store and explained that he wasn’t distributing to that format to grocery stores anymore and didn’t want to make exceptions. “It’s a slippery slope if we start,” he wrote in an apologetic email.

All that is fine in one way and not so much in another. It’s fine since a chip on my shoulder is typically a good thing. I began using the hashtag #yesagrocerystore for a while until it began to feel shrill. Also, I realized the drivers for a lot of the small local breweries we work with were coming by even when they weren’t delivering; they dug the sandwiches from our delicatessen section. Since there are several beer bars that have excellent food, Milk and Hops, Fool’s Gold and Double Windsor just to name three, I took it as high praise for the rest of the store.

On the other hand, there is significant detriment. I haven’t been able to extend the brand that I’m building very much and monetize my skills. I went into this job with the idea that I could build it into something that would be self-supporting income in case the journalism income declined precipitously again. Those hopes are fading. Yes, success at retail has led to feelers from a couple of other outlets, both of them offering lower pay (um yeah, those were short conversations). My attempts to break into the bar world have been rebuffed; maybe there’s a glass wall. I fear that I fit the stereotype of the grocery store beer buyer who doesn’t really like craft beer but follows the sales patterns. I’m overweight and not white. About once every two weeks, someone — and not always a white person — is surprised to discover that I actually like craft beer and furthermore that I’m somewhat knowledgeable about it. The overweight part is something I’m working on; the stereotype blinders I can’t help. Also, there are some bar owners who know me from five years ago when lower body injuries were a daily problem for me. I am beginning to get back in shape and hope to lose the baggy jeans for catsuits as I did in my early 40s. It would be a very au courant and very Wakanda. And it would be a loud reminder that my cane is not a permanent part of my wardrobe.

Of course, out on the fringe is where I’ve lived most of my life. For years I didn’t fit into any particular African American crowd either. Then, suddenly in the late ’90s, I stumbled into a crew that like me grew up middle class, and more importantly we didn’t regard our Blackness as an anti-colonial stance, we regarded it as imperial. That is to say, if we took an interest in Wong Kar Wai films then guess what y’all, liking Wong Kar Wai was now a Black thing. Ditto lunches during restaurant week, classic American songbook, or anything else that caught our fancy. We weren’t fitting into new holes; we were destroying the pegboard. It validated new narratives. Unfortunately, as the new millennium settled in, rising rents, career snafus and other vagaries pulled us apart. In particular, I was pulled from the orbit of what was left of the group, since I had to work more and more just to stay somewhat afloat economically.

On a recent Thursday many of us reunited in the East Village. One of our old crowd was doing a reading at place near Avenue D. Once we got over the shock that we’re now approaching 60 instead of 40, the old rhythms resumed. When I asked one ringleader that I hadn’t seen in years how she was doing, she paused and looked me in the eye. Then she uttered a guttural, “I’m okay.” There was a pause. “I guess,” she continued. “You know what I mean.”

I did. And I loved that the pauses in her declamation were as charged as those in Thelonious Monk’s music.

The reading was magical. It reconnected me to the days when metaphor meant more to life than algebra and artistic expression was something to be lived not just blogged.

When I left, I looked at the night sky which was just beginning to envelop Avenue D and realized something important. I’ve been on the fringe most of my life. If I’m on the fringe in craft beer, it shouldn’t feel like an imposition. It’s an obstacle that I’m used to overcoming. It’s practically a homecourt advantage.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 10, Holidays in the Store

Episode 10

Much of My Life Revolves Around These Beverages

There are several reasons that I tend to think my culinary career started at Petak’s, a small shop on Madison Avenue near Engineer’s Gate in Central Park, in 1986 rather than at Bloomingdales, the renowned department store, in 1984, and holidays are the biggest one. I had an office job for my first two years after college and while we usually worked weekends, the idea of working on most holidays was well beyond the pale. At Bloomingdales, we did work holidays like Memorial Day and Labor Day, but the idea of being open on Thanksgiving, which would have made an immense amount of sense for those of us in the fancy food division, was simply not on the table. Yet, when I got to Petak’s, not only did I work on Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was no big deal. All the key people did; it was expected of us. Petak’s was closed two days a year, Yom Kippur and New Year’s Day. Rick Petak, the owner, was fond of explaining the latter by noting that he didn’t want to be open with a hungover crew. Getting drunk on New Year’s Eve was expected of us too.

I wasn’t particularly bothered by working on Christmas (though it took me a couple of years to understand why I was supposed to go to Chinatown for dinner after the shift); I liked wandering the city in the late afternoon remnant autumn light. My family isn’t a Christmas get together group (our gather holiday used to be Thanksgiving but now it’s Mother’s Day). Over the years, it seemed like my life acclimated nicely to my retail work schedule. There were friends who hosted Christmas Eve dinners, a close pal hosted a New Year’s Night Amarone party. Since the wine gathering made drinking on NYE almost pointless, another friend in that crowd began hosting a New Year’s Eve bash built around hot chocolate, gingerbread and the steam whistles at Pratt. My college pals held summer get togethers the week before or after the major holidays. Although I still aggressively self- identified as a freelance journalist rather than a culinary professional, my leisure time certainly aligned itself nicely to accommodate the demands of retail.

Then, stuff happened. The college pals had kids. The hot chocolate and gingerbread woman was laid off and moved to Mexico City. The Amarone dude’s work dried up (he was a freelance copy editor), and he moved to Warsaw. Meanwhile I began working at a store that is open 24/7/365. If your schedule calls for you to work 10–6 on Thursday at the store, then you work 10 to 6 on Thanksgiving because it’s more Thursday than Turkey Day.

But as I prepared to work on July 4 this year, I realized that normalizing working on holidays has had a detrimental effect on me. As my pals moved away, my rents rose, and my career prospects dimmed. I began to work more and more. I didn’t mind; hell, I didn’t even notice. I like working; I’d go so far as to say I worship at the altar of work. I’m the son of two workaholics. My Dad dressed to go to the office every day, yet on days he didn’t go in, (meaning he worked from home) he’d forego the necktie. I found satisfaction from applying myself and completing a task. Always have. But usually, I finagled something to balance it. When I was an adolescent, I inherited all of the household chores from my older siblings as they moved out on their own, and not only did I prize doing “big kid stuff” I used it as time to listen to the radio stations I adored and intensified my relationship to music. When I was in my 30s, I had a gig at Butterfield Market, where I worked 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, then 8 to 6 on Saturday. After the Saturday shift, I’d bike straight to the gym to do an hour of stretching and stuff that now files under restorative yoga. Then on Sunday, I’d awaken and take either a rigorous step or an incredibly vigorous house groove dance class before biking to bucolic setting (usually Hudson River Park) to read and agenda the following week. I felt like I owed it to myself to play as hard as I worked.

Presently, I work at the store Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That meant that in 2017, I worked Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as well as New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. “Of course,” I chirped to anyone who thought it was odd. “It’s just another Sunday and Monday!” That remark had a bit of a nasty reverb to it. One of my leisure routines is to craft beer bar hop my way home on Sunday and well, there was absolutely, positively, no way I was even thinking about doing that on New Year’s Eve. As I kept to the routine and worked on the King Holiday, President’s Day and Memorial Day, I began to realize that the work hard play harder ethic was long gone, and I was duller for it.

This holiday season, I worked at creating an agenda to re-balance my life. It will feel liberating, which is kind of the point of the day, right?

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 01: Well, How Did I Get Here

Episode 1: Well, How Did I Get Here?

Aisle 2 of a fancy grocery store in Manhattan is my domain and it makes me very happy to be there. The back half of the aisle is devoted to craft beer, and I’m the buyer. Many of my customers — and yes, I think of them as mine — think that the selection is one of the best in the city. Some of them think it is the best. I welcome people to the section as if they were guests in my home. I run an Instagram page for the aisle.

It’s my little obsession, but it’s a total surprise in some ways. Not the success, I expect to make anything I work hard on into a big success, but that this is part of my life at all continually surprises me. This isn’t what I planned.

20 years ago, I thought I had it all figured out. It didn’t seem like a pretense then, nor does it now. It had been 16 years since I graduated college, enough time in the real world to figure that I knew how the things work. At the time, I had a solid freelance writing career. I wrote for several leading publications and websites and I even managed a community at an online service. In addition, I had a weekend job in the food business where I was a cheesemonger and counterman for a fancy grocery store. I lived in the East Village, arguably New York City’s hippest neighborhood and yes, New York City is always expensive, but I had enough revenue flowing through both of my steams that I actually saved money.

I loved my life at the turn of the 21st Century. Work was good; love life was promising. I was fit and routinely attended yoga and dance classes that enraptured me. Then change happened and my sophistication was challenged. First the dotcoms crashed and then while I was still crawling from that wreckage, 9/11 occurred. I went from breezing along to feeling like I was clinging to my lifestyle by my fingernails. Lots of New Yorkers did, so I was in good company. What’s crazy is how often my sophistication has been challenged in the years since then and what a workout my fingernails have received. Sometimes the clinging was temporary, a moment until I found a new place to write or a new store to work at. I initially survived the Great Recession even though a newspaper I wrote for, The NY Sun, went out of business, which meant that $500 a week for columns about the NBA vanished with it. Yet in 2011, when the Wall Street Journal trimmed its freelance budget, it set off a crisis. I spent months feeling like I was freefalling into an abyss of who knows what. Finally, as I approached my third hearing with my landlord in housing court, pretty much willing to concede the fight and accept eviction, a food gig fell from the sky, and suddenly I was solvent again.

The next crisis came in 2014. The food gig — it was at a place on Columbus Avenue — wasn’t working out. I had built a fantastic cheese counter with an even more fantastic crew of cheesemongers that won raves from the NY Timesand New York Magazine and in various issues of Wine Spectator. The owner’s response was to cut my pay by 40% and twist the knife by saying that I was never worth what she was paying me. Whatever. I had gone into the gig intent of stabilizing my finances and building my til then somewhat dormant brand in the artisanal cheese world (during a previous stint in business back in the ’80s The Times and 7 Days raved about my cheese cases, but few of my cheesemonger peers were out of elementary school back then). I was astonished to discover that when I looked for new work in the cheese biz that a few of my colleagues suggested I take a $10/hour gig and work my way up again. Others recommended me to gigs that paid 35 to 40K for 60-hour workweeks. I guess they agreed with Columbus Avenue employer. Another potential employer put a fine point on it. When I called in for my initial, phone interview, I was told that the gig had been given to a friend of theirs that morning. They wanted to talk to me though because I was so not the type. Right, I was older, African American and overweight, I hung up. Bye bye cheese world. It felt like a bad break up too; I’d worked for 30 years in the business. I thought I deserved better.

The bitterness I felt was similar to my raging horror as I watched the demise of my journalism career, but it was worse. I felt as if journalism’s demise was more industry wide and caused by market forces well beyond my editor’s control. The cheese world felt like it was choosing to be insular, and I didn’t belong anymore.

I revised my resume to reflect that I had run the craft beer program on Columbus Avenue. Within weeks I had a consultancy at a small chain of fancy grocery stores upscaling their beer program. I relished the challenge. Much of the place reeked of the NYC food world circa 1997. Here was a chance to bring the stores into the 21st Century. I bumped sales in craft beer up a little and began plotting conquests of other departments. Then I got a strange letter explaining that although sales had indeed increased and the new product was great, the chain was going to go in a different direction without me.

Yeah, after that I was pretty certain that I had absolutely no idea how the world worked anymore. Journalism income was still a trace compared to where it was in 2010. Now, the food biz was unreliable.

A Facebook post about my despair led to a tip about a new, fancy grocery store three blocks away from my apartment. Five minutes into the interview, one of the owners said he hoped I would work with them even though they weren’t offering partnership stakes. The next day, I was doing my tryout shift by cutting and wrapping cheese. A week later they asked me to run their craft beer program. There was one very big caveat, though. The job was part time, initially no health benefits (though that has changed), no vacation and more importantly, I’d need to revive the journalism career in order to pay my rent.

Yet, as I wandered around my new retail home, gazing happily at six packs from the first wave of American craft brewers, four packs from a new wave of gypsy brewers and a smattering of tall boy cans from the latest wave of breweries, I felt a palpable sense of relief. I didn’t know if I reeked of desperation (in my mind, I certainly did), but I didn’t care. I was halfway to pulling myself out of the abyss and I’d done it via social media. I felt thoroughly modern. And things were about to get really interesting.

Yes, we sell very fancy beer at a grocery store

The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me! Read the episodes and you’ll get the idea

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

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