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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

I was shocked when my coworker couldn’t identify this beer.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 32 Something Fishy

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 32: Something Fishy

“Customer service at the seafood department please”

It started innocently enough. I had rushed from the beer aisle to seafood department because well, someone needed to do it. By the time I arrived, I was prepared to explain that I was the craft beer buyer, not a fishmonger, so if you needed some shrimp ladled into a cup and weighed, I could do that. I also have enough cheesemongering experience that if the customer needed oh, say three quarters of a pound of salmon, I could readily plop a side on a butcher block, and cut them a filet. But, if you wanted to discuss the virtues of wild Atlantic Char or the differences between the styles of shrimp we carry, you’d need an actual fishmonger, not a craft beer buyer with knife skills and an eagerness to demonstrate his versatility.

The eagerness to display my versatility part was somewhat new and innocent too. When I started at the store in 2014, I had been working in the New York City specialty food business for 30 years, long enough to know that anything that could be lumped on to your plate would be lumped, often unceremoniously, on to your plate. I could work at pretty much any counter, I could run a cash register, I could program the scales, I could analyze a P&L sheet. I kept all of that under my hat. I had a beer section to manage, and the store was near a Trader Joes, and two Whole Foods, one of which devoted an entire corner of its facility to a craft beer section. My plate was full enough.

Seven years later, much had changed. The beer section was world renowned. That Whole Foods beer corner had been shut down (and replaced by a coffee kiosk). Our selection far outflanks our larger competitors and I’m on the aisle three evenings a week, happy to make a quick recommendation for a good pilsner or local hazy IPA or to explain the Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity laws and their importance to the American craft beer movement. So yeah, when the desperate pages went out for assistance at the seafood counter, I may have been looking to diversify my focus just a little. Also, I was older. At 54, I was eager to stake a flag in some terrain; now at 61, I was more interested in displaying my adaptability.

The calls were a result of staffing cuts that left the store running on a skeleton crew. It was commonplace to find a manager or two spending hours of their shift on a cash register or stocking shelves. I figured ladling shrimp or cutting pieces of salmon would be my extra mile. What I didn’t count on is it becoming a permanent part of my inbox. One Friday evening, I was reminded by the Assistant GM not to forget to close the fish counter.

I raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and was instructed to talk to Salvador, the fishmonger for instructions.

As it turns out, it was pretty easy. Anyone who has closed an artisan cheese counter, and I have closed many, wouldn’t be challenged. The salmon went in one bin, the whitefish were wrapped and put in another, the shellfish had a space for their bins. And that was the hard part. The real fun was beginning to assume some knowledge of seafood would be expected of me. I began enhancing my somewhat sketchy take on seafood. Salvador goes home at 4; afterward, my responsibilities extended beyond Aisle 2 to the seafood station, which was in the back corner of the store

The timing for this well, deep dive, was perfect. Cooking salmon had been a weekly ritual during the pandemic. I began creating recipes involving ginger, onions, peppers, miso broth, and even kale and baby bok choy. Cooking cod, tilapia, and scallops were well within my repertoire too. But our fish counter showcased flounder, trout, lemon sole and other fish that wouldn’t benefit so readily from my throw the refrigerator into a pan and see what happens approach. The same sort of dialogues I have with many of my beer customers about navigating the wide range of local brews we carry found a parallel in the back corner, where I learned that celery salt and smoked paprika make a good rub for salmon or char and that a creamy saffron sauce is easy to make for Chilean Sea Bass. I also found reinforcement for the restraint of limiting the seasoning on some fish to simply cracked pepper, sea salt and olive oil.

Cooking salmon has become a weekly ritual

The other aspect of my home away from my usual home away from home was that I liked was the tactile handling of food. It brought me back to my cheesemonger roots. Beer is safely stored in bottles and cans—or rather cans and bottles given current trends—unless dropped, they are pretty much indestructible. Not so much with fresh fish, which require the level care and attention to detail that I once brought to clothbound cheddar and washed rind cheeses. I began wrapping the cod, trout, banzini, et al with great care, frequently doing old school Italian packaging for each style of fish as if they were a cheese being loving packed away for overnight storage.

The further benefit of being on the fish counter was that I was out of the fray, so to speak. Rather than being in the middle of a heavily trafficked aisle and descended upon by lost customers and bewildered Post Mates shoppers, I could actually hear myself think. When I was on the fish counter, I began to reflect on my career trajectory, the various roadblocks I have smashed into and where to go from here. I’ve been reflecting on the idea that after several attempts to move beyond Aisle 2 that craft beer like artisan cheese and like—let’s face it, many other walks of life—simply doesn’t have a role for an older, professorial African American. It’s unfortunate; I could probably boost any brewery’s sales by 100K a year. Yet, the same was true for artisan cheese and that led me on a path out of that world and into craft beer. I think these realizations amid the chaos of the aisle would be frustrating. Instead, in the serenity of fish counter, I began seeing them as just another set of obstacles to transcend.

A couple of weeks ago, Salvador asked to speak to me. He had a concerned look on his face. He told me that he’d prefer that I wrap the whitefish somewhat simply as he’d instructed. “It’s easier,” he said. I responded that I didn’t mind bringing great attention to detail and wrapping the fish so carefully. Then I looked at him and I realized that he didn’t mean it was easier for me (though this was true), it meant it would be easier for him first thing in the morning to unwrap five packages of fish rather than the 12-15 I was leaving him. This was true, we all had too much on our plates at the store. I smiled and promised to be less precious with the fish. He smiled back as if to say that he appreciated the care and attention I wanted to provide his product.

Salvador is a spry middle-aged man. He demeanor and eloquence suggest that he had no intention of spending his 40s working in a grocery store. I wanted to ask him what he thinks when working in solitude on the counter, but my suspicion is that the conversation would take up time that neither of us have.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 31 Attack of the Karens

This blog parses the changes in my middle age–how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store–and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City, which is never, ever dull.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like, Episode 31: Attack of the Karens

It was the Sunday of a winter three-day weekend (New Year’s Day, the King Holiday and President’s Day all kind of smush together even in recent memory), and a coworker and I were chatting the back corner of the store that I use as my office space. We had just made an important discovery; we had both watched and loved Queens Gambit and were plotting our paths to follow in Beth Harmon’s chess master footsteps.

That can be a long conversation and somewhere in the midst of reveling over our favorite lines of the Slav Defense (2…..c6), we realized that we had been off the sales floor for about ten minutes and reflexively began to walk back to our stations, him to the front and me to Aisle 2. As we turned down the beer aisle, I was reaching into the distant reaches of my chess prodigy mind—territory that had gone mostly unexplored for decades–to explain the development of the middle of the board in that formation when I heard my coworker change his tone to address a customer. I heard him say, “ma’am can you please put your mask on.”

In an instant my mindset when from nerdy teenager perusing his dog-eared copy of Modern Chess Openings, to middle aged floor supervisor at a grocery store during a pandemic. I stiffened my posture a little to reinforce my coworker’s request.

“Oh, I don’t have to wear one,” the customer, a middle-aged white woman, responded.

“Fuck!!” I thought to myself as images of Anja Taylor-Joy and chessboards vanished suddenly. It isn’t too uncommon to spot a customer either with a poorly worn mask or none at all, but all of them are usually receptive to our rules and readily either fix their mask and take one out of their pockets and put it on. Resistance. This was new and not in a good way.

Over the next two or three minutes, the customer escalated the fight in utterly nonsensical ways. She claimed that she didn’t have to wear a mask in New Jersey, which was both not true and entirely irrelevant since the store is in New York City, where there are mask mandates and have been for months. She claimed that she didn’t have to wear one on her last visit, which may have been true if her last visit was in 2019, but you’d like to think she’d notice that the world is different now. Her voice rose with each silly contention; it was obvious she was trying to create a scene. I looked and saw no one filming the situation with their phones. In fact, the three of us were alone on the aisle as other customers, all wearing masks, of course, were avoiding the scene.

She had two bags of popcorn in her arms and asked why she wouldn’t be allowed to buy her popcorn. My coworker calmly noted that she had no right to put our cashiers well being at risk, at which point, at the top of her lungs, she screamed “this is discrimination!” I’m Black, my coworker is Asian. I wasn’t sure what I could say at that point that wasn’t confrontational, but my coworker found a path of least resistance. He directed her to pay for her popcorn at a particular register (it has the biggest plexiglass screen), and it usually run by managers. She did, and she left.

For the rest of the day, my coworker and I struggled to shake free of the exasperation. It was less that we had essentially resolved a conflict by letting the guilty party get what they want, but the ramifications of the Karen factor in a hip Manhattan neighborhood. Wasn’t this sort of thing restricted to the suburbs?

Evidently not. About a month later, I noticed a customer who frequented the store Mondays late in the evening using a flimsy scarf as a face covering. I was usually preoccupied around that time as it’s the final hours of my workweek. My schedule is Friday, Sunday and Monday, which leads to a bit of a reverse workweek. As my clientele are easing into their weekends on Friday late afternoon and evening, I’m hunkering down, and then something like the reverse happens on Monday except I’m not easing into a weekend, but rather consecutive days where writing is my primary focus and I don’t set foot in the store (I do take care of some emails and the like).

One evening I saw her, and after we exchanged pleasantries, I asked why didn’t she buy a mask? She was always fashionably dressed. I’m sure she could find cool masks to match her outfits. She explained that she had a medical condition that prevented her from wearing a mask. I’ve been at the store consistently throughout the pandemic. As have many of my coworkers, I’ve kept up with all kinds of news pursuant to COVID in New York City. I hadn’t heard that one before, but I figured, I should keep an open mind, and on the train ride home, I began Googling.

For the most part I came up empty. So, I resolved that if I saw her again, I would ask for specifics. Sure enough, I saw her again, and again it was on a Monday evening about half hour before I made my exit. She recognized me and asked how I was doing. I told her I was happy as I was about to finish a big story. Instead of factchecking her medical condition tale, we plunged into a conversation about my freelance journalism. She mentioned that she had a degree in journalism from Northwestern, a school I hold in very high esteem. Then she asked if I was going to write about the truth of what was going on.

A voice in the back of my head screamed “Run! Get out while you can.”

I have a bad track record of listening to those voices; they screamed the same thing about journalism 20 years ago and the cheese business eight years ago. In each case, I ignored the warning and soldiered on.

Instead of politely excusing myself from the conversation (I did have about 45 minutes of stuff to do in that half hour), I simply inquired what truth she had in mind.

Within seconds I was sorry that I didn’t listen to the voice in the back of my head. She dove headlong into a COVID conspiracists rant. In fact, she went further than I had heard most people go. When she began contending that 97% of intubations were unnecessary and that no one had really died of the virus, I began wondering if I could make a few calls to Evanston on Tuesday and have her degree revoked.

Instead, I opted for boundaries and explained that I had a lot of work to finish before I punched the clock at 10. She headed on her way, seemingly oblivious to my vibe of skeptical annoyance.

As I finished up, I began to wonder. I had long held out hope that New Yorkers would be the leaders in getting vaccinated and getting back to whatever the new normal is. With those encounters as well as a few with coworkers who were choosing not to vaccinate, my hope was beginning to fade. I thought about recalculating my hopes, but then I realized the music on the PA was Derek and the Dominoes “Layla.” I decided that rather than engage in philosophical algebra and my city and the virus, I should drift away for a few minutes admiring the slide guitar work of Duane Allman. The path of least resistance has its uses.

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.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 30, The Long Hot Summer Part Two

My Brooklyn neighborhood in September; it’s a great setting to walk and think.

Life on Aisle 2 Episode 30: Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer Part Two

Continued from Episode 29

Where Were We? It was the long hot summer of 2020 at the store and managing through COVID times had become routine. My roommate chuckled about how I sometimes failed to take my mask off when I got home from the store because well, I was just used to it; grabbing hand sanitizer on my way out was as automatic as grabbing my keys. What knocked me askew was the offhand way an editor at a site I’d applied to repeatedly shrugged off the lack of diversity on his staff. “It’s not open mic night,” he told the New York Times. I had been laden with guilt for not overcoming the barriers my parents overcame, now I was just seething mad. Then an out of the blue text and email late one Friday afternoon arrived from a friend about a job possibility with a leading media trade publication. I’d given up on pushing that rock up that hill; I spent the weekend reconsidering my retirement from the Sisyphus Games.

All day that Saturday, I thought about my friends who had staff jobs as well as those who had had them for decades before getting pushed out. What skills did they possess that I didn’t? I couldn’t think of any short of they got connected while I was cutting cheese or opening stores (it amused me at the time, though not so much in retrospect that people thought I preferred to flail away at near minimum wage employment rather than enjoy the salary and benefits of a real middle class, full-time job). Here was the chance to correct them, and prove that at 60, I was still employable for something better than lugging cases of White Claw to a sales floor on Friday nights.

Sunday morning before retail, I composed a note to the GM of the outlet citing my pal; I was pleased at how charming and enthusiastic the first draft was. Monday morning, I sent it very first thing. I opened the computer, sent the note, then went to the kitchen get my first cup of coffee. When I returned to my terminal coffee and oatmeal in tow, I was excited to see a response to my dispatch. A dialogue ensued. After four or five exchanges, he looped in his Executive Editor. Ah, I figured, now I’ll get ghosted. Well, this was fun.

Nope, Tuesday morning, the Executive Editor responded and brief exchange about craft beer, baseball and food ensued. Wednesday morning, I was on the phone with him for what was supposed to be a 30- minute interview. We were still chatting after an hour. I was indeed expert in the fields they were looking to cover, sports, politics, and culture, but my actual hands-on editing experience was minimal at best. Nevertheless, I have written for the Wall Street Journal since 2002. My articles there are read initially by three editors, the rewrites by two and the final draft gets another once over. Writers cringe when I tell them of the regimen, but my editors are GREAT; every piece reads like me but better. When I told Executive Editor that I had taught at NYU in 2013 and several of my students praised my ability to improve their writing, he asked me to schedule an edit test.

I was stunned. I had won two rounds. I scheduled the test for Friday and Monday mornings. I had a WSJ review due on Friday, but I figured I’d finish it on Thursday. Then I took the afternoon off to wander the streets of my picturesque neighborhood. I sat in the outdoor seating of a coffee bar and wondered, maybe the long game was going to work out after all. Everything seemed charged with possibility. I savored the moment. Then I went home to get back to work on WSJ review.

I finished my review early Thursday afternoon and spent rest of the day looking to sharpen my line editing skills. The Friday morning test was rigorous, clean six pieces of somewhat sloppy copy in 90 minutes, but that went well. I was cleared to move on to part two. By this time, my progress wasn’t so surprising. I steeled my mindset over the weekend. I wanted to ace part two of the test and figure out how to give notice at the store. I looked at my budget could I afford a week off to refuel before I started if it came to that. Two would be better, but that didn’t seem reasonable.

I sailed through part two of the test, designing the section. I was somewhat happy to have a demanding day of retail to occupy me afterward. I was as usual racing around the store all day and around six, I checked my phone for updates. There was an email from the Executive Editor asking me how much I wanted to get paid.

Well, this too was different. I get that question in retail sometimes, and I just say 275 million over 10 years, Alex Rodriguez’s famous salary from the Yankees in 2007 (yes, citing Mike Trout’s contract or Gerrit Cole’s would be a tad more au courant, but not as iconic). I knew what to expect, but just to see I took A-Rod route. I knew Executive Editor was a baseball fan; I even joked that the famed sports negotiator Scott Boras was my agent. Executive Editor responded cordially, and we worked out a number that was substantially less than what my friends who still had full time jobs made but way, way more than what I was making at the store.

Thoughts of abandoning Aisle 2 for an office danced in my head.

Then the line went dead. I reached back at the end of the week and was given the “we’re evaluating other candidates,” response, which made sense to me. It also ended the period of giddy optimism. The city is sprawling with un and underemployed experienced media professionals. One of them, I reasoned, might be able to hit the ground running faster than I could. Sure enough, I got the thank you for your time and efforts or something like that email a week later.

My friends thought I was crushed, but it was the exact opposite. Age and race had nothing to do with me not getting the job. In fact, a tenet of my campaign, “I’m 60 but I can grow into this job,” was persuasive; I told them that I’m a fervent believer in the Bob Dylan line “a man not busy being born is busy dying.” I was far from a perfect fit for this gig, but that didn’t matter; I had made the finals. A door that I feared was permanently closed was in fact, ajar, if not open.

I subscribe to music journalism and sports journalism newsletters and there are job listings. I resolved to look at them with greater interest. Also, I began subscribing to journalism job boards again. Maybe 37 years of doing this stuff made me of interest rather than irrelevant.

I never thought for a second that I was over the hill, and I hoped that the world didn’t think so either, mounting evidence notwithstanding. Now, I had reason to believe that the world saw things my way.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like. Episode 29, Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer pt 1

During the summer, the agenda changed mightily, fitfully and for the better

Life on Aisle 2 Episode 29: Aisle 2 During the Long Hot Summer Part One

First off, what happened to this blog? When we left off, I had just received my first negative test for COVID (I’ve had three others since), which was a huge relief since I thought I had symptoms (a friend reminded me that just because there’s a lethal pandemic out there doesn’t mean that the common cold has gone on vacation). Sure enough a few days of rest and beginning a new vitamin regimen had me feeling like I was ten years younger. Another great thing happened too. While I was away from Aisle 2 awaiting my results, a colleague from well, ten years ago, who now works at Huffington Post reached out to assign me an appreciation of Bill Withers, which I was delighted to write.

No other work at HuffPo came from that, but plenty did from other outlets. Unlike my primary writing outlet, the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post doesn’t have a paywall, so suddenly my brand was ascending again, just as it did earlier in the year when I was on an NY Times podcast. Within weeks I found myself with an inbox full of assignments from new places like NPR and Wine Enthusiast among others. Retail had become a happy zoo of work with customers coming from all over the city to visit our beer aisle to buy beer that was once exclusive province of high-end beer bars, and suddenly, after several years of underemployment on that count, my writing work had become a non-stop medley of completing exciting assignments rather than proposing them.

It was only when I lifted my nose from the grindstone that the grim realities of 2020 hit me in the face. It wasn’t just the ghostly streets and the empty subway cars; friends and acquaintances and classmates all began dying of the virus. The grief only exacerbated the existential dread that underpins so much of my life, and it tempered the joy I felt over my professional success. Even so, the bullhorn in my head that greeted me as I awakened with screams of “you fucking failure,” vanished. The weight of unfortunate career choices, lessened. The medical emergency in which I carried on daily life, kept me focused.

The unrest that followed the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis became a watershed moment in many, many ways. As someone who has had cops pull guns on me on multiple occasions I was delighted by the outrage and the protests. I didn’t take part because of my previous experiences with New York’s Finest, but I rooted them on and emailed links to some of my “work nephews” at the store, so that they could easily vanquish arguments from others at the store about property damage invalidating the agenda of the protesters.

The locked down city locked down further after the police murder of George Floyd

I took all of this in stride; it was just another complication in an intensely complex year. Yet, my equilibrium was completely rocked when the editor of a famous sports and culture site when asked about the lack of diversity on his editorial staff told the New York Times “it’s not open mic night.” I had long grown accustomed to swallowing the pain of never getting a staff job at an established media outlet. I was usually told through contacts that “they weren’t looking for a diversity hire at that moment,” which I took as code, for “you’re way overqualified and our culture can’t deal with that right now.” One well known newspaper in the Midwest told me to my face that I wasn’t a good fit there because they needed someone who could work hard. When I responded that I was the son of two workaholics and kid brother of three others and noted that I typically worked six or seven days a week between retail and journalism endeavors, my interviewer shrugged off my contentions with the all too familiar, “you’re freelance; it’s different.”

I was taught to play the long game, and it worked for my father. University of the Chicago education notwithstanding, he worked in the post office for 15 years before landing a job commensurate with his skills. Upon his retirement, 25 years after beginning his ascent in corporate America, he was a senior executive at AT&T who was feted with a series of banquets across the country. I was 30 when I was told that I didn’t work hard. I figured just keep plugging away and good things would happen. Many did, but the big things weren’t sustainable, and the ones that were lasting were freelance gigs. Then post dotcom crash and Great Recession, media gigs became scarce and capricious. Suddenly, 40something journalists were getting buyouts. I gave up on the dream of a staff job and began focusing entirely on the arduous task of paying rent. Whether it was via work in cheese, craft beer, writing about music, cinema, basketball, it didn’t matter as long as I piled up enough dollars to meet my overhead costs. I’d pursue gigs when they seemed like a good fit, but I rarely heard back from the outlets and never was the news good.

“Oh, I get it,” I seethed to myself during the summer. It’s not open mic night.

As the summer wore on, things at the store began to feel somewhat normal again. Meaning instead of staring at empty aisles and figuring out how much less than usual to order, I began bouncing around the place, getting a bit of a cardio workout. Deliveries were still a primary source of business, and small armies of Postmates and Instacart shoppers dotted the aisles. It usually fell to me to show these poor miscast young people—many did not understand what “produce” meant and responded to product location directions for lettuce with blank stares– where basic items like milk and tomato sauce were.

One afternoon while taking a quick break from running to and fro, I checked my messages and there was one from a former media biz colleague. She was asking if I’d received her email. Well, no. I’d been running laps around an 18,000 square foot store often with a case of beer on my shoulder. I checked my email. In it she wrote that she’d mentioned me to a friend who was the GM at a key trade publication. He was looking for someone to edit their section dealing with culture, food and politics.

I responded to the text noting that I was a good fit, but not a perfect one.

She insisted that I contact her friend.

I mentioned that I was 60.

She repeated her insistence.

It was 5:30 on a Friday afternoon.

I knew what the first agenda item on Monday morning would be.

To be continued.