Thin, But Not Too Thin
by Dave Woehrle
Every deli serves items you should not eat. And every deli has customers that eat them.
The only man that bought Head Cheese had cauliflower ears and wore a paint-speckled Northern Illinois Huskies sweatshirt. Since he was the only person who every bought it, the same six-pound loaf lingered for entire seasons.
We also served a product called Old Fashioned Loaf. Those three words: Old, Fashioned, and Loaf made certain people hungry. The meat itself was a soft, gray-tan, odorless, homogenous mass. The men who ordered Old Fashioned Loaf were old, smelled like garages, had yellow, tobacco-stained beards and missing teeth. And they only ordered it once, and I never saw them again.
Such a man said, “I need a half pound of your Old Fashioned Loaf. Sliced thick. I’m going fishing for the weekend. Up in Michigan. They say they're biting. And I love the loaf. That shit’s great. Pardon my French.”
Every deli serves items you should not eat. And every deli has a guy in an apron who doesn't understand why he's there. That was me.
I graduated from a liberal arts college during the Great Recession of 2009. I entered a job market that said to young people, “You don't have experience, so I can't hire you, but you won't get experience until someone hires you. Good luck.”
After desperate months of We'll-Get-Back-To-Yous, I applied at a local grocery store.
It paid okay. Well, no. It paid. And I was broke.
I brought my three-page resume, my Dockers and button-up shirt, and a firm handshake to the job interview.
A heavy set woman in pin-striped chef pants and a black apron stained with mayo and flour came in the door and nodded. “You Dave?”
“I am.” I stood and shook her thick hand.
She looked at my resume and said, “What’s this?”
“My resume.”
I talked about my education, my 3.6 GPA in a private liberal arts college, my experiences in writing and teaching, my semester abroad in Southeast Asia, teaching English in Hanoi. Then I talked about my work with disabled children and my love of music.
She nodded and said, “Sounds good.”
I nodded.
She set my resume down and said, “So dis is a deli job, ya know?”
“I know.”
“You ever used a slicer?”
“No.”
“Well, you will. The boss needs to drug test you. You pee in a cup.”
“Okay.”
“So you ready to do that?”
“Sure.”
“Today?”
“Today what?”
“Can you go pee in a cup today?”
“I can do that.”
“Go down to the clinic and bring this paperwork. If you got clean pee, you start Monday.”
“Thank you so much,” I said, shaking her hand again.
“Don’t thank me yet,” she said.
Dis an' Dat
Her name was Teresa, an old school, no-nonsense Italian Chicago woman. That Monday she laid out her work philosophy: “It’s a deli. Do your work. Do it right. That’s it. Can you do that?”
I said I could.
“You’ll learn as you go but we got a lotta salads and meats you need to know about. Definitely taste everything, so you know what you’re selling.”
Like most Chicagoans, she didn’t pronounce the “th” sound in the beginning of words. On my first day she was making salsa, and said “Hey. Go over dere and tell Bill in Produce dat dis bunch of tomatoes ain’t gonna cut it. Look at dis nonsense,” she said, picking up a soft, wrinkled tomato. “Dere rotten as hell.”
I realized on my first day that I had never actually set foot in this particular grocery store. I grew up on generic brands due to my Polish, penny-pinching mother. We didn't have Mountain Dew in the house. We had Wal-Mart's Green Lightning.
I was shocked at the prices. At the deli, items were priced by ½ pounds, so they seemed less expensive.
The clientele drove black Lexus cars and wore black North Face fleeces. They smelled like magazine cologne. They were local businesspeople, coaches of numerous sports. They never mowed their own lawns, and they had great teeth.
Miss Paris
I started work in early December, a busy season. We prepared large food orders for holiday parties – fruit and cheese platters, mostly, but we did ready-to-go hot meals, as well. This is what Miss Paris came for.
She approached the deli counter and said, “Is it ready?”
“Is what ready? Did you have an order?”
“Yes! And it was supposed to be ready twenty minutes ago.”
“What’s the name?”
“It’s under Paris. I swear you people get worse every year.”
“Is that spelled P-A-R-I-S?”
“How else would it be spelled?”
“I’ll check in the back. Thanks.”
She’d ordered our Christmas meal special: roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, homemade mac and cheese, and a side of cranberry sauce.
I brought the order out and asked, “Will that be all?”
“I’m supposed to get another side. I just see cranberry sauce here.”
“I think there’s just one side dish per meal. Would you like something else?”
“Well, it’s a free country!”
Many customers turned to look. My co-workers turned to hide their snickering.
I said, “I’m sorry, ma’m. What else would you like?”
“Beets and onions, if it’s not too much,” she said. “You people get worse every year, I swear.”
“How much on the beets and onions?”
“How much do you think, young man?”
I didn’t blink. I didn’t breathe. “A pound?”
“Do you honestly think I could eat that much beets and onions?” She sighed and looked up to the ceiling. “Give me a goddamn half a pound so I can get out of here.”
Later, in the break room upstairs, sitting with other co-workers of the grocery store, sipping coffee and nibbling donuts, I asked if any had heard of Miss Paris. They laughed and pounded their knees.
“Did you have your Paris cherry popped, bro?” laughed a guy from produce.
I laughed, nodded, and watched the snow fall outside the window.
Bob and the Perfect Sandwich
Bob was a large, bearded fellow who wore loud polka-dot Hawaiian shirts and train conductor hats. He’d come in every two weeks and ask for a sharp cheddar that we didn’t carry.
“It’s the best, man. Just outta this friggin’ world. I had it in upstate New York last summer and it changed my life.”
“I love it when cheeses change my life,” I said.
“Ain’t it great? You gotta try it. It’s outta this world.”
“What’s it called?”
“Ah, geez. It starts with a ‘B’, like Bartlett’s or Barron’s. Yeah. That’s it! Barron’s Cheddar!”
“Cool. I’ll tell my boss you asked for it and I’ll let you know if we get it in.”
“Thanks, Bud. It’s worth it.”
I asked Teresa if we carried it, and she said we didn’t.
There was a pause in conversation.
“Well, are we going to order it?” I asked.
“Is dat fat guy in the weird shirts back again?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna order it if it’s just him asking. Dat doesn’t work in business. Dat cheese won’t move.”
“Move?”
“It don’t move off da shelf. It’s not worth it.”
Bob was persistent. He came to speak of his mythical cheese, nearly tearing up. “There’s no cheese like it. I swear it. And I just can’t find it anywhere else.”
One day, in the middle of a weekend rush Bob came up to me and said, “Hey, Bud, get this: the last few days I’ve been imagining the perfect sandwich.”
I said, “Imagining perfect sandwiches is a great past time.”
He grabbed his gut and roared with laughter like a jolly polar bear.
Then he said, “I love it, Bud. We’re cut from the same cloth.”
“What’s your dream sandwich like?”
“Pastrami on rye, with bleu cheese slightly melted, a slice of tomato. Add some high-shelf romaine, and Bud, just forget about it. That’s the sandwich.”
Mary
Mary had floppy gray hair and wore loosely-knit sweater. She used her shopping cart as a walker, a movable podium. Asking her, “How are you doing?” was like putting a crack in a water tower. There was a flood:
“I’m fine considering my neighbor bought a truck that sounds like a damn tractor. And I would know because I grew up on a farm. He starts that thing up at six a.m. every morning and it rattles the whole house. It’s like an earthquake. But I’m up anyway at that time because it’s when I need to walk the dog. And I like to watch my Judge Judy in the morning before my daughter calls, because she calls every morning, and it’s always something new with her, something about the park district and new fees, or how she doesn’t like her garage and the way it smells. She’s a character and I love her, but some mornings, you know? And I bet that tortellini salad is great, so I’ll have a pound of it. And this new medication, gosh, I don’t know why I take it. It does more harm than good. I have high blood pressure and get these dizzy spells sometimes, and I definitely need a half pound of chicken salad, and these doctors don’t know nothing anymore.”
She stopped talking. It took me a few seconds to realize her order was imbedded in her monologue.
My co-workers avoided asking Mary anything, as if that would keep her from answering. She was a regular, shopping every other day, not for so much for the few groceries but for the listening ears, the small town gossip of who's getting married, who's pregnant, who's having surgery, and who's raising their kids wrong.
Thin, But Not Too Thin
When you ask a woman how they want their meat cut, they will say, “Thin, but not too thin.” They squint their eyes on the “too” part.
When you ask a man the same question, they say, “Hell, I don’t know. It’s for sandwiches. So, you know, I want it sandwich-thin, I guess.”
Every shopper can have a free taste of any product. When someone asked if a certain edible was “any good,” I pulled out a sample to let them try for themselves.
When a customer tried a product in front of you, they'd get self-conscious. It’s rare in life to be watched while taste-testing something. As one chews, one feels the urge to break into the Tasting Head Dance.
The Tasting Head Dance: you furrow your brow, squint, and then shake your head as if you are trying to put your ears to your shoulders, back and forth. Everyone does that to indicate “I’m deciding if I like the taste.”
Women often said after a taste-test, “You see, I like it. But I don’t know if my kids are going to like it.” Then they leaned their faces in, inquisitively.
I stood in silence, nodding, for I was also unsure of the dietary habits of a strangers' offspring.
However, I’ve watched other female co-workers in the same dialogue, and they understand the message. The message isn’t about the taste of a salad. The message is Let’s Talk About Our Kids.
Here’s an example dialogue:
“I like it, but I don’t know if my kids are going to like it.”
Female co-worker (in her 50s): “That’s so funny. My oldest, Cynthia, she loves broccoli but can’t stand carrots. It’s the darndest thing.”
“Oh, you see my little Ayden. He’s so fussy. He just wants Pop-Tarts and Mountain Dew, and I always tell him about these wonderful salads here, and he just won’t listen.”
“That’s funny! It reminds me of my middle one, Kathy. She’ll loves popcorn but just gags at the sight of corn on the cob.”
Both women laughed and touched hands over the counter.
One would say, “Kids.” And the other would nod, knowingly.
Size matters
There are grown men and women who do not understand the size of a container doesn’t determine the mass of food they purchase.
Example: the man in the navy wool coat who asked for a pound of pre-cooked lasagna. I cut out a portion from the sheet of displayed lasagna, placed it in a black plastic container and weighed it. After subtracting the weight of the container, it came to 1.23 lbs.
I said, “Sorry, sir, it’s a little over a pound. Should I take some out?”
He squinted at the lasagna. He shook his head.
He said, “That don’t look like much of a pound to me, son.” He laughed.
I said, “I’m sorry?
“That just isn’t a pound, son. That’s nothing.”
I looked at the digital scale that read 1.23 lbs and nodded.
I asked, “Would you like this lasagna, sir? Or something else?”
He smirked and said, “Whatever, son,” and walked to scan the salad section for twenty-two minutes, shaking his head.
The Wanderer
She came on the weekends. And we all avoided her. She looked like a model out of a Glamour or Redbook magazine: a mom that doesn't want to look like a mom yet, flawless tan make-up, brown hair with blonde streaks, thin, a woman in control in a black trendy down vest.
She ordered five items in one breath: “Third of a pound of oven-roasted turkey breast, shredded for salads, my salads, and two pounds of low-sodium Krakus ham, thick slices, real thick slices, for my boys’ sandwiches, and tuna salad, three pounds but each in a one-pound container, and three quarters of a pound of Boar’s Head American Cheese, but be sure to put paper in between so they don’t stick together, and a pound of your rare roast beef, sliced thin, but not too thin.”
She disappeared into the crowd of shoppers, lifting melons to sniff.
It was difficult to recall her saga of dietary wants, so I called over twenty yards of grocery store, “So, miss, wait, how much on that ham?”
As I sliced what I memorized, often back tracking, four customers waited, each wanting just one item that they would actually wait around for, as to clarify specific needs.
I stacked The Wanderer’s order the way I recalled it. It was a failed puzzle.
Often times, she got so engrossed in her other shopping adventures, she would not return, so I would track her down, usually in the frozen goods section, to give her the order. Which of course was wrong.
“Did you not hear what I said? Gosh, this happens every time when I come here.”
All My Friends
Our jobs were perpetually entry level – at banks, science surplus stores, music stores. We lived with our parents. We were self-loathing. We drank too much and had quarter-life crises and argued about what college really meant.
My friend said, “Our generation kind of got duped into going to college. Everyone told us to study hard and work hard and everything will pan out. Hell, I mean it's not like any of us are fucking astronauts or anything. What's the point of knowing shit?"
The holidays were a bad time to go out. You'd see friends from high school, guys who had gotten married after getting their Masters in Business, pulling in six figures in real estate.
“Dave? How you doing, man?”
“Not bad. You?"
“I'm just settling in this new life. I got married!”
“I heard. Congrats.”
“Thanks, man. It's great. What are you doing these days?”
I'd say, “Well, I'm kind of in a transition mode right now, just kind of job hunting, and seeing what comes.”
“Well, good luck to you. We should hang out some time.”
“We should.”
We didn't. We never would.
These were the kids played soccer and ripped their hair out studying for the ACT in high school, as my friends and I got stoned in the Taco Bell parking lot and listened to jazz fusion albums.
How It Looks
She wanted chicken salad. She did not know the amount.
She asked, “What does it look like?”
“Look like?”
“Like, in a container? What is it in?”
I lifted two plastic containers and said, “This one holds a little over a pound. The other one is more like two and half pounds.”
She furrowed her brow. She fidgeted with her cart.
She looked down at her shopping list and said, “I’m having a party this Saturday. All my girlfriends are coming and everything. I want it to be perfect.”
I said nothing. I waited to hear what container she wanted.
“Give me two pounds, I guess,” she said, reluctantly.
“Okay.”
She watched me and nibbled her fingernails. She said, “Sir, how much do you think that would feed?”
“Uh, well, depends on the people eating it. And if there are other sides.”
“Well, there are other sides.”
“Okay. I’d say this would serve about six people, I think.”
She shakes her head and sighs. She rubs her hands together.
“Well, if that’s what you think is best, then I’ll go with two pounds.”
I scoop up out the portion.
She stares at the chicken salad. She asked, “Will it look good on a plate?”
“What’s that?”
“Like, if I spread the chicken salad on a plate, would it look good?”
“Look good?”
“I just want to present it on a plate at the party and I want it to look good. This party, it has to be perfect.”
I looked at the two and half pounds of chicken salad, compacted in a container. I wondered how it would look spread out on a plate. I supposed it would look like chicken salad.
I said, “This should be a good amount for your party. I’m sure of it.”
“Really?” She perked up.
“Oh yeah. It’ll be great.”
She beamed. She said, “Thank you, young man. You have a great day.”
Deli signing
He was tall and had a steady, goofy grin, long hair, and a denim coat. He looked like the lead singer from a prog-rock band.
I said, “Howdy, sir. How ya doing?”
He nodded. Then he pounded his chest four times and pointed at the hot food case, in the direction of the fried chicken breasts.
I was confused, so I smiled. “Is there something I can get for you?”
He repeated his action. He looked at me. He pointed to his ears.
It took me a few seconds before I realized he was deaf. It took me a few more to understand his message: “I want four fried chicken breasts.”
I put the fried chicken in a box, pointed a spoon to the mashed potatoes and gravy, and raised my eyebrows.
He shook his head and rubbed his thumb, forefinger, and middle-finger together in the universal “too much money” sign.
He arrived every Thursday evening, and I looked forward to seeing him. After the daily jabbering of mildly displeased housewives complaining of children and weather, this quiet, decisive man was a beam of light. The sound of his callused hands on his denim coat had its own music.
His order never varied, and neither did his smile. After a few months of serving him, I came to wonder if he was just pretending he was deaf. It was unlikely, sure, but I like to think he was a man who got to a point where he realized how little he needed to say to convey what he wanted. Why waste breath? Why complain? Just give the world a smile and get what you need.
Devil's in the Details
Every food product we sell has a three-digit code, which is entered into the scales for the correct price per pound. For example, Tuna Salad is 156, and Honey Maple Turkey is 987. However, there is no rhyme or reason to the numbering system. You’d think all turkey meat would be in the 900s, or all the salads would be in the 300s. This was not the case. If one digit was incorrect, a buck-a-pound fruit salad would come up as imported Prosciutto di Parma, for 22 bucks per pound. Customers notice that. They said, “How can you get fruit salad mixed up with that Italian nonsense?”
“I’m sorry. I entered the code wrong.”
“Yeah. You did. It’s isn’t meat. It’s fruit.”
“Yes,” I said, retyping the code.
One day, I was weighing and pricing tapioca pudding that morning and didn’t know the code. I asked Nancy, a kind and weathered veteran of the deli.
Nancy said, “You know how I remember that code?”
“How?”
“Well, think about it. Who actually eats tapioca?”
“I don’t know. Older folks, I guess?”
“Exactly. And the code is 666. Get it?” She grinned.
I did not but said I did.
“666. The devil,” she said. “Yeah. That’s how I remember.”
Tapioca as the Mark of the Beast. Life at the deli.
Waiting For My Girl
Every day at five minutes to two, a man arrived and stood at the end of the counter. He was a tall, graying man with a brown cane, a hearing aid, and a Fisher Nuts hat. On my first day of work, I asked him if he needed anything from the deli. He said, “No, sir. I’m just waiting for my girl,” nodding in the direction of Nancy, who was finishing up a sandwich order. He beamed in silence, watching Nancy.
He was Nancy’s husband of forty-one years. His name was Ted.
Nancy said, “I drag him out to crap all the time. Banquets and dance classes. Our whole marriage I’ve done that.” She pauses, looks down at her pastrami on rye. “He’s a good man. He’s damn near deaf, and I’m damn near blind, so we make a great couple.”
We both laughed.
“I made him take ballroom dance classes years ago. It was tough for him. He’s got all the rhythm of a drunk gerbil, but God bless him, he worked at it. And now we dance all the time.”
She waved to Ted and said, “We don’t even think about it anymore, you know? We used to count steps, but now we just move.”
Karen
She's fifty-seven. Her father is dying. She loves him but hates him for dying and for taking up so much time to do it.
At the deli, she packs her pockets with bits of baked chicken breasts. She pinches off little white chunks throughout the day and tries to hide her nibbling.
She sneaks pulls of Peach Schnapps in the bathroom, returning red-faced and talkative about the weather and how the new coleslaw recipe isn’t as good.
One night at closing, she cried while saran-wrapping a side of ham. I asked her if she was okay. She turned to me, her glasses thick and fogged, and said, “Stop saying that. I just need to finish this.”
One morning, Karen arrived even more red-faced than usual that morning. She was wordless all morning, only nodding her hellos. She went straight to packing the chips, her backed turned to the slicers, the counter, and the customers.
When we got busy, I asked Karen if she could help. She took two uneasy steps, wobbled, and began to fall. I caught her before she hit the floor. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she burped. “Whoa, Karen. Karen, you okay? What’s going on?” She moaned and tried to regain her legs. She stood, swaying, wordless, glassy-eyed.
I said, “Let’s go in back and take five.”
She grunted and shook her head. By this point, customers were staring and my other co-workers had approached the scene.
“What’s going on?”
She shook her head again and put her arm around me, the other around our boss, and we walked her to the back kitchen area.
Karen never spoke.
Teresa said, “Well. Just keep her back dere til she gets her wits about her.”
We were later told she had changed heart pressure medication, which was the reason for her collapse.
She once asked me if she was too old to join the Peace Corps.
Dan
Dan was 22 and barely over five feet tall. He was mostly just a blonde, laughing head, every other thing making him chuckle, usually remarks he made: “It’s a hot one out there today, dude. It’s like super hot summer time!” He laughed as he tied on his black apron for work. They weren’t jokes. They were just statements said loudly.
When I started, Dan worked mainly in the back kitchen, doing dishes, and making food orders. At least, that’s what I thought he did. When I came back he was usually texting or drumming on the metal kitchen counter and asking, “Did you see WWE Raw last night? It was sick! Triple H did this thing where he flipped a dude upside down and just bashed his knee into the dude’s head for like a full minute.”
His girlfriend, Kathy, was seven months pregnant. She came into the store once in a while, a tall, awkward beauty in a black hooded sweatshirt, smiling sheepishly when introduced as Dan’s future wife.
Dan would say to Kathy, “Hey baby. How’s the baby?” He laughed and reached up to put his arm around her shoulder.
“He’s good, Dan.”
“That’s my boy!” He laughed, petting her stomach.
Dan’s father drove him 30 miles every day to work because Dan didn't have a license or a car. He would often arrive two hours early for work because his father kept a different schedule. So Dan would pace outside the store, smoke cigarettes, drink Monster energy drinks, and listen to Slayer on headphones.
The deli was closing and Dan was scooping out the last of the soup into smaller containers. He asked, “Dude, what’s having relations?”
“Relations?”
“My girlfriend texted me and she said she wants to ‘have relations’ later tonight. What does that mean?”
I laughed and said, “You really don’t know?”
“No. But I mean, we have a relationship already, right? So what’s having relations? Girls are crazy, dude.”
“To have relations is to have sex, Dan.”
“Oh.” He gets his phone out again and nods at the screen. “Why didn’t she just say that? Jesus. What’s with girls? They’re crazy.” He scooped out the last of the chicken with wild rice and shook his head.
Dan was one of those people who sent text messages in all caps and ended them with LOL! Example: “HOW YA DOING TODAY? LOL!” When I didn’t respond within five minutes, I would receive, “HOW YA DOING TODAY?! LOL!!!”
One day, I came into work and Dan stood in the kitchen. He was expressionless. He pounded a repeating rhythm on the metal kitchen counter:
Bumbum. Bum. Ba bum.
Bumbum. Bum. Ba Bum.
He nods and says, “Terminator 2, dude. Judgment Day.”
Dan didn’t like doing the dishes. Dan didn’t like doing anything besides speaking loudly, laughing, and relaying the latest from the world of WWF Raw.
“Dude, could you, like, work on the bigger pans? That dried barbeque sauce is bad stuff. It won’t come off and I’ve been scrubbing with that metal thingy.”
“Metal thingy?”
“Yeah. That bunched up piece that scrubs.”
“Steel wool?”
“No. I mean…wait, how can wool be steel? Doesn’t wool come from goats?”
I sighed and continued packaging guacamole.
Dan asked, “Can you just take over back there for a half hour? My hand hurts, dude. I think it’s, like, sprained real bad or something.”
“Okay. Thirty minutes, Dan. I’ll catch you up.”
I enjoyed doing the dishes. Three sinks: one for soaking, one for scrubbing and disinfecting, and one for rinsing. I got into a rhythm. My mind drifted and I could forget I had a college education and was currently rinsing old coleslaw out of a gray plastic bin.
Dan came back and said, “Dude, how much is a quarter pound on the scale? Isn’t it 0.44 pounds?”
“No. It’s 0.25 on the scale.”
“Bullshit. If a third of a pound of 0.33 pounds, then a quarter pound should be 0.44, right?”
“Nope. It’s point two five.”
He considered this and said, “Well, that’s just stupid.”
One day, Dan came up to me with a piece of paper. He asked, “Can you sign something for me?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just something you should sign. Like, you’re my friend, right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“So you can tell people that I’m okay, right?”
“Okay? How okay?”
He unfolded the piece of paper. It was a court order mandating appearances at AA meetings, and he needed a signature to verify his participation and progress.
“Whoa, Dan, I don’t think I can sign that.”
“It’s cool, dude. It’s just that I’m getting my life together. And I just need you to sign this. You know I’m okay, you know? I’m having a boy next month, dude!” He laughed and lightly elbowed my hip.
I signed on one line as a character witness, not as an AA sponsor.
Dan said, “Thanks,” and looked down at the paper.
Then he said, “Do you have, like, another signature?”
“What?”
“Can you sign it again but in a different way?”
A customer yelled behind us, “Hello? Anyone? Is that American Cheese still on sale?”
I turned, grabbed a cheese brick, and asked, “Sure is. How much would you like?”
Dan folded the paper and put it back in his pocket and took out his phone to make another text.
Maggie
Maggie was mousy and straight-forward, a veteran with peppered gray hair. The first day I met her, we talked about Labrador retrievers. She had an old female chocolate lab, a dawdler in the morning.
“She just walks in circles, sniffing the ground, looking around at trees, it takes her ten minutes to just pee,” she said and smiled. “But she’s a great dog. We got her for a case of beer at a millennium party” She laughed and said, “I was stoned. She’s a great dog, sweet as the day is long.”
She worked hard and kept to herself. We rarely conversed. And I liked her best.
Wheelchairs
Every Saturday morning, an old man in a wheelchair, wearing a faded American Legion hat, asked for sautéed onions even though we didn’t carry them, and never had.
When I said no, he asked me to describe different salads.
“Described them?”
“I don’t see too good anymore, son. Just give me a run down of the salads, if you would.”
“Sure.” Suddenly a narrator of food stuffs, I said “We have a broccoli salad that’s popular. It’s broccoli with light mayonnaise and a light vinaigrette. It has bacon and sunflower seeds. Um, yeah, I think that’s about it.”
“What did you say about mayonnaise? I can’t have mayonnaise. And you’ll have to speak up, too. My ears are shot to hell.”
This would go on for about six minutes: me describing salads the best I could, him remarking how an ingredient didn’t agree with him, repeated ad nauseam, until his daughter came and said, “Jesus, Dad. You know we have your food at home.”
He said, “But there’s no sautéed onions, Liz, never sautéed onions.”
Another customer named Jerry came in three times a week. His wheelchair was motorized. He had a quiet, high-pitched, crooked voice and loud, multi-colored socks. He’d sit near the cooled display island ten feet from the deli counter, where several products were ready for the taking. But Jerry would sit there until someone would come around the counter and ask him what he wanted.
Others at the deli would ignore him and say things like, “Dude, I gave him his crap last Tuesday. It’s your turn.”
So I’d go out and help Jerry.
And, as always he wanted the same thing: baked beans and tapioca.
And he always told the same story.
In his high-pitched voice, he’d say, “One time I bought tapioca, but it was actually rice pudding. It wasn’t until I got home until I realized it was rice pudding. By then, it was too late. And it really was rice pudding. But I was home then, you see?”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jerry. But this is definitely tapioca.”
“How do you know?”
“The code. It’s 666. That’s the code for tapioca.”
He silently nodded. Then he said, “It’s just that it was rice pudding when I got home.”
A month later, he was caught stealing several products in his wheelchair backpack, $34 of merchandise and he was banned from the store.
Too thick
She liked her roast beef cut extra thick for her son. “He’s just a carnivore,” she said. “I swear he just rips into these chunks like a madman.”
I grabbed a small hunk of beef and said, “I’ll just cut what’s left here and then start in on a new side, okay?”
“Sure.”
I placed the meat on the slicer and went to adjust the thickness and then part of my thumb was gone. That quick. I grabbed a rag and squeezed.
A co-worker, I don’t know who, said, “Go. Just go.”
So I went. I got dizzy. One of the managers, Ted, a man who, up to that point, I’d only see in passing – as it seemed his job was to pace the store and sigh in frustration – said he’d drive me to the hospital. When I unwrapped my thumb, I saw a dark red oval hole, like a swirl on Jupiter, and part of my nail missing. There were little white dots in the red, which I later found out, were nerve endings.
I rewrapped my thumb with paper towels and went out to Ted’s car, a new Subaru.
“Keep it elevated and wrapped tight. Don’t get blood in here. Christ, I just got this.”
I had a week off work. I had Vicodin and long summer naps. I was house-sitting for a doctor friend my mom worked with, so I lounged in a mansion on narcotics, too self-pleased for my own good. It occurred to me that this house-sitting job was out of pity. I was a charity case getting six hundred dollars in cash to watch OnDemand in a leather recliner for seven days, my only obligation was making sure the dog and the plants didn't die, and that the beer cans were cleaned up at the end of my stay.
I was the son who boomeranged.
Realization
I'd worked at the deli for about a year when a funny thing happened. I would see people around town and without knowing their names, I would know their order. I'd see a man in coffee shop and think, “Three quarters a pound of shredded pepper turkey and a pound and a half of three-bean salad.” I'd spot a woman at the library and think, “Two pounds of swiss, sliced thick, two pounds of Boar's Head spicy chicken breast, and a pound of pasta salad.”
I could slice meats and cheeses, measuring only once, to within a hundredth of a pound. Customers started to comment on accuracy. “This ain't your first rodeo, huh?”
I was good at something I disliked. I was missing part of my thumb.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
We were always short-staffed on Sundays, and I was always hungover. Saturday night out at the bars with my townie friends, all of us employed but never quite full-time, for that would mean benefits.
So Sunday mornings rolled around and I'd be at work - my mouth, dry and hairy, my head all dull concrete – and here would come the clientele in their Sunday bests, perky from coffee and donuts and rejoicing.
Everyone takes their time on Sunday. They want the week to make sense. Nothing is rushed, so the deli was always busy. People want to talk about food - recipes, party plans - not just buy it. Some women would spend three hours, that's 360 minutes, in the grocery store. There was much need to chat, and I just needed Ibuprofen.
It was in the fog of a hangover when I saw the light.
A woman walked by and accidentally knocked over a jar of minced garlic. She looked at the shattered glass and said, “Sir? Excuse me, sir? Yeah, that needs to be cleaned up.” She pushed her cart away into produce.
On my hands and knees, sweeping glass and garlic into my rubber-gloved palm, I nearly laughed. Or cried. Or something. I realized I was a meat and cheese dispensary with bad beer breath. And it was suddenly hilarious. And hopeless.
I got my last paycheck the next Thursday and went to the Grand Canyon for four days. I ate chicken salad out of a can by the Colorado River.
And I never went back.
