Surviving Friendliness
At the Jetro food wholesaler in Brooklyn as a mule for The Restauranteur I waited in the checkout line with a flat cart piled not too high but with notably a small pallet of strawberries that drew the interest of the woman behind me. How much were those strawberries she asked and I did not know. Restauranteur I yelled over the din, how much were the strawberries. She looked at me like I had ask her the square root of some number she should not have to consider in this context and said she did not know. The woman behind me said they were very cheap in Chinatown and was in a completely non threatening way challenging us to justify our total lack of concern for strawberry economics. She looked at the cart and wanted to know what we were, a restaurant or what and I said yeah a restaurant even though there ain't no we about it, as I said before I was just the mule. The woman looking at all the vegetable matter on the cart said what you is, vegetarian? That or a musician or a Subversive or some godforsaken artistic type is the thing you get pegged for all the time if you go around in this world with long hair. I said no, not vegetarian, and she said good because she liked her pork chops. I like pork chops too but I could not comfort her with reportage of a menu that included pork chops so I just shut up which is how many New Yorkers survive the world in which they live when confronted with in-your-face friendly people. As I told the story later a man sitting across from me at the very restaurant for which we were earlier shopping said in response to my wording--that the woman was in-your-face-friendly--that in his opinion those were well chosen descriptive words and they drew a picture of what for him after 25 years in New York was an aspect of humanity that he had little tolerance for. I have some familiarity with urban life and I know that responding to overt friendliness from strangers can turn badly or tedious at times and I too shut it out when necessary but I cannot see that shutting it out as a rule is the way I will be going about it. The woman behind me at the Jetro asked what and where the restaurant was and I told her but then she asked did I have a card and I finally had to tell her I was just a mule and not a card carrying one. I yelled again up to The Restauranteur in front of me but she said she didn't have a card. I said to the woman who seemed disappointed in not getting a card, why do you need a card, I just told you where it was. She said, honey, that's no good because I have craft. Craft? I said. She said yeah, craft, can't remember a fucking thing. I said oh yeah I see what your saying and she said not only do I have craft but I gots CRS. I just waited this time, with the appropriate eagerness she had come to expect from me and she came back with--can't remember shit. I have some of that too, I said. It was a close call that instance of friendliness with a stranger but it seems to be one which up to this point in time I am surviving.
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