Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  “You are speaking to me?”

  “Yes, I’m speaking to you. I’m talking about customer service. Customer service. Ever hear of it? I am your customer. And I don’t appreciate being treated like something you picked up on your damn shoe!”

  The husband sighed and rubbed at his left eye.

  “I don’t understand—I say something to you? My wife, she say something to you?”

  Miss Adele shifted her weight to her other hip and very briefly considered a retreat. It did sometimes happen, after all—she knew from experience—that is, when you spent a good amount of time alone—it did sometimes come to pass—when trying to decipher the signals of others—that sometimes you mistook—

  “Listen, your wife is friendly—she’s civilized, I’m not talking about your wife. I’m talking about you. Listening to your . . . I don’t know what—your hate speech—blasting through this store. You may not think I’m godly, brother, and maybe I’m not, but I am in your store with good old-fashioned American money and I ask that you respect that and you respect me.”

  He began on his other eye, same routine.

  “I see,” he said, eventually.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You understand what is being said, on this radio?”

  “What?”

  “You speak this language that you hear on the radio?”

  “I don’t need to speak it to understand it. And why you got it turned up to eleven? I’m a customer—whatever’s being said, I don’t want to listen to that shit. I don’t need a translation—I can hear the tone. And don’t think I don’t see the way you’re looking at me. You want to tell your wife about that? When you were peeping at me through that curtain?”

  “First you say I’m not looking at you. Now I’m looking at you?”

  “Is there a problem?” said Mrs. Alexander. Her head came out from behind the curtain.

  “I’m not an idiot,” said Miss Adele. She flicked the radio’s casing with a finger. “I got radar for this shit. And you and I both know there’s a way of not looking at somebody that is looking at them.”

  The husband brought his hands together, somewhere between prayer and exasperation, and shook them at his wife as he spoke to her, over Miss Adele’s head, and around her comprehension.

  “Hey—talk in English. English! Don’t disrespect me! Speak in English!”

  “Let me translate for you: I am asking my wife what she did to upset you.”

  Miss Adele turned and saw Mrs. Alexander, clinging to herself and swaying, less like Loretta now, more like Vivien Leigh swearing on the red earth of Tara.

  “I’m not talking about her!”

  “Sir, was I not polite and friendly to you? Sir?”

  “First up, I ain’t no sir—you live in this city, use the right words for the right shit, okay?”

  There was Miss Adele’s temper, bad as ever. She’d always had it. Even before she was Miss Adele, when she was still little Darren Bailey, it had been a problem. Had a tendency to go off whenever she was on uncertain ground, like a poorly set firework, exploding in odd, unpredictable directions, hurting innocent bystanders—often women, for some reason. How many women had stood opposite Miss Adele with the exact same look on their faces as Mrs. Alexander wore right now? Starting with her mother and stretching way out to the horizon. The only Judgment Day that had ever made sense to Miss Adele was the one where all the hurt and disappointed ladies form a line—a chorus line of hurt feelings—and one by one, give you your pedigree, over and over, for all eternity.

  “Was I rude to you?” asked Mrs. Alexander, the color rising in her face. “No, I was not. I live, I let live.”

  Miss Adele looked around at her audience. Everybody in the store had stopped what they were doing and fallen silent.

  “I’m not talking to you. I’m trying to talk to this gentleman here. Could you turn off that radio so I can talk to you, please?”

  “Okay, so maybe you leave now,” he said.

  “Second of all,” said Miss Adele, counting it out on her hand, though there was nothing to follow in the list. “Contrary to appearances, and just as a point of information, I am not an Arab. Oh, I know I look like an Arab. Long nose. Pale. People always getting that shit twisted. So you can hate me, fine—but you should know who you’re hating and hate me for the right reasons. Because right now? You’re hating in the wrong direction—you and your radio are wasting your hate. If you want to hate me, file it under N-word. As in African-American. Yeah.”

  The husband frowned and held his beard in his hand.

  “You are a very confused person. The truth is I don’t care what you are. All such conversations are very boring to me, in fact.”

  As if he knew boredom was the purest form of aggression to Miss Adele! She who had always been so beautiful and so fascinating—she who had never known ambivalence!

  “Oh, I’m boring you?”

  “Honestly, yes. And you are also being quite rude. So now I ask politely: leave, please.”

  “I am out that door, believe me. I can’t fucking wait to stop listening to that noise. But I am not leaving without my motherfucking corset.”

  The husband slipped off his stool, finally, and stood up.

  “You leave now, please.”

  “Who’s gonna make me? You can’t touch me, right? That’s one of your laws, right? I’m unclean, right? So who’s gonna touch me? Miss Tiny Exploited Migrant Worker over here?”

  “Hey, fuck you, racist asshole! I’m international student! NYU!”

  Et tu, Wendy? Miss Adele looked sadly at her would-be ally. Wendy was a whole foot taller now, thanks to the stepladder, and she was using the opportunity to point a finger in Miss Adele’s face. Tired to death.

  “Just give me my damn corset.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry but you really have to leave now,” said Mrs. Alexander, walking toward Miss Adele, her elegant arms wrapped around her itty-bitty waist. “There are minors in here, and your language is not appropriate.”

  “Y’all call me ‘sir’ one more time,” said Miss Adele, speaking to Mrs. Alexander, but still looking at the husband, “I’m gonna throw that radio right out that fucking window. And don’t you be thinking I’m an anti-Semite or some shit . . .” Miss Adele faded. She had the out-of-body sense that she was watching herself on the big screen, at one of those Chelsea screenings she used to attend, with a beloved boy, long dead, who’d adored shouting at the screen, back when that was even a thing. When young people still went to see old movies in a cinema. Oh, if that boy were alive! If he could see Miss Adele up on that screen right now! Wouldn’t he be shouting at her performance—wouldn’t he groan and cover his eyes! The way he did at Hedy or Ava as they made their terrible life choices, all of them unalterable, no matter how loudly you shouted. The boy was not alive. He couldn’t shout or put his head on Miss Adele’s shoulder, and no one had, or ever could, replace him, and these new boys you met found the old movies “camp” and “embarrassing,” and Devin had his own life—his kids, his wife—and there was no home any more beyond 10th Street.

  “It’s a question,” stated Miss Adele, “of simple politeness. Po-lite-ness.”

  The husband shook his shaggy head and laughed, softly.

  “You’re being polite? Is this polite?”

  “But I didn’t start this—”

  “Incorrect. You started it.”

  “You’re trying to act like I’m crazy, but from the moment I stepped up in here, you been trying to make me feel like you don’t want someone like me up in here—why you even denying it? You can’t even look at me now! I know you hate black people. I know you hate homosexual people. You think I don’t know that? I can look at you and know that.”

  “But you’re wrong!” cried the wife.

  “No, Eleanor, maybe she’s right,” said the husband, putting out a
hand to stop the wife continuing. “Maybe she sees into the hearts of men.”

  “You know what? It’s obvious this lady can’t speak for herself when you’re around. I don’t even want to talk about this another second. My money’s on the counter. This is twenty-first-century New York. This is America. And I’ve paid for my goods. Give me my goods.”

  “Take your money and leave. I ask you politely. Before I call the police.”

  “I’m sure he’ll go peacefully,” predicted Mrs. Alexander, tearing the nail of her index finger between her teeth, but, instead, one more thing went wrong in Miss Adele’s mind, and she grabbed that corset right out of Mrs. Alexander’s husband’s hands, kicked the door of Clinton Corset Emporium wide open and hightailed it down the freezing street, slipped on some ice and went down pretty much face first. After which, well, she had some regrets, sure, but there wasn’t much else to do at that point but pick herself up and run, with a big, bleeding dramatic gash all along her left cheek, wig askew, surely looking to everyone she passed exactly like some Bellevue psychotic, a hot crazy mess, an old-school deviant from the fabled city of the past—except, every soul on these streets was a stranger to Miss Adele. They didn’t have the context, didn’t know a damn thing about where she was coming from, nor that she’d paid for her goods in full, in dirty green American dollars, and was only taking what was rightfully hers.

  MOOD

  Time

  There’s no woodland or forest-like aspect but it does feel like the middle of something, and wisdom finally arrives, even if only as an awareness that inside the adult flesh cages lurk the exact same children. By the time you’ve come to grips with January it’s already April and that’s all a year actually is—a series of months that jump four at a time—so it’s three leaps to the end of the year and that sad annual pretense that anyone might actually go anywhere New Year’s Eve. Then it’s April again. The dogs are shitting on the Mercer Street daffodils, and Mary Baker Eddy (of MacDougal Street) still hasn’t managed to diarize a single dinner date with Siddartha (corner of 15th and Sixth). Whither enlightenment? You see the dazed city people, opening those big, blue, unused and unloved street-corner mailboxes, their heads stuffed right down the chutes, feet dangling off the ground, looking for something they’ve lost, namely, the summer of their ninth year, which stretched from the early 1600s until approximately the Korean War. What a cosmic joke! There’s not even anything original about this malaise: all the citizens of late capitalism feel exactly the same way about time. End scene.

  Roberta

  Whatever happens to old punks? Enquiring minds want to know. Well, I can be very precise about it because I happen to know Roberta, once the door bitch at CBGB’s. Roberta knew Ms. Harry and she knew the Ramones—they often swapped clothes—and she took the best photographs of the scene in the East Village at that time and must have partaken of a bit of smack back in the day but I dare you to ask her. Now she’s Queen of the Dog Park and we hail her! We hail, too, her little pug, Edie, who sits on a bench with the humans, wrapped in a mink stole, taking a dim view of her own kind. Old punks wear all black, they are covered in dog hair, their own hair is purple, they really do not suffer fools, they are unimpressed by all impressive things, they worship pugs above people and pity fans who have only graves and Houston Street murals to visit. Old punks have succeeded in staying alive and remaining rent-controlled. They do not complain about the changing city because only bougie cunts do that. They attend pug meets. They unironically admire the withered pug in the homemade wheelchair, dragging the weight of himself around the room. Irony in general means nothing to old punks; they consider it too distant from blood, bile, phlegm and black bile. HOWEVER. They are not above attending an exhibit about Richard Hell at the Brooklyn Museum should such an exhibition come to pass. Unexpectedly, Joan Crawford’s autobiography serves as a personal bible. Nightly services are held throughout the East Village while lounging in bed watching TCM. Surviving punks WhatsApp each other throughout whichever movie, smoking their own marijuana. “What is wrong with Esther Williams?” “Collapsed vulva.” Old punks, having survived all the parties, now prefer parties for one. Do not imagine that because you got commissioned for a second series or are presently showing in some blue-chip gallery in Chelsea that any of this means anything whatsoever to Roberta—she remains a door bitch. The order of business is:

  Charm of dog

  Psychology of dog

  Behavior of dog

  Humor/moods of dog

  This list goes on for a good long while before personhood becomes an issue. Crawford herself couldn’t get through that gate without a dog. When old punks don’t win the fancy-dress contest—despite presenting four different pugs dressed as sushi rolls sitting on a bed of nori—old punks can become enraged, filled with black bile, and will make their contempt for the Friends of Washington Square Association perfectly clear. The glorious essence of punk remains a refusal to be cowed, most especially by time. But even Roberta was a little unnerved to see her long-term parrot, Preston, pass from this world into the world beyond, the one to which we are all finally heading, hidden behind the beaded curtain, out of view, where all the comic books, hookahs, lip rings and bad tattoos are stored. Is it still punk to be predeceased by a parrot?

  The Black Market

  I said to Raphael, I said: “I’m going to quote Du Bois at you. I’m going to say: How does it feel to be a problem?”

  And Raphael said: “Right, except if it was also and at the same time: How does it feel to be a sensation?”

  The answer is: still not really like a person.

  Raphael is very beautiful and stylish, but he doesn’t over-dress like a fashion student; he dresses with the good taste of someone who until recently was not fired by Frieze for calling a senior editor a “zombie collector whore.” (Mitigating circumstances: Raphael’s yearly wage was thirteen thousand dollars.) He’s moved from Bushwick to Forest Hills. Back up in the mix with his tote bag. But he is feeling the general malaise. Feels like he’s being “torn apart inside.” Raphael takes wonderful photographs of black skin but now everybody’s doing that, you literally can’t move for photos of the “black body” and he was more interested in one particular black body (his own) but it’s this generalized “black body” they’re all looking for now, and you get paid on a rising scale for how much white guilt you can squeeze out of a pound of flesh, and this is very tempting, extremely tempting, but Raphael is of the older generation (twenty-five) and is awful close to going offline altogether, or at least removing himself from every platform, because holy God it is exhausting. (Out of nostalgia for his youth, however, Raphael will be staying on Tumblr.) The struggle, the hustle, the struggle, the hustle, the struggle, the hustle! The intended audience can’t usually tell the difference between these two, but those in the know know what they know. All of which means nobody’s in the market for these exquisite pictures of Raphael’s face at the moment of orgasm, and that’s a damn shame. “There’s these doors opening up all over the place but the catch is they only open if you lie on the floor and start performatively bleeding.” His boo meanwhile is nineteen, white, walking for Versace in Milan at this moment, this very moment, which also involves more than a pound of flesh—Struggle! Hustle!—but “he’s a big boy and he knows what he’s getting into.”

  The older people in this city appear to be eating the younger ones alive.

  “Yes, yes,” said Raphael, putting his feet up on my desk, “but that’s my point: maybe it’s time for me to become the diner instead of the meal! I’m beautiful! I’m talented! I’ve got something to say!”

  It was actually my office hours and Raphael is not a student of mine so we laughed at ourselves and gazed out of the window toward the tip of the island. That’s where the boats come in every second Tuesday from every part of the country and armies of young people dressed like sailors—like Gene Kelly in On the Town—run up t
he gangplank, stretch out their arms to the city and sing: “I’m beautiful! I’m talented! I’ve got something to say!” And they’re all right, every single one of them.

  Locate the Self I

  Are you in your tote bag? In the plants? In the bad faith soda-stream (Palestinian tears)? In your rug? In the city’s half-assed attempt to recycle? In your children? In your decision not to have children? In your tribe? In your kink? In your place of employment? In your wage packet? In the likes? In the rejections? In your documentation? In this sentence? Relatively recently a man called Leopold and a woman called Kwa could walk into the cleared central areas of their respective villages and locate themselves very firmly between their cottage/mousgoum and their church/elders circle, and the river/desert and the hills/mountains. Moods were collective yet circumscribed; one put one’s mood in the service of the group; there were seasons of moods and places to have them, and the work of managing moods was never left to any one body alone because no one could imagine that a single consciousness could ever process or contain all the moods that there are on this earth without feeling like they were being “torn apart inside.” (Possession, zombies, speaking in tongues, exorcism, automatons, uncanny valleys, body-snatching, devil-control, hoodoo.)

  Moods on Tumblr

  probably unpopular opinion, but I rly hate those posts that are like “americans who say they are x ethnicity will never be accepted by people from x country! they aren’t really x!”

  hello im making this text post since apparently some of you guys have the same amount of manners as a slab of concrete which is none at all

  DONT ADD YOUR WEIRDO COMMENTS ON PEOPLES ART. christ.

  spicy take

  a lot of people on here irrationally hate this show because they conflate its criticism with the way capitalism uses technology with “durr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch.”