by Susan Orlean
THE WEEKLY CABINET MEETING is attended by the four student body officers and the committee chairpeople. Today was the monthly Student Life meeting, which meant that this group was joined by the principal; the head of school security, Sergeant Murray; and an assistant principal. The meeting wasn’t scheduled to start for an hour, but there were already half a dozen kids in the student affairs room. Kiesha Lawhorne, the chairperson of the Hospitality Committee, and Shakira Jones, the student body secretary, were working on computers along one wall; two kids were listening to a new Jay-Z CD by sharing a single set of headphones, one ear apiece. Someone else was braiding cornrows into the hair of a student. A recent graduate had also come by to visit. He introduced himself as Osiris Flores and said that he had been president of King last year and was now a freshman at Ithaca College. “Being president,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “it was beautiful.”
The student government office is bright and cluttered and randomly furnished. A long white erasable calendar on the side wall listed the month’s student government–sponsored events: Pep
Rally, Homecoming Game, Twin Day, Mismatch Day, Decade Day, Any Celebrity Day, and Pajama Day. After a few minutes, Tiffanie breezed in. She was wearing a DKNY T-shirt and DKNY jeans and had a couple of books in her hands. “I’m hungry,” she announced. She was in a great mood because she had heard the night before that she had won a partial scholarship to Pennsylvania State University. Her other first choice for college is Spelman, a predominantly black school in Atlanta, but getting the money for Penn State was big news.
She saw Crystal and hugged her. Crystal is a slender girl with long, glamorous eyelashes and a husky laugh. She recently was awarded a full scholarship to Middlebury College.
“Can I tell you something, Tiff?” Crystal asked. “You are just a beautiful person.” Behind Crystal was Nesia Mathias, the student parliamentarian. She is another one of Tiffanie’s best friends and had been planning to drop over the day I visited Tiffanie and her family.
“Sorry I didn’t show up,” she said. “I had to go with my daddy. He was meeting his daddy for the first time in his life. You know how that is.”
“I’m hungry,” Tiffanie said again.
“Okay, we ordering right this minute, Mr. President,” someone said.
“Let’s get on it, people,” Tiffanie said. “You all are chilling and being late for the meeting, and that’s mad rude.”
The student being cornrowed nodded at her. “That’s right, baby, you’re the president,” he said. “You enforce your laws.”
“Don’t you be braiding hair in here,” Tiffanie said. “I told you, you can’t be doing that in here. This is the student government room. I’m being mean to you, but it’s for a good cause.”
Ordering lunch became a feature of student government meetings when King became a completely closed campus. Since students could no longer go out to get lunch, they either had to eat in the lunchroom, which was a madhouse, or they could order food from nearby restaurants and have it delivered to them at school. The restaurant delivery boys sign in with the police officer on security detail and bring the food to the kids. There was hardly a fact of contemporary New York City school life that I found more astonishing than this. Student government officials at Martin Luther King Jr. High School seemed to favor Chinese food, particularly chicken with broccoli and pork fried rice, and they tip modestly but not pitifully. That afternoon, they argued briefly over which of the two nearby Chinese places they should order from and then scraped together the necessary money by figuring out who was rich that day and who wasn’t, and by the time that was finished the food had arrived.
Mr. Wells, the principal, strode in. He is strapping and handsome, in his early forties, and he has a glossy brown shaved head, fine features, and deep dimples. His smile is lingering and foxy. This is his twentieth year in education and his first at King. Before coming to King, he was assistant principal at Queens Gateway to Health Sciences High School, in Jamaica. He was raised in New York and went to high school in Far Rockaway, a scruffy beach community that was disintegrating while he was growing up. He never ran for student government, but he participated in lots of school events. I once asked him which he had been most involved in, and he said that when he was a senior a girl in his class was raped and murdered and he organized a march of a majority of the student body in protest. He is extremely charming, even when he is doing uncharming things, like suspending students, which he does with some frequency. One day, I watched him cajole three sour-looking freshmen whom he was sending home for fighting. “I want you to know something,” he said, looking each of them hard in the face, one at a time.”I am going to take good care of your ID cards while you’re gone. I’m going to keep them right here with me”—he patted his chest pocket—“and I promise you I won’t let anything happen to them.”
“But Mr.—” one kid grumbled.
“I hear you,” Mr. Wells said. The kids realized by then that they were beaten and started out of the room. “I’ll be seeing you soon.”
When Mr. Wells walked into the student affairs office, everyone stopped eating. “Are we doing this, people?” he asked. “I understand there is a meeting going on here.” One of the electronic things he was wearing—a walkie-talkie, a pager, and a cellphone—bleated: “King One to Base, we’re at North Four. Do you copy?”
“Copy,” Mr. Wells said. He turned to Tiffanie and said, “Madame President, I have to speak to you about your attendance at gym.”
“I know,” she said.“But Mr. Wells—”
“But Ms. Lewis,” he said.
BY TRADITION, the student body president runs all meetings except for the Student Life meeting, which is run by the vice president. “The meeting is called to order,” Crystal said. “The first issue on the agenda today is school unity. This is on the agenda because a lot of students are saying kids are segregated. Now, is there any way we could start a club or something so we could just talk to each other?”
One of the student representatives raised his hand. “You know, I was walking up the stairs the other day, and I saw this Spanish girl crying and I was, like, Are you all right? And she was, like, No, but thanks for asking. So I think we just got to reach out like that.”
Another: “How come Asians don’t come to any of the school parties and Hispanics don’t come? Maybe we should hang posters about parties in more languages. How about in Chinese, too? And in French?”
Mr. Wells raised his hand.
“I’d like to recognize Mr. Wells,” Crystal said.
“I would respectfully offer these suggestions,” Mr. Wells said. His walkie-talkie squawked again, and both he and Sergeant Murray twiddled with their volume control, and then Sergeant Murray excused himself for a moment.
“As I was saying,” Mr. Wells went on. “How about a multicultural Sadie Hawkins Day dance on Valentine’s Day? By empowering females to do the interaction—that is, to invite a male from another culture to the dance—we could engender some cross-cultural contact. And how about an international food festival?”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Wells,” Crystal said solemnly. “Now, bathrooms. Every student complains about the bathrooms. There’s no soap most of the time and no paper, and the only bathroom open now is on the second floor, and we’re wondering what is the deal?” Sergeant Murray had returned by this point. He explained that the bathrooms had to be patrolled, and he didn’t have enough staff to monitor one on each floor. This was a sensitive issue, since King’s most notorious recent crime, the gang rape, took place in a fifth-floor bathroom.
They next talked about something called the “sweeps”—the patrolling of the school hallways after the start of each period. Anyone caught without a pass during the sweeps is relocated for the rest of the day in the Attitude Readjustment Center, a dreary room on the lower level of the building. Now, during classes, the halls at King are deserted except for the occasional student dashing downstairs with a bathroom pass. Mr. Wells implemented A
RC at the beginning of his term. It is one more partition between the kids at King who are falling away and the kids who are moving ahead. When you are in the student affairs office, planning the Fashion Show and the Talent Show and the mini pep rally for Martin Luther King Jr. Week, it’s as if there were no metal detectors in the lobby and no school superintendent politics and nothing but the exigencies of being sixteen or seventeen. I asked Tiffanie how she got along with the kids at King who are always in trouble. “I don’t really ever see them,” she said. “They’re always suspended or in ARC or something. I don’t end up having much to do with them.” I once stuck my head into ARC, just to see what it was like, and the pent-up annoyance and disaffection and peevishness, the teenage fury of the fifty or so kids inside the room, almost blew me out the door.
THE PRESIDENT SLAMS HER GAVEL and then nibbles a piece of Chinese broccoli. “Meeting is called to order,” she says. “First of all, Robert. So what’s up with the school store?”
ROBERT: “Me and Juanita made a huge effort and cleaned it up. I still don’t know what kind of stuff we’re going to be selling—”
PRESIDENT: “We need to see more progress in the store. Next issue, school unity. Ibrahim, what’s up?”
IBRAHIM: “We’ll have Culture Day in May.”
PRESIDENT: “Why is it so far away? We don’t want to be waiting on this forever. Let’s get on this, people.”
KIESHA: “In May, I’m gonna be really concentrating on getting outta here. How about if we do another ‘Be Easy’ week sometime sooner? You know, when we pledge time to be easy and stay calm and love our fellow man, like, not to yell at someone because they stepped on your sneaker.”
PRESIDENT: “Okay, let’s do ‘Be Easy’ for Dr. King’s birthday. And we should change the morning announcements then, too. Make them really cool. Not real ghetto, just something cool.”
ROBERT: “You should be doing them, then. You’re the president.”
PRESIDENT: “Well, I’m not going to lie to y’all. You all know the truth. Sometimes I’m a little late getting out the door, so sometimes I’m not here exactly on time to do the announcements.”
KIESHA: “You ain’t lying.”
PRESIDENT: “Can I say this, people?” She pauses and looks around the room. “You know what? This is not a perfect world.”
All Mixed Up
The people who shop at Sunshine Market, a grocery store in Jackson Heights, Queens, are thin and beautiful. They are also fat and plain, relaxed and frantic, Colombian, Italian, Jewish, Indian, African American, Bolivian, Uruguayan, Vietnamese, young, middle-aged, elderly, rowdy, meek, cheerful, world-weary, rich, and broke. They buy health food. They buy Ding Dongs and Diet Coke. They have just come to America. They have lived in America, in Jackson Heights, in the same apartment, with the same furniture in the same arrangement, for sixty years. They are in a big hurry. They are in no rush and hoping to bump into their neighbors for a chat. They are in minks. They are in their pajamas, wearing stacks of hair curlers and no makeup. They are buying the works for a dinner party. They are buying a Lean Cuisine Chicken Fettucini to eat alone. They come in every single day and buy the same three things: a gallon of bottled water, a banana, a skinless boneless chicken breast. They come in once a week and weave up and down every aisle and arrive at the cash register, exhausted, with a tipsy heap of groceries. They are immigrants hunting for Goya Guanabana Nectar or Manischewitz Low Calorie Borscht or Trappey’s Indi-Pep Pepper Sauce. They are immigrants who desire Planters Cheez Balls, Salerno Scooter Pies, Maxwell House Coffee, Chef Boyardee Pac-Man Pasta in Spaghetti Sauce with Mini-Meat Balls, Count Chocula, Pringles potato crisps, Frank Sinatra’s Marinara Sauce, Newman’s Own Olive Oil and Vinegar Dressing, and a copy of the Sun (WORLD’S SMALLEST MOM! SHE’S JUST 34 INCHES TALL—BUT HAS A 6-FOOT SON!). They do their shopping with their own red pushcarts, or with eco-conscious green string bags, or with their napping babies in Graco strollers, in which, if the baby is average size, they can also fit a small package of lean ground beef, half a dozen peaches, and two bars of Dove.
The people who shop at Sunshine Market are in touch with their needs. They march up to Toney Murphy, the store’s manager, dozens of times a day and express themselves. This candidness has inspired Herb Spitzer, who owns Sunshine Market, to declare that the grocery business is the easiest business in the world, because the customers will tell you exactly what they want: “The yuppie, the Hispanic, the Asian, everyone knows how to say, ‘Do you have . . .’ Everyone but the Irish, who for some reason don’t like to say.”
“I want birthday candles,” a sharp-looking blond woman in a sheared-beaver jacket says to Toney Murphy one morning.
“I keep ordering them, and they keep not showing up.”
“Well, okay,” she says, looking at her groceries. “I’ll make do with these.” In her cart are three green peppers and a half gallon of milk.
A husky woman with a florid complexion stops Toney, laying a meaty hand on his shoulder. “Toney, I want the Bounce without the odor. You promised to get it. The smelly kind makes my daughter wheezy.”
“Without the odor? I thought you said with the odor.”
“No, not smelly, Toney. You know my Cheryl.”
A man in a ragged windbreaker wants prayer candles. Aisle 8.
“Do you have sparkling cider?”
“Similac?”
“Aluminum foil?”
“Wasa Crisp Rye?”
“Salt? I mean, for the sidewalk.”
Toney knows everything. Toney even knows some things he doesn’t know, like Spanish. When the questions come to him in Spanish—half of Sunshine’s shoppers are Hispanic—he makes up a genuine-sounding answer and points toward one aisle or another. Doing so, he conveys so much kindliness and benign authority that he is probably forgiven each time he directs a tuna-fish shopper into the thick of the English muffins. He would like to get it right, but at the moment he doesn’t have time to take remedial Spanish. Anyhow, to be fair, given the neighborhood, he would also need remedial Korean and Hindi and Russian and Vietnamese. Irritated people with emphatic statements in any language gravitate toward Toney. A tiny woman with a puff of white hair lands on him one afternoon: “You owe me six dollars! I’m a cardiac and I don’t want to get excited! I want what’s due me! I know what I bought! I have evidence! I went home last night and called Washington to report this!”
“What did they tell you in Washington?” Toney asks.
“They told me to take it up with the manager,” she says.
“I am the manager.”
Now she freezes with surprise. He does look a little young and a little informal for the job. A light-skinned black man of thirty-five, Toney is slight and slump shouldered, with a foxish, fine-featured face, a wispy mustache, a slicked-back ponytail, and a daily uniform of blue jeans, old tennis shoes, and a beat-up semi-official-looking blue smock. However, this is not the time to point out to Mrs. Potential Heart Attack that Toney has spent twenty years with Herb Spitzer—ten at Sunshine and, before that, ten at Food Pageant, Herb’s previous store—and that he knows the store backward and forward. Instead, this is the time to expedite the encounter, because standing behind the woman now is a deliveryman with seventeen boxes of De An’s pork products on a hand truck and the look on his face of a guy who is double-parked and is due some money.
“Hey, Toney,” the pork man says. “Let me know when you have a minute for us lowly delivery guys.”
Toney counts out six dollars, and the woman leaves, trembling but not yet fibrillating. Watching her walk out, he mutters, “My first beer tonight is on her.”
Crazy people gravitate toward Toney. He is often accosted by neighborhood schizophrenics, who ask him to inspect their groceries for embedded alien messages or government-authorized concealed poisons before they risk the checkout line. In part, this is because Toney is very approachable. But it’s also true that crazy people just gravitate toward supermarkets, because even though supermarkets a
re private businesses, they provide a sort of semipublic sanctuary where anyone can do what a crazy person might want to do—that is, show up frequently, behave idiosyncratically, and spend untold hours roaming around. Supermarkets are complicated but simple, totally familiar but also strange, and full of big, orderly displays of discrete and interesting items—conditions particularly appealing to an eccentric mind, and ones that I found myself appreciating after spending several weeks at Sunshine Market.
Philosophically, Toney takes the position that the store has to tolerate things other businesses do not. In a place that provides something as basic as groceries, nearly every variety of customer and habit has to be accommodated. People who run supermarkets can, if they choose to, make something of this. They can attain a position of stewardship in their neighborhoods. Everyone knows them. Everyone sees them all the time. Everyone relies on them. They know weird details of everyone’s lives—who is on a diet and who has company for dinner and who has a fetish for Chuckles Jelly Rings. Everyone is affected by a supermarket’s failure or success: A neighborhood without a supermarket is on its way to not being a neighborhood anymore. Often the first places that people break into or burn down in riots are supermarkets—the rioters break in because supermarkets are full of desirable products, and they burn them down because grocery stores are so vital to a neighborhood that if they are run badly or exploitatively or meanly, they are manifestly despised. Toney and Herb are of the stewardship school, which explains Toney’s forbearance regarding nearly everything he encounters in the course of his workday, including messages from Mars in the groceries. “What are you going to do?” he once said to me. “Crazy or sane, everyone is entitled to have a grocery store.”