Not Buying It

by Judith Levine

  I shouldn’t fret. The people who work at the center are friendly. I ski practically every day; they know me. But I am fretting. They are friendly, they know me, but that doesn’t mean they are my friends. They are employees of a business, and I am a customer. Customers buy things. It’s unfair to ask them to break the rules for me, a friendly person they know, who is not really a friend. The twenty-five-minute trip takes about twenty-five hours. Every one hundred yards I consider turning around and going home.

  This feeling throws me back twenty-five years, to my late twenties. I had come out of college with a $5,000 government-guaranteed National Defense Student Loan and was advised by numerous friends and former NDSL recipients that no one had ever paid back one of these loans. For two years I didn’t. Then Ronald Reagan was elected and sold the debt to Citibank. The bank promptly jacked the interest to the going rate and got serious about collecting, but try as they did, they couldn’t manage to collect from me. This was the era before credit companies discovered that bad debtors are (for the companies’ profits) good debtors. Until I paid off the loan and gave the banks a decent interval to reconsider me for a credit card, I could not buy a plane ticket, rent a car, reserve a hotel room, or purchase a winter coat without greenbacks on the counter. I had few greenbacks, so I bought almost nothing. On the rare occasion I traveled, I slept on couches and got around by thumb.

  On one such trip, to California in 1975, as I stood on a roadside outside Los Angeles, a motorist informed me of the rung on the American social hierarchy where my credit-unworthy ass had landed. He slowed down as he came close to me. I thought he was going to pick me up. Instead he rolled down his window and practically spat. “Hey, you! Why don’t you get your own goddamn car?”

  Approaching the hut at the ski center, I am again my hitchhiking, pad-crashing, cash-economy self, about to rely on the kindness of strangers—or collide with their unkindness. And then I realize it’s not ski wax that I want, not even the convenience of having the ski wax ready to use.

  What I want is autonomy, the sine qua non of Western commercial citizenship. To be creditworthy is to be worthy of respect. To buy is to be an adult. A person without money is a child, and all children are beggars.

  What to do now? My friend Debbie, an editor, has recommended staying undercover, employing a “don’t buy, don’t tell” policy. “If you’re a journalist writing about homelessness and you dress in rags and don’t bathe for a week but tell everyone ‘I’m writing about the homeless,’ people will treat you like a journalist.” When Paul and I tell our friends that we are not going out to dinner because of a yearlong project, they congratulate us. “If you dress in rags and don’t bathe and keep your mouth shut,” Debbie continued, “people will treat you like a homeless person. You might learn a little about what it’s like to be homeless.”

  Inside the hut, a hot fire is burning. Business is slow and Nick is alone behind the counter. Though an aggressive racer, off the trail this lanky young Buddhist would be flat on the floor were he any more laid back. His demeanor gives me courage. “Um, could I borrow a little blue wax, just a few swipes?” I ask, assuming the identity of a person who has arrived at a ski center without ski wax and without money.

  Nick smiles. “Borrow it? You can have it.” He takes a ski, bites the plastic cap off a stick of wax, and starts applying it himself.

  As I glide down the long hill at the start of Ruthie’s Run, I realize that while envy may mobilize consumer desire, it’s not the things other people have that one necessarily envies. I mean, how many people actuallylike Rolex watches? What we want from things is what we want from other people, and from ourselves—whatever it is we want. I want to be a strong, competent athlete, one of the athletic crowd, like Grace and Lucy. Advertising offers images of product-enhanced bonhomie—tan volleyball players guzzling Pepsi; cool-looking slackers helping their pals load used furniture into Volkswagens. But I also want to feel independent. And just as it promises to buy us love, the marketplace also frees us from relationship, releases us from needing other people. As long as you’ve got a credit card in your pocket, you can go it alone: call it a form of consumer confidence.

  Not buying has forced Paul and me to feel vulnerable and to ask for help, an almost un-American behavior. But the ability to ask for help might be a good skill to cultivate. Today I asked, and got service and a smile. As I ski up the next long hill, I tell myself that what I need is some non-consumer confidence.

  FEBRUARY 28

  The Ten Commandments of the Old Testament prohibit coveting not only thy neighbor’s wife but also his house, his servant, his handmaiden, his ox, his ass, “or anything that is his.” Will the Lord smite me for coveting Grace’s ass, its flexing muscles propelling her forward over the snow? Need, envy, desire: these problems have vexed not just economists and anthropologists, but poets and philosophers for a long time.

  In Plato’sDialogues, Socrates and his students describe an ideal city-state, wherein material necessities are satisfied and a just social balance is achieved. The sage loosens his toga and spins a fantasy of citizens relaxing on their pallets, feasting on loaves of plain barley meal and wheat, enjoying homemade ordinary wine. Bedecked in garlands, their children gamboling about them, they praise the gods who have bestowed such good fortune. They do not abandon good sense, though, do not run up their credit cards or buy new cars with home equity loans. These are the rational, prudent men a utilitarian economist would recognize. Says Socrates, “They take care that their families do not exceed their means.”

  Not so fast, the student Glaucon pipes up. What the teacher is talking about is a base society, he says, in which people eat just to fill their stomachs—a “City of Pigs.” But people do not want to live like pigs. If they have enough, they will want more. “People who are to be comfortable are accustomed to lie on sofas, and dine off tables, and they should have sauces and sweets in the modern style.”

  As is his method, Socrates carries Glaucon’s critique to its logical, perhaps ironic, end. Not just sofas and tables, he replies, but “also dainties, and perfumes, and incense, and courtesans, and cakes, all these not of one sort only, but in every variety.” To make the fancy furniture and decorate the beautiful rooms, embroiderers and painters will have to be employed, and gold and ivory procured. These needs will in turn necessitate the conquest of more territory, as well as the protection of the state from its equally voracious neighbors. The taste for sauces and sweets leads to imperial ambitions, in other words, and Empire necessitates war.

  From Proust to BG, the rapper who coined the term “bling,” our bards remind us that desire is rarely satisfied by satisfaction. Possession affords a flicker of warmth, which almost inevitably cools. Then we want something else, something different, better, something less attainable. The more pressing that desire, the harder it is to distinguish from need.

  We are left with a conundrum. Our economy is fueled by desire, ignited and fanned by advertising and easy credit. Yet the satisfaction of our desire by the relentless production and marketing of goods is depleting the earth of its air and its animals and putting some of the world’s people under the others’ boots. We have enough stuff; most Americans have more than enough. Yet capitalism needs us to want what we do not have, and desire for what we do not have is an infinitely renewable resource.

  Plato suggests that the tide of expectations rises as surely as the sea is pulled by the moon. But the philosopher of balance believed that a surfeit of personal desire was the enemy of social harmony. Indeed, the very name that Socrates gives the city of sauces and sofas and armies to defend them connotes illness and madness. He calls it the Feverish City.

  March

  New and Improved

  MARCH 1

  Into the city we drive. City of George Smith sofas and vintage Formica kitchen tables, of rosemary ginger sauce from Vong and champagne chocolates from Jacques Torres. City of cakes and courtesans of every variety—and then some. Behold the Feverish City, New York!


  Over the Whitestone Bridge and through the streets of Brooklyn we travel. Arrive at Third Street. Carry our luggage up four flights. Unlock the door to the apartment. Let the cat out of his carrier. Pull up the shades.

  “What’s that smell?” asks Paul.

  Walking from room to immaculate room, we find them everywhere. Plugged into electric outlets and stuck on closet walls, under sinks, beside garbage cans, even in Paul’s clothes cabinet: Air Wick Wizards and other plastic…gosh, I don’t even know what they’re called…fragrance discs?…each emitting Forest Glade or Wildflower Meadow or Ocean Breeze, simulacra of natural scents as close to the real thing as a Barbie doll is to an adult female body. The Wizards, one of which has muscled my plastic Jesus nightlight from the living room outlet, are turned up to 5, the highest level of…again, words fail me…velocity? humidity?…pumping out spritzes like a perfume lady at Bloomingdale’s. No wonder the electric bills have been so high.

  In the hall closet, I find a Swiffer mop and a plastic tub of Wet Thick Mopping Cloths (“Open-Window Fresh”), along with some classic Dry Disposable Cloths, which, I read, “use electrostatic action and Lift & Lock Pockets to attract and trap dirt, hair and 93 percent of common allergens on contact—instead of just stirring them up.” Wow. Ninety-three percent. On both bathroom and kitchen sinks glow dispensers of orange Dial Anti-Bacterial Hand Soap. My $3 toilet brush has been replaced by a Johnson Scrubbing Bubbles Fresh Brush toilet cleaning “system” and a plastic pouch of detergent-soaked paper cleaning pads (12 for $4.69) to insert into a claw at the end of the Fresh Brush and toss after one use (“It’s so easy…Just Clean! Pop off! Flush!”). The pads are biodegradable, says the label. So biodegradable, I learn while wiping the toilet bowl with one, that they begin to degrade halfway through the job.

  The label also warns: “Do Not Use For Personal Hygiene.”

  Paul translates: “Not a vaginal douche.”

  My tenants were a couple of tall beauties from the Czech Republic. Milosz works as a distribution coordinator for a large orchard that sells fruit at New York’s farmers’ markets. He wears camouflage pants and ties his coal-black hair in a ponytail. Magda teaches English to Czech businesspeople; she tosses out American slang enunciated with British precision. Both effervesce with an American-style friendliness, more Peoria than Prague.

  Milosz had told me that his girlfriend is a “clean freak.” That was an understatement. She is a devotee, worshipping at the shrine to Procter & Gamble that she has made of my apartment.

  I ask Ann, whose political work takes her frequently to Eastern Europe, how far consumerism has gotten in the Czech Republic since the collapse of the Soviet Union. “When I first started going there ten years ago, I had to carry everything with me—contact lens solution, dental floss, extra tights, everything,” she says. “In Prague you could not find a single consumer product. The stores would get in one item, everyone would hear about it, and, magically, there would suddenly be lines in the streets. Then weeks would go by with nothing in the stores, until some other thing showed up—and the lines would appear again.” So bereft of consumer enticements was the city that there were no glass storefronts to look into. But since then Prague has been filling with foreigners and other imports, from contact lens solution to couture, and my tenants are of the class that can afford them.

  Still, I can tell that Magda is a neophyte consumer. I mean, she’s excited aboutsoap. She has not yet developed the genius for discernment of the second- or third-generation shopper. If the cleansers and air fresheners give her life meaning, that meaning has not yet squeezed itself into a narrowcast demographic. Nor has she pledged the brand loyalty that is instinctual to any American six-year-old. Ocean Breeze, Forest Glade, Fragrant Gingko—whatever, she’ll take it. As a gift, she has left me a box of Caswell-Massey soap withoutany identified essence. It is merely lavender-colored. Did she not notice that my apartment’s aesthetic (midcentury modern / flea market / global South / contemporary recycled) is, semiotically, theanti- lavender?

  There is one distinction this couple is clear about, however. On my office door I had tacked a huge poster given me by a friend in Paris, reading “NON à la guerre en Irak,” in red letters over a massive black exclamation point. In the circle at the bottom is the name of the poster’s sponsor, Partie Communiste. Milosz and Magda have taken the poster down.

  Now, I’m no fan of the Communist brand—er, party—but I liked this message and design. To me, the placard was an aesthetic product, a work of political art of which the party was, at best, a merchant. I could display it with a kind of ironic nostalgia, an attitude possible only for someone who has not lived through the real thing. My tenants, on the other hand, are survivors of Soviet communism (Milosz tells me his generation was the last to learn Russian at school). To them the Communist Party was a merchant of misery. As noxious as I find the unregulated market of cloying scents forced under my nose in my own home, so Milosz and Magda must have found the daily sight of the party’s name. Newly naturalized capitalist entrepreneurs, they have embraced Brand America with their hearts and their dollars. They are unconditionally in love with consumer culture.

  Back from the real forest glade, I breathe in Forest Glade and cough. It’s a bracing welcome back to life in the Feverish City, breeding ground of the delirium affluenza. I can already feel my temperature rising—and my brain addling—with its temptations, and contradictions.

  MARCH 3

  “One hears a great deal about the role of the town in the development and diversification of consumption, but very little about the extremely important fact that even the humblest town-dweller must of necessity obtain his food-supply through the market,” writes the historian Fernand Braudel. Last night Paul and I finished off the falafel mix and put together a salad of vegetables cleaned out of the crisper in Vermont. We won’t buy more mix; processed foods are nixed from our shopping list. But the cupboard is bare and we are hungry. Even if we do not live to shop, we humble town-dwellers must shop to live.

  We hoist our canvas sacks for a hike over the Manhattan Bridge to Chinatown’s groceries. Out the door, past a row of brownstones, we are thrust into the bazaar that is our neighborhood, Carroll Gardens. “Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape,” write the sociologist Mary Douglas and the economist Baron Isherwood inThe World of Goods. In Carroll Gardens, this is literally true. Two blocks over, Court Street still tastes like a little Italian village. This main artery is larded with pork butchers and delis boiling fresh mozzarella twice a day, with bread bakeries and sweets bakeries, which are further subdivided into dry-cookie bakeries, buttery-cookie bakeries, and gooey-pastry bakeries. Old men drift into d’Amico’s after their bocce games to sip espresso from tiny paper cups and gesticulate emphatically in Sicilian. Marco Polo Restaurant offers red sauce and valet parking; outside, men with large bellies and thin legs, impeccably garbed in black shirts and thin-soled shoes, discuss businesssotto voce. Their ringed hands hold the door for their wives, whose hair is coiffed in the brilliant helmets that are the specialty of Chic Élégance.

  But it is one block nearer our house, on Smith Street, where the old merchants were poorer and darker-skinned and the rents cheaper, that the fighting is fiercest and the licking most furious. Here, in the seemingly benign shifts of taste, class muscles out class, which means that some people muscle out other people.

  In 1997 came the first fashionable eatery, Patois, with its “Brooklyn-French” cuisine and its newly created patina of age, and before you could saytarte tatin the street wasthe “restaurant row.” Soon hip diners from Manhattan picked up the scent, with reviewers fromTimeOut New York on their heels like hunters behind the hounds. Young designers joined the young restaurateurs, European guidebooks started starring Smith Street as an off-the-beaten-track destination, and now every weekend droves of tourists are beating the F-train tracks to the Carroll Street stop, prettifying the air with their French and Italian accents.<
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  Nearly gone are the Puerto Ricancuchifritos; these shops, where steam tables of fried foods melted from crunchy to sodden, have been supplanted by places serving more refined, if not exactly authentic, Latino fare in impeccably authentic ambiance: Cholito (Peruvian), Pacifico (Mexican), Café Cubano. A “diner that’s about being a diner,” as aNew Yorker cartoon once described such establishments, is drawing clientele from the decades-old Smith Street Diner on the corner of Atlantic. Both serve the same moussaka, but you pay a premium at the new place for irony. A dingy Puerto Rican–Brooklyn social club, a bar with a pool table, has been displaced by Brooklyn Social Club, a bar with a pool table, aspiring to dinginess.

  For residential tenants, such “revitalization” is both good news and bad news. The neighborhood used to be patrolled by casual bands of working-class white vigilantes. These days people of color can walk the streets at night unmolested. The bad news: most people of color—or for that matter, most of the former vigilantes—soon won’t be able to afford to live here. The first time I passed Patois and read the menu taped to the window, I said to myself, “Finally, a good local restaurant.” My second thought, instants later: “There goes my rent.” Sure enough, within three months my landlady had tacked 50 percent to the cost of my top-floor brownstone apartment.

  This year, the parks and schools teem with children of all classes, but it is only a matter of time before the gracious houses and roomy apartments will be too expensive for any but the wealthiest families. My walk-up four-room co-op, purchased in 1998 for $116,000, was reappraised in 2002 for $299,000 and almost monthly I receive a plea from a realtor to sell my place, promising prices at least $100,000 higher than that. I could sell my apartment for a fortune, but where would I move? To an equivalent apartment nearby, though probably not quite as nice. Or I could “pioneer” another “frontier” and play my small part in running out the natives.