“Hippie Grocery Store.”

by Chioke Nassor

The kids at the hippie grocery store were all laughing when Tom got off of work.  He smiled and said goodbye to his co-workers with this odd feeling in his chest.  He actually liked going to work.  He liked showing up early and hearing about Martha’s weekend.  He liked cleaning out the rice bins, which was almost as fufilling as cleaning the lint trap when he did laundry.  He even liked all the kooky, green tinted old hippies who would come in with their ridiculous macrobiotic diet requests.

He’d been working at the sandwich counter, mainly, for some 6 months when it hit him, that for no particular reason this job made him very happy.  And that somehow terrified him.  ”Let’s look at it this way,” he tried to explain to his girlfriend Sandra.  ”If I’m 23 and happy at working at a supermarket, what does that say about me?”

“Why does it have to mean anything?!  You’re lucky! You actually like your bullshit job!”

“Exactly, said Tom.  ”That’s the problem!  This is supposed to be the placeholder until I find something I really like, something that means something.”

On his way to work, biking through traffic, or on the days where it was horribly gross out, on the train, Tom would sit and play relationship games with himself.  ”Would I still like me if I worked at this store forever?  What if I was fat like Linda at the baggage counter?  Would I still like me then?  How can she be so chubby when she’s vegan?”

To Tom, even though Sandra hated her temp work at the offices she filled in for, at least she had something she liked to do, something she was passionate about after she got off work.  She might be the worst noise band musician there ever was, which, is actually impossible to tell, but even still, she had something that defined her.

So, on a random Tuesday in October, when it was really crisp and bright out, Tom walked into Primrose, and looked around the store, and nodded to everyone who was already in before going to the back, knocking on Mr. Walters door and quitting.  Quitting the best job he ever had.

Maybe being in New York makes you crazy.  Maybe when you are asked so many times a day, what you do for a living, as if that’s all you could ever be, it starts to warp your mind.  Sandra once told Tom that when she would do yoga, it wasn’t the muscles she was trying to stretch, but the um, what was it?  The fissiods?  The firsion?  That stuff in between the muscle and the tissue that held the muscle memory.  That thing.  She was trying to burn that, and stretch it to teach it to go in the direction she wanted it to.  So Tom started thinking, maybe if he could burn the things around him that he thought were tying him in place, no matter how much he enjoyed them, he’d eventually see who he was as a person.  Like his own sort of conscious muscle memory.

It wasn’t long after that, that he broke up with Sandra.  Though in some ways that was easier to do.  He didn’t really love her in any super romantic way.  She was just comfortable.  The way they’d watch movies in bed and eat Chinese was just…well, nice.

But in the long run, he would never marry her, and she would never really want to only date him from now until eternity, so even though there were lots of tears he could take it.

What was harder were all the odd jobs that he had to suffer through.  Bike messaging.  Farm labor.  Protest street team canvasser.  They all had the air of greatness.  And they all sucked shit.  Tom learned the hard way, that most work fucking blows.  When he was in Alaska, living out of his truck, writing long letters in between his farm fishery job, he would often think back to the Primrose grocery store.  And how somewhere in Brooklyn, there were a bunch of young, eager kids smiling, sharing gossip, making word plays and having fun at the customers expense.  But how long could that have lasted he would say…

Hoping in some way that it was still there.