The Day I Pretended To Be A Senior Citizen So I Could Get Free Vegetables
Stapled onto trees, tacked onto utility poles, taped onto the flat surfaces of electrical boxes: FREE FRUITS! FREE VEGETABLES! Thursday! Between 1 pm and 2 pm, come get your free food!
No desserts so obviously some vegan keto psycho was loose in the neighborhood, trying to make us all die with low blood pressure.
On the appointed day I watched two men shovel potatoes and tomatoes and peppers into the bags of the people assembled. So many apples, so many clementines, so many carrots. I got in line. The men smiled at me. I fake smiled back.
“Carrots?” One asked me. I nodded as I nudged a woman on a walker ever so slightly. She was taking up two spaces and only wobbled for a second or two.
“Apples?” The other man asked. I nodded again. An older gentleman stepped on my left foot with his cane. As if occupying the middle seat on an airplane, I shoved him back so he would know who was the Cane Boss. I rubbed my elbow, which was definitely going to bruise. Man, these old people were made of cement.
“At the center, you’ll get more. A gallon of milk a week plus sugar.” Eating sugar in Los Angeles is a felony so what kind of death mill were they running here?
“Meet us here tomorrow and we’ll drive you to the center!” Not exactly the mall but any excuse not to parallel park and I’m in.
The step to get into the van was practice for Everest and how did these old people navigate that? If I got a run in my compression stockings, someone was going to owe me $16.95 and I bought the cheap ones. In case the driver headed to the desert — and I had to jump out and roll where I would surely die because exercise, not my thing — I loosened them because they wouldn’t look good on the Dateline that was sure to follow my kidnapping. Loosening them makes rolls on your skin and unless resembling a Shar-pei is on your bucket list, leave them in the death grip around the top of your calves. Good circulation is so overrated.
The building was low and squat. The driver opened the door and shepherded me towards an entrance where several octogenarians hovered around a man with a clipboard. One of them lost his footing and swayed to the right, taking the whole pack with him, as if they were being sucked into a wind tunnel. Only my support hose kept me upright.
The music hit me in the face and I watched women clutching at each other and doing the box step in place. Tumbleweeds wove in and out of their legs. Seriously, how badly do I need milk? A man on his death bed took an hour to shuffle to my side and ask me to dance. From the look on his face, he had minutes to live so I magnanimously granted him an audience with me, the vegetable grifter. I prayed silently for death. Mine, not his.
When an officious woman announced arts and crafts activities in the recreation room and the crowd followed their ringleader, I gave up. As I passed the gentleman with the clipboard he cheerily rang out, “Can I see your ID?” I showed it to him and he started laughing, “Oh honey you’re in the wrong group. These people are old. You’re only, he glanced at my ID again and said, “Oh never mind.”
