A Peaceful Chaos
On the night Alan Rickman died four men wearing Harry Potter masks burst into Bryant’s superette. One man, dressed as Hermione, slipped on a candy bar and hit his right hand on a bottle of Schweppes lemonade.
The men fled with a bag of pretzels and two cans of Dr Pepper. Bryant couldn’t be bothered calling the police. His brother had recently been ticketed for selling loose cigarettes and he knew that if his neighbours saw the police in his shop again they’d start spreading rumours. Business was already slow, avocados were pushing five-fifty and the California drought was driving up the price of orange juice.
It was hard to stay optimistic.
Most nights he’d lie at home thinking about the future and wondering whether there was a place for him. He could see people in apartments across the street lighting candles and watching television. Every year the televisions got bigger and the people watching them got younger.
The neighbourhood was changing. A Danish bagel shop had opened on the next block where a DVD store used to be. He was curious to try one — New York bagels he’d heard of, Montreal bagels too, but never Danish ones.
But in this economy he hardly had a dollar to spare. For now he had to stick to Dante’s pizza. Three dollars a slice; half-price after midnight.
Bryant is forty-five. He’s owned his superette for fourteen years. He moved into the neighborhood in 1993, just before Cypress Hill released Black Sunday. He remembers kids feuding and forming rival gangs. The following year Nas dropped Illmatic and a girl on the block named her cat Ill Will.
In those days business was good. People cared less about organic tomatoes and more about The New York Post. The superette had a bus stop out front and people would meet and ride uptown. Nowadays, the bus comes by twice a day to pick up two elderly men and a young Haitian woman who works the night shift at Starbucks.
It’s easy to think about the past, but Bryant knows he’s lucky to be in business. The dry-cleaners next door closed in ’08 and has been boarded ever since. Across the street, a faded sign reads Tony’s Tyres. The new owners have turned a mural of the Michelin Man into a giant donut. A sandwich board out front now advertises Tony’s Traditional Donuts.
Bryant keeps the superette open late on weekends to sell cigarettes and beer to people venturing round from the avenue. Five years ago he opened at nine and closed at six, but nowadays no one comes in through the door before noon.
On Saturday mornings, opposite his apartment, he often sees a kid leaving home carrying a guitar case and returning late at night with a young woman. One morning the kid came into the superette and bought a tin of pineapple, American Spirits, and a loaf of rye bread. His name was Adam, or Addison, he can’t quite remember. He was a skinny kid, around 19, with flat cheekbones and a tattoo of an upside-down cross on his right forearm.
A window in Bryant’s apartment looks into the kid’s bedroom and he often sees him recording on a four-track tape machine. Occasionally he hears some amplified guitar from across the street.
The previous tenants used to frequent the superette. Jody, a tall blonde woman with tight curls, worked in real estate. Her husband Bell worked at a butcher’s shop in Chinatown. They’d stop in three nights a week to buy a litre of trim milk. Six months ago they saw a two-bedroom walk-up and decided to make an offer. Jody felt insecure about selling real estate and not owning her own home; though she blamed her lack of investment on gentrification and the global financial crisis.
Jody and Bell loved yoga and Bryant would often spot them in the pyramid pose. In the winter time, when the sun went down early, a bedroom light would shine through their curtains and Bryant would see their silhouettes doing the downward dog.
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