Sure, it is an off-brand gas station.
Sure, it is the western edge of Detroit.
But I am in charge now.
Came here because the Queens store my family runs was doing well—ok enough so that we had staff not just relatives—and, as my father said, we have people here.
This is officially my own place and so everything that goes wrong is my fault, and everything that goes right is because my family sacrificed for me. You get the general idea.
The gas is the gas. Big tanker comes and fills up, lets us know what price to post. My domain is the retail block past the pumps. Every inch of space is full with something for sale.
Where I grew up that was the retail strategy. Maximize your square footage. My great uncle Rafik’s place in Manhattan is for me the the old country of corner stores—but his is all printed matter.
Australian Vogue?
All the way to the left (fashion is alphabetical by country, regardless of gender). The January issue is sold out.
Up there also is The Paris Review, Japa (the Journal of the American Planning Association.)
The Hindu.
He knows where everything is. Rafik has worked here since 1973. Originally from Herat in Afghanistan. Speaks 5 languages. Jewish.
When he took over the shop from the Greek family who owned it before, it used to be the New York Post, Wall Street Journal racing forms, some porn. Slowly he added foreign papers, The Guardian, Liberation, Corriere della Serra. Also available, every obscure European cigarette. English Ovals, Dunhill Ted, Nat Sherman.
Me? I have American Spirit, Newports, and ESSE Super Slims.
From my uncle’s literary perch, to now my sugar and tobacco fort.
Mostly I sit behind a plexiglass bulletproof shield for 12 hours a day –a dizzying display of 5 hour energy, butane cartridges, Monster, sunflower seeds, batteries, a full inventory of electronic vapors, scented air fresheners. Condoms with warlike names…predator, Trojan, stealth bomber. Rolling papers, (Zigzag and EZ), clove cigarettes, Crawford’s chewing gum (the violet scent reminds me of my grandmother, or someone else’s). Small packets of Tylenol, Advil and Bayer sell well in winter. I see many, many hopeful faces in lottery tickets–scratch offs, pick your kids birthday. Not lots of winners. Maybe a 5 , a 10 payout and a return purchase. One little girl kept her five-dollar winnings. That girl will go far.
I’ve also got a separate beef jerky case, a plexiglass display box with compartments for the sticks, the round ones, and areas for different flavors like teriyaki, hot pepper. Picture the tea box they bring around in restaurants, a nod to someone’s idea of luxury. By the way, the tea and the beef jerky have been in there forever. Careful, especially with the jerky. You can pull a filling or a tooth.
One night when it was especially slow, I took everything down. Wiped the plexi clean with paper towels, and rearranged the contents. Really, until then, I think everything that arrived was shoved into whichever square inch had space. To make browsing easier, I thought I’d group items by type. Made more sense to keep salty snacks together then hunt and browse for Fritos only to find them stuffed next to lighters.
Week after that, I kept at it this time in size order, starting with a line of small pharmacy packets, tic-tacs at the bottom and zig zagging upwards to a gravity defying top layer crowned by economy sized bags of Funyuns, a few hoodies that no one ever seemed to ask for and a Mexican soccer jersey.
I tried an alphabetical array—debating the merits of brand name versus item name with a livery car driver who comes by for gas, coffee and, of recent, an appraisal of the latest installation.
The next week, I took everything down again. This time, when I put the items back, I arranged them by color. The resulting gradient left Maalox and the bubblegum pink of one Orbitz gum to sit next to one another, while the blue mint Orbitz was placed next to a souvenir Detroit Lions bag of peanuts. This, is a very instagrammable image.
Denis, a guy from Burkina Faso who gasses up in the 7-9 am flurry didn’t have cash on him and offered his watch as collateral. Put it in your wonder cabinet over there he said.
The watch went up, but not for sale in a cluster of round things. Copenhagen chewing tobacco, individual cans of tuna and hoop earrings. It was joined by a coin from Japan with a hole in the center and a vacuum sealed bag of dates. Denis, who has a new watch, helped me incorporate the beff jerky case directly into the larger plexiglass wall. Now we can use the compartments for dried meats but also foreign currency and other curiosities people bring in. There are people who come by just to look.
Right now, a group of us are working on a full scale reconsideration of the Linnean classification system, with the hope someday of getting a winning lottery ticket to upgrade our lighting, maybe invite Rafik to come and visit to show him what I have done with my place.