SCHWARMA
-- Bill Carney
I had been out of town for awhile, but when that thing happened on the east coast, I headed back. I rented an entire floor of an old mint-green house for $125 a month and split that with my girlfriend, Constanza. I found a job in a part of town called the Corridor at the Sunshine Grocery. Everyday, Constanza got up early, put on her pantyhose and headed to her "administrative assistant" gig in a big company's personnel, or human resources, department. Everyone in personnel was a Gestapo-type, a budding Kremlinologist. She fitted right in and hated herself for it. I didn't mind. I rolled over and went back to sleep. Let her go to the gulag. I had the afternoon shift in the limbo life.
The Sunshine was across the street from Chinatown. There were parts of town called Greektown, Mexican town, and there had been a Poletown, but Chinatown consisted only of Chung's Restaurant and a pagoda-shaped phone booth. Next to the grocery was the Gold Dollar Show Bar, a run-down burlesque house, and down the Corridor was a nest of skid row rummy joints and the Majestic Diner, where Elmore Leonard used to hang out.
It was an eerie, urban prairie land, where packs of dogs, rabbits and even pheasants wandered the fields and hollowed-out homes. A lot of disabled people lived in the area, and you would see them rolling their wheelchairs down the center of the deserted streets. During winter nights, huge plumes of steam rose out of the vents in the road. Across the street, Big Ed, the neighborhood drug dealer and warlord, would let his dobermans loose and hold parties on the sidewalk. Eventually, the glamour was too much. Constanza started complaining about the neighborhood and my not having any money and sleeping in each morning. She claimed that I was mooching off her. She'd get drunk and do aerobics. I thought she was a pain in the ass and was hoping she'd move out, even if it meant more work for me.
Because of its impossibly complex, non-hierarchical, egalitarian organization, the Sunshine Grocery had been unable to relocate from the area or do much of anything. Sunshine was a money-losing operation in a sorry neighborhood of a beat town in a depressed part of the world's wealthiest country. The grocery certainly honored its motto "Food for People, not for Profit," but if the milk or orange juice was a penny more than the giant supermarket's price, the customers all claimed there was some sort of profit-making conspiracy afoot. "I thought it was food for people," they would complain. The shoppers were a rainbow coalition of oddballs and freaks: black Muslims, Rastafarians, Krishnas, lesbians, hippy slackers, Movement types, Vietnam vets (who had their headquarters and bar around the corner), and the small Chinese and Indian communities who lived there.
As the store continued to lose money, the board of equals decided that the grocery needed a very expensive, fantastically complicated cash register, so they could track inventory and know exactly where the big money-losing items were located. You were supposed to categorize everything that you rang up. Some categories, like "produce" and "dairy" seemed self-evident, but, in fact, most of the food items were counterintuitive or simply beyond categorization. Orange juice, for example, was "dairy." Pickled daikon, packaged seaweed and all that macrobiotic junk, aloe vera gel, colon cleanser kits, goldenseal supplements ... what were they? I found there was a "miscellaneous" category and rang them all up under "miscellaneous." I never did less than a thousand dollars worth of "miscellaneous" sales when I was working. I though of an artist I had read about who canned his own shit and sold it for its weight in gold. To me, this would be a clear "miscellaneous."
A typical day had the customers roaming the store, munching on cloves of garlic like they were apples, and asking if they could purchase the large chart on the wall denouncing the avocado. They traded their home cures involving Cayenne pepper, goldenseal or tofu ice cream. Everyone was suffering, so there was a ready market for the most far-fetched remedies.
I was friendly with different customers. Joe Rogers was a taxi driver who was always trying to get me to come by his Trotskyist meetings. He had graduated from Cornell and been voted "most downwardly mobile" at his 20 year reunion. He used to get real excited about things like Papa or Baby Doc Duvalier being deposed. World revolution was his sports page.
An old guy named Ben only wanted dimes as change. He believed them to be the greatest of all coins since they were lighter than nickels or quarters and you could make phone calls with them. He whispered "dimes" in my ear, like it was a state secret. I leaned close to him and said, "dollars."
The weirdest of them all was a guy named Schwarma, who claimed to be some kind of wizard. I was wrapping cheese when this odd-looking bird exclaimed "Raul!" He was thin, had curly black hair, and he seemed to look very young for an old guy, or extremely old for a young guy. He wore a button of himself, and, on that button, was a picture of him wearing a button. "I use it for hypnosis," he told me once.
Although I told him my name wasn't Raul, he persisted in calling me by that name. "I'm wise to your little game, Raul," he said. To the extent I had a "game," I supposed it was little, but, to my knowledge, there was nothing to be "wise" to. I had no game or no game plan, aside from maybe getting Constanza out of the house. Schwarma claimed that he could read my aura, which revealed that I was the mysterious Raul implicated by James Earl Ray in the Martin Luther King assassination. When I pointed out that I had never even heard of Raul, that served only as further proof. "If you are not Raul, then why did you quickly deny being Raul, rather than asking who Raul was?" It was through such legalistic trickery that he felt he had me caught.
Schwarma always came into the grocery store with different beautiful young women. They were all members of his ashram, which was located in one of the dilapidated mansions in the Brush Park area across Main Street. I had heard that some of them lived in tepees, and that their parties involved a great deal of mind-altering drugs and nakedness. Schwarma always travelled with one girl, who looked like Betty, and another, who was Veronica, and I imagined him as a shaggy-headed, paranoid Reggie. Betty and Veronica would help him load the fifty pound bags of lundberg rice and whole wheat flour onto the van.
Schwarma had attained "Samadhi," which was apparently a sort of heightened consciousness, available only to those who had completely lost their minds. One day, after a battery of detailed Raul-directed questions, all assuming a close familiarity with the details of the King assassination, he let drop an aside to me that he could walk on water and make himself invisible. "I'd like to see you make yourself invisible right now," I said. This remark flew right over his consciousness-heightened head. Put-downs 101 were apparently not part of the basic Samadhi school curriculum. He was a master of all arcane knowledge, but powerless against the obvious.
I said, "Schwarma, my friend, I will give you a choice. You can leave." I was finally throwing a customer out of the grocery store. I felt great. "I can leave or ... what?" he asked. "What's the other choice?"
"No that's it. You get a choice. Not two choices," I said. I explained that I was reading his aura and astral projection and was indeed feeling a great desire for non-existence around him.
He sensed that something was amiss. He carried a puppet named Lothar with him at all times, a puppet which he believed could detect places of high vibratory energy which he also called power spots. He had claimed that the Corridor and particularly the Sunshine Grocery were such power spots. "This place is cloaked in darkness," he exclaimed, as the other customers looked on in bewilderment. "It is now bereft of power and devoid of the slightest vibratory energy. Raul, I have half a mind to report you to the authorities."
"You're too chicken, Schwarma," I replied. "You know, if the police got one look at you and your buttons and your puppet and your gigantic poodles, they'd lock you up on the spot." Schwarma was often accompanied by a pair of fantastically large poodles, named Jesus and Buddha. He believed poodles to be the most mystically-orientated breed of dogs. "I will never return to this place of darkness," Schwarma mouthed like a bad ventriloquist in his puppet voice, while simultaneously waving Lothar about.
It was about that time that Constanza jumped ship. Despite all of her complaining, when she was gone I missed her. "Not every day can be sunshine," she said on her way out the door. But I was left only with the Sunshine Grocery, even less discretionary income, and the sight of Big Ed smacking his dogs around across the street.
Schwarma never returned, but Betty and Veronica and other assorted ashram citizens would come by for their rice cakes and molasses. One day I spotted Constanza amongst them. It was like that scene out of the first "Planet of Apes" movie where Charlton Heston has just been through the orangutan tribunal and sees his astronaut buddy, only to realize he has been lobotomized. "I couldn't take human resources any more," she told me. "It was just too weird ... that whole paranoid thing. I met Schwarma and he showed me all about vibratory energy and power spots. He says the whole Corridor, except the Sunshine Grocery and particularly you, is a power spot. Look, I can't talk. I don't want the others to see me talking to you. They might tell Schwarma. I won't talk to you again."
It seemed funny her saying she would not talk to me, because she hadn't talked to me since she left, but i thought I should try to prevent her from becoming another Betty or Veronica, who were, after all, the same person with different colored hair. That night, there was a Community Concert at the ashram. The party was in the backyard. There were all kinds of flashing lights, bonfires, and those giant ill-tempered poodles roaming around the tepees. Schwarma's band, "Realized Soul," played their trance music and people spun and frolicked like a bunch of stoned, naked dervishes. I sought out Constanza, but before I saw her, I ran into Schwarma. He began loudly chanting some sort of gibberish, but I could tell that the storm was rising and that a naked, stoned, crazy mob, full of evil vibratory energy, was giving me that poodle look. Schwarma was waving Lothar wildly in the air, while screaming in his demented puppeteer's voice. I jumped up, snagged Lothar out of his hand, and began making my own puppet noises, saying "Schwarma is a bad trip!" Possessing the authority of Lothar, I was able to momentarily stun the mob and escape past the wigwams onto the street.
I dashed down the street knowing that the poodles and the lunatics would soon be at my heels. I made it to the vets' bar, the Old Miami, and ducked in there. I knew these guys. They were armed and crazy and hated Schwarma. I peaked out the front and saw the naked mob run by. Poodles are not bloodhounds. At the back of the pack was Schwarma, involved in a vigorous debate with Lothar, whom he must have found on the street. "Is that the fuck who is giving you a hard time?" Crank, the bar owner, asked. Without waiting for an answer, he reached out the bar door and whisked the cult leader from the sidewalk. The vets began pummeling him with their fists, boots and pool cues. It was not a pretty sight. Schwarma was a bloody mess. Even worse for him, he was dead. The vets weren't sure what to do with the body, but I had an idea.
A couple of weeks later, I was working behind the register. My boss was a cool guy and he asked me, "What's this new meat product you got us carrying, this chicken schwarma?" I said, "It's a kind of processed chicken meat, I'm not sure what they put in it. It's OK though, it's Amish. Ring it up under 'miscellaneous.'"