There was only one rule growing up: Don’t touch the meat slicer.
The Store was a beautiful scrubby place with white enameled fridges and vintage cookie tins. But for me, nothing was as wonderful as the slicing machine. It was a streamlined silver sculpture manufactured by Hobart. Not the 410 designed by Egmont Arens. Our Hobart was a later model with a slanted meat feed. When the machine was turned on, it sounded like a circular saw, which is basically what it was. There was a carriage that most often held fresh roast beef. The carriage was pushed back and forth the way you rock a baby to sleep. Instead of peace and quiet, you got toilet paper–thin slices of meat.
No gory end. I have all my fingers. Loved the machine from afar until I hit 14, and the embargo was lifted. Then I loved it up close every day, eating translucent slices of turkey whether I was hungry or not.
Hobart Model 410, 1940, designed by Egmont Arens
Before I was born, in the earliest days of The Store, if someone came in that gave my dad a bad feeling, he would camp out by the meat slicer.
The machine stood on rubber feet that acted like shock absorbers. They raised the slicing machine just enough so my dad’s .380 Swiss automatic could live underneath. He would go pretend to slice meat just in case the spooky person tried to stick him up.
This was New York in 1972. It wasn’t a question of will you be stuck up, it was a question of how often.
After a while my dad felt stupid. He got spooked by everyone and would hover behind the slicing machine like a coward. None of the people he got spooked by held him up. Even if they had, he wouldn’t have drawn the gun. He could shoot cans in the woods, but not people.
So he ditched the gun for good and came up with a new tactic. If someone scary came in, he grabbed my mom, ran to the tailors across the street, and locked the door.
Gabe and Rita were the tailors across the street. They had Yiddish accents and smelled like mothballs. Rita taught me and my sister to sew by saying “in and out” over and over again.
The first time my dad fled to Gabe and Rita’s with my mom was to get away from a spooky guy with brass knuckles on both hands. Mom and Dad watched from the safety of Gabe and Rita’s as the spooky guy slunk around the counter to the register. The guy looked at them across the street and then he looked back at the register like it was booby-trapped, grabbed a six-pack of beer, and left.
From then on, if someone truly scary came in, my parents just fled across the street. It happened maybe two times a year till The Store turned into a restaurant. The restaurant was different from the grocery store. If a customer felt wrong, my dad just kicked them out, be they robbers or yuppies.
In hindsight, Dad’s gun wouldn’t have done any good. Almost every time my parents were stuck up it was some pleasant-looking person they never would have suspected.
Once, a guy who looked like he was going to buy a bag of chips pulled a gun and told everyone to get on the floor.
Our floor was covered in sawdust. The sawdust was delivered in sacks by a crippled Italian goombah from Queens. My dad had to unload the sacks from the back of the goombah’s truck himself, but it didn’t matter. He loved the sawdust. Every morning he and my mom sprinkled down the new floor. When I was little, Mom would give me a salad bowl of sawdust and I would help, dropping tiny pawfuls. If there was a spill, the sack of sawdust would come out and a thick wad of it would be laid down, turning the yellow shavings birch beer red or Coke brown.
At night all the sawdust was swept up. The floor sparkled because all the dirt from the day was absorbed by the sawdust. No mopping needed.
The health department said sawdust was not allowed, and just like that sawdust became a forbidden passion. And there are many passions that have since been forbidden by the DOH—cloth towels in the bathroom, fresh warm turkey, cooking with bare hands—but nothing hurt like the sawdust. I don’t think my father has ever forgiven the City of New York.
I wasn’t alive during this robbery, but my oldest brother, Charlie, was. He, my parents, and a few customers are facedown in sawdust. Charlie stands up and goes over to the guy with the gun who is raiding the register.
“Are you a hand robber?” Charlie asks the thief.
“Shut the fuck up,” replies the thief.
“Charlie, get back here,” my dad says. Charlie turns around and lies down in the sawdust.
The thief leaves.
Everything goes back to normal, minus some cash.
Later that same day Charlie is at a friend’s. Tommy the taxi dispatcher and Jeff Goldblum the actor are in The Store. My dad is telling them about how Charlie mixed up “armed robber” with “hand robber.”
A nice-dressed guy comes in and pulls out a .45.
There is almost no money in the register, because The Store was robbed in the morning. The guy is pissed and herds my mom, dad, Tommy, and Jeff Goldblum into the tiny bathroom in the back.
“Give me everything you got,” the nice-dressed man says, waving his gun.
They all empty their pockets.
The thief takes fifteen dollars from my mom, forty off Tommy, twenty off my dad, and hands Jeff back his ten, saying, “You need this more than me.”
My parents went out and ate lobster that night. If ever anything upsetting happened, we ignored it and went out to eat.
Pink and blue bathrooms at The Store
For a while we had a shopping routine at a strip mall in Paramus, New Jersey.
The strip mall had a supermarket next to a dark arcade filled with cabinet video games and pinball machines.
Mom would give us kids ten dollars each and we would disappear into the dark as our parents shopped for The Store and home.
My brothers played as many games as they could, running from game to game. Danny’s favorite was 720°, a skateboarding game that always ended with your character getting attacked by killer bees.
All of me and Minda’s quarters went to a game called Zookeeper, in which you had to build walls to keep animals from escaping.
Fifty dollars seems like a lot to drop in the 1980s, but it was a deal to keep us from asking to buy all kinds of crap in the supermarket, and the bonus of some quiet.
Also, the way my parents spent money defied gravity. They spent fifteen hundred dollars on an Apple IIC for Charlie when he was 9, because he asked for it.
Once we were coming back from playing Zookeeper and got in a car accident.
Fire trucks showed up fast, and the chief cut our battery wire so the car wouldn’t explode.
It was noisy, flashing lights and all that.
As the car was being pushed out of the street, my dad said to my mom, “Are you hungry?”
We were in the Meatpacking District. At that time the only things in the neighborhood were people getting laid in empty meat trucks and Florent.