Shopping for Father’s Day

Here I was in the shoe department of the largest department store in the U.S. There to meet my wife at noon. She knows I love to wear Merrills and said that if we met there, she’d treat me to new pair with her discount card for Father’s Day. Of course, I got there early to scope out the scene. A hearty Australian man and his hearty wife were buying everything in sight. Ditto a German couple. The young blond wife look liked a trick from Midnight Express in dusky pantyhose, short shorts and black boots, and her husband looked like a Luftwaffe lieutenant, buying as if the EU was making a major comeback. Nein!

Meanwhile, where the hell were the Merrills I loved so much? There were only two of the worst of their styles, one of which I had bought and returned because they fit so poorly. I scoped out the rest of the shoe section and it looked like sale day at Walmart. But maybe the economy had driven down inventories like personnel. And what about the poor people in China who made them for a fraction of their cost?

Then an elevator door opened and out popped my wife, a smile on her face, ready to treat her man right. I explained to her there was nothing there that I liked, and one by one she began pulling out styles I’d only glossed over. One, some brown leather, square-toed Sketchers were kind of nice. Not funky and flexible like Merrills but okay. The beaten-down shoe salesman, probably under-quota, smiled and brought my size 10–1/2 limply, and asked me to try them on. He didn’t push.

He went back to the Australian couple, the wife now wanting a pair of shoes for her hubby sprayed inside since someone else may have tried them on. Gimme a break, lady! This is America. We trade spit here every day. By the time he talked them out of it, I took the Sketchers to the register and my wife whipped out her store card.

A bit dejected, I said that would do it for me. Let’s have a bite to eat and I’ll go back home to write and my wife could get back to her office. But, noooo, bless her. What else would you like? Nothing, darling, this is enough. Pants? Shirts? A bathing suit? No, sweetheart, but thanks. C’mon, let’s go look at shirts, she said. Did I mention she used to be a stylist for film directors and photographers in the ad business and you never ever turned up with one thing (even if it was absolutely the right thing) under any condition? Some clam would always ask for another color. So, we escalated up a floor to Sportswear: shirts, jackets, shorts, bathing suits, underwear, pajamas, etc., each under a designer name, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin, Versace, and so on . . .

I have a collection of beautiful shirts my wife and daughter have bought me. But since I left the ad business and the big bucks, I’m not a collector any more. Two or three that I favor will do. Various languages echoed through Sportswear as well, French, some Asian tongues, the Jersey Shore (where the Mad Housewives come from) Fuhgeddaboudit, with funny money.

There was also a man dressed in the white robes of a priest, skull cap, etc., believe it or not. What the heck was he doing here, thinking of quitting? Looking for a second wardrobe for job hunting or partying? Or was the priest get-up a fake and he doing a little shoplifting? What a world. Or was it just me. There were more Brits, Aussies, Italians, Poles, out-of-towners scooping up the goods.

Jesus, guys. I got the feeling of immigrants just hitting the shore, eating their first meal in an American restaurant. More, gimme more, more they said. Is that what we looked like? The More-People brought to you by Ignorance, Arrogance and Greed. My head ached a bit. It seemed tough to breathe in the crowds. And my good wife asking me if I liked this, that, or the other thing, most of which I did not take in. My brain froze from the quantity of stuff and choices.

As a palliative, my dear wife and I went down to the cafeteria for a bite to eat. Here the noise amped tenfold due to the kitchen-style tiles on the walls and low ceilings, it being the basement cramped with lunchers. Not to mention the overdoing of options to eat, none of them looking particularly inviting under or in plastic. But we plodded on.

I got a thin Turkey and Swiss, slice of tomato and lettuce sandwich, on white bread no less, which I hadn’t eaten in years. My wife got a tuna salad sandwich on whole wheat bread. I grabbed a bottle of water, I thought, which turned out to be a Sprite Zero, no calories but 30 grams of sodium to drive your blood pressure up. Real healthy stuff. My wife had a grapefruit juice, which I can’t drink since I take statins, which interfere with digestion of certain foods. Also, my wife noticed that the package of ten chocolate chip cookies she bought contained no sugar and cost ten dollars. She went back later with her receipt to return them and have her card credited. If the cookies lacked sugar, they contained something worse. Try aspartame, which was originally banned by the FDA for 15 years and reinstated by Donald Rumsfeld when he CEO’d Searle.

I accompanied my wife to the register, standing where the line exited not at its entrance. Because I stood there, all the people entered the wrong way. I’d tell them, “The line starts on the other side.” Some of the older people, said, “Oy,” and dutifully marched around to the official entrance to the line. Yet another woman went straight into the exit with her brown straw fedora pulled rakishly over one eye. When I told her the line started on the other side she said, “Ma non! Ze cashier, she say, I can come in, iz alright, zank you.” “Zank you, too, I said.” Nobody said a word to her.

By then, the geniuses behind the counters had figured out how to credit my wife’s card with ten bucks. Actually, it turned out to be eight bucks, deducting two bucks in various taxes: city, state, national and international fees. After all, this is or feels like the International New World Order Department Store, zank you, and pays ze many taxes, adding up to one tax for NWO. It works zat way.

By now, our lungs ached to scream. The sandwiches were mealy and dry, tasting vaguely of plastic. Ah plastic, what would we do without you? Have a sustainable environment. My wife had drunk the grapefruit juice, and I had passed on my Sprite Zero to her. She said she’d take it back to work. At some point we finished and hastily walked up to the lobby level. My wife was going back to work, east. I was going west to the subway. I kissed her goodbye and said, “Thanks for the gift, I mean, the gift of having the patience to go through this asylum.” “Ciao,” she said, laughed, turned and walked east into the daylight. Actually, I walked out of the store, breathed deeply, dodged the street crowds, and dove into the subway on 34^th Street and 7^th Avenue to grab the 2 or 3 express trains north. I held my shoes close in their sturdy bag, The shiny express train roared in.

It wasn’t too crowded (still early, 2 PM) and I squeezed in to get a seat between two girls. Fortunately, nobody asked if I wanted their seat. It only served to remind me what an old fart I had grown to be. As soon as the train began to move, a homeless black man began to sing some incomprehensible tune and lyric that demanded you repeat each line he sung, though no one could catch his sing/speak, he just integrated “once again, please,” and no one sang, and “repeat after me,” and no one sang, then he did it in falsetto, and no one sang. Fortunately, the mayor hasn’t thought of an entertainment tax for the subway, yet.

I was one of the lucky ones. The 2 train had zoomed up to 96^th Street in no time and I caught a local pulling in, and in one stop I was there. I walked the rest of the way home, feeling as if I had gotten dry-cleaned and pressed. A group of Hispanic teenagers were cursing each other out in back of me and I felt better you than me.

So, this was your typical, not so typical Monday in New York City, the one that would run to Father’s day in six more days. I had successfully escaped Capitalism’s New World Order Universal Department Store once more. Next time, would I be as lucky? Better not want too much, perhaps nothing. Just keep everything you own until you pass and you’ll be okay in the afterlife, which may be this life. Maybe you could pick up an angel’s robe and wings.

But just then I heard a phalanx of fire engines heading towards West End Avenue where I live. Screaming ambulances followed. I relaxed, knowing the chaos had trailed me home like a hungry dog. I dare not look back. I touched my new haircut for Father’s day, trying to see if my brains were still there. I asked the doorman what was going on. He answered me in his Indian accent. Something about a fire in the building’s basement on the corner. “You know, Con Ed is fixing leaking gas pipes there. Could be trouble.” So, I got home just in time for the big boom! Yes, he said, “Big boom. Ha ha.” Since 9/11, nothing is ever ruled out here.

I ran towards the elevator inside the lobby, going “pssst” to alert my neighbor in it not to let the door shut, and she held it, realizing I’d caught her pretending she didn’t see me coming. But this is a tough town; the Capital of the Universe—dog eat dog land, a muggy gray sky overlooking the world of wars, market havoc, increasing unemployment, frustration, fraud, fakes, freaks and the last days of earth. But my new Sketchers, I clutched the bag, eager to get home and try them on again, you know, walking up and down the apartment, looking for an uncomfortable spot in them, making sure they fit just right everywhere, exactly unlike this town.

They fit. And to my dear wife, I can only say Amor Vincit Omnia (Love conquers all). I’m sure a shirt will be forthcoming, a belt, a book, whatever I say. There is no stopping her blessed self. This is the land of plenty until the plenty runs out. And Father’s Day, as Mother’s Day, will be another gone Promotional Event, in the vast scheme that advertising built for the great enterprise of America, crumbling now like the economy, its debt getting larger than its GDP.

For some reason that made me think of the Enterprise sitting on the deck of the Intrepid sitting down on 42^nd and West Streets on the Hudson River, the Prairie Schooners of Ocean and Space. The Intrepid, that venerable warhorse had been turned into a war museum. Imagine. Where was there to go next, I thought, to colonize or just escape the world? Someplace where the subways didn’t run or even trains, planes and ships didn’t dock often. Someplace with just a break from sirens, garbage trucks rattling cans at 7 a.m., weather and police choppers pulsing over like boom boxes to open your eyes. Still, dawn this morning was pink, at least for a few minutes, when the sun rose, and the sky turned gold. It was still good to be alive and hear Louis Armstrong sing, What a Beautiful World. Go, Satchmo.

Yet, tomorrow morning I’d drag me out of bed, make coffee, pour Cheerios from a plastic bag, blueberries from a plastic box into a white bowl and pour milk over both, then mechanically eat the whole thing. By then the coffee would be ready and I’d be ready to sip it, jolt my heart into another day, turn on the computer and hit the emails predicting the end of the world. My wife would join me for the weather. I say to myself as I write, is this news? Can anyone relate to this? Will they be wiser having read this? Will it unveil the mysteries that besiege man’s desire for more stuff? And the pain it causes in so many ways.

I appealed to Sartre, Camus, Marcuse, where are you now that we need you, existentially speaking, really the hell need you most. Somehow, I’m having major angst remembering if the dark blue denim Lauren shirt looked better than the blue pin-striped Tommy Hilfiger. Or was something else troubling me? The pall of gray the sky was turning to? Was it the world that felt dystopian or was it me? Or both? But the Buddha said, “Let go of all desire to avoid life’s pain.” Yes, yet, to all those dads, noble for their sacrifice, who will risk their sanity shopping, or worse, trying to get into a restaurant on Father’s Day, have a happy one. And kiss your wife and each of your progeny. They are the greatest gift of all.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.