Further Adventures in Commerce
The wine store. I’m waiting at the checkout counter. Three aisles away, a big fellow, sixty-something, dressed in black t-shirt and ill-fitting sweatpants, stands shouting through a star-spangled mask into his phone. His wife is on the other end, or somebody just like her. The wine store clerk waits nearby, trying to be of help. He’s a wiry young man with an artisanal red beard. He looks like a vegetarian. I’m one myself and pretty good at spotting another. Nobody else is in the store. All I want is to pay for this jug of Chardonnay and be on my way. It’s an old story.
The wine store clerk sees me and shoots an apologetic look that says: I’ll be with you as soon as I can, but get a load of this guy! An awful lot can be shot in such a look. I feel like the wine store clerk and I have just become buddies, of a kind. The kind you make in a lifeboat.
The big fellow continues bellowing into his phone with heedless presumption. His voice ought to be enough to set the bottles rattling on the shelves. I think I can hear them. In vino veritas. Voices like this fellow’s make you wonder why they even need a phone. If the man’s wife—or whoever—is in the same county, they can hear him just fine without any help from a phone. I call it action at a distance—that’s one definition of magic, anyway—even though there’s nothing magical about this scene in the wine store. Not for me anyway.
The big fellow and his voice boom on: “I just spent half an hour in this damn store! You gotta tell me what you want me to get you. Why? Why?! Because THEY GOT ALL KINDS OF WINE HERE! That’s why! Like what?! Like what?! They got Cabernets. They got Pinots. They got Merlots.” He pronounces all the “t”s in the wine names. “Like what?! Like red wines and white wines and pink stuff. What?!”
He turns to the wine clerk: “Tell me some more wine names.”
The wine clerk utters a few more wine names. The big fellow blasts them back into his phone. I listen to the perceptible clink of bottles along the shelves.
The big fellow pauses. The bottles go quiet. An unsettling silence ensues. I begin to wonder if I really need any wine. Of course I do.
The big fellow resumes his sonic assault on the phone. He has taken up a new subject: “Listen! Listen! Whatever you do, don’t get chuck steak! Chuck steak is nasty stuff! Nasty! NO CHUCK STEAK!”
The wine store clerk shoots me another look. I shoot one back. We’re like a couple of guys playing catch on a fine spring day. Like a couple vegetarians who now know a little something about chuck steak.
©John P. O’Grady
Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on November 20, 2020
