Every Building Is an Atheist

White collar grocery theives and why every question is a threat.

1.

One of my managers at the grocery store is a bodybuilder named Murphy with a shaved head and the year of his birth (same as mine) tattooed on both triceps.

He is patient with everyone. If a you go to Murphy with an issue he will look at your eyes as you speak, he’ll say friendly things like “Mhm” and “Ha ha,” but also he will blink very slowly, so that you know how good he’s gonna feel when the clock tips its mercy and one of you, doesn’t matter which, is finally someplace else.

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2.

Murphy probably makes $31/hr plus benefits and then on Friday-Saturday nights he does security at a nearby club. Couple hundred dollars.

I’ve had one long personal chat with Murphy at the store. It was raining and there were no customers and his voice got high and excited when he talked about AI. Said he likes to just kill an afternoon on his couch with it. “Sit there thinkin about, ‘How good’s it gonna get,’” he karate chops a few gentle increments in the air, “‘five, ten, fifteen years…?’”

In the breakroom last week he was eating a fruit cup on his feet when somebody folded her arms and told him in a stage whisper that she thinks J.D. Vance is a motherfucker.

Murphy chewed his fruit and gave her his Patient Face. Blinking slowly. “This a customer?”

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3.

When I deliver food for Uber Eats on Fridays I’ll sometimes get called to the kosher bakery in Surfside where the proprietor hands me some chocolate gift boxes and an apology for the pile: “Shabbat gets busy.”

One time he asked if I’d be willing to log off of the Uber Eats app and just spend the day working for him. “I’ll put some pins in a Google Map, share it, we’ll just stay in touch like that and you just send me pictures as you drop it off.”

I said sure and closed the app because I forgot that, if you get into a car accident delivering chocolates for a stranger, that’s on you.

He asked if I would do it for $5 a trip and I told him no.

He said, “OK seven.”

I vacillated.

He noticed and said: “OK how about this: seven dollars an order and what’s your favorite chocolate,” picking up tongs and sliding open the display before I could answer, “tell me now, come on, anything you want…”

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4.

He gave me the boxes and shared a map with five stops.

I delivered the first one to a building I always pass. It’s mid-sized and white. Invisibly bland. I went inside and learned it was a building just for seniors.

The lobby was clean and chilly, but the upstairs hallways were dark and cartoon-spooky with with stone floors and flourescent tubes telling me zutt zutt and eeeee.

Each apartment had hollow metal doors that were sad to look at. Somebody painted them green and this made them worse. Like forceps with lipstick.

I knocked on the door but nobody answered so I lingered. Knocked again and got no answer but I thought I heard someone so I called out, “I’ve got chocolate for—” and then whatever her name was, Susan maybe, and after a two-second silence came a high soft voice, far back from the door and scared-sounding:

“You can leave it.”

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5.

After that I went to an apartment building that I see every day, maybe 20 stories tall.

I took the chocolate boxes into the lobby and realized all the signs were in Hebrew and when I got into the elevator I caught myself wondering, “Is this whole building Jewish?”

Buildings cannot be Jewish because buildings do not believe things. They are atheists.

Once the doors closed and I was alone in there, with the mirrors and the carpet and the slow hum of ascent, I remembered that scene in Counterlife when Zuckerman visits Israel and feels himself at home: “See that tree? That’s a Jewish tree. See that bird? That’s a Jewish bird.”

Are all the tenants Jewish, is what I meant.

In 4th grade I went to a therapist who taught me this mantra:

“There’s questions for others,

and questions just for me,

I can take them to the library

where knowledge is free.”

I’m sure it was better than that but 25 years later I’ll remember the rhyme, and that she made it up for me, and I’m moved to think of that adult, with her long blond hair and her skirtsuits of colorless tweed, trying to protect my littler self from a reality I couldn’t comprehend: In the grownup world, every stranger’s question is a latenight jiggle at the doorknob. A tap at the window when your hair’s wet.

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6.

The store’s been busier than usual these past two weeks with Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Manager Murphy was walking around during the rush and saw a customer (a regular) take a pre-made turkey wrap from the cooler and start eating it as he shopped. That’s fine. But then the customer finished eating the sandwich and threw the container in a trash can and kept shopping.

Murphy went to the trash can. He got the container out and took it to the front of the store and stood there. When the guy who ate the turkey wrap came to a register Murphy went over to him and smiled and scanned the broken plastic container and then waggled it: “Sir you forgot this.”

The guy gaped. Blinked. “I didn’t —” seemed to be rebooting, “I didn’t like it.”

Murphy cranked his smile up by the corners like how a hook-handed man folds a towels. “Sir I watched you eat that whole-ass sandwich.” Murphy touches his eyelid and tugs it gently for emphasis. “It took you three aisles.”

The guy was reddening. He was stammering and blinking a lot and his lashes looked like insect legs when the poison hits. He skazzed a hand in the air, “Whatever dude,” then looked at his phone like he didn’t have time for this, “go ‘head charge me for it. I’ll call corporate. That’s fine.”

Each of them walked away looking coiled and tense and self-righteous and angry but also nervous. Like they’d just been caught doing something they regret.

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Thanks to reader support, this newsletter generates about $300 a month, which means I’ve been able to scale back the Uber Eats deliveries and focus on making content here and working, a couple hours each day, on my next author profile for The Metropolitan Review and, when time allows, the grocery store novel in progress.