Tuesday in August. It is the 11th day. Things are quiet at the fruit stand as usual. The main fruit stand is understaffed. So much so that Yancy, who has returned from a family visit, sent me a Slack and wondered if I was busy because to Yancy IT DID NOT SEEM LIKE I WAS DOING ANY WORK TODAY.
If Yancy would take a minute and check the folder he would see a good number of fruit stand requests have been filled by yours truly. It was off-putting for my supervisor to claim I was not working. Yancy talks about a two hour window to fulfill these requests but more often than not, they are completed minutes after receiving them.
At 8AM I am generally starting before Janis, Violet, Kimberly and start filling the requests that come in after 5PM. I try to get in before 8AM and when I am at the main fruit stand I notice that others are not in until after 8AM, except for maybe Violet who is a contracted employee just like me, not a full time employee like Janis or Kimberly or Mr Kool Aid himself, Yancy.
Yancy is almost always in when I get in. At my fruit stand I usually have 10-20 minutes of getting the day started. At the main fruit stand the day starts at 8AM. I have to admit it pissed me off, Yancy thinking I was not doing anything.
I also have to remember, not to trust anyone. Jimmy Chile is trustworthy and perhaps a few others but overall I am not sure beyond Jimmy Chile.
Pam. Pam is a cooking spray that came out in the 1970s. It was created so that food won’t stick to the pan when cooking. My mother refused to buy it. She found out at work from Lucy Ardizzone or Barbara DeLuca that kids where huffing cans of Pam and getting high. I had never heard of it and never had an inkling to do such a thing. She listened to these women as they did their business in the ladies room of the HBJ warehouse.
Presently I am in the midst of an online discussion with Mike. His beloved Wade needed $40 and Mike asked if I could wire it. I did. I figured that Wade would pay back once he got his money. But Wade sent the money to Mike who has it in his wallet and has been unable to get it back to me due to his parole officer.
I expressed how dumb this whole thing was, Wade should have just rewired the money back to me but no, it got stupid and Mike is all ‘I can’t deal with you right now’. It got worse from there. I do feel like a sucker. When I had ‘those’ feelings for Mike back then I went out of my way to make him happy.
Those feelings subsided and I still did things that were somewhat extraordinarily kind. And I never really got anything in return. Not that I was looking for it but it did not go unnoticed especially in moments like I find myself in now.
Mike just brought up the incompatibility of Gemini (him) and Virgo (me). He believes that and I do not. Why bother continuing this friendship? I’ll leave that on him.
Google Gemini rewrite as a James Baldwin essay
The Measure of the Ledger
It is a quiet, suffocating Tuesday in August—the eleventh day, though the calendar matters very little when one is trapped inside the daily machinery of other men’s suspicions. At the fruit stand, as with everywhere men gather to convert their fleeting hours into a meager living, the ranks are thin. Yancy, having returned from the domestic sanctum of a family visit, sends a digital summons through the atmosphere of the workplace—demanding to know if I am busy, operating on the convenient delusion that because he does not see my labor, it must not exist.
Had Yancy chosen to look into the folder, to examine the quiet, undeniable evidence of my hours, he would have discovered that the work had already been met, rendered, and dispatched by my own hands. There is a peculiar, infuriating indignity in being accused of idleness by a supervisor whose authority rests so heavily on performance. He speaks of two-hour windows as though they were sacred decrees, while I have spent my mornings answering the call within minutes of its arrival. I arrive at eight in the morning, often before, stepping into the arena long before Janis or Kimberly, before Violet—who carries the precarious, vulnerable badge of the contracted worker while others parade their full-time security—and well before Yancy himself, who wears his position like a suit of armor he did not earn.
One learns, in these small and daily wars, the terrible necessity of vigilance. One learns, above all, the hard truth of isolation: not to trust anyone. Beyond Jimmy Chile, whose character seems etched from some older, sturdier stone, the landscape is populated almost entirely by shadows.
My mother understood this instinctual distrust, though her terror took a different, more domestic form. In the nineteen-seventies, when the chemical promises of modern efficiency began to flood the American kitchen, there appeared an aerosol spray called Pam, designed so that food might never stick to the pan. My mother refused to let it cross our threshold. She had gathered her intelligence in the ladies’ room of the HBJ warehouse, overhearing women named Lucy Ardizzone and Barbara DeLuca whisper of children inhaling the fumes from those cans to escape, if only briefly, the crushing weight of their surroundings. I had no desire for such desperate, fleeting highs, nor had the thought ever entered my mind, but my mother listened to those women as though they were delivering scripture. She knew, as the vulnerable always know, that every modern convenience carries its own hidden poison, and that safety is usually an illusion.
And yet, despite all my mother’s lessons in self-preservation, one remains perpetually vulnerable to the demands of human intimacy. Presently, I find myself entangled in a foolish, humiliating exchange with Mike. His beloved Wade required forty dollars—a minor sum on paper, but an immense weight when bound to human entanglement—and Mike asked if I would wire it. I complied, believing in the simple, decent arithmetic of debts honored. But the money did not return to me; it traveled through Wade only to land back in Mike’s wallet, where it now sits rendered unreachable by the terrifying, rigid bureaucracy of his parole officer.
When I pointed out the sheer, undeniable stupidity of this theater—that Wade ought to have wired the money directly back to my hands—Mike retreated into the familiar sanctuary of the aggrieved, declaring that he could not deal with me right now. It is a bitter thing to stand in the cold light of day and realize you have played the sucker. Years ago, when I harbored a softer, deeper affection for Mike, I went out of my way to make him happy. Even after those feelings subsided into the quiet dust of time, I continued to perform acts of extraordinary kindness, expecting nothing in return, yet foolishly believing that generosity leaves an indelible mark upon the conscience of the receiver.
It does not. Mike now invokes the cosmos—the profound, unbridgeable distance between a Gemini and a Virgo—as the ultimate explanation for our rupture. It is the final, cowardly refuge of a man who cannot face his own moral accounting: to blame the alignment of the stars for a simple failure of character. I will not argue with the heavens. I will leave the burden of this ending precisely where it belongs—entirely upon him.