Part 1f. PECTOPAH
If there's anything I've never been accused of it's not not being not able to start with one thing, distract the story in the middle, and then have it wind back to the beginning without someone noticing it was gone in the first place. This may be because I'm good at it, though it may also be because people zone out and stop listening when I get misdirected instead.
That made sense. You can read it again if you like, it's not going to advance the storyline however. In fact this entire section is an aside. Though not irrelevant.
Wo hop sat halfway under Mott street in Chinatown since the beginning of time, until shortly after Herman and I got ourselves down from Albany and into the building on Ocean Parkway. Wo Hop then found itself moved into a space in the basement previously occupied by a Russian grocery, moved back to Ukraine after the power of the Benevolent Committee reached past the eastern borders of old Europe.
I say the previous establishment was a Russian grocery even though it wasn't. For our purposes I guess I'll call it a deli even though it was barely one of those either. It was mostly just a crapped out storage space with a front room fitted with a counter and booths from somewhere else.
Herman and I went down there at the end of moving day for dinner.
A pale blue enameled metal and glass meat case with missing chrome along the bottom extended down one side of the room with barely anything in it. A piece of dried up brisket covered with congealed orange fat wrapped in plastic, some sort of cold fish dumplings in old celery water on a metal service tray, a small stack of onion rolls and a half empty jar of generic borscht.
Behind the meat case there was a man. He was wearing a paper hat and a pair of red rubber gloves. On the wall behind him was a wooden shelf. On the shelf was a box of old crackers and a can with a morose cow on it, and some sort of pickled meat in a jar.
The rest of the room was divided by a repurposed waist high wall, mounted in warped panelling, and missing bits of amber textured translucent plastic where the windows used to go.
On the other side of the divider, 1960's cracked and faded cloud pattern Formica tables with mismatched wood chairs serviced the gray ripple-red floor which stretched across the room and terminated an inch out from the stain colored walls. A short hallway led down to a large half working bathroom with a trough style communal urinal. There was a line in front of the door. Only one person at a time wanted to use it. Not a successful plan, the communal urinal model.
Herman and I went over to the seating area and found a booth. A young girl in an apron put a disposable foil ashtray on our table without acknowledging our presence and walked away.
There were a few people at the scattered tables, some of them in normal shirts, and some wearing dirty suit vests or sweaters. The men smoked cigarettes through pinched cardboard filters. Most of them were drinking tea from styrofoam cups and eating some sort of gray meat off fiber spun pale yellow cafeteria trays. You know the kind.
Herman was having tea and dunking the bag in it. "This place isn't going to be ok for me. The way it is now I mean." I agreed and walked over to the counter. I looked into the sparse case. It was almost as if the they were intentionally effecting a parody of the 1980's western impression of a Soviet grocery without the supposed toilet paper lines.
Some people may wonder how a place can stay in business with barely anything to sell all of the time. The answer is because as long as an establishment has patrons, it fills the need in order to exist.
After the collapse, and the committee created the benevolent establishments which catered to the various needs of citizens, places like this no longer needed to worry about profit or sales.
As long as there were people who needed an establishment to exist, that establishment would continue to be subsidized by the allocation of resources based on the number of citizens using the place, regardless of if they actually generated an income or not.
In this case it was the old Russian guys with their cardboard filter tip cigarettes and wives in hairnets with house coats eating the boiled meat from trays who were the benefactors of this establishment.
The man wearing a paper hat looked at me. "We don't have anything." he was scraping the orange grease off the piece of congealed brisket. I looked at the onion rolls. "I think I'll just have an onion roll with butter." he put the spoon down next to the brisket and wiped his hand on his pants. "That we have, just not sandwiches."
"That's fine, just toasted please." I looked back at the booth. Herman was stirring his tea and leafing through a Russian news magazine with faded photos of offices and objects on stands draped with goldenrod tablecloths. There were also captions. In Russian.
When I look at a magazine that's in a language I don't understand, I find myself involuntarily hoping the pictures will have some sort of narrative instead as if put there to supplement and replace the written content.
But they don't usually have that because magazines aren't written for people who don't understand the language they're printed in. And so there's no reference and the photos have no context.
The man in the paper hat asked me if I wanted butter or meat. I said butter and he put it on my roll. I went back to the booth.
Herman was reading one of the pages. "This man won an award. They gave him a crest to hang on his wall." He pointed to a picture of a man wearing a tight knit sweater vest with violently clashing patterns and a gray suit jacket with matching pants. He was standing in front of a wall with an enameled half ivy crown shaped object surrounded by photos in various types of frames. He stared vacantly past the camera at the person behind it.
I cut the roll in half and handed it to Herman. "That's pretty boring bub."
Herman took the roll without looking up. "It says here the award was for some sort of public art project. Either a fountain or a toilet park..." Herman laughed and looked at me. "Probably a fountain..." He laughed again. "Toilet park, I'd like to see that."
Yes. Herman was multilingual.
I enjoy remembering and telling you about the part of time from before Herman became a paranoiac shut-in who, even in a world he created himself, needed constant care to make it through.