My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  Jerry signed the produce order form, and Michael wiggled his hand truck out from under the boxes and rolled it away.

  A WEATHER MAP of Sunshine Market would show considerable variety. In the big walk-in dairy refrigerator, which is called “the dairy box,” the temperature is thirty-eight degrees. In the produce box, it is about forty and slightly damp. In the frozen box, in the basement, where the frozen food is stored, it is below zero and breezy. In the meat box, it is thirty-seven degrees. In the cutting room, where the butchers and wrappers work, it is exactly the temperature you would like it to be if you were going to a college football game in the Midwest and were wearing a sweater, corduroy pants, a muffler, mittens, and a hat. To the meat crew it feels absolutely normal. In fact, most of them can no longer stand ordinary room temperature; within a few minutes, they break into a sweat.

  The butchers at Sunshine Market are Bill Getty, Richard Schindler, and Alfonce Spicciatie. Mariana Rivera is the meat wrapper. Bill, Alfonce, and Mariana started working at the store the day it opened; Richard joined them a few months later. The four of them have been working cheek by jowl in the cutting room, which measures twenty feet by forty, for a decade—a fact that, when I pointed it out to them, evoked this response from Richard: “I guess that’s true. Hey, whaddya know?”

  Lack of sentimentality may actually be an advantage when you’re spending eight hours a day around carcasses. Once, Bill, who is the meat manager, was telling me what I thought was going to be a sweet story about a little old lady who approached him one Thanksgiving for advice on cooking her bird. His summation: “I said to her, ‘Hey, lady, you’re seventy-two bleeping years old. I’m sure this isn’t your first turkey.’ ”

  The beef at Sunshine Market is from Iowa. The chicken is from Maryland. The pork, according to Bill, is from wherever you can find a dead pig. Richard is from Ozone Park, Queens. Alfonce is from Brooklyn. Bill is from Astoria. Mariana is from Ecuador. All of them came to their positions by the ordinary route—that is, they learned meat cutting right out of high school, because it was a good, solid trade—except for Mariana, who had been a housewife and a mother until one day when she was out shopping and someone at her butcher shop offered her a job. Mariana is trim and has a high-fashion rooster-style haircut and a taste for snug jeans and tiny, fragile-looking spiky-heeled shoes. At work, she is always dressed as if she could be ready to go to a disco at a moment’s notice. She told me once about how she got started: “When the butcher said this to me about a job, I said, ‘What, me work?’ He said, ‘Yes, you.’ I said, ‘Me? You’re kidding.’ It was really just an accident.” It was a pretty major accident: She has now been a meat wrapper for nineteen years. “I didn’t want any job. It was all just an accident,” she said again. As she was talking, she was flipping a plastic-foam platter of gooey pink veal cutlets onto the wrapping machine, pulling plastic wrap around it, and then pressing the package onto a flat plate at the front of the machine, which melts the wrap shut. The plate was the warmest thing in the room. She flipped another foam package onto the warm plate and said, “Then I joined the union, and now I’m in it for good.”

  The meat people spend most of their time in the cutting room, which is in the left rear corner of the store. On occasion, they will step out to take care of some meat-related or personal concern, and when they do they rarely bother to take off their cutting coats, which are calf-length white smocks that snap up the front and are splattered and smeared with blood. Bill attended the store’s anniversary party in his bloodied coat. He is a big, tall man with considerable presence. In every snapshot taken at the party, Bill and his bloody coat loom. In some of the pictures, it almost looks as if a homicidal maniac had dropped in for cake and ice cream.

  The meat people are separated from the rest of the market by their body temperatures, by their union (Amalgamated Meat Cutters), and by a swinging door leading into the cutting room. The door has a small oblong window. The butchers can look out on the market as they work, but the window’s shape and size and glassiness make the store look as if it were a show on television. Describing what they see going on in the store, the butchers sound as if they were discussing a sitcom. One day, they watched a shoplifter load five pounds of shrimp into a plastic bag and then vanish. “In my life, I never saw a person pick through shrimp in a more meticulous way,” Richard says. The next day, the man came back four or five times, neatly palming packages of boneless shell steak on each visit. The butchers marveled at his switch from surf to turf. Then they passed along their observations to Angel, who chased the guy out and lost him on the avenue but found the shell steak stockpiled in the Dumpster behind the store. The shrimp were never recovered.

  ONE THURSDAY MORNING, Stephen C. Costa, who is the district sales manager of the Best Foods Baking Group, which is a unit of Best Foods, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of CPC International, which is a multinational grocery products corporation, had a new chocolate-chip toaster cake he wanted to bring to Herb Spitzer’s attention. Thursday morning is salesmen’s time at Sunshine Market. It used to be almost a ritual: On Thursday, the salesmen would stack up outside Herb’s office door, shuffling brochures and presentation folders praising New Liquid Tide, or Cycle Lite dog food with real chicken, or Redpack canned tomatoes, and he would usher each man in and sit through the pitch. When Herb was younger, he got a kick out of Thursday mornings, but ever since he turned sixty he has had a greedy feeling about time. More often than not these days, Herb has Toney tell the salesmen to send in their material and he will call them back if he’s interested. “I could spend my life up here with the salesmen, if I let them,” he says. “And who needs it?”

  Stephen Costa, therefore, had got lucky, and he knew it. He is youngish, curly haired, bespectacled, beefy, and on the shy side when it comes to salesmanship. His district is Queens, and he oversees fourteen delivery routes. All told, each week he peddles forty-five thousand pounds of Thomas’ products—including Thomas’ English muffins and Toast ’R Cakes and Sahara pita breads. Forty-five thousand pounds sounds like a lot of dough to me, but Stephen Costa would like to sell more.

  Herb tapped his pencil on a pad of paper and said, “Okay, tell me about it. You’re a pretty good guy, I’ve heard.”

  Costa said, “You can discount the chocolate-chip toaster cakes if you want.” He swung his chair around. Shoulder to shoulder, he and Herb faced the little window that affords a view of the whole store. The lines at the register were three deep. Someone had just broken a ketchup bottle in Aisle 4.

  “We’ll go regular price. Next.”

  “Next, uh,” Costa said, stumbling. “Okay, next, uh, the following week we have Toast ’R Cakes on sale. The regular retail is one twenty-nine.”

  Herb said, “Fine. We’ll come out at ninety-nine, and we’ll do an ad in our circular. Arrange for your route man to get it. Next?”

  “We have a two-week window on Sahara pita breads again. White and wheat. We’d like it in the circular also.”

  “We’re a small little operation here,” Herb said. “We can’t do a circular every single time. Is that it? You don’t have much ammunition for your presentation here, do you?”

  “I’m kind of new. Let’s see, I do want to talk to you about another English muffin. The Thomas’ twin-pack.”

  “What can you do for me?”

  “Twenty cents off, plus another dime if you do a coupon. I’m not able to offer much more. I’m the new kid on the block.”

  “I’d like to go at one ninety-nine, but if your price is one ninety-seven and a half, I’ll have to go at two oh-nine. At the lower price, you can have a dump display and move a lot of product.”

  The intercom rang, and while Herb was answering it, Costa flipped through his papers for another muffin to flog. The call was from Toney, telling Herb that another sales representative was downstairs and eager to meet with him. “Tell him he’d be wasting his time,” Herb said into the phone.

  There was a knock on the door, and someone cal
led out, “Herb, it’s Ronnie from Pepsi. Key Food is going ninety-nine on liters.”

  “Then so will I. Have your guy mark them.”

  He didn’t bother opening the door. The transaction was completed through drywall.

  Costa signed his paperwork on the muffins and stood up to leave. Herb glanced at him and said, “Nice job.”

  Herb’s office is a narrow second-floor wedge in the back of the store, above the trash compactor and the dairy and produce boxes. The wall separating it from the trash compactor isn’t totally sealed, so the loud growl and crunch of the compactor is as audible as if it were in the office. The compactor runs, on and off, all day long. Conversations in the office that begin in a normal speaking tone often shift into a shout at some point. “Nice job” was a shout.

  As Costa was going down the stairs, a man named Don Vitale was coming up. Don Vitale is the Mazola man. He is also the Skippy man and the Hellmann’s man. He and Costa don’t know each other, but, as it happens, both of them work for CPC International, which owns Mazola as well as Thomas’.

  Vitale is a strapping fellow, and he was wearing a loose raincoat. He and his coat seemed to take up most of the office. The coat was brushing along the top of the desk. His head was brushing the ceiling. Taking his files out of his briefcase, he knocked a chair backward. As he picked up the chair, he said, “Herb, we’ve got a Mazola promotion to the Hispanic market. We’ve got these ballot boxes, and you put them with an aisle display, and we’re giving away bicycles and twenty-five-dollar grocery coupons and whatever. It’s a tie-in with the Spanish television show that Mazola helps sponsor, called Sábado Gigante.”

  “This thing was dreadful last time you did it,” Herb said, and he began riffling through papers on his desk.

  Vitale said, “The show is a huge hit, Herb. The girls on the show are models, or whatever, and they’re incredibly popular. They’re cute girls.” He paused and looked at Herb for a reaction.

  Herb had turned slightly away from him and was scanning some paperwork on his desk. He once told me that he was now quite inured to being pitched, even by someone of Vitale’s gusto. “At this point, I know exactly what I want for the store,” Herb had explained to me. “Someone else isn’t likely to present me with something I haven’t already decided I want. I’ve been in this business long enough that I know my style.”

  Vitale tried again, adding, “Herb, the girls are appearing at some of the stores in combination with the promotion.”

  “I used to do this sort of thing more often,” Herb said, mostly to himself. “We used to give away samples of new products and so forth. Maybe we should start it again, although I’m inclined to think that good service matters to people more than this sort of hoopla.”

  Vitale said, “Herb, this has been a major success in other places. The girls were just in a store on Roosevelt, and it was a mob scene.”

  Without looking up, Herb said, “That’s why you’ll never see them here.”

  AT THE END OF THE DAY, you close down a supermarket by first putting the more tender vegetables in the cooler and the money in the safe. At Sunshine Market, at the end of every day, the afternoon cashiers—mostly high school girls from Jackson Heights who are saving for college or for a solid start in life—go around the store and collect the abandoned things and put them back where they are supposed to be. Then they go up and down each aisle and tidy up all the merchandise. Bruce Reed told me that in grocery language this is known as “leveling the shelves” or “touching the shelves.” If you take the time to do this, then every morning, when the store opens, it looks fresh and full and ready for business, brimming with everything anyone might need, instead of looking like a place where hundreds of people had been racing through all day, pulling things off the shelves and carrying them away faster than they could be replaced.

  One Sunday I spent at the store had been a big shopping day, so the shelves were particularly empty and somewhat disordered. There was a Reynolds Wrap and a four-pack of Charmin in the magazine rack, some Scooter Pies in the Ding Dongs, a Cadbury chocolate bar on top of the Schaefer beer display, a five-pound bag of Heckers All Purpose Flour on the Maxwell House shelf, a can of Carnation Leche Evaporada with the Sanka, and a can of Krasdale Fancy Small Whole Beets in with the Calimyrna figs. A basket with Downy fabric softener, two cucumbers, a head of lettuce, and a roll of ScotTowels was abandoned on the Pepsi display: Maybe someone had left his wallet in his other pair of pants. A box of Duncan Hines Devil’s Food Cake Mix, a half pint of whipping cream, and a package of Joseph Woo’s slivered almonds had been abandoned in the canned tomatoes: maybe the sudden onset of a diet or the decision to hold off baking for a cooler day. It took the girls a good half hour just to round up the stray groceries. I watched them put those things back where they belonged and then start touching each shelf in each aisle. By the time I headed out the door that night, they had just begun touching Aisle 3.

  The Lady and the Tigers

  On January 27, 1999, a tiger went walking through the township of Jackson, New Jersey. According to the Tiger Information Center, a tiger’s natural requirements are “some form of dense vegetative cover, sufficient large ungulate prey, and access to water.” By those measures, Jackson is really not a bad place to be a tiger. The town is halfway between Manhattan and Philadelphia, in a corner of Ocean County—an easy commute to Trenton and Newark, but still a green respite from the silvery sweep of electric towers and petroleum tanks to the north, and the bricked-in cities and mills farther south. Only forty-three thousand people live in Jackson, but it is a huge town, a bit more than a hundred square miles, all of it as flat as a tabletop and splattered with ponds and little lakes. A lot of Jackson is built up with subdivisions and Wawa food markets, or soon will be, but the rest is still primordial New Jersey pinelands of broom sedge and pitch pine and sheep laurel and peewee white oaks, as dense a vegetative cover as you could find anywhere. The local ungulates may not be up to what a tiger would find in more typical habitats like Siberia or Madhya Pradesh—there are just the usual ornery and overfed pet ponies, panhandling herds of white-tailed deer, and a milk cow or two—unless you include Jackson’s Six Flags Wild Safari, which is stocked with zebras and giraffes and antelopes and gazelles and the beloved but inedible animal characters from Looney Tunes.

  Nevertheless, the Jackson tiger wasn’t long for this world. A local woman preparing lunch saw him out her kitchen window, announced the sighting to her husband, and then called the police. The tiger slipped into the woods. At around five that afternoon, a workman at the Dawson Corporation complained about a tiger in the company parking lot. By seven, the tiger had circled the nearby houses. When he later returned to the Dawson property, he was being followed by the Jackson police, wildlife officials, and an airplane with an infrared scope. He picked his way through a few more backyards and the scrubby fields near Interstate 195, and then, unfazed by tranquilizer darts fired at him by a veterinarian, headed in the general direction of a middle school; one witness described seeing an “orange blur.” At around nine that night, the tiger was shot dead by a wildlife official, after the authorities had given up on capturing him alive. A pathologist determined that he was a young Bengal tiger, nine feet long and more than four hundred pounds. Nothing on the tiger indicated where it had come from, however, and there were no callers to the Jackson police reporting a tiger that had left home. Everyone in town knew that there were tigers in Jackson—that is, everyone knew about the fifteen tigers at Six Flags Wild Safari. But not everyone knew that there were other tigers in Jackson, as many as two dozen of them, belonging to a woman named Joan Byron-Marasek. In fact, Jackson has one of the highest concentrations of tigers per square mile of anywhere in the world.

  BYRON-MARASEK is famously and purposely mysterious. She rarely leaves the compound where she lives with her tigers; her husband, Jan Marasek; and scores of dogs, except to go to court. On videotapes made of her by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, she looks pet
ite and unnaturally blond, with a snub nose and a small mouth and a startled expression. She is either an oldish-looking young person or a youngish-looking old person; evidently, she has no Social Security number, which makes her actual age difficult to establish. She has testified that she was born in 1955 and was enrolled in New York University in 1968; when it was once pointed out that this would have made her a thirteen-year-old college freshman, she allowed as how she wasn’t very good with dates. She worked for a while as an actress and was rumored to have appeared on Broadway in Tom Stoppard’s play Jumpers, swinging naked from a chandelier. A brochure for her tiger preserve shows her wearing silver boots and holding a long whip and feeding one of her tigers, Jaipur, from a baby bottle. On an application for a wildlife permit, Byron-Marasek stated that she had been an assistant tiger trainer and a trapeze artist with Ringling Brothers and L. N. Fleckles; had trained with Doc Henderson, the illustrious circus veterinarian; and had read, among other books, The Manchurian Tiger, The World of the Tiger, Wild Beasts and Their Ways, My Wild Life, They Never Talk Back, and Thank You, I Prefer Lions.

  The Maraseks moved to Jackson in 1976, with Bombay, Chinta, Iman, Jaipur, and Maya, the five tigers they had gotten from an animal trainer named David McMillan. They bought land in a featureless and barely populated part of town near Holmeson’s Corner, where Monmouth Road and Millstone Road intersect. It was a good place to raise tigers. There was not much nearby except for a church and a few houses. One neighbor was a Russian Orthodox priest who ran a Christmas-tree farm next to his house; another lived in a gloomy bungalow with a rotting cabin cruiser on cement blocks in the front yard.

  For a long time, there were no restrictions in New Jersey on owning wildlife. But beginning in 1971, after regular reports of monkey bites and tiger maulings, exotic-animal owners had to register with the state. Dangerous exotic animals were permitted only if it could be shown that they were needed for education or performance or research. Byron-Marasek held both the necessary New Jersey permit and an exhibitor’s license from the United States Department of Agriculture, which supervises animal welfare nationally.