Groceries--Late August 1995

There is a grocery store on Ashland just south of Chicago Avenue where we go to buy meat. It’s cheaper than the Jewel at Milwaukee and Division, an important consideration, and less haunted by the faux-hipsters of Wicker Park.

We walk out of the late-August heat through the automatic doors, Lou and JP and I, and into the cool bounty of the aisles.

We have eleven dollars, or—more accurately—eleven “extra” dollars. We need cat food and Kool-Aid and sugar and rice, and bread and some chicken legs if they’re cheap enough. There is nothing left over for niceties—butter or spices or cookies or eggs or milk. Cartons of ice cream are a memory. Fabric softener, hair conditioner, soda in bottles. Pancake syrup. Cheese. Cake mix. Fresh fruit. Cereal. The rows of neat bright packages, cans stacked in ranks and files, all mock us. These things are for other people. We remind ourselves that we are not like other people, people with desires and petty ambitions and brand loyalties. We are loyal only to ourselves, to each other, and to certain corners.

It has been three months, nearly, since the last time we filled up a grocery cart. We had bought so much food back in June, on the day I got my summer paychecks, that we couldn’t carry it home and had to have it delivered. Since that food has been gone, we have lived on fifty-cent treats from the ice-cream truck and two-bit cans of off-brand soda from the vending machine in the yard down the street. We’ve lived off grilled chicken legs and corn from Isaiah’s house and free meals from the soup kitchen at the church on Wolcott. We’velived off bowls of popcorn, peanut-butter-and-butterscotch sandwiches, and a self-developed blend of Kool-Aid flavors we refer to as “the pink shit”. Mostly we’ve lived off little foil packets, spoons and lighters, and fresh syringes. Hunger, at least of the traditional kind, has become incidental.