There’s a rush of righteous verdicts around an absolutely horrendous idea, concocted by 2 Google-twits, to replace real neighborhood bodegas around the country with automated kiosks filled with limited and generic items.  Its a bad idea from every angle, not least of which is that bodegas are the heart of the neighborhoods they find themselves in, filled with stories like this:

I was living on Grand Street in the Lower East Side of New York City at a time before it became fashionably hip and was still filled with the dark dangers of a city knocked off its center and careening like a broken top.  The bodega around the corner on Eldridge St. was the only light on, the only oasis that served up cuchifritos, beer, mystery meat sandwiches and “loosies” until 11pm.  After dark, the streets were deserted except for the sea of girls that appeared to ply their trade on the corners and the flotilla of New Jersey licence plates that circled them like sharks drunk on chum.  And yeah, the shop had a cat, maybe a few of them.  When its the neighborhood shop, they get to know their customers, their habits and their likes.  Mine was cheap, bad food, ice cream, cigarettes and beer at the time, and they had plenty of all of it: Coke and Twinkies and ice cream sandwiches and Budweiser chilling next to the Colt 45s, and the guys behind the counter could almost have the change ready when I walked in, I was so regular and consistent in what I bought late at night.  Most of the street girls knew I was local and we had a silent agreement that I wasn’t “dating”, so we would glide easily past each other in the aisles, each aware of the other’s presence while looking for a quick sugar or carbo fix before resuming our everyday cadences on the other side of the doorway.

I was trying to quit smoking cigarettes so I decided to go the “loosies” route, hoping that the trouble and time it took me to get dressed, go downstairs and around the corner to buy a single Newport for a dime apiece (they were always Newports and I hated menthols) would be enough to deter me and break the habit.  Consequently, I visited my neighborhood bodega 5 or 6 times a day in my futile quest.

I’m in there one night and there’s two guys, a little tough looking, standing at the counter talking to the owner behind it in a semi-serious tone.  They notice my nod to him, my trip around the aisles looking for nothing in particular and then my approach to the counter.  “I’ll take 2 tonight” and he knocks two Newports out of the bottom of the pack, where, for some reason, he would always rip a hole right through the cellophane and foil instead of opening it at the top.  On my way out, one of two speaks to me.

“Hey, you live around here, right?”  This doesn’t sound good already and I’m on the defense.

“Yeah. So?”  A quick glance to the owner to get my bearings on this and determine my next move. And then the guy pulls his badge from under his shirt, mounted on a leather back and hanging from a chain around his neck.  He’s undercover NYPD and he’s on the job.

“So, we got a guy that’s doing bad stuff around the area, holding up bodegas, messing with the girls, bad stuff.”  I’m stopped cold and thinking things like ‘did I change my underwear’, ‘do my roommates know where I’m at’ and ‘do I even know a lawyer?’

“Yeah.  So?”

“Well, we think we have him, he’s at the station house.  He was robbing a store nearby.  And we have an eyewitness.  We need to put him in a lineup to make sure he’s the guy”.

“Oh, yeah? So?”  Because I’m so articulate when confronted with the possibility of jail time.

“Yeah, well, you kind of fit his description a little, he’s got bushy hair, he’s tall.  So we were wondering, would you be interested in being in on the lineup so we can pin him.  Don’t worry, it ain’t you, we got the guy, but we need to do this for the witness to make it stick.  We’ll give you five bucks”.

Suddenly, its a whole new ballgame and I light up.  I’m an experiential person, I like cop shows on TV, I’ve never been inside the deep end of a police station, all kinds of possibilities are open.  And this cop could be Serpico!  And yeah, five bucks, I’m a broke-ass actor in New York, subway tokens are still only 35 cents and a slice of pizza is a buck twenty-five at Ray’s.  This has some legs.  “Oh yeah? That sounds pretty cool, what do I have to do?”  And before you know it, I’m in the back seat of the unmarked car out front on my way down to the 5th Precinct on Mott Street in Chinatown.

Its all amiable chatter with the cops, my new best friends, and we head upstairs to where the booking rooms are and I’m looking around thinking, “fuck, this is real live Barney-fucking-Miller in here”.  There’s a guy that looks like Abe Vigoda hanging around the water cooler, there’s coffee-stained cups on a table with packets of sugar lost in a white spray of spilled CoffeeMate next to them.  The walls are a dingy sea-foam green, there’s the smell of mustiness hanging from every chair merged with old coffee grounds and cigarette smoke and a sense of languid restlessness on the faces of every cop in the station.  I’m an actor: this is paydirt!

More small talk, I make a joke, one cop chuckles and I’m joined by other “volunteers” who kind of amble in with other cops over a period of 30 minutes and the truth is, we don’t look anything like each other, I mean one guy was short and blond!  But one of these guys is “the guy”, I’m thinking, and there’s a sudden rush of sanity that flows out of my ears for the first time: “what the fuck was I thinking?”  This could end up being some bullshit, New York at that time was a weird place, I have no idea what they could know about me and I have an big audition in 2 days…

When we’re all assembled, we walk into some narrow little room with only enough room for us to sit on small stools like we’re taking a crap (“what, we’re not standing? and where’s the lines on the back wall?”) and for fuck’s sake, I could be sitting next to “the guy” and I don’t see handcuffs on anyone and what the fuck is going on here?  But there’s the glass panel in front of us (with Jerry Orbach or Richard Belzer or Dennis Franz behind it) and we stare dumbly at it like we don’t really know what’s going on, but in the tradition of all lineups, no smiling, please.  And then we get up and leave.

All of us “volunteers” are kind of hanging around, looking around at the walls, trying to stay out of everyone’s way as the rhythm of the station keeps in time as if we weren’t there.  But we all want our five bucks.  We ask some “procedural questions” that we learned on TV much to the annoyance of the real police we’re talking to and its all pretty much boring and listless and we want to go home and we’re afraid we’re going to get stiffed.  But one of the cops comes up with an envelope and hands us either crumpled fives or a handful of ones and a low-moan “thanks” and we’re on our way out to the street.

The next night at the bodega I come in for my fix of two Newports.  The owner’s behind the counter, taps two out of the bottom, takes a quarter, gives me back a nickel, shakes his head and says, “you crazy, man”.

#bodegastories