Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

That’s true, you would’ve.” I had three crates stacked now, lifted them up, told Larry to put the fourth and last crate on top of the three I held, and started for the door.

“Where you going with those?” Finerman said. “Now, put them down and explain to me, Kev.”

I would have, the situation was getting too unsettling and scary for me now, but everything had been arranged, which I had agreed to, and I’d feel even worse and more stupid having had all those television men come out here and set up their equipment for nothing. “I’ve got to put these berries away, under manager’s orders,” I said.

Then you’re going the wrong way, if that is what you’re doing,” Finerman said. “Storeroom’s in back. Kevin?

Now, you come back here this instant, Kevin.”

I was walking through the door. Finerman, as I’d thought, didn’t try to stop me physically, though by now he must have known what was happening. Larry, Mary Sarah and all the delivery boys followed me outside, mumbling to one another that something fantastic was about to happen.

“Okay, fellas,” Paul Dougherty said, and the cameras began shooting film of me. Paul Dougherty was reporting off camera that I was leaving the market to demonstrate my solidarity with the pickers’ movement for higher wages and better living and working conditions. Behind me, Mary Sarah said “Now I get it; now I understand,” and Larry said “Oh, Jesus, and I was the one who put the last crate in his hands. You think I’ll be fired?”

I looked around for Blackspot, but there was a whole slew of ordinary-looking pedestrians grinning and smiling as I almost never saw them do on the street. I walked to the curb, set down the crates, lifted the top crate and was about to turn it over into the street, when one of the three boys standing beside me and hamming it up for the cameras said “As long as you’re going to throw those away, can we have some?” I said no, though I honestly didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t planned for anyone to bring up what I could see was a perfectly legitimate request, and when he said They’re just going to go to waste, anyhow,” I told him “All right, but only one basket apiece, understand?”

They took a basket each from one of the crates on the sidewalk and then it seemed that everyone in the crowd other than my coworkers and the television people and one unhappy, ungrinning, very ordinary-looking man except for a purple birthmark the size of a glass coaster in the middle of his forehead began grabbing baskets of berries out of the crates and carefully sticking them into their shopping bags or just eating handfuls of berries right on the street, as the three boys were doing. The crowd emptied the three crates in less than a minute and were grasping for the berries in the crate I was holding away from their reach, when I threw that crate to the ground and quickly stepped on and smashed the berries rolling every which way and then almost everyone in the crowd joined in stepping on the berries with me.

“We’re pressing wine,” someone said. “Down with the illegal growers,” Blackspot shouted at the cameras.

“Up with the C & L fruit men,” a woman said, and that was the cheer the crowd liked best. “Up with the C & L fruit men,” people shouted. They give away free berries for nothing.”

The cameras picked up on all this. Paul Dougherty was reporting the story as if a last-ditch game-winning touchdown had just been scored. It was almost a surprise to me not to be hoisted to someone’s shoulders and paraded around and hip-hip-hoorayed to.

Later, Jennie and I sat down for the evening news.

I’d told her something special was going to be on that we should watch, as I hadn’t mentioned what had happened at work today. She said she better see how the chicken was doing in the oven, but I said “Sit tight, just for a second.”

There were a lot of reports about Vietnam and Africa and the UN and our country’s gold crisis and the city’s impending school crisis and then the store I was in. “Oh, gosh, I can’t believe it; you were right,” Jennie said. I told her to can it, I couldn’t hear. Off-camera, Paul Dougherty, while the screen showed me leaving the store, was telling a different story from the one he’d begun to recite when the incident actually took place. Now he said that what had started out to be one individual’s protest against the major city supermarkets’ nonadherence to the ras-, black-and loganberry boycott turned into a major neighborhood fun-in. “Kevin Wimer was the principal figure in the demonstration. But the neighborhood, a polyglot of race, creed and culture, wouldn’t let Mr. Wimer have his protest without them eating it, too.” The television showed the loud frantic activity of people stealing the baskets and popping berries into their mouths for the benefit of the cameras, and Paul Dougherty said it was like a “modern-dress Cecil B. De Mille-presents scene of Bacchanalian Rome.” The last shot showed me walking back to the market with the empty crates and Paul Dougherty, in the foreground, and for the first time on camera, saying “So what began as a plucky individual’s protest against a segment of the giant corporate structure ended up as the best gesture of neighborhood goodwill and all the free publicity that accompanies it that a supermarket chain could hope to get. I guess you can say ‘Berry sweet is revenge.’”

“What’d he mean with that last remark?” Jennie said.

“I don’t know; too highbrow for me. Maybe that my stunt backfired.”

“Did they can you?”

The manager said he’d speak to upper management about it. Meanwhile, because they’re short of help in the produce section, I should stay on. But there are always other jobs.”

“We got bills, you know, a baby coming on, and chicken costs money, especially if you don’t get it at twenty-percent off.” She went to the kitchen, yelled out “You’re a fool and a showoff, Kevin Wimer,” and, a little later, that dinner would be ready in five minutes.

Blackspot called. “You weren’t at first forceful enough with those three kids, but thanks, anyway. Nobody won or lost, but it at least drew some much-needed nonviolent attention to the movement. I was wondering if you’d join our picket line tomorrow against a pro-grower Food-O-Rama on a Hundred and Sixty-eighth. We need marchers badly.”

“I’m still working,” I said. “But because of my general all-around foul-up today and sympathy for the movement, I’d like to give a few dollars to the pickers. Where do I send it to?”

“We’re having a full-page ad in all the city’s newspapers on Sunday. It’ll mention just that matter and also the address of national headquarters where the donations should go.”

The phone rang a minute later. “Let it ring,” Jennie said. “Even pull out the jack, since there’ll be no end to those calls,” but I left the table and answered it. It was Nelson’s wife, Rita. She said she hadn’t seen the story on television herself, but a couple of her friends called to tell her that one of Nelson’s coworkers had come on television to say that not only did Nelson deserve to get burned but the whole city should be torched if the mayor and city council and all the supermarkets and their customers don’t support the berry boycott. I told her that wasn’t true about one of Nelson’s coworkers and wondered what news program her friends could have been watching. “It certainly wasn’t the one my wife and I saw, and the other station covering it filmed the same scene.” Then I asked how Nelson was and she said “Oh, fine, absolutely fine. How else would he be with half his body charred to shreds and all the pain that goes with it, which no amount of drugs seems to help.”

“But is he improving any? I mean, Nelson and I were friends at work, so I’m interested. Everybody at the market’s concerned, customers too.”