James Hynes - Next

But it’s not just the snobbery that gets to him. He grew up with snobbery, he spent his teens hanging out at Somerset Mall and making time with rich, smart-mouthed Jewish girls from Franklin or Huntington Woods, or even richer Kingswood School girls, spooky-intense WASP princesses from Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe, and by age sixteen he was used to being cut dead for his store-brand jeans or his haircut or his shitty Pinto. Hell, he wasn’t just used to it — he wore their condescension like a badge, he thought it was funny. (And it’s even funnier in retrospect, because in the years since, he has gone to work in academia, which means that on a daily basis he’s condescended to by experts. ) It’s just that once upon a time, Ann Arbor was different, Ann Arbor was above all that suburban class-warfare bullshit. Okay, maybe it never was, not really, maybe it’s the soft-focus blur of mid-life nostalgia, maybe he’s been soaking for too long in Ann Arbor’s marinade of pretension and infinite self-regard — but he remembers his college days and a few years after as a time of great leveling, when even the mouthy daughters of Southfield furriers and the guilty-rich daughters of GM executives found the lanky son of a middle manager from Royal Oak exotic; when everybody he knew voted for the Rainbow People’s Party candidate for mayor, a sexy manager from Borders; when the owner of Big Star Records used to hold parties in the basement of his house in Burns Park and supply the weed himself; when the term “politically correct” was a joke that lefties told on themselves. Sure we were smug, thinks Kevin, sure we were superior, but I was part of something then, I belonged in Ann Arbor in a way that I never belonged at Somerset Mall or in Bloomfield Hills or even Royal Oak for that matter. I was one of them.

Of course, even if you were one of them, Ann Arbor’s righteousness could be a pain in the ass. Kevin can still hear the humorless whine of some grim little rich girl whose painter’s pants he tried to get into one summer evening, the painter’s pants that she wore just tight enough to make her unattainable ass perfectly round. They were toking up on the battered couch on the porch of her communal house on Greenwood Street, and she told him that the personal is political, that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, that she’s sure he’s a nice guy and all, but has he read Shulamith Firestone on love? (He had, and it depressed him for a month, not because he believed a word of it, but because every girl he had a crush on did.) And besides, she continued, sadistically pressing herself closer to him on the ancient sofa, she was thinking maybe it was time for her take a woman for a lover.

“I’m just not that into penetration anymore,” she said, calibrating to the fucking millimeter exactly what effect that kind of talk has on a guy. But Kevin knew the drill, he knew the speech by heart by now, so he said, “I hear you. That’s cool.” And they each took another hit off the joint, thigh to thigh on the swaybacked couch during the long midwestern twilight, the girl weighing her lust against her ideological purity, and Kevin wondering — as the weed tugged at his dick with little silk strings — what would happen if he put his hand on her breast.

Without realizing it, he’s already floated through the doors of the Gaia Market in Austin as if on a little cannabis cloud, as if he’s tapped into some long dormant reserve of THC stored deep in his body fat. Frosty air smelling of produce curls around him like a big mitt, reeling him in, chilling the sweat all over his body, and he glides past three more iterations of the sign: LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP, LOVE WHERE YOU SHOP. The repetition is intended to plant the slogan deep in his medulla oblongata, making it instinctive like fear or hunger, while at the same time rendering it functionally meaningless to his conscious mind, like saying “cat” over and over again. That’s exactly what bothers him the most, in fact, and he wants to dig his heels in, but his feet aren’t even touching the ground, he’s floating up the escalator now under the big posterboard banners that proclaim Gaia’s brand identity with Newspeak directness: ORGANIC, PURE FOOD, QUALITY, WELLNESS. At the top Joy Luck is talking to one of Gaia’s whole-food jihadists, an überfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and a wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap. Maybe it’s Ian, about to have his ass handed to him, and Kevin thinks, you tell him, sister, because when you’re done, I want a piece of him, too. Kevin wants to dig his fingers into that smug green T-shirt and rock that grinning, gentle, clueless boy back on his heels and tell him what the problem is with Gaia: that they’ve taken everything that was both special and obnoxious about the Ann Arbor Kevin used to love — the food, the politics, and the attitude — and they’ve packaged it, art-directed it, and marketed it to Kevin at three times the price he used to pay at the Packard Food Co-op. It’s just like Wal-Mart crushing small-town pharmacies and hardware stores, only it’s worse, because the stores that Gaia is exterminating weren’t like the mom-and-pop grocery stores that never knew what hit them, no, Gaia’s victims actually had a political analysis of consumer culture, and now here’s this national, centralized, corporate simulacrum of everything co-opers held dear and it’s successfully wooing away the co-op’s clientele on the same principle as Office Max or Home Depot. And because the brainy Chomsky readers who run the co-ops have a political analysis, they know exactly what’s happening to them: it’s the last reenactment of the Battle of Bertrand Russell — first time as farce, second time as tragedy — as the gentle vegans and pacifists who thought they could wear down corporate hegemony like water on a rock find instead that corporate hegemony has opened wide and is eating them alive, and they get to watch their own death, kicking and screaming like Robert Shaw in Jaws.

Whoa, thinks Kevin, who am I kidding? Who the hell do I think I am? Let’s be honest here, he reminds himself, I was just another suburban counterculture dilettante. Doing blow at the Rubiyat and going to nuclear freeze rallies to meet girls didn’t exactly make him Walter Benjamin. Because it’s not like he was ever actually a member of the Food Co-op, basically he only ever shopped there to get close to the girl in the painter’s pants, who stood out mainly by virtue of being surrounded by squat lesbians in overalls. With a knowing, karmic nudge, Gaia’s escalator deposits him abruptly at the top and he nearly stumbles to his knees. Luckily Joy Luck’s looking the other way, as she and the Gaian gesture in the same direction. Kevin turns his back and shrugs on his jacket again, glancing back at them. So this isn’t Ian, she obviously doesn’t know the guy, she’s just asking for directions. Kevin hangs back a bit, pretending to read the label of a bottle of wine as he watches Joy Luck stride away in the mellow light up the wide aisle behind the checkout lanes, past giant stacks of organic popcorn and pesticide-free apple juice and jars of chipotle ketchup.

“Are you a fan of Chilean wine?”

“Sorry?”

“That’s a really nice Merlot.” It’s the kid Joy Luck was just talking to. “From Curicó province?”

But Kevin’s not even looking at the bottle in his hands, but gazing dumbstruck across the vast interior of Gaia Market, from the high ceiling like a forest canopy where every conduit and AC duct is painted the same sylvan green, to the woody labyrinth of custom shelving below. In between are bright constellations of track lights as far as he can see, which makes the store look like a lavish modernist set for the fairy wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a faux forest full of mysterious, twinkling lights, and beautiful and slightly alien creatures. (Almost an English major, was Kevin.) And music — not pan pipes, exactly, but something light and airy and subtly engineered to appeal to the better instincts of the boomer clientele. It’s the high, elven voice of Joni Mitchell, the Canadian Galadriel, singing in harmony with herself, “Hellllp me, I think I’m falling… in love with you…”