My meetings at the show are much briefer than for salespeople. So I head down to the cheap seats of Fancy Food, the basement. This is where the least desirable locations are, and for the most part it’s dead. One sign by a booth says “No investment just earn money!” A little farther an aisle is blocked off where someone vomited. Past there is a stage where free headshots are given away.
Last Aisles, Last Call
The last aisle downstairs has old style salespeople barking out “Wadda we got?”, “Throw’in down some shade!” and “You’ve had the rest now try the best!”. The level of energy here has a rehearsed quality. But it is already 1 pm on the last day of the show. People are quietly packing up their booths. All the important buyers have left and most of the Italian pavilion is already gone. Everyone just wants to go home.
The very first sales call I ever made in the food business was to Greg when he was running the cheese department for Eli Zabar. If there is royalty in NYC then the Zabars family would be it.
Talking the escalator back upstairs, this is where the ugly part of the expo emerges. Exhibitors are tired, but now we’ve got to break down the booths. The back of the building opens up. An invisible ocean of humid summer air rolls through the show. Well to do homeless people wander around pleading for free food before the City Harvest charity arrives. One aggressive, plump lady in a red dress, grey hair tied back, proclaims her love of Manchego. Free of course. Matt Kevill is untouched by this masterpiece of cheap theater. No manchego for you!
We finish packing up, and I leave the Javitz Center to head home. Walking towards the PATH train, I try to take notes on what I’m seeing. But how do I describe being a tourist in a foreign land when I am one of the natives? In the last 10 years this island has ceased being the unofficial capital of New York City. Holden Caufield’s place where “everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move…Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you” doesn’t exist anymore.
The wealthy upper East side has fled to Brooklyn. Little Italy has been occupied by no longer little Chinatown. The bottom of the island used to be an ironic cesspool of humanity. It’s subway branches reached to the heaven of midtown with roots firmly planted in hell aka Wall Street. Now the financial district is the new heaven and midtown the old Hell’s Kitchen. The mind reels.
How can I describe a people who are such a mix of everything around them? Each Manhattanite is like a living crowd pressed into one person; a human diamond. 2,000 years ago schizophrenics were possessed by demons. Today it’s someone who channels hipster Brooklyn one day and wealthy Long Island the next. Nothing is good for everyone, but everything is good here. Go from one Asian neighborhood to the next, and things are same same but different.
Most people value going to the beach. But Manhattanites buried them under giant asphalt highways named “FDR” and “Joe DiMaggio”. In most cities downtown roads curve around extinct hills and streams. But while nature abhors a straight line as Camus would say, in this “desert of iron and cement” it’s all you’ll get. Manhattan’s version of the wild is Central Park and in that zoo you are the monkey. Name one other place in the world that tried to kidnap and ransom the entire nation of Canada on no less than SIX occasions (and still has the Obelisk of William Macneven to prove it)?
Now this island is a vacuum. As money gets sucked into Manhattan, cultural identity leaks out to Brooklyn and Queens. Yet it is still a bastion of democracy. Where else can Madison Avenue executives and homeless people ride side by side on the subway?
When I say cultural identity, I’m not talking about the “American” one. While Manhattanites are Legion in personality, they are still the fine malt whiskey of our country. Living ingredients are distilled from all over the world into this intense, concentrated mix of flavors. As recipes go, take thousands of murders in the 1990’s, add the horror of 9/11 in the 2000’s, and brew in some economic 2010’s depression.
Welcome to my ex. A brunette when the sun rises and a blond when it sets, may you shag her harder then she shags you.