Gristedes on NYE, Or Hell on Earth

If for some reason I end up in hell when I die, I know exactly what my hell will look like. It won't be all fire and brimstone with a callused, horned Satan stirring a pot of babies' skulls. Nope - my hell is Gristedes grocery store on New Year's Eve - where I'll forever wonder the packed aisles in a permanent case of deja vu.

After returning from Texas for Christmas, we came back to the city, a little reluctantly, but excited to go to a friend's apartment for New Year's Eve. I had signed up to make artichoke dip and a cake and therefore had to subject myself to my local grocery store (Gristedes) on the busiest and most New-Yorkest of all days of the year.

I normally go to Gourmet Garage, but Gourmet Garage doesn't carry regular everyday things like instant pudding mix (needed for the cake) or Triscuits (too low brow, apparently.) So there I was at Gristedes, pushing my cart down an aisle that a person of even the slightest heft wouldn't be able to fit down themselves.

It WAS crowded and the people were nasty (an old lady in a fur coat I think she'd had on since 1967 actually tapped me on the shoulder and declared she was 'going left' to move me out of her way, as if the direction I was going and therefore my shopping list didn't matter. I also witnessed a dapper looking gentleman ask the manager where his collard greens were. When the manager replied in a heavy Chinese dialect that someone 'already bought all them' the gentleman called him the M-to-the-F word and stormed out.)

But best of all was the fact that they had chosen the smack dab of the afternoon on New Year's Eve to restock their entire store. I went to get cream cheese and found the entire dairy section blocked off my men who looked on parole from a variety pack of misdemeanors and felonies. Indeed, I was there for two seconds, frantically searching for that blessed Philadelphia logo, before one of them came charging at me a hundred miles an hour with a stack of boxes up to the ceiling as if I were a hundred point target in a video game.

By the time I found the cream cheese, I grabbed 3 boxes in a panic and darted out of there only to remember I also needed heavy cream and butter. I had to go back 2 more times, literally risking life and limb.

It got better. In the vegetable aisle, a homeless man wearing a new pair of Nikes asked me for money so he could 'buy some meat.'

But the kicker of the entire trip was the fact that they apparently had run out of baking powder, which meant I'd have to visit yet another grocery store on that most dreaded, evil shopping day. 'But the stockists are here!,' I wanted to scream. And how does a grocery store run out of baking powder, anyway?'

These are the questions I'll be asking myself if I am not a good enough person in this life, pushing my cart around and around Gristedes, dodging the convicts and evil old ladies and begging homeless who have newer workout shoes than I do.