It was extreme gluttony. I had prattled on about Dinosaur BBQ, this spare ribs joint up in Harlem, and about the amazing value of the food there. Because if there's one thing my immigrant Korean American family appreciates, it's a good cost-benefit analysis.
"You wouldn't believe it. So like, I shared the Sweetheart Dinner for two, and you got a whole rack of ribs, PLUS cornbread, PLUS four sides. Guess how much?" Other families play, oh I don't know, Who Am I? or Guess the License Plate. A favorite pasttime of the P Family is to play "Guess How Much?"
My brother, who likes to thwart whatever hopes I have for building anticipation, declined to play along. "Just tell us how much," he said, before anyone could Guess How Much.
"Twenty-six dollars! AND there were like, 6 ribs left over," I exclaimed.
"Wow, good deal. You can probably feed three people with that," my dad said, whistling.
"Yeah! And, the quality of food was like, really good. And you get to choose between salt potatoes, mac 'n cheese, and..." I gushed on, like a teeny bopper divulging her new crush. "We should all go! It's better than Tony Roma's on Northern Boulevard."
And so we went. The swag platter for four, which involved deviled eggs, buttery chicken wings, fried green tomatoes, and boiled shrimp. I ordered a diet Coke, averting my mother's eyes as I ordered it, lest I be on the receiving end of a death stare from her. (She thinks the reason why Americans are fat is because, among other things, we drink too much soda.) Our plates clean, we ordered the sweetheart dinner for two, to be divided among the four of us. I was kaput after my second rib. My mother--a tiny woman at 5'1/2", polished off at least five. We had to order another half-rack between us.
When the bill came, my brother said, "Well, it's not that cheap for lunch, but it's definitely a cheap dinner." It came out to about 20 bucks per person.
My dad said he'd be sure to bring our relatives from Korea to here, so they could sample American BBQ, and he wouldn't be fitted with a ridiculous bill. "Cheaper than kal-bi!"
After lunch, we went across the street to Fairway, a big supermarket that's known for its cheap prices and fair quality--hence the name. Naturally, they being the competition (they had just opened a store in a former warehouse neighborhood in Brooklyn), we had to check it out. As we walked across the parking lot, trying to find the entrance, the parking attendant/security guard dude at the front walked over to us and started yelling.
"Hey, what you doing?" He had a thick, Caribbean accent of sorts.
"What?" My dad responded. "What it look like I'm doing?"
"Where you tink you're going?" The man continued to yell. I got so incensed--the thought of someone yelling at my parents, at my dad made me so freakin angry.
"Listen. We just trying to find entrance." My dad's eyes narrowed.
"I started yelling at you when you came in, but you just keep walking." The man crossed his arms over his chest.
"You gonna tell us where the entrance is or not?" My father demanded.
"Why you keep walking when I say to stop?"
"Because nobody heard you!" my brother said.
"What the hell is your problem? How dare you yell at customers? Is that how you run this place?" I said. I have no tolerance for bad service. Having been raised in an environment where the customer is always right--no matter what--and having to smile and take it, and bend over backwards to someone who's been yelling their head off about you because the yogurt they forgot to put in the fridge went bad overnight, and they want their money back... you learn to swallow your pride on the job. But when I'm the one being, if you will, served, and I'm the customer, then you better damn well expect that I will not take getting yelled at.
"He saw me." The man pointed at my dad.
"Nobody saw you!" my mother said.
It was a whole family act--all of us were joined in yelling at the parking guy. You can't say we're a passive family. Again, as much as we sit there, grinning and bearing it, nodding our heads to say sorry when we're at the store, you better believe we're not just going to sit back and take getting yelled at by an incompetent parking attendant, who may or may not be getting his aggression out at us. What, did he view us as an easy target? Did he think we'd just adhere to the stereotypes of being docile and nonconfrontational? To which I say: hell no! Being in the real world for as long as we have (or in my case, as short as I have), we don't sit back when an injustice is being done to you, especially when you're in a position where you should be valued (as the customer).
The man rescinded, then pointed to the right with a dismissive flick of his hand. He really could have saved himself a lot of stress and saliva by just pointing to the entrance in the first place. Instead of watching us walk across the entire length of the parking lot, only to then chase us and start huffing and puffing and getting his panties up in a tizzy, he could have politely done his job, and have been helpful instead of acting like an asshole.
The funny thing is, as we eventually made our way to the entrance of the behemoth Fairway, I thought about what my brother-in-law (heretofore referred to as, BIL) might think if he viewed this whole spectacle. BIL went to boarding school for most of his life, and is, to put it bluntly, a WASP. I think he would have been mortified to see how low-class we were behaving. I'd like to think that, as a lawyer, he might celebrate in our standing up for ourselves, standing up in the face of injustice, and so forth. Instead, he would probably be smacking his hand across his forehead, thinking, "what the hell did I just marry into." If my orthodontist sister were there, I wonder if she would have been embarrassed by us? For us? I'd like to think she's retained some of that fiery P Family chutzpah, as it were.
I don't know why this was my first thought, after I stopped fuming about the parking attendant. Would the people I worked with in the upper echelons of book publishing also find it to be low-class behavior? I don't know, and now that I'm fully ensconced in the blue-collar world of the supermarket--if only for the summer--frankly I don't care.
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