A year ago, when I moved into this apartment, I thought I’d scored by getting a pad right above a deli, which would allow me to run errands in my pajama pants if necessary. Ran out of milk? No problem: go out front door, take one step to left, go into deli — sweet, right?

Not exactly. I have availed myself of various beverages in pre-shower attire, it’s true, and the guys who work at the deli have generously reserved their judgments. Alas, the same live-and-let-live attitude that greets the bedhead which I have attempted to style with a sweatshirt hood is also extended to their “coffee,” which is wretched.

For those of you not familiar with New York deli coffee, and who may assume that it’s wretched as a general rule: it isn’t. It’s fine. It gets you where you need to go, and it’s not Starbucks, but many of us prefer it to Starbucks; it’s a known, if uniformly undistinguished, quantity — a Pavlovian comfort suggesting cozy rides on overheated trains, and streety smells like newsprint and smoke — and it’s a buck for a large, and a large is called a large.

The downstairs deli’s coffee is bad — Vegas-truck-stop bad. It’s bitter; it’s oily; it looks like a cup of French onion soup and induces nationally-ranked coffee breath. Cleaning the coffeemaker would probably solve most of these problems, but the deli guys don’t seem interested in doing that — or in wiping down the coffee counter, which has a marzipan-esque glaze of spilled sugar on it. The pourers all have serious clogs, so in order to get any sugar out, you have to make a javelin-throw motion with the pourer, which doesn’t work the first seventeen times you do it but then abruptly will loosen an arterial spray of sugar, most of which fans out over the counter, and you would wipe it up, but naturally they’ve run out of napkins again, so you just leave it, as generations of frustrated coffee-sweeteners have before you. Besides, you have more important things to worry about, like why the deli guys keep ordering cups sized “small” and “large” and tops sized “thimble” and “hubcap.”

The “whatever, let people make coffee at home” attitude is okay — a bit odd in a retail establishment devoted in part to the sale of coffee, but hey, it’s their deli, they can cry if they want to. It’s the “whatever, the sell-by date is really a guideline” position I kind of can’t get behind. Do I understand it’s faintly ridiculous to insist on freshness in products such as Diet Coke and iced snack cakes? Yes, I do. Do I enjoy saying things like, “Wow, I didn’t know Coca-Cola Corp. went back to using that font…nineteen ninety-seven?” No, I do not. And I can and do make my own coffee at home, but coffee cake is another matter entirely, and when I purchase one, I just want a doughy snack, not a flashback to the Clinton administration. But when I point out that a given cake is so old that it’s not so much “Little Debbie” as “In Utero Debbie,” the deli guys respond thusly: “[Blink.]” And then, the next time I reach for a snack cake, the same one is back in the rack. I…no! Stop doing that, deli guys! Just throw it away!

So, weird approach for a deli, as I said, but then, the deli downstairs probably makes ninety-three percent of its money from the folks buying lottery tickets, which…Lord, deliver us all. The average lottery transaction is conducted in a manner so painstaking, so deliberate, so dogged and inflexible that it suggests a compulsive disorder of some kind — not a gambling addiction. Something more like autism. The lottery customer comes up to the counter, plants feet firmly in front of the machine, and will not move and will not break eye contact with the machine or with its operator, and will not interrupt the recitation of the numbers for any reason, and if the recitation is interrupted, the customer will repeat them and then repeat them again as if it is the incantation that is lucky and not the numbers themselves, to the point where the siren and bellowing horn of a passing fire engine is filling the entire deli with sound and the customer is screaming the numbers over all of that, and then when she gets her tickets she just stands there, entranced by them, counting them, sorting them, reading them with her lips moving, like, you already held up the whole line playing fifty different sets of numbers — now that you’ve completed your transaction, do you think you could get your still-not-rich ass out of the way?

The deli is C-shaped, too, so to get to the back, you have to squeeze past everyone at the counter, and the lottery customer is un-squeeze-by-able, because she’s in that lottery fugue state they all get into, and no “excuse me” will have any effect, not even one shouted at point-blank range and coupled with a shoulder-tuck brush-by. You have to physically move her out of the way. Nor will the presence of a dozen people behind her in line register with her at all; never has the phrase “go ahead and take care of these people first” crossed the lottery customer’s lips. She’s not even aware of us. She’s certainly not aware that people live on this block and don’t so much appreciate the dropping of the fruitless tickets on the ground.

The deli creates litter. The deli attracts a certain clientele during the day, the kind of people who don’t see anything at all depressing about sitting on the newspaper hutch outside from dawn ’til dusk, drinking Red Bull and playing Win For Life cards and smoking Phillies and eating takeout from the Caribbean place and reading the racing form and, when they go home, just dropping all of that shit on the ground outside because they don’t live on this block so what do they care. The deli has a trash can right inside the door; the deli across the street has a can right out front. Nobody’s going to call me a die-hard environmentalist, or a neatnik, but at least I have a relationship with proper receptacles. The first shift at the downstairs deli? No. Welch’s cans, Miller Lite bottles, ripped-up lottery tickets, copies of Hoy, bones, butts, crumpled napkins, Waldbaum’s circulars, condom wrappers, you name it and it’s drifting up against my front door, or in a grody little Blair Witch-y pile in front of the art gallery. My block is never going to land the cover of a travel magazine, but I think we’d all appreciate it if the used-paper-plate count dropped a few percentage points.

The second shift is okay — people getting off the train and grabbing a Post, that one MTA worker who is always out front smoking Kools and arguing with someone on the phone (if the MTA does strike, it’s not going to make any substantive difference in her “working” life that I can see, but I guess we’ll find out) — but then the third shift comes on. The deli does not stay open all night, happily, but it’s open until about 1 AM, and the late-night crowd is primarily composed of drunks, slam poets, and women who believe that a State Of The Relationship talk is best conducted outdoors, with witnesses, in a band-saw whine. At first, a season ticket to the Drama Queen Theater’s performance slate seemed like a great deal, but then I realized, it’s always the same fight. Well, “fight” — the girl does all the fighting. The guy just stands there, hands in pockets, looking by turns bored and gassy, while she rips strip after tiny strip off him: she hates his friends; how come he didn’t text her back last night, she stayed up; he hates her friends; who was that skank at White Castle; he has to get off work next Friday to do that thing in the place with the thing, what does he mean he forgot; he doesn’t care about her at all; fine, she’s going home. And then she stomps off, and when he doesn’t chase after her, she comes stomping back and dumps another ration of shit on his head, and it’s like listening to a crow choking on a piece of gum, just an undulating wave of squawk. Every time, I consider raising the window, telling her just to dump his unresponsive ass already if she’s so miserable, and slamming it closed, but I never do, because another girl will spring up to replace that one and it’s that girl’s mother’s birthday so what does he want her to do?!

People: Find a bar and fight in front of that. It’s what bars are for. And if you must fight in front of a deli, fight in front of one that has a good ice-cream selection, knows how to make a cheese sandwich, and cares whether the ATM is working, because this is not that deli. Okay? And don’t even think about leaving that Arizona can on the ground, bitches.

December 12, 2005

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