Mangos, Trowels, and the Howlin’ Wolf: An Optimistic Journey through the Heart of the American Dream

MY COFFEE HAD TOO MUCH CREAM IN IT. My usually disciplined pour had fallen prey to distraction. The sugar was perfect, but the taste of bitter beans had been lost in thick white liquid. I heard Stavros Dimakis pressing home fries on the flat grill, whispers of their scent reached my nose. My spoon had a small circle of coffee in it, an odd reflecting pool perched on a napkin next to my fork next to my knife. My arms hairs were stuck to the table in a faint circle of someone else’s maple syrup.

“Hey Max how come you haven’t come to visit me yet?” asked Stavros. “Max, we live a street apart from each other. Just leave, you don’t need to tell your parents, just walk over and visit me.”

“No, you wouldn’t do that would you, Max?” Max’s parents chuckled.

“Yes, I would!” exclaimed Max.              

“Thata boy, knuckles,” said Stavros, fist bumping the eight year old.

(Image provided courtesy theheartbeatofhaverhill.wordpress.com)

I smiled and looked up at my father who was shaking his head, grinning. Stavros and my father had been football buddies in high school, and when I went there the first time with a group of friends he asked: “Little Valenti, is that you?” He had seen pictures of me on my father’s Facebook. He knew Blute because he comes in every Sunday with his father, and he knew Dimitri because every Greek knows every other Greek in Haverhill.

Our food came on large plates, Stavros having given us much more than the usual serving size. The home fries which I had previously smelled from across the room finally erupted with scent right below my nose. Homefries were not what I searched for that day, though they were right under my nose.

THIS WAS THE FIRST STEP IN MY JOURNEY. Mark’s Deli, by the train tracks, so close that when the train comes through you’d better hold on to your coffee mug. I work at Cherry Village Pizza in Hampstead, New Hampshire, and while we’re not very popular, needing only six regular employees, I realized something in my many nights there: 90% of the people who come in know Billy, the owner, at least enough to converse with him about their families, their moving schedule, and anything else they could talk about.

Small businesses employ more than half of the work force according to the U.S. Census Bureau, employing 4.5 million more people than large corporations. Out of those small businesses, the ones with less than 100 employees had the largest number of employees, Billy has six. If Billy has six, and businesses with under 100 employees create most of the workforce, that means that there is a whole lot of family owned pizza shops.  Yet, people still shop at big corporations, not supporting these economically healthy small businesses.

The goal of my journey was to show why more people should shop locally, at small businesses, so I would go to several local businesses and take down prices to compare to WalMart: simple. As I left Mark’s Deli and started to walk down the dirty sidewalk, looking at the cracks in the streets, the brick buildings with their dirty windows, I planned my path to from our Middle Class Earth, to an outstretched hand of Corporate Mordor.

HIS HAIR WAS LIKE A CLOAK, COVERING ALL BESIDES THE TOP OF HIS HEAD. His glasses were dirty gold and his leather jacket hung open. The shop smelled musty and of cigars. The door was open. He told Dimitri and I, as we meandered through the vinyls, that he wasn’t even supposed to be working that day. He also informed us that if he was talking too much we could tell him to shut up. The woman at the counter had gone upstairs to find her husband, with whom she owned the shop, leaving us alone in Welfare Records with that man, whose name I still do not know.

“Yeah, I’m sorry if I talk too much,” he said.

“No, no, it’s fine man!” I said to him.

“Well you just let me know. I don’t mind at all, just tell me to shut up. One guy was in here once, I didn’t even offer, he just asked me to shut up and so...I did,” he said chuckling.

While walking around, holding a Ghost Mice record and a Violent Femmes record, I realized I had never looked at Welfare’s selection of CDs. What I found was astounding, a strange, older punk band who had coincidentally opened up for the Street Dogs when I saw them in December---eight bucks. What I was most astounded by, however, was the man working the counter on his day off.

“You guys watch Jessica Jones, or Daredevil?” he asked.

“No, I don’t,” said Dimitri shaking his head.

“Yeah me neither, been wanting to though, just don’t have Netflix,” I replied.

“Ah, got cha man. Yeah, Daredevil is great, more action-y, and the Punisher is joining this season, but Jessica Jones is more psychological and wicked cool.”

(Image provided courtesy of bdcwire.com)

Once we had jaywalked to my car parked across the street, I looked back at Welfare Records, soaking in the grey-cream siding which was covered in old records, the logo looking like it came out of Doom. I realized that the reason I was uncomfortable the first time I went in there was simply because I knew it was on the ever frightening River Street, where you couldn’t move a three feet without stepping on the butt of a cigarette. Now, I couldn’t get enough.

TRUE VALUE IN BRADFORD IS ACTUALLY CALLED ARTHUR SHARP’S. My father told me that my grandfather had known it by no other name besides Arthur Sharp’s. My father and I are starting a garden this summer, and we decided that this would be our supplier for seeds. As I walked around two men came in.

“Hey John! Back again today?” asked the man at the counter today, who had previously asked if we needed any help.

“Yeah, need some more stuff, seems like every time we go back to work on it we’ve forgotten something else,” said John.

True Value is actually what is sounds like, true values. Inside I found knock-off shirts and hats, “Sons of Belichick” was my favorite. Most importantly, however, was their wide selection of hardware. They had more screws than a con-man has identities. I had no idea that there was more than one type of trowel, but let me say, True Value has every type.

(Image provided courtesy of yelp.com)

JACQUELINE’S HAS EL YUCATECO, that delicious green hot sauce that had been introduced to me at Plaza Azteca on the border of Methuen and Salem. I thought it was great, a balance of heat and flavor which can make any good chimichanga into a spectacular tube of meat and cheese. After a while of searching, my father made the executive decision to order El Yucateco off of Amazon. We were nearly out of it when my father and I found ourselves in Jacqueline’s Spanish food market. I pulled open the metal door, which reminded me of a door which would close off a mafia meeting from the outside world. Once inside I grabbed a mango, having never actually eaten one before. I walked around this small shop for a minute, attempting to decipher what the Spanish labels meant, and then I saw it. A four inch tall bottle of green with another label I couldn’t decipher but could certainly recognize. I could not believe that we had ordered a bottle of El Yucateco from God knows where, when it was right here the whole time.

Once we had left Jacqueline’s, we crossed the street by the Greek Orthodox church, and reentered the car. I then knew that my mosey through the bright and sunny parts of Middle Class Earth had ended. I knew then that I had to enter a realm of shadows, Minas Tirith was behind me, Mordor awaited.

SOMETIMES A COOKIE CUTTER CAN HOUSE A BROWNIE. I had left my father at home for my trip to WalMart; instead, my girlfriend, Amanda, came with me to help me on my journey. As we walked around the belly of the beast, I pulled out my iPod which I had used to type up prices from stores and shops downtown. As I walked around WalMart I became increasingly disappointed. My mind flooded with questions: How am I supposed to argue my point now? All of WalMart’s prices are better, save a few items which were the same. How was I supposed to prove that a more affordable and unambiguously stocked store was less preferable?

We made our way to the food department where I was looking for beef to compare with Haverhill Beef. Amanda said, “Well, there are the hot dogs!”

(Jeff Bridges as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski (1998))

“Oh, is that what you call them?” questioned a voice reminiscent of a South Park representation of an older hippie who drives a Prius. I turned towards the sound and couldn’t be more satisfied with the sight which reached my eyes. This was a man who can only be described as The Dude, if the Dude shopped at WalMart. This man had Jeff Bridges hair with a much longer beard, jeans and a blue tye-dye-esque shirt, with an incredibly fierce looking wolf and full moon on it. “I always just called them cow lips,” he continued, “because I had a buddy who worked where they made the hot dogs,  and they just took whatever they didn’t want from the cow, like the face. So I call them cow lips.”

Amanda, being the kind person she is, responded with a laugh and a “that’s very clever!”

“Yeah, I’ve got nicknames for everything,” he said, shifting back and forth in front of  us like a small dog who couldn’t quite tell if he trusted us yet, “like um... buggies! The cars, you know punch buggy, we call those bee-bops in my family. And, me and my daughter, we call peas bullets, we’ve got a nickname for everything. Okay, I’ve got to get cream, uh, have a good night!”

“You too!” Amanda and I replied to our new friend.

This was it, I had found my ring of power, the object WalMart could use, and equally be destroyed by. I had been searching WalMart for some sort of higher price on a product so I could say “Ha! WalMart is awful, shop locally,” instead, I found the quintessence of loneliness in a market. WalMart has good prices but they come with a greater cost. WalMart, being a large corporation, has its headquarters in Arkansas, not in New England at all. Therefore, when WalMart as a corporation pays its taxes, the tax money does not go to all of the states where it has locations. Each location pays some degree of taxes, however, the headquarters deals with the majority. This is a major source of slow economic growth according to a study done by Penn State, run by Professor Stephan Goetz.  

The Andersonville Study of Retail Economics says that if a shopper spends 100 dollars locally, in places like Welfare Records, Haverhill Beef, Arthur Sharp’s, and Jacqueline’s, 68 dollars stays in the local economy. That means that the local and state government has more funding and can provide more for the people. On the other hand, if a shopper spends 100 dollars at a national chain or online, only 48 dollars stays in the local economy. Now, this may seem hypocritical because True Value is itself a worldwide chain, the difference between True Value and WalMart is that each location of True Value runs independently by an owner, separate from True Value as a whole. Subway also does this, a sub shop which has a location inside of the Plaistow WalMart, however, Subway owners have no say in the menu. True Value’s products are left up to the owner. My grandfather called it Arthur Sharp’s, not because Arthur Sharp was the manager of the store or a carekeeper for set prices and products, he called it that because it was Arthur Sharp’s. An independent local shop.

Now, I did my research on why small businesses are great, and yes they employ more than larger businesses, however, what intrigued me were the tangible elements, the aspects that couldn’t be backed up by data.. That’s why I went to these places, that’s why I found The Dude. The Dude was a man walking around WalMart with things to talk about; however, he could only share them with other souls floating through this store. None of the employees had ever asked him about his nickname for hot dogs, what he was looking for, if he needed help...the list goes on. The Dude had to find the cream for his White Russians on his own. When I was in Welfare Records, our leather clad acquaintance told me I could tell him to shut up if he spoke too much. This store has products made to fit everyone, but not any specific jobs. You can find hot sauce at WalMart, but not El Yucateco. You can find wood screws at WalMart, but if you need just the right size screw for your special order European door, you’re...well I’ll let the pun go unspoken.

WalMart lacked something in its store. Yes, I could buy a hammer for four dollars less than True Value and a CD for five dollars less than Welfare Records, but you sure can’t find several types of trowels or vinyls at WalMart. It lacked a variety, and a personality. WalMart itself is a representation of what they sell, cookie cutter blanket products.

WHAT WAS BELOW MY NOSE TASTED HOW THEY SMELLED. The home fries had a crunch along the outside contrasting their mushy and malleable centers. My coffee had one last sip in it, the waitress asked if I had wanted more. I considered it, just due to the fact that more coffee would outweigh the overflow of cream, however, I declined.

When we left, Stavros shook both of our hands and told us to take care. We started walking up Washington Street towards Haverhill Beef. I was thinking about how eight cents of every dollar spent in America goes to WalMart. “You know, Haverhill’s not a bad city,” I said to my father.

“Eh, it’s not great,” he replied.

“I don’t know, I think that’s based on perspective. I think it looks like a bad place, but it is truly a picture of the American dream. Small shops flourishing because downtown is a giant family. I don’t know, I like it. It’s my home,” spoke I. 

( Image provided courtesy of bostoncoasters.com)

“It certainly could be better,” he concluded.

“Maybe, but I like it,” I decided.

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