SHOPPING IN SoHo

The Seventies SoHo loft with space enough to casually toss canvases about now goes for $17,000 a month, or $23,000 for the penthouse. Either way, it's a good place to live, or die. Below all of these Viking ranges & awkward couches, one skips down the cobblestone streets to find high-end boutiques, white tableclothed bistros, & women wearing shopping bags like bracelets. In a zone such as this, the shopping trip is a status grab, living through a line of credit, on-line, off-line, thick, black Am Ex.
Lay it onto the counter with a cool “click”.
“This should take care of it.”
One day, I wandered into Dean & DeLuca in dire need of a shot of espresso. The morning espresso or coffee is essential but the mid-afternoon espresso fires up those synapses in the brain for the remainder of the day in the best of ways. The place was teaming with fresh aromas, impeccable displays, eager purveyors yearning for eye contact & a “free” taste, a butcher with a snow white apron devoid of blood & guts -- it was a perfect, gourmet scene. At Dean & DeLuca, everyone can be a “top” chef who uses organic goods that inflate the cost of a meal to the restaurant level. One might call it gastronomical proportions. On impulse, I grabbed a chocolate bar with Hazelnuts (the nocciola flavor, in Italian, to refer back to those days of cookery).
Once in (on) the check-out line, I lusted after a four dollar peanut butter brownie but abstained, thinking that the small chocolate bar would “sorensify my sufficiency”, as my grandmother would say. The shock came when the cost of the chocolate turned out to be six dollars. At the risk of looking like the broke fool I was, I opened my wallet and handed over the cash. Who knows if my stone face & glasses hid my sheepish embarrassment? Everyone has the inherent fear of appearing cheap & a seeker of bargains in a luxury setting. Why shouldn’t a shitty deli coffee & a Snickers bar suffice for all of two dollars? Why didn’t I call upon my acquaintances at Vosges Haut Chocolat for a sampling of nouveau-fusion, miso-truffle delights? Why is New York the most expensive city in the United States? Why am I a corporate whore? Why do I not live in that cold water flat for 80 bucks a month with salsa music blaring & Puerto Ricans screaming below my feet? Why do I live in no man’s land in between Bushwick & Williamsburg? Where does East Williamsburg begin? Where does it end?
Even so, I’ve resolved to pay the dues. As the great Hunter S. once wrote, “take the ticket, take the ride.” The view will always be free.