SoMa Literary Review - The Need for Cheese

The Need for Cheese

By Michael Disend

Penman thoughtfully weighed the five-pound oblong block of cheddar in his hand, wondering if he needed so much cheese.

Behind him, opposite the dairy section of Rainbow Grocery, the celebrated worker-owned SF food co-op, a woman with a cobra tattooed on her throat and half her face pondered a bottle of merlot. To Penman’s right stood a pale young man with greasy, unnaturally vivid black hair fashioned into spiked rows. He gazed sadly upon diverse brands of hummus.

Penman felt sympathetic: there were no simple choices. Eating correctly in San Francisco was more than a political obligation, it was an art.

It was good to be sympathetic. Necessary. Otherwise he would have strangled the fat Jewish-looking bitch with the black-and-white checkered keffiyah around her neck. She’d been checking out pears when Penman arrived at the store.

He dropped the thick block of cheddar cheese into his shopping cart and moved by Cobra Girl, as he’d come to call her.

She stepped aside without wasting a glance at Penman, and he noticed that each tilt of her head caused the snake to sensuously undulate, fangs forward, appearing to mesmerize potential partners and hunt victims all at once.

Imagine waking up next to that, thought Penman snidely, trying to mask a feeling of rejection.

Am I not worthy of being snake bitten?

As he navigated the shopping cart through Rainbow’s aisles, Penman reflected on all the women he’d ever had sex with, trying to resuscitate memories from the dusty files of yore. Each time he did this exercise, it grew more difficult and less rewarding.

First off, who cares? Women meant something when they were in your life and in your face. Otherwise, not. They were indistinguishable. Secondly, and more ominous, he simply couldn’t remember details. So why bother?

Is this what happens at a certain biological time? pondered Penman, instantly darting away from the notion.

Anyway, there was nothing to get excited about here at Rainbow. What a freak show! Every time he came to the politically active food co-op, he realized how little he really knew about San Francisco or its inhabitants. There seemed to be row upon row of bizarre-looking men and women, each emitting sharply political or anti-Israeli comments as he strolled past, or so Penman imagined, because he’d never heard even one such comment since he’d started shopping here.

Penman swung down a canned goods aisle full of tomato sauces and strange dips from Asia .

Rainbow prices are bullshit, he thought. This place is expensive.

Penman felt his outlaw nature starting to rise. His eyes roved over various makes of organic body brushes, row upon row of supplements, a rack of pricey “sales,” until he found himself right where he needed to be: at the bulk produce section where a little, shall we say, sleight-of-hand might be in order.

There was a sale on trail mix: a fortifying blend of almonds, raisins, dried figs, peaches, apples, along with pumpkin seeds, coconut, raisins, and at least a dozen other ingredients which Penman, easily bored, didn’t bother to read. It looked great! Penman ignored the DO NOT GRAZE sign and grabbed a fistful, munching contentedly.

A Rainbow worker, a dwarfish guy with shaved head and granny specs, one of many such bald sentinels in San Francisco , gave Penman a disapproving look as he passed.

Or so Penman thought.

They won’t mess with me! Nonetheless, Penman ate more quickly and gulped an uncomfortable blob of nuts and seeds that rightfully deserved more rounds of munch.

He studied the price.

$5.45 a pound.

Penman, slipping into self-examination/meditative mode, noticed that his mind belatedly approved of the price. Pretty fair, actually. He overruled that impulse and searched for a similar-appearing trail mix at a cheaper price, preparing to fill a bag with the primo and then label it with the bin number of the cheap stuff.

“Excuse me, please. Can I get in here?”

Penman stepped aside, concerned the shopper, a spectacled gray-haired professorial sort, had noticed which bin number he’d written. Hey, wait a minute! He knew the guy: Aaron Abramowitz — the ultra-spiritual Noe Valley psychotherapist!

Penman, trying for a chuckle, brushed against Abramowitz rudely.

“No, you can’t get in here.”

Abramowitz looked up, eyes registering terror, and Penman felt awful. What a bully!

“Penman? Is that you?”

Penman put his arm around Abramowitz’s shoulders and gave him a little hug.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, bub. Just playing.”

Abramowitz shrugged off the arm and stood up straight, his expression difficult for Penman to get a handle on.

“Are you still boxing, Penman?” he asked coldly.

“Not boxing, Aaron. Training. Training like a boxer” — a convenient fiction that Penman would never have had the nerve to say in Brooklyn , or one of the few tough Frisco neighborhoods like the Excelsior.

Abramowitz nodded, then resumed filling a bag with salted pumpkin seeds.

“Have you visited any interesting gurus lately?” asked Penman, searching for a common bond. After he’d first moved to San Francisco from Manhattan , he’d met Aaron through a website connection for Nasargadatta Maharaj, a famous Indian sage. They’d hit it off and Aaron drove Penman to various satsangs in Marin County . Every spiritual hustler on the circuit hit Marin repeatedly and Aaron rarely missed any of them. One was a blonde ex-real estate broker stretched out on a couch prattling away about the “Four Questions” to a packed house. Ask the “Four Questions” profoundly enough and you’d turn into a Buddha, like you’d been baked in a nirvana pie. Another was a goofy chick from Maui who said she was in the official “lineage” of Ramana Maharshi who had established no spiritual “lineage” whatsoever and even cautioned seekers against such rubbish. After every visit to a contemporary teacher of non-dual wisdom, Penman would respond with vitriol and unmitigated contempt. If that didn’t put enough strain on the friendship, there was that incident in the Y boxing room.

“No, not lately,” said Abramowitz, as he carefully copied the correct bin number onto a paper twist and tied his bag. “My father has been very sick. Actually, he’s dying. I’ve been flying back and forth to New York City .”

“I’m so sorry,” said Penman, imitating his friend Trooster’s expression, which arose from genuine empathic compassion, unlike his own. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Aaron stared at Penman, as if remembering something, then shook his head. But he seemed to be warming up.

“What have you been up to, Penman? I was just thinking about you last week, in fact.”

Penman was tickled. It was nice to be thought about, even by Aaron Abramowitz who, despite decades of spiritual seeking and travels to hundreds of teachers, was clearly on a lower rung of the Path ladder.

“Hypnosis. Zen. Gym. The usual.”

His pithy yet potent list made Penman felt like a Mountain God, still below a Buddha but way past your run-of-the-mill biped dreck wandering through samsara like an iPod-wearing klutz.

Hypnosis! Zen! Gym!

You couldn’t get more regal in the true sense of the word.

“I see,” responded Aaron. “Well, my therapy practice has fallen off since this started with my father. Nice to see you, Penman. I have to go.”

“I’m going, too.”

They both walked to the express lane, ten items or under, and continued chatting. Penman shifted to a conversation of bhakti-like references to sages Ramana Maharshi and Nasargadatta, saying the most effusive over-the-top hyperbole-ridden baloney in a calm, everyday manner, praising these famous Masters as if he were an incessantly meditating devotee who only emerged from his Pine Street apartment for necessary errands, like buying trail mix from Rainbow Grocery or toilet paper from Walgreen’s.

Abramowitz seemed to be falling for it. He was all ears. But Penman’s attention was caught by an attractive Japanese woman ahead of him who was staring at the cheese block, which Penman had set on the checkout counter.

“That’s a lot of calcium,” she said.

Penman half smiled, nodded, didn’t reply. What did that mean? Was it good or bad? He tried to remember what he knew about calcium. He stared at her fashionable black skirt — refreshingly femme for this joint — and her tight, sleeveless white top. Noted jugs with a more-than-passing resemblance to those adorable little yellow melons.

A looker!

“After that afternoon I get physically sick whenever I hear the word ‘boxing’,” said Aaron suddenly.

“What?”

“Yes, it was awful. The way you made me hit the bag over and over. Frankly, Penman, it was traumatic.”

Penman stared at him, bewildered, belatedly noticing that the Japanese woman was already being rung up.

“You can’t get enough calcium!” he cried out, an effort that went unnoticed since she was engrossed in looking at her bill and being coyly flirted with by the cashier, a dewy androgynous lad who probably played guitar in a Mission hipster

band.

So what! Penman swung around and faced Aaron Abramowitz.

“Winning and losing are essential in this illusory world, bub,” he snapped. “Remember what Krishna said to Arjuna on the field of battle when he didn’t want to fight.”

Abramowitz firmly placed a divider between Penman’s stuff and his own. Penman noticed the therapist’s purchases were heavy on vitamins and supplements, quite a lot actually, way more than ten, which wasn’t quite fair. To Penman’s surprise Aaron also didn’t seem impressed by his reference to the Vedas. Or was it the Upanishads? Something Hindu.

“I just want peace, Penman,” said Aaron loudly. “I’m not interested in winning or losing.”

Penman was being rung up now, too. He noticed the cutie pie cashier was suddenly monitoring their conversation, as were several other Rainbow shoppers. In fact, a whole bunch of people. The bitch in the keffiyah glared from the next aisle.

“Me, too,” said Penman. “Everybody wants peace.”

Award winning author and performer Michael Disend was a Haight Street hippy kid who dwelt carefree in Golden Gate Park . His acclaimed novel of those years, Stomping the Goyim, was recently reissued by Green Integer. His Penman Chronicles consists of 1000 stories mostly based in San Francisco