Attempting Normal (23 page)

Then I took some breaths and fought the urge to tweet about my mouth cancer or call my friends or go to the hospital. After feeding my need to be the unique creator of an all-new cancer, I started to work a different angle. Maybe I
didn’t
have mouth cancer. It could be something else. I
am
the proud owner of a lifelong
case of oral herpes, a gift I gave my ex-wife that thrills me to this day. I also get canker sores occasionally. I started to put it together and realized that what I was looking at was canker sores dyed brown by licorice. I figured it out. In that moment, when I realized what was going on, I felt like I had beaten cancer.

The next morning at 9:58 I walked out of my room with a spring in my step and a new perspective on life. I had the outlook of a survivor. A survivor of made-up mouth cancer. I stepped up to the waffle maker and made myself a lobby waffle. As I sat among the business travelers and tourist families sucking up free food I had no judgments or worries. I was elated and alive. It was the best waffle I ever tasted. I fought the urge to masturbate on the floor in front of the buffet.

  20  

I never liked Whole Foods. I never wanted to shop there. I think it is an elitist, overpriced sham. I found Whole Foods reprehensible even before their CEO John Mackey wrote his horrible oped in
The Wall Street Journal
.

I hate Whole Foods because everything is overpriced. Most people want to be healthy and everybody should have access to healthy things but what Whole Foods is trying to establish and represent is the idea that you can’t be healthy unless you can afford it. Notwithstanding there’s no indication that organic vegetables are any better for you than non-organic vegetables. Are you worried about pesticides? You’ll adapt to pesticides. What are we, a bunch of pussies all of a sudden? We’ve adapted to worse. The air in my house is 65 percent feline shit particulate. I can handle some non-organic fruit. In terms of nutrients they’re no different. For years I shopped at a vegetable stand in Astoria from a guy with a Greek accent a block from an elevated subway that rained filth from the sky every seven minutes. I was fine.

John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, wrote an editorial in
The Wall Street Journal
against health care reform. There was a lot of libertarian wrong-mindedness in his piece—some crazy ideas about tort reform, some misguided nonsense about allowing insurance companies to go across state lines, which I think will only lead to bigger monopolizations, not more competitive markets.

There’s a lot of bullshit in his editorial. But the thing that interests me the most is these couple of paragraphs:

What I extrapolate from that paragraph is that he is willing to just let poor people die. It’s not his fault or even his concern. It’s part of the malignant evolutionary theory of free market capitalism. If you can’t afford the good food or if you can’t afford health care or if you don’t have a job or if your car is dangerous because you can’t get it fixed and you DIE, you just lost the game—
bzzzzz
—thanks for playing extreme capitalism.

Here’s the next paragraph:

Okay, well how about we make it a new right? What’s wrong with that? Later in his editorial Mackey says:

So listen, all of you sick people, despite however you may have gotten ill, whether it was genetic, or who knows why you got cancer. If you just eat better, and perhaps shop at Whole Foods, you have a better shot at survival. As long as you don’t get caught or killed stealing or robbing someone just to afford a head of lettuce or a slice of meat at that place, that is.

I decided to boycott Whole Foods, like lots of other people. I’d been doing it even before the editorial because it made my soul feel less dirty. But after the editorial I took it further. My subsequent action was impulsive and mysterious to me. I don’t know why I did it. I will try to figure it out here.

I wanted to buy some stevia, which is a very sweet sweetener derived from a root. It has no fat in it, no chemicals. It’s spectacular stuff. I usually get the stevia at Trader Joe’s, a nice store that doesn’t present any political or ethical dilemmas. I find TJ’s irritating because everyone is so friendly and I start to question that, but that’s my problem. Also, the way they package things is a little too cute for me but there are a couple of things I get there. Stevia is one of those things.

But on this day, they didn’t have the stuff I wanted. The good
stuff. The 100 percent pure stuff. They had the one that was cut with filler to bulk it up, like shitty cocaine.

I knew I could go to Whole Foods and get pure stevia. I’ll admit I have lapses in personal integrity. I thought to myself: “You have your principles. But these are extenuating circumstances. Go get the stevia. It’s not that big of a deal.”

I went into the Whole Foods in Union Square in New York, which is a block away from the Trader Joe’s. I’m a sellout, a scab, but I go in. I’m just going to grab the high-grade stevia. I walk into the Whole Foods and it’s a cluster-fuck of food elitism, quirky handwritten signs, overpriced food, and lines and lines of people. They run people through a literal maze to pay for food. They treat you like a rodent. You have to respond to a color and a number signaling you forward like an aspirational healthy robot.

But I press on. I go downstairs, I pick up the stevia, the good shit, 100 percent. I’m holding it in my hand and looking out at the Whole Foods all around me. I’m feeling absolute disgust. I hate everything it represents. I hate John Mackey. I hate the idea that people have to pay through-the-ass exorbitant amounts of money just to have healthy food. It’s not right, and I blame John Mackey, but my hatred for this kind of grotesque third-world unfairness existed before him and runs deeper than one rich asshole. I look over at the long line, the customers with their carts and baskets, penned in like cattle. I’m holding my little container of stevia. It’s $7.99. I’m looking at it and realize, “Dude there is no way you are waiting on that line. And you know what? There’s no way you’re paying for this stevia. You cannot pay for it. What you are going to do, Marc, is you’re going to hold it in your hand in front of you as if you’re looking at it and walk right out of the store.”

That’s what I did. I held the stevia in front of me. Not because I didn’t want it to look like I was stealing. I wanted to hold it right out in front of me as if to say
I’m leaving with this because I deserve
it, because this store sucks, because I don’t want to wait on line, because the person who runs this operation is a wrong-minded, right-wing libertarian whack-job who just wants poor people to die, that’s why
. I was holding it as if I were the Statue of Liberty, my container of stevia my torch. I walked out through the in door, past the security guard, holding that stevia in front of me, looking at it as I walked out onto the street. When I was back out on the street, I stood in front of the store holding the plastic jar aloft. I wanted to see if anyone was going to stop me, to say, “Do you want to pay for that, buddy? Did you forget something, buddy? You’re under arrest.” Any of that. Nothing happened. I waited a few minutes. I probably looked ridiculous standing there on a crowded New York City street with my stevia in the air, but I waited a few minutes more and no one came. I put the stevia in my bag. I felt good.

Not only did I not feel guilty, but I felt like I wanted to go back and steal more stuff from Whole Foods. It’s easy if you live in a big city. They can’t manage that place. They can barely manage the lines.

Join me. Go in. Get yourself some healthy greens, some organic produce, and some vitamins if you have no money. Just bring your Whole Foods organic hemp bag, load it up, and just walk out. Walk out through the in-door. And if they ask if you paid for it just say, “Yeah, I did.” Or if you pussy out, just say, “I forgot because I have a vitamin deficiency because I’ve been eating and shopping at affordable supermarkets lately. I should always shop here, because do you see what happens when I don’t? I’m sorry,” and go back in and pay for it.

Don’t boycott Whole Foods—steal from them.

  21  

I am in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee, and things are not good inside of me. That is not an emotional observation. I don’t think I’m going to die. But last night I came close. I might be being a bit dramatic. I’ll let you be the judge. I put a lot of things into my body, for better or for worse. Something went in last night, and I don’t know how else to say it: That thing fucked my shit up. I mean literally.

I read a short story in high school once about a hot-pepper-eating contest. I remember liking it. I don’t remember much of what I was assigned to read in high school. I did a lot of sleeping in English class and my teacher was a mean old drunk woman who looked like she was balancing a pile of hair on her shaking head.

It was the descriptions of the peppers and the experience of eating them that sticks in my mind all these years later. I couldn’t remember the name of the story so I googled it. It was actually hard to find. I found someone had scanned the story and put it on
their personal Flickr page. Obviously, someone else at some point thought, “What was that pepper story I read in high school?”