The first time I heard about Trader Joe’s was in high school. My friend Alaina pulled a chapstick out of her purse and asked me to hold it while she rummaged through her bag for something else. “Why?” I asked her after reading the tube. “Why what?” she responded without looking up. “Why the fuck does this say Trader Johann’s?” I asked her. “Oh,” she replied as she grabbed it from me, “It’s Trader Joe’s. They do that with everything.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that, and while I was grateful for a sliver of new information, I was leery of learning more about this trader and his various names and products. I was always learning something from Alaina. At different stages of my life, I’ve preferred to stay tethered to people who know more than I do about something, anything, so we don’t end up looking at each other and going “Okay…what now?” She and I first became friends in the lunch line at school, when I noticed that we both painted each of our fingernails a different color. I gasped, tapped her, and wiggled my fingers at her, and she gasped and wiggled hers back. I think that’s the purest way I’ve ever become friends with anybody.
We became close pretty instantly, exchanging phone numbers and then deciding to join the same extracurriculars. We were friends virtually, too, following each other on diaryland, and then livejournal, and then deadjournal during our brief emo phase, then to xanga, and then back to livejournal, which was just a place that made sense. We would message on AIM and send each other pictures of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and discuss what makeup she was buying and I was stealing. We burned CDs for each other and had sleepovers at her house where we would repeatedly watch Donnie Darko in hopes of “getting it,” and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, which we somehow did “get,” despite the fact that neither of us smoked weed at the time. We would stay up so late watching movies that we’d end up deliriously singing “Hold On” by WIlson Phillips until we had tears in our eyes, and then we’d make up interpretive dances to whatever was on the radio until it was morning and we heard her parents waking up for work.
Eventually, after watching Harold and Kumar enough times, she ended up smoking weed (I have no definitive proof that this is why she started, but it seems like a worthy catalyst). She never offered me any—probably because she’d met my mother and knew better—but we did get drunk a lot together after high school. I didn’t even know she drank until one day in Spanish class, when I had dry mouth from eating pretzels, and I took a long, desperate gulp of her water bottle, only to discover that it was vodka. From then on, she would let me know ahead of time whether it was okay to drink, by using our creative and very covert codes “yes water” or, you guessed it, “not water,” when I gestured to her bottle.
One summer, she bought us wine with her fake I.D., and we took it to my mom’s house to drink while she was at work. We didn’t have a bottle opener, so we got the brilliant idea of using a hammer and a screwdriver to get the cork out. We actually ended up getting the cork in, and used that as an excuse to drink the entire bottle, even though we were going to do that anyway. Once we were properly buzzed, the house phone rang, and it was a paramedic, saying that my little brother had gotten into a bike accident at his friend’s house and was being life-flighted to the hospital. No, I’m not joking. This was in like, 2008, and my mom didn’t have a cell phone, so I kept calling her job and leaving messages on her machine until I realized that we actually had to just give up on that plan and head to the hospital.
We climbed into Alaina’s minivan and went to the nearest emergency room. Thankfully, she’d already driven drunk enough times to get us there safely (I do not condone drunk driving, I was 19 and an idiot! I’m still an idiot but I no longer drink and I also don’t drive). Anyway, we got to the hospital, made our way to the desk, blurted out my brother’s name, and the receptionist typed her keys, gave me a once-over and said “He isn’t here.” I honestly don’t remember what exactly happened after that, due to being wine drunk at like 3 p.m., but I do remember figuring out that he’d been life-flighted to a different hospital because of neck injuries, and that by the time we tracked him down, I was sweaty, no longer drunk, and shaking. When we burst into the room, my mom looked at us and asked “Where have you been?” as though we hadn’t experienced a hero’s journey in getting there.
I actually don’t remember why I was telling that story, but while it was dangerous (again I do not condone drunk driving!!), it was one of my favorite experiences I’ve ever had with another person. We ended up splitting another bottle of wine after the incident. You know, to calm our nerves. My brother turned out fine, by the way.
Oh yeah, I was talking about Trader Joe’s. Alaina was the first person to mention Trader Joe’s to me. My college boyfriend was the second. Yes, this is the same guy who told me that the South Park movie soundtrack was the greatest music compilation of all time. As annoying as that fucker was, I can’t deny that he contained multitudes. I actually got as far as outside of Trader Joe’s in this instance, at least confirming that it is a real place. Outside of the store, there was a life-sized chess set, and my then-boyfriend decided that this was the time to teach me how to play chess. This is a situation where surrounding yourself with people who Know Things™ can bite you in the ass. Usually, it works out in my favor, as I am spoiled with the riches of knowledge that I will then shower upon someone else, completing the cycle of sharing trivial information. But stopping me in the middle of a mission to teach me an entire game is a bridge too far. Not only that, but there was a smug-looking child and his grandfather standing nearby, seemingly guarding the chess board. Things weren’t looking good for me.
Before I could even get the characters straight—is ‘characters’ the right word? Clearly we didn’t make it very far in the learning process. Anyway, before I could get to know the horse and the queen and whoever else, the smug child and his grandfather started laughing haughtily, like members of a royal family who were about to kill a jester with their bare hands. I wasn’t even sure what they were laughing at, but my college boyfriend started laughing too, and before I knew it, I hated Trader Joe’s. When I asked why everyone was laughing, the smug child said “You don’t know how to play chess! And you’re old!” I was 21 at this point, which of course, is not old. I stood there thinking about how he didn’t yet know the pleasure (and then pain) of drinking too much watermelon vodka, or the catharsis of loudly wailing Portishead lyrics into a karaoke microphone, or the glee of kissing someone you would later grow to hate. And though I understood at that moment that he was just a child, I prayed that someone would bully him.
When I think back on my own childhood, there are few interactions I can recall that involve adults (excluding my own parents). At pretty much every stage of life, I’ve exclusively focused my attention on people my own age and younger, which I think is why old people don’t like me. I don’t have anything against them, but I’m not someone who has a lot of old person experience. When I was born, all of my grandparents were dead except my maternal grandmother, who taught me how to twerk while “More Bounce to the Ounce” blared from her stereo. This didn’t exactly provide the necessary material for interacting with elderly people.
In fact, I get a little weirded out when I see a very young person and a very old person talking to each other. I don’t actually have anything against it, but like…what the hell are they discussing? I get nervous around them, the same way I would if I saw two talking Siamese cats walking toward me. I just know they’d ask me a riddle I couldn’t provide an answer to, and I’d get banished inside of a well, where I’d have to eat my own hair for sustenance. No, I haven’t thought about this a lot. Why do you ask?
I’ve kept my distance from the establishment for almost fifteen years, which honestly doesn’t mean anything, as there isn’t one near me. What I’m saying is, I’ve done nothing to keep up this one-sided feud, and it has held strong. You’d be surprised at the amount of grudges you can hold with little to no effort.
Anyway, I’m babbling on and on about this because a friend was recently talking to me about something at Trader Joe’s, and I said “Oh, yeah, I’ve never been there.” She laughed really hard for a minute or two before getting really serious and asking “Wait, are you serious?” like I told her I was a Jehovah’s Witness or something. So now she’s decided that we’re going to Trader Joe’s. I’m not sure when it’s happening, but I will report back on the experience. Please pray that the chess board is gone.
Looking forward to the report!