Usually in reference to my neighborhood when I say, “such and such is like crack to these guys”, I’m actually talking about crack.
But I’ve found something even more widespreadedly addictive in a neighborhood where I learned the other night on a walk to the bodega, to never let a crackhead dogsit (she lost his dog, and boy was he angry)… And that thing is Popeye’s.
Being a vegetarian, and a person who never really enjoyed most fried foods, I don’t get the appeal of a soggy cardboard box full of salty, greasy chicken bits. Apparently I am alone on that.
I got off the train yesterday and immediately turned the corner to drag my tired ass to the grocery store for some olives because I had been thinking about olive since lunch. I got inside Food Bazaar (nicknamed Food Circus due to the shit show of crowded ghettoness that is usually contained within its premises) and the first thing I noticed was that it was empty. Not just emptier than usual, but EMPTY.
One girl says to a bored (because there was no line of shoppers) cashier, “You know they all at Popeye’s gettin’ their 8 pieces for 5 dollars.”
Oh.
OH.
Wow.
And when I left the Food Circus and turned the corner onto Broadway, I saw the line out the door and down the block, stemming from the doldrums of that dirty, underlit Popeye’s.
I chuckled and thought that was all. Not so. On my walk home I heard, on multiple occasions, people saying into their phone, obviously calling people who were farther down Broadway, in line already, “Hey yo tell him I want…”.
Popeye’s Chicken, a community unifier. A sale on cheap chicken caused more energy to course through that little corridor on Myrtle and Broadway than I’ve seen as of yet in my time there.
