Two days after I returned from Afghanistan, I encountered him in the dairy aisle of an upscale grocery story.
Even from fifty feet away, I could tell he was irate.
Face flushed and body trembling, he sauntered past the gourmet cheeses and artisan breads with a quart of Tropicana orange juice in his hands. He began shaking it—and his fist—in front of a middle-aged employee who was restocking the shelves with coconut water and Red Bull.
“Can I help you, sir?”
He was bespectacled and balding; the top of his head gleamed under fluorescent lights. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was so irate that, for a moment, no words came out.
I was headed toward the checkout aisle, but the man’s anger was so palpable, so electric, that it pulled me in. I stopped at the edge of the frozen foods aisle, goose bumps flecking my arms, a sourdough baguette clutched to my chest. Other customers stopped, too. We pretended to inventory our carts and peruse the freezers for blackberry pie, gelato, and Chicago deep-dish pizza. All the while, we craned our necks and drummed our fingers. What was the man about to say?
He sneered and threw back his balding head, laughing into the grocer’s face. “Help me? How can you help me? Well, for starters, maybe you can explain to me why I came all the way over here, from the other side of town, to buy organic orange juice when you don’t have any?”
“Sir, I’m so sorry. We’re expecting another shipment tomorrow. If you’d like, I can take your phone number and we’ll call you when it arrives.”
“But you’re supposed to carry organic orange juice,” the man continued. “Organic. Do you hear me? We only eat organic at our house. And you’re out of it. I shop here for a reason. This is unacceptable. I want to speak to a manager.”
***
Still standing in the frozen foods aisle, I was suddenly reminded of an Afghani man with penny loafers. It was February and ten degrees Fahrenheit. Wind tore over the treeless terrain and a light snow funneled down. The man didn’t have a jacket, gloves, or hat. He was stooped over, placing steel rods in cement, building a vehicle wash rack in the corner of an Army compound in eastern Afghanistan.
There was a hole in his penny loafers that exposed the side of his foot and three brown toes. Every time he stepped, fresh blood seeped from the hole and colored the snowy dirt. Soon the ground was flecked with red spots and trickles.
I crunched over muddy ice to reach him and turning to the interpreter, I said, “What happened to his foot?”
The interpreter conferred in Pashto with the man. After a few moments, he turned to face me. “He cut his foot on rebar,” he explained. “He says he’s sorry for the blood.”
“He shouldn’t be wearing penny loafers,” I said darkly. “This is a jobsite.”
“He says these are the only shoes he owns.”
The man in penny loafers regarded me with green eyes, his face anxious. Snowflakes melted in his hair. He said something else to the interpreter, his voice low. I realized he was worried I’d fire him. I realized that building the wash rack might be his only job. I realized that the money the Army was paying him to build it was not enough. Not enough to buy a jacket, gloves, hat. Not enough to replace a tattered pair of penny loafers.
I was twenty-four years old and this was the first time I’d seen abject poverty.
“Medic,” I yelled. “Come over here and fix this guy’s foot.”
The wind continued to howl as I watched the medic disinfect the man’s abrasion with iodine. Then he wrapped his foot over and over, ever so delicately, with layers of white gauze.
***
I was trembling in the grocery store. My fingers dug into the baguette, leaving fingernail marks. I stepped toward the Orange Juice Man and my mouth opened. I started to say something incoherent: You spoiled bastard. There was this man with penny loafers. You need to meet him. In Afghanistan.
Something saved me from making as big of a scene as the Orange Juice Man: my cell phone rang. It was my father, a man who’d awoken many nights while I was in Afghanistan, worried about my safety, unable to sleep. He’d served in the Peace Corps, lived for three months in a mud hut in Lesotho.
“The spaghetti is ready,” he said.
“OK, Dad. I’ll be home in a minute.”
Later that night, I would tell him about my reaction to the Orange Juice Man. And he would understand me when I said that the poverty I saw in Afghanistan affected me more than the war.
But first, I trudged to the checkout aisle with my baguette and encountered another angry customer. This one was a woman—red headed and a bit on the tall side. She gesticulated at a display of canned Coke. “I told my friends I’d bring glass bottle Coke to the party,” she said to a manager. “They’re expecting glass bottle Coke. What am I supposed to do? Are you sure you really don’t have any?”
I took a step back. I inhaled until my lungs couldn’t take in more, then slowly released the air.
Essay appeared in Green Briar Review in January 2013 and is available here.