Robin Whetstone

Soviet Cheese The man looked like trouble, with his long black coat and pinched face. I should have just kept walking. I had walked up to the metro station to buy bread from the back of what was not technically a bread truck. The man in the coat approached as I walked away from the cluster of customers, clutching my oval-shaped loaf of frozen brown bread. He blocked my way and opened one side of his trench coat, exactly the way they do in movies. Tied to the inside lining of his coat was a long tube of plastic-wrapped something. “Pssst, devushka,” he hissed out of the corner of his mouth, his eyes darting around nervously, “Hochesh seer?” "Hey girl. Do you want cheese?" That’s it? Cheese? Not drugs, or jewelry, or counterfeit money? How ignominious for this poor man, the first black-market cheese-pusher I had ever encountered. His children would never be able to grow up and write a memoir, or a country song. “Daddy Sold Black-Market Cheese” just didn’t grip the im...

From 2003 The man was going to talk to me, I could tell. I was sitting on a red girder railing outside the United terminal, smoking a cigarette. My back was to him, but when I saw him sit down out of the corner of my eye I could tell he wanted to talk to someone. And I don’t know why, but I knew it would be me. “You know what gets me?” The other smokers ignored him, but I shifted slightly to look at him. “What gets me is that there’s a whole stand in there selling cigarettes – cartons of cigarettes – but there’s nowhere to smoke but out here.” “Yeah,” I said, unsure of whether to commit myself to this conversation. “You can’t even smoke in New York anymore.” “That’s what I heard! Man, I’m from LA, and that shit just would not fly there. It’s another example of the government, trying to fuck us. ‘What can we do to fuck someone today?’ they say. ‘I know, no smoking.’” “Yep.” I didn’t want to discuss the various ways the government was trying to fuck us with this stranger. I...