From the Editor’s Desk

Every move I have ever made, the same friend showed up with the truck. He never asked what was in the boxes. He knew anyway, by the weight and the sound: this one is books, this one is the good dishes, this one is the thing you should have thrown out two apartments ago. He carried all of it down three flights and up three more and never once put anything of his own in the truck, because he didn’t own anything in it. That was the deal. At the end of the day he’d eat the pizza and leave, and the next time I unpacked, every box was where he’d set it down, which was always the right room.

Years later I asked him why he kept doing it, and he said that moving is the only time you ever find out what people actually have. Not what they say they have. What they’d pay a man to carry.

That’s the issue this week. Three people who carry what isn’t theirs, and who know, by the weight, more about the market than anyone selling in it. In San Diego, in the second week of April 2020, a laid-off server pushes a stranger’s cart through the oldest warehouse store in town for a forty-eight-dollar tip, finds one pack of toilet paper left on the pallet, and has to decide whose it is. In Honolulu, at the Pier 38 fish auction, the man whose steel tube says what every fish is worth draws a bad core from his cousin’s best bigeye and has a few minutes to decide where the center of a fish is. And in an old covered market, a porter who has walked under the word destur, make way, for thirty-nine years votes with his guild against the freight elevator, and then carries it up the stairs himself. Read them, and then pass them on. Tell somebody.

(Next issue: The Thief — something is taken, not bought, and the shadow economy has its own rules.)

— The Editor