Chips Ahoy!

Back in August we tried Fiction Week. Those short stories became some of our most popular this year. We asked our Founder Pass holders to vote on how often to do Fiction Week and they thought twice a year sounded right. So we’re closing out 2023 with three short stories.

But that’s not all. This week, we’ll also have a two-part series on the State of Hardware by Michelle Santiago Cortés—because if you’re anything like us, you love your lit with a side of tech analysis. 

Don’t forget to buy your 2024 Dirt subscription! We just added credit card payments so it’s super easy. If you subscribe between now and the end of 2023 you’ll get a free Prune subscription when those launch next year.

— Daisy Alioto

Chips Ahoy! is a short story by Nick van Osdol.

I had an old boss who told me a funny story. He was an ex-Goldman type of guy. Cunning, super sharp. Gregarious. Tall. 6’4 or so. Heavier set, second-generation Indian. Early to mid-thirties, losing his hair, getting bigger. Clearly a bit self-conscious about all that. 

We worked in New York in an office near Lexington and 33rd. He was always working himself to the bone. Truly. But he was too nice to work me like that. That hard. I was young. On Friday nights, when it hit 7 or 8, he told me to get out of there and go drink a beer at a bar. “Or something,” he would say, acknowledging he had no idea what I liked or who I was outside of work and never would. You could tell he hadn’t done anything like that—just pop into a bar for the fuck of it—himself in a while. 

He worked. All the time. He did tell me that funny story once, though. I’d never seen him laugh as hard as he did in recounting it. And I never heard him laugh that hard again. Especially not down the line when he got indicted for wire fraud. 

Here’s the story. He pops into a bodega late one night. In the mornings, he always got the same double cup of shitty coffee from the same bodega. And when he was working late, he’d trot back over to the same bodega to get some shitty, sugary snacks to tide him over deep into the night. 

So he tells me that one night, when he was at his wit’s end with work (as usual), he went to the bodega. He picks up a sleeve of Chips Ahoy cookies for $1.99. But, as he’s heading up to the  counter to pay, he sees another, bigger roll of the same cookies for $1.79. A clear incongruence in the economic system most ex-Goldman type guys assure us is intimidatingly rational. 

So he’s miffed by this, doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t jive with his ex-Goldman banker brain. He starts asking the bodega man why one larger package of cookies is cheaper than the smaller one in his store. And I can picture them there, the only two people in there. It’s past midnight on a random weeknight, probably a Tuesday or something, and my old boss is trying to reason with this guy, who probably has zero control over the prices in the store (and definitely doesn’t care). The bodega man shrugs as my old boss gets increasingly frustrated and irate because he just can’t make this situation square in his head. Nor can he convince the shopkeeper to show an inkling of curiosity in his reasoning. I don’t even know if he bought the bigger sleeve of cookies for less money or not. He was worried about his waistline, too. But maybe he did, to prove a point. 

That doesn’t matter. What matters is that when he—my old boss—was telling this story back to me, also pretty late, on a Friday night, he was cracking up so much that I could tell he actually appreciated the absurdity of it all. After getting a bit of distance from it. He was doubled over with laughter at one point, so much so that I was, too, after a while, as we sat in his office. There is something about watching someone else laugh that hard about something banal that is infectious. 

And he must have seen the absurdity not just of the cookie situation but of his quotidian existence, his having been in the bodega so late at night, buying a shitty pack of cookies, doing mindless work, when he should have been at home making love to his wife and having the kids she and he probably wanted to have—or at least sitting on the couch and petting his dog absentmindedly while watching TV or something—instead of ruining his body and his mind and everything in between working on bullshit that he ultimately was somehow so committed to—god only knows why—that he resorted to crime to keep it all going, down the line, ruining the rest of his life in the process (in addition to the  ten years of it he wasted). And I never heard him laugh like that again.

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