Sunday. Fluorescent lights float and follow on the fresh tile wax. The merchandising is impeccable. A military order. Bags of chips and chili cans. Dog food bags. The perfect discipline of the shelves. Labels straight. The order of flood debris. Like hymn books in the pews. Like train cars. I’m walking. County guards called standing in line covering down. The shoulder geometry is important. Shoulders ahead of you. A set behind you. An overall greater shape. Ants act like this.
The pharmacist is eyeing me with something approaching contempt. No overt expression, only a sneer in the way she moves. She recognizes me. My clothes. She fills the bottles. Shades of fear but I can’t tell if it’s hers or mine. She wears too much lipstick. Probably lonely. Works too hard. You read these things if you watch long enough.
On her feet all day in the American palace of excess. A parade of bounty. Endless aisles of low-priced, cost-cutting, coupon-saving frenzy. Frozen meat coolers belching icy air. Bargains stacked to the ceilings. Shelves bulge like our waistlines. The shaky shopping cart wheels. They have a crew to wax and polish miles of sticky floors each night. A museum of gluttony. Hell brought to earth by General Mills. Procter and Gamble.
She’s filling prescriptions and watching me. I’m stealing cough syrup and size-six gel insoles. Appropriate clothing is necessary. Insoles in the jacket. Robitussen in the backpack. The weight of these things in the clothes. They pull me down a little. Closer to the earth. I’m not a thrill seeker and I’m no role model. I seek only an equilibrium. By the time I’m done, I have quite a collection of equilibrium. Tomatoes, a red onion, pack of bologna, two pounds of bacon, can of bean dip, 24-count pencil pack, the new John Grisham novel, and a nice kielbasa. America the abundant. Oh say can you see.
The next day at work, I’m telling Marten I quit smoking. He’s a solid six feet. Heroic mustache. He reminds me of a ranch hand in a telenovela who beats up the landlord and takes the girl for himself, then leaves her for the call of the open range or something tragically romantic like that. I don’t think he’s listening. He acts like he’s not listening and bends over the sink. I come back with the dishes, and he’s got the Tejano a little louder. All he has to do is load the dishes, put them on the conveyor, and take them out clean, but he rinses them first. This is work ethic. I’m trying to tell him I’ve quit smoking, but I haven’t quit smoking, I love it too much. I just need to say something. Anything. It’s restaurant policy, after I’ve bussed the tables, to dump the leftover chips in the crisper. They serve them in the drive-thru. This is, of course, a health code violation and probably a terrible practice but I’m part of it. Someday a poor soul will get sick, and the whole place will be shut down, but for now it’s good to belong.
I clock out and start walking home. Cool evening. Mockingbirds cry in the trees. They sing all night. Trying to attract a mate. Defending territories. They’re trying to participate somehow. Find some center of a place to be. Why any creature would desire a mate is beyond me, but they sing and sing and sing. Six blocks of rotten sidewalk home. Past the church with the bricked-up windows. They’ve converted the streetlights to LED. I miss the old lights. Their sweet orange glow replaced by a light that looks like rubbing alcohol smells. Even the shadows they make are clinical. LED shadows move the way dentists pull teeth.
The church with the brick windows is deserted. Part of the sign is still there. Presbyterian. A hollow monument to hope. I can smell the grass. I try to imagine the people. Sunday best. Squealing Easter egg hunts. The crunch of leather shoes on the pavement. Cars in the parking lot under the sun. They wash the cars on Saturday afternoon for inspection on Sunday. This is just an image. It might have been. Now the neighborhood home-office types wear clever t-shirts and shit their dogs in that grass. One nation under god.
There’s a dumpster around the back. A nice one. Hidden from the street. I use it a lot. It’s usually half full of illicit dumpings. Jugs of used motor oil, old clothes stained with what might be blood but probably isn’t blood. I found a stack of porno once, and another time I saw what appeared to be the mechanics of a meth lab. Powdery broken glass, a copper saucepan turned to soot. Hundreds of empty decongestant packets. Disposable packaging is the final high-water mark for any civilization.
At home I find a note from my landlord on the door. I don’t read it. I’ve found a great Christian hellfire station on the radio. I listen as I go through the coupons in the paper. The sermon this week is about redemption and how death has no respect for age. How we’re all hell bound if we don’t allow ourselves to be redeemed by the blood of Christ. They talk about blood a lot. He’s saying Jesus was killed on the cross in an act of vicarious redemption.
—There’s a coupon for buy three large sunshine apples get one free, and $1.50 off organic yogurt—
I’m wondering how one person could be redeemed by casting their wrongs on another person and then killing them. They should call it vicarious condemnation. Now he’s at the part where the Roman soldiers and Jewish priests told Jesus to go ahead and hop down from the cross if he is, in fact, the son of god. They asked him to prove it.
—Here’s one for 50 cents off three-liter diet Pepsi—
I crumple it. The bottles are too big to manage.
He’s saying Jesus stayed on the cross for love. That love is the only thing that kept him up on the cross, suffering and dying for us.
—$1.50 off Head and Shoulders shampoo—
It seems to me that vicarious redemption was a pretty bad deal. I think what kept him up there was more likely the nails. Outside the birds are still singing.
Now work. Mid shift. I’ll be able to swing by the grocery on the way home. Rosa, the old Mexican woman who makes the salsa, is huffing again by the tortilla machine. I love to talk to her when she’s on the gold rattle can. She sprays it in a dish towel. Rosa gives the best advice.
I ask her: “Rosa, is stealing wrong if you don’t keep the things for yourself?”
She takes a hit. “Solo puedes ser lo que eres.” She’s a very fat woman. Gold paint around her nose.
“Rosa, I steal a lot of food and other things.”
“Debes ayudar a los pobres.”
“I steal from the grocery, and it goes in a dumpster behind the church.”
“Por que haces esto? Eres un nino muy enfermo.”
“I don’t know why I do it,” I say. “I don’t feel bad about it at all, and I think maybe I should.”
“Nino diablo alejate de mi,” waving her gold rag.
“The thing is, I don’t feel much of anything.”
“Dejame solo. Tengo que hacer salsa,” she says, her huge hips moving as she goes off to the refrigerator for tomatoes. Rosa gives the best advice. She might have been pretty once but probably she wasn’t. I wish I spoke Spanish.
After work I walk to the grocery. Monday. Two-for-one coupon day. The store is packed with desperate people. So far: two bags of Rosarita’s blue corn chips (in honor of Rosa), can of refried black beans, jar of olives, fifteen packs tropical fruit blend Hi-C drink mix, a pound of sharp cheddar cheese, EZ Bake buttermilk biscuits in the silver tube, and five toothbrushes. I wander the store, thinking of poverty.
—Two pounds of tuna fish in fresh lock pouches—
I think about poverty and nobility. Could it be that one leads to the other? Does one have to choose a life of poverty to be considered noble? Is poverty holy? I’m not troubled by the notion. I do not fear it. I just wonder. With all the bounty of this place. With all the excess and the greed of it and the hubris of the soap aisle. There must be fifteen hundred soaps.
—3 bars organic eucalyptus almond scrub soap—
The seafood department is at the back of the store. They put it there to hide the smell. There’s no hiding it. It smells like SeaWorld with the tanks drained. As a lucky result this area is lightly populated. There’s a hallway by the employee break room, past warehouse doors that look vaguely like they open on a cancer ward. The hallway leads to an emergency exit. They’re watching Mexican soap operas in the break room. I can hear them crunching chips. The door warns, Emergency exit only, alarm will sound. The alarm does sound. It announces my freedom. It opens on an alley. The dumpsters smell of rotten eggs. The reek of homeless piss and the industrial oil recycling containers are in a perfect line, like dead soldiers.
On my way home after I’ve dumped my backpack, I stop in my local EZ Mart. I buy a roller hot dog. Stale bun, all-day chili, jalapeños, mustard, mayo, pump dispenser cheese. Delicious. I steal an Old English 40 oz. Right down the pant leg. I’m getting good at this. The land of opportunity. Thank you, come again.
I find myself thinking about the pharmacist. She’s like a smell. Must be the scented candles near the pharmacy. She’s soapy woodsmoke. She’s sandalwood. I wonder how long it takes to become a pharmacist. What do you study anyway? And why do they wear lab coats to fill up pill bottles? It seems superficial in a very American way. A veneer. The way the paint is always fresh in Las Vegas. This is how we’ve replaced the medicine man. The American shaman wears a lab coat and has a smoke break at 11:30. Sharp.
Other times I think I’d like to go to a hospital. Just to lie there in that bed and watch a TV mounted on the wall. The sweating, beige pitcher of iced water there on the table. A nurse, or a pair of nurses, would come in and check on me. That bed is adjustable and I could make it comfortable. The food wouldn’t be good but who cares about food? I’m perfectly healthy but an IV would be nice. Fluids. Clean sheets. A chart. My personal chart. Hospitals aren’t clean places. They’re teeming with germs and sick people and disease, but just for a while I could stay in that bed. Look out the window on a parking lot with trees. Or look out the window on a highway. People in cars going to see other people. I could rest, hearing the nurses move down the halls, rolling equipment by my room. Weeping people in wheelchairs. The warm, caring nurses. Nurses don’t wear lab coats.
The next day I call out sick and head to the grocery. I don’t usually make back-to-back trips but it’s a beautiful day. My spirits are high. Wandering the aisles looking for a clean-smelling candle. The pharmacist is behind her counter. She’s wearing purple scrubs. This is very unusual. Maybe she’s also in nursing school. I select a candle and she looks at me. Her eyes are brown like molasses. Dark like cigarette burns. Her eyes tell me something. They tell me it’s time to go.
It turns out the grocery manager had been on to me for a while. He’d been waiting. I should not have made back-to-back trips, but I am not immune to the greed of man, be my quest virtuous.
Avocados are a powerful weakness of mine, though I’m allergic. They have a special kind of gravity. They weigh the pockets. I had a fat one down the front of my pants when I marked him. End of the pet food aisle. He stood there as I approached. Fists on hips. A tango pose. Primary-blue polo tucked into khaki trousers. Cuffed.
“The fuck you think you’re doing?” His mouth was a little wet line. I could tell he’d been practicing a speech, but it wasn’t coming out well. He jerked his head. “Let’s go my office…” then some words about police on the way and, of course, jail.
I follow him to his office at the back of the store. It’s a decent office for a grocery store manager. A desk the exact color of a desk. His own bathroom. From the photos he has a family. His little world with everyone in their orbits. He sits and stares at me, about to say something.
“I have to toilet,” I say to the manager. His nameplate says GERALD MOORE.
“You have to toilet?” I can see he thinks this is strange.
“Through there,” he points with his eyes. I’m surprised he lets me go by myself, but he has his own private world, his private desk, his bathroom. His private kingdom. I find his private window in the bathroom.
I stop by the church and find the dumpster empty. I drop the candle inside and the glass breaks. A hollow sound. I keep the avocado. I carry it with me. The skin is soft and warm. I can feel its solid center beneath the soft meat. Above me in the trees, the birds have begun to sing.
Jon Fotch’s work has appeared in Avatar Review, Carbon Culture Review, Euphony Journal, Menda City Review, Mudlark, and Whistling Shade.
