While trying to reach an impossible Zen state on the couch in my basement, my back-laid seething was interrupted by the sound of a door opening, then some light footsteps. Around this time was when my grandfather (colloquially, The Big Dick; formally, Pappy) usually took his nap, and his footfall would’ve been much more laborious than what I was hearing. As such, I figured it was the only other person in our house, my sister Kylie. That, or I was about to be hogtied and have a bag thrown over my head. A couple more footsteps, and yes: my deductive prophecy was confirmed as she emerged from the staircase with a polite how-do-you-do-O-brother-of-mine type smile. I craned my neck to be level with my shoulder and shot my best I’m-fine-thanks-and-how-are-you-O-sister? type smile right back. My hair was a flat, matted mess from cuddling with a pillow, and the blanket strewn over me wasn’t big enough to cover my whole body, so it was awkwardly stretched from my neck to my shins. The new, seven-hour episode of CreepCast played from a far off laptop, and my phone was also laying face-down next to me, where I put it as soon as I heard the door open. At the very least, I had gained enough foresight earlier to pull my pants up before anyone could get the jump on me. It’s a pretty pathetic scene when you have time to study it, but thankfully she came right and ready with something to take both of our minds somewhere beyond this horrible reality.
“Will you go to Walmart with me? I wanted to go to Target, but this Walmart’s closer…”
I was immediately excited at this chance to unsubterraneanize myself, but the idea of getting off this couch to go to a Walmart was less enticing. Apparently sensing my apprehension, she felt the need to really seal the deal, as it were, because she rushed into telling me that I didn’t have to drive, “or anything.” She thanked me when I told her I would go. Another hour on the couch probably would’ve been lethal anyway, Walmart be damned. Then, Kylie wrapped our bleak exchange up in an ominous little bow by saying, “I just didn’t wanna go alone…”
Neither Kylie nor I had ever been to this particular Walmart before, which gave an even greater sense of mystery to our outing. However, I needn’t have been inside every Walmart in America to understand what I was getting myself into. Walmart has become much more than a grocery store. It’s a hydra that never gets a scratch but still keeps regenerating ugly heads, with fangs hanging out of long jowls and staking itself into pre-dug earth. I don’t need to know the area to know that I’m likely to reach a certain point in the store where lights have gone out and will never be replaced, and that I will trod through a particularly sticky patch of floor that I can only assume was poorly mopped after a child vomited part of a footlong from the in-store Subway. Even with the mountainous schnoz protruding from my face far away, I know that I will learn a new combination of unpleasant smells that will emanate from people I would not be in close quarters with under any other circumstances.
Kylie punched the address into Apple Maps, and it was not long past our driveway before we found ourselves on a one-lane backroad. These roads take you on a very picturesque journey before spitting you out in front of some of the great, looming talismen of modern American civilization. Vines growing up the side of archaic buildings are replaced by the Golden Arches; alive and flowing creeks are replaced by guardrails with unfathomable dents in them; and the serene presence of spirits that lived lives you couldn’t possibly picture the truth of is replaced by roaring metal boxes on wheels operated by people you can picture far too easily.
Very soon after being jolted from that psychic/historic journey and once again onto a road with two lanes, I could see a building approaching rapidly, barely obscured by the few trees that were left in these pathetic patches of natural real estate; left to be choked between concrete borders which create a divide between the dying grass and the endless asphalt. Far off, little flashes of yellow and fat streaks of blue began hazing into my vision, coming closer and closer until we reached a stoplight. Now sat still, I was able to fully drink in the composition and marvel at how depressing it is to see a yellow spark plastered onto a compound type building, colored mostly by a darker-than-a-prison-facility shade of gray. But before I could find some long running vein that connected this to life itself, we were in the parking lot, and my manic jumps from pure depressive loathing to really surface level, wax poetic musings were replaced by a deeper, more extreme hatred. There was this giant, fuckoff red pickup angled perfectly to be in the way of about five or six parking spaces. The truck itself wasn’t large enough to create that inconvenience on its own, though; it was towing a fishing boat behind it as well. From the undercarriage rose these tacky, cartoonish decals of orange flames scorching the bottom. I tried very hard to will them into reality so that this pathetic compensation could be dragged to Hell, where it belonged. I even put two fingers up to my temple and clenched my teeth, but it was not so.
I was overcome with the compulsion to take the gum out of my mouth and stick it right on the door handle of this awful obstruction. Yes, I could see it now: The inconsiderate cousinkisser taking all the time to unload his groceries into his backseat, probably loading some cheap booze into a cooler and just shoving his cart away from him into the oblivion of the greater parking lot. Swallowed out of the yokel’s mind by stretching blacktop, HondaToyotaFordHyundais, and choked trees; left exactly where it stopped rolling for a minimum wage employee to locate at the end of the night. All this before reaching for the door and getting a three-finger hold on my flavor-sucked spit sponge and involuntarily gaping his mouth; its edges curled downward in disgust, and his whole face concealed in a shadowy veil under his camo baseball cap. A dramatic scene indeed. But I was with my semi-responsible co-caretaker who wouldn’t let pointless rebellion slide, so I had to keep my pathetic chud rage inside me and walk away with this anger built up in my chest. It was an important preparation before entering the store. A trial, no doubt, as I wouldn’t be able to stick gum on anyone/anything I saw that displeased me. Corporate grocery stores don’t just have big names and a wide reach; they also contain essentials to life and gizmos for leisure. Everyone who’s alive needs to live, and everyone living needs a little something extra that makes the living worth it. Because of this, you’re liable to find any sort of person in a Walmart, and as it is, you must coexist with any sort of person in the confines of the store.
This is a major reason that Walmart terrifies the average American. When you are confronted by the idea that others may live lives very similar to yours, it will become harder to push down your natural compassion and guilt which has been made a symbol of weakness by the masculine culture of our forebears. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to live out the individualistic lifestyle that America has bred you to desire without second thoughts. It’s harder to be comfortable with an “every man for himself” mentality when you see man by himself, playing a game of mental ping pong trying to decide whether or not the total balance of his necessities will break the budget for the month. It’s hard to keep yourself important in your mind when you know that you aren’t the only one like you.
When I was much smaller than I am now, and when my family was complete and nuclear, we took trips to Ocean City almost yearly. I didn’t see it then for the luxury that it is, and I definitely didn’t see the sacrifices I’m sure my dear old folks had to make to ensure that they and two little monsters could live securely throughout the year, and then have a nice little romp in the summer on top of that. I was just happy to get in a car and wake up in a rented condo by the beach, and to float through the boardwalk at night as a family unit. On one particularly gray Beach Day of one particular trip, I was overcome with the human compulsion to explore. It didn’t feel exciting to be where the water breaks anymore, and I hated to be around all these people near the shore*. I wanted to swim farther and farther away. I needed to go out past a reasonable point. And it was entirely without reason. What would I do once I got out far away from all the other swimmers? Tread water and look back at the shore? But I guess there’s some beastly pride to be taken in being the only one looking back from so far away. So, probably through endless whining, I convinced Kylie and my mom to go out farther than any of us had gone before. They didn’t quite share in my enthusiasm for this feat. At many waypoints, they wanted to turn back, but there were always just a couple more yards before I’d be satisfied. And eventually, I guess I was, because I remember reaching some arbitrary part of the ocean and feeling satisfied. But as we rotated ourselves where we stood, none of us could move very easily. When we finally spun to face the beach, we noticed that everyone had gotten out of the water, and were standing in the sand staring at us. That’s when the lifeguard started yelling, “Evacuate the water! Unsafe conditions! Whirlpool!”
I’ve never been a particularly strong swimmer, and although my mother and sister were undoubtedly better than I, it’s much harder to traverse the water with a little boy clung onto you and pushing you down. Sometimes I wonder about how I might’ve looked to anyone standing on the beach getting their fill of faraway tension for the day; pushing Kylie’s head underwater so that I could stay above it. I wonder if they took my panic into consideration before seeing just a rotten child who would rather drown his sibling before going to that mansion in the sky himself. And I wonder how their feelings would change if there had been many families caught in that whirlpool, and everyone tried getting a good hold on the top of a head to stay afloat. If it was harder to discern from the shore through a mess of limbs and splashing water, and if it appeared in a newscycle as a Number Tragedy instead of a Name Tragedy. What then? But I doubt anyone standing on the beach that day remembers my formative Whirlpool Incident, because it was not any kind of tragedy. My sister got out of the water herself, despite her little brother-handicap, and a lifeguard came to rescue my mom and I. She calmed us down and told us how important it was to breathe as she swam us back to safety. When our feet were finally planted back into sand, my dad was just then stumbling up to the shoreline. My sister had to find him in his beach chair and wake him up when she got back.
I was reminded of the crowds gathered on the beach on that dreary day as Kylie and I snaked through aisles in the megastore. Many years later and dry, I could still see large families moving like monster jellyfish in tandem. The large, smooth heads were made up by parents and shopping carts gliding through the smooth, open walkways; and the electric tendrils of the creature were acted out by vibrating and bouncing children. They would pop over to anything that caught their eye for a second, but they were straightened out and pulled on as the head of the king jelly pressed forward. Passing many seacreatures, Kylie and I moved through medicine and vitamins to beauty products and toys, past outdoor gear and to electronics. It was here where me and a very nervous-looking tall dude both did a drive-by glance at the bargain movie bin before making brief eye contact and pushing our carts on. The bin laid in the middle of the walkway that stretched outside the very tiny and dark book aisle. He had on some sort of gray graphic-tee, but it was impossible to tell what was on it with him hunched over his cart like he was. He was sweating profusely, and his hair was thin and jutted out in all directions like a small dog who had just licked an electrical outlet. His eyes were nauseously anxious in their movements. I felt an unfortunate kinship with this fellow because of our shared interest in films we should’ve watched long ago and our sweating nerves. We were surely soul-bonded in some way. As he moved on to new real estate for his eyes to scan, I was slightly disappointed to let the DVDs I eyed pass me by, but the thought of Kylie paying for them, only for me to watch them once–months after purchase–was much more troubling. So, I moved on undaunted.
As Kylie led me through walkways and down aisles, I tried my best to not ram my cart into anyone else’s hip while still avoiding shelves and boxed goods in the middle of the floor. Between these trials of physicality, I was faced with the tiniest, most impossible to decipher glimpses into lives I will never know a thing about. I saw two women in hijabs as we zoomed past the chip aisle–probably deciding between Lays and Utz; and just beyond the shelf opposite to them stood a woman in a sports bra and athletic shorts contemplating sodiepops just as hard. It felt strange to observe these people that seemed to be stationed up and down these long, gray cellblocks. Glass placed at the entrance of any of the corridors would not look out of place, but would send the situation to a perversely voyeuristic realm that nobody wants to experience when shopping for groceries, I hope. But when Kylie began leading me down these aisles, I saw more than vignettes standing around me. I was there long enough to see each of the statues come to life and strut up and down to peruse their choices, and then they would move on. Looking out into what I could see of the greater store from the two shelves we walked by, I saw a man a little older than I who was bound to a wheelchair spinning the wheels with great purpose to reconvene with his parents who had passed my viewpoint a couple seconds before. I turned around and saw that Kylie was nearing the other end, so I swiveled the wheels of my grated perch and pushed it on to catch up.
Every item that she added to the cart was available to anyone else in the store. If there was enough stock, everyone who came in for a pack of GoGo squeeZes could leave happy. And anyone could sort through this same pile of peaches that we were, and everyone would leave with the ripest peach they could find. There was no competition in the produce aisle. Nobody was grabbing a riper looking peach out of anybody’s hands; everyone just grabbed the first ripe one they could find. And they too would leave happy with their peach selection.
When it was all said and done, I was given another surprise as my sister opted to lead me past the self-checkout lines and into a cashier operated one. My sister is strong-willed, we’ll say. She is very confident in her own abilities and in her idea of what is right, and trusts herself to do what she knows must be done, despite any extra work that this will bring. But some obscure constellation must have been visible that night, as here we were unloading the cart onto the cute little treadmill which sluggishly brings forth all the stuff you have to pay for to the cashier. I looked up for a moment and locked eyes with the woman manning the register. She had the typical deadness in her stony gaze of the demoralized wage worker, but she flashed me something more than the typical customer service smile. There was a hint of genuine radiation in the curl of her lips. She was stronger than I, no doubt. The company culture of Walmart would crush me in a week. The daily Walmart Cheer—a strange humiliation ritual Sam Walton was inspired to implement after seeing the staff of a Korean tennis ball factory gather enthusiastically to start their day—would be enough to drain my spirit for a month. And when faced with the possibility of being chosen randomly to lead it, I would sooner quit, start working at Weis, fulfill my duties as a cashier for three months before I’m transferred to the deli in the back where some of the lights are burnt out but nobody cares enough to fix them, and finally submerge myself in the lobster tank out of suicidal boredom.
But seeing this girl with a little life still in her filled me with a great joy, and with a little hope in my heart, I looked around at all the people that were making up this current, ever-changing Republic of Walmart. During my hearty gazing, something finally grabbed my attention for more than two seconds. A big tall fella was stopped up against the far wall of the building, nervously scratching his arms and shifting in place whilst leaning against his cart; just as I had been doing during my tenure in the store. When he flicked his eyes up at me and quickly away, I realized that I had seen him before. It was the dude who I had that special little moment with at the bargain movie bin! Brilliant! I could really drink him in now. And he was quite a sight indeed. Seeing more than just the general shape of his hair, I could see that it was mostly gray. He was definitely balding, and what hair was left was kind of unclean, but not in the way that he himself was unkempt. It was just like he hadn’t taken his daily shower before venturing out to Walmart. And–by God!–he was wearing a Star Wars shirt. Yes, I knew there was something special about this big ole bugger from the moment we had our passing soul-bond. This is a man who I might get along with, had I been born a couple decades earlier. But when I looked into his cart, my stomach started to sweat. Sitting lazily on top of his picks for necessities were two DVDs. Jaws and Inglorious Basterds. The two selfsame films I gave fleeting interest to earlier. He had circled back at some point later into shopping to pick up what we both left behind when our eyes danced nervously up at each other, now free to pick out what he wanted without the competition or judgement of some gutless little punk. Feeling a little lightheaded, it dawned on me that this man was a mere apparition. A projection of myself from the future. My soul-bonding with this fellow and the mere sight of him became much more sinister. He was me, without a doubt–but I didn’t want to be him. In thirty years… Well, by the looks of him, ah… in forty years I will probably still find myself at Walmart from time to time, but I don’t want to be nervous to be here at that point. By then, I hope that my appreciation for this awful building will have grown. Not for the work culture Sam Walton has created, nor for the money that its current CEOs will still be raking in off the backs of minimum wage workers; but for the people who make the building so full. The people that will go out into the world after they’re done shopping or working and live lives I know nothing of, but who all the same make up a great population of individuals who I am lucky to be a part of. It is this community of individuals that America was built off the back of, and which has remained as one of the only ways that I can find it in myself to have any sort of national pride. There is nothing anyone who runs a Walmart or a country could do that could possibly make me less proud of that.
As I pushed my grated, now bagfull, once-nervous perch back across the parking lot to Kylie’s car, I noticed that the big fuckoff truck was gone. It was off on some road I can’t name going somewhere I couldn’t guess, and its driver’s side door handle was untarnished by my gum. It occurred to me as I was transferring bags to the trunk that perhaps the poor parking job was done out of haste instead of belligerence. The image I had conjured in my mind earlier of some young redneck strolling through the parking lot with a puffed up chest and with his arms outfixed as if he had impossible latissimus muscles was fizzling away as the sun began to redden and slowly begin its descent below the horizon I knew. It was replaced by visions of a family-man running into the store and booking it straight for the pharmacy to get some medicine for a wife who had fallen unbearably ill mid-roadtrip; still strapped in the passenger seat and curled in pain like a warning snake. But I didn’t see any wife in the passenger seat when we got here, so it was probably just some belligerent douche. Nevertheless, both of those people are probably in multiple Walmarts right now, and they will be for as long as a Walmart is open in America.