Ok,
Time for the trashiest thing I’ve ever seen– Back in March of ‘06, I went to Biloxi, Mississippi to do some post Hurricane Katrina volunteer work… dealing with FEMA and all sorts of fun…
At the time there was very little hotel availability near Biloxi, construction crews and displaced families had it pretty well booked solid… So I decided to stay in Mobile, Alabama–about an hour to the east, and commute to Biloxi each day.
Now, some of the things I saw surrounding the Hurricane and Recovery make for a pretty good set of stories, but that is for another time.
I decide one night to take advantage of my micro-fridge and get something other than take out/fast food… So, I find the local Super Wal Mart.
Now, for those of you who don’t know, Mobile, Alabama lent it’s name to the trailer a/k/a the Mobile Home… not ‘mobile home”
Truly one of the great centers of American society and culture. This of course means that I suspected that this Wal-Mart would be something of an “Alpha Wal-Mart.” I was right, but could not have, in my wildest imagination, began to have conjured up what I was about to witness…
First of all, the Old South is alive and well. Don’t let Northern Virginia or Myrtle Beach, SC fool you… You just have to go far enough to find it. Rest assured, Mobile. Alabama is far enough.
It was a Monday evening, around 7 or 8pm. I was figuring on digging up one of Hormel’s kick-ass microwaveable entrees. The Beef Roast Au Jus will knock the socks off of Granny’s pot roast, beleive it. I wanted a bottle of acceptable red wine (nothing special, just a Kendall Jackson Cabernet, which was Wal-Mart priced at $13 a bottle, as opposed to the $19 it runs in a PA State Liquor Store)
– and a couple good, crusty french bread dinner rolls… My mission was simple… so I thought.
The parking lot yielded few clues as to the experience that awaited me inside Sam Walton’s baby Gorilla… The usual pick-up trucks, SUVs, an occaisional rebel flag license plate or decal… I could have just as easily been in Southwestern Pennsylvania— until I walked through the sliding doors, the positive air pressure blower blasting me in the face like the winds of un-change.
Immediately I knew I was somewhere else… there were all sorts of interesting people… Middle aged white women wearing pink woolen suits stright out of Jackie O’s wardrobe. (On a Monday night… confused the hell out of me, but I saw three such women, dressed like they were going to the country club for dinner, circa 1962.)
There were similarly dressed middle aged black men and women. I thought that people in the store who were all dressed up at 8 o’clock on a Monday night while shopping at Wal-Mart were a bit odd, but in a strangely charming “Old Southern Class” sort of way… These people were clearly the minority.
Myself, I was wearing a Dr. Dre T-shirt and Pittsburgh Pirates baseball cap and jeans–gotta represent, baby!
There were a number of normal people, thugged out younger black guys and girls (whom I oddly felt the most connected to- KoolAidMan lived in a project or two in his youth) Young mothers fighting their children, with their frayed sanity on the line… Bratty little shits who seemed intent on taking my knee to their heads as they darted through the aisles…
Other than the overdressed, and a few more NASCAR shirts and hats than I’m used to… the Wal-Mart was like any other I’d ever been in… and then I took my place in the the checkout aisle (all were hopelessly log-jammed)… behind… them.
A beast of man was hunched over a shopping cart, as if the act of waiting were taxing his physical resources to the point of exhaustion… His torn and ripped “Rick Mast” (he used to drive the #1 skoal bandit car) t-shirt receding northward faster than the Arctic Ice Cap… leaving what seemed like miles of stretch-marked side-gut oozing up over his filthy gray sweat pants… a gleaming stream of sweat pouring through the hairy lowlands of his northern ass crack… A mop of greasy red hair scattered about his head, neck folds and shoulders… a true sight to behold.
The female of the tribe caught my attention next… this house of a woman seemed to be digging through both shopping carts, maybe arranging things so the cashier gets everything together… as I watched more intently… begging the question of why they make stretchy pants in a size 68 chunk… I noticed that she was actually taking some items and placing them in the child’s seat for some reason…. The thought of whether or not these two had ever mated, and in fact, whether or not it was physically possible sent a pang through my empty stomach…
I tried to put away the bad thoughts… she was wearing one of those old cross colors t-shirts, the kind with Bugs Bunny and Tweety dressed all ‘hip hop’ on them.
Bugs Bunny dressed like Kriss Kross---Jump! Jump!
It was badly faded, and carried what appeared to be a mustard stain on the left bulbous hulking mass that had to be either a breast or an upwardly mobile gut roll… greasy bleach blonde hair pulled back with a head band, so you could see her late 30-something forehead, which looked like the lunar surface… if the moon had active red and yellow volcanoes… I shit you not, on top of it all… she was missing the majority of her lower front teeth… I noticed this when she interrogated what appeared to be children, 3 of them, approaching… not a damned one of em over the age of 14 or under 200lbs… “Dr. Thunder or Root Beer?”—
As they answered, all sounding half retarded… or maybe they just had speech impediments… who knows… She actually began to bust into a couple warm 12 packs of Wal-Mart’s store brand sodas and pass them out. I saw the daughter, tightly flanked by her two brothers, (an interlude to her evening, perhaps?)
She said “Baawbby, you hafffta hold mine, I gots the cheeekens”
It was then that my quiet disdain turned to a strange sort of amused horror… Like rubbernecking at the scene of an auto accident and watching a severed leg, complete with one testicle, fall out from under the white sheet… but this was worse… I saw them… the “cheeekens.”
Briefly, when I came into the store, I thought about giving up on my roast for one of the gaggel of rotisserie chickens that Wal-Marts display, hot, ready and packed to go… right near the entrance/check out aisles…
Bwittney, as I learned her name was (from Baawbby tewwing her to ‘take youw dawcta Funder, I’m hungwy’), was carrying the mother load… two fresh cooked rotisserie chickens…
I thought to myself, they’re gonna have a picnic in the damned parking lot… nope, not a chance… I watched the mother crack open a bag of sams club cheese curls (which aren’t bad, by the way, for being generic)– and of course, this is the family sized bag, and hand it to the unnamed son, whose facial expression and haircut reminded me of ‘Gomer Pyle’ in Full Metal Jacket.
Turns out the mother had also been building a stable sort of resting place for the cheekens, atop the groceries… There was still one overstuffed cart ahead of them…
As the family was about to drop dead of starvation, they did what any good family would do— they tore into those chickens like a pack of dingos would rip into a baby with bacon stapled to its face.
Right there in the goddamned store… tearing into two chickens with the bare hands… Dad finally mustered the strength to straighten out his back, no doubt creating a natural wonder, “Crack Gusher Falls,” in the process… So he could get at the cheekens…
You know how messy even fried chickens are to eat… let alone whole rotisserie chickens without utensils, all of them, with their cans of wal-mart pop and with the bag of cheese curls being passed around…. I was watching the grease and cheese dust become one with these people… I feared that they may unite, not unlike Voltron, into a massive beast of cheesy-cheeken-grease… shooting bones and feral hungry glances around the store…
I’m from Fayette County, Pennsylvania… a den of poverty and somewhat ‘backwoods’ folks (with a healthy mix of ghetto in a few of the larger communities)… people half-jokingly call it “Fayettenam.”
Even that did not begin to prepare me for what I was seeing… it was the complete de-evolution of Homo Sapiens –I expected them to hunch over and sprout more body hair, dragging knuckles… to become Homo Erectus before my very eyes.
As it came to be their turn to begin to check out, Bwitney handed the cashier the tops of the chicken containers, the cashier didn’t bat an eyelash…
I think that disturbed me the most… even more than the fact that in ten minutes the death toll was two chickens, a giant bag of cheese curls, at least 9 cans of soda pop, and a few slices of bread that the father used to stuff into his gullet in between chunks of rotisserie cheeken flesh.
These people are out there… and in Mobile, Alabama… they don’t surprise anyone… If you haven’t yet, rent Idiocracy… because the future is closer than you think… and you need to be prepared.
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