I’m not exactly sure what it is about those big box stores...

I’m not exactly sure what it is about those big box stores that seem to attract the teeming dregs of humanity—most of them are cheap, and so attract people who are poor, who are naturally a bit less…sophisticated I guess you’d say, and more prone to unpleasantness by virtue of their circumstances—but just about every time I wind up going to one of these places—because I am poor—I find myself full of bitterness and bad vibes—because I am prone to unpleasantness by virtue of my circumstances ie being in one of these giant stores (note: I am talking about Wal-Mart here: you knew that, right? Right), surrounded by this broken, gross throng, squeezed into the groaning and overstocked aisles by the forces of corporate greed and consumerist lust.

There is always something to marvel at when you wander this place. Old people who look minutes from death, cruising around on electric carts, the baskets full of gallons of strawberry soda; a whole family of rednecks, the parents strung out and hollow-eyed, snapping at their filthy children; two separate people—an incredibly obese white woman and a middle-aged black man—wearing t-shirts that read SARCASM: THE BODY’S NATURAL RESPONSE TO STUPID; an entire bewildering panoply of freaks and weirdos that cause the mind to reel with reactions varying from wonder to disgust.

There was a man there, making his way through the store, that caught my eye. It’s hard to say exactly what it was that was so striking about him. He was old and gnarled, but not much more than anyone else in the store, and wearing a dirty green t-shirt with suspenders. He somewhat resembled William Murderface from the popular cartoon Metalocalypse, but again, this is not an exception to the rule: a lot of the people in the store, regardless of gender, looked kind of like Murderface. In addition to all this, his dark and tangled hair was bound up in a pair of pigtails, looking not unlike that famous photo of Frank Zappa. 

I gotta get a picture of this guy, I thought to myself, and began following him, hoping to snap a picture with the shitty camera that’s on my phone. I was hot on his heels, just a couple of steps behind him, close enough to see the flecks of dandruff like chips of ice in his pigtails, waiting for him to stop, or turn back toward me so I could get a glimpse, but he was relentless, plowing on through the frozen foods section, head down, not stopping. 

As I made my way behind him, though, I began to notice the other people in the store. As we passed a woman, she turned to her husband, who was walking toward the man with the pigtails me, and motioned with her eyes for him to look at the man. The husband looked over, and he and the wife shared a smirk.

(A side note here: the smirking husband, who thought the man was so hilarious? He was meth-head skinny, his ropy arms covered in tattoos, wearing a camouflage cowboy hat, with teardrops inked into the corners of his eyes: what right does he have to laugh at anyone?)

It continued: a mother wearing combat fatigues with her two daughters turned inward and giggled to themselves as the man made his way past them; a toddler did an actual, honest-to-god double take when she saw him; a gang of hispanic teenagers burst into laughter as soon as the man was out of earshot. We rounded the corner, the man and I, and I saw the woman in the fatigues snapping an indiscreet photo with her hot pink iphone. 

And there we were, the lot of us, and I was one of them, this crowd of mean-spirited and petty assholes, grouped together to make fun of this poor man who just wanted to come to this place, and buy his goods, and make his way to his home. A man who gave us—a bunch of shithead monsters to the last—the benefit of the doubt, something we weren’t willing to give him. 

He was buying chocolate milk and bologna.