It insults the sophisticate like a sacrilege, to the outlander as alien as unwritten dialect, and both are correct to call it capitalistic.
Miniature marketplace of candy smells and gum, plantless and plastic, an assault upon all things organic, not postmodern but modern, a modern mercantile, with its gleaming tile floors and lurid lights that burn blue and bright – you are blue-collar and sweaty: classless, you are where the classes commingle and coexist.
Who among us doesn’t ever need milk at midnight, Camels, Copenhagen, Coca-Cola, condoms for the cock? Who doesn’t sometimes require chips, a brown banana, an orange, or mushy apple from that wicker mitt atop the industrial microwave built for burritos and pizza pockets and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches that may not make you sick? An ATM? Candy galore, a whole rack devoted to excruciatingly sour things to provide you with your fix? Generic coffee scalding and utterly black?
The small medicine aisle is there for the nights you’re in a pinch: pink Pepto or loparmide, aspirin, ibuprofen, antihistamine, nose drops and eye. Dextromethorphan for the cough and wheeze. (You’ll find them next to the antifreeze.)
Key chains with laser-lights; reflectors for your bikes.
For the gambler, there is lotto, and malt liquor for the drinker, with which to get blotto.
And the dicklike hotdogs are sweating violently on a gunmetal spit. Heaped nachos you smother yourself in day-glo cheese (chili optional) for times you get the hankering, as who among us does not?
Outside the tape-measured door, where tons of slabbed concrete lay gummed with grime, the sandy ashtrays stand tall on either side of firewood-for-sale, and the not-for-sale bikes. Both are stuffed with miscellaneous trash, while week after week, cigarettes collect deep in the curbside gutters, along with last year’s leaves that clack and flutter. The parking lot is crazed with cracks and oozes black, and reeks.
But inside the convenience store, everything is new and clean and bright. The very lights breathe fields of cool. A billion bottles blaze and wink. Multicolored Slurpees to freeze your head tumble like laundry in their big machines (see them through the sudsy windowpanes). Racks of mags – nothing real obscene – newspapers; ads; sunglasses so cheap they’re practically free; the green-smocked staff of questionable pedigree.
Urban or suburban, and burning like a beacon of Western civilization in that oceanic American night – twenty-four hours a day, 366 days a year – the convenience store glows with an inextinguishable light.
December 18th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Interesting piece, but “dick-like hotdogs?”
December 18th, 2009 at 12:35 am
love the new website, ray, but i don’t know what you’re getting at with this.
December 18th, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Ya, Ray, what’s with all the cock talk?
December 18th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
What am I getting at? What’s with all the cock talk?
Get behind me, Philistine.