WAL-MART ATE MY NOVEL! (Part One)

What a feast that must have been! Imagine the Goliath of American Retailing gobbling up these pages, and then—what? Spitting them out? Suffering indigestion? What an indignity!

We had gone to the Goliath to pick up a few things for the week ahead. As usual, I let my wife and her daughter do this work while I went to the built-in McDonald’s to sit in a plastic chair with a cup of coffee and my manuscript and big black notebook. This is a strange thing for me to do: I despise the arrogantly commercial atmosphere of both Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. Years ago I would occasionally force myself to go to our local Wal-Mart to just sit and watch the people: a fascinating, and horrifying, experience. But this was America. Wal-Mart was the American Dream, personified. I had to see it, look at it, study it, in the same way one studies the artifacts in a museum. My wife points out that our weekly journey there is a practical matter: the huge Wal-Mart has everything from shoe laces to cinnamon rolls. One stop takes care of our major needs for the week. And this is true, of course. As a practical matter it makes sense to go to Wal-Mart. But I am not a practical man, so I sneak off to the McDonald’s, get a cup of their coffee—it’s only 75 cents with the senior discount—and sort of crouch down in a plastic chair, spread out my notebook, and do some work. The perversity of this arrangement actually intrigues me. My novels are truly un-American. They are built on an entirely different value system. They will never be sold in a Wal-Mart. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people who shop at Wal-Mart would hate my novels. My way of life grinds against the Wal-Mart interface. In Wal-Mart/McDonald’s I hunker down, duck my head, sneak over to a table at a far corner, and using whatever poetics I can summon, make a subtle foray against the Wal-Mart way of life.

Last Saturday I joined my wife at the checkout counter. Her cart was filled with colorful, cheerful things. Each thing passed through the scanner with a little beep. She paid with a rectangle of plastic. We went outside, pushing the cart, to our car, a nice black ’97 Honda Accord with a V-tec engine. All the bright, cheerful things were put in the trunk. I drove us home, feeling rather cheerful myself—I had written a piece of dialog for the Evidence movie. When we unloaded the car, however, I couldn’t find my notebook. It wasn’t there, in the trunk, with our groceries. In horror I realized I had left it in the shopping cart, in the parking lot of Wal-Mart. I jumped into the Honda, fired up the V-tec engine, and raced back. The notebook wasn’t there. The carts scattered around the area were empty. I went inside to Customer Service, waiting anxiously in line as people returned packages they no longer wanted or which they had found, in some way, lacking. The packages were all cheerful looking, the people all drab and angry. No one had returned my notebook. I went home drab, angry, depressed, alarmed.

I am accustomed to look at events as though they were dreams. If this were a dream, I asked myself, what would it mean? I had lost my novel at Wal-Mart. My dreams had been devoured by the monster. I staggered into my house like a beaten soldier. (More later)