shopping spree

The beginning of the end was pretty tame.

He walked into the local Food Lion to buy some Pop Tarts before heading to work. The aisle was blocked by three middle-aged women fighting over a jar of mayonnaise. He stopped to watch this spectacular spectacle unfold in front of him. While he stood there, he wondered why anyone would use spectacular spectacle to describe something.

The first woman was big. Not tall, but fat. Her arms were larger than his thighs, but none of it was muscle. She needed mayonnaise like he needed reminders of his ex-girlfriend.

The second woman was tiny. Twiggy tiny. Her legs were as wide around as the cardboard that a roll of paper towels is wrapped around.

The third woman – who happened to be holding the jar everyone so eagerly wanted – had on a Pixies t-shirt and nerd glasses. Her curly hair looked like an afro that hadn’t been combed in weeks.

“I have three kids!” the fat woman said loudly. “They need this more than you do.” She said directly to the skinny woman.

“Well, if we’re going by need, I’d say I need it the most!” Twiggy yelled right back.

“Well, I got to it first, so I’m taking it,” afro woman said.

“Ladies, why are we fighting over a jar of mayo?” I said.

All three looked at me curiously. Then back at each other. Then back at me.

Twiggy spoke up.

“You haven’t heard?” she said.

I stared back in silence.

“He hasn’t,” the fat one said in disbelief.

“Do you not have television?” afro added.

“I have not heard of anything, and no, I do not have a television. They seem so…pointless.”

They laughed at me and went back to fighting. He ambled his way through the melee.

Suddenly, he noticed that the shelves were pretty vacant. As always, the Sex Pistols churned through his mind at the mention of those two words together. He got to the Pop Tarts and saw one measly box of Vanilla Ice Cream flavored ones.

“I guess it’ll have to do,” he said, taking the box in his hands.

Walking to the cash registers, he noticed another thing, no one was paying.

“Odd,” he thought to himself. He found the short, balding manager of the store. He had glasses and a whiny Irish accent – if such a thing is even possible.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The manager looked up at him and started chuckling.

“Here’s two bucks,” he said to the now hysterically laughing polo-shirted man. “You can’t say I didn’t pay whenever the cops show up.”

The two dollars dropped from his hands to the floor.

“They’re worthless kid,” he finally spoke. “You have no idea, do you?”

“Not at all,” he said, not waiting to find out the answer. Why? Because it dawned on him that he needed to get some beer.

He got in his car and drove 20  miles west. There was a small mom-and-pop beer craft beer store down the road. He got there and it was still closed. Lucky for him, he got up early this morning.

Getting out of his car, he noticed a din of activity everywhere. It seemed like the day before Christmas, but it was August 3. All the shops were buzzing.

At the door, he knocked. He knew the owners and knew they’d be there. Gracie came to the door, peered outside and saw who it was and clicked the door.

“Inside, fast!” she said in a hushed, but excited tone.

He slinked inside the door, and looked around. All the shelves were empty, but the floors were full of boxes. Each one filled with bottles and cans of beer.

Finally, his interested was piqued.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked Gracie, who was by now joined by her husband Jeff.

“It’s the end, my friend. The end.” Jeff said.dd

“The end of what?”

“Life as we know it.”

“You’ve got to explain a little better.”

“You really haven’t seen?” Gracie asked as she grabbed two boxes of beer and walked over to the basement entry. He was one of a select few people who knew about the basement storage site under the store. It was an old bomb shelter, built in the 1950s, that Gracie and Jeff didn’t know about until one day when the termite man showed up and asked if they wanted it bombed as well.

“No, I haven’t. I woke up this morning, wanted a Pop Tart and watched three ladies fight over a jar of mayo. Now I come here to get some beer, because some kind of run on stores is happening and I don’t want to be unprepared.”

“We’re all unprepared.” Jeff said. “And if you want some beer, just take a few cases. Pretty soon, it’ll all be gone.”

“What do you mean?”

“The roads, they’re all closed going west,” he said. “The military aren’t letting anyone leave.”

“Wait a minute. I drove west to get here.”

“From the island?”

“Yes, from the island.”

“It’s only the main highway. But I’m sure they’ll get to your road soon enough.”

“And there’s a curfew at 5 p.m. tonight,” Gracie added.

“What?” he said incredulously.

“They’re shutting down the entire east coast, my friend. Go home, get ready for the shit to hit the fan.”

He grabbed six cases of really good beer. Put them in the back of his car. Going back inside, Gracie and Jeff were almost done putting the beer in the cellar.

“How much do I owe ya?” he asked.

“Nothing, my friend. Money doesn’t mean anything. It’s just friends and enemies now. I consider you a friend.”

They shook hands and he left.

He had one more stop – the old Roses department store. If things were really about to get “shut down” he knew something else he needed.

Getting to the store, it was oddly open. Cashiers stood at their posts. But they weren’t paying attention to customers, they were watching a television. The president was speaking.

“My fellow Americans,” he began. “This is a time of unprecedented action. We don’t do this lightly.”

He decided to go finish what he came to this store for. He got a shopping cart and headed to the outdoors section. There, he grabbed as many fishing poles and pieces of tackle and fishing line as he could find. If the supermarkets were going to be empty soon, he’d need a way to get food. Fishing was about it, on an island.

Lastly, he grabbed seeds. He took the entire display of vegetables. He found it odd that no one had hit up Roses yet. I guess being in a bad location was good for him today.

As he exited the store, the president continued:

“These are your friends. Your family. Your spouses and your children. But for the good of the rest of the country, North Carolina’s coast must become a quarantine zone.

“I wonder what the fuck is going on?” he thought after those words. But for now, he just wanted to get  home. Call his girlfriend and make sure she was on her way home.

“Looks like I won’t be moving out afterall,” he chuckled as he started up his car. Full tank of gas and Lucero playing on the stereo.

“Punk rock girls and Lone Star beer,” Ben Nichols bellowed. “Tonight’ll be ok…”

The white Lando Calrissian

“Wow,” I said out loud, kind of thinking saying wow is sort of dorkish, “I’ve never gotten into a fistfight over Star Wars before,” at once realizing that the rest of the statement made it all a moot point.

She looked at me and patted me on the head. It hurt a little. Not my pride. No, my head. It’s where the guy who insisted on telling me that “No, Return of the Jedi, was never actually called Revenge of the Jedi” had hit me on the noggin with his chair. It bled a lot. But in the end, he bled more. And he was wrong.

Thankfully, no one had a smartphone. It would have kept the whole thing from happening. It also would have kept me from meeting Rose.

She’d been sitting off in the distance while I was eating my pastrami sandwich. I’d driven 113 miles for this sandwich, so I was going to enjoy it. And while I was, indeed enjoying it, I noticed Rose sitting by herself in the booth next to the jukebox. She had long red hair, curly red hair, and deep blue eyes. She was wearing a Hunter S. Thompson t-shirt and a pair of oddly orange plaid shorts. I actually think I have a pair very similar to them. So, I decided to go up to her and talk about those orange plaid shirts.

It wasn’t normal for me to go up to strangers. Especially women. Except on the job. There, I talked to just about anyone. Even if in “real” life I’d never have the guts to do so. I’ve always thought that somewhere in my mind that’s why I became a journalist. Because it forced me to talk to people, and I wasn’t going to do it any other way. Unless they came up and talked to me. And how often does that happen to a guy like me? Not very often, I’ll settle on.

I finished my sandwich a little quicker than I would have liked, but I had a new goal. It was now I drove 113 miles for a chance to talk to this redheaded beauty. She couldn’t have been sent here by anyone other than God. Well, by fate, at least since I don’t really believe in God so much.

I took my final swig of lemonade – don’t drink carbonated sodas anymore – and walked up to her. I stood in front of her and stalled. My mind raced about. “This is not what you want to be doing,” I thought to myself. “She’s going to freak out. You’re some random dude with a shaved head and a long-ass goatee standing and staring at her.”

“Yes, you would freak me out if you did that,” she suddenly said without looking up from her book – “The complete history of Star Wars”.

“Did I say that out loud?” I asked.

“Yep, you sure did,” she said, putting her straw to her lips and sucking up a swig of Diet Coke. I’d noticed earlier what she was drinking when she got a refill.

“Whoops. Well, now you know why I don’t talk to strangers.”

“Did you just say that to the beat of Rick Springfield?” she asked.

“I don’t think so, but I did hear that in my head as I was saying it.”

“So did I,” she laughed. Good sign I thought. And I waited a second to make sure it was just a thought, not an utterance.

“May I sit down?” I asked.

“Only if you tell me exactly what you were originally planning on saying to me when you so awkwardly approached me,” she countered, taking another swig of Diet Coke, this time staring me down as she did.

“Well, I was sitting over there,” I pointed to the table I was at.

“And you were wolfing down that pastrami sandwich …” she said spinning her hands in the air as if to tell me to speed it up a bit. Kind of like Peyton Manning does when he’s trying to run through plays in the no-huddle.

“And I was wolfing down a fantastic pastrami sandwich that I drove 113 miles one-way to have, when I noticed your shorts. Well, I noticed you first, and then your shorts…”

“Just the shorts?” she interrupted coyly.

“Well, and your hair and eyes.”

“Nothing else?”

“And the Hunter S. Thompson shirt.”

“Nothing else?”

“Um, and you were drinking Diet Coke.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, that’s about it.”

“Continue then…” with the same waving arm motion.

“So, I thought, ‘Damn, I love those shorts. I have a pair just like them. This is a sign to at least go up to her…’”

“And make a bloody fool out of myself.”

“Yes, and make a bloody fool out of myself. And may I say, I love that you use bloody.”

“Why thank you,” you may sit down now.

We laughed and joked for another five minutes when Return/Revenge guy walked up.

“Hey Rose,” he said. “What are you doing with that guy?”

“Having some nice conversation, Charlie, that’s what I’m doing,” she replied angrily.

“I see,” he said, sizing me up. Charlie was about 5-foot-9 and weighed in at 225-230 pounds. None of it was muscle.

I looked at Rose, she looked back. Not showing her cards, I thought.

“You guys know each other well?” I asked.

“She’s my step sister,” Charlie said. I felt better. I looked at Rose for confirmation. I got none.

“Why are you talking to this clown,” he said, motioning at me. Obviously, this was not a brother-sister conversation.

“Because he’s sweet and charming and handsome. So, everything you aren’t,” she said. “Plus, he knows more about Star Wars than anyone I’ve ever met.”

I was a little shocked by that comment. We hadn’t mentioned a word of Star Wars in our talks, at least that I could remember. I hadn’t even mentioned the book she was reading. I looked at Charlie, and it dawned on me. He was dressed up like Lando Calrissian, blue shirt and all.

“No shit?” he said looking at me, then her, then me again.

“Yep,” she said. “I think you two should do a quiz off!”

I looked at her with desperate eyes. I knew a lot about Star Wars, but I didn’t know that much. Probably not as much as someone who dressed up like a pretty minor character in a popular eatery near the college.

“You’re on!” Charlie said, plopping down in the seat next to Rose. “And the loser has to eat whatever the winner wants out of her shoes!”

I found that a pretty odd request. I found Rose’s reaction to it, even more odd.

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” she screamed, taking off her shoe – a green Adidas running shoe that had seen better days.

She finally looked at me and winked.

“May the best man win,” she said.

Soon we were reeling off questions to each other. Each of us started off with what we thought were softball questions, and we were both right. The answers being Ewok and 1138. But the questions instantly got harder.

After 25 minutes, we’d both stayed perfect. That’s when I started to get bored. I wanted to talk to Rose, not some guy. And I let an easy one slide. “What was the original name of ‘Return of the Jedi?’” I asked.

Charlie snickered. “You think you can trick me?” he said. “Of course not! They never changed the name.”

“Ha!” I said. “It was Revenge of the Jedi. They even made posters that said it, sent them out, and had to recall them at the last minute.”

“Bull shit!” Charlie yelled.

“Nope. You lose jack,” I said, looking at Rose’s shoe.

Then a punch. It hit me square in the ear. It didn’t hurt as much as Brad Pitt made it seem like in “Fight Club.” But it did startle me. Enough to fall out of my chair. I got back up and threw a punch back, right into Charlie’s nose. It started to bleed. He lunged for me, but missed as I stepped aside. He grabbed a chair and leveled it right on my head. I fell in a heap. Blood everywhere.

I got up, staggering and kicked the fucker right in the balls. He fell. I kicked his face. He bled some more. I turned about and grabbed Rose’s shoe.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, breathing heavily.

“Second best idea you’ve had all day,” she said.

“And what was the first?”

“The urge to eat Pastrami,” she said.

I smiled and felt my teeth. One was chipped, I could feel it. I hadn’t chipped a tooth since I was in college. And that time I bit down on a spoon. Yep, the wild life.

We walked outside just in time to avoid the cops. A mall security guy had called them. Told them to look for a “Keifer Sutherland looking guy” and “a white Lando Calrissian.” The cops, obviously, weren’t in any hurry to arrive on this scene, so we walked right by them.

Ten minutes later, we were at a Tasty Freeze enjoying some more conversation and a couple of sundaes. I’d completely forgotten I had to be at work later that night.