A young man in a jacket with the hood over his head stood in aisle No. 8 in a nonchalant grocery store on the softened edge of a small Southwest American town that knew no better than what the day and night gave it.
He was looking over the selection of mayonnaise the store had there. The vast number of choices boggled his mind. He threw the hood back off his head and played with his mangled, tangled hair. He considered purchasing true, authentic, real mayonnaise. He picked up one of the jars and it weighed almost as much as a plump cantaloupe. It was far too much, he decided, and put it back. Then he was drawn to something called Wonder Whip. Undecided, he just shook his head. He looked up and down the aisle and was glad he was the only one there. Cliché soft pop music played from the invisible speaker system. It made the skin on his skull crawl.
A few moments later, a woman in a dressy red coat came up the aisle and stood right next to him. She was studying the mayonnaise and wonder whips as well. She was so close to him that their arms were touching. He couldn’t believe it. The young man took one step to his left.
The woman took notice of his discomfort. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
He turned to look at her. She had twirly red hair to match her coat and wore too much makeup, and the plastic surgery was obvious. “Nothing’s wrong… I was worried that perhaps I was in your way.”
She looked at him intensely and smiled, her artificial skin glowed like grease beneath the bright store lights. “You aren’t in my way at all,” she said in a sultry, drawn-out tone. “I suppose you could say I’m a people person and… Well, to be honest, I just like to be close to others. It’s comforting. See, I’ve suffered some terrible losses in my life. Just terrible. More terrible than any human being should ever have to endure.”
The young man rubbed at his nose with a fist and tried to smile. “I’m sorry to hear that.” Then feeling somewhat ashamed or embarrassed or whatever it was, he took a step closer to her so that their arms were touching again. He listlessly pointed. “My dad wants some of this mayonnaise stuff for his sandwiches, but I have no idea which one to get,” he said. “Why does there have to be so many?”
The woman rolled her eyes in negative agreement. “Tell me about it,” she said. “That’s the whole problem with this so-called modern society of ours. They give us far too many choices. It’s overwhelming and time consuming. We are forced to expend so much energy on needless things while what matters most is set aside because we are just plain wore out.” She put her arms out in front of her in a gesture of: Just look at all this! And she slowly rotated like a ballerina in a box. “An entire aisle dedicated to condiments. It’s abhorrent.”
The young man would have agreed if he had known what abhorrent meant. He just dumbly smiled.
“You would think humanity would have more pressing things to attend to than coming up with 100 different kinds of ketchup,” she continued. “What about starvation? Or the problems of war or disease or pollution or poverty? Why isn’t anyone sitting around thinking about all that?”
She gazed at him for an answer, her eyes wide and mad with eccentric high voltage. “I don’t know why,” he said.
She heartily gestured with her arms once more and made a lackluster trumpeting sound with her plumped up mauve mouth. “Because of all this! They’re all so god damned concerned with products… Coming up with products, advertising products, displaying products, selling products,” and she craned her neck toward the ceiling and grimaced. “And building these… These grotesque cathedrals of products!”
She clamped her hands upon his shoulders and got uncomfortably close to his face. “Do you realize what the world would be like if we could undo all that has been done!? Just imagine if only we could erase all the bloody parking lots and all the buildings and all the materials and people that went into every grain of rock, stone and glass, every piece of wood, every wire, every length of pipe… Every, every everything! I’ll tell you this, young man… I imagine it. I imagine it every day. I even go down to my church twice a week and give the little man there a quarter so that my prayers will be answered before anyone else’s.” Her emotions suddenly drooped. “But it’s like God is the god damn lottery… I never win.” And she pulled her hands away from him and looked down at the shiny floor for a few moments. She was softly mumbling something he could not understand.
The young man became concerned that a lunatic had hitched herself to him and would never let him be. He took her pause of madness as opportunity, and he quickly snatched a jar of mayo from the shelf and started to walk away.
“Wait!” the woman cried out when she noticed his departure, and she trotted after him. She put a hand on his shoulder again, this time with a more forceful grip and one that turned him. “Don’t you care that as a society we put greater importance on products than we do people!? Don’t you care that people are diving off buildings because someone chose the love of things over plain old wonderful love!?” Her eyes bounced rapidly back and forth during the time of her latest concerned gaze at him. A tear came out of an eye, rolled down her painted face, and dangled at her jawline before falling.
The young man pulled away from her and nervously fumbled for an answer. “Sure, I care. I care very much about the state of the world… But right now, I really need to get home so my dad can have this mayonnaise for his sandwich. He’ll refuse to eat it without, and he needs to eat because he’s a diabetic. I care about that as well, mam. Have a good night.” He moved with purpose to the checkout, paid, and quickly rushed out of the store.
The young man clutched the sack holding the jar of mayonnaise and walked as fast as he could toward home. His body of quick pace skimmed along the outer face of an adobe wall that separated Spanish-style homes from the streets.
Where he was in the city was higher up and he could gaze down onto the floor of the inhabited desert, and it was like a gridwork of multi-colored lights and lines. He could make out popping blues and reds that indicated police were in action. He gazed north to the modern complex bathed in white and fizzing light that was his high school. He could see the massive parking lot and the rectangular piece of green and oval metal glint around it that made the football stadium. He was glad to be breathing the night air despite its tint of poisoned atmosphere.
He looked up and the light pollution slowly faded, and the sky grew deeper and darker, and he could see that orgasmic splash of silver screaming stars across the witch pitch firmament. He saw the spinning planets and man’s rushing satellites and golden green comets and he thought about the mad rant of that crazy woman in the grocery store and wondered if she wasn’t all that mad after all. His heart was pounding. She had really shaken him up.
Once the young man got home, he unlocked and went through the door by the garage and into the kitchen. He shed his coat and hung it on a peg. He set the grocery store bag on the table and withdrew the jar of mayonnaise and set it down as well.
His father looked up at him and struggled to smile. The run-down man had set out in waiting before him: a plate, packages of sandwich meat and cheese, iceberg lettuce leaves peeled from a fresh head, a slice of wet tomato, a loaf of bread, and an empty glass next to a half gallon of milk. “I thought you would never get back,” he said in a grainy voice, and he shakily reached for the jar of mayonnaise that his son had opened and broken the freshness seal on.
“Sorry about that, pop,” he said. “Some crazy old lady started talking to me at the grocery store about all that’s wrong with the world.”
The father seemed disinterested as he spread the mayo across the bread slices with a shining silver butter knife. He grunted. “There’s a lot of crazy people…” and he pointed with the knife, “Out there.”
The young man pulled out one of the kitchen table chairs and sat down in it. He looked across at his father who was meticulously assembling his sandwich. “Do you ever wonder if it’s the crazy people that might be right about everything and the ones we think of as normal are the actual madmen?”
His father raised his eyebrows at that notion before taking a big bite out of the sandwich he held before him with two hands. He thought as he chewed. He picked up the glass of milk he had poured and took a long drink. He ran a paper napkin across his mouth. “Now that’s a thought that should be taken seriously.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. You should pursue it.”
They sat there in complete quiet as the father finished his sandwich and left the table. The young man watched him as he slowly shuffled off to the recliner in his den that sat in front of a large television. The father made an old man groan as he settled into his favorite spot. The television illuminated and soon the son heard the crack of a bat on a baseball and the sound of cheers and frenzied announcers that followed drowned out everything.
After the young man cleaned the kitchen, he went and stood in the opening to his father’s den. The older man was already snoring. He came around to the front of him and laid his favorite blanket out across his resting body and soul. He looked down and watched as the older man slept and it wasn’t long before the son saw himself in the exact same position in 50 years or so. He left a lamp on but turned the volume of the television down to just an audible softness.
The young man then went to the large window in the front living room and pulled the curtain aside so he could look out and say “goodnight” to the once classic world. The glow of the city out and below had somewhat dimmed, but the moon above was bright and thriving. Then he heard the calling and felt the vibrations of their entrance from somewhere else, and there suddenly on the quiet street beneath a streetlamp pink glow came a herd of ancient people, and they were barely clothed, and they held magic and creation and civilization in all their hands and their throng cast hopeful as they made their way into the new world to forge an old way of maddening and wonderous life.
END
CEREAL AFTER SEX 