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80's Night at the Publix
Nov. 9th, 2010 10:43 pmTurned out tonight was 80's night at the Publix off of North.
Walked in, after a long shift, to pick up a few things for dinner later. The 5 o'clock shuffle of the living dead was in full effect. Everyone post-time card drunk on forced Grin and Catatonics. Exhausted nurses in blue scrubs shaking off the death funk, living business suits feeding off the hosts that propelled them, grad school-shocked students lost in the glare outside their papers, recently off-duty security guards sunk under the pistol's weight strapped to their hip... all chained to the green baskets or self-navigating shopping carts.
Overhead the intercom system blared the greatest hits of Big Country, Culture Club and the Human League. Underneath the shoppers mindlessly chanted along, seranading the cans of soup of flashing Blue Tooth's with a chorus of - "Don't/don't you want me?/ You know I can't believe it/ When I hear that you won't see me."
Well, needless to say, I found the whole scene a little too 'Temple of Doom' for my tastes. Already turned around to walk back out, when the League segued into the opening chords of the Clash's 'Train in Vain'.
Froze on the spot as if the law had just laid its heavy hand down upon my shoulder. Turned back in slow motion. Listened to make sure I had heard correct. Confirmed it on the opening lyrics.
In the parlance of the youth - "Aw, hell no!"
Reached into the bottomless depths of my bomber's interior pocket, plunging my fist back through the decades, combing my fingers through the detritus of forgotten pop culture kitsch. Finally I felt what I needed buried under an old Rubix Cube and mummy wrapped in the cord of a cassette walk man's headphones. My old sunglasses, with the narrow pink frame and dark tinted uni-visor so I looked like Scott Summers on casual Friday.
"Activate Retro Vision!" I shouted for no reason at all except for the distant hope that somehow, somewhere, someone might be watching.
On command, a neon supernova sparked off the lens of my shades and engulfed the entirety of the supermarket's interior. The labyrinth shelves of the aisles and the registers at the checkout line vanished, leaving only a gallery of silhouettes before my vision.
When the blast's glare subsided, and the supermarket rematerialized out of the passing haze, everyone inside found themselves replaced by the people they were in 1987 - the year I traded my virginity in exchange for lessons in shamanistic punk-magick.
The grad students were all but gone. Most of the employees and the cop working the door had been attenuated into childhood if not reduced to outright infancy. As were a lot of the just off shift medical staff. A handful of elderly couples now found themselves in their early forties rather than seventies. But it was the business drones that proved my favorite. Gone the sports jackets and ties and meticulously laid out outfits reeking of bad coffee and stale meeting sweat.
What remained was a glorious tribe of savages - big hair frizzed up into a cloud puffs or soaked under Jerry Curl or curled into feral mullets. White t-shirts hung like smocks testifying the word according to Frankie. Boy Toy fashions abounded with wrists covered in a thousand flavors of a future that never was. There's only one other punk here. A young blond with pink hair and a leather jacket you know she wore in even the worst of Summer's heat. Everything was excruciatingly earnest and optimistic and smug at the same time.
For my next trick I pulled out an unmarked, but well scratched, CD from my bomber's side pocket. A lot of the younger mages are digital nowadays but I never quite got the hang of it. I squeeze the CD onto the tip of my forefinger until it balances straight. Then, with my left hand, I begin turning it counter-clockwise muttering the words of my esoteric incantation.
"White riot/ I wanna riot/ White riot/ A riot of my own!"
The intercoms crackled as the lights flickered above.
I sped up the incantation and the revolutions of the disc upon the trigger finger.
Every bottle of soda in the place popped like champagne corks and fizzled out. Vegetables imploded into seeds or pits like popcorn in reverse. The meat squirmed under the cellophane and began abattoir screaming. The cans ruptured and oozed their nutrients.
While everyone in the place, young(er) or old(er) went ballistic.
This once elderly couple collapsed into a puddle of cascading soups and began to fuck on the spot. The kids scaled the shelves and openly raided the candy. Infants cried helplessly between the blind stomp of Air Jordan's and Vanns. Everyone else tore shit up.
Knowing that it wasn't long before reality seeped back in, I kept spinning that disc around chanting faster and faster, as the lobster tanks were kicked open and food fights went guerrilla:
"An' everybody’s doing/ Just what they're told to. An' nobody wants/ To go to jail."
Blood trickled down the trigger finger when the punk girl grabbed me by the shoulder without warning, waved daintily with fingerless gloves before grabbing me by the jacket and pulling me in for a long kiss.
When she pulled back... we, and by which I mean everyone, was back to normal. The spell shattered, along with the concentration needed to maintain it, under the gravity of her kiss. The song snapped back into muzak Huey Lewis and gone was the chant of the Clash.
Well... everything except the store that is.
Yuppies stood half naked in their 'Lord of the Flies' make-over - faces painted tribally with condiments and wielding mop handle spears. The nurses and grad students and lone cop were all back, blinking in confusion at the mass chaos that had erupted in the black out's width of their absence. The old couple took advantage of the confusion and clambered back into decency.
The punk was now a business woman. My age. The same smile was there but all she could see was the slight ring of fat under the chin. Her eyes were the blue of a clear June afternoon, but it was only the crow's feet at their corner, dabbed with disbelieving fingers, that looked back at her in the reflection of my shades. The pink hair back to blonde. She was still beautiful... if not more so for the crystallization of her year's wisdom. However I could tell by the tremble of her lips that something had been lost... a confidence or a verve of attitude... gone through the compromises we have all had to make and only now remembered.
"I'm sorry...", I told her yanking the glasses off my face.
"Wh...what happened?" she asks not really expecting an answer.
"When you kissed me it not only broke the spell but it put you at ground zero of its collapse."
"I don't understand what that means..."
"It means besides me you're the only person that remembers what really happened just now. I'm sorry..."
Someone started yelling at that moment, and along with everyone else, she turned to witness a baffled clerk swatting a swarm of recently liberated lobsters from climbing up his legs.
I slipped out under the cover of the commotion, leaving the supermarket and its crisis behind. The disc was still on my fingers and I pocketed it back, suckling the blood from the cut. I thought about returning, sticking around, helping her to forget... but that's not how it works.
From there I decided to take my chances with the Kroger's down the road vowing to never spin an 80's night again.
Walked in, after a long shift, to pick up a few things for dinner later. The 5 o'clock shuffle of the living dead was in full effect. Everyone post-time card drunk on forced Grin and Catatonics. Exhausted nurses in blue scrubs shaking off the death funk, living business suits feeding off the hosts that propelled them, grad school-shocked students lost in the glare outside their papers, recently off-duty security guards sunk under the pistol's weight strapped to their hip... all chained to the green baskets or self-navigating shopping carts.
Overhead the intercom system blared the greatest hits of Big Country, Culture Club and the Human League. Underneath the shoppers mindlessly chanted along, seranading the cans of soup of flashing Blue Tooth's with a chorus of - "Don't/don't you want me?/ You know I can't believe it/ When I hear that you won't see me."
Well, needless to say, I found the whole scene a little too 'Temple of Doom' for my tastes. Already turned around to walk back out, when the League segued into the opening chords of the Clash's 'Train in Vain'.
Froze on the spot as if the law had just laid its heavy hand down upon my shoulder. Turned back in slow motion. Listened to make sure I had heard correct. Confirmed it on the opening lyrics.
In the parlance of the youth - "Aw, hell no!"
Reached into the bottomless depths of my bomber's interior pocket, plunging my fist back through the decades, combing my fingers through the detritus of forgotten pop culture kitsch. Finally I felt what I needed buried under an old Rubix Cube and mummy wrapped in the cord of a cassette walk man's headphones. My old sunglasses, with the narrow pink frame and dark tinted uni-visor so I looked like Scott Summers on casual Friday.
"Activate Retro Vision!" I shouted for no reason at all except for the distant hope that somehow, somewhere, someone might be watching.
On command, a neon supernova sparked off the lens of my shades and engulfed the entirety of the supermarket's interior. The labyrinth shelves of the aisles and the registers at the checkout line vanished, leaving only a gallery of silhouettes before my vision.
When the blast's glare subsided, and the supermarket rematerialized out of the passing haze, everyone inside found themselves replaced by the people they were in 1987 - the year I traded my virginity in exchange for lessons in shamanistic punk-magick.
The grad students were all but gone. Most of the employees and the cop working the door had been attenuated into childhood if not reduced to outright infancy. As were a lot of the just off shift medical staff. A handful of elderly couples now found themselves in their early forties rather than seventies. But it was the business drones that proved my favorite. Gone the sports jackets and ties and meticulously laid out outfits reeking of bad coffee and stale meeting sweat.
What remained was a glorious tribe of savages - big hair frizzed up into a cloud puffs or soaked under Jerry Curl or curled into feral mullets. White t-shirts hung like smocks testifying the word according to Frankie. Boy Toy fashions abounded with wrists covered in a thousand flavors of a future that never was. There's only one other punk here. A young blond with pink hair and a leather jacket you know she wore in even the worst of Summer's heat. Everything was excruciatingly earnest and optimistic and smug at the same time.
For my next trick I pulled out an unmarked, but well scratched, CD from my bomber's side pocket. A lot of the younger mages are digital nowadays but I never quite got the hang of it. I squeeze the CD onto the tip of my forefinger until it balances straight. Then, with my left hand, I begin turning it counter-clockwise muttering the words of my esoteric incantation.
"White riot/ I wanna riot/ White riot/ A riot of my own!"
The intercoms crackled as the lights flickered above.
I sped up the incantation and the revolutions of the disc upon the trigger finger.
Every bottle of soda in the place popped like champagne corks and fizzled out. Vegetables imploded into seeds or pits like popcorn in reverse. The meat squirmed under the cellophane and began abattoir screaming. The cans ruptured and oozed their nutrients.
While everyone in the place, young(er) or old(er) went ballistic.
This once elderly couple collapsed into a puddle of cascading soups and began to fuck on the spot. The kids scaled the shelves and openly raided the candy. Infants cried helplessly between the blind stomp of Air Jordan's and Vanns. Everyone else tore shit up.
Knowing that it wasn't long before reality seeped back in, I kept spinning that disc around chanting faster and faster, as the lobster tanks were kicked open and food fights went guerrilla:
"An' everybody’s doing/ Just what they're told to. An' nobody wants/ To go to jail."
Blood trickled down the trigger finger when the punk girl grabbed me by the shoulder without warning, waved daintily with fingerless gloves before grabbing me by the jacket and pulling me in for a long kiss.
When she pulled back... we, and by which I mean everyone, was back to normal. The spell shattered, along with the concentration needed to maintain it, under the gravity of her kiss. The song snapped back into muzak Huey Lewis and gone was the chant of the Clash.
Well... everything except the store that is.
Yuppies stood half naked in their 'Lord of the Flies' make-over - faces painted tribally with condiments and wielding mop handle spears. The nurses and grad students and lone cop were all back, blinking in confusion at the mass chaos that had erupted in the black out's width of their absence. The old couple took advantage of the confusion and clambered back into decency.
The punk was now a business woman. My age. The same smile was there but all she could see was the slight ring of fat under the chin. Her eyes were the blue of a clear June afternoon, but it was only the crow's feet at their corner, dabbed with disbelieving fingers, that looked back at her in the reflection of my shades. The pink hair back to blonde. She was still beautiful... if not more so for the crystallization of her year's wisdom. However I could tell by the tremble of her lips that something had been lost... a confidence or a verve of attitude... gone through the compromises we have all had to make and only now remembered.
"I'm sorry...", I told her yanking the glasses off my face.
"Wh...what happened?" she asks not really expecting an answer.
"When you kissed me it not only broke the spell but it put you at ground zero of its collapse."
"I don't understand what that means..."
"It means besides me you're the only person that remembers what really happened just now. I'm sorry..."
Someone started yelling at that moment, and along with everyone else, she turned to witness a baffled clerk swatting a swarm of recently liberated lobsters from climbing up his legs.
I slipped out under the cover of the commotion, leaving the supermarket and its crisis behind. The disc was still on my fingers and I pocketed it back, suckling the blood from the cut. I thought about returning, sticking around, helping her to forget... but that's not how it works.
From there I decided to take my chances with the Kroger's down the road vowing to never spin an 80's night again.