Every other corner hosts a tableau of plastic liquor bottles, grungy sleeping bags and suffering, an ethical knot to untie.
Driving by Midtown Walmart recently, I saw a woman’s body curled on the corner where shoppers turn in. She was maybe 90 pounds, face turned skyward, jaw slack, eyes closed. At some other point in time, someone might have stopped to check her pulse or call an ambulance. We don’t live in that kind of town now. In Midtown, human bodies are part of the landscaping.
At the stoplight by Northern Lights Bingo, I often think about the way we confuse luck with something we feel we’ve earned. All winter there was a man who used to stand at that corner as I was taking my son to soccer practice. Young, bare-handed, mumbling into another dimension, he held an unreadable sign on a piece of yellow legal paper. He’d stare right into my son’s eyes through the window. My son began to dread that stretch of road. He told me the man made him feel afraid.
Walmart is as American as it gets. That place has everything — insulin, papayas, ammo, thong underwear, diamond rings, air fryers — but so many in its orbit are on the edge of having nothing at all. When I got outside the store, a full moon bloomed overhead as paramedics loaded the bleeding woman into an ambulance. A pregnant woman walked by leading a herd of kids inside, all of them licking Ring Pops.
He thought maybe there was a way to get to the root of it, addiction in particular. I told him what I knew: Sobriety comes from inside and the government can’t touch it. Nobody’s written a statute to address heartache, which in many cases goes back generations, and leads people to drink or shoot up or lose touch with reality in a way that keeps them from paying rent, I said. His plan wasn’t formed, he told me, but he thought maybe he could come up with something.
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