Friday, June 06, 2003

Abandon all hope ye who enter here.

That’s what they ought write over the entrance to Meijer, I think. Or at least that’s my experience of the thing. For, today, I experienced hell.

My father and I were standing in line to check out. We thought we’d picked a good line. It was rather shortish; the people in front of us didn’t have much in their cart. But we were wrong. Oh, how we were wrong.

First, the cashier was slow. Not just slow, but I’m pretty sure he was disabled somehow. I’m not making fun of him, or blaming him, but it’s important to note that he was extremely slow. Because it compounded the other problems.

First, there was a couple in front of us. I would guess the man was thirty-five, and the woman thirty. They looked kind of preppy. So it rather surprised me when I looked down and the man was groping the woman’s rear end. She was rubbing her hand up and down his stomach – his lower stomach, if you follow. She wasn’t doing anything explicitly obscene, but she was hinting at it. He took his hand and started pushing his fingers into her chest. Not her breasts, mind you. That would be obscene. But he was hinting at it.

Terrific, I thought. I’m stuck in line with my father, and there’s a peep show just a few feet in front of me. Oh, well, I thought, this can’t possibly take very long.

Then the plot thickened.

Three women came up behind me. They looked kind of trailer trash, but I don’t care much about that sort of the thing. What did bother me was that they were clearly, incredibly drunk. And possibly gay. Which is also okay by me, except when they decide it’s a good idea to grope each other publicly.

They stank of alcohol, and the one girl kept running into me. The one must have just dyed her hair, because the one that kept running into me kept calling her Blondie. Not once or twice mind you, but incessantly. She was almost singing it in a refrain, except there was no tune, and she kept interrupting it with other things. “Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, hey what’s that on the wall, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, hey, you have nice tits ::grabs her breast::, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, hey, do we want candy bars Blondie? Blondie, Blondie, Blondie, Blondie…”

My dad wouldn’t stop gawking at them, with that quizzical WTF sort of look old men have sometimes. I knew that if the women noticed him, they’d probably bitch him out. Shit, I thought, shit.

Twenty minutes later, the line moved a little, and I escaped out the door in a mad dash. I hope never to return.