The Supermarket of Cthulhu

Hunting all over town yesterday for a poinsettia (Chiara needed it for a table display) and ended up back in my neighborhood, checking the grocery stores.

Basically there are two. There is the Smith's, which is really rather nice; smallish and yuppified, and with a liquor store and a dry cleaner's underneath. And there is the Albertson's, which gives off so palpable an aura of dread for me that I've never even gone inside.

But Chiara needed a poinsettia. And Smith's did not have one to sell.

So I'm in the parking lot of the Albertson's and it is nearly deserted.

In a handicapped spot is a junker with a toddler-sized severed doll head hanging from the rear view mirror. There are two spots very near the entrance specifically marked only for police parking. Off in the far corner of the lot, under a sputtering halogen light, is a windowless van in idle.

Inside is a circus show.

The aisles are strewn with bags of food toppled from their shelves, puddles of snowmelt have to be jumped at nearly every checkout stand, the bakery is dark but its wares are still out, under their sneeze guards, going stale.

The clientele give the impression that the store's manager may have accidentally booked a roadie convention for the store and, on the same day, a 1973 class reunion for an all transsexual high school.

A scarecrow man with stringy, wet hair sang to himself as he passed by me on his way to the exit. In his shopping bag he had lightbulbs and a box of matches.

As I searched frantically for the floral department, a married couple dressed in leather argued forcefully over a package of waffle cones.

A solitary old woman slowly pushed a cart so squeeky one might have been forgiven for thinking it was haunted by the ghost of a child who died in pain. The old woman seemed not to hear it, but shuffled on, looking lost and afraid.

The florist's counter was like something out of the Omega Man, not sinister or rundown per se, but so completely abandoned and stocked so entirely with dead and dying plants as to give the impression that the florist had left weeks ago to hunt for fuel or firewood and had never returned.

I quickly selected the least plague ridden poinsettia from the dismal pile and made for the checkstands.

I took one look at the snaggle-toothed man working the express lane and the corpulent zombie packing the bags of groceries and made for the self-checkout.

In the end, I made it home without incident. Chiara came home some three hours later and I was still washing and washing my hands.

She didn't even use the plant in her table display. She said there was just something wrong about it.

I called her a snob.

I Cannot Return to the Nursery

I have a problem.

The guy at the Armstrong Nursery Center on Pacific Coast Highway thinks I am someone I am not. Though it’s partly my fault, I suppose, I can never go back there. I will have to drive fifteen minutes out of my way and purchase plant food or flowers or terra cotta pots or whatever at another location.

I don’t see any other solution.

I was dropping by with a soil sample to inquire about some funny little white bastards living in the pot of my lemon tree.

(Turns out they are soil gnats. There’s a spray you can get.)

The manager is a nice guy, although a little lispy; it grates on you if you hear it for too long.

Anyway, as I’m waiting for one of the high school kids who work there to retrieve my gnat-killing spray, the manager guy says to me “So how is that avocado tree doing?”

But see, I don’t have an avocado tree. Never did.

I’d tell the guy, except that he’s made this mistake once before and I didn’t hear the question or something and said "fine." So now he, in his mind, correctly associates me with avocado trees, but I still don’t have one.

I decide I have to fix up this confusion.

So I tell him that my avocado tree is doing fine but is not making any avocados. He asks what kind of exposure it gets and I say southeast. That’s the problem, he says. I agree.

Then, he asks me if I still work at Boeing.

I am not going to lie to the guy. A houseplant mistake is one thing - he just misremembered what kind of plant he sold me - no big deal, but a mistake on this order suggests he has confused me with another person altogether. So what do I do?

Naturally, I tell him no, I don’t work at Boeing still.

But before he can ask me about my kids or my boat or my trip to Senegal, I get out of there. And can you imagine if he saw me with my wife instead of the woman he might imagine me to be married to?

But obviously that will never happen because I can never return.

Fuck.

I Discuss Houseplants in a Hot Tub (Much to My Consternation)

Chiara asks me to go with her to the apartment complex’s hot tub sometimes. She calls it the jacuzzi, which she pronounces “Yah-Kootsie.” I usually decline for one of several stock reasons: that it will be crowded, that it is too late, that I just showered.

Last night, feeling a bit down on myself for not having left the house all day, I accepted her offer on the condition that, if it were full of assholes, we could leave.

I should have been more specific.

We arrived and thought that we were alone. The lights of the hot tub itself were off and none of the usual flotsam associated with pool-goers was to be found on any of the chaise-longues (sunscreen, wadded t-shirts, sunglasses, Da Vinci Codes).

It was only after we began our slide into the burbling water that we realized we had company - hiding, submerged nearly to the head, in the shadows on the far side of the hot tub.

It being too late to back out with any kind of plausible excuse, I said good evening and slurped over to the far side of the hot tub with Chiara, arranging myself so as to have my back more or less toward the gentleman. He seemed nice enough, but who needs conversation with that kind Heffnerian overtones?

This guy clearly didn’t see it that way.

Guy: “No swimming for you two, huh?”

Chiara: “No, it’s cold!”

Guy, looking at me now: “Well, you made the right choice. A sign of maturity, I’d say.”

Me: “Yes.”

A pregnant pause.

Me: “It is pleasant to sit in warm water, isn’t it?”

Guy: “Yes.”

So now I think I’ve awkwarded my way out of any further smalltalk. I even begin - as a sort of preemptive strike against any further chattiness - a conversation with Chiara about quotidian and personal details of our life together that could not possibly invite third party commentary.

I bring up the houseplants and my earlier visit to the nursery in search of the large indoor palm tree I am still angling for. I tell Chiara about how, after I had asked five or fifteen well thought out and important questions of the woman helping me (“How much water should I give it?” “How much light does it need?” “Does it have a smell when you cut the leaves?“), she rather snarkily replied that there were “really no such things as indoor plants.”

The man from the other side of the Jacuzzi, his face shaded by the night like a sweaty Bloefeld, volunteered that he bought an indoor plant just the other day, at Costco.

I nodded. But thinking he may not have seen me, I said “yeah?”

Guy: “It should live for a hundred years.”

Me: “Wow!”

Guy: “Wanna know why?”

Me: “Sure.”

Guy: “It’s a silk plant.”

And now I want him to die.

Luckily, just then some kids jump into the hot tub and distract the guy. “Is it better in here?” he asks of them.

Kid 1: “Yeah.”

Guy: “How much better?”

Kid 1: “Like 110%

Guy: “And it took you how many years to figure that out?”

Kid 1: “Um, like fourteen.”

Guy: “And how old are you?”

Kid 1: “Sixteen.”

And now I kinda love this kid.

Guy, to Kid 1: “Got your permit yet?”

Kid 1: “Yeah. Two months ago.”

Guy: “See any bad drivers?”

Kid 1: “Yeah. I saw some today!”

Guy: “That’s good. Because if you don’t see any. . .you’re probably the bad driver.”

Me: Barf.

I embark on a description to Chiara of my genuine respect for the gardening staff here at the complex. Some of their birds of paradise are twelve feet tall and thriving. Ours is slowly dying after having spent six months in some kind of botanic coma; ours always looks like it is about to cough.

Anyway, the fucking guy has overheard me and smells blood in the water again. The kids have gone back to the main pool.

Guy: “You ever been in the model units they got here?”

Me: “No, why?”

Guy: “They have plants in those that never die.”

Me: “Why’s that?”

Guy: “They’re silk.”

Me: “You got me.”

And I got out of the water and went to the main pool to swim angry laps.

The only other notable moment from last night was, after the guy had finally left, a young couple arrived at the hot tub. They were comprised of a handsome frat guy type with a shaved chest and his curiously overweight and frumpy girlfriend who carried all of their stuff.

The frat guy gets in to the hot tub and she hands him a beer. He sits there, drinking it while she perches on a pool chair on the other side of the Jacuzzi.

They do not speak to one another until he asks her to give him another beer and she complies. She is not drinking. I think he has agreed to sleep with her out of pity or as some last-ditch attempt to thwart his onrushing homosexuality. I imagine he propositioned her, but insisted that she provide the atmosphere.

By which he meant Corona.

I would have liked to stay to see what became of them, but the hot tub had more or less fizzled out and my enjoyment was prunier than my hands.

An Argument Concerning Houseplants

Chiara and I had an argument today about houseplants. The crushing weight of the domesticity is not lost on me.

I’m not proud of myself. At one point I believe I actually said that she hated all living things.

This because she rather misliked my plan to purchase an indoor palm.

We sulked and traded the occasional barb for the better part of the afternoon. After the worst of it, she went to watch the home and garden channel on television (I ache with pleasure at the possibility that she sat through a landscaping show where they extolled the virtues of the single trunked kentia palm), and I retreated to the bedroom to read a novel I don’t care for.

This was not really resolved until I came into the living room an hour later and found her wheedling away at our small space heater with a screwdriver.

Mostly the space heater is used to placate the cat when it complains bitterly about the cooler evenings in winter or to warm Chiara’s feet while she hunches over on the sofa to watch plastic surgery programs which send me scurrying out of the room, nauseated.

Thing is, she isn’t repairing it or anything; she wants to vacuum inside the thing.

This is part of her larger vacuum crusade.

Some of the items that I have seen her vacuum in our time spent together: the bed, her clothes, my clothes, me, the cat, books, the out of doors, the insides of shoes, the leaves of plants.

I have learned not to question her wisdom on these matters.

Wordlessly, I helped her to separate the housing of the machine and to clean the accumulated dust of a decade of use out of the corners and electrical whorls and from behind the surprisingly sharp fan blades.

When we finally managed to put it all back together and turn it on, it caught fire, melting the electrical wiring inside and leaving our living room smelling acridly of burnt plastic.

She laughed and bit her finger and raised her eyebrows contritely. I shrugged and we went into the bedroom to escape the smell and to watch a truly disgusting Jessica Simpson biopic.

I still don’t know if I can buy my palm tree. I’m afraid to ask.