Vic Socotra

28 June 2009

Super Center

(Super Center at Brandy Station)

They say that the abuse of crystal methamphetamine steals your youth and rots your teeth. I had not been in a WalMart in years, so I had no reason to think about it prior to the break in the late afternoon between the visit of the installers, who were sort of like the ghosts of Christmas, if they showed up in broad daylight on a torrid Virginia summer’s day.

I managed to get the satellite radio hooked up myself, feeding the little portable unit’s output jack into the old walnut-cabinet stereo that dates to about 1972. I positioned the little paddle antenna so it had a good look at the southern sky. The device thought for a moment, acquired the signal, and Bingo!- two hundred channels of digital radio, clear as a bell.

There was no reason at all o connect to the local media. In fact, as far as I was concerned, it was easier to listen to BBC 1 than it was to Brandy Station’s only radio station and that sickly-sweet bogus country crap.

What’s more, I didn’t even have to go on the roof, which is something best avoided at my age.

The installation guy from the Skynet satellite company was something else. He might as well have had a pistol in his belt, which would have saved me a shred of my dignity. Instead he announced that the dish had to go on a pole, that would be a hundred and something bucks extra, and the wireless modem needed a super-whammerdine buffer against surge, and the IP address matter cold be resolved for a slight additional charge.

He was one of those country hipsters, most of the usual piercings, and wild curly carrot-colored hair that erupted from under his workman’s cap.

I did not like the kid. I felt better after he was gone, since the internet is now a point of presence on the property. I had a break in he schedule, and decided to run into town, since I had forgotten to purchase batteries.

Brandy Station is a little town of about 10,000 people, but is what it always has been: the nexus of the county. Accordingly, Sam Walton’s people had dropped one of their big boxes on some former farmland out by the State Road, and everything the Chinese can produce is available at deep discounts.

I could not tell, based on the crush at the WalMart, whether the cashier was a meth addict, or just a victim of poor country dental hygiene. Her associate’s badge proclaimed her name to be Trudy, and her teeth were definitely a fright.

The glimpse I got of her lower mandibular when she gave me the curt customary greeting freaked me out. Of the sixteen teeth you would expect to find in a full lower adult dentition, she had maybe seven. There were the remains of two central incisors, sort of like the darkened Twin Towers in mid-attack, and only one of the lateral incisors. I could not assess the state of her canines or first premolars, but it looked dark in there from what I could tell. She was not particularly friendly, either, and did not appear to be disposed to banter with the customers.

My understanding is that meth use is much more prevalent in the country because of three major factors: lack of external supply chains for drugs that don’t kill you as quickly, plenty of secluded land on which to make mischief and dump the waste (five times the product, if done efficiently, and of course access to the raw materials to produce it.

You have heard of how that works, or used to, before the Feds started to regulate over-the-counter cold medicine. Meth cooks could get all the raw materials they needed at the Walgreen's or Rite Aid pharmacies. There was one right next door to the WalMart Supercenter, fter all, and that was the source for ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in Sudafed and the generic variants.

It used to be that the most common way to produce meth was to score a bunch of Sudefed and then process it in a pressure cooker on a stove for a couple hours. Makeshift chemists were responsible for thousands of trailer park firestorms and explosions in out of the way single-wide homes.

The Feds now make you sign for drugs that include the raw materials, which has cut down on the free-lancing by the amateurs. Of course the sword cuts both ways, and now the meth comes from places where the raw materials can be purchased in bulk and shipped along the well-traveled paths that everything else comes by.

I sometimes think it is not as much the better dental care in the city that makes people better looking. It might be access to a better quality of drug network.

Anyway I hate to be judgmental about people, although that is how I make my living. I do not know if Trudy is a reformed meth user, and all I can testify to is a certain air about her. And the stumps of those front teeth.

Certainly she did not want to banter with me, or the heavy-set man in front of me who was purchasing some white sport socks, a slab of meat, and a six-pack of St. Paulie Girl imported German beer.

I gathered from his purchases and his glassy eyes that he had been drinking most of the afternoon and become too tired to do laundry. Dinner would be on the grill, and the beer would carry him until bed-time.

That was my supposition, anyway, and the cashier gave him no more mind than she did my four beige towels, cute Frog toilet-brush holder, double pack of hefty-sized “D” batteries, the folding step ladder or the hooks to hold up the shower curtain.

She had no judgment at all in her eyes, which appeared haunted by something I could not see.

I suppose you could have construed something about my purchases. I have no idea what the person behind me was thinking. Some industrial strength battery-driven product involving amphibians? Something requiring a swing and a potential mess that would need to be mopped up?

It did not occur to me to turn and say that I was hooking some things up to the satellite, and needed to get high up in the room to do so, or that the feral cats who patrol my property have only so much forbearance, and the batteries were necessary to advance the feeding mechanism that deposits dry food to supplement their regular diet of rodents.

I was almost to the Sate highway before I realized that I should not judge, lest I too be judged. I drove past some little places that fronted on the road, and the big agricultural properties and back out into the country.

I suspect every single-wide nestled under the brilliant green of the trees has its own story.

I know mine does.

Close Window