things move around

Yesterday when I got in from work I asked the girl at the desk where the nearest liquor store was. She explained that there was one really close by: all I had to do was take a right on the highway and drive a little way…

She looked aghast when I asked how long it would take to walk. She swallowed and said she “wouldn’t recommend” walking. But I was adamant. She said it might be as much as 15 minutes there and another 15 back. At this news I reeled. 15 minutes! There was no guarantee I would make it to the liquor store and back. But the main thing, I reflected, was to make it there.

Accordingly, I postponed my expedition for 24 hours, during which time my apprehension at the prospect of my forthcoming ordeal was such that I was scarcely able to accomplish a stroke of work.

Today when I got in from no work I had a clever idea. I would combine my reckless march to the distant liquor store with a visit to a pharmacy, where I could get bandages for blisters, mosquito nets, ammunition, unguent, smelling salts (can you still buy smelling salts?), a sedan chair complete with native bearers, and, if necessary, balm for my broken lips. Since setting up home on the Pacific coast I can’t go inland without my face splitting apart like a mudflat.

It was a different girl at reception. Perhaps the first one was still in shock at the crazy foreigner who wanted to walk to the liquor store, or perhaps she was shopping the freakish tale to Fox and the Weekly World News. Is there a pharmacy nearby, I asked. Why yes - just hang a right on the highway, over the bridge, past the liquor store…

I walked down the six-lane highway, out of Spokane’s limp heart and along one of its arteries, into one of its limbs, like those of a starfish, groping blindly in the night for a purchase on a rolling, dispassionate slab of terra firma. The sides of the highway were lichened with independent commerce and a few chains, with autobody shops and appliance stores, with tanning salons, tattooists, hair salons, a gunsmith, big box hardware and army surplus outlets, a coin dealer, barbers, comics, porn and manga, endless cheap eateries with buffets and bogofs, and every store had a large sign jutting out over the road, white lines with removable black lettering, saying SOFA LOVE $60 / MONTH, CLAY PIGEONS $5.99, and BIG FISH MEAL $4.99. I walked for 40 minutes, quite quickly, through the efflorescence of enterprise, the exhaust fumes and the gloaming, up on to a hill, where I found the pharmacy, and from where the whole town was visible as it lit its lights. And in the 80 minutes I was walking on the wide sidewalk, I didn’t see another living thing, except a bum I overtook on the way back, and a lost looking woman lolling obesely at a bus stop, and three crazed teens whose heads emerged from the windows of an SUV and gurned at me, and jeered. And the liquor store was closed, but I got a bottle of local wine from the hotel, which turned out OK. I’m just pouring the last of it out now, as I sit here writing this and listening to Carlton and the Shoes, looking out at the river, heavy with snowmelt, full of motive in the stealthy, starless night.