Yes, Wal-Mart, but not just Wal-Mart, it’s a SUPER Wal-Mart, with a grocery store, First Citizens bank, hairdresser and everything. Wal-Mart, the hub of urban Statesvillian nightlife, where you can roam the aisles until dawn because it’s the store that never sleeps. Where you get a feel for the true culture of this fair city, because like the watering holes of the African savannah – any and all types of animals eventually find their way to the Super Wal-Mart.
So it’s around ten PM on this Saturday in July, in Statesville. Where else do my boyfriend and I go but Wal-Mart? Many others have had the same thought, the same urge, as we have to park way back down in the lower left corner, close to good old K&W cafeteria. We trudge through the rainwater and oil puddles, up to the lit edifice of yellow smiley-faces and wheelchaired-welcomers.
Just outside the automated doors of Wal-Mart, a group of youths in baggy pants and skate shoes hang around the doghouses stacked against the wall. The two boys, one skinny to the point of emaciation, decked out in a wife-beater and ball cap, the other sporting blue hair and still managing to look innocent and clean-cut, pull down one of the larger doghouses from the stack and set it on the ground. The shorter of the two girls, the midget of the whole group actually, climbs into the doghouse, peaks her head out and barks several times. The two chains adorning her neck help make the whole dog act that much more effect. The other girl, who has an eyebrow ring and a scarlet-streaked ponytail, sits on the doghouse and laughs with the two guys, until the kid in the doghouse crawls out, whipping the dust off her Breakdown pants.
Once we have passed through the entrance of this Super Wal-Mart, an even wider variety of human specimens are available for our observation, not to mention the wide variety of products and groceries this store provides. Middle school girls clad in the latest Limited Too/Claire’s fashion browse the cosmetic section. Little violet-haired ladies, smelling like lavender in their flower-print dresses check out the Daniel Steele novels by the aisle with all the Hallmark cards. Three-foot-tall kids checking out the rubber balls, adolescents messing with the Star Wars Phantom Menace figures, moms with permed hair, bustling around trying to keep their families somewhat together while playing a scavenger hunt with the items on their shopping lists. The dads, with their slightly balding hair and a bit of belly poking out over their belts, are either hurrying around trying to help their wives with the scavenger hunt or are hiding in the electronic section amidst the Top 40 CDs and skinny teenagers gawking at the stereo systems. “Dude, like, turn it to the polka station and bust out the volume and turn it right off, so the next person who turns it on…”
And then, between Electronics and Toys, there are the Sporting Good and Hardware sections. Ah yes, the annex of Wal-Mart that attracts the native population – red-blooded men and women in tight acid washed jeans, shirts bragging on their favorite WWF wrestler, boots or tennis, depending, and the ever popular mullet hairstyle.
Which leaves Office Supply, Clothing and the grocery store as the remaining highlights. Less hurried mothers shop for socks and cheap tee shirts in Clothing, while a general conglomerate of all the previously mentioned groups drift through Office Supply. We swing by the grocery store part, picking up some Pringles and strawberry daiquiri mix for the party tomorrow, almost getting run over by some fifteen-year-olds in long plaid shirts and carpenter jeans cruising the aisles by way of bike, picked up on the other side near Toys. Then we almost get knocked down again by the Wal-Mart employees in hot pursuit.
Once out, on our way back to the car, several high school boys in khakis and surf shirts sitting with their backs against the wall spot us and start serenading us with a wobbly and loud rendition of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” which seems to complete the Wal-Mart evening, and we’ve seen just at least one representative from each fraction of the Statesville social spectrum.
What is a village, if not it’s villagers?