Charlie Visits Walmart

by Rudolfo Carrillo

He is driving a car that is colored like ashes or the far reaches of intergalactic space and will be good and goddamned when an oil-smeared and dusty—like the petroleum gathering machinery of Oklahoma in the Thirties—group of humans stops right in the fucking road, and he has to turn the wheel sharply to the left, else those folks be rendered lifeless components of the inanimate galaxy all around them.

They are waiting for a straggler who is still on the other side of the wide avenue. Leonard is taking a piss on the big, green electrical transformer that sits next to the rubbish dumpster behind the Walmart Supercenter. Yelling and cajoling him to be done with his relief, fearful of the heat which such watery pause often brings, at least one of them is also thinking about the simplicity and order of life in jail. None of them see the car turn the corner on a vector that might well forcefully intercept their desperate but satisfying congregation.

Thanks to Charlie's lightning-fast reflexes, a collision does not occur. He is past them and gliding into a parking space before the group's laggard finishes his work and passes out with his pants around his knees. The man's associates are fairly howling with laughter and recrimination and head on down the street, leaving Leonard to rot in the bright sunshine while our protagonist pulls himself out of the driver's seat using a kind of leverage that is ordinarily reserved for those obsessed with the weather.

The doors to the Walmart Supercenter slide open automatically when you approach them. Before he is in range of that miraculous technological demonstration, a sun-flattened man wearing a mesh baseball cap—with the name of a natural gas supplier in Lubbock, Texas embroidered roughly up front—rambles up casual-like and asks about the rain and wind. Charlie tells him it ain't ordinarily this dry and just wait until October. When the conversation veers toward money, Charlie draws out a fiver from his left front pocket and hands it over with stormy admonitions accompanying the transaction.

It only takes them a few minutes to account for and bag up his purchase: objects designed for consumption, the mysterious high-tech life-saving devices of probable Venusian origin that generally come along with those solid, liquid and gaseous forms. Charlie rushes home afterward so he can spend the rest of the early morning investigating other worlds.

He did not see the humans in the parking lot again. Charlie believes they retreated toward the tool section of the Walmart Supercenter. Maybe some of them are watching the tropical fish in the pet department. After unpacking, admiring and then storing his new acquisitions, he falls into a deep sleep and dreams that a navigable river flows through the midst of the Sandia Mountains, that there is a colorful restaurant on the edge of town, down a muddy road, where anyone who asks for a meal will be fed until they nearly burst.

Continue Reading..

September Sojourn Shattered

By Rudolfo Carrillo

What happened yesterday was I drove my car over to Fair Plaza to take advantage of the plethora of acquisitive possibilities contained therein. They've got a place on the corner that is stocked to the brim with a wide variety of recordings made by other human beings, mostly for the sake of entertaining others, but sometimes for informational purposes or to elicit emotional responses, too. Somewhere in there is a movie which is about a book that is about a movie, I am sure of it. You gotta give the clerks silver clad tokens to take any of the collection with you though, even if you are just borrowing it, and there are only two types of workers on duty there. One type is middle aged, frantic, but handy with computational devices; the other is comprised of kids with extra-long fingers who are working there when they aren't busy studying the forces of capitalism.

There is another a big room at the other end of the plaza where food is stored and distributed. In between them there used to be a liquor establishment called the Wine Cellar that was dark and mossy inside, usually filled up with neighborhood drunks and carnival workers. The tavern had a decent happy hour buffet with plenty of greasy red hotdogs and preheated, chemically treated nachos available for the above referenced subcultures to indulge in whilst they rooted for their favorite college football team or Nascar champion.

Now that is all gone. Instead there is a dollar store and rent-to-own joint in the bar's place. I don't know which is worse, but I reckon it is more productive to have the poor and downtrodden buying stuff rather than drinking away the afternoon to the accompaniment of roaring motor cars and million dollar collegiate athletic programs.

The food storage and distribution warehouse I told you about is roomy, with shiny concrete floors, cool-blue fluorescent lighting, heaps of vegetables, and a load of fresh-killed meat from faraway places like Grants and Clayton on display in luxuriously cold refrigerators in the back. There is a kiosk stocked with tobacco. The folks behind the cash registers all got pretty red vests to wear and will load up your haul in plastic sacks that last for a million years, but only after you hand over some cottony-green slips of paper or elsewise type in a series of numbers onto a device that is hanging around nearby and is more intelligent than the ships men sent to the moon.

On the way outta there, I saw a red-haired woman pulling her plunder toward the bus stop. She had a red-haired baby fastened to her chest with a bandolier. A red-haired child with dreadlocks and a tie-dyed t-shirt trailed behind, dragging a sack of diapers and a case of Mountain Dew behind him like the whole lot was made of fissionable material. They all began to trot when they noticed the number eleven waiting on the curb and blowing black smoke out of its end, cigar-like, infinitely gritty against the cloudless sky. As we passed them, rolled out onto Lomas Boulevard in a dependable silver automobile that was powered by the liquified remains of dinosaurs and the broad-leafed ferns they once frolicked amidst, a song by the Rolling Stones began pouring itself out of the speakers. It was something called Shattered.

I pushed the clutch down with my crippled left foot, positioned the shifter properly with my broken right hand. As we accelerated away and that whole scene became part of the past, I told my wife that Some Girls was probably the last good album the Glimmer twins ever made.  It was hot outside, for September, anyway, and the streets were mostly empty on that account.  Home was only a couple of miles away.

Continue Reading..

A Phone Call From the Future and It's For You

By Rudolfo Carrillo


I have a wall-mounted rotary telephone with an ivory color to match the surrounding environment, to complement the other electronic and mechanical appliances that define the space in mi chante used to store and process food into attractively temporary constructions for consumption.


Well, that damn thing started ringing last night about ten and besides startling my pack of ferocious, pizza-eating canine sentinels, it additionally became a dandy and perfectly logical reason for me to rise, moonlike and spherically, from my repose upon a burgundy lounger made from dreams, copper, and ethernet cables.


I reckoned answering the incoming transmission would afford me an opportunity to survey the local refrigeration unit for another Otter-Pop, which we have been loading up on for relief from the heat of summer.


The fella on the other line wanted to tell about how the election for president of the United States was only a hundred days away. Course he also wanted to know to which side I was leaning in the upcoming and gloriously democratic fray. That ought to be clear, said I to him with just the slightest Saturday night-induced vocal nuance. I am for the one that jumps heroically into the captain's chair, consults his science officer and chief engineer with the proper gravitas, and warps us all the hell out of the mess we have been navigating mournfully towards while increasingly dramatic music composed by Alexander Courage plays in the background.


Well, it took him a few ticks to figure out what I was getting at, but when my pop culture obscurantism unraveled poetically on his side of things, he laughed nervously and suggested we meet at his Nob Hill office to get to know one another and work out some strategizing. I told him I would sleep on it and did just that.


The next morning, the sun came up just like it was supposed to do; the dogs didn't wanna have anything to do with the dry kibble I offered them, unless I tossed in some warm milk and a couple of encouraging winks; meanwhile, I figured out a meaningful way to meaningfully contribute to the meaningful political discourse dancing this way and that, with great profundity and cyclical rhythm, on the airwaves and lips of my fellow Americans.


What you all have read so far is the preamble to that, which goes something like this:


According to indications available to Rudolfo Carrillo through a combination of personal experience and anecdotal electronic data-gathering missions, the author is convinced that a reordering of priorities is order. The man responsible for this particular polemic earnestly believes our world is on the edge of just about every kind of cliff the reader can meticulously and neurologically render.


The economic and cultural gap between the rich and poor in this city is heartbreaking. The experiences that led to that conclusion are easy to come by, repeatable by you or you in any city in this nation, I fear.


If you don't care to acknowledge that fact, then grab your keys, ATM card, and detachable-face car stereo thingy and drive down to the Smith's grocery store on Carlisle and Constitution. The drive there will be idyllic, composed mostly of tree-lined avenues, well-kept gardens, and good neighbors gamboling blithely from one private pool party to another, Tecate or mojito in hand. Ah, summertime!


Spend some time wandering through the formidable produce section, let the young woman with a sparkly smile serve you up some fresh sushi from the demonstration counter. Take a careful look at the humans that are coming and going, note their happiness and satisfaction, the kind attentiveness of the clerks.


Then leave that place, buoyed by hope and pride in our community. Drive about two miles south, to the Walmart that is gently nestled in the economically shattered neighborhood next to the air force base where they store thousands of thermonuclear devices and have soaked the surrounding earth with enough jet fuel to poison our enemies and our own citizens with equal relentlessness.


When you are inside that second food distribution center I told you about, take some time to count the number of young women accompanied by more than two children and with no partner or father in sight; whose shoes and shirts are slight and threadbare not out of a sense of fashion or because of a bizarre involvement with the cult of the visibly youthful human form, but because there are no words for new or beautiful in the vernacular of interminable unemployment and sullen trips to the payday loan counter next to the thrift store where mi jita found a gently used pair of flip-flops in her size.


When you take your leave, do not look up, like I did, at the gangsta rolling past the doorway. He is threatened by eye contact and will mistake your tears for weakness, for proof of the corruption of the ruling class, even as his attention is diverted by the shameful self-loathing induced by five missed child-support payments.


In case you are interested, I was gonna interview some middle-class folks in an earnest attempt at balancing the foreboding tone contained herein, but they were so worried about losing their jobs, their delinquent student loan payments, and about how they were still working towards getting three co-payments together this month so that the family could get to see a doctor who is so overwhelmed with patients and looming insurance companies that his corporate backers only give him fifteen minutes per patient, not a one of them had time to chat.


And if all that descriptive stuff seems more than a little unsettling to you, you are damn right, it is. It is my hope, however, that these words will invoke progression, actions designed to walk all of us away from the precipice, back to the center of things. Taken all together, that should give you all some idea of who my vote is going to, come November.

Continue Reading..