Walmarts Are the Same Across America
Tennessee's taking me in. Went to Walmart, went away from home, went on writing, went downtown, went on my porch
I am seeing cats in the corner of my eye in places where no cats should be. The Vanderbilt library. My roommate’s closet. At the wheel of an Amazon truck. This is the consequence of coming to a new city and leaving a cat behind. But I had to pack my bags and get on the flight. Even if I was scared. Even if I was making a cat sad. I am the bad, 22-year-old, unsettled pet owner, who arrived in Nashville Sunday, June 1.
First full day of this Southern summer, I felt my bones warm on the porch. Heatlover, summerlover, I craved the hotness New York had yet to crank itself up to yet. Maybe the last time I would ever swoon into the unforgiving Southern sun.
At Walmart, the profound loneliness of moving to a new place and what it required overwhelmed me — the act of buying salt and ice trays to fill a bare kitchen made me sad. Maybe it was the responsibility of adulthood, and how horrible moving in America is. But the uniformity of the Walmart comforted me and reminded me of spending certain Friday nights in college smoking a joint in the store’s parking lot with my friends, then shopping for everything we wanted: flip flops, notebooks, green wigs, muffin pans, socks, potato chips and a mandatory cheesecake we devoured in the car. Alone now, anonymous shoppers joined me under the rows of American flags, pushing carts filled with processed food or the buttons on mobility scooters they could not navigate the behemoth store without. On this weekday night, they emerged from the country’s crevices in their jeans and sweatpants, left with no choice but to contribute to the multi-billion-dollar Walton family’s worth. American inelegance surrounded me, and I leaned into it. Goth 20-somethings with neon green hair, construction workers wearing vests the same color and women with thick eyelashes and purple wigs passed me by. Seeing people my age, I wondered if we would be friends. As I look at the people, some look back. Mostly men. The man with a long, brown mullet stares over his girlfriend’s head. So does the white guy with neck tattoos beside his partner, her pregnant belly the color of cream and popping out over her Mickey Mouse pajama pants. What young American woman has not been leered at inside a Walmart? Admist the shopping and stares, I listen to a “This American Life” episode on starving children in Gaza, navigating the giant store filled with auto equipment and food and televisions. I try not to cry while I reach for a Great Value mayo and keep shopping.
Outside as I wait for my Uber, an employee in her blue vest smiled at me on her smoke break as she placed the white stick between her lips. The smoke settled in the thick air of the summer night, soothing me. A man in front of me lit his own cigarette from his seat in a mobility chair. “Tired. Ready to go home,” he told the man who gave him the Camel. I agreed and got ready to fill my plastic bags in the pack of a pickup truck. “Was it rough in there?” the Uber driver asked. “Yes, it was,” I told him. It took me two hours to shop. “Hot or cold, need any air?” he asked, but I was okay.
The next day, the Banner staff had our in-person Wednesday meeting at Demetria Kalodimos’ studio, who was on the news forever but does our podcast now. The second I heard her voice, I wanted to get to know her. Maybe it was the power of her oration from her decades as a news anchor, or maybe it was the sprig for reporting pitted in my solar plexus stretching towards her with reverence. She and Steve Cavendish are two veteran reporters who started the Banner. Neither know how much I admire them and want to emulate them. I want to stick a pick into their brains and dredge up each decade they have spent in the industry, their stories, their experiences, their losses.
Kalodimos gave me a tour of her studio, an old Gulf gas station she transformed with vintage furniture and an all-blue bathroom. Her Emmys sit on the doorway to the once-car garage where mechanics rotated tires and did oil changes, now a studio Kalodimos records the podcast Banner & Company that authors, artists, politicians, country singers and original Nashville Banner reporters have sat for interviews.
The day prior, Cavendish drove me home after we had a staff day working out of a public library branch. I often worry that the editors regret hiring me, their driver licenseless intern because I saddle the staff with the burden of helping me get around. I rely on their kindness often, and they could not offer to pick me up or drop me off, but they do. At the time of writing this, I have been inside exactly half of our staff’s vehicles. Being a professional passenger is not without its perks, of course. It gives me one-on-one time with the editors and reporters. Suddenly, sitting next to Cavendish on my second full day in Nashville, I had the surreal sensation of placing my life’s moment down in time, and the grasping of how sudden life could be. As he drove under a highway overpass, answering my inquiry into how he has lasted in the hemorrhaged journalism industry to restart Nashville’s historic afternoon paper as a digital-only nonprofit, I felt a spectator to my life’s development rather than the doer, prompted by the ego sensation of there I was or look at me brought on by our conversation and my place in his car. There I was with a man who had been reporting before the internet, before I had been conscious, when four days prior I was at home in Queens, sitting on a bench reading my book alone beside a group of old desi men in Traver’s Park. Cavendish told me that when his former job told him he had to lay off 35 percent of his staff, he responded with “you can start with me.” Look at me, absorbing each word about his “no assholes policy” and how “no one is good enough to take their shit.” He told me to be adaptable and kind, and that having a strong work ethic means more than being the best writer in the world. And with the sensation that struck me, the geographical change and my first real role in the media, I was hit finally not out of fear, but with an exhilarating phenomenon made of the combination of my youth and desire to be a good reporter. I understood that though I would grow in age and experience, this sensation could be endless and evergreen so long as I push myself for it and hold strong to the desire to document, to tell people’s stories and follow wherever it may lead me.
Now I contemplate who I am here, as I contemplated who I was in Prague.
I have grown to be a girl away from New York, living in a Southern city. I am past school unlike the young people I live with and here on my own volition. As a little girl, I modeled myself after Penny Lane from Almost Famous and said I would save all my money and run away via Greyhound buses across America. My desire to leave was rooted in the domestic violence that defined me wholly. My desire to write is rooted in my role as the scapegoat of the family: punished for telling the cops, then my teachers, then not telling CPS in middle school. I told the therapist I saw for three months my freshman year of college, and by then I had resigned to not tell the truth in my writing, thinking I was past what happened. When I visited home, my mother would shake her head and say, “Please, just please. Don’t write about us.” But how can I write without doing that? I need to tell the truth; so I never stopped writing either, despite the shame my family mixed into the one act I loved.
Thankfully a child no longer, I am ready to stretch across America, my words my own and scapegoat no more. And each new place I arrive at, I will walk in a Walmart like all the others if there is no thrift store nearby, and I will buy the ice trays, and the pillows and the cutting board to start again.
My words and wandering go hand in hand, knowing my desire to leave, go somewhere, run away, is rooted in the disenfranchisement I faced as a child; my desire to tell other people’s stories must be rooted in feeling robbed of my own. Now, “running away” no longer means following a band on tour or drifting away on a Greyhound bus — these were childhood fantasies. Dreams have been replaced by a calling, I hope, and it has wound a string around me, pulling me to new places, new people and new ideas. In the profession I have chosen, the wandering is to be expected, accessible and even promised. A journalist can report on the place she knows, or she can be led by what may once have been the scent of a story but is now the scent of stable employment and a meager salary.
When I wrote my first story, Cavendish called me. It was around 2 p.m. and rain poured outside as I stepped into an Uber to get home, and with my phone to my ear he told me: “I wanted to tell you I am so proud of you for your first story,” Cavendish said. “I am so proud of you,” he repeated. For once, it felt so good to hear.
Go Downtown
Martin, the staff photographer, told me to go explore downtown after he took my staff photo in Demetria’s studio. “How about a smise?” he said, as he snapped pictures of me talking and gesticulating, like I do. “I don’t know what that is,” I said. “A smile with your eyes.” I tried it out, but settled on my wide, closed-mouth smile that now beams back at me from my first official press pass. Martin is a Nashville native and the only person who encouraged me to go downtown, where others told me to avoid it by comparing it to Times Square. I desperately wanted to see Broadway and did not care if it was a Southern mimicry, a place not to experience whatever the real Tennessee may be, but a place for drunken debauchery. No bright lights and grime scare me. No smog, no drunks, no crowds on concrete is capable of deterrence. A St Marks Pl veteran patron by the time I was 17, I know how to step over vomit and keep walking. Steet smarts turned into a thick film over my skin, one no four years in a hippie dippie upstate town could buff off.
Rows of big men in black shirts stood under the neon lights, beneath an LED woman winking in a cut top and cowgirl boots, beneath lit-up saloons telling you are in NASHVILLE as white stripes of American flags glowed from the hue of bright words advertising BARBECUE, HONKY TONK and RIBS. This parody of America, still is America — the nation has never strived towards a particular authenticity, just greed and what it does to a good time. The people give in to it, playing dress up as cowgirls and boys and acting horribly. Nashville’s Broadway, with gluttony, so many bright lights, cover song singers selling the idea of Country, drawing you to keep on flinging that credit card down at the bar. The first place I selected called AJs was a classic American sports bar, except for a lonely singer on stage and cranked up patriotism with huge flags, and signs like “proud to serve those who serve.” Going to Nashville while in the military must be great, I thought. People may actually care. I took my seat next to a woman with long platinum blonde hair, wearing silver bedazzled cowboy boots and a hat. The women’s hair in the bar matched the same white hair, frizzy from the heat and fried from the bleach. And the men beside them were all pot-bellied and gray haired, grasping jack and cokes. The singer held his guitar on stage as pale daytime light shone on him, laying down witticisms. He approached the end of his Wednesday afternoon slot, counting down the songs and telling the crowd of day drunks he would play anything for $20. “Even Beyonce,” he said and began strumming “Texas’ Hold’ Em,” mumbling the words to the song he halfway knew before asking if anyone knew Gavin Adcock. His idea of Country. The bartender was the only one who gave a tentative raise of her hand, not wanting to be singled out. The singer said, “When I heard this song for the first time, I cried so hard and I called my ex-girlfriend.” He played “Never Call Again.”
We got our ways honey
Lord knows that I stay stuck in mine
I know the song will forever remind me of Nashville, and when I leave this place and listen to it, it will take me back.
You drove away from me
Left me staring at my phone at midnight
The bartender gave me my check: $10 for my shitty dad beer. I signed it, tipped then texted Martin a picture of the bar to show I went exploring like he said, but I was not pleased at Broadway’s version of a dive bar. “There’s no dive bars on Broadway,” he responded and told me to cross the street and go to “Robert’s” so I did, walking past the singers trapped on stage all day, leaning against wide-open windows, their country croons drifting to the street and luring in the outside masses like southern sirens to sailors. The “Robert’s Western World” bouncer stamped a demure “R” on the inside part of my wrist where someone would kiss. Branded, I took a seat at the bar inside and ordered wine. Hot oil sizzled across from my seat as a man dropped chicken strips and pickle spears into a fryer vat’s bubbling liquid. He worked efficiently, unfazed by the bar’s commotion, slinging ham patties and grilled cheeses. When I saw a man begin to tune his fiddle onstage, I knew I had come to the right spot. Rows of cowboy boots lined the walls beside neon Busch Light signs and of course, the endless American flags stuck to the walls. Stickers like one that said “I’D RATHER BE LISTENING TO EDDIE NOVACK” were stamped above the fryer. Beaming figures looking in different directions were plastered on the wall behind the stage. They hovered over the high-up stage like angels who were ostensible country royalty. Dolly Parton smiled among them — the only person I recognized. Above the stage and beside the faces was a sign that said, “PROTECTING THE MUSIC."
Waiting for the band to play, I took out my book: “Dynamite Nashville” by Betsy Phillips because the only way I know to grasp a city besides being out in it was reading about it. At that moment, I was doing both. My book out on the bar drew a Vancouver woman to me, who praised my book reading in the bar and told me her city was beautiful. Then when she left, JB the bartender spoke to me. He was my king cowboy server, with a handlebar mustache and excellent manners. The cook dropped my grilled cheese in front of me with a gentle smile, which I ate to the tunes of old country music, all songs before the 1960s’, and it was the best grilled cheese I ever tasted. A woman named Kimberley came around with a bucket and a Venmo code for people to drop tips into. She does not dress her age but younger than it, and that coupled with her emphatic warmth would make you glance twice at her. When she stopped to thank me before I left the bar, perhaps it touched me more than it should. When I went back there the second time (yes, I did), JB pulled up a stool for me at the bar when there was not one. I now have a standing invitation to see him DJ at a restaurant on Sundays, and he gave me a free Moon Pie. He dropped the treat on the bar without saying anything, then I paid for the check, he also treated me to my beers for free. The same band was on stage, the same Kimberley went around with the same bucket and the same bouncer gave me the same R on the inside of my wrist, who I learned is named Mac and also has a sweet voice, according to the lead singer Paul Kramer, although I did not stay to hear it. As I spoke to JB during his shift and learned he worked at “Robert’s” for four and a half years, he called it an “oasis” on Broadway. Kimberley and Mac slow danced beside the stage. When I told him I liked watching the drunk mother’s dance and be happy here, he told me how wide the eyes of bachelorette party group’s get when they realize what they stumbled into — an old timey bar averse to the typical gimmicks that populate the strip, like Jelly Roll's Goodnight Nashville or Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N' Roll Steakhouse — a name as obnoxious as the man it is named after, but one my friends and I swapped for “Roofieville,” when Martin told us it is notorious for men drugging women’s drinks there, with no mitigation from the management.
Tucked into bed that night, my friend told me to watch out for guys named JB over text.
At times, I am overwhelmed by the attention I am shown here. My friend tells me there are not many Italians in Nashville, but I am unsure if it is because of my supposedly seldom to come by features, or because I have undergone a metamorphosis, and people can tell. I’m in a new city. It’s summertime. My hair is long and healthy again for the first time in a long time, and I am getting paid to write. Ultimately, I am a little lonely East Coaster. In the spaces of time unoccupied by writing, books substitute friends to reduce how hollow I can get. On the porch, I read Baldwin, I read Morrison, I read about Tennessee. I look up to watch the birds soar against the light of a brilliant sun, a simple pleasure. The bluejay on the telephone wire, the hummingbird at the flowers, the mourning doves cooing in pairs, drinking from my neighbor’s bird bath. They land on the grass of my front lawn, and I listen to the sound of them grounding, like an exhale. At times I fear my roommates will discover I possess innate abnormality, a strangeness reavealed by us living in close proximity, and that I keep secrets: the delightful drop of banana peels over the porch, hoarded food in my room, cigarettes in my purse, the fact that I have not kissed since last summer. One night we stay up on the couch and talk of many things — of allergies, of Cuba, of television. We discuss where we think we go after death. Nowhere we all think, except for the one who is Christian and still has a good relationship with God. I appreciate the contradiction of her rational, STEM-oriented mind and religious ardor, despite religion’s metaphysical nature. It is everywhere down here, as ubiquitous as sweat in this heat, and it is driving me crazy. I shadowed our metro reporter Stephen Elliot at a council meeting, set off by a pastor saying, “Dear Lord let us pray,” and the heads in the room plinked down like anchors into the sea. People augmented the prayer with yes Lords! and mhhmms, amens. This is a part of politics in the land not of “Do you go to church?” but “Where?”
The South may try to mold me, wedge into my soft spots and make them softer. At times, I catch my tongue lilting into a “y’all,” and fend off the contraction from entering my vocabulary. Other times, I cannot resist sinking into sickly-sweet syrupy charm — why resist being the receiver of Southern manners. But this is a strange place, and I do not think I can stay here long. Tennessee has already scarred me: puppies I saw one day being sold in cages, in 80-degree heat smog, reduced to half-dead tuffs of fur by a man who likely considers himself an entrepreneur, holding a deck of business cards. Handguns I saw on the waistbands of what looked like a teenage boy counterprotesting at the No Kings rally. I do not have a car to be here, I do not love America that much, or at all, and I miss the city.
Yet I love Southern Black women, how outward and innate they are, whose audacity and warmth I had only seen mythologized in film and books. One woman, leaning her head and laughing on the coat arm of our handsome tour guide, who is a really a judge’s intern. Another woman, picking at the back of the other intern, then smoothing the coat jacket down. And the lady at the community garden I sat in, who I made laugh when I responded, “So I gotta go?” after she ambled towards me on the bench and said: “We’re going home." As she moved to lock up the gate, she told me they would teach me how to garden. At the council meeting, the women ate beef jerkey and Swedish Fish from ziplock bags of endless snacks. They had shown up to hear the final budget vote, laughing while I was miserable, desperate for the tedious meeting to end. Then one turned and offered me a stick of gum like I wished she would, and I felt better. They are the South to me.
And at least there is the music, making it so I can forgive this place for its sins — for Nashville knows not else how to be.
Superrrr long random stuff about Nashville.
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