The Great American Box Store Revolution
April 2017
In a downright clichéd performance, our ’02 Subaru’s pistons began misfiring at the bottom of Death Valley, among the rows of signs reading “BRING WATER” and “DANGER: HEAT” and “GET GAS YOU IDIOT TOURISTS”. Luckily, jerkily, it pulled through to the closest town, Baker, California, where we promptly took it to a Mexican-run auto shop that has likely seen a long stream of frantic tourists fresh out of Death Valley with busted carburetors, or weekenders returning from Vegas to LA with busted carburetors, wallets, and livers. The mechanics didn’t speak much English, and had trouble communicating what exactly was the problem and what they were going to do and how much they were going to charge to do it.
After confusedly milling around the concrete parking lot for a couple hours googling various car maladies and Spanish translations, we decided to take the car to the next closest city where we could find some corporate shop with a nice clean interior and a chipper white secretary who would promptly set a diagnostic appointment and serve us coffee. Was this decision racist? We grappled with that a bit as we pulled out of the lot. Not exactly racist – communication challenges are undeniably intimidating – but certainly not doing anything to break down any cultural or linguistic barriers. The Mexican community will continue to use the Mexican mechanic. The white people will continue to use the sparkling corporate shops with the smiling white secretary.
And thus, after a fretful night of camping in a nearby plot of land with unclear ownership, marred with thousands of glass shards from broken beer and whiskey bottles, a smashed up tube TV, and a few empty porno DVD cases, we gunned it the next morning to the closest next-bigger dot on the map: Barstow, California.
Indeed, the waiting room at the nice, clean mechanic shop had an impeccably presented blonde lady at the helm, who promptly set a diagnostic appointment and served us coffee. We sat in the small, cramped waiting room alongside two truckerish looking gentlemen with long untrimmed moustaches and paunchy stomachs peeping out from their under faded T-shirts and an elderly woman who was accompanied by a small, freckled boy in a Minions T-shirt and a fedora. Occasionally he would stretch up from his seat and whisper something in her ear, and she would smile, turn, and whisper back. The woman and was wearing a bright pink sleeveless dress that revealed sagging, veiny arms. Her white hair was long, loosely tied in a bun with pieces flowing down her back. She watched us with kindly crinkled eyes circled with smeared eyeliner.
Waiting for the diagnostics to finish up, we glanced at the magazine on the table: Barstow and Beyond, which featured a team of lady racecar drivers decked out in pink and black leather jumpsuits dotted with corporate logos and giant globular helmets slung with one gloved hand at the waist. Cindy the secretary saw us looking at it, and proudly explained that it was her and “her girls” who were featured in that edition. She had been running a program that showed local teenage girls how to build, tune, and race cars. It was, she explained, a good way to keep them out of boys and drugs. There were conditions for membership in Cindy’s elite club, however. The girls had to get good grades. They had to volunteer at the community veteran’s center. They had to believe in Jesus. Only then can a teenage girl be ready for the demands of the race.
The car was diagnosed and we were charged twice the price it would have been anywhere but a corporate shop in California, but we had no choice but to accept after having rejected a similar bid from the Mexicans. We had two hours to kill, so we turned to fellow waiters in the shop for advice on where to get good tacos and whether there was a Barstow public library. The woman in the bright pink dress stepped up: “Why don’t me and Andy take you around? Our car just finished up and we’ve got nothing to do. We can drop you wherever you want.” We looked at each other, silently assented, then thanked her profusely and followed her out to her Taurus with chipping gold paint.
Shortly we were cruising down the former main street with Bernadette and company, through Barstow’s vanguard of cracked, dirty merchandise windows displaying empty, dusty stores topped by fading wooden signs with remnants of their former letters still holding on. Three or four men in shabby, loose clothes and stocking caps wandered the sidewalks muttering to themselves and smoking cigarettes. A few stores remained open for business: a dollar store, a cheap Mexican food drive-thru, a 24-hour donut shop. The historic downtown felt like a bomb had gone off, and everyone had simply shrugged and walked away from their livelihood without a fuss, and without the will or energy to investigate the culprit.
As we surveyed the destruction, Bernadette pointed out various dilapidated storefront buildings with chipping paint, and FOR SALE signs in the windows. “This used to be a JC Penny’s. That was Bob McCready’s barbershop, but he closed up, oh ten years ago now, I guess.” She pointed to a white wooden two-story building with a wrap-around porch and an empty sign hanging from the second floor. “We used to own this place. It was a hotel.” There was no sentimentality in her voice. We wondered whether she really didn’t feel sentimental or sad about the hollowed out hotel in the hollowed out town, or if she’d simply mastered the art of concealment.
A moment of silence. Then Bernadette’s eyes lit up: “How about I show you the new Wal-Mart?” She was serious. Off we went into the bleak new center of town.
Barstow, located along the legendary Route 66 in San Bernadino County, is two hours east of LA and two hours west of Vegas. For those making the journey from one wasteland to the other, Barstow is and has always been merely a pit stop. Bernadette explained how her uncle had helped build the Santa Fe Railroad that runs through the (former) center of town at the turn of the century. Our racecar driving mechanic secretary had mentioned that her grandma used to work in the “Harvey House” in the station, which was a tavern-hotel for workers and travellers heading west to chase the ever-persistent California dream. Nowadays, larger urban areas in California ship their homeless populations to Barstow, where they can be housed cheaply and stop menacing the urbanites, wearied by their constant, uncomfortable confrontations with living specters of Americanism. As this area appeared to be the garbage dump of Los Angeles, it didn’t surprise us to find out that Hinkley, the town where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company of California dumped tons of chemicals into the groundwater for decades (only to eventually suffer demise at the hands of the famous Erin Brockovich) was right next door. In fact, Bernadette was from Hinkley, and still had to have her tap water tested regularly. “It’s fine,” she said, “I was glad to get the payout, to be honest. And the water has been fine now for fifteen years!”
Barstow is home to 20,000 people while the nearby army base is home to 22,000 people. The only features more prominent than the ghostly main street and the box store strings were the churches and the army recruitment centers, with flamboyant ads showcasing badass dudes jumping out of helicopters or laying in bushes glaring upon evil terrorists in the distance through big expensive viewfinders. We asked whether the young people were joining up and/or leaving. Bernadette masterfully deflected: “Yes, they are, but when they come back – it’s funny, you know – the first thing they want is Del Taco.” We drove by a non-descript white adobe walled fast food restaurant with a bright sun for the logo.
“We have three of them you know,” she explains proudly, “but this one is the original. The kids always come back to it.”
What was originally a kindly drop-off for a car-less, wayward couple had now become a full-service tour. At last, we arrived at the new main street, home to massive, shiny new Wal-Marts, Taco Bells, Dollar Generals, McDonalds etc. Then, we drove past an ominous, massive, grey, empty box store and Bernadette explained that they were closing up the regular Wal-Mart and opening up a new Super Wal-Mart. “This one wasn’t big enough. The new one will have groceries, a bigger clothes section, a barber, a mechanic. I’m just glad because I think the prices will get even lower, and right now I have to buy my kids winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter.” She laughs dryly, “It’s all twisted. I’m raising all these kids on welfare and social security. I raised them all, all by myself. I need the Super Wal-Mart.”
Our pink-dressed, wizard-haired guide’s ten-year-old cohort, Andy, hadn’t said one word the entire time, only stared out the window and sheepishly smiled while averting his eyes whenever we tried to bring him into the conversation. Later, over lunch, Bernadette explained that Andy was her great-grandson, and that she was homeschooling him because his severe arthritis made it too physically painful for him to attend public school. We thought, Who ever heard of a ten-year-old with arthritis? She went on to tell us that Andy’s seventeen-year-old sister had been born addicted to drugs, and although now she’s a straight-A student, Bernadette keeps a GPS tracker on her great-granddaughter because she suffers from short-term memory loss and often gets lost, even within the Barstow city limits. We didn’t ask whether Andy’s arthritis had similar origins, or where Bernadette’s daughter or granddaughter were now.
Eventually we circled back from the new main road and, after a few miles driving north, pulled into a place marked Plata’s Mexican Food by a fading sign depicting a sombrero-clad cartoon serving a taco. “This is where the local people eat”, she said. “I could take you to Del Taco or the touristy train station, but this is where we eat.”
We looked around the drab concrete building. Firemen, construction workers, Hispanic housewives all gathered on cafeteria-style tables or booths in fluorescent light. Bernadette recommended a pork burrito; I obliged, insisted on paying, and we all sat down in a booth. Over our burritos, we watched Bernadette and Andy who had taken out a napkin and began drawing his math homework on it. The windows were dirty and natural light struggled to filter through. Bernadette leaned over to correct a wayward 1 that should have been carried to the hundreds, not tens, column. She cheered when Andy figured out the answer, and a tiny smile peaked through from under his fedora. This tenderness seemed to contrast everything we had just seen and heard in this struggling town. In that moment, we were somehow glad that our car had nearly dumped us in Death Valley, that we had made all the decisions we had made that had led us to a town we had immediately dismissed upon arrival, and also to an improbable solidarity with this 80-year-old stranger who has been holding things together for her town and her family, despite the odds, for countless decades.
We look at Barstow and see a place that is representative of an ailing nation. A nation that is slowly succumbing to its hyper-capitalist cancer, the persistent drain of urbanism, replacing culture, economy and community with big prison-like boxes filled with rows of cheap Chinese-made crap and trans-fat food bathed in white fluorescent light. We see Barstow as one of the countless victims of the box store revolution that is slowly strangling the nation, a revolution with coerced foot soldiers like Bernadette who must “join or die”.
She knows she is of a dying generation in a dying town. Yet she retains the basic, steadfast will to survive, compelling her to look beyond the pity, nostalgia and anger that we, as strangers, somehow feel on her behalf. She looks upon the Barstow main street, her failed hotel, the first house she and her husband ever lived in that has since been converted into a church, the army base, the old, empty Wal-Mart, the new shiny one being built and she still she sees community. “I could leave. But then who would fix the kids’ bikes when they have a flat tire? Who would come to fix my leaking faucet? Who will pitch in for the rent when I’m running short? There is always someone around to help when I need it, and I try to pay that forward. How could I leave?”
Heading back to the mechanic shop, Bernadette screeched to a stop for a sudden red light. We all waited, staring ahead patiently, as silent as Andy, with no cars passing for the perpendicular green light. A plastic cup tumbled past in the breeze. The light changed and no cars but the golden Taurus sailed on through the intersection.