Fated to Keep Going

 “It’s a warning: tread carefully, you who are drunk with power or even a little tipsy; you too could end up plucked and squawking and driven from the city.” Eduardo Galeano

I hated to do it but I couldn’t leave the shopping cart full of stuff next to the dumpster behind the market. For one thing, the cart wasn’t one of ours, it belonged to Smart & Final. Most of the contents had spilled on the ground: two pairs of sneakers in plastic bags, part of a Swiffer duster, a Big Gulp plastic cup, two wooden broom handles, an empty pack of cigarettes, a mattress cover, a gray sweatshirt, a pink bedsheet, a soiled bath towel, a couple of magazines, a flimsy floral-patterned scarf, a section of hose from a vacuum, a metal nail file. Somebody’s stuff. Somebody’s earthly possessions. I opened the lid to the dumpster and started tossing it all in, then I wheeled the cart out to the street. It made me feel sad. 

Our shopping carts find their way all over town, miles from the store, until they are rounded up by a man paid to return them to us. The carts often come back from their travels encrusted with mud and grime, with bent frames and broken wheels, littered with weeds and branches. Wheeled beasts of burden, luggage carriers of the poor and downtrodden. If they have any life left, we douse them with disinfectant, rinse them off, and let them dry in the sun. Sometimes my co-worker Jose gives them a new set of wheels. 

M runs the receiving dock. He unloads trucks and checks deliveries in. M is short but thick, big-boned, with a long ponytail and a deep, raspy smoker’s voice. He lives in the San Fernando Valley and his daily commute is in the neighborhood of 160 miles. I don’t know why he doesn’t look for a job in a store closer to home. The cost of gasoline has M sleeping in a black van in the parking lot a couple of nights a week. The shit people have to do to keep going is unreal. In some cases the problem is too many hours, too many days in a row, and in others it’s not enough hours, a losing proposition either way, but that’s the American wasteland; wages are low, rents are stratospheric, especially here on the glitzy American Riviera, and serfs swap the hours of our lives for money. I walked 13.3 miles last night during my shift. It wasn’t too difficult, the store wasn’t busy; I made my rounds with my broom and dustpan, took out the trash, emptied the cardboard baler, mopped the johns, and rounded up the carts. Simple job. The secret is just to keep moving, circulating. 

My neighborhood is noisy. If it’s not wailing sirens from fire trucks, ambulances or cop cars, it’s the unsettling whine of leaf blowers, hedge trimmers, chainsaws, or nail guns. MTD buses lumber past on Milpas. One of the things I remember about the first Covid lockdown was how quiet it was; that was eerie, but kind of beautiful in a way, when the dominant sound was the wind in the trees or birdsong. 

And we are fated to keep going, through the stupidity of our rulers, their cruelty and indifference to life, the hypocrisy and cowardice that follows in their malevolent wake; the sun rises and we get up and do it all over again. No wonder people go insane. No wonder so many are too worn down and tuckered out to think for themselves, to push back against the bastards who run the machinery that churns out misery and suffering; it doesn’t have to be. Human beings still haven’t figured out how to share the bounty in any manner that approaches equity.