Introduction: The Grocery Store After Midnight
For most of my twenties I did my grocery shopping late at night, a practice which my solitary life and odd work schedule made very easy. I did this not because it was more convenient, but because I was afraid of suddenly encountering four-year-old children sitting in their mothers’ shopping carts:
“Mommy! Look! That man doesn’t have a hand!”
This was a moment packed with everything I dreaded. I would be minding my own business, doing this ordinary thing, when suddenly I would catch the attention of a curious child who’d never seen anything like me. The sound of that child calling attention to my disability seemed to suck the air right out of the store. My face reddened. My stomach knotted. I was overcome by the desperate feeling of being exposed – wanting to hide, but knowing there was no place to hide. The look of embarrassment on the mother’s face and the sound of her quieting her child were almost unbearable:
“Shhhh! It’s OK, he’s just different, that’s all.”
That was me she was talking about.
Mom would push her cart quickly in one direction, while I moved just as quickly in the other.
I had this experience five or six times before I stopped going to grocery stores during the day. I would get off work at 11:00 p.m., adrenaline still pumping from producing the late newscast. At home, I would fire up the bong again and again watching TV, until I felt suitably prepared for my shopping trip. Then, slightly off-balance and with my eyes flaming red, I would drive to the store and push my cart around the deserted aisles, squinting in the fluorescent glare, watching the stock clerks replenishing the shelves and laughing to myself at the elevator music playing in the background. In my cocoon of numbness, I was relaxed, safe, invisible.
No one noticed me. The children were all asleep.
