Free Love in the Time of Climate Change by Brian Adams Page A

going.”
    â€œPlease?” he begged.
    â€œNo way. I’m not going out at eleven at night and getting you a toilet plunger.”
    â€œGetting
us
a plunger. Remember, dude, there’s only one toilet and you don’t want to go anywhere near there. I can
see
the smell.”
    â€œGo across the street and borrow one from Scary Man,” I said, doing my best to suppress the gag reflex.
    Jesse genuflected.
    Scary Man, in the house adjacent to ours, was always glaring at us. Three “Romney for President” signs dotted his lawn. His gas-guzzling car, which he’d let idle for whatseemed like hours every morning before he left for work, had a bumper sticker with Obama and a slash through it. He incessantly, constantly, obsessively mowed his lawn.
    He thought we were a gay couple. Just to annoy him we held hands and one time even kissed while he watched.
    We hated him.
    â€œAre you kidding me?” Jesse groaned again. “I can’t even look in that direction without getting the heebie-jeebies. Come on, I’ll fix dinner the next two nights.”
    â€œFour.”
    â€œThree.”
    â€œDone.”
    I grabbed my jacket and headed for the car.
    I realized immediately that there was one significant problem. One huge obstacle standing in the way of a successful plunger retrieval mission.
    The only store open at eleven at night was Walmart.
    Walmart! God, I hated that store. I loathed it. I despised it. It creeped me out even more than Scary Man. It was the mistress of the big-box bitches. It epitomized all that was wrong with capitalism run amuck. Out to make a dime, they couldn’t give a damn who or what they had to run over to get it—their workers, employee health and safety, small-town downtowns, the environment. If corporations were people, like our enlightened Supreme Court has so fascistically ruled, then Walmart should be tarred and feathered, water-boarded, and then lynched. Not necessarily in that order.
    Ugh! Walmart! But the glaring reality was that we had a toilet to unclog. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
    Cursing the Roommate and his prolific bowel movements, I headed out to the devil’s store.
    Depressingly enough, I could barely find a place to park. Almost midnight on a Wednesday and the store was absolutely packed. And, of course, finding any sort oflive person inside who could help you was an absolute impossibility.
    Attention shoppers: Best of luck finding anything!
    Emergency supplies? Housewares? Toiletries? Where the hell would they put plungers?
    After about ten minutes of fruitless wandering, I began to get paranoid.
    One: What if I didn’t find one? God knows, the house had been intolerable enough when I left. Coming home empty-handed was clearly not an option.
    Two: Even more of a concern, what if a student saw me here? How would I explain myself? For all my vocal “shop local” and anti-corporate rhetoric, for all my litany of environmental atrocities that Walmart has spewed, getting busted here could significantly damage my reputation.
    Three: Worse-case scenario, what if
She
were here. I couldn’t imagine a scenario like that possibly unfolding, unless maybe she had experienced a similar clogging emergency.
    I couldn’t go there.
    I began to sneak a peek down each aisle before venturing forth, furtively spying on shoppers for faces I knew, slinking from toys to women’s clothing, and then, damn it, somehow back to toys again. I grabbed a pack of compact fluorescent lightbulbs as a cover, a pathetic attempt to mitigate the grossness of my shopping transgression should I get spotted.
    I could plead an energy-efficient-lightbulb emergency; after all, I had to see in order to grade papers. Feeble excuse, but it was the best I could think of.
    After what seemed like eternity, and on the verge of abandoning all hope, I stumbled around the corner of Kleenex and paper towels and, hallelujah, praise the Lord, there