GALLATIN GUNS
by David Berman

Gallatin Pike is a six-mile strip of mega-stores just north of my neighborhood. I'm talking about Circuit City and Home Depot and their kind. Each one is large enough to hold a legislative body or garage a battleship. It is a beige and gray zone cluttered with rectangular, non-unionized landforms, evocative of what I imagine Pink Floyd's latterday album The Division Bell would sound like if I could ever make myself listen to it.

Today I need to go up there to get four new tires on my truck and buy a new pair of eyeglasses. Mine are a complete mess, taped together in five different places, they have been the cause of many asides from other people over the years, letting me know that when I wear them I resemble the cult leader Jim Jones.

My plan is to get the glasses and the tires at one store, Sears, which is attached to the Rivergate Mall, and try to make it back home before the headache, nausea, and numbness in the limbs gets a foothold in my body. I enjoy going to the mall but if I'm in there more than ninety minutes I start to get these physical symptoms that I perceive as a lite, fourth-degree poisoning.

When I leave the house there is a yellow dust coating the porch and the grill and the rocking chair. The word pollen comes to mind. I don't know much about it but it immediately bothers me like an unswept floor. Like I'll have to get to that later.

Ten-thirty a.m. has it's own distinct je ne sais quoi. It is the time of day children most often break into houses. The fast food restaurants teeter on the edge of breakfast and lunch. At 10:30 a.m. it can no longer be denied that this day has a history.

Between my neighborhood and the commercial strip are two cemeteries on either side of the road. One contains soldiers and the other one, country stars. You must pass backwards through death to arrive at Hobby Lobby and T.G.I. Fridays. In the last couple of years I have found my surroundings to be highly allegorical, and remarkably coherent in their underlying unity. For that reason and others I am not feeling like a foreigner here, on this side of death, in the contemporary marketplace. If I feel like I am an outsider it is only in relation to the other shoppers. The mall itself is anyone's native terrain, and it's mine as well.

The Sears Auto Center garage is huge, with forty bays it is larger than an airplane hangar but it is mostly empty when I arrive. I'm told it will only take ninety minutes, which I know to be my targeted tolerance time. I don't talk about it much with others, but my junior year in high school I worked in the children's clothing department at Marshall Field's in the Galleria as a temporary Christmas season employee. I believe I may have experienced chromosome damage from the dyes and perfumes in the air at that time.

I remember visiting Vienna in the early nineties and being surprised at what a large percentage of the pedestrians wore eyeglasses. And they were smaller, more rectangular, and more likely to be wire-framed than what Americans commonly wore. Now fifteen years later, the Austrian style has not only become the new standard, it has made the large goofy plastic framed eyeglasses of the past completely disappear.
I've been told you must go to small towns to catch the last of the disappearing stock. I got a good tip from someone about the frames at Sears but it's a bust. Apparently all the rednecks are trying to look like Viennese analysts. You come to the mall to learn these things.

And when you hit a brick wall shopping it is terribly discouraging. You want it to be over with, to check the mission off your list. I leave the Sears and head out into the mall proper on the off chance that there is a good behind-the-times one-hour eyeglass store. And there is. And they have one pair of large plastic-framed glasses. Which after the lens are tinted, are exactly what I want. This is good. I think I'm going to get out of here without any commercial trauma.

Later on, as I'm driving past the graveyards, where all shopping ultimately must end, I look in the rear-view mirror and admire the new glasses. The only problem is, I look exactly like Jim Jones.

dreamt 5000 movies, every one I'm running away

tired

misplaced


apologies


to the world

RAIN







FALLING







RAIN







FALLING







RAIN

empty spaces

"Now I wander aimlessly

No light on in the hall

No friendly step a-steering me

No guiding hand at all"

Watch One Hour With Me

when my hallelujah days

streak into blues and greys

be my guide

stay awhile