T.G.I.B.F.

...in which Ashley forgets that he already faced his fears.

This is another antique essay I’ve rescued from cyberspace obscurity, from back in the days when I had a Walmart nearby. (Walmart couldn’t survive in Germany with such restrictions on its exploitative practices.) This advanced European utopia I now call home has not only a Black Friday, but an entire Black Week, during which everyone behaves in an orderly fashion. It’s one of the many holiday rituals the Germans perform incorrectly.

This is the way I remembered it: My mother had signed me up for swimming lessons that I didn’t want when I was about six years old. My parents and my older, scarier siblings did their best to stress the importance of learning to swim as a potentially life-saving skill, thereby vindicating whatever deeply rooted fear of drowning I already had. My family has always been quick to emphasize the innumerable dangers of living. This is how they looked out for me—by constantly warning me about the broken glass, deadly highway accidents, and killer bees ready to end my fragile life at any minute.

I knew that this preschool swimming course would conclude with a leap off the diving board into the deep end of the pool. This was the qualifying exercise, the rite of passage that would signify we were no longer merely children filling a pool with pee, but masters of the chlorinated seas. And I knew that diving into this deep end, where one’s feet did not touch the bottom, is where my death by drowning would occur.
And so, as I recalled, I confided in my mother that I was terrified of this plunge into my watery grave. And my mother was then convinced that continuing the swimming lessons would be too traumatic for her delicate, precious baby. So, I was allowed to remain a landlubber, spared my fate of sleeping with the fishes.

At least this is what I thought had happened until this past Thanksgiving, when I recounted this memory to my family at the dinner table. But my mother corrected me on the story’s finale: I hadn’t been allowed to skip the final swim lesson. Despite my appeal for clemency, I had been forced to walk the plank and after some coaxing and threatening, had made the deadly jump. And when my mother said this, it was like a shaft of light opened upon my memory and I could clearly remember doing this—holding my nose and cannonballing my tiny self into the drink.

This was enormously liberating. All this time I had been emotionally flogging myself over this incident, thinking I had chickened out when faced with this mortal childhood fear. It should have been obvious that this wasn’t the case, seeing as I made many a sporting dive into our neighborhood pool throughout my childhood. I ain’t ‘fraid of no deep end! But having this story of childhood wussitude corrected filled me with self-assurance as if I now had the courage to face any fear that modern life could generate.

And that’s why I went to Walmart on Black Friday.

Among my list of neuroses is a fear of crowds. I have no problem being in an audience of relatively still people all facing the direction of Cory Hart’s comeback tour or other organized spectacles, but a swirling mass of people—say, storming the breakfast bar or the closeout aisle—can make me pretty antsy. I’ve had to slip out the emergency exit at crowded art openings, and I generally avoid the grocery store on heavy traffic days.

So, what better arena to face my fear than Black Friday at Walmart? After all, I’m the sort who had relished the anti-Walton propaganda over the years, reading about trampled consumers and other violent altercations during the Black Friday mêlées of November’s past. I’ve been boycotting Walmart for years, stewing in my leftist snit over their predatory business practices, environmental damage, and union-busting exploitation of workers both here and abroad. I happily peered down my snoot at the lesser peons who swarmed like ants in their quest for discount Playstations and epileptic Elmos. From my ivory tower of comfortable isolation, I pitied and feared the mass hysteria of the Christmas-shopping peasants, shoving and stomping on one another in their lust for empty consumerism.

But considering my fear of the jostling unwashed, Black Friday at Walmart seemed like the perfect place to attempt desensitization—the fried rat to my G. Gordon Liddy. So, as my eyes fluttered open from my turkey-induced nap, I was seized with a rare case of shopaholism.

Mind you, I had no intention of actually purchasing anything in this evil empire. I was in this strictly to mingle with the maddened masses, to experience this retail Running of the Bulls I’d been promised was so exhilarating. Black Friday enthusiasts had described to me the sort of adrenaline rush that makes you wonder if you would live or die in a struggle over the last Vizio flatscreen. But what I actually encountered at Walmart fell short of the Benghazi-style eruption of mob violence I’d been promised in all those YouTube clips.

Having missed the initial opening rush at 6:00 pm, what I saw inside wasn’t a plague of marauding hoarders fighting over Barbies and Hoovers, but lots of people standing in line. They had all loaded their carts with the advertised bargains and stood in queues that snaked around the store aisles, all of them bitterly complaining about the lack of organization that kept them immobile. Had I intended to buy something—maybe take advantage of the discount on the insanely expensive ink jet cartridges my home printer sucks dry—there’s no way I could justify the hours I would have to wait to make the purchase. This wasn’t the swirling mass of people I’d expected, but a bunch of consumerist cattle waiting their turn to be slaughtered in the checkout lane. I had been eyeballing the pool cues in sporting goods as potential weapons for nothing.

Of course, this was actually the prequel to Black Friday, seeing as the store opened on Thursday night. Much has been sputtered with indignation about Walmart and other retailers being open on the Good Lord’s Holy Day of Thanking the Natives, or whatever it is that Thanksgiving is actually about. Add this to the near-universal irritation of seeing Christmas displays in the stores earlier and earlier each year and it seems part of a business conspiracy to push the start of the Christmas season back to somewhere in April. But judging from the crowd I saw, scheduling the start of Black Friday on Thursday seems like a necessity to give more customers ample opportunity to risk cuts and abrasions. The demand to be part of this stampede is on the increase.

There are extra employees hired to manage this nightmare, all of them sporting flimsy, disposable vests in neon yellow. Appropriately, they look like an interstate road crew, directing traffic around a four-Tahoe pileup during rush hour. Cops are on duty, too. But the collective crush of shoppers and their loaded carts keeps these authoritarians as immobilized as anyone else in the store, putting their helpfulness when the riots breaks out in question. They’re not too helpful, generally, to be honest. I asked one confused and frightened temp what kind of discount I might expect on certain electronic items (Black Friday prices are not marked on the displays) and the answer I got was, “No idea.” I got the identical answer when I tried again with two yellow-vested youngsters in the cereal aisle. It was clear that the dedicated shoppers knew exactly which items had the primo markdowns and stuffed their carts accordingly, but the employees didn’t have a clue.

I hung out in that cereal aisle when I needed a breather. This being a “Super” Walmart, it features a grocery section, and though this area was comparatively calmer than the electronics department (by far Mecca for the Black Friday faithful), it occurred to me that I could probably eat anything I wanted during this chaos without being noticed. These are storm-like conditions, after all. A run on Christmas gifts after Thanksgiving looks much like a mania for batteries and water before a hurricane. The usual shopping decorum is out the window in an emergency like this. I could probably have fetched a bowl from housewares, opened up some milk, and sat down with some Fruity Pebbles without anyone saying a word.

Automotives turned out to be a reliable safe area, too. Wiper blades and Penzoil are simply too practical to be of interest to holiday bargain hunters. But even here it became clear that actually browsing in this insanity was a bad idea. One must remain on constant alert in the Black Friday swarm. Carts are forcing their way around every corner. Customers are climbing over endcap displays to move past the logjammed line of shopping carts. People are passing charcoal grills and bicycles over the heads of the others like Iggy Pop over a mosh pit. Attempting to actually to shop in the middle of this action could result in serious injury. Read the ingredients labels some other time.

I dodged and weaved my way through this retail Mardi Gras for about an hour before I got bored with it. It was enough of a densely-packed, moving crowd to qualify as facing my fear of such—there was even some question as to whether I could actually make it to the exit again—but as baptisms of fire go, this didn’t seem like a big deal. Maybe in 40 years time I’ll even forget that I ever forced my way into Walmart on Black Almost-Friday and have to be reminded that I did, in fact, take the terrifying plunge. Maybe that’s how we know we’ve successfully conquered what frightens us—when it ain’t no thang.

Perspective makes a huge difference on how we view humanity’s parade of stupid. Almost dying is the same thing as surviving—or is it? I’ve sometimes found myself feeling terribly nervous driving on some big city freeway, trying to stay alert and alive in very hectic, high-speed traffic. But the perspective that overcomes this anxiety is in realizing I’m witnessing hundreds of people hurtling forward in their Audis and Volvos who are not crashing into each other. Somehow, mankind has forged enough order out what promises to be chaos that people can become unified by a basic need to avoid killing each other. We’re not likely to drown in the deep end because others would prefer that we didn’t.

And so, what’s to fear in Black Friday? For every isolated incident of someone trampled to death while loading up on toaster ovens, there are millions who simply charge into the store, buy a bunch of brand name products they don’t need, and go home unscathed, save their crippling credit card debt. What’s more, they apparently had a good time overindulging in consumer goods in the sport of shopping that enlivens their otherwise empty lives of nine-to-five toil and HGTV.

Still, what truly gives me hope is remembering the one Walmart customer that evening I overheard leaving the store. He raised his voice in disgust to his friend: “Man, I ain’t coming back here on Black Friday, Blue Tuesday, or Orange Thursday.”
There’s one more who’s had enough. Braving this sort of craziness may be therapeutic for me, but he’s adopted the more pragmatic perspective: You can’t drown if you don’t go near the water.

- A.H.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)