As I unpack the groceries, delivered to my doorstep, I discover that instead of nine rolls of toilet paper I have received twelve, three of them emblazoned with a yellow stripe as Bargain Extras.
And I remember the old woman in San Francisco: when I was living in the ratty, drug-dealer-infested apartment house on Market Street in the nineties, and getting some groceries free from the AIDS Project and others in bulk from the local grocery store, a day when I was dragging home tons of things... including a big plastic bag of rolls of toilet paper that I was trying to hold on to without dropping everything else, as my fingers went red and numb as they usually did with the AIDS Project bags with all their cans and bottles.
And a homeless woman, an old crone, filthy and half-mad but in some ways far more clear-headed than I was, bursting into cackling laughter at the sight of me: look at you, with all that bum roll, what are you going to do with it all – I was embarrassed and annoyed but frankly that day I could see her point.
All the focal points and discrepancies of Marxism, all the bizarre experiences of failure and poverty versus comfort and hoarded goods, all the fears and uncertainties of failure and success, and further back all the strange and horrifically disturbing ways that the eighties flung the differences between Us and Them (those with homes and the homeless) or Them and Us (those with plenty and those of us scraping by) into our faces –
Putting these rolls of toilet paper away, I am laughing, long and surprisingly loudly. Like I just got the joke, and it's on me.
Comments