volume one IN THE D U D L E Y C L A R K - Ohio Vine Tours

He springs open the doors.
If Roy’s current wish were suddenly to come true, he would
have his tunes cranked up and wouldn’t have heard what the
driver said. Instead, he would sense everything like a blind man,
or a gastropod, and he wouldn’t have this feeling he has right
now, that he needs to say something back to this old, gay-as-athree-dollar-bill
bus driver’s kind words regarding his step.
Roy nods, careful not to make eye contact, and steps down
and out and in no time is blessed by the benediction of rain.
The doors hiss closed. The bus grunts and roars, looking like
an armored worm, and pulls back into traffic.
The Safeway is only a block away.
Roy makes a beeline for its giant red S, and the best prices in
Seattle.
Not that he shops at all that many places and compares them
and knows where the best deals are. In actual fact, Roy pretty
much restricts his grazing to Safeway and the Red Apple over
on MLK. It’s true that he’s tried some of the Yuppie grocery
stores, like Larry’s and Whole Foods and the PCC. But they
made him feel uncomfortable, like he needed to spend more
money in order to belong. He would stand in line with his little,
plastic basket containing a few stalks of celery and a can of flat
anchovies, and maybe one or two other items, while the woman
ahead of him wrote a check for eight hundred and sixty-five
dollars and eleven cents for two bags of food. And most of it
wasn’t food, anyway, but bottles of French mustard, German
water, organic wine—shit like that. Not real food. Just fancy
packaging. And they would invariably have a kid in a sling. And
the kid in the sling would invariably have an attitude and would
invariably be wearing clothes that cost more than all of Roy’s
clothes put together with his squeegees thrown in. (Why does a
kid who doesn’t even walk need Italian shoes? Or a hand-knitted,
lambswool sweater?) And the people who shopped in these places
all looked like they lived in fashion magazines and wouldn’t give
Roy the time of day if he fell down on the painted concrete floor
and had a seizure and his brain fell out of his head.
The Safeway is better because that’s where regular people
shop, people who don’t wear Gucci iPod cases and Armani
ROY ROGERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY