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By Root 1418 0

find Carbondale. But there was nothing there. I was perplexed and disillusioned. Before I had left on the trip I had lain awake at night in my bed in England and pictured myself stopping each evening at a motel in a little city, strolling into town along sidewalks, dining on the blue plate special at Betty’s Family Restaurant on the town square, then plugging a scented toothpick in my mouth and going for a stroll around the town, very probably stopping off at Vern’s Midnite Tavern for a couple of draws and a game of eight-ball with the boys or taking in a movie at the Regal or looking in at the Val-Hi Bowling Alley to kibitz the Mid-Week Hairdressers’ League matches before rounding off the night with a couple of games of pinball and a grilled cheese sandwich. But here there was no square to stroll to, no Betty’s, no blue plate specials, no Vern’s Midnite Tavern, no movie theatre, no bowling alley. There was no town, just six-lane highways and shopping malls. There weren’t even any sidewalks. Going for a walk, as I discovered, was a ridiculous and impossible undertaking. I had to cross parking lots and gas station forecourts, and I kept coming up against little white-painted walls marking the boundaries between, say, Long John Silver’s Seafood Shoppe and Kentucky Fried Chicken. To get from one to the other, it was necessary to clamber over the wall, scramble up a grassy embankment and pick your way through a thicket of parked cars. That is if you were on foot. But clearly from the looks people gave me as I lumbered breathlessly over the embankment, no-one had ever tried to go from one of these places to another under his own motive power. What you were supposed to do was get in your car, drive twelve feet down the street to another parking lot, park the car and get out. Glumly I clambered my way to a Pizza Hut and went inside, where a waitress seated me at a table with a view of the parking lot.

All around me people were eating pizzas the size of bus wheels. Directly opposite, inescapably in my line of vision, an overweight man of about thirty was lowering wedges into his mouth whole, like a sword swallower. The menu was dazzling in its variety. It went on for pages. There were so many types and sizes of pizza, so many possible permutations, that I felt quite at a loss. The waitress appeared. ‘Are you ready to order?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I replied, ‘I need a little more time.’

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘You take your time.’ She went off to somewhere out of my line of vision, counted to four and came back. ‘Are you ready to order now?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I really need just a little more time.’

‘OK,’ she said, and left. This time she may have counted as high as twenty, but when she returned I was still nowhere near understanding the many hundreds of options open to me as a Pizza Hut patron.

‘You’re kinda slow arentcha?’ she observed brightly.

I was embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry. I’m out of touch. I’ve . . . just got out of prison.’

Her eyes widened. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. I murdered a waitress who rushed me.’

With an uncertain smile she backed off and gave me lots and lots of time to make up my mind. In the end I had a medium-sized deep dish pepperoni pizza with extra onions and mushrooms, and I can recommend it without hesitation.

Afterwards, to round off a perfect evening, I clambered over to a nearby K-Mart and had a look around. K-Marts are a chain of discount stores and they are really depressing places. You could take Mother Theresa to a K-Mart and she would get depressed. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the K-Marts themselves, it’s the customers. K-Marts are always full of the sort of people who give their children names that rhyme: Lonnie, Donnie, Ronnie, Connie, Bonnie. The sort of people who would stay in to watch The Munsters. Every woman there has at least four children and they all look as if they have been fathered by a different man. The woman always weighs 250 pounds. She is always walloping a child and bawling, ‘If you don’t behave, Ronnie, I’m not gonna bring you back here no more!’ As if Ronnie could