For Customers in Training

By Adam Kaz

One time at a college party Stephanie stood on a table and yelled, “Our entire lives are dictated by corporatists, everyone, all of it! Everything we do builds profit for other people. And the best we can hope for is to appease our overlords into giving us enough of their money so we can have the freedom to self-actualize. But no matter what we do we’re going to die. Life is a game run by corporatists, and then you die.”

And right now, February 2020—the time of year when Illinois’ prickly chill suctions and extracts all life from the skin—Stephanie, 26, is standing stock-still in a Heinen’s Grocery Store. She’s in the produce section, leaned up against the oranges, now facing the wall just between the entrance and the glowing vegetable cooler. Meanwhile the motion censor doors, sounding like spacecraft vacuum seal loading docks, open and close with each new customer, blasting quick bursts of chilly air against her tired face. But she pays no mind. Stephanie has been reading and rereading a sign on the wall for about 30 seconds now.

It (the sign) is made from the same featherweight corrugated plastic material she has seen used for political lawn ads. About four feet off the ground, painted to look wooden, with words written in misshapen, scratchy, and sometimes backward lettering so as to replicate a child’s handwriting, the sign is placed above a grouping of two foot high toy shopping carts. On it reads: “For Customers in Training.”

Body tense, teeth clenched. 

“Can you believe the garbage they’re shoveling into our kids’ heads?” Stephanie calls back to husband Ron, 27, who right now is teaching their child Carl, four, how to identify the mushy spots on an onion. They’re several paces behind.

“What?” Rob is preoccupied. Carl, who's been grabbing things a lot lately, has his pint-sized hands wrapped around Rob’s demonstration onion. The two are in a sort of tug-of-war, which Rob ends with a gentle a correction—“No, little buddy, we don’t grab things”—and then places the vegetable back. “What?”

Stephanie marches over to them. “‘For Customers in Training,’ do you see that?”

Rob follows her pointer up to the display. “Huh,” he says.

“‘For Customers in Training.’ Might as well say, ‘For Corporate Drones in the Making.’ My god, they’re getting to them so young, Rob. I mean, give the kids a chance, right. Give them something without all this consumer crap down their throats.” Weaving a strand of hair from her eye, she crouches down to her son. “Buddy, listen, you are not a customer,” she says, shaking his shoulders. “You (clap) are (clap) a (clap) citizen.” And then rocketing to her feet, goes, “I just can’t believe this bullshit.”

Carl gasps, says, “Mommy, you can’t say that."

Mommy crouches back again. “Car, look, it’s OK to say bad words when you’re an adult and you’re really upset. Sometimes there’s nothing else you can say. Moderation is the key, pumpkin. It’s OK to swear, but only sometimes . . . and only if you’re an adult.”

Rob presses his thumb against the onion’s soft spot. “Yeah, but you know, Carl.”  He clears his throat. “You should learn to handle your emotions so you never have to say words like that,” he says, staring at his hands. “It’s a very rare thing to say bad words, only when you really have to.”

Stephanie, now back on her feet, crosses her arms, says, “Yeah, that’s what I said, Rob: moderation."

“Yeah, Carl, just like Mommy said.”

Carl rubs his eyes. “Can we get ice cream next?”

When sophomore-in-college Stephanie caught wind of sexual harassment rumors circulating around a philosophy professor, she organized dozens of students into a frenzied, aggressive march into his classroom. The protest led to Stephanie’s dismissal from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but it also became the basis for her personal statement in her Reed College application, for which she received a full scholarship.

“The moral decay in this country is just so obvious,” she says to Rob apropos of nothing as they shop for black beans, she grabbing from the shelf and he steering the cart. “I mean, look around, where else in the world could you find so much pathetic excess other than in a U.S. supermarket?”

Carl, who just a second ago was hobbling beside his dad, lags behind the couple, bobbling his blank eyes between the many colorful packages in the Latin food aisle. He wanders away from parental surveillance toward a display of Mexican sodas, which are frustratingly shelved just beyond his reach.

“I mean, who are are we kidding?” Stephanie tosses two cans into the cart. “How do these people think we can maintain all this shit?” For a second she looks at Rob. “Sorry, stuff.” Looking back at the shelf, “How can we maintain all this stuff? All this food and fuel and entertainment? How else other than by the wealth of war and plunder? We’re in a collapsing empire, Robby, we’re seeing it firsthand. And it’s everywhere: in the unions, in our colleges, in our culture. Stagnate wages, violent porn, kids zombified by their phones. The community of one has taken over, and look where it’s gotten us.”

“You’re right,” he says, “absolutely right. It’s a mess.” Sigh. “But what are we going to do about it?” Rob looks at the empty child-sized space between his left knee and foot. “Where’s Carl?” 

They turn around. Baby boy Carl, now at the back end of the aisle, is trying to spring-step himself off the bottom shelf toward the breakable glass items above his head. Hands stretched high he attempts the launch, soars a few inches, slips-stumbles-fumbles backward, catches his weight with his heel, and then doggedly tries again. Rob half-jogs to his son. Grabbing him under the armpits, with a “harrumph” he swings the laughing menace up and over back to the ground.

“Nope, nope, nope, not cool, little guy,” he says once he’s settled the boy next to his mom. “If you want something, use your words.”

Stephanie ruffles Carl’s hair. “My little scamper,” she says, “you scared me to death, you know.” She wraps his head under her arm, and in that gritted teeth voice saved only for the cutest or most severe situations, she says, “My little Indiana Jones, you’re gonna give someone some real trouble some day.”

In college Stephanie ended all her emails with words like “Bomb” or “Terrorist” or “Pakistan.” If asked why she’d tell you it was so the CIA would flag her correspondence, which she hoped would contribute to the information overload that constantly stymies the War on Terror. Of course she made an exception for teachers and employers.

And right now, on the car ride home, with a thoroughly tuckered-out Carl in the backseat and a zoned-in Stephanie in passenger, she tells Rob in a hushed voice her evolving thoughts on the concept of shopping vis a vis the whole bankrupt capitalist dystopia of which she is trapped.

“I hate being a hypocrite,” she says, “but there’s no way around it, that’s what’s so messed up. You’ve heard me say this, but the fact is I can’t participate in the world unless I reap the benefits of slavery and suffering. I have to be a hypocrite. My computer, which I need to make a living, was made by slaves, my fruit was picked by slaves, my car, which I need to exist in this country, was made in a planet destroying factory; and now on the road we’re just adding more and more dents to a climate catastrophe. We’re doing it now, literally right now. I mean, Jesus, man, it’s so fucked up.”

Stephanie looks back at little Carl, says, “I just hope he’s ready, you know.” And then to Rob: “We’ll make him ready.”

He bites his thumbnail, sniffles one sharp breath. Rob clears his throat. “Right, I hear what you’re saying, Steph, but, uh, does he have to be, you know, that ready?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just I’m not sure we should be talking about all this stuff with him.”

“Stuff?”

“The corporatist stuff, you know.”

She scoffs. Lifting her right leg against the dashboard and pressing a hand against her temple, as if to tune her body and mind to a pouncing position, she stares dead-eyed at him.

“The corporatist stuff?” she says, eyes narrowed, head at 45 degrees, voice several decibels higher, “Dude, can you please get off my back?”

“Shhh.”

“Oh, don’t shush me, Rob.” Several decibels more. She puts her leg down and leans into the driver. 

“It’s just Carl, OK.” He checks on the kid, still dead asleep, through the rear view. 

“I knew this was where this was going,” she says. “With all that ‘moderation’ stuff earlier, I knew it.”

“Stephanie, you know I love your passion. You know that, right?” Rob slows the car to a stop at the light. His eyes remain glued on the road. “But I’m concerned we’re ratcheting up Carl’s anxiety.”

Scoff again. “I’m preparing him, that’s what’s happening. I’m showing him the real deal of being alive, which is a lot more than what he’s getting at that Nerf-d daycare.” She looks out the window. “Kids need to adjust to the reality of things. A little anxiety is part of the adjustment. Besides, he’s not really that anxious.”

Rob continues on, “It’s a little weird, I think, that he can’t sleep alone, right? I mean, that’s weird—not normal, I mean. And maybe, I think, if we could let up on the doom and gloom a little bit, maybe he might be better off.” He pauses. “And maybe if an economic collapse or if a climate disaster is coming . . .”

“If?”

“If it were to happen, he’d be better able to manage it if he weren’t so scared all the time.” 

The car lumbers on. It’s a silent, stealthy beast. Only the sound of wheels on slush crack the tension. Outside the setting sun reflects a radioactive sheen off house windows and pathetic, emaciated snowbanks. The couple look at the road ahead, squinting, grimacing.

“He’s only anxious at night,” Stephanie says, breaking the silence.

“That’s like half of all the time.”

“You’re so dramatic, oh my god.”

It’s quiet again.

“You know,” Stephanie says, eyes scrolling between the ranch homes of their suburban Chicago neighborhood, “if we get a divorce, if that were to happen, I’m taking Carl to my mom’s farm. You know that, right?”

Rob says nothing.

“You know that, right?”

“Well, Steph.” He pulls the car into the driveway. “I’d rather not say anything a lawyer might repeat back to me.”

“Suit yourself,” she says. “Wanna watch a movie?”

In high school Stephanie bought a black T-shirt from a thrift shop with the words “You have more freedom than you are using” written in white jagged lettering across its front. Eleven years later it’s still the first thing she wears out of the wash.