"Why I Quit Caring" by George Singleton

George Singleton has published ten collections of stories, two novels, a book of writing advice, and a collection of essays. Over 250 of his stories have appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, his non-fiction in Oxford American, Garden and Gun, and Best American Food Writing. He’s received a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina.

Why I Quit Caring

Looking back, I guess I can see how she thought I stalked her. It’s a scary and sensitive time for everyone, I guess. It’s not like I hung out on the curb in front of her house, or peeked in her windows. Hell, I didn’t even know her name or where she lived. I thought I did a good deed. It’s not like this woman noticed me two tables over at a restaurant one night, then walking behind her at a bookstore the next. My lawyer wanted me to say that I’d been taking steroids and itched for a fight, but I couldn’t do it. First off, my biceps aren’t much bigger around than a can of Raid. I’m old. It’s just that I felt, you know, needed. I’d been brought up during the Civil Rights Movement, and had it ingrained in me to wedge myself into situations wherein I thought there might be an injustice about to take place.

“Help! Help!” the woman screamed right there in the Dog Food Aisle. She left her shopping cart and took off running toward the cash registers, or the self-checkout, or the pharmacy section. I left my buggy and ran after her. I thought maybe I’d missed someone lurking that she’d noticed. Boy, this woman could run, even wearing a burqa that must’ve weighed forty pounds, including the veil.

I don’t know if I have arthritis or not in my hips—I’d come to the store to buy both milk thistle for my liver and some kind of joint relief medicine that included turmeric—but I took off after her. I yelled out, “I’m here to help, I’m here to help you!” like an idiot. I’d not said such a phrase since my first year in college, in the top bunk in my dorm room, with my girlfriend. My roommate had gone home to see his own girlfriend, who wasn’t but a junior in high school, for the prom. She ended up going to Florida State a couple years later. My college roommate transferred there, and although he couldn’t keep a 2.0 at a liberal arts school, he graduated magna cum laude and soon thereafter became a lawyer. As I chased the burqa woman down the aisle at Food Lion I actually thought about how I might need to call him soon thereafter, at least for some advice.

I got tackled by someone not associated with the store. Some do-gooder dropped his twelve-pack of Bud and plowed into me, then held me down by the trachea, or esophagus. I just know that I couldn’t breathe for a moment. He put his weight down on my neck, is what I’m saying. “Someone call 911!” he yelled out. He said to me, “Just because someone has a different faith than yours, you can’t be harassing them,” which kind of surprised me. He didn’t wear one of those red hats or anything, but he wore overalls and a beard. His breath smelled like garlic, which reminded me that I needed a jar of pickled garlic cloves for my blood pressure.

The woman in the burqa didn’t let out one of those high-pitched mournful trills like you see on the news after there’s been a car bomb. But she did bend down, lift her veil, and spit on my face.

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I’d retired five years early and found myself bereft of things to do. I didn’t like to fish. I’d never hunted in my life. Jogging seemed impossible what with my hips. Who cares about stamp or coin collecting? It seemed too late to learn a new language, then travel the world. My poor wife Christina, who died a year before I retired, had given me some kind of woodworking tool every birthday, Christmas, and Valentine’s Day, but after she succumbed to what the doctor’s ended up calling massive head trauma after getting hit by a car on the intersection outside her job, I gave up bowl-turning altogether. I didn’t like to watch sports on TV, seeing as I thought everything was rigged. Collecting art was out of the question seeing as I’d filled my walls with framed photographs of Christina. The dating scene didn’t appeal to me, for I looked ahead and foresaw any sane woman walking out on a prospective relationship once she came inside my house and rightly judged me as obsessed with my deceased wife. 

So I’d read somewhere that Muslims and Hispanics—hell, anyone who wasn’t white—got harassed ceaselessly in public places around here, what with the current president’s supporters feeling enabled and justified. Anyway, I took it upon myself to protect such individuals in any way possible. I’m no saint, sure, but I thought how I wouldn’t want to be yelled at while trying to search out a sale on canned tuna or whatever. For what it’s worth, there for a while I thought that the people I protected all suffered from scoliosis or one of those other I’m-hunched-over maladies, but it’s because they bent down to shop off the lower shelves where the cheapest, generic products got placed. My town has a large population of Hmong because of some kind of deal that occurred back in the 1980s. I didn’t want to see poor Laotians undergoing trouble trying to live their day-to-day lives.

Don’t even start me on what my Black friends went through. Back when I worked as a manager at the Sheraton, I don’t know how many of my Black employees told me about times they got a middle finger pointed at them, or how many times someone called them the N-word, or how many times they stood outside the hotel and someone tossed them their keys as if they were valets. I don’t know how many times one of my housekeeping women came down complaining that some white guy wanted to offer them ten dollars to have sex there in the room. Then when the guy came down to hand over his key card, I’d have to say something like, “I bet you stole the lotion or hair conditioner after you didn’t get your way,” and so on. I witnessed a lot of red-faced embarrassed men leave the Sheraton, then calling Corporate to complain about me.

Maybe I owned bad luck, it seemed. I didn’t remember that section ever being part of a report card during elementary school, but I’d bet if it were I’d’ve gotten a big Unsatisfactory. I’m no lady killer, but back in high school my braces locked up with my girlfriend’s braces. Her father caught us, there in the living room. She had braces on her legs, unfortunately. I received an Unsatisfactory from both her and her father that day.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

They took me back into a room adjacent to the butcher section of the grocery store, treating me as if I were a shoplifter. I explained my motives to a boy who couldn’t’ve been a year out of high school, an assistant manager who wore a clip-on bow tie. He wore a name tag that read Tony! with an exclamation point. I said, “I didn’t do anything wrong, man,” and explained my hobby of sorts. I said, “Maybe you’ve not noticed, but I’ve come in here every day for two or three hours at a time, waiting to protect one of your shoppers.”

It’s not like I kept a diary or anything, but over the last month I’d followed around a good dozen Laotians, I don’t know how many Black women, and two women of the Islamic faith. I can’t count how many Mexicans I stood around, just in case. I tell you this: My knowledge and appreciation for both Jarritos Mandarin sodas and taco seasoning mixes has grown exponentially.

Tony! said, “We take stalking very seriously at Food Lion. For me to become an assistant manager, I had to undergo two hours of video training on how to deal with the public. Everything from what you done, to finding some homeless person in the parking lot trying to steal a shopping cart.”

I told him I used to be the manager at the Sheraton out by the interstate. He said he went to prom there, in the ballroom. Lying, I said I thought I remembered his face, for some reason. I thought it might make him say something like, “Well, just don’t come back here again.”

It smelled like sweat and fat trimmings in the room. I said, “Do you mind if I stand up and stretch a little bit?” because my legs hurt. I thought, I wish someone would come over the intercom and request Tony!’s assistance so I could sneak away, then hang out at Harris-Teeter or Publix or Ingles or Wal-Mart for the rest of my stretch as a bodyguard. Maybe I’d expand to Lowe’s and Home Depot.

I wondered what happened to the Muslim woman. Was she in another room, waiting to give her side of the story to a cop? Did they just let her leave after spitting on me? What with Covid still prevalent in South Carolina because no one would get a goddamn vaccination, I felt as though maybe I could press charges on her. I said to Tony!, “I hope you have surveillance cameras throughout the store.”

He said, “Yes sir, we do. Especially in the dog and cat food aisle. You wouldn’t believe how many people open up cans of cat food and eat from them. During one of my required videos to become an assistant manager, I learned that there’s people out there with a psychological problem.”

I’ll just jump ahead and say that someone from the sheriff’s department showed up and asked me a slew of questions. He asked for my driver’s license. He said, “Rabun Foster?”

I said, “I weigh a little more than it says on my license.” He stared at it, then looked at me. I said, “I’m probably closer to five-ten than five-eleven.”

I answered without trying to sound like a smart-ass. He asked to see the in-store cameras. We watched as I blithely followed this woman around, pretending to shop for myself behind her. Probably because he was Islamophobic he said, “I don’t see nothing wrong here,”  and sure enough he said, “If anything, you got a case for her spitting on you.”

I said I didn’t want to press charges, of course. Tony! seemed dejected over the situation. Maybe he got a bonus or something for catching criminals in his store. He apologized to me, though. Then he followed me out, and handed me a box of Ho-Hos they had on sale, as some kind of consolation gift.

I went out to my truck in the parking lot, got in, and looked at the Mercedes parked right across from me. There sat that woman I tried to guard, behind the steering wheel. It had been more than an hour. Call me paranoid, but I drove out of there and took a crazy route toward my house in case she tailed me so later a group of henchmen might show up with bombs. As a matter of fact, I even stopped by the nearest fire station and just sat there in my car until right before the five o’clock news.

I thought of all the required seminars I underwent to become a manager at the Sheraton. Most involved bedbug eradication.

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A local news crew awaited me when I got home. They parked on the road, but a reporter and cameraman stood there on my front porch. I recognized her only because at eleven o’clock at night when she came on TV I always thought how she missed her calling as an exotic dancer, what with her name being Destiny Harbor, or maybe a marina manager. I won’t lie—I’d been looking in my rearview mirror so much hoping that Food Lion woman didn’t follow me that when I saw the news crew I figured they were there to give me a Yard of the Month prize. Since Christina died I’d gone out of my way to make the place look like what she always wanted: I’d planted azaleas, two crape myrtles, all those day lilies. My front porch was framed with perfectly pruned boxwoods. My Bermuda grass grew in such a spectacularly uniform way that it appeared to be AstroTurf. I had both elaeagnus and tea olives lining the property. I’d planted daffodils in a circle around two oak trees that had been there for a century at least. Mulch? All over the place.

Destiny held a microphone and held it in my direction as I still stood in the driveway. My hearing’s declined over the years, of course, so I thought she yelled out to me, “Are you a racer, sir?” I held my free box of Ho-Hos, like an idiot.

A racer? I thought. I’d run some cross country back in the day, but a constant nagging tendonitis in both knees finally made me decide to forget about running in college and focus on my Hotel/Motel management degree, which they now call “Hospitality Management,” I guess because it doesn’t sound so Psycho. I said, “In my heart I am. I’ve been one since about the age of thirteen.”

As it ended up, she asked me if I were a racist. By the time I figured this out, it was too late to correct myself. I shuffled up toward Destiny and her cameraman. I said, “Hey.”

Destiny said, “Do you have any comment about what happened with Saba Khan?”

Again, the hearing. Listen, part of this might be attributed, too, to Destiny Harbor’s speaking so quickly and kind of speaking in a high-pitched manner. I thought she said, “Chaka Khan.” I kind of underwent a flashback to the early 1980s, in college, dancing with Christina at a discotheque to the funk-inspired song by Rufus, “Tell Me Something Good.” I thought, What does this have to do with Yard of the Month?

I sang out, “Tell me something good,” of course, figuring I was about to get a plaque, or at least a certificate. I thought Destiny wanted only to lead up to some kind of TV newscast drama, you know.

Then she said, “Come look at this, Mr. Foster.”

Well of course it was this particular Saba Khan woman crying, nodding her head up and down about a thousand times a minute, saying she’d been abused and frightened and a slew of other things, there at the hood of her Mercedes in the grocery store parking lot. She said she felt cheated out of not being able to use her clipped coupons because she’d gotten distracted. I said, “It’s not what it looks like,” and tried to explain myself.

I should mention that my neighbors started coming out of their houses to see what went on. The last time a news crew came through the area happened when a supposed meteor, the size of a golf ball, landed on the Finks’ roof five years earlier. It ended up being a regular piece of black rock thrown by a teenager in love with their daughter.

I waved at my neighbors, all of whom had brought over funeral food when Christina died unexpectedly. I think I still had some kind of casserole in the freezer that involved tuna, macaroni and cheese, crushed potato chips, maybe meatballs. I had good neighbors. For what it’s worth, I’d follow them around in a grocery store should they need protection, even though half of them flew Don’t Tread on Me rattlesnake Gadsden flags off their porches.

Destiny said, “Ms. Khan says you attacked her in the Food Lion.”

I stared at the “news journalist” and said, “What?”

She repeated herself. I shook my head. I said, “That woman spit on me,” and pointed at my right cheek. “I thought maybe she was a llama.”

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Of course I contacted a lawyer, right away. It was one of those lawyers who have billboards out on the interstate, usually working for workman’s compensation or whiplash. She, too, could’ve been a stripper: Glory Pounder. I explained the situation. I had left that news crew in my yard, went inside, and called this woman I knew who used to eat at our restaurant inside the Sheraton. She always ordered the redfish, which I admired. Anyway, she said I had nothing to worry about. I didn’t trust her. She said, “Well, I wouldn’t trust me either if we lived in California, New York, Delaware, Oregon, or any other nice liberal state, but this is South Carolina. You could’ve shot this woman and come out innocent, Rabun.”

I said, “That doesn’t make me feel better.”

She said, “Listen, if you get arrested, call me immediately. I’m ninety-nine percent sure this won’t happen. If I were you, I’d go on about your day, doing what you normally do, to keep your mind off it.”

“I hope,” I said. I said, “You still eating the redfish over at the Sheraton?”

There was some silence on the other end. Then she said, “Have you been stalking me or something?”

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I took the lawyer’s advice. Because I didn’t get my garlic cloves, milk thistle, and Move Well pills, I figured I should go to a store—not the Food Lion—and do my own shopping. I said to myself, “Do not follow around anyone who might look vulnerable, do not follow around anyone who might look vulnerable,” like a mantra.

Then I thought about how my one real hobby since Christina’s untimely death happened to be crossword puzzles, thus how I even know the term “mantra.” Not that I bet often, but I’d say you could get a hundred Hospitality Management majors in a room and not one of them would know the word “mantra.” Mattress, but not mantra.

I looked out the window to make sure Action News! no longer loitered in my yard. I got in my truck, backed out of the driveway, waved at my neighbors who still stood around their front yards feigning an interest in their brown fescue, and drove to the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market—a place I normally detested. But I figured their assistant managers and any security cam viewers would be overly-busy watching for shoplifters, upskirt photographers, vegetable fondlers, young men hired out by competitors to, say, walk around opening six-packs of sodas, stick holes in cereal boxes, place frozen peas and tilapia in the diaper aisle.

Of course, right away, I ran into a woman I thought to be Saba Khan. At least it was a woman in full burqa and a veil or sorts. What are the chances?, I thought.

I didn’t know if I should approach her and try to explain myself, or veer my buggy into an aisle that had no hopes of selling pickled garlic cloves.

I figured it might be best to confront her, I don’t know why. Christina always told me that every year she told prospective clients at Liberty Tax it’s better to confront the IRS than contort the IRS. I didn’t know what that meant, and I’m not sure she did, either. I know this: the so-called accountants at Liberty Tax took turns standing on the corner from the first of the year until April 15, dressed up like the Statue of Liberty, hailing customers who couldn’t figure out how to fill out a 1040 form. And I know Christina’s body contorted when that old Ford Fairlane veered off Southport Road and hit her in front of the strip mall where Liberty Tax stood, between a nail salon and a wig shop.

I tapped the woman on the shoulder and said, “I’m not here to hurt you.” I’d said the same thing at the Sheraton a hundred times when I needed to knock on a door and ask people to quit smoking.

Saba Khan stopped. I noticed that her buggy held cans of pork and beans, pinto beans, Lima beans, chickpeas, and, oddly, Cream of Wheat. I thought, She’s read the latest thing about foods to eat to deter cancer. She didn’t turn her head. When I look back on this situation, now I remember a sound that might’ve been a knife coming out of a sheath. I said, “You spit on me earlier today. I was trying to protect you, believe it or not.”

Saba Khan turned around toward me and lifted her veil.

It wasn’t Saba Khan. No, it was a man that I immediately thought I’d recognized on one of those MMA channels I watched sometimes, you know, fighting in an octagon-shaped ring, a person fluent in boxing, karate, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, judo, kick boxing, and maybe a few of the culinary arts, like ricing or dicing. This guy showed his face and I noticed two cauliflower ears and scars over both eyebrows. His nose looked like it had been smashed flat, then repurposed as a sluice gate. He clenched his fists and said, “You don’t want to mess with me.”

Oh, man. The first thing I thought was, Where’s the public restroom here in the Wal-Mart Neighborhood Store? I thought, I need to leave my buggy here and plain run outside and drive away. I thought, When did Candid Camera come back on the air, after being cancelled back in 2014 when Peter Funt had taken over for his father Allen? When I was manager at the Sheraton, I spent, probably, way too much time sitting around a vacant room with a channel changer in my hand.

But instead of running I said, “I made a mistake.”

He said—and I quote—“Damn right you did. I’m here to teach idiots not to mess with people who’s different, goddamn it.”

There were two of us, in the same city!, I thought.  I tried to explain how he and I were in the same situation, that we were brothers in arms, and went through everything I’d gone through earlier in the day, even though that Dire Straits album came into my subconscious ear. One time I checked in Jack Sonni at the hotel, he being the rhythm guitarist for Dire Straits, at least for a while. I got his autograph, surreptitiously, seeing as he had to sign that thing saying he wouldn’t smoke in the room. It’s framed and hanging in my den, between photos of Christina.

I said, “I’m an old retired man just wanting to protect Americans,” though it wasn’t probably true. Looking back, I just wanted to feel meaningful, on my own part. I didn’t want to be placed in a grave next to Christina with a headstone that read CHECKED PEOPLE IN.

People waggled their buggies between us. They picked up boxes of macaroni and cheese. No one seemed bothered or confused or concerned with a man wearing a burqa talking to a man with a week-long beard growth. That’s how it is in a grocery store, I’ve found. This might be the epitome of “To Each His Own.”

I stuck out my right hand and said, “Goddamn, man. We’re in the same business. My name’s Rabun.”

He stuck out his hand—look, it was gnarled, like maybe he’d been in that octagon too many times with someone twisting it sideways to the point where it was backwards—and said, “Lester ‘The Exterminator’ Clark. I’m a good democrat. I ain’t putting up with what’s going on, from here on out.”

Did I just find my best friend? I thought. I imagined having this guy over for a barbecue, maybe watching one of those shows about surgical procedures wherein people got their faces or awkward boobs repaired. I smiled at him, you know, like people smile when they understand they make a mistake. I tried to say, “Good to meet you Lester,” but he pushed his buggy onward, toward the Milk Aisle up against the back wall, fast.

I stood there like an idiot. I thought about my deceased wife Christina. I looked up at the ceiling to see if there were security cams—there were—and waved. How close was I to being punched out? I thought. What were the odds to be spit on, then punched out by an MMA fighter disguised as a Muslim woman?

I didn’t get my garlic cloves, et cetera. I would get it later. I didn’t find the Move On pills. No, I left my buggy there and walked out slowly. I made a pact to myself that I’d never ever try to help out another human being, which kind of pissed me off. I thought, What can I do, what can I do? In the parking lot I came across a dog—it looked like a mix of pit bull and, I don’t know, Shepherd. Then I remembered how, pushing my buggy earlier, I’d spent too much time in the beer aisle, staring at an Australian beer called Foster, in big cans.

To the dog I said, “Are you lost?” I thought, Instead of trying to protect people, maybe I should help protect innocent dogs, in need of fostering, then adoption.

 I reached down to pet its head. He bit me on the thigh.