To those who consider them unfounded, conspiracy theories are little more than an opportunity for people with small, empty lives to announce to the rest of the world that they know something it doesn't — something big. To wit:
"I might be an overweight 40-year-old video-store clerk who'll get fired the next time I berate a customer for renting The Beach, and whose only sexual experience is with the one-legged hooker who hangs out by the bus-stop kiosk where I catch a ride back to my mother's house, but you seem OK with the Warren Commission's obviously ludicrous deduction that Oswald acted alone, so, really, who's pathetic?"
Or whatever.
The Illuminati is probably too busy tracing myriad credit card purchases, and the Masons are too involved keeping progressive politicians out of the race in accordance with some thousand-year blood oath, to worry about me or my attitudes regarding all that weird shit on a dollar bill. After all, there are a few billion people currently inhabiting the planet.
But I do go to the Home Depot on 22nd Avenue N. in St. Pete fairly regularly.
And every time I cross that daunting orange threshold, I feel like an outsider, a trespasser on some secret group's hallowed ground. It's not because I don't know the first thing about home improvement, which I don't. It's because repeated reconnaissance and painstaking research have led me to believe that the biggest shadowy plot of all lay within a 10-minute drive of every suburbanite in the country.
First of all, They deal in an area that no red-blooded American male can resist — tools, power tools, cordless power tools, great big cordless power tools, grills, large pieces of wood, and the like. Even the most repair-illiterate men are susceptible to the Depot's gravitational pull. As many woefully derivative stand-up comics have pointed out, not knowing what a router is doesn't make us any less interested in seeing one. It's in the DNA somewhere, lodged between the gene that makes us refuse to ask for directions and the one that causes us to immediately forget birthdates the first seven times we're told.
You could've just gone out to rent a DVD, but if you pass a Home Depot on the way, you either stop to get some batteries, or make a mental note to look around the pad when you get home and discover some shit you didn't know you needed, thus facilitating a trip to the Depot in the very near future. If you don't believe me, stop in at any hour of any day (they're open until midnight on weekdays, and what's up with that, anyway?), and you'll find a staggering array of male humanity, from guys in painters' pants to mohawked punk rockers in full black-leather regalia, dragging their female companions from the Mag-Lite display to the wheelbarrow section.
On my most recent trip, I saw a dude rocking some shimmery iridescent jeans and a colorful long-sleeve button-up, like he was on his way to the disco but just couldn't pass up an opportunity to compare tile saws.
Then, They cram all this impossibly alluring paraphernalia into a building roughly the size of four city blocks. Make no mistake about it, anyone who builds a store to that scale is up to something more than meeting your various consumer needs. Upon entering, you become a subject in some unimaginable experiment. And finding boxer shorts at Super Wal-Mart is a cakewalk compared to locating anything at the Depot, be it a hammer or a hose-gasket for a 1994 Amana clothes dryer. I'm half-convinced that a large team of gleefully malevolent gremlins rearranges the aisles every couple of weeks.
Have you ever wondered why so many Home Depots now have McDonald's in them? It's so customers will no longer starve to death in the course of looking for a replacement ball-cock for their toilets.
Next, They go to great lengths to staff the Depot with plenty of employees who couldn't point you in the general direction of what you require if you happened to be waving a large handgun around while you asked. Every fourth or fifth person in the place works there, but every fourth or fifth person is also invariably surrounded by people making inquiries they can't possibly answer.
I don't think the orange smocks actually denote full-time Home Depot representatives — I think They hand them out to the first dozen or so customers through the door each morning, and promise them the Extra Value Meal of their choice if they agree to hang out all day. (Which they'd do anyway, of course, wandering from the drills to the wet-vacs, expressions of vacant joy upon their faces.)
I can elaborate on it no better than this: At one point, I knew at least six young Bay area musicians who were working for Home Depot at the same time, and nobody hires that many individuals pointedly uninterested in anything other than their extracurricular pursuits unless exasperating customers is part of the plan.
Finally, and most suspiciously, there are a select few who seem to have no trouble at all navigating the Home Depot gauntlet. They're mostly contractors, or others whose livelihoods depend on a working knowledge of the home-improvement giant's workings. Some might dismiss their aptitude as experience, but I find it much more ominous. They're in on it. They've become members of the Depot's mysterious cabal, and naturally, their Welcome to the Depot's Mysterious Cabal care package came with a CD-ROM detailing stock, floor plans, and names of real employees fluent in the language of the trade. They probably get a discount, too, the fuckers.
So why the elaborate ruse? What do They want? What's Their ultimate goal? I don't know yet, but I do know that They're onto me. During my most recent trip to the 22nd Avenue Depot, a kindly old gentleman in an orange smock appeared out of nowhere as I rounded the corner of the Heavy Duty Garden Tools aisle, as if waiting for me. He was alone, unencumbered by other confused consumers, and was able to easily lead me to the wares I required, from outdoor floodlights and propane tanks for a portable cooking station, to toilet seats and replacement kitchen faucets. Obviously, this agent's mission was to throw me off the trail, to start me doubting the veracity of my theories.
It didn't work, though. Something's going on with the Depot, and I intend to find out what it is. There's plenty of research to be done, and I look forward to my next sojourn behind enemy lines.
In fact, I think I need some Spackle.
Scott Harrell can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or by e-mail at scott.harrell@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2004.