THE WAY WE LIVE When the Toilet Roll is Sold Up Yonder, I’ll Be There

What happened? A scant five years ago people like me yearned for quaintness. In fact, sometimes quaint was not enough. People had to have ancient.

In fact, I know people for whom even ancient wasn’t enough. They wanted primeval. I stayed with a friend in California: It took me two days to stop wanting to scream every time I walked into his living room and saw his folk art collection.

But I certainly wasn’t an exception to the rule. If anything, my own appetite for Old may have been more extreme than others*. The cold, gray sea of New is where I grew up. Old was my beach, dry land, terra firma, the place where a person could sip cappuccino and know the world would stay put until the very last drop. Now all I care about is wholesale stores. The huger, the bleaker, the better. If it looks like an airplane hangar, I want to go. If you had a gigantic, airplane-hangar-looking, super-discounted cappuccino bar, with 10,001 cappuccino machines and waiters in tinfoil caps flying by on skates with trays of plastic cups held high, that is where I would go, in order to get the best deal on a cup of cappuccino.

Obviously I’m not alone, or they wouldn’t keep building huge, new discount warehouses all over the city-Sam’s, Price Club, Hypermart and more to come. I saw a man I know shopping at Sam’s-the new Sam’s on Park Lane.

He was stooped over a display of oversized water bottles. For less than $10, you could get six oversized insulated plastic water bottles, but they were shrink-wrapped together, so you had to buy all six. You know, the average oversized water bottle has to last 80 years. But it was such a price. You could buy all six and give five away as hostess gifts.

The man stood up tall and beamed. “I just love this place,” he said. “I come here just to see what they’ve got that’s new.”

That’s how I am. Of course, we feel at our household that we are achieving substantia! savings by buying certain items in bulk. The hitch is that the bulk is really bulky. Another hitch is that it would take an awful lot of accounting to make accurate comparisons on all the prices. Another hitch is that, once we get to the store, we can never remember what we already have at home.

At one point I had so many huge cans of coffee stacked up all over the house that it occurred to me I should stop buying the real stuff and just buy futures. But the worst one-the item that really achieved amazing proportions of glut-was toilet paper.

Who knows exactly which psychological syndromes were at work when we went to the Hy-permart on Garland Road and took our enormous shopping cart (I love the size: It makes my heart pound) down the bulk toilet paper aisle. It always seemed like a good idea to buy a couple more bales.

At the height of it, before we got a grip on ourselves, toilet paper was choking off other life-sustaining activities at our house. We didn’t have room to store foodstuffs. There were bales of toilet paper underneath beds and stuffed into places where no one would find them for years. We had toilet paper in our attic, which gets very, very hot in the summer, and we learned the hard way that toilet paper that had been stored there needed several hours in the a.c. to come back down to room temperature.

I have no idea if we really save money. At one point 1 made an ounce-by-ounce comparison on plaque-removing mouthwash liquids. The container from the airplane-hangar-sized wholesale store did come out a little cheaper per ounce than the one from the comer drugstore, but then I decided you would need to calculate the evaporation factor when you’re filling your mouth with plaque-remover from a container the size of a keg of beer.

But price alone doesn’t explain this phenomenon. Mere money is not what has made these vast, ugly, echoing, badly lighted places so popular all of a sudden, any more than it was sheer quality 10 years ago that made us want to buy our T-shirts from a store made up to look like a purveyor to the queen.

It’s the feel. The breeze. The air. The music of the place. The shopping jazz of the 1990s is the sound of a propane-powered forklift with a humongous load of Super Glue coming down the aisle behind us-thumpa-thumpa-whirrr-while we dance along the concrete runways between the three-story racks.

It’s probably all about hoarding, right? Maybe. Certainly that’s the kind of expert theory you would come up with if they had your Rolodex card on file at the “Today” show and you needed a respectable, psychological-sounding line of patter in order to get on.

But I wonder. Is it deeper than that?

During the quaint thing. I suffered a hundred little epiphanies. Every time a suit from a store with time-worn mahogany cabinets turned out to be no better than the one from the mall-made at the same factory in the Philippines, in fact-my faith was wounded. When I discovered that the great Italian chef with the terrific Italian restaurant in my neighborhood was not from my neighborhood, was not Italian, was not a chef, and was a lawyer. I died a little bit inside.

I smiled and said, “Oh, you’re a lawyer. That’s great This is an investment. That’s great.”

But my heart wept. And 1 wondered, Why don’t 1 just go back to the mall where I probably belong?

Maybe this whole wholesale, warehouse, forklift shopping thing is not about hoarding so much as it is an expression of disappointment in quaint. Think about it. What did quaint ever do for us?

Maybe this is only a transition, a passage in our culture. Maybe it’s even an expres sion of disappointment in stuff. All stuff. Maybe the next thing will be to buy noth ing at all. To live in a tiny house with rice- paper partitions and rake the patch of dirt in front with our fingers. (The time to start buying the rice paper, of course, would be now.)