In Badlands Born, the crew gather their supplies from Curdy’s Grocery, Jasmine’s childhood grocery store. The fictional store blends two places from my youth: an old Wisconsin tavern on Highway 13 and a neighborhood grocery store two towns over. They’ve always stuck out in my head, as they were old places even when I was young, and they’re still standing today.
The tavern was a two-story wooden affair with a single gas pump. At the parking lot’s edge, closest to highway 13, stood a modest light pole with three 1950s-fabulous illuminated globes advertising gas, food, and beer. The tavern also had a logo’d beer sign over the door, probably Old Style, with the tavern’s name spelled out in simple black lettering underneath, a name I can no longer remember because name of the bar wasn’t of interest to five-year-old me. The yellowish globes looked like cartoon heads to my eyes, the same shape and color as LEGO figurines, even more so at night when lit from within, bulbs glowing like eyes.
When I saw the pole with the BEER, GAS, FOOD triumvirate looking back at me, our the car was only ten minutes away from the big town of Medford, and the only fast-food restaurant in northern Wisconsin, Burger Chef. Ten minutes to a kid’s meal with its cheeseburger and a new toy to play with on the long drive home. The Burger Chef closed in the 1980s, the tavern likely changed hands several times, but the lights remained, as did the flutter in my stomach thirty years later when I passed them on my way to a family reunion.
Curdy’s interior is patterned after an IGA grocery store several miles from the family homestead, and the last place I remember having returnable pop bottles (I’ve heard that others call their fizzy sugar water “soda,” but that’s blasphemy). Mom had a thing for Pepsi in the bottles because not only were the cans more expensive, the Pepsi didn’t taste quite the same. As the larger chains phased out bottled Pepsi, little IGAs like the one down the road were the only places left to get it. Of course, each bottle had a nickel deposit to ensure their eventual return and guess whose job it was to do that?
Once a month, I’d gather the empties and drive the ten miles to the IGA for their deposit and pick up a new month’s supply. I remember the store’s interior being dark compared to the bigger, more modern stores, with the smell of peppered steak fries wafting from the deli, and the false images on the walls from the time the owners replaced the old signs and wall displays without painting in-between. If you squinted, you could tell where the old seafood cooler had been, or made out the outline of a cow that had once looked over the dairy section. The store hadn’t yet changed over to barcode scanners, so each item had price stickers in various colors and one sad employee perpetually sitting in the aisles labeling the new stock. Once again, the IGA was an old place even in the 1990s, and is still open today if you want to take a tour. Though if you mention my name, the locals will likely deny ever having known me.
