Bob’s Variety and Newsroom makes good on the Camel sign with bulk tins of tobacco and cigarettes by the carton, but there’s no news to speak of, and not a lot in the way of variety. The magazine rack in the front room looks like a loser’s stadium at the end of the season: one Used Car Trader and single copies of two deer-hunting journals.

The real stock crouches in back: an astonishing, curatorially tended collection of pornography. Videos, DVDs, straight and gay hardcore magazines—when you come around the divider, the first pounce of it has power. Spend more than a few minutes, though, and it settles into a dissertation on the monotony of human sexuality. Even the conversations of the regulars, launched from time to time from a Formica kitchenette set on the street side of the divider, feel practiced and familiar. They wheel for a while, then roost again like trained pigeons.

Bob’s is a storefront between the My Way Diner and an appliance-parts supplier in Glens Falls, New York, right opposite OTB and a hearty row of taverns. Glens Falls, as its boosters keep reminding us, is Hometown, USA. They say this wanting us to picture what that meant in 1944 and 1964, when magazines like Look doled out such titles, but it is for this desolation of a Main Street that the city still qualifies.

Glens Falls is a Wal-Mart town. This, to be fair, is only a shorthand explanation for the downtown’s decline: Its implosion started twenty years before Wal-Mart, when a mall opened out by the Northway; now it’s the mall and surrounding commercial strips that Wal-Mart works hardest at killing. But Wal-Mart is in fact the whole reason I ended up at Bob’s: I was hoping to get my hands on a copy of Maxim.

Not that I’m a reader. Two years ago, I canceled a free promotional subscription when I couldn’t make my eyes focus on a single page of the magazine. I actually started to worry that the combination of hyper-abbreviated articles and strobes-on-the-go-go-girls pictorials might trigger ADD. But last spring, Wal-Mart added Maxim and “gadgets, beer, and babes” cousins FHM and Stuff to its growing list of purged cultural products. An appropriate response, I figured, would be to spend the Fourth of July weekend buying copies from every merchant in Glens Falls still offering the magazines.

Cumberland Farms, Stewart’s, gas stations, grocery stores—all of these failed me. I kept a tally: Time, Rolling Stone, Redbook, Shape, Seventeen, Us, Sports Illustrated, occasionally Easy Rider. Nowhere were the racks more than half full, and no one, it seemed, was holding anything out of view. In the Rite Aid, when I asked if the displayed Good Housekeeping and People could really be the only magazines they carried, the grandmotherly clerk—who obviously assumed I was asking what she kept behind the counter—studied me for a second. “The vendor controls the shelf space,” she said, with country clarity. “It’s them that makes the decision on what gets sold here.”

Downtown was worse. I spent an hour wandering up and down the five streets that converge to form The Corners. Twice I spotted the word NEWSSTAND on the sides of awnings; both times, when I got closer, I saw the word was a corpse surfacing through the green to haunt newer tenants. Forget Maxim: I had begun to despair of finding any reading material at all when an antiques dealer sent me toward Bob’s Variety and Newsroom. By that time, finding porn felt like a triumph. In honor of the Fourth, then, and free expression, and one or two adolescent addictions, I accepted an invitation from the Asian proprietor to join her grown son at the regulars’ table. She remained where she was, violently rubbing the belly of an adoring retriever.

“We don’t carry it since last year. Too much trouble with the distributor,” she finally volunteered. The trouble, her son said, had nothing to do with the suppression of objectionable content. This was more like thuggery—a case of one supplier for the entire southern Adirondack region squeezing local retailers.

“They were murdering us,” the son snarled. “Lying about what we owed them, and there was nothing we could do. We complained so much they finally sent their own guy out to do inventory. He found their computer tally was off by fifteen hundred dollars, and we still had to pay them.”

And so the last newsstand in Glens Falls cut its own supply line. Four miles outside of town, Wal-Mart is busy out-muscling the thugs, offering huge sales to distributors while keeping them in line with computerized inventory; here at Bob’s, meanwhile, things migrate toward the extremes . . . which leaves me exactly where, I finally asked, for Maxim? For that, the proprietor laughed, I’d need to drive the half hour to Saratoga Springs and hunt down the Saratoga Newsroom.

When I left Bob’s, I walked away from downtown, out as far as the Greyhound Station, a single room through the back entrance of a shuttered diner. It wasn’t worth asking for newspapers or magazines here, so I inquired into New York City schedules. I’d missed the day’s two runs already; if I wanted to leave tomorrow, the agent warned me, the Special was still suspended because of the holiday: Forty-eight dollars one way is what it would cost me. Has Manhattan ever felt farther away from Glens Falls than it did at that moment?

I walked one more block, past Pizza Hut, into a weedy stretch of acres facing Glens Falls Memorial Hospital. Turning, I stared a while at a two-story American flag draped from the roof of a block-long factory. Then I read every word of the building’s FOR SALE notice. And then the writing gave way completely, and there wasn’t a single thing good, or even bad, to read.