Seven Months in a Gas Station, 2005, Jeremy Smyczek

From MemoryArchive

Who: Jeremy Smyczek
What: Life as a gas station attendent.
When: May-Dec 2005
Where: Wilmington, NC (although fictionally moved to Tennesse)

I. Introduction

What began for me as a part-time job to bridge a gap between student loans became something a bit more; it became a microscope into humanity—mine, and certainly that of others. A lot of intellectual snobbery inherent in a graduate student got weeded out along the way, and if anything, that was for me the chief accomplishment of writing this memoir. It is a novel in the sense that while it is autobiographical, creative liberties have been taken in the interest of narrative cohesion; places and names have been changed to protect the guilty, and stories conflated to bring separate events into a singular perspective. But within the fiction, I hope, lie a few greater truths—truths about arrogance and humility, about the importance and the humor of the everyday, about the worth of all occupations and all walks of life. Working in a gas station, across the street from a four-year university, in front of a seedy apartment complex, and on a confusing transit point for tourists introduces one to a rare cross-section of humanity: lost travelers, college kids, working people, and immigrants. The poorer classes have their dramas, to be sure, and much of that is depicted herein. But like anyone else, they have their triumphs, and I have attempted to portray some of those as well. The organization here moves roughly from comedy to tragedy, from a world held aloft for my scorn to one mined for its greater meaning, and as such it was a journey taken more for my benefit than for the reader’s.

The theme here is simple: all of these stories revolve around one building, one franchise gas station of 23 owned by a woman that I’ve never met. You’ve almost certainly been in a place just like it, perhaps in a rush on your way to work, perhaps because the long lines at the supermarket seemed daunting that day. But there is a life to these places that most never stop to take note of; wandering amongst the shelves of Doritos and two-liters of Pepsi are real live human beings, the kind that people with my background had never had much cause or opportunity to interact with. People who are unfamiliar to one are easy to ignore out of fear and distrust, and that, perhaps, is the great shame of human existence: in our tendency to “stick to our own,” we miss the thrilling adventure that is the life of most other individual humans. I cannot tell their stories for them, so what we have here is my story with them as supporting characters. But whether literally incarnate or not, everyone in this book was inspired by the life of someone I met in the course of seven months working in a gas station. Without realizing that they were doing it, they taught me more than graduate school has about what it means to be alive—to struggle, to triumph, to painfully fail. Sometimes the characters are portrayed rather clownishly, as it is difficult sometimes to see a stumbling drunk as something apart from a clown. Sometimes they are heroized, as a certain nobility of spirit strikes some as inherently heroic. How you react to them most certainly speaks about the quality of the presentation, but it might also tell you a bit about what you think about people. Where that balance lies is ultimately for the reader to decide.

In incipient form, this novel appeared as a weblog. The response from readers has continually shaped its revision, challenged the author to do better, and generally been of so much constructive benefit that it is a debt that I can never truly repay. I hope that by adopting suggestions for revision from hundreds of commenters that I have written a better book than the entity which they encountered online. But again, that is ultimately not for me to judge. The Beginning My import-drinking friends have a perpetual complaint: they just never stop weeping that Heineken they buy at convenience stores and gas-marts (like mine) has an invariable skunkiness about it. They just don't seem to listen when I tell them why that is: the convenient store was not designed for people who drink imported beer.

People who drink imported beer already have a forum, you see, and it's called the supermarket, or any of the katrillion specialty stores like Cost Plus or Trader Joe’s that have whole sections devoted to esoteric libation. But my friends want to shop at the vagrant street fair I work, where vagrant street fair products fly off of the shelves to the exclusion of all others, and where a $13.99 twelve pack of Heineken might outlast a presidency—and then wonder why it's stale. Hello? $13.99 might not seem like a lot to people with jobs, but that's ten deuce-deuces of Steele Reserve and a Dutch Master to my good and regular folk who busk change for a living. Besides, that much beer would get pretty warm sitting next to them on the alley on a Tennessee Summer day. They'd have to consider sharing, or something. What's worse from the vagrant point of view is that there's yet to be invented a paper bag that wraps snugly and perfectly around that twelve pack to allow drinking of all units simultaneously while walking down the street. Besides, that might make a mess and waste a lot of more-than-one-dollar-per-120z-unit beer, and that would be a sin unfathomable. So the singularly purchased deuce-deuces it is.

This Tuesday, I hear the familiar cry: "Yo man. Need more Steele."

"It's out" I shout back, dismissively. Johnny is referring to Steele Reserve 222, one of the single most repellent liquids ever to feign potable-beverage status. Only its preternaturally high alcohol content and low price afford it much appeal, and that selective appeal is pretty strong around these parts. It isn't actually out-of-stock, of course, but I'm working alone, as I do on Tuesday. Walking into the back and leaving the floor unmanned invites a spate of gasoline drive-offs, shelf-raiding, and general looting and revelry so pronounced that in the suburbs it might pass for rioting. In the absence of order, unfortunately and pathetically as this paradigm executes itself, I am, as Judge Dredd so eloquently put it, the Law.

"C'mon back and get some Steele! I can see it back in there," he says, in reference to the visible back stock between the bottles and cans in the front display. While in fact Johnny's beer does have back-up in the cooler, he'd have said the same thing if it hadn't. The locals, with some cause, by and large hate me and try to make my job inconvenient whenever feasible. The irony of this occurring in a convenience store is not lost on me. That still doesn’t make it funny. I give Johnny a longer leash than most: the popular rumor is that he's a fetal alcohol syndrome guy, which might explain his malgrown frame, slowed reaction time, and general badly adjusted temperament. I would buy that more excuse enthusiastically, if but by extrapolation it did not grant that 30% of my customers were also FAS victims. This as a proposition both invokes more pity than I have at my disposal and would grant me such a grim view of indigent parenting habits that I'd want to scream, so I take guff from Johnny and deal with the rest case-by-case; whether it's FAS or not, this guy's not all there in a manner probably not wholly self-inflicted. While I do not have it so well in this life, I certainly caught a few more breaks than Johnny did, and so I can’t hold him to the same standards of self-loathing that I apply to myself.

Nevertheless, it's not my fault that there's been an unfortunate run on his abhorrent malt swill, and I'm not going to do anything to fix it. I've got people wandering to and from the pumps, which, if taken off the hooks before I authorize them, cause my register to emit an ear-piercing wail so horrible that it elicits nausea within seconds. I'm sure the people who designed the POS system bought the tone on clearance at a 1970's government psy-ops warfare seasonal event. It's beyond agonizing: merely horrible noises can be assimilated over time; this grates into perpetuity. I'm not leaving the register.

"It's out. Get something else." I cannot lose this thrilling battle of the wills for a slew of reasons, among them that I'm trained not to leave the floor when working alone, I'm my own supervisor and could care less what Johnny thinks, and that delinquent vagabonds have very little clout with management, in the event that post-intoxication they remember their grievances and bother to complain. But I suspect that winning is not Johnny's goal--he wishes merely to annoy me, unless he's forgotten how unsuccessful this approach has been historically, and does have winning as his goal, a not dismissible possibility.

He finally settles on a 24oz can of Icehouse, no doubt a terrible blow to his refined palate. "I don't like this beer. Why can't you get me my Steele?"

"Sorry. It’s out. It'll be in tomorrow." Technically, this is not a lie, as it will be, because it's in right now. No additional sin on my soul. Yet how anyone who drinks flat, revolting, malt liquor from a paper-sack wrapped can in the street wandering about on a sweltering afternoon can be concerned with epicurean concerns is lost on me. Johnny pays, more quarters and less junk change than usual (good day?), and heads toward the door.

"See ya, buddy," I offer in his direction, smirking evilly, as he sulks out. I've won today, and I'm happy. On the whole, there is more good natured-fun in our rivalry than either of us admits. I am, to paraphrase Grendel, the coolest reinvented character in modern fiction, the thing which he pushes against and gains meaning from. Or at least I’ll flatter myself that much today.

"Hey," I am assailed by the next victim, a sixteen-year-old looking kid, plunking down a twelve of Heineken in front of me, "I had $5.01 on pump three, and is this Heineken fresh?" Besides his confused syntax and 50 miles worth of gas, I am annoyed that he's even trying to buy beer. In the less cultivated states, I'm sure I'd be old enough to be his dad.

"ID please" is my answer to him. We'll discuss product born-on dating when I am even approximately convinced of his legal age. It's a Tennessee license. 09-18-1983. Goddamn, I can't believe they let kids born the same year as Return of the Jedi drink alcohol.

"Thank you," I reply, handing back the proffered ID. " Probably not."

"Really? Why not?" he asks, as if the Heineken turnover were in any way remotely associated with me, well besides me drinking it, anyway. But blaming the messenger seems the general status quo in human society.

"It probably has something to do with clientele," I answer him, because I'm feeling oddly charitable. A shrug would be his reply most days. I don't think of myself as an antisocial guy, but conversations on this job tend to provide me with more info on the patronage than I could ever possibly have wanted, which is very little. "It's more of a deuce-deuce and forty kind of crowd." There is no rancor in my voice, and no stereotype. It's just the truth. I stock the beer at night and I know.

College kid buys the Heineken anyway. He'll complain about it next time he's in, but that's simply because it's in our nature to pawn off blame when you're foolish enough to do things you were warned against. He should have gone to the supermarket.

The Hours

There is a thing that the night crew at a lot of gas-mart-type places do: we drink on shift. Did you ever wonder why those people selling you beer at 12:45 AM on a Friday night/Saturday morning, trapped behind a counter while everyone else is getting drunk and scheming out targets for fornication, seem so jolly? That's right, we're drinking too. It's not really a difficult scam to pull off, as the geriatric old ladies that typically operate this type of establishment have left by four in the afternoon and are in bed by nine. We know from about day three what’s within the range of the camera and what isn’t, and so know where we can hide our stuff. Besides, it's utterly necessary for us to have some kind of parallel perspective come closing time. If I hadn’t tippled a bit by midnight, does one really think that I could be polite to the late-night clientele? Nihilo ex nihilo. Good moods are not inherently achieved by hours of abuse at the hands of drunk and stoned clientele; they can, conversely, spring forth directly from access to cold beer.

Really, it's a comparative ideology kind of world. Many of my patrons don't speak English as their first language, and the hammered Spanglish I get come near-closing hours is a touch difficult to understand. So slamming a few Budweiser 22's in the cooler puts us on a communicative level that, while mutually incomprehensible, is at least amiable. Now my Mexican day-laborer friends can simply point to what they wish to purchase, without me having my nerves frayed or losing my composure. Alcohol provides patience, in a way that simply taking a deep breath or asking someone to repeat themselves (for the fourth time) doesn't. The language barrier, an oft-commented upon thing, lives and breaths with a palpable ability to quickly annoy both miscommunicating parties. Ethanol’s single greatest attribute is the instantaneous benevolence it instills upon the soul, which probably goes a long way toward explaining its seven millennia of popularity. I’d go as far as suggesting that it might make a select few Muslims a bit less dour if they’d sit down for a round or two, but hey, I didn’t write their book so I don ‘t get to make the rules. The book I got raised on says Christians are allowed to drink within moderation, but as a fella’ who grew up in an Irish Catholic neighborhood, I can attest that that particular Biblical jurisprudence is taken with a decidedly liberal bent, if one can count he shamrocks adorning the front of every third seedy bar of my childhood stomping grounds as evidence.

But in my version of events, at my job everybody wins. I get to catch last call at my local with a proper head start, and my customers deal with someone sociable as opposed to the utter prick they'd encounter were I sober. People who wish to decry us (the employees) as irresponsible reprobates for doing what we do have never had this kind of job. It's a job that involves staring into the files of humanity at its most debased and winking, a sly little wink, that acknowledges how filthy and corrupt we are, before proceeding to sell the cheapest alcohol imaginable to the people with most cause to avoid it. I am a cancer and a cirrhosis merchant, and the saddest thing of all is that someone actually pays me to do something I should probably be jailed for.

But that’s just life, as a gas station attendant.

A River in Egypt

There's a low-rent apartment complex near my station, colloquially referred to as "the Glen," evoking pleasant ideas of the Scottish Highlands that could not be more misconstrued if the place existed on Mars. The residents use my store as the local grocery, which in turn gives my job its unique and delightful character. The handy walking distance allows for Glen residents to visit my shack of employ three or four times daily. Luckily for me, they joyfully embrace this opportunity, allowing our staff to chart how drunk, high, and cracked-out they are over the course of the day. To anyone who thinks I'm using unfair blanket statements or painting a willfully bleak view of the patronage—there's a standing invite to come work with me any given Friday night.

One of my favorite Glen pastimes is witnessing the purchase of small quantities of alcohol, by the same people, many times daily. The drill goes: purchase one or two 24oz cans of some asphalt-tasting toxin like Steele Reserve or a forty of Schlitz; pay in a manner so exact as to suggest that the sum of coinage handed over represents the fruits of scouring the furniture cushions; go home (or to the alley, or whatever) and consume the beer, along with copious portions of pot, crack, meth, or some combination of the above and a pack of Newports. Return to my store and repeat said process at two-hour intervals until closing time.

I'd say that I want to know why my friends don't just buy a whole lot of beer to begin with, since, inevitably, they're going to drink a whole lot of beer, but actually I don't. Not knowing, and the gloriously fun conjecture that entails, is probably more entertaining to me than having the actual 411 ever would be. To put this in a properly male perspective (Warning! Politically incorrect comment!), it's like that girl at the bar you're dreaming of doing the business with: she's never going to look as good naked as your imagination has her looking. (I don't know--do women think like that too?) The real reason for the walk-by drunkards is in all likelihood more mundane than I suppose it to be. Images of sugarplums they certainly are not. But isn’t the paranoid human capacity for conjecture almost always more interesting than the truth? We imagine grisly car wrecks when someone we know is late because they’re stuck in traffic; we contrive evil conspiracies when the line at the drive up window is moving a bit slow. The answers to most things that we perceive as mysteries turn out to be pretty pedestrian, yet it’s so much more fun to take wild guesses.

In any case, I've worked out a list of theories as to why this booze circuit works the way it does. In no particular order:

1) Drunkard doesn't have a refrigerator, and hence leaving future beverages in our cooler keeps them from getting warm. This would make more sense if most of the clients weren't apartment dwellers with furnished appliances. Finding places without refrigerators isn't even very common anymore, so this can't explain more than a few instances. Well, a few instances beyond the landscapers, who are obviously drinking on the job.

2) Small quantities are easier to hide from the wife/cohabitant and younguns, who might complain about drunkard squandering the rent money, or worse, not sharing. I suspect this might explain a few more instances. The fridge would be considered fair game for the eight other people living in the apartment. Hence, buying what you can keep in your hands is just an elaborate and well-planned method of hoarding.

3) Busking $1.39 in change takes about two hours. This adequately explains those drunkards who feel that all twenty cents in the "give a penny, take a penny" bin are specifically allotted to advancing their alcoholism. Hey, the people that left them there were leaving them for somebody, right? Why not them?

4) Unspeakable acts were performed in exchange for twenty dollars. Since the walk-by drunkard phenomenon is an overwhelmingly male one, there's probably an awful lot of cellmate love performed for the local drug dealers in exchange for cash. Nevermind...that twenty would go right back to the dealer. Who exactly would pay cash? Is there really a sizable contingent of undiscerning homosexuals with disposable income wandering Tennessee? 'Cuz the number of dirty children that get dragged into my store by crack moms indicates that the local ladies certainly didn't have to pay for it.

5) I deliberately left this one for last, based on its preponderant improbability: they really think that one forty is all they'll be having tonight. This one keeps flitting through my mind, like the memory of an itch. I can't banish the possibility that some of these folk are actually convinced that tonight will be different from every other Friday of their lives, that tonight they're going to kick back with a single deuce-deuce, tall boy, or 40, smoke some seedy brown Mexican weed out of their 50-cent, modified Black and Mild blunt, and call it quits when they're done with it. That's right. This time it'll be different.

As Stuart Smalley used to say: "Denial: It ain't just a river in Egypt."

Diet Life

So a fellow waddles in to my store the other evening--and I mean waddles. He's probably got a circumference challenging his height. To make the spectacle more appealing, he's wearing hospital scrubs. I'm typically cordial, because, even though I'm a condescending asshole, I am religiously polite to all those who have yet to offend me.

"Good evening, my friend, how is your Friday?"

"I'm tired," he replies, clearly from the natural exhaustion of hauling 300 lbs of behavioral negligence around through a work shift. His tone is gentle, though, so I am compelled to be nice. His parents probably fed him badly, and, given the severity of the matter, his preponderant enormity is likely not entirely of his own choosing.

Tubby retrieves beer from the right end of the shop (where six and twelve packs are procured, rather than the 22's and 40's) and then heads to the 20oz soda cooler. He proceeds to the register with a six of Bud Light and a PET bottle of Diet Coke in tow.

"I also need a pack of Winston Lights in a box," Tubby proclaims, but again, in a tone so much more civilized than my Philly-blunt demanding regulars that I can't much begrudge his request. But I am distraught, and full of an amalgamation of disdain and pity.

Tubby weighs what he weighs, risking hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, coronary failure, and likely premature death, all because he's incredibly fat. And yet somewhere along the line, he's been, willingly or not, duped into the proposition that drinking light beer and diet soda, and smoking light cigarettes will somehow redeem his sedentary lifestyle and grotesque exorbitances in terms of personal habit. He's going to die young in a rich country, and hasn't even the good sense to see it coming. It's a common scenario in which Americans equate behaviors which are not specifically harmful with actual healthy living, as if drinking Diet Coke and Bud Light mystically equates to jogging or avoiding saturated fat. It’s an intellectual sickness that never seems to have caught on in Europe, where people seem to either drink beer, or not drink beer, to smoke or not smoke. Only in America, I suppose, do people insist that you can have it all ways. Hell, Burger King comes right out and tells you so.

"Will there be anything else for you, sir?"

"Nah."

"That will be $10.23, I convey, as always separating my work voice from my clandestine inner commentary. Tubby pulls out a ten, and then scrounges about his scrubs for the requisite coinage. At least he’s not the fellow who gets 99 cents in change back because he’s too lazy to fish a penny out of his pocket.

He knows when to just do enough, I think. Perhaps there's still hope for him.

Potty Emergency

An unfamiliar customer, fiftyish, greying, mustached, eyes full of madness, marches toward my counter. Frustration radiates from his pores; I can feel it from eight paces.

"What kind of gas station doesn't have a public restroom," he blurts, half plaintive whine, half veiled accusation. Yep, I designed the building, quite precociously, too, seeing as this decrepit shack predates my existence by at least ten years. My hostile friend might have read the prominent, eye-level “no public restroom” sign on the door on his way in, or the one at the register, or the ones on the office and stockroom doors, rather than blaming me for his troubles, but that, alas, is ostensibly too much to ask.

I want so very badly to think of something incisively, marvelously witty to say, something that will convince Mustache, and simultaneously the entire soft-drink gulping, lavoratory-dependent domestic population of the error of their ways. I yearn to drive a steak into his petulant vampire heart, banishing him and his malignant redirected aggression out into the waning sunlight, to burst ablaze, consumed in cruel conflagration.

"This kind doesn't...sir," comes my rejoinder, much to my disappointment. The pause before "sir" and my chirpily obsequious tone do make it readily apparent that I'm taunting Mustache, but it's far from my best work. I have lowered my ladle in to the well of genius, only to find that it's been a dry spring in Tennessee. Ah well. Even the greats have off days.

Mustache pays for his gas and sulks away. I chuckle at the fact that he's going to have to stop again at the next business, and at the grief that's almost certainly causing him. He's obviously not a local, as indicated by his distance-implying potty emergency, so I'll never see him again and am unconcerned that he's leaving angry—not that there's much I could have done for him besides being properly sympathetic to his plight, which I obviously am not. Perhaps if he'd been nicer. But the establishment's decision not to feature a public restroom was made, I kid thee not, without consulting your humble author in any capacity at all. The nerve of it, I say.

As this is a postwar building, we have a restroom, of course. It's just on the far side of the office and hence accessible only to employees, which is important considering the drinking-on-shift bit from our earlier story. The girls I work with at night will sometimes even let children and the elderly use it. I might be bothered at the erosion of my desired united front, but in fact most of the people to whom they grant access are travelers passing through and hence won't be likely to cite precedent and demand this privilege in the future. Furthermore, Vicki and Shayla, my night-shift compatriots, understand my adamantine rule on the matter: if someone makes a mess in there in abuse of their kindness, their abused kindness will be accountable for the cleanup. I am nothing if not fair. Given, however, the litigation-happy society that we live in, should anyone trip on the junk-laden office floor on their way to the bathroom, I’d almost certainly be named in the lawsuit. And what on earth have any of these people done for me to warrant that risk?

Now, from any service industry employee's perspective, public restrooms are an iniquitous construct. Human beings, inherently being inconsiderate pieces of shit, will never treat anything of someone else's with the same caution or respect as their personal effects. If you want to know the end result of this, simply ask any bar or restaurant employee who has found a misdirected turd as the last thing standing between him or her and going home for the night (and plug your ears if you are sensitive to expletives). There seems to be a repressed pathology in a certain type of individual to redecorate interior spaces in an organic waste motif. The expense of constant remodeling, as well as the possible outbreak of cholera and such, deters these individuals from implementing their predilection at home, so they go at it with creative gusto all the more zealous when given an opportunity in public.

Restaurants and bars, to their perpetual dismay, have little recourse against this. They want people to stay and keep spending money, and the consumption of food and drink has certain incontrovertible effects on the human body. A+B=C: they are at an appreciable competitive disadvantage should they not choose to make toilet facilities available to the public. Gas stations run, on many levels, contrary to this principle. We, conversely, want you in and out as quickly as possible. Turnover, and not intensification of spending, is how we make our money. Besides, we are the Mecca of service industry revenge; in that cheery and expansive customer service is almost irrelevant to our business. Is everyone ready for an economics lesson? Gas stations attract patronage based upon: A) location; and B) fuel prices. Price your gas around the industry standard, and build your station on a busy road, in front of a large apartment complex, or both, and people will patronize it if you spit on them. Discerning people will travel for a nice meal, but gas doesn't come in flavors. Even if other factors like public restroom availability are dramatically unequal, people will pull their car up to whatever pump is closest when the low fuel light comes on. Adam Smith has nothing on me.

We are, in our own tiny way, a mere extension of the global oil market. Everyone likes to hate us, and yet we've successfully identified and isolated all eleven of you who are riding your bicycles to work in protest. You need to drive. Your car needs gas. QED, you need stores like mine to keep your vehicle happy and people like me to take your money. An offshoot of this is that folks with my job get to indulge in a fantasy that the rest of the service industry can only pine for in the deepest night: we get to say "no."

Serial accommodation is the mark of modern American service culture. Service employees are trained to say "yes" to nearly everything. This used to simply exist at the higher end of things, but has trickled down, like runoff from a manure field, to infect every level of the industry. The customer used to always be right, even when he was obviously wrong, because he was dropping four bills a night to stay at your hotel; the customer is now always right, even when he is wrong, everywhere, because if your business doesn't entertain his juvenile delusions of grandeur, your immediate competitor's just may. It's become a perverse game of one-downsmanship where each commercial entity contorts itself ever more painfully for the joy of the increasingly sadistic and inconsiderate patron. You say you want to order something, mid dinner-rush, not on the menu and entirely concocted in your freakish imagination? Coming right up. You want to explore every mathematical permutation by which you might have your Whopper? No problem. You want the hotel manager to clean your demolished room personally? We'll send her right up. You'd like your new car towed to your house by the salesmen, pulling it by a rope attached to a bit between his teeth a la World's Strongest Man competition? Why not? If this trend continues, in a few years you'll be able to make concubines of whatever unfortunate service staff has the splendid opportunity to meet you.

But no, you still can't use my bathroom. What a delicious word. No. no. NO. Nooooooooo. The mere feel of it about the mouth brings a shiver of glee to any service staffer beaten down by years of assenting to flatly ridiculous demands, so that they don't have to hear "no" in reply to their own somewhat more pressing questions: do I still have a job? No. Can I pay the rent this month? No. Do I have a snowball's chance in hell of climbing the corporate ladder in any competition-based U.S. service field? A resounding, unequivocal, echoing-through-the-fields NO. So instead service industry staff fill the role of the pushover significant others of the employment world, spinelessly acquiescing to the public's mercurial desires: we become, by this process, easy to like but impossible to respect.

But my job, and a few others (think any bureaucracy), represent a line in the service sand, which you cross at your peril. You can't distill petroleum in your backyard, and you can't get your driver's license at Wal-Mart. So we can say "no" to you. It's a small man's power, you might suggest, and I'd agree. But I am content, at least in this regard, to be a small man. It's also a power that gets horrifically abused, especially in places like the post office and the BMV—I don't deny that for an instant. The authority to decline unreasonable requests and to discipline bad behavior is not to be taken lightly, and it has the ability to metamorphose into a monstrous intransigence by which perfectly polite and reasonable customers are treated with a discourtesy not warranted. Since I obviously need to use these services myself, I'm not happy with this opposite pole either.

But at the end of the day, much of the reason that "no" is such an affront to guys like Mustache is that they've been so completely spoiled by years of hearing nothing but "yes." If he'd stopped at my station thirty years earlier, he'd have had no reason to expect a public restroom. He'd have had to exercise better planning skills or just gone in the ditch like everybody else. Because people are accustomed to establishments bending over backwards to pleasure them, they've come to expect it, to the extent that they feel that business is bound by rules and laws regarding their convenience, imaginary rules that exist only in the precedent-inundated minds of guys like Mustache. Like children who come to see candy and cookies as their intrinsic right following a day at school, they mistake indulgence for obligation. I get to be one of the shrinking breed that is empowered to clarify the difference for them. And that's why I do what I do.

Shoeless Joe

Some college jackass comes into my store on a weekend night, with friend. I'm outside the counter sweeping, and I notice his filthy, unshod feet as he stares down into the ice cream cooler in a pot-induced frenzy of dairy lust.

"Hey guy, you need shoes to be in here." My tone is officious; it's late, and I'm tired and being a jerk.

He replies, in brokenhearted inquiry, "Can I buy my ice cream first?"

"Nope."

He sniffs angrily and storms out, instructing his equally baked friend to buy the ice cream for him on his way to the door.

"Why'd you tell him to leave?" Vicci, my fellow cashier, asks, heading tilting in puzzled-dog expression.

"No shoes. It's not my rule; it's the health department's." I can hear his friend mutter something under his breath about this assertion being bullshit. Although he is unwise to contradict someone who can revoke his walking-distance convenient store privileges, he's probably right. He buys his friend's ice cream, his own soda, and leaves. I see as they head back the Glen that Shoeless Joe has ridden a skateboard barefoot to get here. Underclassmen and their vestigial high-schoolisms crack me up.

I have no idea if there's anything about compulsory footwear in the Tennessee health code, and frankly, I could care less. This isn't exclusively about that, although I would certainly prefer not to have ringworm and athlete's foot slathered around my floor by anyone's fetid, sweaty dogs. It's about acting like an adult.

College kid apparently didn't pick up before leaving for school that the public world is not in fact an extension of his home. It places expectations on the individual that aren't present whilst strolling around the shitbag apartment hung-over in one's boxers. One of these is, of course, that in the huge majority of indoor service establishments he's going to be expected to get dressed before partaking of their bounty. I could care less that he wants to skate-punk around the parking lot of the Glen, repelling coeds with his bare feet and atavistic juvenility. He's outdoors and in his rental property in that situation. If they have a problem with his annoying the drivers coming to and fro (as they almost certainly do) then it's their problem to correct it. Seeing as limiting the inflow of crack into the complex is among the Glen management's competing priorities, I imagine that they perceive skateboarding to be a comparitively minor threat. Fair enough.

But in my store, he's going to be given an etiquette lesson. He's going to miss it, of course, and probably all the rest of them he'll receive before failing out of college and skating home to his parents, but I feel it's my didactic civic duty to see if I can't create that crack that floods his brain with light—to impart to him that strangers have different expectations than the people he hangs out with, and that he's going to have to learn to play ball if he wants his ice cream on the first trip. His upbringing really should already have instilled this understanding, but since it didn't, epiphany by coercion is now passed on to luckless dupes like me, who are still brave or stupid enough to attempt it. He'll no doubt curse me all the way home, or mock me in that ubiquitous amateur-night college mode of sarcasm, because, like an unwise Zen novice, he's looking at the matter all wrong.

The fact that the raging alcoholic Mexican day-laborers that live alongside the students in the Glen, people who are often new to the country and the language, can understand playing by the rules better than the college kids is a source of enduring wonder for me. Is it fear of deportation or just better parenting? Many to most of them are in the country legally, hence I am left to wonder if there's something in the water, or in the homestead, in Mexico that teaches people to interact with strangers is a manner expeditious and courteous. They picked up somewhere, perhaps by being strangers in a new land, that they don't carry the ground rules with them from home anymore than they carry their physical haciendas themselves. And maybe that's why they often comprehend, even 20 Coronas in, something that the college kids rarely get at all: when in doubt as to proper courtesy in a situation, defer to the people in charge. The college kids have this dynamic inverted: assume yourself to be the person that sets the rules, and then pout when you are informed otherwise. They retain that childish egotism that views rules as conspiratorial infringements on their personal liberties. To be sure, some rules are like that, but most rules are simply tiny, agreed-upon sacrifices of convenience we make for the mutual benefit and smooth running of society. I have to wait at the stoplight so you can pass through the intersection with minimal fear of property loss, death, and disfigurement. You then in turn do the same at the next intersection: quid pro quo, in all its beautiful simplicity. I would very much like to never stop at an intersection, but given sufficient traffic, that suggests that someone else will always have to stop at every intersection. I can, nevertheless, elect to break the rules and never stop, but sooner or later the police cruiser or ambulance driver is going to explain the consequences of that decision.

Consequence, as a word in our privilege-obsessed society, has taken on a pejorative connotation that it doesn't deserve. It has come to be associated with words like "punishment" and "retribution" as in "suffer the consequences," when in fact it means nothing more then "effect" or "result." Rules, like traffic laws and no-shoes policies, are there to inhibit negative consequences like collision fatalities and fungal sprawl, while promoting positive consequences like smooth and predictable transit and public health. Most people never contemplate the idea that they live in no fear of measles due to rules governing vaccinations as they blow through red lights because they're late for work, just as college kid thinks that it's my personal bad attitude and not his lack of foresight that's kicked him out of my store.

He's right, of course, but he's missing the part where he's wrong. He made a decision to controvert the rules, when asked to do something as mundane as putting on a two-dollar pair of flip-flops before entering my establishment. I taught him that his behavior results in public embarrassment and delayed gratification on his ice cream. He won't learn that lesson today, but maybe if enough other people teach it to him, he still stands a chance of becoming a decently considerate adult—the kind of person that doesn't habitually shed blame for his miscues. His parents, like most parents, didn't do a very good job of raising that kind of person. Perhaps the rest of us still can.

Somebody Else’s Problem.

Yes, that's a HHGTTG reference. It's five minutes past closing on a Wednesday night. I see three collegians pushing a dark green Ford Explorer toward the pumps, trudging slowly, step-by-step forward, like Arab traders leading a camel into a desert wind. The pumps are off, of course; their arrival hither is bound to be disappointing. I am typically prescient about where that disappointment is going to be vented. I am the Gas Guy, after all.

I watch them stare disbelievingly at blank gauges on the pumps as they jab and prod the fuel grade buttons and fumble with the nozzle beneath our unlit pavilion. I listen to my register buzzing happily as it spits out the end of the night reports. I am counting my drawer and waiting for their card-house of denial to topple, its remnants blown by the wind toward my locked and bolted door. I stand in my citadel, the Tai Chi Ch'uan master surrounded by enemies, awaiting the first strike that I may begin the lesson. They're not only going to learn why they're wrong, they're going to learn it on my schedule.

It comes. One of the collegians, a well-kempt frat-looking fellow (as are they all) approaches and tugs desperately at the pull handles, feigning (or perhaps worse, actually feeling) surprise when they do not yield. He gives me a look of thwarted ambition, impotence—futility. It's the kind of look that inspires pity and amusement toward children and pets when you've given them a challenge beyond their abilities. It elicits derision and disgust toward adults.

"Hey" frat unit A implores, knocking on the plexiglass window that separates us, "our friend ran out of gas, and the pump won't take his credit card."

"That's because we're closed, and the pumps are shut off until tomorrow," I shout, because plexiglass absorbs a lot of noise. "There's nothing I can do for you." I am wondering which of the usual semaphore-flag indicators of closed-business status they overlooked most effectively. Was it the absence of any other vehicles? Maybe the pavilion lights being off? The darkened interior of the store, perhaps? That it took the above plus pumps lacking electricity, a locked door, and me telling them to send the point home makes me pray silently that these are not criminology majors. Yep, guy standing and counting money equals establishment open for commerce: there's the logic of desperation, in all of its finery.

"Thanks," he snorts sarcastically, as he storms back to the truck like the proverbial scorned woman. Sure enough, this is my fault. Score another one for the Gas Guy's Crystal Ball™. By the look of A's slightly puffy eyes, by the way, these guys have been drinking, which makes me decidedly unsympathetic. Hate away, my frat boys.

If my collegiate friends here were in any danger, I might be a little more inclined to help. I go through, like most people, a partially conscious checklist when evaluating candidates for aid: Are these guys safely off the road and out of the way of traffic? Check. Do they have recourse to assistance? Judging by the fact that all three are now yammering on cell phones, check. Is it hazardous for them to be outside? No, it's a pleasant evening and I walk home through this neighborhood alone nightly. Is there a well-known organization called triple-A, which specifically addresses and rectifies situations of driver negligence and idiocy? Check. Finally was this actual bad luck, or just somebody not paying attention? Extra-bold check on the latter. There are probably at least 30 gas stations within a five mile radius, and I would bet their souls that they passed five of them with the needle of a freakin' Ford Explorer on "E." It's not quite as thirsty as, say, an H2 in terms of fuel economy, but it's hardly a Geo Metro either. I conclude that my heart is not, in fact, breaking.

I was in a very similar situation once, as my empty-tanked Toyota Corona bucked and wheezed into a BP station that closed two hours earlier than the one I work in now—ten minutes before I got there. The clerk wouldn't turn the pumps back on, rerun his reports, and recount all of his money just to accommodate my faux pas. Having no coins for the pay phone, no cell phone, and no collect call access to my land-lineless erstwhile roommate, I walked three miles across gangsta-infested urbania in the dark to get home. Although it never hurts to ask, I held no grudge against the station attendant for not reordering his evening around my poor choice. As I trudged home, I envisioned a yellow flag attached to a steel bit flying through the air, followed by a referee's miked voice: We have a foul on the play: stupidity--offense. That's a three-mile walk home through the ghetto penalty and repeat second down.

But the guys aren't done appealing my decision. "C'mon can't you turn the pumps back on for a minute?" vociferates frat unit B, ostensibly believing that with an identical tone and request, he's going to get farther along than A did.

"They shut off automatically at close and restart in the morning," I yell back. Instead of a prevarication, I like to think of this statement as a personal redefinition of the word "automatic." Today it means "operated by breaker switches flipped by human fingers." I repeat that "there's nothing I can do. Sorry." B slinks away, vanquished by the iron-clad consistency of my argument.

I can turn the pumps back on, of course, but doing so involves re-booting the POS system, starting another business day, and re-totaling everything. I'm not sure how to go about it, it would take forever, and would probably get me fired. While that may happen one day anyway, it will be a down-in-a-blaze-of-glory, my-terms kind of getting fired, and not falling on a grenade for some snotty kids who probably couldn't be bothered to say "thanks."

But the hitherto-silent unit C, the actual owner of the vehicle, approaches. I can't wait for his boldly divergent tack. His query arrives: "Why don't you guys leave the pumps on at night, so people can use their credit cards?" It's a good question, as I've seen stations that do just that, but strangely theoretical and not terribly germane to his current dilemma. I wonder why on earth he wants to debate something with me that can't help him at present. It's not like I can make a phone call and spontaneously change company policy.

"Because if something goes wrong with the machines, there'd be no one here to assist the customers," I reply, pleased with the reasonable-sounding improv. C, apparently at last realizing that having different lawyers come before the same appellate judge is getting the same answer, retreats to the Explorer.

I formulate a better answer, as often happens, after he leaves: because that would be underestimating human stupidity. "Never underestimate human stupidity" is beyond an aphorism, it is an axiom, containing the better part of all self-evident truth necessary for operating commercial industry. The irony of letting the same people who can't keep their cars, which have well-lit, prominent fuel gauges, from running out of gas, operate pumps unattended is clearly lost on C. I can just imagine the chaos of leaving machines unsupervised which accept money and dispense flammable liquids—in the wee hours of the morning, when most users would be intoxicated. I would come to work one day, to find the area that had once been the fuel pavilion a scorched crater, while the rabble from the Glen picked through the smoldering wreckage of my little shop searching for intact menthol cigarettes and unpunctured cans of Steele Reserve, with the ardor of rescue workers at NYC ground zero. And I don't want to see that.

I go to the back to put the money away and restock the beer. When I return, the frat guys and the Explorer are gone. I conclude that the situation was not so dire as they protested, and that I was correct to assume that they could navigate it with no extraordinary assistance from me.

A little tough love goes a long way.

The World’s Navigators.

"Can you tell me how to get to (insert desired location)?" is something I hear with inordinate frequency, at least several times weekly. This puzzles me to some great end, as, although my station is near I-40, it isn't on it, and hence I wonder how people get so terribly lost. Let me correct: I used to wonder, before I became wiser in the ways of the world, paradoxically by being exposed to an awful lot of idiocy. I have subsequently formulated a theory that neatly explains the whole badly-lost-traveler phenomenon, and it goes something like this: if you work in a gas station, your place of employ exudes a unique polarity that impels hapless pilgrims in your direction; someone will always be lost and wash ashore at your counter, no matter where such may be situated. I am, by this epiphany, now convinced that if I worked in a gas station in Vladivostok, I would have a minivan full of Canadian tourists disembark asking me the way to Juno, Alaska, and I would have to explain they took a wrong turn at the sea bridge across the Bering Strait, back when it was still frozen. Oh, and the lost folk invariably want to use my nonexistent public restroom while asking me for directions which I am wholly unqualified to give them. Sucks to be them.

The oddness of this incessant circumstance has led me to seek the opinion of those better versed in history or law than I, with a specific question: where and when was, pray tell, the national plebiscite that ensconced gas station attendants as the preferred navigators for tourists who have wandered afield?

Any traveler, in this bold modern world, has a plethora of options at his or her disposal, the like over which their parents and grandparents could only salivate ravenously. They may: consult this newfangled organization, usually pronounced "triple A," which will happily mail any member detailed print directions based upon the individual itinerary, given sufficient notice; barring the available time, they may go to a website called "Mapquest," which, having taken satellite photos of the entire freakin' United States, will, for free, offer them a detailed and printable guide which gives instructions so minute that a chimpanzee could drive by them; they may purchase a paper map and abide by its dictums, in an old-school manner that sufficed for 10,000 years or so; or they may, less sagely, jot down the instructions given them by Uncle Bill over the phone, dictated from his hazy memory of the last time he orated directions to Albuquerque, and then stop at my gas station, seeking my flatly inexpert guidance, when they inevitably get lost. (That one I can answer, by the way: get back on 40W; drive another 1,200 or so miles; don't get off the interstate.) That this latter option is chosen so frequently makes me grateful that breathing is still an involuntary exercise of the human body. Clearly, were it not, a whole slew of the public would forget to do it and die.

And yet I wonder why people place such faith in strangers so unqualified to alleviate their quandaries. Do they not know that gas stations are typically staffed by stoned teenagers and convicts, because most don't check backgrounds or references, and are surprisingly liberal and tolerant in their hiring choices if they do? I am reminded of a wonderfully entertaining Jacky Chan-Owen Wilson film called Shanghai Noon, in which Chan's character confronts Wilson's, screaming, "You gave me bad directions!" Wilson's character replies laconically, "No, John, I gave you wrong directions." Who's to say that even if the $7.25 an hour guy that you're placing your vacation-welfare in the hands of was intricately knowledgeable about local cartography, which he almost certainly is not, that he wouldn't send you along the wrong arrow for his own amusement? Sure, that's a mean thing to do, and I've (to date) never done it, but why assume it won't happen? Success is a narrow tightrope over the seas of misfortune and treachery, and yet one that millions elect to walk daily—especially when directions are involved.

A curious externality of this situation is that, after so many desperate requests, I have begun to actually feel guilty for not having the right answer to navigational questions that I should never have been expected to answer in the first place. I begin to feel like there is a school for gas station cashiers that imparts "the knowledge," as certified London cabbies are required to have, and that, having avoided, I snuck into the job without this essential qualification. Because so many people get lost and demand my assistance, I start to feel like I ought to have some assistance to offer. I've caught myself apologizing for a lack of information that I have absolutely no commercial, moral, ideological, or practical imperative to possess—my logic is overthrown by remorse, as if I were a guilt-ridden Roman Catholic, or something.

But then, the cars disappear into the distance, and I'm left with the understanding that I did the best I could, while shamefully inept to do better. Would they have asked a sommelier to fix the blown fuel pump on their car? Would they have conscripted a cop to perform lasix surgery on their eyes? They asked a convenience store clerk to point them in the right direction, weirdly assuming that he were properly enabled to do so. And I do the utmost that my limited proficiency allows me to offer. If they get lost again, and want to sue for malpractice, they need look no farther than the rear view mirror for the object litigant.

Diesel

A haggard woman in her forties pulls up to pump seven, in a Honda Civic, from a few body styles ago--1989, if I had a guess. I look at Vicci, and grin. Vicci looks and grins back. The customer picks up the hose and I hear the dog-whistle wail of the authorization-request come on the register, and press the buttons necessary to make it go away.

Our station rests on the cutting edge of 1977 technology; we don't have a PA system, and so can't, in proper stentorian, anonymous form, tell the patrons at the pumps when they're being unfathomably stupid. (That's probably a good thing. I can imagine myself publicly-addressing things like, "THE PUMP ISN'T ACCEPTING YOUR CARD BECAUSE YOUR ACCOUNT'S OVERDRAWN, JACKASS, AND SOMEONE REALLY TOLD YOU WRONG ABOUT AQUA AS AN ACCEPTABLY MANLY COLOR FOR YOUR TRUCK. PLEASE COME INSIDE TO PAY.") So we just watch, and wait. Haggard woman tries, very hard, to fuel her vehicle with a pump that deliberately precludes it. I am reminded strangely of a chimp sticking a grass stalk into a tree in an effort to extract insects. After a minute or so of dejectedly fumbling about, she hangs up the hose and heads in our direction.

"Hey!" I am finally accosted, as our troubled patron strolls in and addresses me in proper out-of-towner West Virginia drawl, "This isn't my car, and the gas hole won't open. Can you help me? (or, more accurately "Hehh, this in't mah cahr, and the gass-hoawle won't opin."

"Did you pull the lever on the floor on the driver's side?" I ask, knowing full well that she has.

"Yeah, but the gass-hoawle (her coinage, by-the-way, not mine) jist won't come opin." As she speaks I notice the black teeth and badly receded gums that pass for identification among certain mountain folk.

I could, of course, settle this matter without going outside. The reason that the "gas hole" won't open is because she's trying to put diesel fuel in a standard petrol car; service station designers in America long ago acknowledged the blind obduracy of the motoring public, and made diesel nozzles too big to allow lawsuit-lusting miscreants to eviscerate their engines by administering the wrong kind of gas. But I nevertheless telepathically tell Vicci, who looks as if she's about to interrupt and clear matters up, that I'm having fun here, and head out with West Virginia toward the car.

"Wow, you're right," I declare, upon chivalrously attempting to pump the fuel for her. "The gas hole just won't open. Are there different kinds of diesel Hondas?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah. This is a diesel pump, like the sign says, and that's why its shorter than the other pumps, and why the nozzle doesn't fit in your car. I just wondered what kind of Honda diesel it was."

"Oh! Ha ha ha! And Ah just thawt that there was sumpin' wrong with the gas hoawl! So Ah really should gowda anudder pump! Ha ha ha!"

(I realize afterward that I could have wittily added that the diesel pump lacks octane buttons, and that she must have assumed that we were the only gas station in North America lacking fuel grade options, but, as everyone knows, the things you wish that you might have said and the things that you do say are often very different animals.)

"If it's not a car that runs on diesel fuel, I suggest that you pull forward to pump nine," I entreat, dealing, bemusedly, with the waste of time, because I encouraged it in the first place. There are two of us working on a slowish night, so I have to do something to kill clock. And so she does pull to a usable pump. She finally gets her vehicle fueled, of course, and upon returning to the shop, gratefully, if hickishly, thanks us, pays for gas and goes.

Rotten-toothed mountain woman didn't pick (I hope, fervently) the diesel pump because she's stupid. She may well be stupid, but like everyone else that inadvertently selects the diesel pump, she probably did so because she was preoccupied and distracted—somewhere else. But all of her preoccupation is an illusion; she's a drowning woman flailing around in the image-factory waters of the ego. Where she's going and whatever else is on her mind isn't real. It doesn't exist and hasn't happened yet. Conversely, the car she's trying to poison is real; the wrong kind of fuel is terribly, terribly real. But reality, unkindly, doesn't offer judgment on your soon-to-be-blown engine; it merely presents events, sans commentary. And it lets you know, sometimes through gentle reminders like the remonstrance of a gas station attendant, and sometimes through signals much harsher, that thinking ahead to your destination, thoroughly unaware, while you ignore the salience of the moment is going to land you in some trouble. Life, as John Lennon sagely observed, is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Buddhists are big on awareness of the moment, but since Buddhism isn't (quite fairly) a cultural priority in the West, we tend to think in terms of the future, and not the present. The result is, while we are enthralled with what happens next, we rarely see what's happening now. We supplant the impending for the extant—and do so often at our own immediate peril.

To be less esoteric, West Virginia merely did what we all do: she practiced the idea that her proprietary rights to foolishness overweighed the correction rights of those better inclined, and that's why she was taken aback to discover that there was nothing wrong with her car and something wrong with her. Once again, fair enough. Her folly is of a universal flavor—it’s just how we're raised and trained to think as people. Worry about the end and never the process. Stumble in a myopic drunken haze through each moment because the next moment is where it's at. It's a phenomenon that transcends race, class, age, occupation, gender, income, and religion: put an ice cream cone on the far side of a land mine, and put on a raincoat for the human shrapnel that's going to come splattering onto you. People living in the next moment will always manage to see the ice cream cone and miss the land mine.

"I could have told you there was nothing wrong with her car," Vicci lectures, after West Virginia has rolled off into memory.

"I knew there was nothing wrong with her car," I reply. "I wanted to make her feel stupid so she might pay a little more attention next time."

"That's not very nice."

"Being nice wasn't my goal," I say, and then realize the last word I've chosen. I have a quick inward chuckle, realizing that my need to orchestrate conclusions at the expense of process is the same as anyone else's.

I wouldn't make a good Buddhist, I fear.

Alberta.

I see, through the plexiglass, Alberta promenading toward the shop, at her typical glacial pace; Alberta is slooooow. She finally dawdles through the doorway, ringing the little cat-bell chime and, Pavlovian, invoking a certain discomfort for me. I look at her, with the usual mix of pity and antipathy.

Alberta's about 5'4, with wispy, greasy brown hair. She's missing several teeth, with those brown, rotten remainders announcing why the others chose to vacate. She's only 44, but has the body of a woman 20 years older: slack, sallow skin, no muscle tone, plenty of fat. Her most distinguishing feature is those wild, twitchy, pale eyes, shrieking of madness and desperation.

Alberta's a crackhead. Her addiction, if I can blame it, has wiped out whatever intelligence or personality she may have once had. Now she's just need--penetrating, all-encompassing need. High-maintenance on a stick.

"Hi Alberta," I sigh, as she comes in. If an eye-roll could be embodied in voice, that would be the tone I'm aiming for.

"Hi. What's your name again?"

I tell her, for the 400th time. I could just as easily make up a new one on each occasion, for all the good it's going to do helping her remember. She's just not all there anymore.

Alberta washes dishes for a living, although I'm hard-pressed to see how anyone who moves so slowly can keep up with a busy lunch crowd, although I must conceded that addiction is a more powerful motivating force than I give it credit for. Yet I realize that it's good that she's still employable, and that someone else besides me, you, and Uncle Sam are footing the bill for her fitty-rocks. But I also know that dishwashing wages can't support a crack habit, and hence am impelled to wonder what unspeakable things she's done and had done to her to finance her hobby. I want, in the depths of my heart, to believe that no self-respecting drug dealer would accept sexual favors from Alberta in exchange for product, but that idea is about as intellectually fecund as the notion of a self-respecting drug dealer. I'm quite sure that I could kick in any door at the Glen and bust the latter out, passing the pipe and acetylene torch around with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, as the old joke goes. That very idea makes me think in the terms of another writer: How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!

But I don't dare judge Alberta. Her desire is simple; she likes crack. Everybody wants something, and are often, or usually, willing to prostitute themselves for it. All those who work slavishly to bring about their desires, whatever they may be, are, on some significant level, whores. It’s not as if we really need most of what we work for; anyone who has ever put in overtime for an iPod has done, philosophically, if not materially, what Alberta does. Alberta is just the refreshing kind of harlot that doesn't bother to feel superior to other whores; she knows what she is.

Eventually Alberta comes to my counter and pays for her stuff. Her bill for the soda and roll of toilet paper she's getting today amounts to $1.66. She does her standard two-minute fumbling about with her wallet after I announce the tally, holding up the growing line behind her. I take her money, give her back her change, and then gently push her aside with the left hand so I can deal with the other customers while she takes another two minutes to put her money away. "Alberta, step aside, please" is what I say, in dispassionate monotone.

"Wow, you sound like a cop when you say that," she replies, without a hint of sarcasm.

My quickish retort is, "gosh, Alberta, how would you know that?" It's not the best comeback ever, but it does successfully mute her. She's obviously been part of some canned, unreleased, COPS episode. If not, she should certainly audition.

Weirdly, Alberta's never bothered by the fact that she's just been herded aside like cattle. My brusque demeanor doesn't hurt her feelings, even if it embarrasses her slightly, because she has no feelings left to hurt. It's the crackhead's version of enlightenment: she's sunk to a point where she just doesn't care, and so it's difficult for me to offend her. It's liberation of the ego via narcotics; I suspect that whatever Universal Ultimate monitors and governs Alberta's destiny might almost approve—at least she doesn’t cause any harm to anybody.

Yet, ultimately, I prefer Alberta's brand of self-sale, if proffered the option between hers and that of her putative social betters—hers is utterly devoid of arrogance or pretension. That her idea of happiness doesn't seek to belittle, demean, or displace others is, in fact, rather uncommon. That's a complement I can't extend to too many people. So I feel a certain sympathy for, and almost an affinity with, Alberta. Her powerlessness grants her the freedom to do what she likes, reputation and consequences be damned. Her dismissal by society as worthless is, in a unique logical contortion, a quality nearly to be admired, and perhaps even envied. Most of us have to worry about the choices we make; Alberta can be whatever she wants to be, because nobody cares about the people who choose to be forlorn junkies.

There are, of course, plenty of Albertas where I work, and each one has a story, a history, that can teach me things about paths better left unchosen. So I don't look at the alcoholics, the pot-fiends, the crackheads that come before me each and every shift with the summary dismissal that most people grant them. I have developed, without consent and perhaps even against my will, a quasi-paternal affection for them, that transcends the reality of how much they irritate me by being unwashed, unmannered and unlettered distractions from whatever I may be trying to clean or stock when they darken my doorstep. As Alberta, just before leaving, was pulling another of her favorite tricks, requesting for me to combine all of her dimes and nickels into quarters after I'd moved her aside and was trying to process the line she had caused, another quote in reference to her, from that guy I mentioned above came to mind:

This thing of darkness, I acknowledge mine.

The Vicious Cycle Shop

I am immersed in a pool of ink--sticky, murky suffocating ink, inhibiting my movements, cloaking me in darkness, and threatening to drown me. All is not lost, though: above the surface I hear the piercing wail of the approaching ambulance, its unnerving, plaintive loudness telling me to reach toward it if I can just...muster...the strength.

The ambulance has been coming for a while, perhaps twenty minutes, yet doesn't seem to be getting any nearer. Just the same BEEEEEP...BEEEP...BEEEEP. I begin to understand that I'm going to have to find them in order to live. So I gather any residual strength still in my weakened form, and lunge upward, a last, desperate heave, out of the ink and into the light.

I'm awake now, and shut off the God-awful racket of the alarm clock, which has going off for, perhaps, twenty minutes. It's 2:52 PM, and I'm supposed to be at work at three. I'm still wearing my uniform from the previous night, covered in sweat and grime, so hung over that I offer a quick, fervent prayer that heaven will strike me dead so I don't have to face the day. Zeus ignores me. No thunderbolt. I won't even have time to shower. This is really, really going to suck—transcendent, cosmic suckiness.

There has been a preternaturally vicious cycle at play of late, by which I work all day with a crippling hangover, feeling my frustration grow and blood pressure rise as I try to process each customer in most expeditious fashion, only to find another, and another, and another, standing in place of the original, clones and robots and zombies replicating themselves to my enduring horror. At the end of nine or ten hours of this, I am so horribly, if self-imposedly, stressed out that I sprint to the cooler in the back to crack open a beer--precious, potent, potable antidote. It works so well that I have another, and then a few at the local bar, and then many more at home before being chased into my coffin by the sunlight, only to emerge again--short on sleep, hung-over, late for work. Some might call this alcoholism, but I find that an irrelevant and academic distinction. To me it is simply speciously poor planning. In any case, this vicious cycle needs to go back to the shop where I bought it. The tread's worn off the tires and it's no fun to ride anymore.

"Excuse, me, there, shop clerk," I imagine myself saying, "I'd like to trade in the drink-to-relieve-job-stress-causing-stress-inducing-hangover-leading- to-more-drinking-to-relieve-stress cycle please. What else have you got?"

"Well, we have this year's eating-to-cope-with-depression-leading-to-depression-causing-obesity."

"Nah, kind of girly. What else?"

"We have a special on blowing-yourself-up-in-defense-of-your-faith..."

"I don't do politics. Something with a lighter frame?"

"Ah. Certainly you'll look good riding this squandering-your-meager-income-on-pot-then-insisting-you-smoke-pot-to-cope-with-being-poor."

"That is so already taken, and I'm late for work. I'll keep the one I've got and get back to you."

And so I rode my vicious cycle into work. My hangover is my problem, naturally, but I work in customer service, so, while it is true enough that I inherit the customers' problems, the corollary of this is that they inherit mine. The giving of shit in this world is much like a biological feedback loop: simply put, what goes around comes around.

It is a right reading of a will, it is today: inheritances abound. The customers probably don't deserve the total avoidance of eye contact or the terse grunts of affirmation or negation that are passing for answers, but luckily they are accustomed to it. It isn't as if the convenient store industry is chock full o' rising stars in the retail trade. On days when I'm being alert and nice, they mostly cower in surprise and suspicion anyway, so perhaps the automated way is just the way to go, from a conservation of energy standpoint.

But they aren't helping. They’re being usually clueless, asking dumb questions and attempting to pump diesel into their unleaded cars a record five times in one shift, ignoring the "no public restroom" sign posted three different places, paying for candy bars with $50's, etc. Yet I remain painfully cognizant all the while of the irony that I work in a market niche specifically designed to accommodate people's laziness and stupidity and then become offended when people take us up on our offer by acting lazy and stupid. We're basically accepting bribes in the form of exorbitantly high prices from people who can't muster the will to walk or drive the extra six blocks to supermarket where everything costs half as much. And I am surprised that they can't read signs. Go figure. But please, just not today, I think, over and over. Not when I feel this shoddy.

So I try, very hard, pay attention, to stay with the pitch, to live in the moment, so that I don't just descend into the vacant place where I work on remote and may as well be blind and deaf. It's the place where, nine customers later, I couldn't tell a person what anyone was wearing, what cars they drove, or even necessarily what they bought. I'm losing this struggle: what is happening around me is becoming more and more indistinct as I sink farther under and drift away with the current.

I'm trying to reach this thing people talk about called the happy place, to remove myself from where I am to a better neighborhood, except that there is no happiness in this hot, hazy locale I'm withdrawing into. I seem to have been shot down on my way to the happy place for flying without a permit, over a vast and barren desert. Now I'm just stumbling about, injured and delirious, scanning the horizon for an oasis that doesn't exist.

After several hours of this, I'm speaking to people across an intellectual abyss, a fog of distraction so thick and fetid that, given the additional factor that as the shift wears on I'm dealing with increasingly drunk and stoned people, it's a miracle that we're able to communicate at all. With the tides of memory and oceans of imagination flowing between us, we as well be shouting into megaphones from different continents.

"Yo, lemmee get a vanilla Dutch," someone will shout, from Antarctica.

"but i can't hear you i'm so very very far away i'm sorry," is all that they're going to hear back, from Denmark.

Nine hours of this go by, during which I'm angry and disappointed with myself for being a bad cashier and an awful human being and an irresponsible drunk, all the while dropping change and asking people to repeat themselves and growing testier and testier when customers try to drag me out of my quagmire and actually get me to assist them. Like I said before, they really don't deserve this. And as everybody knows, they're at their most demanding when you're at your least prepared. I feel like a 1980's AFC Champion in the Super Bowl: I'm plummeting out of the game and haven't a clue what do about it besides cringe, pout and huff.

Finally, mercifully, it ends. I lock the doors fifteen minutes early, and breathe, trying to shake off the lunacy of an entire day of talking without saying anything, when all I wanted was to be left alone. This really isn't any way to live, I think, and then sprint to the cooler in the back and crack open a beer--precious, potent, potable antidote. As I feel it's cool, soothing, carbonated remedy gallop down my throat, the can gone in minutes, I think about the vicious cycle shop, and when I'm actually turning this one in. But since I made the shop up in my imagination, it follows that my imagination sets its operating hours, and so I can't go tomorrow. It's a half day there on Thursdays, you see. And that means they'll be closed hours before I wake up.

Spaces

Tails. I lose. Shit.

My coworker Mike and I have just settled matters in the time-honored, if somewhat pacifistic, death-duel that is the coin toss. I’ve chosen heads for as long as I can remember, and today the god of dichotomous transactions, or at least random mathematical chance, has frowned upon me. I have to clean the pumps.

When there are two staffers on at night, the wicked Ethel (our store manager), likes to, understandably, leave lists of chores to be executed during down time. Cleaning the pumps is among the least desired of these. It’s not really hard work to fill a bucket with warm water and to wipe down the grimy fuel stands with a rag, but it leaves one smelling of exhaust until a shower and a trip to the laundry become available, which does not occur until at least the following day. Flirting with the college girls is problematic enough when your cards are on the table as the guy selling them cigarettes, but smelling of blue grade fuel? Come on.

What’s worse, being caught outside by the customers compromises the spatial hierarchy that we’ve worked so hard to establish in the building itself: the six-inch dais that exists behind the counter grants us a weird air of authority that animal-level rules of eye contact and head position have ingrained into humanity; I’m taller, and hence I’m in charge. Outside, when I’m revealed to be a slightly-above-average height six-oh male, my authority evaporates like spilled gas on a hot summer day in Tennessee. I now have to deal with the folk who drive up while I’m thus exposed like they are, quite literally, on equal footing. (It’s the same feeling I get when I run into them at the bar, but at least there I have alcohol to ease the transition.) That means no sneering, no rushing them, no condescension. I might even have to do more than say “hi” and ask them how they’re doing, winging my way through actual conversation while they pump gas, as if it were something I’m versed in, as opposed to something I’ve learned to feign. Damn.

But I also get to see a little bit of what happens outside the lines, if you will, the things that I normally only see the results of. So I watch the locals passing bottles of Bud Light and Corona in the car, taking that last hit off a joint, pooling money, arguing with spouses, emptying their trash from home into our garbage cans—the little bits of reality that make up our patrons’ lives immediately before and after my brief and highly ritualized indoor contact with them.

And today, as I’m finishing the last pump, I see a striking Russian girl who lives at the Glen walking toward the store, and feel a twinge of envy that Mike, and not me gets to deal with those fetching eyes and supple form and that voice. Oh my, the timbre that is a Russian girl’s voice. To sound more exotic she’d have to be from Jupiter.

As my eyes follow her into the store, I notice something entirely less welcome: some jackass at the front counter with a lit cigarette in his hand. I look over and wave a frantic, beckoning wave in his direction.

But smoker, like most militant smokers, clearly pines away for the glorious days of the seventies and eighties before the scientific community could prove that his suicidal, filthy habit was also a homicidal, filthy habit, and he could still pollute everyone’s air so long as he sat in the in a confined area of Taco Bell. So he’s passive-aggressively venting, literally, his frustration that this is no longer the case by carrying lit cigarettes into places he’s not allowed to and then acting surprised when he’s told to stop. We’ve all seen the type: they’ll take one last monster drag before discarding a butt and getting on the bus, just so they can exhale smoke everywhere once aboard and thereby assert their territorial pissing rights—as if smoking, any more than breathing, were exclusively the act of inhaling. And so I waved at this one.

“Why you got to wave at me?” smoker asks after charging through the doors. He’s clearly furious at this perceived slight, and he’s standing on the step before the door, about six inches up from the lot that I’m standing on. He has, Annikin, the high ground. The rage in his eyes, his superior build, and his advantageous strategic position are, I must admit, a touch intimidating. The edge I carry for nearly all of each day at work has been, quite rudely, inverted.

I could, at a later and better opportunity, explain that I used gestures because shouting at bulletproof plexiglass, which absorbs an awful lot of noise, from twenty paces would be about as effective as treating advanced sarcoma with aspirin, or that the burden of non-smoking in indoor spaces has shifted, palpably and obviously, onto smokers in recent years, or that I waved instead of spoke because his presumptuousness obviated the standard rules of etiquette. But none of that matters right now. Right now, a white man had the unbridled gall to wave at a distance to a black man, and the black man is all in a snit about it. Cracker invaded his racial space.

Wild guess? Blind, bigoted thinking? Pointless theorizing? No. Mike, the guy that I lost the coin toss to, as I found later, had told this guy to leave the store moments before I waved at him, and got no grief at all. Mike’s black, by the way. Or maybe he’s just nicer than me.

“You’re not allowed to smoke in the store,” I say, with what I hope is a firm but uninflammatory tone.

“Why you got to wave at me?” Obviously, this is a fairly major issue for him.

“Sorry. Please don’t smoke in my store,” I offer, trying to be appropriately firm yet conciliatory. I have no idea if I’m pulling this off or not.

Smoker gives a shrug and a snort seemingly meant to convey, “Was that so hard?” before turning and going back to his car. He got me to apologize, which is far more than he deserved, as he, not I, was the one doing something he knew he shouldn’t be doing. But sometimes that’s how it works when the other guy has the high ground.

Since I’m done cleaning the pumps now, I take the six-inch step up before the doors, head through them immediately smelling the leftover Newport smoke hanging in the air from my angry departed friend. I wash my hands and step the next six inches up behind the counter—back onto the command perch. One total foot and a social light-year of difference.

“What was that guy saying to you out there?” Mike asks me.

“He was yelling at me for waving him outside because he was smoking in the store.”

“Yeah, I told him the same thing right before you did.”

I look over at Mike. Maybe smoker’s beef with me wasn’t racially charged at all. Maybe Mike just had a better way of asking, or at least the illusion of superior height. Perhaps I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, although smoker’s very different reactions to two people giving him the same message is a bit suspicious. But I would have given that same wave to anybody in that same situation, and suspect most people wouldn’t have taken it as a personal insult. Ah well. Who knows?

Oh, and I smoke, by the way. I’m not some anti-tobacco zealot; I just understand that we’re the minority and need to accommodate others, not the reverse. But it’s a simple matter of courtesy to understand that lighting up on other people’s property, be it their homes, their businesses, what have you, without permission is just plain presumptuous and rude. Just like I don’t assume I can smoke in other people’s apartments, they aught to extend that consideration into my store. To do otherwise is an invasion of people’s space.

With little more to do, I ruminate for a few minutes on this very idea of nearness and distance, insides and outsides, of high and low, tall and short and Herve Vellechaize and his suicide, on clashes of spatially segregated cultures. I wonder about odd ideas of personal definition and personal space flying under the radar of consciousness, defining the way we approach and react to people and situations, before the welcome interruption of a girl from very, very, far away breaks my train of thought.

“Hel-lo,” begins my Russian angel, in that mesmerizing, drawn-out way that Slavs pronounce multisyllabic English words, as she approaches the counter with her 20oz bottle of Diet Sun Drop. I guess Mike doesn’t get to serve her after all.

“Hello,” I return, with an actual sincere smile.

If only I didn’t smell like gas.

Dead for a Ducat

It’s still there, 74 days, and counting, later. “It” is a dead bumblebee, on its back, shrunken and desiccated in death, resting in plain view on a ledge beside the back door of the shop. It’s huge, waxy, pandirectional eyes are staring at me in an odd memento mori, announcing that he’s waiting for me, for us all, in the undiscovered country.

Why, one might ask, don’t I just sweep it up and throw it away? Because I’m conducting an experiment of sorts: I’m seeing just how long it takes for anyone else to sweep it up and throw it away (and for all I know they’re doing the same with me). After 74 days, I’m beginning to suspect that I might not live long enough to find out.

Furthermore, I’m learning quite a lot from this bee, and the running critique on human nature that he’s (or she’s, as I have no idea how entomological gender biology works) providing for me. It has been, and continues to be, an extraordinary ten week seminar.

The principal idea that this dead insect is conveying is that if people are going to notice and correct a change for the worse in the general state of cleanliness, they’re going to do so almost immediately. Once material objects go unnoticed and unaddressed for a sufficient chronological span, the tendency seems that they become part of the furniture—part of the landscape, even. It is hardly revolutionary psychology to note how the human brain has a curious method of assimilating objects once they cease to be novel, stuffing them into the vast mnemonic file called, “well, it was there yesterday.” This is why people can drive from home to work and back on the freeway and later be able to tell you almost nothing about the experience: the interstate, after the third or fourth time one has driven it, simply becomes a chapter from memory and no longer a new, interesting, or vital experience. There exists little likelihood that it will be much different today or tomorrow from how it was yesterday, so people simply react to it from memory, with just enough awareness fixed at the level of immediate consciousness to avoid crashing into the other cars. From a practical and utilitarian point of view, this type of activity is really pretty benign, but from a philosophical or spiritual perspective, the implications are somewhat more troubling: in doing so, one misses out on an awful lot of the minutiae that makes life interesting.

The intellectual negligence that I’m describing, regarding a thing as small and unseemly as a former social insect, certainly doesn’t end with wee and dismissible bits of matter. This is the phenomenon by which citizens of Switzerland and Nepal find nothing noteworthy or spectacular about the Alps or the Himalayas, how Londoners ride the bus to work past Big Ben and see a large clock telling them that they’re late, or go to church at St. Paul’s and find it the most pedestrian church in the world, wonder what the gawking tourists see in it, and sit through service as bored as anyone in the most truly uninspired of newer Episcopal buildings. It’s how fishermen on trawlers find nothing at all grandiose or inspiring about the pitch and yaw of a ship on the ocean, or indeed the sprawl of the ocean itself: while the witnessed phenomena are unchanged, the person receiving sensory input has changed. It is as if wonder and novelty are inextricably entwined.

In a perplexing way, the human brain seem to be offended by the concept of wonder, as if it is a cutting intellectual insult to be presented with something beyond its ability to effectively name and categorize, define and comprehend—something to simply admire rather than master. So as a gesture of spite it simply blinds itself to things that are beyond its grasp or outside the scope of what it deems compelling, as a means to isolate itself from the sensory overload that is the concept of amazement. We call things death, or ocean, or mountain, or God, or universe, so that we now have a working concept much more comfortably functional and infinitely less complex than the named thing itself.

My expired bee is teaching me another, more immediately germane, lesson, though. This lesson is about the people that work at my store, and the way any small, simple, repetitive business is run. Convenient stores work on protocol, you see; sameness is the fuel that runs their engines. Clerks are trained to be droids, assiduously executing a program that we acquire over two or three days of training and then incrementally refine from our own on-the-job experience. A simple, quintessentially repetitive system allows us to work without supervision, which in turn allows store owners to shell out minuscule weekly sums on payroll. We are not trained to ask questions or make difficult decisions, or to take initiative beyond that which we are explicitly asked to do. But it should also be noted that our failure to take such initiative or display ostensible ambition is not, necessarily, indicative of idleness, complacency, or lack of intellect—it is often a measure of self-preservation.

Allow me to explain: general managers of convenient stores, especially locally-owned, mom-and-pop chains, have gone as far as they’re going to go up their respective corporate ladders. So, like any person standing on a platform and looking down, they view anyone climbing the ladder beneath as a threat to be confronted and dispatched. Our store manager, Ethel, has been at her job for 23 years. She’s used to threats; threats get fired. And although no one outside of the tangled confines of her imagination is vying for her job, it is ultimately salient for her subservients to not appear to want her job. Sure, getting sacked from here isn’t the end of the world, but a lot of the people that work the lower rungs of the service industry have certain baggage that makes finding more prestigious jobs a touch difficult: criminal records, inability to pass a drug test, lack of a high school diploma, no references, poor interviewing skills, etc. So rather than find another position at another gas station down the street after a few wageless weeks they can ill-afford, they understandably want to keep this one. And cleaning the office isn’t part of the protocol. Ethel likes to do (or not do) that herself. And so that dead bug just keeps sitting there.

But the ex-bee is lecturing on something else, distinct and yet related: it is elucidating the concept of institutional rot—how good businesses morph into bad ones, how clean homes become squalid and filthy. You see, nothing in a messy apartment or dirty convenient store is ever that different from how matters appeared the day before—just a little nastier, a bit less efficient, than the last version stored in short-term memory. It isn’t as if anyone ever intends to have that disgusting tub-ring, or pink mold in the toilet, or peeling paint, or a rust-speckled car, or a massive belly, or a failed marriage, or a bankrupt commercial enterprise: these things just happen while we aren’t taking the time or exerting the effort to properly maintain the object of concern. The space shuttle Challenger took seven souls to heaven with it in January of 1986 because engineers assigned the (quite obviously) important task of monitoring launch-test simulations tired of getting data back saying that the o-rings were faulty , and assimilated the information, which leads to ignoring information, consequently lowering the bar over time. We all (or at least those old enough to remember) got to see the results of that on national television: NASA—Need Another Seven Astronauts, as the joke going about my grammar school had it.

The failure for anyone else to notice or remove a deceased, hairy, black-and-yellow, winged insect from a shelf in the office of my convenient store will, of course, carry no such implications. Yet while the scale is smaller, the tone and color of those very implications is the same: ignore the upkeep on anything, and sooner or later you will be most unpleasantly surprised by the externalities of that decision, or group of decisions. The retributive cards dealt may be as mundane as an unimpressed visitor to your unkempt home and a dirty office at the gas station, or as poignant as the funerals of spacefarers, but they will be dealt nonetheless.

So I look at that bygone bumblebee, 74 days, and counting, later, and think of a Hindu term badly overused and yet scarcely understood in the West: karma. Karma is popularly portrayed as the idea that your negative (and even positive) actions, or inactions, may come back to bite you in the ass; karma, in its more orthodox understanding in the Hindu faith says that those same actions or inactions will come back to bite you in the ass: you reap what you sow. It is, to Hindus at least, a law as simple and predictable as gravity. And so I wonder what the karma of my staff’s united laziness and inattention is. Plague? War? An unusually rude customer? The slushee machine breaking unexpectedly?

So the bee sits there, long dead and oblivious to the condition of its slowly decaying shell. Bombus americanus didn’t know that it would one day give an entirely different species pause for reflection, because it didn’t know much of anything: it was a bug after all, and God (if you’re into that way of describing things) didn’t give it much awareness of anything besides the needs to pollinate and feed. But I like attempting to discern big ideas by looking at small sources. Call it the scientist in me that never grew to fruition.

A simple pinch of two fingers and a fling into the nearby trash would, of course, make that bit of organic litter go away. But I’m not sure that I want it to go away: its enduring presence has shown me quite a lot about things that I need to know and understand. So I’ll keep this running tally going, maintaining a log on the extent to which a staff of six sentient beings can continue to accommodate a rotting bumblebee in their midst. It has been a college of the everyday—a means to learn without a lesson plan. 74 days and counting.

Evil.

It’s 6:30 P.M. on a Thursday night, and I’m staring into the eyes of Lucifer, the Morning Star cast from heaven for attempting to usurp creation. I hate staring into the eyes of Lucifer at 6:30 on Thursdays. I could have sworn I included avoiding this very situation in the New Year’s resolutions, along with smoking and vacationing in Darfur.

“Write…a note…to the register,” Satan commands. Although it is my custom to succumb to temptation and do things I’m not supposed to do when there’s something in it for me, Satan is presenting a situation that can be of no possible benefit to myself, my store, or my coworker Mike, who got me into this mess. More on that in a bit.

The arch-fiend isn’t sporting leathery bat wings and cloven hooves or smelling of sulfur and brimstone these days, in which such ostentatious displays of masculinity might offend the neo-eighties, (WARNING POLITICALLY INCORRECT COMMENT), faggy pink shirt ethos that has so lamentably re-descended upon us. He’s camped out, in all his puissant, diabolical might, behind the unwavering brown eyes of a retired, horrifically insane physics professor named Leona. She’s made a request of me that there is zero, zip, nada, rien chance that I will accommodate, and now we’re locked into a struggle of wills that I really could have taken a pass on.

Leona is like something out of a dark fairy tale: a tall, gaunt, wrinkled black woman, who, seemingly to add the requisite fairy tale touch of outlandishness, carries with her at all times a wooden cane that she neither needs nor uses. She used to teach at the university across the street, before her mental condition deteriorated into its present, heavily medicated state, at which juncture she was politely asked to retire. Her story is something of a parable around these parts, principally about the psychological risks of trying to foist advanced math upon nineteen-year-old American college students.

As to the mental condition bit, I should clarify: she’s usually heavily medicated. She is clearly med-free today, and I’m reaping the harvest of it with the joy of a 1984 Ethiopian subsistence farmer staring in horror at his scorched, foodless, lifeless plot of earth.

But like any story that climaxes in the middle, or any story at all, this one starts at the beginning: I was walking back from my restocking duties in the cooler to the front of the store, only to find Mike engaged in a debate of sorts, with Satan, which he kindly redirected toward me.

“It’s his shift and not mine, so I can’t make that decision,” Mike generously deflected, “so he’ll have to decide it for us.” Understandably, I became immediately apprehensive: Mike and I have the same rank, an identical unimportance. Neither of us are managers, and so, with this little lie, his passing the buck onto me could only mean that he felt it was my duty to lift a weight that he had neither inclination nor means to lift himself.

“So it’s your shift,” the Evil One, in Leona guise, replies, to me, as powerful and yet wanting as John Milton wrote him. “I have a cappuccino, and need two packs of Marlboro 100’s. Ethel lets me run a tab until I get my check.” Ethel is the store manager; Ethel is on vacation. Nowhere in the employee handbook or in my training is it said that I can extend tabs to regular customers: you pay for your stuff, or you get your stuff when you have the ability to pay for it. No advanced degree in economics is necessary for an understanding that five-year-old children already have come to fathom. My company, and hence my place as its representative is not a bank: it does not evaluate your credit-worthiness, or discern your likelihood to repay a loan. It offers many, small, relatively inexpensive products and then requires that you pony up for them, immediately, on the spot. We do not engage in a layaway program for nicotine and caffeine; we live in the old world barter system by which we exchange product for money, instantly and finally—a transaction as clean as a scalpel, as done as death. The only way I can extend her a credit is if I pay for her items myself, and as she’s making my evening decidedly unpleasant, my prevailing winds are not blowing in that direction.

“Ma’am,” I say, searching for words too evasive to immediately collar, “Ethel’s on vacation, and I haven’t the authority to loan you merchandise or the money to pay for it on your behalf. These cigarettes and that cappuccino don’t belong to me, and therefore I don’t have the ability to give them out without payment. Have you got a credit card or checkbook?”

“No,” Satan/Leona retorts, “WRITE…A NOTE…TO THE REGISTER,” as if raising her voice at me will have the same effect that it might on children and animals. I am telepathically telling Mike at this instant what he can go do with himself.

All the while, we are locked in a terrible, mutual gaze of unflinching eye contact. I’m, I must self-indulge, very good at this game, as someone whose inherent curiosity about other human beings often overpowers my fear of them: I occasionally, through this modest asset, wordlessly send people away blushing and frightened who could buy and sell me or kick my ass. This is the nearly boundless power of eye contact—the hammer of the awakened.

But at this moment, Leona and the intensity of her madness-laden stare are overpowering my resolve. Her otherworldly dementia is trumping my Zen; the dark side is stronger some days, whatever Yoda said to the contrary. I am looking into two torches from the nether world, not twitchy and irresolute, like the flickering, dancing eyes of my crackhead patrons, but fixed and still as the eye of a storm, frozen and patient as sedimentary rock.

Leona cannot win this battle, in the material sense, of course, but I can certainly lose it. She isn’t getting squat from me without shelling out the obligatory ducats, but she can make me flinch. Physically, I am as steady as a glacier, but Leona is making me flinch on the inside, where everything that matters occurs anyway.

“You aren’t getting cigarettes without giving me money,” I reiterate, for what I hope will be the final time, knowing full well that a physically unintimidating, sixtyish woman has, in fact, driven spikes into my soul. My patience is exhausted; I want this to simply end.

And then a strange thing happens; Satan slowly unscrews the top of her cane, reaches into its caverns, and produces a five-dollar bill. Khrushchev has blinked; the missile crisis is over.

“I’ll buy this cappuccino, and take one pack of cigarettes,” the Lord of the Flies proclaims.

That’s right; the Enemy had the money to pay for most of what it was requesting from the get-go. We have gone through this entire, arduous process unnecessarily, as a tacit exercise in lunacy, because Leona hasn’t kept up on her prescriptions. I am bereft of words. I simply ring up her purchase and send her on her merry, utterly depraved way.

And after Leona leaves, after the shift has ended, after I’ve graciously thanked Mike for leaving me to deal with a deeply unbalanced person, I am left to ponder the idea of evil. One might argue that Leona isn’t evil, but instead that she’s merely disturbed, but I would maintain that these are simply two different ways of describing the same quality, with ignorance being the third. Right conduct in life arises from clarity of perception, the ability to see the right path and avoid the pitfalls deriving from perceptual error; evil and madness, blindness and ignorance are the pollutants that muddy the perceptual waters, the perversions of the will, as Augustine described them, that sully our motives and lead us astray in our actions. Evil is a sandstorm and a blizzard, hiding us from reality and goodness as clear as the air.

By this measure, from a certain perspective, no one, not your serial killers or pedophiles or war criminals is ever really evil, in the common sense of the word, which is a creature to be despised and abhorred. People are, rather, simply mistaken, choosing unwisely for lack of the ability to do better. We can understand this concept more fully when we look at certain phrasings: when one has done something evil, it is frequently described as having done something wrong. The individual has been presented a riddle and answered it incorrectly; from an objective point of view it is the same nature as a teen failing to correctly answer an algebra problem. Hence it makes little sense to hate lunatics and murderers alike; they suffer from an illness that has corrupted their better nature and compels them to perform acts that are repellant to those less afflicted. They are, in their fundamental essences, sick, things to be pitied and helped rather than scorned—there but for the grace of God go I.

So, for the better running of society, we take corrective measures: we prescribe medications and build prisons and hire police and fund schools, so that people can be guided correctly in life and not fall into the darkness and folly that is error, the identification with unworthy principles that leads individuals to cause harm, to inflict suffering on themselves and others. Leona isn’t a great danger to anyone, and that’s why she’s simply prescribed meds and not locked in a cage like some rabid animal. But there is, nevertheless, something quintessentially unnerving about looking into the swirling chaos and hellfire just beneath the surface of that unwavering glare, as disconcerting as free-falling down a well: it is looking into a funhouse mirror, seeing a distorted but recognizable version of your very self.

Vision.

At 4:06 P.M. on a Friday, a man pulls up in front of the shop on a ten speed bicycle. It appears to be at least twenty years old. The man himself appears to be somewhere between sixty and seventy. The bike has several little plastic grocery sacks tied to its handlebars, bearing the names of other local shops. It is clearly his primary means of transportation.

The man is a tall, mocha-pigmented black man, perhaps six-foot-two, with what, quite unusually, appears to be naturally dark blond hair and beard. His clothes are little more than rags; his denim overshirt is frayed at the cuffs, his sandals falling apart around his feet. Everything he is wearing has faded to several shades lighter than its original hue: his denim shirt has drained from dark blue to pastel, his undershirt from red to pink. Great, I think, bum. Then I think of how hot it’s been lately, and, forgive me for this thought, I imagined how ripe he was probably going to smell.

Something interrupts this line of reasoning, gently applies the brakes and steers it in a different direction: the street people I see don’t usually wear faded clothes; they wear dirty clothes. I look again: there are large bleach spots all over the man’s shirt; the socks underneath his sandals are white as unbroken light. These are clothes that have been washed, hundreds of times, over many years, and obviously quite recently. The shopping bags suspended from his bicycle are new and unwrinkled, recent purchases. None of this quite fits the profile I’ve assigned him moments earlier.

As the man is repositioning the plastic sacks, the four o’clock rush hits. Cars descend from nowhere, the pump-authorization alerts wail as if there’s an imminent air raid, and a ten person line forms before my register. My tramp is dead last in line. The line moves slowly, the scourge of this plastic money age in which people seem unable to resist paying for small purchases via PIN debit transactions that take ten times as long as their cash equivalents. When the tramp approaches at last, I thank him for his patience, the industry-standard apology for a long wait.

There is no need, though. The man radiates patience. He exudes serenity and peace. The calm, unforced smile on his face as he sets his two fountain drinks and bottle of vinegar on the counter draws me into his little envelope of content.

I ring up his purchases: the bill for the three items comes to $3.34. He hands me four dollars and, when I return his 66 cents in change, promptly drops it into the plastic “leave a penny/take a penny” bin beside the cash register.

“Would you like a bag today, sir?” I inquire.

“Nah,” he replies, “I don’t think so. You have a nice day now.” I believe that he actually means it. I watch him walk outside and find room in a bag from another store for his purchases. He didn’t take a bag from me because he already knew he didn’t need it. I remove his change from the bin and set it above the drawer, to break into pennies as later necessary.

I have just been in the presence of a mystic, a sage who wants nothing because he knows that he already has everything, who lives by his needs and gives of the little that he has. I feel a sense of wonder and awe that an angel has been sent into my convenient store, and a twinge of envy that when this man dies he will melt away into Nirvana, stroll unassumingly through the back door of heaven, while I’m busy being reborn 40,000 more times or rotting in Purgatory or whatever while I work out why I assumed initially that he was a vagrant. In opposition to what Peter Gabriel once wrote, my hell will be a big hell—and I will walk through the front door.

It is 4:46, the calm between the on-the-hour, post-work flurries of business that define any convenient store. A boy of perhaps seven comes in and picks up a pink Critter Rose, a nylon flower in a plastic tube with one of several fuzzy, brightly colored toy insects attached. His sports a purple dragonfly.

“How much is this?”

“It comes to $1.06 with tax,” I explain, as children tend not to be so adept with the concept.

“This is what I have,” he says, opening his palm and exposing seven dimes. “It’s my mom’s birthday today, and I forgot to get her anything.”

I take his seven dimes, and add 36 cents from the sage’s donation to it, ringing up the piece of gimcrack that will doubtless bring a smile to the child’s mother’s face. “Somebody else got the rest of it for you,” I say. “Tell your mother that the guy at the gas station said happy birthday.”

I realize, after the boy happily strolls away, that I have just completed a tiny miracle begun by another, witnessed Providence at work, whatever theological construct tickles the fancy. It is beyond my skill to relate the unique feeling of that recognition.

At certain moments, like this one, I am offended that people have the nerve to ask me why I work here.

Dues

I work in the customer service industry; to do such is to deal regularly with assholes. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it; assholes are the thin gruel by which we feed our coffers and sustain our meager existences.

There are some days in which I can deal with assholes in an adroit, compassionate manner. When I’ve been keeping up on the meditation and the exercise and the philosophical literature, when I’m not too hung over, when the planets are correctly aligned, I can look at the assholes from a place of higher perspective, from which I realize that there are, generally speaking, only two root causes for people acting like rude imbeciles toward other people. They either: A) never learned any better, by which avenue I have as little right to condemn them as people have right to condemn me for not speaking Cantonese, or; B) they have the capacity for good manners and fail to employ them because they are internally miserable individuals, lashing out uncontrollably at others to expel their hidden discontent and bring strangers into their web of unhappiness. It’s difficult for me to get angry with the assholes on days like this. I have empathy and pity for them; in a manner sincerely uncondescending, I feel sorry for them.

And then, of course, there are the all-too-human days, when I’m tired and full of myself, when everything is a personal insult, and I just don’t feel like dealing with the grief. On those days, as an esteemed Viennese neurologist once nearly put it, sometimes, an asshole is just as asshole.

This is one of those latter kind of days, and Manuel is one of those assholes. Some dues are about to be paid.

But first, the back story: Manuel started coming in here a few months ago, when he moved to the Glen, a seedy apartment complex behind my store which offers large, inexpensive one bedroom apartments and that omits that whole cumbersome “criminal background and credit screening” phase of the pre-rental proceedings. The result is that the locale has exactly the residential mix one might expect under the circumstances: ex-convicts, drug dealers with no paper income, welfare moms, illegal immigrants and college kids. It’s a gangsta’s paradise, stocked to the rafters with potheads and crackheads, booze-hounds and the occasional hooker, all lining up before me nightly, six packs and munchies in hand to show me their stories, like a card player’s tell, implicitly giving things away without so much as a syllable.

Manuel is a Mexican immigrant of questionable legal status, who lives, as I mentioned, at the Glen. He’s about 5’11, slightly built with an angular, more Spanish than Aztec face, featuring shifty, suspicious brown eyes and a thin, black moustache. His habit has been to come into my shop several times daily, wordlessly buying a single, 24oz can of Budweiser, and quietly departing.

Now, I must note, a strange thing happens when one works in a small, enclosed space like the one I work in: over time, the space slowly contorts itself into the whole world, a state in which one ceases to notice or be concerned with what transpires beyond its boundaries. Customers entering become visitors from an alien planet or alternate reality, beaming themselves into existence before the doorway, scattering their atoms moments after they exit. So it came as some surprise to me when I belatedly observed that Manuel was drinking his beer in his car, a red, banged-up, late 1980’s Pontiac Sunbird, in the far corner of our parking lot. He had propped up the hood to project the idea that he was performing maintenance or repairs, but he wasn’t; he was just sitting in his car, swilling his paper-sack enclosed Bud, then proceeding inside to get another—after tossing his empty, crumpled can onto the parking lot, as if that were an acceptable thing to do in his view.

What Manuel was doing was illegal, of course. But both myself and my weekend comrade-in-arms, Mike, are laissez faire, live-and-let-live kind of gents that weren’t bothered by that. It wasn’t as if our friend Manny was directly hurting anybody by his open-container code defiance, after all, and so, on both juridical and moral grounds, we decided that a blind eye was the appropriate tool of response. However, when you pollute a space which we take turns cleaning, your problem becomes our problem. Moreover, it’s just bad form—biting the hand that feeds you.

The day following our tardy epiphany, Mike told Manuel as much. “Look,” he said, quite placidly, “we don’t care that you drink beer in our parking lot, but when you leave your empty cans on the ground, you’re making a mess that we have to clean up.” Mike was being Mike, a practical, even-tempered man who was simply thinking in the very utilitarian terms of action and consequence: we like you when you buy things and thereby fund our wages; we dislike you when you create labor for us during said time which we would have been paid regardless.

Manuel nodded obediently during this brief lecture, and so we considered the matter settled. He went out to the battered Sunbird, drank his beer, put down the hood and drove off. It wasn’t until Mike, later, was sweeping the lot that we realized that Manuel had deposited every, single piece of trash from his litter-laden vehicle onto our blacktop. That’s right: he had perceived Mike’s gentle remonstrance as some sort of slight, and taken what he felt to be the appropriate measure of vengeance—biting the hand that fed him once again. Some people, I swear.

Naturally, I brought the incident to Manuel’s attention the next time I saw him in the store. I was, as I always am, less dispassionate than the terminally laconic Mike. “Look, amigo,” I began, “we don’t appreciate you leaving us a parking lot full of trash the other night. Drinking your beer on our property is illegal, and if I see you doing it again I will have to call la policia. Comprende, amigo?" I hoped that littering my diatribe with scraps of my horridly incoherent Spanish might serve to more effectively drive the point home.

But instead of nodding subserviently, Manuel gave a taken aback, utterly feigned, “who me?/ no speak English,” shrug before heading out to his wreck and driving away. It’s horse-droppings, of course: Manuel speaks and understands English just fine. Yet once again, I considered the matter punctuated: who’s stupid enough to bite the hand that feeds him three times? Honestly, the assailed hand is destined to stop feeding after enough of this.

So our happy status quo, that of Manuel purchasing his cerveza and departing, persisted only as long as it took me to fathom that it had never existed at all: as I spied a dinged, red, Pontiac Sunbird through the back plexiglass of the building one Thursday, I realized that Manuel had simply moved his ride to the other side of the premises, which the clerks face away from and are less likely to notice. And he’d taken to setting his empty beer cans on the outside ledge, behind the newspaper box, where they’d be difficult to notice—passive–aggression as timed explosive. Some people do bite the hand that feeds them thrice. There is, it would seem, just no benefit in talking sense to a certain breed of contemptible miscreant. They're going to take every bit of didacticism as an affront, and fervently offer you clandestine, emptied cans of mediocre beer as your reward.

It must be noted that, however much I’m tempted to or justified in doing so, I’m not permitted to refuse paying customers service just because they’re assholes: asshole money doesn’t bookmark itself as being appreciably less spendable in the store owner’s checking account than decent-person money, after all, and so telling Manuel what he could go do with himself while withholding his precious Budweiser has never been an option for me. Unless patrons are being threatening or actually violent, I am enslaved to the CIAR, grin-and-bear-it ethos. So I merely endured the latest escalation of Manuel-versus-Gas Center #2, because I know, in the way of all things, the way of the force, that an avenue of karmic adjustment is going to present itself.

It does, of course, because if one is patient, karmic retribution mails itself onto your doorstep, happily and silently. Hamlet waited eight years for his revenge, after all, with rather spectacular results, so what's a few months to me? But now it is 12:17 on this same Thursday eve/Friday morning; there is a red, dented, Pontiac Sunbird, deserted in the back lot behind me, that has clearly been abandoned overnight. This isn't a new thing; Manuel has left his ride here for days at a pop plenty of times in the past. And yet, part of the CIAR malarkey that I deal with is that I can’t order cars towed without managerial approval unless exigent circumstances dictate that I simply must. I’m certainly not getting the requisite approval tonight, as my store manager has gone to bed four hours earlier, and I’d get a new orifice of my own if I woke her up at this juncture.

But this whole world, and the life of its occupants, involves dues: you get what you pay for, and you reap what you sow. It’s a closed system, contrary to what everyone thinks, by which gains and losses are relative, by which iniquity comes back to haunt you, and kindness is repaid when you least expect it. It may seem random and unfair at first glance, but that’s simply because first impressions are almost always wrong. With this idea firmly established, I again looked outside and realized something quintessentially beautiful. Manual’s mangled, unsightly ride is blocking my trash dumpster; the exigent circumstance requisite has been satisfied. I pick up the phone, gleefully, and dial seven digits.

“Forest Hill Towing,” comes the disinterested night-operator on the other end.

“Hi, I’m the night clerk at Gas Center #2. We have a trash pickup in the morning, and we also have a car blocking the dumpster.” We don’t have a pickup in the morning, but I can lie when I’m being bantam-weight Genghis Khan, the scourge of the underappreciated.

“We’ll have someone right out, sir,” comes my happy reply.

Minutes later, I wickedly laugh out loud as Manuel’s ride gets hauled away, while I'm crowing like the 86-octane Sword of Vengeance that I am. By the time he comes back to the store on Monday to rudely discover his transport missing, he’s already $259 in the hole. Blue Book on his car is probably only $500. As he comes into my shop aghast, I simply hand him the business card of the towing company and send him on his way. He's still never retrieved the car: there are penalties for being penejos.

Karma, as has been observed, can be a bitch sometimes.

The Master.

Years ago, I was a barman, at a popular sports bar near a populous university, a Big Ten school that ran wild with fervent ardor whenever its sports teams competed. In the rung-climbing wilderness that is the progression up a ladder in a bar, I began as a doorman, advanced to afternoon bar shifts, and matriculated as that angry guy slinging cocktails in your direction during frantic evening sporting events and open-mike night: I was, in short, a college bartender. Such is an experience that cannot so much be described as it has to be lived; it was, like all jobs entailing direct service to an inebriated public, a tiny, ripe, slice of hell.

Hell, in its middling form, had reprieves. In the days of the afternoon shifts, I ran across a man, unassuming as vanilla, humble, patient, and kind. His name was John Haze. John was, and probably still is, a supervisor at the local United Dairy Farmers, a convenient store much akin to the one I work in now. What I did not know was that I had discovered my teacher, my guru, my sensei—the first person to show me the rules of mastering this world

John was about 43 years old, with thick blond hair usually needing a cut and black-framed, badly unfashionable bifocals. He was, sartorially, quite unremarkable: sweat pants, tees, and sneakers made up the bulk of his attire—appropriate gear for the bicycle he rode in place of a car. John would sit at my bar most happy hours on his off days, drinking his draft Bud, smoking his Marlboro Reds, occasionally watching sports, always tipping well—and kicking the crap out of everybody at NTN trivia for hours on end. He was, on more than one occasion that I watched him, the top-scoring player in the nation for an individual game.

It seemed natural enough to wonder what a guy who knew everything like it was his job was doing working at UDF, mostly because I had a whole different outlook on things at the time. But there was, as there is with everyone, a lot more to John than people cared to notice. He had spent a year in law school, before dropping out because he took no joy in it, despite the fact that his grades had been excellent and he was progressing toward his J.D. That made no sense to me, of course. Why would anyone work in a convenient store who could have been a lawyer? Had he no…oh, I don’t know…ambition?

He didn’t, though, by any means, because he’d figured out something in those days of law school that I wouldn’t figure out until some time later: ambition, as is commonly defined and implemented, is not a noble human quality. He’d seen, up close and personal, the madness of greed and the cruelty of competition, the grasping and scheming that, to him, was law school and would almost certainly be the practice of law. And so rather than enter into a life of elevated blood pressure, unkindness, stress and servitude in exchange for something as tawdry as a fat paycheck, he simply walked off into his simple, contented little life without ever looking back. He had committed an arch-heresy, performed a tiny insurrection against the very rules which govern our society. He had looked the Man straight in the eye and said, “I will not play your game; your game is no fun. I will play my game instead.”

John did have another game, though, besides NTN and the figurative one just described. It is a very old game that is played by hundreds of millions of people, but played exceptionally well by very, very few. John’s game was chess, and he was wickedly good, a ranked Master who at his peak had won regional tournaments and was probably among the top several thousand players in the United States. I found this out, like I had found out about the law school bit, from somebody else. John didn’t talk about himself unless you asked, because along with his lack of ambition he simply had no ego whatsoever. I later had the privilege of watching him win nine, lose three, and draw one of thirteen chess games at the bar next door. That might not sound too impressive, until one considers that he was playing all thirteen opponents simultaneously, rapidly moving in a circle from one board and opponent to the next, allowing the opposing players thirteen times his amount of time to consider their moves. And he worked at UDF. What on earth was I dealing with here? A madman?

What I realize now, each night as I stand behind the counter of my little shop, years later on these beautiful summer nights, is that I was dealing with one of the one people in about ten thousand that I would actually consider sane. He had figured out a truth so profoundly obvious and yet so painful for the rest of our vain, silly selves to accept: we are not truly defined by the things that we allow ourselves to be defined by. We are not our jobs, we are not our clothes, we are not our cars, we are not the opinions of others, or even our own opinions of ourselves. These things are ephemeral and shifting, chess pawns to be traded and sacrificed before the king that is the higher Self. These things do not have the power to make or break our happiness any more than we allow them to do so. They are labels which we were taught to adhere to early in our lives, in order to make us obedient and hence less difficult to control; they are sticks and carrots treating us as pack mules, and the truly daft thing is that we allow our lives, nay, demand that our lives be led this way, thinking that the better sticks and bigger carrots of promotions and new cars and home refurbishments will make us more than pack mules.

This is a disastrous way to live, involving a cornucopia of suffering, as most people are partly aware by the size of their pharmacy co-pays and Xanax prescriptions, yet most people never look to any other way, thinking instead that incremental adjustments to an inherently defective model will make it work, that you can turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse. But you can’t, and John got that. John understood that a man’s greatness flows forth from the confines of his heart, that it is to be found nowhere outside, and certainly not on any line of an IRS 1040 form. Perhaps he even understood, like Jesus and Lao-tzu and Buddha, that he could change more people into good and great people by leading with his quiet, dignified example than with the soapboxes and megaphones that are the trade-tools of loud, blathering, discontented fools everywhere. He certainly knew that finding a job you loved involved not a better job, but rather learning to infuse love into whatever job it is you do. A lot of lawyers are detestable, angry, bitter, avaricious people, despite the fact that they make eight times as much money as convenient store clerks. A few convenient store clerks are really somewhat content being unimportant. At the end of the day, who’s really better off? Sure, the converse is sometimes true as well, but nobody ends up a convenience store clerk because anyone in their childhood pressured them into it; the same can’t be said for investment bankers.

I once asked John, before moving away and losing touch with him, if he would give me a chess lesson. He agreed, as it was not in his nature to refuse a small kindness, but we somehow never got around to it. As I try so very hard these days to live the lessons of his example, though, I realize that that’s quite alright. He taught me plenty else.

Cards There is a high school baseball tournament taking place at the university across the street; it has caused an atypical run on every form of smokeless tobacco that my store carries. Although I have a deep and abiding love for the sport that is baseball, I have ever been puzzled by its inextricable association with a habit so disgusting that smokers actually look down on it. At least when we, Peter Jennings-like, die of lung cancer, we won’t be missing our surgically-removed jaws like carnival freaks. The dads have been the principal purchasers, but that hasn’t stopped the kiddies from giving it a shot.

“I need a bag of Red Man and a tin of Skoal Wintergreen,” announces a tall, athletically-built young man wearing a baseball cap. He appears to be about seventeen years of age. Perceptive lad that I am, I am immediately suspicious of his credentials to purchase tobacco. It doesn’t help that his buddy standing next to him looks even younger than he does.

“Sure, I just need to see your I.D. first,” I reply, turning to retrieve his can of d