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 dip and taking the three steps and back to get the bag of chew. When I return with his product, he presents me a military identification card. That’s fine—date of birth is on the back; I know this drill. I carefully inspect the photo to make sure that the person in front of me is the same person on the card, and vice versa, and then flip it over to check the date. I give it a puzzled look, while doing a swift bit of usually unnecessary improvisational math: present date minus birth date equals seventeen years, nine months. Nope, kid’s not old enough. I quickly wonder how many clerks have been inattentive enough to fall for his bluff.

“Sorry friend,” I say, returning his I.D. and removing the contraband from the counter, “that’s not going to do it.”

“C’mon, man,” comes his disappointed reply. I am curious as to whether this ineloquent rebuttal has ever succeeded with anyone besides his parents.

“Absolutely not” is my final and unshakeable response. He gives me a disgusted snort and storms of with his friend in a huff.

That is how our conversation transpired, in reality. I will now remove it to Facetioustan, the nation-state that I have invented and rule over as Celestial Emperor.

“Hello,” says the young Facecetioustonian man, “I’d like to stupidly and illegally indulge in my noxious, filthy habit which involves publicly expelling my polluted bodily fluids, all so I can fit in socially with my other future frat boys on the team. Can you help me?”

“Well,” I reply, “as a man who inhales burning leaves as if that were an intelligent decision, I certainly ought to be sympathetic to your situation. However, we have the tiny issues of an arrest record, my heretofore criminal-background-free status, a massive fine, and getting fired from my job, all for the benefit of you, a complete stranger who may well be an undercover plant hired by the alcohol and tobacco authorities, with no possible reciprocal reward to me of any kind. Sure, dude, that will be $8.79. No. Not really.”

We catch a redeye flight and return to reality. I’ve always, from years of being a bartender, food server, and clerk in retail stores that sell alcohol, felt a strange awkwardness about asking for people’s identification. Part of the entire process carries the faint ring of totalitarianism, the low-volume equivalent of tapping a baton against the palm while screaming, “YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE,” to whoever is standing in front of me. I just don’t care for it. But recently another idea came to mind why the carding process is uncomfortable for both parties, one that makes a bit more practical sense: by asking for your identification, I am, in a subtle, implicit way, telling you that I don’t trust you, tacitly suggesting that I suspect that you’re lying to me. This little insult really isn’t the smoothest way to break the ice with a stranger ever devised, and makes me silently, sarcastically thank the government for foisting it upon me. Besides, I’m frequently left surprised and feeling silly when people are ten years older than I think they are: a lot of my customers are black people or Mexicans, and frankly, I’m horrible at estimating the ages of individuals in either group no matter how much practice I have; I consequently end up requesting identification from people who are 32 and then feeling like a jackass.

Now of course, if we lived in another fictional country where people obeyed the law, and worked through legitimate and available channels to change it when it did not suit their fancy, this entire authentication ritual would be a moot point. I concur with many that the very idea that most states allow sixteen-year-old children to sling around a 4,000 lb. piece of complex machinery at 70 mph on public interstates while allowing the federal government to bully and extort them into compliance with its mandates on the drinking age to be, for lack of a better word, a bit incongruous. But I didn’t write the law; some armchair despot from the state next door named Elizabeth Dole did. Complain to her; she has an email and an office phone—I’m just doing my job.

Later this same evening, a young woman in a denim skirt and leopard-print tank top walks into my store and heads toward the beer cooler in back. She is breathtakingly attractive: about 5’8, slim, tanned, and toned, with long blond hair and gigantic, pale, blue eyes. There is a natural spark about her that 95% of the sorority girls shooting for the same look just can’t imitate. She procures an eighteen-pack of Miller Lite and proceeds toward my register. I am looking forward to flirting with her, exchanging some playful banter while staring into those limpid pools of azure, as somebody whose name escapes me once described a pretty pair of eyes. But while I am convinced beyond measure of her beauty, I am unconvinced of her owning 21 years on this planet, and we have to get that part out of the way: I may play my games after I have done my duties.

“Hi there,” I say, looking straight into those gorgeous orbs, “how’s your night going?” She does not look away. Great, I think, she’s confident to boot. This girl is going to be a force of nature for the next thirty years, batting men about like cat toys, losing them under the furniture, getting bored, and walking away.

“Hi,” she returns, in a husky, phone-sex kind of voice and with a smile that is making my heart go pitter-patter and something somewhere else start to react in a manner somewhat, er, excited. “I’m doing just fine.”

“May I see your I.D., please,” I ask, happy that I’m about to know her name. She opens a wallet and holds it aloft for my inspection. There is a Tennessee driver’s license sporting the photo of a pretty blond girl, 22 years of age. The license is current and valid, bearing the name Shannon Hillcrest. So far, so good. I look from the picture back to the girl in front of me, and back again. Something is wrong. I mentally adjust for elapsed time since the photo, changes in makeup, hair color, etc. It doesn’t help. The girl standing in front of me, while similar-looking, is not the girl featured on this driver’s license. Additionally, I can feel her getting nervous from the amount of time I’m taking.

I see a university I.D. in one of the pockets of the wallet. I take my thumb, slide it two inches upward, and read the name on it: Lindsay Hillcrest. This is her older sister’s driver’s license, neatly explaining the resemblance. Lindsay’s beauty is a gift and a power for which she should be thankful, and that’s going to get her a lot of things out of a lot of people in this world. But here, tonight, I have become the Thin Blue Line, and beyond me there is chaos—I am guarding the gates and holding the keys like Agent Smith. Her ruse will get her no beer from me, for all of the reasons already detailed by the truth ministry from Facetioustan.

“I’m sorry, Lindsay,” I say, looking straight at her again, pulling the beer off the counter, “but this isn’t your I.D., and we're going to have to try this again in another couple of years.” This time, she blushes and looks away. I have faced off with a goddess, and pulled an upset out of the air. She shrugs a shy, “well, I tried,” kind of shrug before slinking silently away with her head down, falling from Aphrodite to teenage girl in mere moments.

Some days being the Gas Guy is too much fun.

Barter.

I am working a Monday shift, which I despise, as it means that I am working alone with nobody to talk to—for the ninth day in a row. A man, a dark-skinned black man, about 5’9 with a pot-belly from too many Hooters appetizers and too much Corona, walks into the store at about 8 p.m. wearing a shirt that I vaguely recognize as a work shirt. I know that I know this guy from somewhere, some faint memory from a largely forgotten dream.

“Hi, Mike” I say, as my just-sprung-from-jail coworker comes to relieve my endless stretch of work performed to keep him from getting canned, “welcome back. You owe me your soul for covering your ass. I demanded that Ethel not fire you, that I would cover all of your shifts until you got out.”

“Thank you. And you’re right, I do,” he concedes, adding, “but this wasn’t my fault.”

I am puzzled as to how a man jailed for non-payment of child support can be blameless in this situation, yet curious about his version of the events.

“Do tell,” I instruct.

“I was at the county agency when they told me that there was a warrant out for my arrest for being behind on my payments, when I’ve never missed a child support payment in my life. Next thing I knew, I was being handcuffed and taken to jail. They only hold court there once a month, so I sat there for eight days, before I appeared before a judge. ‘Why is this man here,’ the judge said to the prosecutor, ‘cuz he saw that my failure to pay was a mistake in the paperwork, and then they let me go.”

As Harper Lee once noted, what a man says is often less important than how he says it: there is no stammering in Mike’s delivery or whining in his tone. He is looking at me while he speaks and his eyes are not twitching wildly. I’m an imperfect judge, of course, but better, I think, than most at telling if someone is lying. After all, as anyone is who regularly has underage high school and college students attempt to purchase alcohol and tobacco from him, I am lied to an awful lot. I decide that I believe him, and that my long, overtime pay-laden stretch of work is a blessing compared to Mike’s long, wageless, pointless stretch of time in county. But I’m still very tired and my knees hurt from all the standing and I want badly to go home.

“So you’re going to work the rest of this shift for me, right?”

“Ah, no,” Mike says, “I just came in to help you out for a few hours. Besides, I don’t have my key with me.”

“You can borrow mine,” I testily reply, “and bring it back to me next time I work, or leave it in an envelope in the drawer tomorrow. I really think you should work the rest of my shift.” The tone of my voice has, rather suddenly, looked directly at the Gorgon and turned to stone.

Mike, being a placid, observant man, immediately picks up on the anger and realizes, so I think, that he’s just said “no” to a guy to whom he owes his job, and hence his “successfully executing terms of parole” status. And that’s never, as we know, a wise decision. “Let me make a phone call,” he responds complacently, “and get some things done here, and you can go at nine.” I agree, finding this bargain acceptable.

But I am bothered still by Mike’s initial lack of gratitude, his summary dismissal of my altruism. I covered more than entire, hectic week without him, working 95 hours in nine days so that he could have a job to come back to when he resurfaced from the system, and he had to think twice about letting me go home from work. I am, weirdly, taking this paucity of appreciation as a personal slight, an affront that is scratching at my thought process, inflaming my perspective.

And suddenly I realize that I have already been rewarded for what I have done, that I was never doing anything for Mike at all—that I was wholly and self-interestedly doing something for myself. My logic is polluted and proud: I didn’t work this span so Mike could have a job when he returned; I did it so he would owe me a favor later, for the extra pocket money, for getting to feel beneficent and generous and decent, for myriad reasons, all relating to my own reward and gratification. I am no saint nor angel. I did not do this thing for Mike; I did it for me. What I have performed was a thinly-veiled masquerade of self-interest in the guise of charity, the creation of a debt that I will almost certainly collect on later. I am as generous as a loan shark, munificent as a bookie.

I look back over at Mike, now busy draining water from our soda coolers, preparing to add more ice on this hot, humid summer night. His eyes are roving now, his mind doubtlessly distracted by the implications of missing a week of work, wondering what he is going to do next, preparing to perform damage control on this tiny, hairline fracture of his life. We have two situations: mine, in which I did a lot of work and am a bit tired and cranky, and his, in which he has possibly violated the terms of his parole, lost a week of income, and has just returned to the larger society, lucky and grateful to find himself still employed. Mike has a lot more than I do on his plate right now, and it’s vain and silly of me, I conclude, to expect his immediate attention to be on what he owes me.

But he’s still working the rest of this shift. When he finishes the set of tasks he’s performing, I thank him, hand him my key, and take my leave.

“Welcome back, buddy,” I say again, sincerely, with the anger drained from my voice. I am happy to be out of this place, that has been my own more profitable jail for a little while. But as I clock out and exit, I contemplate the idea of reward, how so often when we think ourselves benevolent we are simply engaging in trade, bartering our efforts in exchange for repayment, all the while indulging in the curious delusion that this makes us something more, something other than—something better—than salesmen. How untrue. I have sold my labor for wages, sold a favor for a debt, sold a little extra sweat in exchange for an illusion of goodness. I am a dealer—nothing more, and nothing less.

The Fog.

A woman rushes into my store shortly after four P.M. on Saturday. She is short and mildly obese, dressed in fashionable office attire. She is in the fog. The fog is a place where we all go sometimes, but some of us live in it perpetually at our own expense. Her eyes are up and to the left, indicating that she is using the conceptual portion of her brain, and probably sees almost nothing of what is transpiring immediately around her. Her breathing is rapid and shallow, signs of hurry and panic. She never once looks at me while tersely barking her order for a pack of cigarettes and a prepaid sum of gasoline. She is miles and days away from here, in a place where she would not even remotely be able to describe the experience she is presently having if asked about later.

I have been playing a game at work, a fun and fascinating exercise that I like to call “prophet.” It is a simple game that anyone can play: it involves quietly, calmly staring at the people in front of you, taking in every bit of information that you can possibly observe about them, drinking in the modulation of pitch and tone in their voices, carefully monitoring the movements and directions of their eyes, perceiving the pace and evenness or unevenness of their breathing. The astounding thing about this game, if one has the patience to play it without distraction, is that the thing, or even the kind and category of thing, that people are going to do next sometimes leaps into the conscious mind before they do it. It’s a bit frightening the first time it happens; after that, it’s kind of a rush. Prophecy: this woman is going to do something harmful or inconvenient to herself before she leaves my station, through her lunatic hurry and inattention.

She heads out to pump three, stabbing wildly at the buttons to find the correct sequence to begin fueling. She is looking away the entire time the gas is pumping. Following thirty seconds or so of this, she suddenly looks toward the nozzle with an unpleasantly surprised expression, hangs up the pump, and comes back into the store. I already know what she is about to say.

“Do you have some paper towels? I just spilled gas down the side of my car.” She has managed to overflow the tank, even though the pump shuts off automatically before this happens, probably because she kept squeezing the handle, refusing to believe that she’d overpaid and would have to come back inside for change.

“There’s a sink with a towel dispenser above it over there to the right,” I reply. “You can use it to wash your hands as well.” She does, before taking extra towels, her change from the prepay, and fleeing out the door. She wildly wipes off her car with the towels, when she could have done so much more effectively with the squeegee right next to her, before heading off into traffic. I would be wholly unsurprised if I found out later that she was involved in a collision on her way home. She is a menace to society in her fog.

Humanity’s capacity for abstract thought is a wonderful ability, one that allows portions of the brain storing memory to combine previous stimuli and imagine new ones, to create prospective new situations from old ones. It is probably the very gift that allows us to be the animal that invents, that creates based upon real and anticipated needs. The potential to imagine, to be somewhere other than where we are, is probably why textiles and power plants and skyscrapers exist. The fog of distraction is, when used properly, not such a bad place to be.

But that fog needs to get checked at the door of the house, before people carry it off into an ephemeral, sometimes dangerous world which deserves and demands full attention. I do everything in my power to shake folks out of it when they come into my store, to give them a hand and raise them from the quicksand: I look into their eyes, ask them questions about their days, their jobs, their families, their clothes, their choice in purchases, their plans for the evening. I want them to turn off the TV in their brains and talk to me; I want to drag them out of the fog so that they can see that the present is a pleasant, air conditioned shop with an interested stranger who sincerely wants to know more about them, and not an invisible point on the line from A to B.

Sometimes I succeed, getting a smile and a confession of what they were busy musing about. Sometimes they have sick or hurt relatives, and need a bit of sympathy, a word of kindness. Sometimes they’re late and think that their hectic, distracted silence will get them somewhere faster than their calm attention will. It won’t, but they believe it will. But mostly I want to help them understand where they were so that they can be here for a moment, and realize that here is nothing to be scared of or averse to, nothing to be avoided but something to be engaged and enjoyed—the Buddhist concept of the past as memory and the future as fiction, with only the now as real.

And sometimes, inevitably, I fail. Two more young women come in later in the shift, chattering excitedly to each other like monkeys. Their bill totals at $11.18. Woman A hands me a 20, ignoring my conversational overtures and looking at the floor, then abruptly decides that it is important that she give me eighteen cents to get an even dollar amount in change. She hits up woman B for coins, and the two of them fish through their purses, digging like dogs mining under fences, while the rapid, meaningless chatter continues and they pool three nickels and three pennies. Woman A’s dancing eyes begin to move toward the door before she hands me the coins.

Prophecy: she is going to try to leave without getting nine dollars back.

By the time I have hit the “cash” button, and procured a five and four ones, she has turned and taken a step toward the exit. I could easily let them both stroll out of here, and let the donation of nine dollars to my drinking fund be her punishment and hence her lesson.

“Excuse me. EXCUSE ME.” I get her attention with the loud one. I hold aloft her change. “Did you want this back?”

“Oh yes I’m sorry I forgot all about it,” she chatters at me rapidly, not hearing or seeing anything that’s happening because her mind is spinning like a red-lined rotary engine, before disappearing with her friend out the door, into the fog.

I hope that there is no Jack the Ripper lurking out there, in that fog. Neither of them would stand a chance.

By any Other Name

There is a young lady standing in front of my counter; clinically speaking, a fascinating series of events is taking place. The twin clusters of cells that are my eyes are perceiving her dimensions, in their primitive and deeply limited capacity to perceive space and color. They are sending messages to the ancient, instinctive part of my brain called the amygdala. The message they are sending can be roughly translated thus: this is a female of your species, of adequate height, with large, bright eyes, indicating perception and inquisitiveness. Its round, full hips and round, full breasts, respectively, indicate excellent childbearing and childrearing capacity. Her colorful decorative attire suggests good grooming status, an excellent ploy to attract mates and keep offspring free from disease and infection.

The newfangled, oh-so-clever part of my brain called the cerebral cortex translates this information into other words so that I can comfort myself by thinking that I am more than a monkey wishing to pass on its monkey genetic material. It gives me a slightly more refined message: there’s a hot, brown-eyed, brunette, nineteen-year-old college girl with a unique, funky sartorial sense about her, standing in front of me looking to buy a pack of cigarettes.

“Thank you Shandra,” my thorax intones, in a voice deep and soothing, looking to allay fears that corrupt so many wild mating opportunities. My cerebral cortex has translated markings on the piece of plastic she has handed me, cleverly inferring her age and name from them. “That’s a very pretty name.”

Okay, enough of the National Geographic version of this story, for a moment.

Shandra (pronounced “Shohn-drah”), as I hand her I.D. back, perks up immediately. “You said it right!”

That’s because I’m not a drooling moron, I think to myself, and I can add one letter to “Sandra,” and take the wild guess that it’s probably going to be pronounced the same way. But she is clearly flattered by my use of her name, a trick I figured out a while back, because people always are. They get attached to their names, are happy when they are used, take joy when people approve of them, and are saddened when their names are not often used or not approved of.

I’m gonna let the whole world in on something that it is probably completely unaware of: that’s the same thing dogs think about their names.

We don’t name ourselves, after all. Our parents give them to us shortly after birth, to satisfy a legal requirement, but more importantly to train us to come when called, to have a presupposed means to get our attention. Over time, as our brains mature and acquire greater intelligence, we come to associate our names, and the tone of voice which pronounces them, with attention, with food, with affection, with reward, just like Spot and Rover associate their names with Jerky Treats and someone stroking their fur. When our dads were angry, we instinctively knew it from the sound of his voice and concluded that perhaps flight might be a safer response than obedience, just as our dogs pick up on the apprehension in our voices when we call their names but they hear “bath time” in the way that we’ve called it.

William Shakespeare, a smart monkey from 400 years ago, had an interesting take on the issue, from the perspective of a young woman talking about a young man’s name that she wasn’t supposed to like. We might all be wise to listen:

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Montague. What’s Montague? It is nor hand nor foot, Nor arm nor face, nor any other part, Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other word would smell as sweet.

What people don’t realize is that their names are simply words, with a communicative, rhetorical value identical to any other word—a name for a thing, and not the thing itself. I can prove this easily enough: if I say that the word “car” is a stupid, ugly word, and that I have no problem with the vehicles themselves but simply dislike the sound of the word, no one but perhaps a few deeply neurotic linguists and engineers are going to get upset as a consequence. It’s only a word, after all. Next I say that I think the words “Jennifer” or “Kristine” or “Mark” are stupid, ugly words, and watch a bunch of agitated monkeys work themselves into a tizzy over it. None of them had any idea how deeply their programming ran, how utterly brainwashed and indoctrinated they are, until that moment. I can say I don’t like the word “Dan,” and Bob doesn’t get upset, but Dan does. How ridiculous is that? We’ve taken ownership of something as if it were interwoven into our DNA and not a convenient label that somebody else gave to us, getting hopping mad in defense of a concept as rhetorically neutral as “bag” or “drawer” or “potato.”

But back to the ranch. I flirt with Shandra for a little while longer. I really ought to get a phone number out of this, but I’m not feeling very assertive today, and she’s an awful lot younger than I am. I wouldn’t even be able to take her to the smoky dive bars that medicate my insanity nightly, and hence I’d actually have to employ the imagination to find other things for us to do. Well, besides the obvious one, anyway. I’ve already overthought the matter, of course, but as a man who routinely writes six-page stories about two minutes of work in a gas station, such is my custom.

I let Shandra off the hook of my unbending gaze, and she flits out the door, nervous and blushing. That one was mine but for the asking, I realize. I’m sure she’ll be back, in case I change my mind. But my mass of monkey cells has just exerted magnetic control over hers for a couple of minutes, by the bizarre, primal power of name usage and eye contact.

A friend recently gave me, like a wonderful, unexpected gift, a quote from the wizened Chinese sage Chuang-tzu. I will pass this gift on to others: “When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said ‘You get three in the morning and four at night.’ This made all the monkeys furious. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you get four in the morning and three at night.’ The monkeys were all delighted.” Sounds about right to me.

Lies.

It is Friday night, and Gas Guy is a bit nervous. Keshia, our newest hire, has called in sick with a stomach virus for her last two shifts. If she doesn’t show for this one, I am looking at a whole world of hurt trying to navigate this evening on my own. I have received no phone call telling me that she isn’t coming in, but sometimes that just means that someone has quit and is afraid of the disapproving voice tone on the telephone that such a choice might elicit.

At 6:00 sharp, Keshia strolls through the door and consequently lowers my stress volume about four decibels. It appears I will be spared the rigors of anarchy tonight.

“Hi Keshia,” I say, “are we feeling better?”

“A little,” she replies, in that mopey sick-person voice that both actually afflicted people and people feigning illness like to employ. I decide to check this out for myself, which, at the end of the day, is really the best way to arrive at any conclusions. My inquiry proceeds thus: observe as many facts from as many senses as possible, and then see if that version of events coincides with the version of events that I’ve been given in language; ponder the motivations of the person speaking to see if they are consistent with actions performed. This is a new game that I like to play, called “jury duty.” I’m getting fairly good at it.

Physically speaking, Keshia is an eighteen-year-old, medium-hued black woman, somewhat overweight, with bright, alert eyes and a sartorial fetish about making sure that her shirt and shoes always match. Today she is a shade lighter than she normally appears, and further seems to have lost between five and ten pounds in the week since I’ve last seen her. Her shirt and shoes do not match.

I then consider circumstances: Keshia has been sharing a one-bedroom apartment with a friend of hers, a situation which, understandably, is driving her batty. She is desperately looking to hoard up some money, so that she can spring forth into that giant, grown-up world in which she has her very own place, and doesn’t have to deal with anybody else’s issues. Missing work frivolously is certainly bound to undermine that quest, and hence her doing so deliberately makes little sense from a pragmatic point of view. Furthermore, Keshia takes instruction well while she works, and comes in early to pick up extra hours when asked. The idea of her blowing off two mid-week shifts in the interest of social pursuits does not gel with my brief, probably arbitrary assessment of her work ethic, especially considering that our job features no paid sick-leave at all

The matter is sent off to the jury, which convenes for about eight seconds, combines the physical and circumstantial evidence, and returns with a “not guilty” verdict. Even though, factually, I know that the most call-offs are fabricated crises, I decide that I believe Keshia. The prescription bottle of anti-nausea medication I spy in her purse essentially seals the deal for me, telling me that her story would be extraordinarily well-crafted as fiction, a tremendous amount of planning and effort to defend a falsehood.

I could be wrong, of course, employing my prejudices and predispositions to confirm an idea that I wanted, deeply, to believe. I am not an upright-walking polygraph; I am a flesh-and-blood human being, who suffers from the same disorder that we all share: I like telling lies, and I like hearing lies. I know, way down deep, that lies contain, nearly always, a manifest artistic superiority over the truth.

Humans like lies, you see. We like stories that are totally and wholly disassociated from the actuality of events, because fiction is more amusing and pleasing to us than the harsh, clinical realities of discernable fact. We like thinking that we were created by sky gods when actually we descend from less intelligent apes; we like reading novels because they are pretty, if utterly untrue; we laugh and cry in cinemas over events that never took place, represented to us by actors who gloss existence to make it appear more palatable and rational than extant reality could ever hope to be. We become, from early infancy, creatures so addicted to lies that when reality, in no-Santa-Claus form, presents itself, we are profoundly disappointed—crestfallen and dismayed that someone or something had the temerity to shatter our silly illusions regarding anthropoid existence on a wet rock in space.

A few simple examples can illustrate this point. Say a person is out for the evening, and has spilled food or drink on the shirt he’s wearing. Does said fellow want people to point that out, at embarrassing expense to his ego, or rather to persist in the illusion that he’s wearing a clean shirt? Does anyone actually want anyone else to tell them when they look like hell? Do we sincerely want to know when we’ve badly screwed something up at our jobs? Of course not. We are addicted to praise and flattery, which are typically pleasant lies, and shrink like frightened children from needles before the incisive and often painful logic of truth. We like truth only so long as its deployment is favorable to us, and despise lies only until they benefit our self-image.

The key to smashing the locks of a lie-based existence is a simple, and yet a seldomly employed one: take nothing on faith, and rigorously examine every bit of information presented before regurgitating it like gospel. Become that smart person that one admires, rather than merely mimicking that person’s words and ideas. Jesus and Shakespeare and Gandhi and Einstein were not a breed apart; they were mere mortals who peered straight into idiocy and illusion and saw what was on the other side. They led unconquered lives because they exhibited the uncanny ability to perceive events for themselves, rather than farming out the task to everyone else and then lazily reporting secondhand news. They were people who saw that the latter path leads to sloth and torpor and ignorance, while the former grants the unparalleled joy of constant discovery, an immersion into the larger world of wisdom and knowledge that defies stereotype, shatters preconception, and enlarges the mind into something beyond what it had been before.

Keshia probably doesn’t know many of the things that I’ve talked about yet. She’s barely old enough to smoke cigarettes (which, to her credit, she does not). But today she has chosen to work through sickness and discomfort, and I am grateful for a decision that functions to my benefit. I am no more altruistic, really, than most people—just a bit more keenly aware of my selfishness.

“Thanks for coming in, sweetheart,” I tell Keshia, admiring her determination, the independence of a young woman who has lived beyond her parents’ shelter since she was a tender seventeen. She has seen a lot more truth than most people her age, and is hence a lot wiser than a typical, psychologically insulated American young person.

“Well, I needed to make up the hours anyway.”

I parse this last sentence in my mind: make…up…the hours. It’s as if we imagine ourselves constructing time rather experiencing it, being creation’s authors rather than its subjects. The abstract edifications of human conceptualization are a source of enduring wonder and delight for me; I love how we take the boundless and endless paths and alleys of the present and carve it up into the nifty rhetorical fiction of words, symbolic aural concepts bravely standing in for the reality that they represent. As most of the great spiritual literatures of the world concluded long ago, truth cannot be told: we may merely invent lies to describe it, paring away useless information until we arrive at something better and closer to the essence of the described thing in question.

If the above is true, then I tell myself another silly lie whenever I spot the lies of others: what I am telling myself is not that I have discerned deception from forthrightness, but that I would make a good juror, that I am smarter and more perceptive than other people. I am as addicted to the crack that is self-approval as anyone else is, but I tell myself prettier lies, so that I can believe that such is not the case. Sometimes I am terribly, terribly, disappointed by the limitations imposed by my own foolishness and vanity. But on other days, I realize that this is just what I am, and to lament it is as sensible as the proverbial butterfly, dreaming it were a Chinese philosopher. I know that it is simply in my nature to deceive and be deceived, a fundamental part of what it means to be human.

Katrina, and her Waves.

The world, or at least my infinitesimal fragment of it, is going mad this Friday; panic is in the air, competing with nitrogen as the dominant gas. Another kind of gas is fueling the hysteria, the kind whose price has rocketed well past $3.00 per gallon for the first time in most of my patrons’ lifetimes. My station is out of standard and mid-grade, with only the exorbitantly expensive premium, and diesel, which is of little use to most private citizens, left in our subterranean tanks.

I’m not in the mood to play savior today. I want, desperately, to tell all of the people who are yelling at me about the asking price of our station’s remaining fuel to crawl into holes and die; I want to lecture them about buying inefficient vehicles that they never needed, all to serve their warped ideas about social status, while they operated under the ridiculously flawed paradigm that a product that had artificially maintained a nearly constant price for twenty years would do so forever. These people need a harsh dose of reality. Really, they do. They need to be told that cheap gasoline is not an inherent right, but rather a convenient luxury offered them by a very successful capitalist strategy, a bubble that has lasted longer than most, and yet was destined to burst, like all bubbles, eventually. I want to tell them that venting hostility toward me regarding the price of a flexible economic commodity like oil, as if I were a Saudi sheik or seated on the board of directors at British Petroleum and did my night job for fun, makes approximately as much sense as blaming me for hurricane Katrina, Sudanese genocide or the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that took down Pompeii. In short, people are being nasty to me, and I want to be nasty in recompense.

But I can’t, and I know that I can’t. This understanding has nothing to do with my fear of losing my job for being salty, as I’m well beyond the point of needing this gig any longer; it has everything to do with the needs of the hurt, frightened, desperate people that I’m dealing with. They do not need correction, at least not at this juncture; they need reassurance and stability and comfort. I’m not in the mood to provide it, and really wish that someone else was, but that deafening silence from the wilderness is telling me that I have to provide it, because, logically, if I don’t, then I can’t expect anyone else to furbish it either.

“When will you have more regular grade in,” asks a fortyish professional woman, in a panic.

“Honestly,” I honestly answer, “we know about as much as you do. Don’t worry, though. The sudden demand has overwhelmed our supply. This is a temporary condition, and we’ll have more gas as soon as we can.” I pause, and see that the stump-speech words have had no affect whatsoever, before serenely adding, “The world isn’t ending; gas prices just went up a bit.”

She interrupts her panic for a moment to look at me. I look back, calm as a man who uses infinite-miles-to-the-gallon sandals to get around. My engine runs, like hers, on calories, but mine uses a different kind of fuel, one unmodified by hurricanes and wars: I eat solid food, and I walk places. Sure, it’s a primitive means of fuel and transport, but one that got us around perfectly well before pack animals, steam, and internal combustion. On days when I’m feeling extra fancy, I ride a bicycle. Granted, the former method is Paleolithic and the latter preindustrial, but in case of dire emergency I can always get on the bus or call a cab. Some people think that my lack of motorized transportation is pretty weird, but then again, I think the two people who got in a wreck in my lot on Thursday while racing for an available pump are a whole lot weirder.

But I just deal with this day, and the throng of people and their wild, roving eyes with the whites exposed. The office is awash in fear; the cave is under siege from hyenas. They’ve been on the phone and the internet all day long, absorbing and internalizing the all-encompassing terror in the voices and words of everyone they communicate with. The sky is falling; the End is near. What’s really happening, on a deeper level, is that they’re exerting frightened pack-animal behavior not appreciably different from when a herd of gazelles on an African savannah spot a look in the eyes of the other gazelles that says “lion,” and take off running like hell. The sad thing is that they don’t even know that that’s what they’re doing and why they’re doing it

But I do. So as much as I want to be a mirror that reflects the light of their anger, I have to be a pool that drowns the heat of their fire. I have to suck it up and take one for the team. These folks may have to revert to the less advanced means of transport that I rely on; they may have to do without a second vehicle, they may have to trade in the junky, thirsty eighties V-8 Buick and buy a scooter; they may have to deal with high gas prices and the temporary economic recession it may well usher in. None of this is going to kill them. It may inconvenience them, it may traumatize them, but it is not going to deprive them of life or liberty, it is not going to bereave them of their children and siblings and spouses and so they all need to, if you will pardon my French, chill the f-ck out. There is an American city lying underwater, many of its residents having, some by necessity, gambled and lost against the wild caprices of nature. Bands of marauding thugs have taken root and flowered there, reverting to our precivilized instincts to plunder and rape and kill, patrolling the waterways of what was called New Orleans like jackals and dingoes, while others cower, beholden to their mercy. And people here are losing there shit over temporary price spikes and shortages in gasoline. I really wish I believed in any formal construct of god on days like this, so that He might smiteth the earth and remove this odious little race of vermin before we do it ourselves, which we inevitably will.

The latter sentiment is the one that I am inclined to share with people right now. So I swallow hard, and take deep breaths, and force it down into the pit of my stomach, storing it away to be freed later on a stack of metal plates at the gym and the water in my apartment complex’s swimming pool.

By Saturday the madness has largely subsided. I see the odd car here and there, circling from empty pump to empty pump like sharks, before swimming off into the hot night to search for another station. The crisis has passed its apex, and a general sense of normalcy is returning as people make the trip back from crazy animals to thinking animals, forming contingencies regarding the new fiscal reality of higher fuel prices, which mean higher freight costs, which translates to the consquent actuality that soon nearly every commercial product will cost more than it does now. There may be some choppy waters on the horizon, but the ship that is life is big and sturdy, and will sail through what it cannot sail around.

At six o’clock on Saturday, a massive industrial vehicle pulls up to pump seven, with two men seated in its cab. One gets out and begins to pump fuel, while the other heads into my shop and presents me with a corporate credit card. He appears generally at ease, which makes sense, considering that the money he’s spending isn’t his. He approaches my counter with a loaf of bread and a two liter of Pepsi.

“Hi there,” I say, “How are you doing tonight?”

“I’ll be better in a little bit,” he replies, reflecting the curious if pervasive assumption that the world transforms itself as soon as one clocks out from work. “Have people been giving you a hard time about the prices?”

“Yeah, a few have,” I continue, taking his cash for the groceries before charging $75 of diesel fuel onto the corporate card. “But I know that they’re not actually mad at me. They’re just angry, and I’m the next person they talk to, and so they take it out on me because that’s just how it goes. It does me no good at all to lose my composure in response to it, ya know?”

“That’s right, young man. Good for you for thinking about it like that,” agrees the driver, a man aged about sixty, and consequently a bit less silly than the younger demographic that I principally deal with. I am grateful for his words of reassurance, out of my secret fear that if I offer too many of my own and get none in return, that my supply will run out.

“Good night, friend,” I call, as he slips out the door, amazed as always by the profound impact that the words of total strangers have on one another. Perhaps, I think, reflecting on the small kindnesses that buoy us above murky flood waters of insult and ingratitude, the whole world isn’t going mad, after all.

On Cats and Mice

A thing happened to Gas Guy, or rather a culmination of a process happened, a mere few months ago. Gas Guy had a vision in a cave, an experience that transformed him from a presupposed knower to an inquisitive seeker, from a man who had ideas and opinions, into one who now merely possesses questions, leading to trasient and ephemeral guidelines about the whole nature of the human experience.

Are we wonky and deep enough yet? No worries. Rather than peer any further into the heart of creation, I have picked the safest path to deploy my newfound truths regarding creation's manifestations: I have found a degree of spiritual harmony, and am using it to get laid. I’m quite sure that Jesus and Buddha did it too. (Whoops, I forgot, once again to shelve the blasphemy for this story. I'm so going to hell.)

I am not a handsome man, you see, in that square-jawed, broad-shouldered, traditional conception of a handsome man, and hence have to work with other precepts. I have a nose that goes out a bit too far, and a chin that quits just before its time. I am tall and gaunt, about six-feet even, with a trim and fit, if a bit skeletal, 155lbs to my credit. My lone distinguishing feature, aside from brown hair about eighteen inches long, is a pair of large, pale grey eyes, that look blue when I wear blue clothing, and green when I follow accordingly. They have a dark ring about the iris, just like wolf eyes. Women, oddly, find them attractive.

I use them, like a poker player with only one good card, to my utmost advantage. I stare down everyone I encounter these days, young, old, male or female, with a gentle, friendly unwavering look, because I’m not frightened of them anymore. The results are always entertaining: some men get intimidated because they read prolonged eye contact as either a challenge to fight or, for the more insecure ones, a homosexual come-on; they shrink from it for either, or perhaps both, reasons. Women start to get flustered, giggling like little girls, playing with their hair, as they certainly did when their fascinated and loving fathers gave them the same entranced look with very different intentions.

The gaze, for me, is part scientific curiosity, part animal gesture of dominance. It is an open refutation of most of my previous life, in which I was afraid to look girls in the face and wordlessly tell them what I wanted from them. What was I afraid of? Are these usually soft, gentle creatures physically intimidating to me? Or was I just another coward fearing the psychological rigors of rejection? It was a stupid way to live, regardless, and my ability to choose to live otherwise is paying off for me rather, well, handsomely.

I think that I understand now a concept that I did not before: to fear rejection is to insulate oneself from life’s larger project, exchanging the fresh air of exploration and inquiry for the dank, hot vapors beneath the blanket of cowardice. I was consoling myself for failures that had not yet occurred, an exercise as intellectually fecund as that of a man who celebrates what he has not yet accomplished—winning the World Series before it has been played, or, even worse, losing it.

In any case, poor Kristina has become hooked on the drinking-it-all-in gaze. She’s a sweet girl, who sells products for Mary Kaye cosmetics, and has a totally respectable day job educating children. She shops in my store quite often. Over the course of a few short conversations, she’s developed a mad crush on me, the iteration if which I could spot from a different area code, she is so unsubtle. She manufactures reasons to come in to see if I’m working, sometimes several times daily, buying 30 cents worth of gum when I’m not, just so it doesn’t appear so obvious why she’s in the store—which of course it does. She tells me all about herself before I can even ask, in the desperate hopes that something will spark enough interest in me to inspire me to ask her on a date. What she’s doing is precariously close to stalking, but, since I do not associate stalking with the nasty unpleasantness that such understandably carries for most women, I’m finding it kind of cute.

So why don’t I put the girl out of her misery? Well, physically speaking, she’s really not my type. She’s attractive, in a certain mousy kind of way, with a pretty face and nice brown eyes, but a bit too skinny, my preference being women a good measure curvier. That may come across as a little shallow, but keep in mind that I’m, as I mentioned, six feet tall and 155 lbs. If somebody doesn’t offer some padding, bones could get chipped in that act of sin. I like to think that my desire for some hips and chest is just sexually pragmatic. Besides, I have some more promising prospects on the horizon at present.

It’s 6:15 on Friday evening, and Kristina has just stumbled out the door of the shop, badly intoxicated from two minutes of me looking at her while I listen to her chatter.

Keshia, my fellow cashier, inquires, “Why don’t you just ask that poor girl out, on a pity date?”

“I don’t offer pity dates. The last thing in the world someone like that needs is me leading her on. Besides,” I add, “she’ll probably ask me soon enough, and then I won’t have any choice.” This is true, as by the rules under which I operate, I won't.

My prediction remains unconfirmed for a whopping four hours, fifteen minutes. At 10:30, Kristina comes back into the shop, while I'm doing errands on the customer side of the counter. I can tell by her hurried movements that she’s a bit nervous.

“What can we get for you, Kristina,” I wickedly inquire, knowing full well why she’s here.

“Actually, um, I’m not here for anything…er…What are you doing after work,” she blurts. Saw that train coming from the station, I did. I wonder if it took her the 22oz Smirnoff Ice she bought on her last trip in to work up the gumption.

“I’m going to be here pretty late,” I answer, truthfully, a bit bemused at my uncanny ability to call shots of recent. “Why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll call you sometime?”

“Uh, yeah, let me get you my business card.” She begins digging through the cavernous expanse of her purse, piling disparate things into her left hand while she continues ferreting with her right, her movements growing more frantic with the knowledge that two people are watching her. Keshia, being the kind, attentive girl that she is, tears off a piece of blank receipt paper and sets it on the counter with a pen in an effort to give Kristina an easy out, but Kristina is hell-bent on conveying the Successful and Important label that a business card will clearly sell me, and will have none of it. I am not at all surprised when she fumbles everything she’s holding onto the floor, items scattering as badly as if she'd shattered a vase.

I squat down to help her gather her things, gentleman that I try to be. In the cheeseball Hugh Grant movie version of this story that she’s written in her head, we no doubt lock eyes and kiss passionately on the way back up. In the real world take, I help her collect her possessions, trying not to make her any more nervous or embarrassed than she already is, take her business card and send her on her way, promising to call.

“Oh, my,” Keshia opines, “that girl's going to be knocking things over the whole time you’re out with her.” I look at her and smile. She’s probably right.

But who knows? Maybe this woman is wonderfully suited to me, and I just haven’t given her a chance yet. Maybe there’s a delightful and hidden spark in her personality that can compensate for her initial shyness and slight build. I’m going to find out, because she mustered the courage to ask, which, from what I understand, is a hard thing for a girl to do.

I have come to admire courage, gradually learning that conquering fear opens the path to new endeavors, that it makes life beautiful and pleasant in times that previously seemed dark and foreboding. If I congratulate it so when I see it in myself, expressed in such tiny avenues as looking directly at people when I’m talking to them, then I have to reward it when someone like Kristina puts herself through something that was probably terrifying just to get me to call her. I could complicate the matter with superfluous window-dressings, but my take on the matter is as simple as this: my stalker risked a little bit of herself, as she would no doubt have been disappointed had I rejected her overture. And because she had the temerity to do that, I cannot find it in my heart to reject her without an interview, which is all a first date really is. Fair, after all, is fair—nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Moving On

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

This thing, this situation, that has taught me so much about myself, about the world and all its beauty and horror, this life as a…gas station attendant, nears its end. To leave it behind will involve both a little euphoria and a touch of sadness, as all endings and new beginnings do, but to dress the situation up with a little (probably meaningless), feel-good rhetoric—it’s just time.

In a few months, Gas Guy starts a very different job, in a very different kind of office, because he allowed himself to do this one, at his rare best moments, with a love and patience that trumped selfishness and bitterness and resentment. Since that was the goal all along, the very thing I asked by immersing myself into the purgatory of service-slavery, it is time now to set new goals based on the same principles: I must come to love a different kind of work, not necessarily better or more necessary, but better suited to my interests, better matched to my skills, with a greater power to influence minds, and hence a greater responsibility to work with a compassionate caution, a vigilant remonstrance that I always do my best.

But I had to go through purgatory to burn away much of my stubbornness and foolishness, my blindness and arrogance and opinion, before I could let myself move on to new endeavors. I’ll not delude myself or anyone else into thinking that I am cured of the folly that being human so often entails, but, then again, I never will be nor will anyone else. I will offer myself only the flattery that I am less sick than when I took this job, that I am less foolish than the man who took issue over the smallest of perceived slights, who dwelt constantly in the twisted precepts of his imagination and created a reality so painfully illusory and unhappy that he was fit to do no kind of work that allowed him to share illusion and unhappiness with a greater multitude of people. I never liked that guy much, and so I will leave as much of him behind as I am able when I punch in the five-digit alarm code for the final time, a little while hence.

When I started this job a small span back, I was bitter and sarcastic, and saw people and things only so well as they conformed to the veil of my bitterness and sarcasm. Sometimes that filter produced some pretty funny descriptions of events, but the descriptions were funny because I had taken reality and perverted it to fit my peculiar and unique sense of humor. I still do, of course, but try to at least recognize that that’s what’s going on. When I can’t possibly resist the urge to label things and people to conform to my snarky predisposition toward them, I at least struggle to comprehend that the description is not the event, that people are not reprobates because I’m in a bad mood, nor saints when I am ebullient. They are what they are, wholly independent of what the three pounds of gristle in my skull is inclined to designate them that particular day. Life and time transpire as they do, and my opinion of it changes matters none at all.

I saw this job, I must confess, as beneath me when I took it. I cringed at the thought that someone with my education should be reduced, out of pecuniary necessity, to a labor so menial and so mundane. I felt superior to the college students and the laborers and the vagrants and crackheads and hookers that roll through here, because I knew things and had seen things and had been places that they’ll never know and never see and never be.

And, in that regard, I was half right; all of that last assertion is true. But I came, slowly, in fits and starts, to realize that every one of those people could apply the same statement to me and be just as correct. Sure, most of the pothead furniture movers I’ve sold beer to have never poured libations in three countries or toured Pompeii or read Milton and Shakespeare or the Bhagavad-Gita or the Tao te Ching. They have not led lives that afford them the idle luxuries that I have been afforded, and have had to learn other lessons, missives hard and real and practical. They have learned to keep 35-year-old automobiles running, to work on scaffolds without plunging to their deaths, to build the buildings that I live and work in, to survive traumatic childhoods that I never had, to reap the rewards of backbreaking labor that I’ve never performed; they have learned that survival is often more an act of necessity than one of decorum or convenience, that life in a country that sometimes doesn’t like your native tongue or skin color or taste in recreational drugs can be a pretty cold thing. Many of them are brusque people, with brusque demeanors, not crafted, as I once imagined, as a personal affront to me but rather as a defense mechanism against a world which has often been unkind to them, in a manner which it has never been so ungracious to me. Whores, as Jesus himself knew, know the dark secrets of the world in a way that I do not, and cannot, ever know.

I learned, concurrently, about the fortunate ones, kids driving cars that they could never afford without parental assistance, wearing fine clothing and living lives of ostensible comfort and ease. I begrudgingly accepted that my reflexive hatred of them was nothing more than envy, that my resentment was based in the warped ideological construction that because rich people are generous to their children, that the world owes me riches. It doesn’t. Wealthy people devolving wealth onto their own does not, contrary to popular opinion, entitle any of the rest of us to a cut.

I learned about this kind of learning, that of the blessed and the unblessed, because, once I got past my initial fear and revulsion toward kinds of people whom I had never before encountered, I began to ask questions. I began to realize that everyone has a story, and that all the stories are good ones. Not good in the sense of being pleasant, always, but good in the greater sense of being enthralling testaments to the human will to persevere through misfortune, or, alternately, the heartbreaking tragedy of those who do not persevere, who live lives of melancholy defeat and despair. I learned that, sometimes, charmed lives have their own sufferings, and beleaguered ones have their conquests. In watching and listening to all these narratives, I came to a terribly belated, if never-too-late understanding: I am damned lucky to have had so little to vie against in my time on earth.

In the face of the poignant, brilliant, joyous struggles of the people whom I’ve met, I decided to become, as the wise Dr. King would have it, a great street sweeper. I’ve elected to cease doing silly things like drinking at work, picking fights with the clueless nineteen-year-olds, and resenting every moment of my time behind that counter. It didn’t happen all at once, of course, and coincided with other changes in my perspective, but it happened, slowly-but-perceptibly, nevertheless. I can now perform a very easy job without much exertion, because I decided to pay attention to what I’m doing rather than fantasize about what I’d rather be doing or dreaming about where I’d rather be. The fact that a diplomat lobbying for human rights in China and me sweeping a floor in Tennessee are not of equal importance does not mean that the latter action is unimportant: if people worldwide with low-wage employment all quit caring at once, the entire global economy would collapse overnight. The world needs ditch diggers and street sweepers, or else we’d all have a lot of flooded roads and dirty streets.

And yet, all that said, with Dr. King in mind, I realize that some people are called to be ditch diggers and street sweepers, and others, perhaps, are not. I once, years ago, worked with a mentally retarded, 50-year-old dishwasher named Shirley. She washed dishes as Michelangelo painted, and Beethoven composed, and Shakespeare penned poesy, as it was dubbed during his time. She washed dishes so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth paused to say, “Here lived a great dishwasher, who did her job well.”

But although Shirley was certainly a great dishwasher, I suspect that possibly I am not called to be a great gas guy forever; I hope that vanity can be forgiven. And so I’m going to do something else: I’m going to teach college freshmen how to write, in the hopes that one day they may be able to tell their own stories with the passion and the insight that I desperately strive for, and often fall short of, in telling mine. I am going to try to teach with love that which I have learned through turmoil and conflict, so that others may see things for themselves which I have not yet learned and may never learn—to see the world through the rigorous wonder of observation, to tell the truth as they see it and not how anyone taught it to them, to tell the story of reality better than I can tell it.

If I can sweep a floor with dignity, which I believe that I now can, then I feel that I may be ready for a greater challenge. I merely hope that I may learn as much from teaching as I have from watching these manifold incredible things transpire, from an elevated perch in a convenience store.

Cheese and Whine.

“Hi sweetheart,” I say to Maria, one of the hard-core regulars, as she walks into the shop on Saturday. “How are you?”

Maria is normally a rather cheerful woman, but seems out of sorts tonight. I’ve had a bit of bad news myself, and I’m not at all in the mood to deal with anybody else’s plaintive little cares, the bitching and moaning that passes for conversation with a lot of people.

“I’m really tired,” Maria whines. Yep. Just what I was expecting. Take my question and answer it with a complaint, without even bothering to ask how I am in return. The really awful thing is that I get this answer from about a third of my customers. Right, sure, I shouldn’t ask if I don’t want an honest answer, but really I just want someone else out there to engage in the pleasant set of lies that we dub courtesy in English so that we can all interact a bit more effectively. Nations will march off to war over lies about God and Hitler and Allah and Imperialism and Communism, and I can’t, with a sled and a pack of huskies, drag somebody into saying, “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” unless they literally and explicitly mean it and believe it.

“What’s troubling you tonight, dear?” I’m going to be nice anyway, damn it all, as a spiteful exercise in my higher social skills.

“Well, I worked all day long,” she begins her ode to sadness, while I grab the cigar rolling papers she’s going to need to get stoned when she gets home, “and then I got in an argument on the phone with that damn man of mine, and it’s late, and I’m tired, and I just want to go home and,” she whispers, “smoke me a fattie so that I can go to sleep.” I am unsure how I became the intimate confidante of every substance abuser in my zip code, but it obviously happened somewhere without me even filling out an application for the job.

I stop to do a mathematical formula: job + telephone argument + advanced hour = bad day. I realize that I sometimes give people way too much credit for sophisticated motivations and that I should just start applying math formulas to all of them and be done with it. As I listen to Maria complain with my patience a little more constrained than it usually is, I start to get offended and annoyed that she’s missing the point so badly.

So what’s the point I’m talking about? Maria, is like me, and like everyone else, a unique, highly improbable event. She thinks she’s an overweight woman who wears glasses and sports dreadlocks, and in those terms she is technically correct, but she is, like everybody else, a whole hell of a lot more than that. She is a recombination of genetic material unlike any that has ever come before and any that will come hence, an animal so totally individual that were I to take away her name and all of her possessions and everything she has ever learned, she would still recognize her reflection in a pool of water. She’s a thing so special that theologians come up with beautiful words like soul and Atman and inner light and Holy Spirit to address her individuality. She is a construction of organic matter so complex that it takes hundreds of differentiated organs working at a breathtaking level of productivity just to keep her from breaking down and dying any given moment. And in the face of that amazing fiat from nature she has the audacity to whine over a little bit of struggle in her life, the necessity that she work so that she may live.

“But if you in your pain,” Kahlil Gibran once wrote, “call birth an affliction and the support of the flesh a curse written upon your brow, then I answer that naught but the sweat of your brow shall wash away that which is written.” I think Mr. Gibran had that one just about right: we work, and we suffer, that we may live. An animal that lies down too long in the wild is a sick animal that does not expect to survive. Only industrial humanity has the luxury of viewing work as a curse, as some type of punishment, rather than the things we do to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. Maria would be darned bummed out, I strongly suspect, if the entire capitalist experiment were to fail tomorrow and she had to start hunting or gathering to live and thus be rudely informed of how easy she actually has it.

And so we grouse and grumble about our pain, as if it were designed by a wicked god to torment us, instead of being the very capacity that lets us know that we are animate, incarnate beings and not stones littering a beach. Who doesn’t feel pain? Quadriplegics? Heroin addicts? Other categories of people on the edge of death? Pain is the world’s most useful reminder to get your hand the bloody hell off of that burning stick or not to step on that snake again. People who shrink from pain—intellectual, emotional, or purely physical—are refusing to learn the lessons that pain and fatigue are trying to teach them. People who are habitually exhausted at the end of the workday, nine times out of ten, need to get more sleep and exercise. People that are constantly upset after talking to their significant others on the phone need to learn better communication skills or find new people to date.

I want to tell Maria this, as I listen to her sad misconceptions about the unparalleled gift that is life, that she’s a whiner, and that I’m sick of whiners, and that I just found out that an old friend of mine that I’d lost touch with was a whiner just like her except his case of the whines was so bad that he put a shotgun load through the back of his skull in a public park in Ohio and left some poor kids to stumble across his body. I want her to know that he’d forgotten that to be alive is nearly always to be loved, and that whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, there are people who are deeply attached to our lives, who hold fond memories of our presence and the shared experiences we have celebrated and endured alongside them. That thought alone should shut her up and make her realize that the world is bigger than just her, and go home and call her parents to thank them for making her.

But of course, I don’t. I can hardly go around condemning other people’s rudeness in dumping their small cares upon strangers and then go do something like that, especially when the reason I’m upset has almost nothing to do with her story and everything to do with the blaring noise in my head. So I just look at Maria, and, gently rebuke, “So it’s all about you then. Is it?”

She falls silent, with a look of childish amazement, and starts wildly beckoning me to follow her. I come around the counter out of curiosity, wondering what she’s up to, and follow her pointed finger to the plastic front plate on her car. It reads, I jest not: “IT’S ALL ABOUT ME.”

“Thank you Maria,” is all I can say when I get done laughing, which is something I badly needed to do. Maria drives away and I’m left with a valedictory thought regarding our conversation: Maria can poke fun at her whining and her selfishness, so at least she knows the score on that count, I muse. And that’s the start to understanding an awful lot more.

The Promised End

There is a new Marlboro display, shorter than the old one by several feet, hence no longer blocking the rear view of the store. It hasn’t yet developed the epilepsy-inducing flickering fluorescent bulbs that the old one had, and for that I am sincerely grateful. We stacked the RJR products on it when we first got it, but when the Phillip Morris people took note of that, they swept them onto the floor in a huff. Capitalism, I swear.

About five feet to the left of the counter, there’s a slushee machine featuring blue raspberry and strawberry as the flavors: given the sweetness of the end product, it is almost unfathomable that it is five parts water to every one part concentrate. I am convinced that imbibing the undiluted concentrate would send the hardiest constitution into instantaneous diabetic shock.

These two features are the only physical changes, additions or otherwise, that the store has undergone in the seven months that I have worked there. This record might not appear so grossly negligent were everything else not twenty years out of date. It is a three-legged, one-ear-bent, aging mutt of an establishment, and today is my last day working in it. My time here has been sometimes enlightening, and sometimes depressing, infuriating, and painfully dull. Beyond its meager pay, the job has, of course, had experiential value; all jobs, no matter how ostensibly pedestrian, do. Probably foremost amongst these is that I got past a lot of the unease toward black people and immigrants that growing up in a lily-white, provincial Irish Catholic neighborhood in Cleveland had instilled in me. There aren’t really different kinds of people in the world. There are people who dress differently and that speak different languages and dialects, and that can be a little intimidating to the uninitiated, but patience and time changes a lot of that, if a fella’ keeps an open mind about it.

But because I can change is no indication that Gas Center #2 has any intention of changing at all. The cash registers look as if they could have been designed by Atari; it lacks exterior cameras, essentially begging people to drive off without paying for their fuel; it has no email or internet access in its office. (That’s right: they actually fax memos from the corporate office to the stores. The place is an architectural and functional testament to commercial mediocrity in practice, to choosing a good location and then constructing a business barely efficient enough not to implode upon itself, with the knowledge that foot traffic will save the day in the face of incoherent management.

But the museum, changeless quality of the place isn’t limited to the woodwork and the equipment: the same woman, a high-school drop out with the neurotic tendency to leave notes everywhere instructing the staff just what they’ve done wrong, has been running the place for 23 years. She’ll probably still be there in another fifteen. While the faces have changed and will change, illegal immigrants from points southward will be trying to break the $50’s and $100’s they get paid with on thirty cent purchases until the end of time, to the ubiquitous consternation of the present staff. The current staff of people with questionable references, criminal backgrounds, and the abject inability to pass a drug test will move along to be replaced by others in the same straits. It is as if the place itself is an extended middle finger of glass and concrete, proudly held aloft to let the world know just what it thinks of change and progress.

Gas retail is, like bars and restaurants, a cyclical rather than a linear trade: at the end of the day no project has been completed; nothing has been done that will not swiftly be undone. People will get hungry and thirsty and sober, their vehicles will use up their fuel, and they’re they’ll be again, at that doorstep with debit card in hand, with high gravity malt liquor and strawberry blunt wraps and low-octane fuel on their minds. All that changes, principally, for my clientele is this month’s drug of choice. I go to stock room in the back of the store around seven P.M., where Mike, now the assistant manager, has just opened a 22oz bottle of Corona, taking a break toward the end of his long day shift. Since it’s a slow Saturday, there’s a second cashier, and, most importantly, it’s my last day, I feel morally compelled to join him. I stick to the 12oz version of the same beer, as I do have five hours of work left to do. This becomes the theme for the evening, as Mike and I invent excuses to restock things in order to drink more beer about once an hour. Like I mentioned a long time ago, working for Mike when he was in jail to keep him from getting fired was a thing that I knew would eventually come back to me, and so it has.

As I drink one of these beers, I reflect back on what I have witnessed in my time here: I know that there are people in combat zones who have seen far worse things than me. There are people like you and me who have seen children blown to pieces, who have watched close friends die. Having prostitutes hand you their business cards, and watching people walk away disappointed because my store doesn’t carry their improvisational crack paraphernalia—looking at an endless parade of abandoned single moms and lost potheads and homeless alcoholics—doesn’t compare to the horror that a lot of people face every day; in fact, it pales badly in comparison. But it does not mean that these things are not horrible—only that they are not the worst things in the world. Because the chapter in the human drama that I have witnessed in not humanity at its most elementally debased and disgusting does not suggest that it is not disgusting at all.

The shift, this reflection in tow, proceeds uneventfully, aided by the cheeriness of my growing buzz. I converse pleasantly with Archie, the other cashier I mentioned, and with the English-speaking customers (and even a little bit with the Spanish speaking ones, from whom I’ve acquired the basic phraseology of small talk over time). At the end I lock the door, take the till to the office to count it down, then open a 22oz Budweiser, open the back door for ventilation, and light a cigarette. Some very hard questions present themselves: Have I really learned anything from this experience? Or were things that struck me as epiphanies into the human condition arbitrarily defined based upon my mood swings? To my left in the darkness behind the building are poorly stacked, dirty plastic soda crates awaiting pickup by the Pepsi and Coke delivery drivers, enclosed by an ugly, filthy cinderblock wall. To my right are the rusting cardboard and trash dumpsters, with the smell of stale urine wafting forth from the homeless folk that use the place as their latrine. It is a panoramic view of human waste and irresponsible consumption, of which I have been a principal purveyor for the last seven months.

But then something else comes to me: I am in such a foul mood, and inclined to spin such profound negativity, because I love this place and will miss it. It is not a love like a spouse or a sibling, or even a good friend, but like a cherished pet that I have raised to my liking and which obeys my every command. I have had the run of the place since shortly after receiving the keys, free to follow or disregard the rules as I saw fit. I had total mastery over my given work; its absolute lack of challenge was something that I maligned in the past but perhaps underestimated as a tool for freedom of thought. Not too many MA students choose to work in gas stations, and so I have been given an unparalleled degree of trust and freedom. Did I use it well? Who knows, really? Sometimes yes, and most certainly sometimes no. I take one last long, agnostic look out into the darkness, and shut and bar the door.

I turn out the office light, step around the corner, and prepare to set the alarm. Archie is waiting at the front door, his cab running outside. “You ready, Arch?” “Yeah.” I’ve asked him more than I’ve realized: I’ve asked him if he’s ready for me to set the alarm, but I’ve also asked him if he’s ready to part with someone he hardly knows forever, for another human being to drift from view, as we all do to each other eventually, leaving us, in our hearts, alone.

I punch, a bit more slowly than usual, 8…0…7…0…2 into the keyboard, a red light goes on and a series of loud, monotone beeps tells us to get the hell out of the building. Archie unlocks the front door, and I follow him out as he locks it behind us.

“It was nice working with you, Archie,” I say. And it was. I only knew him for three weeks, but he seems like a nice guy and I wish him well. “Thanks,” he replies, “and good luck to you.” But luck is not what I need right now: alcohol is what I need. As I trudge off into the chilly December night, full of a strange, small loss and a fair amount of beer, a question from the guy I steal half my questions from slowly slips into my thoughts:

Is this the promised end, or but the image of that horror?