13. No Place I Want to Be

I got bruises on my memory
I got tear stains on my hands
In the mirror there’s a vision
Of what used to be a man

I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
Time don’t matter to me
‘Cause I’m a thousand miles from nowhere
And there’s no place I want to be

–“A Thousand Miles From Nowhere”, Dwight Yoakam

I was plugging along one night, stocking the shelves when this big guy in his twenties stops and asked, “Hey, man, how you doing?”

I shrugged. “I’m fine.” (I guess it’s safe to say I didn’t have the most chipper demeanor when I was working).

“You sure? You okay?” He seemed genuinely concerned—which struck me as weird.

For starters, I’d never seen this guy before in my life; and most guys couldn’t give two shits how someone else is feeling. This dude was a big, square-jawed jock, not exactly the kind of person to reach out to somebody else, especially me.

In my experience, young guys who are bigger than me are total dicks as a rule; it’s just who they are, big dumb lumps who never lost their taste for bullying. (I had some big idiot college kid customer who’d ride his bike over to the store a couple of times a week on a junk food run. He was gratuitously and overtly rude to me every single time. It got old real quick. One night, after I rang him up he realized he’d forgot his wallet. The look on his face—like he was ready to cry. I had a choice right then. I could have told him: “Tough shit, come back later, asshole” but instead I took the high road. “I’ll put it on my charge and you can pay me back next time.” He nodded mutely, knowing full well that I had just done him a favor that he absolutely didn’t deserve. He paid me back the next time and while we never became friends, he did become a great deal more respectful around me. And I hoped he learned something, the prick.)

Getting back to this guy who asked me how I was—it really confused me. He looked like Hollywood’s idea of a star athlete. Was he gay? He didn’t seem to be hitting on me.

The next time I saw this guy, about a week later, he asked me again how I was. He seemed sincere, which was definitely unusual. We got to talking and it turned out he had just gone through drug rehab which apparently had raised his compassion quotient exponentially.

Jake had been the star quarterback on his high school team, dated the top cheerleader who he subsequently married and had two kids with. “I was a total asshole,” he told me. “I was using steroids and amphetamines and I thought I was just King Shit.” After high school, his drug use spiraled out of control and his marriage tanked. He ended up in rehab and was now trying to put his life back together. It wasn’t easy. His ex-wife was still using drugs and he had to fight her for custody. But he had a good job as a delivery driver for the biggest dairy company in the county. His employers liked him so much they leased him a house across the street from the plant and allowed him to work four 10-hour days so he could have three-day weekends with his sons.

Jake was a good dude, someone who turned his life around 180 degrees, someone who was easy to root for, and someone who now cared about his fellow man. He’d stop in about once or twice a month and we’d catch up. As far as I know, he stayed on the straight and narrow. A rare success story, especially in these parts.

I had this little group of four construction workers in their early twenties who were loud, rowdy and generally obnoxious to me. Their leader was wore a leather jacket, put mousse in his hair, wore an excessive amount of cologne and had a blonde bimbo girlfriend who frequently accompanied him and his buddies. The other guys lightened up over time and actually became friendly towards me. Mr. Leader-of-the-Pack did not. It didn’t help matters, either, when his girlfriend declared out loud that I was cute. From then on, he was always watching to see if I was putting the moves on his girl. (I was not.)

This reminds me of another story: I had this customer, a pretty blonde Waitress who worked down the street in a roadhouse. The first time I had her as a customer she bought a twelve-pack of Bud bottles and a can of chewing tobacco.

“Just make sure you hit the cup,” I said, deadpan.

“It’s not for me!” the waitress said, half-wailing but laughing. “My husband’s having a poker game at the house.”

“Just messing with you,” I told her.

So I used to joke around with her when she came in. Everything was fine until the day she brought her husband in, an enormous cowboy, all in black, even a black Stetson and a black mustache.

“Honey, this is the guy who always makes me laugh!“ she told him.

If that information pleased him, he hid it really well. In fact, he clenched his fists and glared at me while I contemplated my premature demise. (Ladies, please: it’s okay to flirt but when you’re with your boyfriend or husband, pretend you don’t know me. It’ll go better for both of us, I promise you.)

I had this customer, Mac the Hippie, a blonde, long-haired guy in his late twenties who wore round gold-rimmed glasses. He told me he used to work in a 7-11 store in Texas where he was victimized a couple of times by a local biker gang who would just walk in and grab twelve-packs of beer and leave, without even making a pretense of paying for anything. The third time it happened Mac couldn’t restrain himself any longer.

“Hey, you guys. Fuck you!” He gave them all the finger.

The bikers stopped in their tracks, their arms full of beer and cheered. “Hey, good for you, man! Way to stand up for yourself!” Then they left again without paying.

One night Mac knocked over a whole display of potato chips.

“Behold Shiva!” I said. “Destroyer of worlds!”

He grinned sheepishly but appreciatively.

Maybe the only saving grace at the liquor store was that I could express myself freely. I wouldn’t say I was free to be myself, exactly; but I could say whatever the hell I wanted to, to anybody. The flip-side was that my customers could punch me or shoot me. In other, more restrictive retail environments that I worked in, I often yearned for that freedom. (Even with the consequences I mentioned, it was still a toss-up).

Once when we were slammed during the evening rush, this entitled hippy-dippy Doofus rolled in and started ringing the deli bell for service even though it was obvious that me and Martha were swamped with customers at our registers. “C’mon, I want some service! Let’s go!” he was yelling. Then he’d hit the bell again. He did this about three times. Finally, I had enough.

I walked over and said,” You must be lost. Burger King is thattaway.” I pointed out the door.

“Whaa-at?” Doofus was confused.

“I said you must be lost, “ I repeated.” This ain’t Burger King. This ain’t ‘Your way, right away’. You want service in the deli? Be patient. We’re busy right now. When it slows down, someone will help you in the deli. Okay?”

He was stunned.

“Okay?” I asked again.

Doofus nodded mutely in shock.

“Thank you.” I went back to work the line of customers at my register.

I mentioned that a nightclub had opened on the next block from Bob’s Super-Mini. We’d get these rushes of customers from the club between sets of the bands playing there. For about a month, this Yuppie Asshole would walk in on a Saturday night, and loudly proclaim what a dump the store was, etc. He’d just go on and on in this drunken rant about what a shithole Bob’s Super-Mini was and how he couldn’t believe he was lowering himself to shop here, etc. I found it tiresome and obnoxious the first time. By the fourth time of hearing it, I’d had it. I walked up to him, mid-rant, and said, “I want you to leave.”

“Whaa-at?” He was surprised.

“You heard me. I want you to leave the store and don’t come back.”

“But why-yyy?” Yuppie Asshole whined.

“Because you are rude and insulting every time you come in here. You don’t like the store? You don’t respect the people who work here? Fine, shop somewhere else,” I told him.

“Well, okay,” he said, slinking away.

The very next weekend Yuppie Asshole came strolling back in like nothing happened.

I intercepted him halfway into the store. “What are you doing in here? I told you not to shop in here anymore.”

“You were serious about that?” he asked with a little superior smirk.

“Yeah, fuckin’-A, I was serious about it. Get the fuck out and don’t come back,” I said, pointing towards the door.

“Well, okay. You must have a lot of problems, like issues with your dad or something,” Yuppie Asshole said.

“Yeah, you can just shut the fuck up about my family already,” I snapped. “Get out.”

On his way out the door, Yuppie Asshole said, “I better not catch you outside, asshole.”

That remark made me see red.

I came flying out the door, literally jumping out in front of him. “Well, here I am, motherfucker!”

I pinched my thumb and index finger together. “I am this close, motherfucker, from kicking your ass from one end of the block to the other! Just fucking try me!”

Yuppie Asshole’s eyes were the size of dinner plates. He backed away, absolutely terrified.

l suddenly sensed we were not alone. I looked across the street and there were knots of people watching our confrontation, including a little group of mouthy teenagers that I had to chase off from time to time. Forty yards’ distant, they looked completely spooked.

I had to deal with seriously dangerous people all the time and the idea that some drunken yuppie scumbag would pop off and try and threaten me was a line in the sand for me. (No fucking way.)

“You’re looking at the heads. Sometimes he goes too far.”
—Dennis Hopper, Apocalypse Now

The same situations would come up, time after time, and I’d develop little jokes and routines.

My regulars would see me sweeping the parking lot or standing in front of a beer cooler, writing down a list of what beers I needed to stock on a yellow pad. They would grimace sympathetically. I’d turn and say, “Working in a liquor store isn’t all glamour. There’s some dull stuff, too.”

I’d have some idiot customer in the middle of their transaction have to run out to their car to get money. This would happen invariably during the evening rush and the next customer in line would ask me (rhetorically), “They went to get their money?”

“Yeah. And I don’t take live chickens or string, “I’d reply.

Every year at graduation time, I get college guys running into the store after 2 am. “It is too late for alcohol!” I’d call out.

“What? No! C’mon!” they’d protest.

“Look at the clock,” I’d tell them. “What does it say?”

“Oh, no!” It was often after 2 am for real, not just on our clock set ten minutes fast.

“Four years of college and you can’t tell time,” I’d say as they were on their way out, their shoulders slumping in disappointment.

“Ohhhh!” the kids would yell.

We had some potted plant that Bob had been trying to sell forever. Customers would idly stroke it out of curiosity. If it was a regular I knew I could joke with, I’d look over in feigned alarm. “Oh, no…”

“What?”

“It’s just that the last customer who touched that got a really…bad…rash, that’s all,” I’d say sadly.

“Really?”

“No, I’m just fucking with you.” And we’d laugh, the regular from relief and me because it was just too easy to get people going.

I developed another routine for my regulars browsing the candy aisle. I’d say, “You know there’s a whole thing going on here that I call ‘the psychology of candy.’ Look at all the different things it appeals to: sexual: Big Daddy, Wild Cherry, Sugar Baby, Bit ‘O Honey. ‘Almond Joy’s got nuts, Mounds don’t.’ Financial gain: Payday, $100,000 Dollar Bar. Snobbery: Symphony. It’s not a candy bar, it’s a symphony. Obscure: U-No. ‘You know?’ No, I don’t know. Confused: Whatchamacallit. I’m not eating anything called that. Skittles? For the skittish. And finally…for manic-depressives—Rocky Road.”

Of course, all these routines developed from ad-libbed remarks I made the first time the situation arose. The best ad-lib I ever made was when I got a couple buying a six-pack of Corona, a large bag of dog food and a fifth of Cuervo. I looked at them and said very deadpan, “I’m telling you right now…that dog is gonna get drunk.”

Then there was a routine that I only used on regulars that I knew could handle it. It would have to be late at night and be just the two of us in the store.

The guy would complain that he couldn’t find something.

I’d look out over the four aisles we had, the shelves lowered to inhibit shoplifters, and sigh theatrically.

“Let me explain something to you. We’ve done the hard part. We’ve cut back the forests, tamed the animals, planted the fields, cooked and processed all the food and brought it within these four walls,” I’d say, waving my hand in a magnaminous gesture. “If you can’t find it… fuck you!”

The guy would laugh and I’d go on.

“Motherfucker, it’s not like a giant warehouse or something. Shit ain’t that hard to find. And like your dumb ass ain’t in here every night of the week….Can’t find it? Try harder, motherfucker. Try…harder.”

And we’d laugh together.

Bob Duckworth started a bakery back in the deli kitchen when he took over the liquor store. He had a buddy who set the whole thing up, also named Bob. We called him “Bob the Baker.” He was an older, wiry, white-haired gentleman of indeterminate age who was very active, very spry. (An attractive redhead in her twenties came looking for Bob the Baker one day. “Are you his daughter?“ I asked her. “No-o-o,” she answered, laughing at me.)

Bob the Baker hired a Cambodian guy, Hank, to do the most of the actual baking of donuts and pastries. Hank was a big, sloppy guy, covered in flour, who worked like twelve hours a day, kneading dough. He didn’t look like a tough guy. One night some drunk got into it with him and took a swing at him. Hank stepped back and the drunk fell and broke his nose. When the cops showed up, the drunk wanted them to arrest Hank. The cops told him, No chance. They thought it was hilarious the guy broke his nose.

Hank told me later that he had escaped the Khmer Rouge, traveling north to Thailand through the jungle alone, subsisting on mushrooms and snakes.

“Snakes?” I asked incredulously.

“Oh, it’s not hard to kill snakes,” Hank told me. “You just do like this…” he mimed grabbing a snake. “Grab him around the throat.”

“Whatever you say,” I said, shaking my head.

Hank went on to tell me that the drunk was lucky. “I know pressure points all over the body.”

“You do?”

“Sure. Like here.”Hank reached out and lightly grabbed a spot on my forearm. My nerves immediately jangled in alarm. “Or here.” He grabbed an area between my collar bone and my neck. I started to go limp.

“Okay, okay, I believe you! I believe you!” I said, backing away, laughing.

Hank didn’t look dangerous but between his knowledge of pressure points and his job kneading dough twelve hours a day, I’d say he was a lot more formidable than he appeared.

We had a bakery case out front, facing the front counter and our registers. There was always a little controversy with the customers because they always wanted the freshest donuts out of the back but our boss, Bob Duckworth, told us we had to sell all the donuts and pastries in the case first.

I had this one customer, Sally, an older blonde lady, snub nose, blue eyes. From the checks she wrote, I knew she had a German surname. (I didn’t think it was meaningful at the time.) Sally wanted the freshest pastries out of the back, rather than the ones in the case that were pretty stale by the time my shift was started in the evening. She was a regular customer and pleasant enough so eventually I relented; I’d go and fetch her fresh pastry out of the back. Sally was very appreciative, thanked me profusely, and all was fine. One day she asked me where I was from originally and I said,”New Jersey”. Sally went off on this sideways rant about “Jews from northern New Jersey.” I didn’t stop her, I let her go on. I continued to get her fresh pastry, regardless.

One night, Kate and Jim were restless and they wanted to shoot pool so the three of us went down to “the Schneid”, the bar across from the liquor store. The two of them found a table and started playing a game while I hobnobbed with the people in the bar, most of them regulars of mine from the store. They were all smiles, many of them seeing me outside the store for the first time. The bar owner couldn’t have been any nicer, he kept topping off my drink. One of the people at the bar was Sally. We started chatting and somehow I managed to work into conversation that my dad was Jewish, from northern New Jersey. The look on Sally’s face; she gaped like a cartoon fish. (It was so worth it.) The subject never came up again but she was exceedingly deferential whenever she talked to me from then on, knowing full well that I showed her mercy by not calling her out on her Nazi racist bullshit the first time.

The first person I ever got fresh pastry for was Justine. She had been a schoolteacher until MS confined her to a wheelchair. While Justine was hospitalized, her eighteen-year-old son cleaned out her bank account. “That’s the most fucked-up thing I ever heard!” I said. After she told me that, I couldn’t do enough for her.

One day, Dave, the owner of Butchie’s biker bar, saw me helping out Justine and joking around with her. We had never been friendly before, he was just another big, burly, macho asshole to me; but after he saw me with Justine, he became a lot friendlier. Dave offered me a free ticket to see the Allman Brothers band (they were actually playing in Butchie’s, which was tiny!); I told him I couldn’t get the night off but I appreciated the gesture.

The night the Allman Brothers came to town, I was closing with this guy, Mario. He was a hapless, giggly stoner in his late thirties. It was 2 am when two roadies for the band came in, a stocky, blonde guy with curly hair and a taller, muscular dark-haired guy. I called out, “It-is too-late-for-alcohol!” as the blonde guy headed for the beer cooler.

Dark Hair came directly over to me behind the counter. “What’s that?”

“It-is too-late-for-alcohol,” I repeated.

“You’re telling me I can’t get a fuckin’ beer?”

“Sorry, man. It’s the law.”

“Fuck the law,” Dark Hair snapped.

“We could lose our license.”

“Oh yeah? If you won’t sell me a beer, how ‘bout I just fuckin’ take it?”

“Well, that would be stealing. I’d have to call the police.”

“Go ahead,” Dark Hair challenged me. “Call the fuckin’ police.”

“Yeah?”

“—Yeah.”

“O-kay…” I said. I turned to Mario, who was gossiping on the phone with a co-worker, Danielle. “Gimme the phone, Mario.”

Mario was oblivious, crouching down behind the counter. “I’m on the phone.”

“Gimme the phone, Mario,” I said, a little more urgently this time.

“I’m on the phone with Danielle. Jee-zus,” he said, sounding exactly like a snotty teenager.

“Fuck,” I muttered to myself. I turned back to Dark Hair, who was watching me closely.

He leaned across the counter, putting me in punching range. “So you gonna sell to me or not?”

I shook my head and frowned sympathetically. “ I can’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t do it,” I repeated, doing my best Robert De Niro impression. “ If I sell to you after hours, I gotta do it for everybody. I can’t do it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

Blonde Guy returned from the back of the store and placed two twelve-packs of beer on the counter. When I reached out to take the beer off the counter, he stopped me. “Why are you grabbin’ on my fuckin’ beer?”

“It’s too late to sell them to you and your buddy here says he’s gonna rob me for them.”

Blonde Guy turned to his partner. “Teddy, you said that? You asshole. C’mon, let’s go.”

As the two of them started to leave, dark-haired Teddy paused at the door and nodded at me. “I like this guy.” Pointing at Mario, who was hanging up the phone, he said, “That guy, I could break in half.”

They left. Mario turned to me, completely spooked. “What was that all about?”

I sagged in relief and blew a big sigh out of both cheeks. “You missed it, Mario. You missed it.”

(For the next week, I called him “Phone Boy” and Mario would just giggle sheepishly and hang his head, “I’m sorry!” I’d shake my head at him, “You should be.”)

At some point, I told Maxine I wanted a raise. She said, “Well, I hear what you’re saying but Bob will never give you one.” So I wrote Bob a letter. I listed all the things I did for the store: stocking the beer coolers every day for free, a half hour before my shift started; training new employees (and with all the turnover on the graveyard shift, that kept me pretty busy); repeatedly putting my own safety (and my family’s safety) on the line for the store; and all in all, generally being the most reliable, honest, hard-working employee the store had ever had. There was no ultimatum: “give me this raise or else”; just a request to be fairly compensated. Bob’s first impulse was to fire me (always his first impulse with any employee). Then he asked Maxine, “Is this all true?” And she said, “Well, yeah.” So I got my raise.

To say that Bob was cheap is like saying Godzilla was a big lizard. While he wasn’t outright crooked like Freddy (we all got our required breaks), Bob was determined not to lose a penny if he could help it. He insisted on counting the money every morning and was frequently off. (Being dyslexic didn’t help.) One morning Bob spent about three hours ranting and raving about firing me because my till was $300 short. I got the heads-up from Carmen over the phone. I told her I wasn’t about to jeopardize my job or any future employment by stealing. (Bosses did not keep me around for my charm.) It eventually transpired that Maxine failed to run a Z-ring (which would have cleared her transactions from the register’s memory) before handing her till over to me.

We used to get a group of retarded adults, accompanied by counselors, in the store about once a week. (It seemed like a strange destination for an outing to me but maybe the counselors figured they could better control their group in a smaller liquor store versus a much larger grocery store.) There was one retarded guy who would gulp down any open container in sight. He’d grab a Styrofoam cup of coffee or an open soda, give a little yelp, and down the hatch it would go. The first time he did it to me, I had just made myself a fresh cup of coffee and I had it on the counter next to my register. I heard a yelp and saw him drain it in a single gulp. I admit it freaked me out at first but I saw him do it with the open containers of his retarded buddies as well. There was no malice in it; it was just his signature move. I just learned to keep my cups of coffee or open sodas discreetly out of reach when he was in the store. Maybe everybody did; because one afternoon I watched him pour a cup of coffee from the freshly brewed pot I had just made. He then walked right out the door.

Bob saw it as well and he came right up to me with narrowed eyes and a grim look on his face.

“Did that guy pay for that?” he asked me.

“Nope.”

Bob glared out the door at the hapless coffee drinker.

“But he’s retarded, Bob,” I said.

“I don’t care what he is. That’s shoplifting.”

“For Christ’s sake, I’ll pay for it if you want,” I told him. Bob waved off my offer and stalked away angrily.

The next week I told one of the retarded group’s counselors about it.

“Really? He wanted to bust him for shoplifting?” the guy asked.

“Hey, what do you expect? This is Bob were talking about. The man’s so tight he squeaks,” I said.

I was closing for awhile with this nineteen-year-old kid, Billy (or as I thought of him, “Bug Bite Billy”). Billy’s entire face and body was scarred by countless spider and bug bites that he sustained while living in a hammock in rural Mendocino county, watching over somebody’s marijuana patch for a year. When he went to collect his pay after a year of sheer misery, the drug dealers he was working for told him, Sorry, they couldn’t pay him, they’d been robbed. (An obvious lie.)

One night, Wendy (the woman who asked me to spend the weekend with her at her cabin in Tahoe) entered the store in an absolute state of hysteria.

“Can I just sit here behind the counter for awhile?” she asked me. “Uh-ok,” I said.

She collapsed in a heap on the floor behind me at my register. Wendy had been crying, her eyeliner and mascara were all running and smeared. She looked like a wounded animal; she was sniffing and sniveling quietly.

I turned to her. “What the fuck? What’s going on? Why are you so upset?”

“There’s this woman at Butchie’s,” Wendy said. “She said she’s gonna beat me up. I’m afraid to go back to my car. I have to get back to the motel. My kids are there…”

“Jesus Christ, Wendy…”

“Can you give me a ride? Please?”

“I’d love to, but I don’t have a car,” I told her.

She started sobbing anew. “Well, now what am I gonna do? I’m so scared. But I gotta get home…”

“Hey, don’t cry, it’ll be okay. We’ll figure something out.”

Just then Billy came back from his lunch break. I took him aside, “Hey, can you do me a big favor?”

“What?”

You see that lady over there?”

“Yeah. Why is she crying?” Billy asked.

I waved my hand. “It’s a long story. Listen, can you do me a favor? Can you drive that lady back to her motel?”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“No, she’s just a customer…but she’s upset and she needs to get back to her kids at the motel. I’d do it myself but I don’t own a car.”

“But what about Bob? I can’t just leave the store, he’ll fire me.”

“I will take full responsibility, “I told him. “I swear to God.”

Billy was skeptical. “So I’m not gonna get in trouble for this?”

“If there’s any trouble, it’ll all fall on me, I promise. Okay?”

“Okay.” So Billy drove Wendy back to her motel and all was fine. Bob never found out about it and Billy didn’t get into any trouble. (No trouble, that is, until the night he broke into the lottery machine during his graveyard shift and made off with $3000 worth of scratcher tickets. He was, of course, captured on the store’s video surveillance camera breaking into the machine. Maxine told me about it and added that breaking into a lottery machine is a federal offense, punishable for up to ten years in prison. So now there was a federal warrant out for Bug Bite Billy, in addition to the Nevada warrant out on him for burglary that Maxine had just learned about.)

Stu came back into the store one evening. I was on the floor, making a list of what I needed to stock when I looked up and there he was, twenty yards from me, a quart of beer in his hand.

Our eyes met and I said, “You ain’t even supposed to be in here.” (It’s what I said to him the night of our fight.)

“I’m just getting a beer,” Stu said humbly.

“Just get it and go.”

“Are we cool?” he asked me.

There was a lotta-lot I could have said in response to that but I didn’t feel like starting shit all over again. I was worried that if I said something harsh he would just drop the glass quart of beer on the floor; or worse, throw it at my face. (That would have set off an epic brawl.) So I just shook my head. “Just get it and go.”

The next day, I told Bob and Maxine about it. Bob said,”Well, if you don’t want him in the store, just kick him out. That’s fine by me.”

I said,”You know? I think I’ll just play it by ear. And if I feel like I have to kick him out, I will.”

The next time I saw him was late at night. I was behind the deli counter when Stu entered, looking a little squirrelly, a little suspicious to me. He didn’t spot me right away. At some point, Stu felt eyes on him and he turned around and actually jumped when he saw I was watching him like a hawk.

“Hey, I’m not doing nothing!” Stu said guiltily. “I’m just looking, shopping for stuff.”

I came out from behind the counter and patted him on the shoulder a couple of times. “I know you’re not! I’m just looking out for you, buddy. Let me help you find what you’re looking for.” I was all smiles but the real message was, Don’t even think of fucking around in here again.

Stu quickly grabbed a small bag of chips, paid for it and left.

The last time I saw Stu was late at night. I was alone at the front counter. Mario (or whoever) was on a break.

Stu came in and said, “Hey, can I borrow this?” He held up a big white empty plastic bucket that we kept by the door (we sold flowers out of it).

I gave him a doubtful look.

“Please? I’ll bring it right back,” he pleaded.

“If you’re not back in five minutes and I have to go looking for you, you are gonna be the sorriest motherfucker…” I started to say.

“—I promise, I promise,” Stu begged. He dashed off like a whipped puppy.

He was back in three minutes. “Thank you, thank you,” Stu mumbled. He ran off and I never saw his dumb ass again.

Cora (or “Ditzy Cora” as I thought of her) was an older lady who worked as a cashier in the daytime. She was a happy, easily distracted person who was quick to laugh at herself and her own spacey ways. “Hey, there, crazy lady,” was my standard greeting to her. Cora would giggle. “Oh, I’m so out of it today,” she’d say to me. “Really? How can you tell?” I’d crack. She’d giggle again delightedly in response.

Cora told me that once, when she was a teenager growing up in Hawaii, she’d won a date with Ricky Nelson in some contest. (Ricky Nelson had been one of the stars of the ‘50s-‘60s TV sitcom, “Ozzie and Harriet” before embarking on a rock’n roll career.) “So how was that?” I asked her. “Oh, it was fine, he was very polite, and we had a chaperone, of course,” she said.

One day Cora asked me if I wanted to see a photo of her daughter. “Maybe the two of you could go out, “ she said. “Sure,” I said, humoring her. She fished a photograph of her daughter out of her purse and handed it to me. I took one glance at it and passed the photo back to her. “Not gonna happen,” I said.

Cora was disappointed. “Oh, she’s not good enough for you?”

I almost choked. Cora’s daughter was this impossibly glamorous blonde in her twenties who was probably dating race car drivers or movie stars or something.

“Not good enough for me? Are you kidding? It’s the other way around. She’s way, way out of my league,” I replied.

“Oh, that’s too bad…” she said.

“—Tell me about it.”

“I really think you’d like each other,” Cora told me.

“Don’t I wish, Cora. Don’t I wish,” I said ruefully.

Cora told me she was worried about me walking home late at night so she gave me this brass cylinder that attached to a keychain. At one end was this little screw top; when you unscrewed it there was this nasty little blade on the inside. Reversing it, you could turn the cylinder into a weapon. Her daughter had given it to Cora for protection.

“If she gave it to you, why don’t you keep it?” I asked her.

“Oh, I only go out in the daytime. I want you to have it,” Cora told me.

I took it reluctantly, just to be polite. (I couldn’t help wondering what practical use it would be if someone tried to jump me on my way home. “Hold on,” I’d tell my assailant as I worked to screw the blade rightside out on one end. Plus the damn thing was probably illegal as hell. I didn’t want get charged for carrying a concealed weapon. I gave it to Kate, figuring it might be more helpful to her, and that the cops would probably go easier on her, a woman, for carrying it than a guy, like me.) Cora meant well, anyway.

One Thanksgiving, Bob gave the entire staff these twenty-pound turkeys. I didn’t want the damn thing; I always had to work the holiday and Kate and Jim were burned out on cooking these big holiday dinners. We usually ate a big pasta dinner at that point, that I cooked. I knew Cora didn’t have a lot of money so I gave it to her.

Patty was someone that I first worked with when I started at Bob’s Super-Mini. She was a housewife and a PTA mom now but when she was younger, Patty had been a speed freak for awhile. “I don’t why,” she confided to me shamefacedly. “I don’t why I ever did it or what I was thinking.”

“Well,” I said. “You felt trapped, right?”

“Yeah.”

“If you had money, maybe you would have taken a vacation or something to get away, right? But you didn’t have any money…”

“—No,” Patty answered.

“So what do you do? What can you do? You can get high. And you know what happens when you get high? Everything changes. Everything’s new, everything’s different. The same old surroundings, they look different now. And everything’s a challenge now, too. Going out? To the store or a bar or a restaurant? It’s an adventure now, it’s not the same old shit, it’s different now. It’s an escape. You just escaped the same old boring routine, just by getting high. And that’s why you did it,” I told her.

“Wow,” she said. “I think you’re right.”

“So you don’t have to beat yourself up over it anymore,” I said. “It was foolish, it was dumb. You paid a price for it but worse things could have happened, am I right? You’re okay, now?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Patty said wonderingly. “Thanks for explaining it like that. No one’s ever put it like that to me before.”

I shrugged. “People fall into the same trap with alcohol. I should know.”

One night I’d been sweeping the parking lot and when I came around the corner, Lori (queen of the biker bar scene) Wendy (Tahoe) and Patty were standing in a little huddle talking to each other. The three of them turned and glared at me.

“What?” I said. I didn’t even know the three of them knew each other.

“We’ve been talking…” “…And it turns out, you’re not an asshole…” “You’re a nice guy!” they told me accusingly. “You just act like an asshole!”

We all laughed.

Then I shrugged. “Well, what do you want me to say?” I asked. It turned out Patty was Cora’s neighbor; she found out that I’d given Cora my Thanksgiving turkey. Lori was Wendy’s best friend; she found out that I arranged a ride for Wendy back to her motel. I had once “loaned” Lori ten bucks when she asked me for it. (I never got repaid, nor did I expect to be.)

The upshot was that Patty gave me a spare microwave oven, one that I still use to this day. And that for the rest of the time I encountered these women, I had to endure these sidelong, suspicious, knowing looks from the three of them for concealing my true nature. (I’ve had worse outcomes.)

I stopped working at Bob’s Super-Mini because I was tired of working Thanksgiving. (And Christmas. And New Year’s, etc.) With the help of my parents, I was working less hours and taking film classes up at the junior college in Santa Rosa. Maxine informed me that I had to work Thanksgiving night (again) and I told her, ”No way. I’m sick of working Thanksgiving. It sucks.”

“Well, you get the next day off,” she said.

“So-fucking-what. What good does that do me? The holiday’s on Thursday when everybody’s celebrating it, not on Friday, the day after,” I said. “I don’t even know why we’re open on Thanksgiving night, anyway. It’s slow as fuck.”

“Well, then it should be easy,” said Maxine brightly, like she was handing me a gift.

“It’s not easy, it blows. I want to be home with my family on the holiday, not waiting on the two drunks an hour I’m gonna see,” I said.

“Well, Bob wants the store open on Thanksgiving night. We still do some business.”

“Then you and Bob can work the night shift on Thanksgiving. No, fuck this, I’m not doing it,” I said defiantly.

“Well, it’s not optional. It’s your scheduled shift,” Maxine said.

“Then fuck it. I quit.”

Maxine was surprised. “Are you sure about that?”

“This only works if it’s mutually beneficial. I don’t get shit out of working the holiday. So yeah, I’m sure. Sorry, but I’m done,” I told her.

And that was that.

******************************************************************************************

Dropping bottles and cleaning up spills is an occupational hazard in a liquor store. Customers would drop bottles—and even six-packs— on the sales floor. Behind the counter, the clerks (including myself) sometimes dropped the bottles of hard liquor we were grabbing off the shelf for our customers. I would often (involuntarily) entertain my customers by making these elaborate juggling catches of liquor bottles, reminiscent of a pro football highlight reel. “That was an amazing catch! You’re so graceful!” they’d exclaim. “If I wasn’t so fucking clumsy, I never would have dropped the damn bottle in the first place,” I’d reply.

Once you’ve dropped a bottle of booze behind the counter, and had to smell the fumes the rest of the shift, you become highly motivated to never, ever do it again. I developed this technique of kick-saving bottles I couldn’t catch. If a bottle started to fall and I knew I couldn’t catch it or failed to grab it out of the air in time, I’d stick my foot out at the last second; the bottle would hit my foot and slide to the floor, intact. It was kind of like that with my customers: I couldn’t always keep them from falling, but if I was quick enough, I just might be able to keep them from breaking.

The very first time I ever set foot in the liquor store, I was a customer and it was Freddy Wood’s Market. Kate, Jim and I had just moved to Shadow Valley from Calistoga. We were on our way to some formal family event down in Berkeley, where my uncle and his family lived.

I needed cigarettes so Kate pulled over at the corner market and I strolled in there in a suit and tie, dress pants, dress shoes, the works. Two big, dirty, longhaired, bearded rednecks were standing in front of the counter, wearing overalls. They guffawed when they saw my appearance. One of them drawled, “Why I must be in ‘the Twilight Zone’…” referring to the popular TV show from the early‘60s, an alternate reality where the strange and the improbable were commonplace.

How right he was.