Back then we didn’t have an ATM machine the first couple of years I worked at the liquor store so the majority of the transactions were cash—and checks. Freddy took checks—which struck me as nuts—a liquor store taking checks. If you wanted to write a check for cash over the transaction amount you had to have the okay from Freddy and Maxine and your name and a deposit slip in their special black book and you had to live inside Sonoma County.
It was not unusual for us to get bad checks. A couple of times I had to go over to the police department to talk to them about the bad check writers. On one occasion, they had a cop from Santa Rosa who wanted to question me. He introduced himself to me as “Detective Frank Halverson, Bunco Squad.”
He was like something out of a TV cop show: balding, cheap polyester suit, ugly tie. He asked me about a woman who wrote me a bad check three months earlier, what she looked like.
I said, “Three months ago? You’re asking me about three months ago? You know how many customers I’ve had since then? I have no idea what she looked like. If you asked me the next day or about someone from the week before, maybe, but not three months later.”
Detective Halverson set his jaw and said grimly, “Freddy Wood’s Market isn’t a store, it’s a BANK.” Which I found hilarious, although I did not actually laugh out loud at the time. (I never saw him again but I liked to imagine him at home watching “Kojack” and “Streets of San Francisco” re-runs.)
One time we had a guy pass three bad checks on us in a single day. He targeted all three shifts. Freddy was at the guy’s house at dawn, banging on his door with a baseball bat. Freddy got his money back.
If you wrote a bad check to the store, your name would end up on a list taped behind the counter next to the front door where anyone could see it. The most recent offenders had their actual bad checks taped to the wall. Looking over the list I saw a pattern developing. Many of them had grandiose first names followed by ridiculous surnames, “Elvis McQuackenbush” or “Gwendolyn Hogg”. It was kind of funny in a way, but I also couldn’t help wondering if some people were doomed at birth, by circumstances beyond their control.
One day I got a man whose check was up on the wall. A big, dark-haired guy who was kinda rough around the edges but handsome in a bad-boy kind of way. He demanded I take his check down. I told him that I couldn’t do it, that only the owner, Freddy or my boss, Maxine were authorized to do that. He stormed off that day but I’d see him now and again. He had a girlfriend who was a bank teller. She was quiet and demure during the work week but on weekends heading over to the biker bar she’d throw on her biker gal outfit that featured a form-fitting fringe jacket and red-leather chaps over her jeans, which was a bit over the top, even for that crowd.
Her boyfriend (whose name wasn’t goofy-sounding, it was more like an action hero like Mannix or Mike Hammer or McBain) ended up making front page news. He had a buddy who ran a motel and the buddy had three speed freaks living there who he wanted to evict. So Mr. Action Hero offered to help him out. He lined up all three speed freaks on the ground and shot them all in the back of the head, execution-style.
I don’t think that’s what the motel manager had in mind.
It was a quick conviction for murder and that is the second triple killer I have met personally, there being the Killer Couple at the youth hostel in San Francisco, if you remember.
After it all went down, his girlfriend was crushed, permanently diminished. She looked tired and sad, even scared. She let her looks go, her hair get ratty. She had three little kids. (Was he the dad? I didn’t know and I sure as hell never asked her about him.)
We didn’t have a lot of black customers at the time. For one thing, the town and the county wasn’t that ethnically diverse. For another, the old-time employees of the store tended to freak out anytime a black person came into the store. They would freeze up and get very robotic when waiting on black people. I didn’t have that problem. I had lived in inner city black neighborhoods so I wasn’t tripping.
So I had this very nice black professional couple, Duane and Angie, come into the store. They asked to write a check for over and I said, “Sure.” For one thing, I thought if I told them about Freddy and his black book and how they had to be approved first, they’d think I was making it up, some kind of evasive racist bullshit. For another, I wasn’t sure that Freddy and Maxine would approve them because of their own genuine racist bullshit. So Duane and Angie wrote checks to me for over the amount for a couple of months and everything was fine. My instincts were right: they were probably two of the most affluent, upscale, regular customers we had. (Angie was the IT person at some corporation; I don’t know what Duane did but he was always wearing a nice suit during the week.)
One night, they tried to write a check for over with my boss Maxine waiting on them. She started telling them about Freddy’s black book and how they had to be approved first, blah-blah-blah, and the two of them looked over at me for support. I did one of those stare-at-the ceiling gestures that let them know not to mention my name or our previous arrangement. It was then Duane and Angie realized I had been doing them a favor and they were especially friendly to me from then on (and despite my fears, they were approved for Freddy’s black book).
I was generally pretty irritable during the majority of my transactions, what with my asshole crooked boss Freddy not giving me a break on an eight-hour shift, lazy co-workers, and rude and stupid redneck customers. Multiple times during a shift people would tell me—after I rung them up— that they had to run to their car to get their money. That’s annoying at any time but when you’re in the middle of the evening rush it’s especially aggravating.
The exception was with black customers; I always tried to be on my best behavior with them so they wouldn’t mistake my surly and sullen demeanor for racism directed at them. (It didn’t always work; every time I ID-ed a young black guy they would inevitably make it out to be racist harassment.) I told my sister Kate this and she laughed at me.
“You’re nicer to the black customers than you are to the white customers? That’s hilarious! That’s reverse racism.”
“ I don’t want them to get the wrong idea,” I said.
“Why not just be nice to everybody?” she asked.
“It’s not as easy as you think,” I replied. ( For Christ’s sake, I had rednecks who would intentionally fart at the checkstand and walk away with a big grin on their faces.)
I started making incredibly mundane small talk with my black customers like “Wow, it sure is hot this summer” Or “Man, do you think it will ever stop raining?” and the look of gratitude that came over their faces, the way their bodies would slump with relief, no longer on guard, no longer being treated as “Other”. It made me absolutely ashamed to be a white American living in a society so racist that something so banal as talking about the weather was somehow an act of charity and kindness.
I didn’t have a car back then. I walked everywhere or took the bus. On my way to Walgreen’s, I passed an old black guy sitting at a bus stop on a blazing hot summer day. I was in the drugstore for about twenty minutes and when I started back home, I came across the old guy still sitting there.
I said, “Man…you still waiting on that ’80’ ?”
“Yeah, you know it,” he said, his face instantly split by a wide grin.
We bullshitted for about a minute about bus routes and the Golden Gate Transit bus never being on time, it was either early or late, etc. The actual dialogue was inconsequential but the effect was amazing. I didn’t just cheer him up, I cheered myself up as well. I was starting to realize that seemingly small interactions could actually be a much bigger deal than I had ever believed.
I started carrying a dollar in change in my pocket for every shift. When people were short a small amount, I just covered it with my loose change. Customers began looking at me differently. I wasn’t just a stuck-up college kid passing through, I was becoming part of the community.
I started looking out for people. I had this one customer, Ronnie, a short black guy in a rumpled business suit who was a BMW salesman in Marin. He’d always be in a pretty foul mood, often reeking of marijuana which I assumed he smoked on his commute home, trying to chill out from a long day of selling cars. Ronnie always bought cherry red Gatorade and he’d always ask me if we had any cold somewhere and I tell him—for the millionth time—no, we didn’t, we only had it the shelf, warm.
One day, I created a facing in one of the coolers for Gatorade. He came in later that afternoon, bracing himself for the same charade we always played out. I said, ”Hey, follow me” and I took him over to the cooler to show him the new row of Gatorade I had made.
I waved my hand like I was a wizard: “From now on, your Gatorade will always be cold.”
Ronnie’s face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning . “Wow, thanks, dude.” And he was a lot more cheerful when I dealt with him from then on.
I had a redneck auto mechanic named Hank who took sullen brooding to a whole other level. He loved the San Francisco Giants and believed they would win the World Series every year. If I didn’t agree with him or was in any way less than enthusiastic about their chances, he’d turn dangerous.
“They’re gonna win the World Series,” he tell me. “Say it.”
“Well, Hank, I don’t know, a lot’s gotta go right for them to…”
“—Say it. They’re gonna win it all.”
“No, you’re right, they’re gonna win.”
“You’re goddamn right, they are.”
Hank’s other love was a New Zealand beer called Steinlager. It tasted just okay to me, somewhere between Rolling Rock and Heineken, but for Hank nothing else would do. It was always warm, too, which didn’t help matters either. So I created a facing in the beer cooler for six-packs of Steinlager. Hank was so pleased he brought a fellow mechanic into the store to meet me. After that, I could basically do no wrong in Hank’s eyes (although I still had to echo his World Series predictions with maximum conviction). He even offered to give me a break on any auto repairs I might need and was disappointed when I told him I didn’t own a car.
“Well, when you do,” he told me. “Come on by.”
This story continues projecting the world of “Freddy Wood’s Market” by focusing on the financial problems of trade in a small-town liquor store. The “checks” of the title can refer both to the owner’s willingness to accept checks (a practice the author finds to be “nuts” because of the proclivity of the clientele to proffer bad ones), and to the generally ineffectual attempts of the owner to check their irregularities. The policeman’s verdict, “Freddy Wood’s Market isn’t a store, it’s a BANK,” underscores the contradictions that make Freddy Wood tick.
The “balances” of the title can also be read in more than financial ways. There is the balance of traits within Freddy Wood, as just noted. Then there is the bizarre balance between the rough “action-hero” and the demure bank teller who is his girlfriend. When the action-hero turns into a murderer, the girlfriend is “permanently diminished,” and the whole atmosphere of the liquor store is thrown off balance.
Finally, there is the social balance the author tries to create by trusting his black customers more than his white ones, and by making small talk or by doing small kindnesses to restore some balance to those who are left out by society at large. The offer of the auto mechanic to take care of the car-less liquor store guy who has treated him kindly is the final vignette in a series of attempts to balance things out.