7. Whipple’s Pharmacy

Dreams wash down the gutter
All my hopes in vain
Crows up on the rooftop
Laughing out my name

Here I am—on the short side of nothing
Here I am— on the short side of nothing

We danced all night as life stood by
We told another lie
Found a spot down by the roadside
There I closed my eyes

And here I am—on the short side of nothing
Here I am—on the short side of nothing
All alone, all alone
Can’t find my way home

–“The Short Side of Nothing”, Los Lobos

I had applied to Whipple Pharmacy out of desperation, frantic to get away from Madeline Sports. The drugstore was located on a little side street off the main drag in Petaluma. It was a funky-looking, family-owned store. The worn carpeting, the off-kilter floor, the aisles lined with a variety of merchandise (everything from cheap toys to holiday decorations to fans and patio furniture) as well the more sterile pharmacy section reminded me of crummy-looking mom-and-pop stores back East. It gave me hope; at least it wasn’t some corporate wasteland like Madeline Sports and the mall.

Alas, it was not to be. It was one of those situations where P.G. Wodehouse would have his dimwitted character Bertie Wooster quoting Shakespeare: ”Where every prospect pleases and only Man is vile.”

The two owners, Pete and Rich, were not exactly wonderful human beings, let alone nice people to work for.

Rich was the head pharmacist. With a thick head of curly, prematurely white hair and gold spectacles, he would have easily fit into a Norman Rockwell painting of a kindly, neighborhood pharmacist. Looks can be deceiving, however; kindly he was not. More of a supercilious prick and bully, in fact. (He bellowed at the hapless female employees in the pharmacy all day long.)

Rich had a hearing problem. To what degree was the question. He seemed to able to hear what he wanted to hear, and pretend to not hear when he wanted to force you to repeat something. Rich read lips —or so I was told. So I tested him on more than one occasion. When he would make some snotty remark to me in front of the other employees in the pharmacy section, I would turn my back to him and loudly exclaim, “Whatever you say, you fucking asshole!” I’d turn around to see the other employees’ horrified faces but Rich would be oblivious. So I guess he really did read lips after all.

Pete was the younger owner. He had dark hair and a beard and dark-rimmed aviator-style glasses, a kind of retro, ’70’s look. Pete was what you might call “skinny-fat”: tall but with slumped shoulders, skinny arms and legs and a paunch from drinking. The first morning I worked with him, he was so drunk I couldn’t understand half of the things he said–or mumbled, rather. His wife and kids despised him so maybe that’s why Pete drank so much (or perhaps, it was the other way round, I couldn’t say for sure).

The job itself was fairly straight-forward. Whipple Pharmacy was a combination general store/pharmacy. My shift was 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. I stocked shelves on the floor from Tuesday through Friday. A couple of days a week the store would receive deliveries from a large pharmaceutical corporation. These would arrive in the form of large plastic crates called totes. The rest of the shift would be spent putting the stuff up on shelves: cold medicine, saline, Band Aids, deodorant, toothpaste, etc. When I wasn’t stocking pharmacy stuff, I was either stocking general merchandise like paper towels, toilet paper, cat food, etc., or down in the basement manually tagging merchandise with a price gun. On Saturdays, I worked the register at the photo counter and supervised a couple of other cashiers and counted out their tills at closing time in addition to my own.

It should have been painless but personalities always get in the way. And by “personalities”, I mean people’s egos. And by “people’s egos,” I mean the bosses. Never content to simply haul away the lion’s share of profit, owners and bosses always seem to feel a need to demean and degrade the people who work for them. There was no reason for Rich to actually work at his own pharmacy; he was wealthy enough to hire a replacement for himself. But where else could the fat little fuck push people around? In what other arena would he be king?

Pete was no better. When he wanted me for something, instead of actually locating me on the sales floor or in the basement, Pete would simply lift his head back and yell, “Chris!” Other times, he would waggle his index finger at me to beckon me like I was a disobedient child.

Pete did that to me once in front of a female sales rep. I walked over to him and said, glaring at him, “I am not a dog—so you can stop doing that shit with your finger.” He was stunned into speechlessness; the sales rep was actually terrified.

Another time Pete was walking in front of me, tearing up a cardboard box and scattering the pieces behind him.

Turning, he said, “You want to pick that up?”

”No, I don’t think I will,” I told him.

“What?! What do you mean, ‘No’?” Pete was shocked.

“I mean I wasn’t hired as a garbageman. So you can pick up after your own damn self.”

I was a very angry person by now. Between Stu stalking me, Megan dumping me, and all the crap that I took at Madeline Sports, I had a very short fuse. My first day on the job at Whipple’s, Pete popped out of his office unexpectedly as I was coming down the basement stairs. By reflex, I broke into a fighting stance immediately: left hand up to block, right hand ready to strike. Pete clutched his heart.

“Jesus, Pete, you scared the shit outta me!” I told him.

“Have you had military training?” Pete asked nervously.

“No…” I laughed.

What I had was a hair-trigger from feeling threatened 24/7 at the liquor store. When I was at Madeline Sports, one of the jocks who worked there thought it would be funny to jump out at me in the back warehouse. I happened to be holding a long metal hook for hanging merchandise. When the jock guy jumped out at me, I put the hook at his throat and had him on his tiptoes in a second. “Wow, you’re quick!” he said. He was impressed but not so impressed that he didn’t try me again a half hour later. This time he came at me low. Again, I happened to be holding a long metal hook; and again, I had it at his throat in a flash. “Holy shit, you’re fast! Have you ever been jumped?” he asked me. “No,” I told him. “And I don’t intend to start now.” (I didn’t have any training; I had never mentally prepared myself to stick someone in their throat. What I had was paranoia and a great deal of rage.)

No sun will shine in my day today
The high yellow moon won’t come out to play
(That high yellow moon won’t come out to play)

I said darkness has covered my light

And has changed my day into night, yeah
Where is the love to be found ?

Won’t someone tell me ?
Cause life (sweet life)
Must be somewhere to be found (must be somewhere for me)
Instead of concrete jungle
Where the living is hardest
Concrete jungle
Man, you’ve got to do your best

—“Concrete Jungle”, Bob Marley

The guy who actually hired me at Whipple Pharmacy was a wiry, little cowboy named Jared. He had neatly-parted dark hair and a trim mustache. A couple of years younger than me, Jared had been an Army sniper and on the US Army rifle team itself. In the Gulf War, he had commanded a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. (A Bradley is an armored personnel carrier.)

The first words out of his mouth were, “I’m not a gun nut. I don’t have guns scattered around the house or anything.” Jared had guessed—accurately—that other employees would have filled me in on his background.

I lifted my hands. “Okay, I’m not accusing you of anything.”

Jared was a jack-of-all trades at Whipple Pharmacy. He did all the maintenance (plumbing, electrical); he fixed shelves, installed anti-shoplifting mirrors; delivered medical equipment and prescriptions to housebound patients, etc.

With his background (both in the military and growing up on his family’s ranch), I might have expected some macho, swaggering redneck but—as his opening statement indicated to me—Jared was not like that at all. He was laidback, well-mannered and had a very low opinion of Rich and Pete. While I wouldn’t have considered him intellectually sophisticated, he was no dummy and was at least willing to consider other people’s points-of-view. We were discussing “Pulp Fiction” one day when we were out on a delivery. He dismissed it as a “movie for losers, about losers.” I said, “Wait a minute. Hold on. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I started breaking the movie down for him, pointing out the different themes and motifs. Jared said, “Wow, okay. Maybe I’ll have to watch it again.” That surprised me.

Often we were both down in the basement, me working on one side and him on the other. With music blaring on the boombox and the PA squawking messages from time to time, I stared at his back some thirty yards away while Jared was working on something and thought to myself, Army sniper, my ass. I’m gonna sneak up on him and scare the shit out of him. Before I had even taken a step, he said, without turning around, “I know you’re there.” I was in disbelief. (Nobody’s that good.) I tried on two more occasions—and got the same result: “I know you’re there.”

Jared was fearless as far as I could tell. I’m pretty sure he would have fought anybody if he thought he was in the right. (Not me. No way I’d fight just anyone.) I always thought I could have taken Jared in a fight, although I’m not sure why. Maybe because although he was self-assured, I was half-crazy by that point. He told he broke his thumb once going after two shoplifters in the public parking garage outside. They had taken a fifth of vodka and Jared broke his thumb wrestling the bottle out of one guy’s grasp.

“What was the other guy doing?” I asked him.

“I dunno. Running away.”

“What if they had both jumped you at the same time?”

Jared’s eyes widened. “ I guess I wasn’t really thinking about that as a possibility.”

We both laughed.

One day the two of us caught a shoplifter together. The guy was a habitual offender—he’d shoplifted before in the drugstore—and Jared told me we were gonna follow him. The guy noticed us and dumped the bottle of booze he’d stashed in his clothes on a pile of merchandise on a nearby sales table. He was a bearded, sloppy-looking guy in his late twenties, early thirties, a little bigger than both Jared and myself.

“Okay, that’s it,” Jared told him. “We’re going down to the office and I’m gonna call the police.”

Jared led the way down the back stairs to the basement office, the shoplifter followed, I was bringing up the rear. Halfway down there was the wide open entrance to the alley where we took deliveries. The guy, seeing the open air, decided to make a break for it and run over Jared in his desperate bid for freedom. As they grappled with each other, Jared said, “Look behind you!” The guy turned to see me closing in on him, my eyes wide, adrenaline pumping. He stopped struggling instantly.

Jared left me with the shoplifter guy in the basement office and went off to call the police.

“What happens now?” the guy asked nervously. (Maybe he thought we were going to beat him up.)

“I have no idea. I guess it’s up to the police,” I told him. I was practically hyperventilating, still in fight mode. I didn’t know if he was still going to try to make a break for it since I was by myself. My eyes scanned Phil’s office to see if there were any dangerous objects like a random hammer or a saw that the guy might threaten me with. Luckily for me, the guy was pretty freaked out by my demeanor and stayed docile the whole time we were there alone.

Jared came downstairs with two local cops who told us they were letting the guy go—shoplifters can only be arrested if they take items outside the store and not before.

“This is like the third time I’ve caught this guy!” Jared protested.

It doesn’t make any difference, the cops told him.

“You guys are a big help!” Jared said angrily. They just ignored him and left with the guy.

Jared and I stared at each other.

“They’re just letting him go ‘cause he’s from a rich family,” Jared told me.

“He is? That fucking deadbeat?”

“Yeah,“ he nodded. “ I am so sick of the fucking cops in this town. They never do anything when we call them. You know, I was gonna join the police when I got out of the Army?”

“So what changed your mind?” I asked him.

“I went on a couple of ride-alongs and I realized that if I became a cop I’d be spending all my time with deadbeat loser criminals. And that’s not how I want to spend my time.”

“It’s good that you saw that ahead of time,” I told him. “Before you joined the force.”

“Too bad it’s not like the old days,” Jared said. “You know? Like when you could just put a posse together and string a thief up when you caught his ass.”

“I seem to remember they usually blamed crimes on some guy passing through, an outsider or a drifter or a person of color,” I said. “Not someone from a rich family, like this guy here.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do but that vigilante justice bullshit is no solution,” I told him. Jared shrugged in frustration and rolled his eyes.

We were opposites: Jared was hyper-competent with friends all over town. He met his fiancee, Laura in high school and they had both worked at Whipple Pharmacy. With his multitude of job skills and roots in the community, Jared could write his own ticket. Me, I was alone; an outcast everywhere, with minimal job skills and zero connections.

(I have a saying: “The truest test of character is how you treat people when you have them at a disadvantage.” Jared was a case in point. He could have lorded his military experience, his ability as a crack shot, or any number of other things, over me. He never did. Not one time.)

Of course, being guys we capped on each other all the time. Jared made fun of my hair one day in front of some other store employees. Unfortunately for him, he’d been growing out his mustache to a ridiculous extent of thickness and length for some time and I’d been just waiting for a golden opportunity to bust on him.

“At least I don’t look like Yosemite Sam,” I said, referring to the wild-eyed Bugs Bunny cartoon character with an identically goofy handlebar mustache. “Pow! Pow!” I mimicked Yosemite Sam firing off his six-guns as the other people in the room fell out laughing. Jared turned red, grimacing as he realized he’d been had.

The two winters I worked at Whipple Pharmacy were exceptionally rainy. One winter we got something like fifty straight days of rain.(“Noah only got forty days and forty nights. Goddamn. Should we start building an ark?” I asked everybody.) I went through several umbrellas before acquiring a large blue and white umbrella.

“Nice brolly,” Jared sneered before picking it up, opening it up and twirling it around. “Very cute.”

I got him back the next time we had to unload the delivery truck.

Once a month a delivery truck with 800 cases of merchandise would show up outside Whipple Pharmacy. The back alley where we normally took deliveries from UPS, etc., was too narrow for this truck so we had to unload it on the street and then wheel our individual handtrucks with maybe five to six cases at a time all the way down the sidewalk and up the alley to the basement’s entrance, a distance of almost eighty yards. It was a process that took several hours and was physically pretty grueling. Pete usually joined me and Jared to help unload. In the winter, the two of them would bitch about how cold it was. I went over to the driver, a gnarly old biker dude from Milwaukee, and said,“These motherfuckers think this is cold!” He laughed and I laughed right along with him even though I was secretly freezing myself. (One time Pete wasn’t there to help and the driver asked me where he was. “Aw, he’s got a cold,” I told him. “Actually, the cold’s got Phil and it’s been trying to get rid of him ever since.” The trucker laughed uproariously. He hated him, too.) I went over to where Jared was standing there, shivering, his red nose dripping and I asked him, “Are you okay? Would you like a blankie to keep you warm?” Jared’s eyes popped comically in indignation as I laughed, taking my revenge.

As compensation for unloading the 800-case delivery, Jared and I were allowed to go to lunch on the company dime. We would go to a nearby diner and the third or fourth time we did, Jared encouraged me to order a beer. He himself didn’t drink—or smoke.

“You sure about this?” I asked him. “I mean, it’s the middle of the workday.”

“Aw, it’s fine,” Jared assured me.

“Okay…”

Then he encouraged me to order another one.

“You sure?” I was pretty uneasy at this point.

“Sure, I’m sure. Fuck them,” he told me.

Pete and Rich were not happy about it, not at all. And the final upshot was that Jared quit and I was left alone to face two bosses who really didn’t like me now.

Meanwhile back at Madeline Sports, things had gotten weird.

I was still hanging out with Kevin and Todd, drinking together, going out to eat, etc. Kevin lasted about four or five months after I left; Todd, maybe a year (although I honestly don’t remember now).

Monica, the other assistant manager, got carjacked by two fifteen-year-olds with guns. They made her drive around for a couple of hours, then left her by the side of the road out in the East Bay. The cops recovered her car later. She was unhurt, but presumably shaken up by the experience.

A twenty-one-year-old man was stabbed after an encounter with some teenage gangsters at the mall. Todd, who was a former EMT, and a customer, a doctor, tried to save the guy as he bled out from a sucking chest wound on the sales floor at Madeline Sports. He died. The killer was eventually caught hiding out in Mexico and extradited back to the US where he was convicted.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with two women customers at Madeline’s back in the summer. They asked me if it was okay for them to walk back to their hotel a few blocks away. It was a warm summer night. I looked at them: two attractive women in shorts and halter tops. I told them I wouldn’t advise it, they should get a cab. They scoffed at this.

“Really? What is it? Gang territory or something?” one of them asked.

“No…it’s not gang territory. I just wouldn’t advise it,” I told her.

“Really? Why? What’s the big deal?”

“Look, if a girlfriend or a female relative of mine asked me if it was okay, I would tell them, ‘No. It’s not a good idea.’ You asked my advice, I’m giving it to you.”

They rolled their eyes at this. “What-Ever,” they said.

What I didn’t tell them is that while downtown Santa Rosa wasn’t gang territory, every Thursday night when the city had its Thursday Night Market downtown, we’d get a swarm of gangsters inside the mall. Some of them would come into the store and grab armloads of shirts on the sales table and throw them off the second floor balcony.

Customers would turn to me in astonishment. “Aren’t you going to do anything?”

I would just shake my head. “My boss says the company won’t back us in any physical confrontation and won’t give us any legal or medical assistance.”

“So you’re just going to stand there and let these kids get away with it?”

I’d shrug. ”Hey, it ain’t my stuff flying over the balcony. If the company won’t back me, what am I supposed to do?”

I also didn’t tell the two women about the news story I had read about some poor lady jogging or walking her dog at night in Santa Rosa when a carload of guys in a station wagon grabbed her and took her off someplace where they raped her repeatedly.

Crime was everywhere in Sonoma County and I was more conscious of it than most people from my time working at the liquor store.

When Polly Klaas was abducted and killed by Richard Allen Davis in 1992, the national media descended on Petaluma where nearly all of them managed to work the terms “bucolic”, “pastoral”, “idyllic” or “Norman Rockwell-like” into their descriptions of the city.

While it’s true that downtown Petaluma had an old-timey, classic Americana feel to it, at least in the daytime, my reaction to seeing Richard Allen Davis’ mugshot was that he could have easily been a customer of mine at the liquor store. (I don’t know that he was, I’m just saying he would have fit right in.)

Petaluma is also the place where a woman who owned a liquor store ran outside after a guy who shoplifted a twelve-pack of beer; she wanted to get his license plate number for the police. The guy ran her over with his car—twice!—turning a shoplifting misdemeanor into first-degree murder. I’m pretty sure Norman Rockwell never painted something like that.

On my lunch breaks at Whipple Pharmacy, I used to go a couple of blocks over to a 7-11 store to buy lottery tickets. (Yes, I was that desperate. Still am.) There was a nondescript, blue townhouse I used to pass on my way. During the period I worked at Whipple’s, there was a triple murder there. A couple were buying drugs from their neighborhood dealer and someone showed up and shot all three of them—in the middle of the day!—before running off with the money and drugs.

Life and death, good and evil, were everywhere and here I was trying to cope with two weasel bosses who found me insubordinate and hard to manage.

Rich and his pharmacists used to laugh about all the money they made prescribing drugs to elderly patients and the resulting ripple effect: the old people suffered from side effects requiring a second prescription to deal with the first prescription and then possibly a third prescription to deal with the side effects from the second prescription. That they thought that this was funny did not endear them to me at all. Oh, and the fact that entire pharmacy staff (i.e., Rich, his two assistant pharmacists and the pharmacy tech) went to Hawaii every year with their ill-gotten drug profits, I didn’t find amusing at all, either. (But I was the bad guy at the store. Right.)

After Jared’s abrupt departure I would still see his fiancee, Laura, and her mom now and again. I had gotten to know Laura a little bit when she was working at the store part-time and Laura and her mom used to get a kick out of hearing me bitch about the owners.

One afternoon, I was stocking pharmacy stuff on one aisle and Phil was crouched down on the other side. Laura and her mom approached me.

“Chris, what are you still doing here? Haven’t left yet?“ they asked me, jokingly.

“Well, I’d like to leave but my parole officer says this place is good for me,” I said.

There was a loud bang as Pete hit his head on a shelf, rising up in surprise. The three of us exploded with laughter as Pete staggered away, rubbing the lump on his head.

Then there was Pete’s mom. An older, imperious lady who worked the cosmetics department, she liked to give me grief about the pharmacy totes piled up near her counter.

“You’re always in the way, Chris, always in the way,” she told me one time.

“Except for when you want me to haul those fifty-pound bags of dog food out to your car, right? Except for then?” I asked ironically.

“Well, yes, I suppose,” she agreed with a sour little smile. “Except for then.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Our customers were super-special, too. When I would be out on the sales floor, stocking the shelves people would literally step over my outstretched arm as I crouched there filling a bottom shelf. (I’d think to myself, Really? You can’t say, ‘Excuse me’ and give me a chance to get out of the way? You couldn’t go down a different aisle? What am I? Invisible?) I say, “people”, but I think it was always guys in this particular case.

Women customers would do other things. When Jared and I would close off a seasonal aisle so we could stock it, using shopping carts with signs that read “Closed”, impatient women customers would simply push the carts aside and stand on top of us, demanding to know what we were putting up.

The one day a week I worked a cash register was plenty. I’d have these snobby women who couldn’t be bothered to take their own shopping out of their shopping cart and I’d have to come around the counter and unload it myself. (Nice.) That was uncommon. More typical were women who refused to put their money in my hand. They’d lay their bills on the counter instead. The strange thing is they never had a problem taking their change from my hand.

I had one lady put me through this. As I handed her the change I saw she had laid a book she was reading on the counter. Glancing at the cover I saw it was entitled “Becoming A Person.” I said, “Good luck with that.”

There were two or three occasions when I had male customers who were so overwhelmingly snotty, rude and condescending that I had to ask myself, Who is the asshole? And where did he get such a smug, superior attitude? A God-complex, even? And every time the question answered itself when they wrote me checks or handed me their credit cards. They were doctors. (Of course.)

I never thought I’d miss my liquor store customers, the dirty, shifty bunch that they were. But at least they didn’t put on airs.

Actually, there was a kind of lowdown hotel across the street that contained a number of older alcoholics that would occasionally stumble into the pharmacy to buy their booze.

One hot summer day an old drunk bought a small fan. It had to be assembled and he begged me to help him. I wasn’t inclined to help him but he persisted, telling me there was no way in hell he’d be able to put it together himself. (One look at him confirmed that was only the truth.) He even offered me five dollars, which I declined. I put the damn thing together in a fairly short time, to his delight and my great surprise and relief.

“You see? You see? I told ya you could do it,” he said, grinning widely.

“Yeah-you-did,” I conceded, somewhat amazed, both by what I had accomplished and how by helping the poor slob I actually managed to feel good about myself for a second.

I had a young woman once buy a box of condoms from me. It was the largest box of condoms I’d ever seen, like the size of a cereal box. My jaw was on the ground but she was utterly unfazed and unembarrassed by her purchase. Later I felt bad about it and I resolved to do better in the future.

I got my chance when I encountered a young Hispanic couple in their twenties on the sales floor and the young man inquired in accented English where the condoms were. Determined to be thoroughly modern and grown up, I guided them down the aisle where we kept the condoms, a huge display catering to all needs. I waved my hand triumphantly.

“Here you go,” I said, somewhat proud of my composure and maturity.

The couple gaped at me in shock.

“I said ‘candles’ not ‘condoms’,” the young guy said in clear, ringing tones, not bothering to hide his disgust at the gringo degenerate in front of him.

They wanted a Jesus candle. We did, in fact, carry those along with other religious candles in colored glass with saints’ pictures painted on them. And no, they didn’t want my help in locating them.

Oops.

One beautiful Saturday afternoon in the fall, I was working a register up front. About three customers had already said to me, “I bet you wish you were outside instead of working right now” when a fourth customer, a middle-aged lady buying a newspaper, made that exact same remark to me. I grunted in response and gave her the change. She walked out the door and was gone for a moment before marching back inside towards me.

“I don’t know if you’re having a bad day…” the woman started.

“—Not ’til now,” I said offhandedly.

“I’d like a refund, please,” the lady said, putting the newspaper back on the counter.

“Sure thing.” I gave her back fifty cents. “See ya later.”

She drew herself up with great indignation. “No. You won’t,” the lady huffed.

I turned and glared at her.

“Even better!” I snapped.

Telling an employee somewhere that you bet they wish they were someplace else—outside on a beautiful day, home on a holiday, whatever—is insulting as hell. (I’m not saying the lady set out to insult me; I’m saying she was absolutely oblivious. The lady got mad at me, not because of anything I said to her but because I was insufficiently grateful to her for condescending to make any conversation with me at all.) What you are actually telling that person is that you are privileged enough to not have to work some crappy job, and they are not. You’re big and they’re little. You’re actually reveling in your entitled status, rubbing it in that you are free to go where you please. You’re not being sympathetic or empathetic, you’re being an asshole! So don’t do it. If you feel bad about someone’s lot in life, the proper response is not, “Well, I’m glad I’m not you!” I don’t go up to a homeless guy and say, “Boy, I bet you wish you had a roof over your head and a hot meal right now”, do I? No, I don’t. If I see a cashier or a waitress or whoever having a tough time, the most I might say is, “I hope it gets better for you.”

One winter evening while I was working at Whipple’s, I was in downtown Shadow Valley with Jim when we ran into a customer of mine from Freddy’s, an older, attractive lady.

She smiled at me. “Hey, I know you!”

Seeing a friendly face at that time was a rarity for me. I smiled back. “Hey, how are you doing?”

Abruptly she said, with the same smile on her face, “Hey, are you the one who got shot?”

“No, I wasn’t,” I turned away, my smile replaced by a growing rage.

I ranted to Jim all the way home. He was baffled as to why that remark upset me so much. I didn’t calm down, I got angrier and angrier as I struggled to explain myself.

When we got home, I punched the top panel of my bedroom door clear out of the door, picked up a chair and smashed the double-mirrored doors of my closet.(Eventually, I ended up tacking a blanket over the top half of my door; my closet was fucked.)

Over the years, I have never managed to adequately explain my reaction to people. I’ll give it another try, right now. To have your identity reduced to “The One Who Got Shot” is ten times worse than being “Liquor Store Guy” (or even “That Motherfucker Who Walks Everywhere”). It’s having your identity reduced to an anecdotal detail. Trivia. Like “the Dog Who Got Run Over by the Car.” (“Was that you?” No, I was the other mutt in the alley. Fuck you.) And no, I wouldn’t have been any happier if I had been the guy who got shot.(Did I get shot? No, but thanks for asking, you heartless bitch.) Being a liquor store clerk was a dangerous existence. I felt that that I was taking my life in my hands every shift I worked there. Rolling dice. I never knew who the fuck—or what the fuck— was walking through the door. I’m not saying it was heroic (I wasn’t a soldier, a cop, or a firefighter). And I wasn’t saving lives; I was selling people crap that they absolutely did not need—and probably shouldn’t have. Nevertheless, it was a dangerous job and I didn’t appreciate someone trivializing my survival, my pain or the risks I took every night of my life down there at that goddamn corner store.

Of course, there was even more to it than just the liquor store. Not long after Megan dumped me, I gave up any dreams I had of having a music career as well. I gave up all hope of pretty much of anything good ever happening to me again. I was an open wound.

Walking to the bus one evening in Petaluma after a long day at the pharmacy, I was stopped by a young saleswoman in the street. She had perfume samples in a case. “Maybe a bottle of perfume for that ‘special someone’ in your life?” she asked me, holding up a bottle. “That ‘special someone’ left me six months ago,” I told her. A flicker of contempt rippled across her face. “Oh, sorry,” she said before moving on.

When I had been dating Megan and things were really good between us (or so I thought), I had this strange dream that the two of us were cops. We were out on foot patrol and I got shot and fell down. She left me there as I called after her, repeatedly, “You don’t leave your partner! You don’t leave your partner!”

When I told Megan later about the dream she got very defensive and said, “Well, dreams don’t mean anything!”

I laughed and said,”I know! I just think it’s funny that that we were cops together.” (That was the detail my dumb ass focused on at the time. It was only later I would be haunted by the “You don’t leave your partner! You don’t leave your partner!” bit.)

I did finally run into Rob one night in the liquor store.

I was getting a six-pack for myself out of one of the beer coolers when I thought I heard someone call my name. I turned and there was this scrawny, hunched-over figure with a metal cane and a bandanna wrapped around their shaven head coming down the aisle towards me.

I stared blankly as this person approached me.

“Chris, it’s me. It’s Rob!”

“Oh, shit! Rob!” I thought I’d been looking at a chemo patient. “How you doin’?”

“Been in rehab. Getting better. You know what? Getting shot sucks,” he told me with a rueful grin.

“I bet,” I said as we laughed.

“I just wanted to tell you that you were right.”

“About what?”

“I shoulda backed off more,” Rob said. “Not picked fights with so many people.”

I shrugged. “Shit happens. Whatta ya gonna do?”

Rob pointed at me. “No, you were right. Totally right. I shoulda listened. One minute I’m beating the shit outta this guy, the next thing I know the motherfucker’s shot me.”

“Hey, man, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I told him.

“No, I want to. I want to tell you. I haven’t really talked about to it to anyone else but I know you’d understand.”

I waved my hand in dismissal.

Rob continued, “After the motherfucker shot me, he got in his car and drove off. I guess Sandra had called the police. So there I am, slumped against the Pepsi machine outside with both hands pressed against the gunshot wound when the cops come flying up and grab me. They thought I was the shooter! Until they pulled my hands away and saw all the blood. So they put me on the stretcher and they’re putting me in the back of the ambulance and it’s like a movie—I’m trying to describe the guy while I’m laying there.” Rob did a comic, croaking imitation of his wounded self, “ ‘ He was about five ten, wearing a leather jacket, he had a beard…’ ”

We both laughed at this melodramatic image.

Rob went on to tell me that they had shaved his head for surgery. He still had the bullet lodged in his spine, it was too dangerous to remove. Rob had to go to the hospital every week for an injection to bring the swelling down. If they missed with the needle they could paralyze him.

We both contemplated that for a moment.

“So they caught him?” I asked.

“Yeah, they caught him. They charged him with ‘assault with a deadly weapon’, you believe that?”

“ ‘Assault with a deadly weapon’? He tried to kill you. He shot you with a gun, he didn’t hit you with a bat! What the fuck, dude?” I was in disbelief.

Rob shrugged. “It really don’t matter, though. Half my family’s in prison. That motherfucker ain’t ever getting out alive.”

I paused to digest this little nugget.

“Hey, man, can you buy me a beer?” Rob asked, grabbing a forty out of the cooler. “I’m a little tapped out at the moment.”

“Sure thing,” I told him. “ Get two.”

Things got progressively worse for me at Whipple’s Pharmacy. I could see the writing on the wall. I started working part-time back at the liquor store, no longer Freddy Wood’s Market, it was now “Bob’s Super-Mini.” I hadn’t met the new owner yet but my old boss, Maxine was still running things. We agreed I’d help stock the shelves a couple of hours a week at night after my shift at Whipple’s. I guess I was building an escape hatch for myself for when things inevitably blew up at the pharmacy.

The first development that really pissed me off was when they hired this new cashier, Tabitha and decided to pay her the same as what I was making after two years of working there. (I heard that even Pete thought that was wrong.) There was nothing special about her; Tabitha was a lazy, entitled slug as far as I could tell but Rich gave her special treatment because she socialized with the girls in the pharmacy after-hours and I did not. All’s I did was ninety-percent of the stocking and receiving when I wasn’t unloading that goddamn 800-case truck once a month or supervising four other cashiers every Saturday and double-checking their tills to make sure they had counted them out properly.

The second thing was–after all the endless carping and criticizing of my job performance and poor attitude (and lack of wage advancement since Jared left)–Pete wanted me to work through Easter Sunday, the store was having a big sale. I thought to myself, No fucking way. These assholes have got some nerve. That Saturday I decided to go to lunch and call in sick for the rest of the weekend.

I went down to the bus stop on my lunch break and waited for the bus to take me home where I would call in sick. And waited. And waited. The bus was two hours late! (Fucking holiday weekend.) So when I called I talked to the bookkeeper and told her I thought I had food poisoning or something, sorry, I didn’t call earlier but the bus was late.She listened sympathetically enough and told me that she’d pass the message on to Pete.

The next Monday I walked through the door and Pete said, “What are you doing here? You quit.”

“I didn’t quit, I called in sick.”

“No, you quit.”

“I never said I quit but if you want fire me, fire me,” I told him.

“I don’t have to fire you, you quit,” Pete insisted.

“Call it whatever you want. I’m sick of working here anyway,” I said. I turned around and I left.

I got back on a bus and I went up to Santa Rosa to get money out of the bank so I could get good and thoroughly drunk. I was steaming mad.

I’m standing there at the ATM machine on 3rd Street, getting some cash out when I hear this voice behind me ask, “Hey, have you ever been robbed?”

I said, “As a matter of fact, I haven’t.” I turned around, fully prepared to beat the shit out of whatever jackass was dumb enough to try and rob me on this-of-all-days.

A tall redneck stood there with a goofy smile and his hand out for a handshake. “Hey!” is what he said.

I glared at him.

“Hey!” he said again, thrusting his hand towards me. “It’s me, Travis.”

I kept glaring at him.

“Travis, Cindy’s husband?”

I finally recognized him. Travis and Cindy were friends of Kate’s. I had dinner at their house once.

“Jesus, Travis. You picked a really bad day for a joke. I just got fired today.” I shook his hand finally.

“I’m really sorry,” Travis said.

“Yeah, it’s really not a good time right now. I’ll see you later.” And that’s what I remember of my last day at Whipple’s Pharmacy. Two weeks later I was back working full-time at the liquor store where I would remain for the next three years.