9. Bob’s Super-Mini

Ever since you left me
I’ve lived out of my car
parked between the liquor store
and Uncle Bubba’s bar

Booze helps ease the heartache
of your constant being in mind
As constant as that buzzing noise
of Uncle Bubba’s sign

Liquor, beer and wine
is a flashing sign I see
Every durn morning I get up
it’s buzzing down at me

I look up to the heavens
for a ray of hope to shine
And there it is in neon:
Liquor, beer and wine

–“Liquor, Beer and Wine”, Rev. Horton Heat

The new owner of “Bob’s Super-Mini” was Bob Duckworth. Where Freddy was a big, fat man who was sometimes jolly but more often surly than not, Bob was short and lean and leathery. His default mode was a kind of aggressive cheerfulness that was supposed to mask his near-constant suspicion of his fellow man.

Bob had made his money as a “troubleshooter” for a chain of strip clubs in the Southwest. What that entails, I’m not sure (embezzling bartenders, strippers turning tricks—or not doing so—for high rollers?); it sure sounds unsavory, and not likely a profession to inspire trust in one’s employees.

Bob took me off the register after my first shift because I had an over-ring. This delighted the two ex-felons I worked with: Ted, a black guy who’d been in a street gang in Chicago; and J-Cat (who’d been to county jail a few times). Criminals have a sense of who is and who isn’t one of their crowd and Ted and J-Cat were greatly amused to see a lame goody-two-shoes like myself being treated like Public Enemy No. 1 while they were being given free rein on the registers.

To pass the time, I took over their assigned tasks on the floor, in addition to my own limited role: stocking all the beer and soda coolers, plus the dairy cooler, putting ice in the soda machine, stocking general merchandise, etc. At first, the two of them were thrilled that I was doing half their jobs for them. After awhile it dawned on them that I was subtly disrespecting both of them. By doing their jobs as well as my own, I was quietly suggesting that I was a better man without saying a word. Certainly, Bob and my old boss, Maxine noticed; I was back on the register after a couple of weeks. Ted and J-Cat became some of my regular graveyard partners over the next three years, meaning that I often closed with one of them at night.

I used to cook these big pasta dinners for Kate, Jim and myself on Sunday nights. There would always be enough for a fourth serving every time and I began a habit of taking that leftover portion to Ted or J-Cat (whichever one of them was closing) every Sunday night. They appreciated the gesture—and the free meal—and it helped break down some barriers between us.

J-Cat and I eventually became drinking buddies. Ted and I never quite reached that point. We became friendly but not friends. Although he was often a glowering, intimidating presence, Ted had a sense of humor, albeit a limited one.

One of his favorite pastimes was teasing our local wino, Buddy. When Buddy would enter, Ted would yell (in a parody of a hip-hop MC), “Big Buddy’s in the Huh-Huh-House!” Buddy would wince and head for the beer cooler. Eventually, Ted got me doing it with him and in turn, I got J-Cat doing it as well.

If a customer started complaining to Ted about something, he’d put on a nasally imitation of a “white guy” voice and say, “Gee, whiz. I dunno. Gee, whiz…” To make Ted laugh, I used to imitate the owner, Bob. “That’s the way we like it!” I’d say, in a high-pitched, fake Texas accent (drawing heavily on Dana Carvey’s imitation of Ross Perot). “Yes, sir!” (I’d also imitate what I called Bob’s “John Wayne Spanish” that he’d speak to this Mexican immigrant that he had working for him under the table:”Don-day estah…?”) Ted told me about a liquor store in his neighborhood called “Little Iran” by the locals because the store was purportedly owned by Iranians. If you asked for credit, the clerks would raise an index finger and say, “One time only!” So those became our catch phrases: “One time only!” and “That’s the way we like it!”

One night when I was working with Ted, thick, white smoke started billowing out of the back stock room. Alarmed, we called the fire department, who were literally a block away. The firefighters showed up, walked into the back room, came out again and said, “You got a burnt ballast on one of your fluorescent lights back there. It was no big deal.” They were very snotty and put-out by the whole thing.

One of them asked me why I didn’t go into the back room and check it out for myself.

“Why didn’t I go into a smoke-filled room? Really?” I asked ironically. “Gee, I don’t know.”

Another one of them told Ted if we wasted their time like that again, he’d send the owner a bill.

When Bob showed up a few minutes later and Ted relayed their message, Bob laughed grimly and said, “I’d like to see ‘em try.”

“They had to drive a whole block, Bob, “ I said sarcastically. “A whole fucking block. ‘Sorry we made you put down the fried chicken and the porn for five minutes…you fucking assholes.’ ”

The three of us shook our heads.

I never fully trusted Ted (and subsequent events would bear my suspicions out). I never trusted him to have my back in a fight; I had a hunch that Ted (and possibly even J-Cat) wouldn’t have minded at all watching me get my ass kicked by an angry drunk. Like Rob before him, Ted was jealous of my rapport with the more attractive female customers, especially the regulars. He also told Maxine that I came to work drunk —which was an absolute lie. (Hungover, yes. Drunk, no.) He was a big guy and just a bad dude. Ted missed work for a month once because he was in county jail for assault. He’d been drinking with a guy; the guy said something that offended Ted so much that he beat him into a coma. The DA was waiting for the guy to recover to determine what charges to bring. When the guy finally came out of the coma, he either didn’t remember who beat him or pretended not to; the DA dropped the charges and Ted came back to work.

Another memorable graveyard partner was “Johnny Steel”. He was a skilled pool player in his late thirties who got his nickname for his unflappable demeanor during games (“nerves of steel”). But Johnny had also been Sonoma County’s biggest drug dealer and the police had taken extra-special interest in him because of his nickname. “They thought I was some hardcore killer and I told ‘em, everybody told them, ‘No, man, the nickname comes from playing pool!’ I ain’t never killed nobody! Those cops were nuts!”

He actually confided all this to me one night when we were hanging out, outside. Out of sheer boredom, I started singing this super-annoying rap song from a video I saw on MTV, Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Membrane”: “Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain!”

Johnny started laughing. He told me how he’d been this big time drug dealer, selling speed, and how at the end of long, profitable day selling drugs, he’d call up the biggest madam in Sonoma County and she’d send over her best girls and then Johnny, his crew and the girls would all party together using his product with “Insane in the Membrane” as their theme song (“Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain! Got no brain, going insane, Got no brain, going insane, Insane in the membrane, insane in the brain!”).

Life was great, according to Johnny, right up ’til he got busted and sent to prison. Medium security prison, he told me, not maximum. Nevertheless, he told me that he was terrified the whole time he was in there. (And Johnny was a rugged ex-Marine, peacetime in Korea in the ‘80s; not necessarily physically imposing, but possessing an affable, aw-shucks sort of redneck exterior that concealed a much harder interior. I sensed this because I’d known guys like him before. They don’t talk tough or brag about being tough; in fact, they often exaggerate how scared they’ve been. These are often some of the most dangerous guys out there. When they get mad, look out.)

“I did whatever I could to stay on the warden’s good side and stay out of trouble,” he told me. ”Maintenance, odd jobs, whatever. And I swore to myself that I’d never do anything again that could land me back in prison.”

I had first spotted Johnny stocking shelves at a chain grocery store, “Food For Less.” A week later, he was closing with me at the liquor store. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Didn’t you have a good gig over there at ‘Food For Less’?”

“Man, everybody says that!” he exclaimed. “ ‘Food For Less’? They should call it ‘Work for Less’! I wasn’t making no money over there.”

Johnny always gave me updates on his bathroom breaks. (Not that I asked.) “I have to take a shit,” he’d say, with a rueful grin, placing both hands on his ass. “But it’s not brewed up just yet. I have to wait.” Then afterwards, he stumble out of the employees’ toilet. “Don’t go in there!” he’d warn me in a mock-panic. “I sprayed potpourri spray but it didn’t help… It melded, it got stronger!”

I liked Johnny. He was funny, irreverent, and I firmly believed he’d have my back in any confrontation at the store. I only saw him look pissed off a couple of times, and the expression on his face was enough to make the offending party back down immediately.

Johnny was clean but he had a girlfriend who was still using (an unworkable, volatile situation). A pretty, spacey girl, at 2 am. she’d often come by to see him, right when I was about to leave. His face was furrow over with concern and stress. I’d tell him if he needed to talk to her, I’d work his register for a few minutes. He took me up on my offer a couple of times.

He was also friends with another attractive woman, Janice, a regular customer and a barfly who was always in and out. She was very reserved and often very fucked up on something, drugs or alcohol or both. I learned from Johnny that she was stuck in this toxic, dangerous relationship with this big Native American guy who was a dead ringer for the actor, Danny Trejo (“Machete”). He had hit her, threatened to kill her, she was afraid to leave him and Johnny was trying to help give her the courage to do so. (I knew her psycho boyfriend because he came in the store one Thanksgiving when we were slammed with customers, went into the back office and made off with the change drawer. This happened back when it was Freddy Wood’s Market. A big, very scary-looking guy.) Janice had two little boys and they’d often show up (unaccompanied) at the store late at night, dirty, barefoot and hungry. Not a good scene at all.

The first graveyard guy I think I ever closed with at Bob’s Super-Mini was Jonah. His wife was pregnant, due any day; and Jonah had a deal with his buddy, Sue, to cover his shift if his wife went into labor at that time. (I had Jonah and Sue both down as tweakers, speed freaks. They were both tall, pale and gaunt, with hollow faces and dark eyes.) Sure enough, Jonah’s wife goes into labor during his shift and Jonah’s on the phone, trying to find Sue, who is nowhere to be found.

In desperation, Jonah turned to me. “Can you cover my shift?”

I told him that I had just worked a full eight-hour day, I was tired, Bob would have to sign off on any overtime; besides, didn’t he know anyone else to call? I’d only been there a month.

“C’mon, man, please, I’m begging you! I gotta be there for the birth of my son. I’ll give you twenty bucks on top of what Bob pays you,” Jonah told me.

He called Bob and Bob asked to talk to me. “You think you can handle it? It’s all overtime. You’d be doing me and the store a big favor, not just Jonah, “ Bob said.

“All right.” I worked a double shift. Bob came in at 5 am, all appreciation and Jonah made it to the hospital in time to witness the birth of his son, he and his wife’s first child.

Then Jonah stiffed me the next two weeks over the twenty bucks. He had this story, then that story. I was irate; I had helped this fucker out, a total stranger, and here he was, giving me the runaround.

At the store, we had a charge. This meant we could put groceries or cigarettes or booze or whatever the store sold—on our personal account. The items would be rung up by another employee, the receipts saved, and the amount deducted from our paychecks. It was a win-win for the store. It encouraged employees to shop and allowed the store to profit from our paychecks. (Freddy had the same system.)

So one night on my lunch break, I grabbed up twenty dollars’ worth of beer and brought it up to Jonah’s register.

“This is going on your charge,” I told him.

“But…”

“—But nothing. You owe me twenty bucks, this is twenty bucks’ worth of beer. We’re even.”

Jonah started to object again but the look in my eye told him that probably wouldn’t be a good idea. (He and his buddy, Sue, were not long for the store. Addicts, like I said.)

Speaking of charging groceries, Bob hired these two kids, Kyle and Yusuf. Kyle had just gotten out of the California Youth Authority (CYA),i.e., juvenile detention, where he had done three years for robbing restaurants with a gun. (Fifteen-years-old is a magical age, apparently.) Kyle, a big, blonde kid with a mustache, had muscles on top of muscles, and not weight-room muscles, either, but the kind you develop from doing hundreds and thousands of pushups and pull-ups, motivated by the need for self-protection. He always had a smile on his face (I never saw him in a bad mood) but he smiled at the rest of the world like he felt sorry for us all. Kyle knew things we didn’t and he was prepared for shit going down in a way the rest of us weren’t.

Yusuf was just another teenager with an attitude; he and J-Cat knew each other.

One day Kyle sold Yusuf a six-pack of beer and put it on his charge. They were both underage! (Kyle was eighteen and Yusuf was seventeen). And if there hadn’t been evidence on paper, they were both on the surveillance camera as well! Criminal masterminds. Fired just like that.

While there was a rotating cast of characters on the graveyard shift, I usually started my shift with the same person every afternoon, Martha (or as I thought of her, “Crazy Martha”.) Martha worked 1:00 to 9 pm, I worked 6 pm to 2 am (and the graveyard shift ran from 9 pm to 5 am when the owner Bob rolled in). Martha was a diminutive, dark-haired, spiteful little woman in her forties who was happiest when someone else was unhappy. She lived across the street behind Schneiderman’s bar.

Martha used to drive me nuts because she was always hitting the buzzer to summon me to up to the front to work the second register while I was trying to stock the beer coolers.(It was one of the reasons I came in early, just so I could get my coolers stocked and set without her interference.) I used to tell her, “If you hit the register keys as fast as you ring that buzzer, you wouldn’t need my help!”

She pissed me off so bad one evening by repeatedly buzzing me up front that I practically had steam coming out of my ears. The customer I was ringing up, a big, young, tough college jock, took exception.

“You gotta problem with me?”

“Huh?” I was completely caught off guard.

“I said, you gotta problem with me?”

“Not you! Her!” I said, nodding my head in her direction. We both laughed in relief at the misunderstanding. Martha, of course, was oblivious.

While I was working there at Bob’s Super-Mini, a nightclub opened up on the next block. Customers from the club started parking in our lot, taking up all the spaces for our customers, so Bob posted a sign warning that non-customers would be towed. The sign proved a pretty effective deterrent but from time to time, cars were towed. I never felt the need myself to tow anyone but some employees got a kick out of having people’s cars towed, like Martha.

One slow Tuesday night, there was a pickup truck in our otherwise-empty lot and Martha decided to have it towed.

“I think you’re crazy,” I told her. “And if some motherfucker flips out because you towed his truck, I am not backing you up. You are on your own.”

“Well, that’s fine, “Martha said. “I‘m having that truck towed, I don’t care.”

And she flashed an evil little grin before calling the tow company.

An hour later, a big redneck, his face flushed red with anger, stormed up to my register.

“Did you have my truck towed?!” he demanded.

“No. It was her!” I said, pointing to Martha over at the deli counter.

“What?! Is that true?!” he howled as Martha sauntered over, cool as a cucumber, and walked behind the front counter.

“Yes, I did,” she said with a smile. “There’s a sign outside warning you that you’ll be towed if you’re not a customer here.”

“Fuuuuccckkkk!!” he bellowed, slamming both hands down on the counter.

“Sir, if you don’t calm down, I’m gonna have to call the police,” Martha said.

“Call the fucking police, you bitch, I don’t care!” he yelled.

I seriously wondered if the two of us were going to be in one piece by the time the cops got there. He yelled and she grinned and I sweated the three minutes it took the cops to get there. They ended up taking him out in cuffs, they couldn’t get him to calm down, either.

There was another incident. It happened during the early evening rush. A large, flaming-angry blonde lady marched in and confronted Martha at her register.

“I want an apology! You called my mother a bitch and I demand you say you’re sorry.”

Martha eyed her and said casually, “I’m sorry…I’m sorry your mother’s a bitch.”

“Waaahhhh!!” the blonde woman lunged at her across the counter. Martha just stepped back and laughed. (Holy crap! It was like something out of a Scorsese movie: there’s an insult, then an apology, and then a bigger insult as all hell breaks loose.) It was nuts.

Martha and I reconciled over something crazy: salsa. She used to bring in this homemade salsa, very hot, very garlicky. Most of my co-workers were weenies, they couldn’t handle it but I genuinely loved the stuff. This, in turn, made Martha very happy, and she used to bring me jar after jar of it. (Hey, whatever it takes to get along, right?)

We used to get this little Mexican guy as a customer. He’d come in on a Saturday night and buy something like a beer or a frozen burrito. He’d never say a word, not in English, not in Spanish. He had an unfortunate habit, afterwards, of hanging around the front counter and staring down the various rednecks passing through. He’d pick out one and just eyeball him until the guy got agitated and started cussing and threatening him. I’d have to simultaneously try and chill the angry redneck out while trying to persuade the tiny, mute Mexican guy to leave.

The redneck would say to me, “You better tell your little buddy there to stop staring at me.”

I’d respond, “He’s not my buddy, he’s just a customer.” Then turning to the Mexican guy, “C’mon, dude, you better get the fuck out of here. Like, now.”

The redneck would fix the Mexican with his own stare, “I’m not gonna kick your ass in here because I don’t want cause trouble for this guy…[meaning me]…but if I catch your ass outside I’m gonna fuck you up but good.”

The Mexican would just keep staring.

I’d try to reason with the angry redneck, “Please don’t, okay? I know you can kick his ass, you know you can kick his ass, just let it go. I don’t know what the deal is with this guy, he’s just a weirdo. Okay? So please don’t.”

This scenario played out multiple times, and let me tell you, it was touch-and-go every time. Picking fights with large, drunken rednecks is not the recipe for a long, healthy life.

(What’s crazy is that later on we had the exact same thing with a short, Native American guy. He’d stare at rednecks, too, until they started cussing and threatening him. One night, he pissed off an actual cowboy. And yes, I was about to have a fight right there in the store between a Cowboy and an Indian. More on that particular cowboy, later.)

One night the mute Mexican decided to do the staring-thing with the employees (it was a slow night so I guess there weren’t any customers to piss off). I came out of the back room to find one of the new guys, Jonah, and Neil (a holdover from Freddy’s) telling the little guy he had to leave. I chimed in, figuring I had the most experience in getting the dude to leave. Nothing doing. He just kept staring. Ted walked in, on his night off, already a little drunk.

“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Ted asked.

He grabbed the guy by his shoulders, marched him to the store entrance and shoved him forcefully outside. The little guy bounced off of a steel support pole and fell down.

The other three of us were standing there with our mouths hanging open.

Ted turned with a fierce grin and said, “Now that’s how you handle shit!”

We all laughed in a kind of horrified shock at Ted’s quick, brutal and decisive action. Behind him on the sidewalk we could see the Mexican guy get up, rubbing his head. He staggered away into the darkness and we never saw him again.

(J-Cat had his own story about staring. After he left Bob’s Super-Mini, he moved north to Washington State with his girlfriend. J-Cat was standing in line at a liquor store and the customer in front of him kept turning around and staring at him. At some point, J-Cat had had enough. “What?!” he barked. The guy stuck his hand out for a handshake. “How you doing?” he asked in a soft-spoken, country voice. Recounting it to me later, J-Cat said, “I call it ’ the Washingtonian Stare’. Here, if you stare at somebody, you’re looking for a fight. Up there, they just want to say hello.”)

The aforementioned Cowboy rode up to the store one night when I was sweeping outside. I heard the clip-clop of hooves on pavement and there he was on a white horse, bigger than life. He was wearing a battered white Stetson, leather chaps, denims, plaid shirt, and of course, cowboy boots. Cowboy was in his late forties, with thick greying hair, a bushy mustache and face reddened by a lifetime of working outdoors. He dismounted and tied his horse up to one of the steel support poles outside the entrance.

Turning to me, the cowboy said, “I was outta gas and I needed smokes so I brought my hay-burner here.”

I just nodded. (Right. Right. Right.)

He went inside where my graveyard partner sold him a pack of cigarettes. The cowboy walked out and mounted up on his horse just as a car pulled in, blasting loud rap music. Three white kids got out, baseball caps on sideways, gangsta wannabes.

The cowboy and the kids stared at each other in disbelief.

“What the fuck, yo?” said one of the kids.

I just shook my head. “Worlds collide,” I said. “Worlds collide.”

I had the occasional customer enter the store with a bird on their shoulder, usually parrots, but in one lady’s case, a cockatoo. They put down a little towel for the bird to sit on—and use as a toilet (I guess a bird can’t be housebroken). I had one customer who not only had a large green parrot on his shoulder but an eye patch and actual peg leg as well. Not a prosthetic, like a flesh-colored leg-shaped substitute, but a stark metal rod with a cap, like a cane extending from his knee cap to the floor. Yes, he looked like a pirate; I believe that was his intention.

You see some really strange shit working in a liquor store.