5. Trouble Coming Every Day

I was talking one night to one of my regulars, Sherman. He lived just a few doors down from the store. Sherman was a short, red-faced, Vietnam veteran who worked as a school custodian. (One of the original residents of Shadow Valley, he once told me he could remember when Main Street was a single dirt road running through the center of town. There was just the one store; the general store at the crossroads–which doubled as the gas station–and the only law enforcement was a single county sheriff driving through once an hour.)

I said to Sherman, “You know, Abe Lincoln was a liquor store guy.”

“Is that right?”

“Well, he worked in a general store that sold liquor,” I told him. “When he was first running for Congress, his opponent, Stephen Douglas, in a public debate, brought up the fact that Abe used to sell booze for a living. Lincoln said,’ That’s right—and Mr. Douglas here was one of my best customers. But I’ve left my side of the counter while he clings as tenaciously as ever, to his.’ ”

“I’ll be damned,” Sherman marveled. “Abe Lincoln worked in a liquor store.”

“And you know what happened to him?”

“He became President?” he said, joking.

“Somebody shot him.”

They call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday’s just as bad
They call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday’s just as bad
Wednesday’s worse, and Thursday’s oh so sad

The eagle flies on Friday, Saturday I go out to play
Well, the eagle flies on Friday, and Saturday I go out to play
Sunday I go to church, Lord, and I kneel down and pray

—“Stormy Monday” – T-Bone Walker

I was standing outside the front door of Freddy Wood’s Market when a car swooped in, parallel to the sidewalk, right on top of me. For a brief second, my life flashed before my eyes.

The driver was a regular, a tough guy with curly blond hair. (I called him Mr. Lucky Strikes in my head because he was the lone survivor of the three customers who smoked the non-filter brand. The other two died of heart attacks.) He asked me, “Can I get a pack of smokes?”

“Dude, I thought you were gonna shoot me,” I told him.

“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Mr. Lucky Strikes said.

“If you think people only get shot in the movies, you don’t get out enough,” I replied.

I never got shot or robbed while I worked in the liquor store but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened; it’s not like it was a far-fetched possibility. Working as a liquor store clerk is one of the most dangerous professions there is. Statistically, it’s right up there behind fishermen and lumberjacks.

Now I was working in a small town in northern California, not some gritty inner-city neighborhood but I still encountered violent criminal-types on a nightly basis (and on a bad night, sometimes an hourly basis). I used to say I felt like a cop—I dealt with the same kind of people they did— but unlike them, I had no gun and no backup.

My graveyard partners were unreliable, they were often ex-felons themselves with long criminal records; or former addicts; or both. I had no way of knowing which way their sympathies lay or whether they would back me up in a fight.

I was also a fixed target; if a customer had a beef with me, he knew exactly where and when to find me five nights a week. And it’s not like it was hard to piss people off; it happened every night at closing time.

In California, it’s illegal to sell alcohol past 2 am. Both owners I worked for at the liquor store had the clock set ten minutes fast so we would stop selling at ten to two every night. (This was a fail-safe so that the store didn’t lose its license.)

Our regulars all knew this and yet they would still bitch, argue and complain about it every night of the week. “C’mon, man, you know it’s not two! Your clock’s fast.”

I’d just shake my head. “You know the deal. The owner doesn’t want us selling past time.”

Strangers would completely lose it with me. “You asshole! You’re really getting off on this, huh? This your favorite part of the night, telling people no?”

“Not exactly,” I’d tell them.

Occasionally, we’d make the rare exception—for regular customers who weren’t obnoxious about it, and who didn’t make a habit of it—we might sell them booze a couple of minutes after our clock said two (but in reality, no later than five minutes to the actual 2 am). But it was a drag, knowing that conflict was imminent every night at closing time. That’s usually when the trouble started or at least was guaranteed to to be a real possibility. I used to warn my partners, “Don’t jinx us!”

We’d be having an easy night or a slow night and the idiot I was working with would say, “Boy, we finally got an easy shift…”

“—Noooo! You stupid motherfucker!” I’d yell. “You just fucking jinxed us!”

“What are you talking about? What jinx?”

“You just fucking screwed us, you dumb shit!” I’d moan.

“It’s been slow all night. What could happen?” the jackass would say.

“Just wait ’til we try and close. You’ll see,” I’d tell them.

Closing time would roll around and inevitably there would be trouble, more than usual because of the jinx.

Afterwards, the idiot partner would say, “Wow, you were right. That was terrible. I don’t get it, it was such an easy night…”

“The jinx! The fucking jinx!” I’d mutter.

“Ok, I guess you’re right…”

“—I know I’m right!” I’d exclaim.

“I’ll never say anything again,” they’d finally concede, sheepishly.

“ You better not,” I’d warn them.

Full moons were also bad. People would definitely act weirder and more out of control. The worst was a time when it was a full moon—and it was Friday the 13th. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving and we had customers who were falling-down drunk at 8 o’clock in the evening.

I had a bad feeling so I told J-Cat, who was my partner that night, “ We got trouble coming in two hours, I can feel it.”

J-Cat, who knew me pretty well by then, just nodded. “Okay, I believe you.”

Two hours later on the dot, it happened. A guy got kicked out of Butchie’s, the biker bar. We could hear him roaring down the street a block and a half away. A big, dark-haired biker guy entered the crowded store with his buddy, a shorter, grey-haired biker.

“Fuck everyone in this place!” he yelled to announce his presence.

His buddy approached me and asked for a pack of cigarettes while Big Biker Man addressed J-Cat. “I been out too long, you know what I mean?”

“Yes, I do! Yes, I do!” said J-Cat, gleefully, one jailbird to another. I thought, That’s a big fucking help. Thanks a lot, dude. Just bond with the motherfucker, why don’t you?

Outwardly, I acted oblivious.

Big Biker Man repeated,“I been out too long, I need to go back inside.” Then eyeballing me (who was half his size) he said, “I want to fight this guy. Yeah, I wanna fight this little dude right here.”

Everything stopped, went quiet. It was like the entire store was holding its breath to see what would happen next.

The silence was broken when his partner said, “Shut up, Sal! Just shut the fuck up and let’s get the fuck out of here!” He pushed him out the door and they left.

I was not thrilled by that encounter (especially in light of how many things could have gone wrong for me if I had to physically confront a biker twice my size who wanted to go back to jail). On the other hand, it proved that my instincts were working just fine, my radar was right on the money. (Woo-hoo! I almost predicted my own near-fatal beatdown at the hands of yet another redneck asshole. Hooray for me!)

That was an extreme example but by no means the only time I felt seriously threatened.

I once waited on an old Latino gangbanger (a real OG) who had three teardrops tattooed below the corner of one eye. The teardrops signified the three people he killed in prison. I was pretty nervous during that transaction. That makes the third Triple Killer I’ve met—that I’m aware of. (There was the Killer Couple at the youth hostel in San Francisco and then the bad check writer Mr. Action Hero and finally this guy.)

Then there was the bearded, long-haired bookmaker, paroled from San Quentin that day and kicked out of Butchie’s that night. He walked into the store, snarled a request for some Marlboro Reds. He threw his money at me and snatched the cigarette pack out of my hand. Then he threw his head back and yelled, “You just tell everybody that ‘Johnny the Book’ is back!”

The week of the LA riots, I had these two young black guys with forties of malt liquor in their hands try and walk out the door without paying. They grinned at me, basically daring me to do something to stop them.

I jumped out from behind the counter with both my hands raised.

“Whoa-whoa-whoa, fellas!” I was smiling. They smiled back at me, then their faces hardened.

One of the guys asked me, “You like your job that much?”

Very soberly, I replied, “Ain’t a lotta jobs up here.”

He nodded and they walked back to the register to pay.

The other guy, trying to salvage something from the encounter, asked me to give him a can of chewing tobacco for free. “I’m Kevin Mitchell’s cousin,” he told me. (Kevin Mitchell was the star slugger for the San Francisco Giants at the time.)

“Then tell Kevin to send you some money,” I quipped, making the guy’s partner crack up.

They paid for their stuff, walked out the door and immediately got into a fight with some rednecks across the street.

I once had a Latino street gang come in the store, four or five guys and a very pretty girl. The guys headed to the back for the beer, the pretty girl walked over to my register and started flirting with me. I was thinking, Great, now I’m gonna die when one of these guys sees me chatting with his girlfriend. The gangsters came back up with twelve-packs of beer. One of them said, “I see you like my sister, huh?” I was still searching for a response that would help me avoid a beatdown when they all laughed. “It’s cool,” the guy said.

I was talking to a regular customer one afternoon when these two tall, weathered-looking bikers entered.

“You got a phone I can use?” one of them said, sounding exactly like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. (He even had the Clint squint down.)

The two guys made my blood run cold (and I had been waiting on bikers for awhile by then).

“There’s a payphone right outside,” I said, gesturing feebly.

“Thank you, gentlemen, “ rasped Biker Clint.

They walked outside and immediately five police cars from five different agencies pulled up with a screech. The two bikers were arrested on the spot. What they did to warrant such a massive response from law enforcement I never found out.

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

The turnover at the store continued. Megan left for another job and Freddy hired this twenty-something-year-old girl named Sammy.

I had first met Sammy as a customer. She came in and bought a Mother’s Day card. “ Taking care of Mom?” I asked, rhetorically.

“Actually it’s for my dad,” Sammy told me.

“Your dad?”

“Well, my mom left me after I was born so I raised just by my dad so I buy him cards on Mother’s and Father’s Day”.

“Wow, that’s really nice,” I said, somewhat touched.

About a year or two later, Sammy came to work at the store. She was tall and tan and willowy with long, straight, golden-brown hair. Sammy looked like the quintessential girl-next-door and she had, in fact, once done a TV ad for shampoo by virtue of her great hair. She was invariably sunny and cheerful, a ray of light in the otherwise drab and dingy universe of the liquor store. Sammy also had a talent for making unintentional double-entendres and she would blush when I would point them out to her. (Sadly, I recall none of them.) We had a blast working together and customers would ask us if we were brother and sister. Sammy had a boyfriend and I had a girlfriend so it usually felt more like we were siblings than like we were potential dating partners.

Sammy’s dad, BA had a tattoo parlor next door. He was about six feet tall but extremely thick, all muscle (and not gym muscle, either. Working muscle.) BA had long hair and a beard and these incongruously merry, Santa Claus eyes that he shared with his daughter. I say incongruous because BA was one of the most feared guys in town.

Sammy told me he was once slamming a guy’s head against the side of a car when a woman approached and begged him to stop. BA paused. “I’m sorry, m’am. Is this your car?” he asked politely. When she told him no, BA roared, “Then what are you bothering me for?!” and went back to battering the guy’s head against the vehicle.

Sammy came to work at the store around the same time as my brother, Jim. Working with Jim was cool but the customers acted completely weird about it. They confused us with each other and would resume conversations or reference transactions that they’d had with the other brother. This, in turn, confused us. We look related but not alike. Jim is taller, skinnier, younger, and has spiky, blonde hair. I’m shorter, stockier, older and I have curly, brown hair. Nevertheless, customers continued to mix us up.

The one thing that stood out about Jim’s time at the liquor store was the night I talked him into putting on a large, green, Styrofoam top hat that had been part of a Saint Patrick’s Day display and then getting him on a Big Wheel (a plastic tricycle left by some employee’s kid). I proceeded to give him a big shove and sent him flying down the center aisle just as a woman customer entered the store. Jim and the woman’s eyes locked in mutual surprise as they both burst out laughing. Jim told me later that the next couple of times they encountered each other in the store they would both crack up, remembering it.

While Freddy didn’t allow me to have a break, I gave Sammy and Jim half hour breaks. Jim left after six months but Sammy stayed on. Freddy fired her out of the blue, partly because I gave her breaks (and he didn’t like the precedent that set), and partly because we got on so well and he didn’t like the fact that we were having fun at work.

BA didn’t take his daughter’s firing well. He confronted Freddy in his office and when Freddy made some smart-ass remark about being able to fire who he wanted to, for whatever reason he wanted to, BA lifted Freddy off the ground by his throat (all 300-plus pounds of him. With one hand!). Sammy didn’t get her job back but Freddy was considerably more apologetic about the whole thing.

A few years later I met Sammy over at Butchie’s. She had invited me to stop by for a drink. So we were in there, laughing it up, remembering old times. When we got up to leave, there were a bunch of bikers clustered by the door. I was wondering if I was about to run into a whole lot of trouble but when we approached, they dispersed rapidly, practically ducking and hiding under tables and chairs. I knew they weren’t running from me; it was the power of BA’s reputation. They weren’t going to upset his daughter, Sammy, or her presumed date and bring down his wrath upon them. Crazy shit. (It’s like the Sioux Indian warrior, Man Afraid of His Horse. I once had a college class on Native American history where the professor and the rest of the class were laughing about that name. After class, I explained to the professor that the name did not mean the warrior was afraid of his horse; it meant if you just saw his horse, you were afraid. So in this case, Man Afraid of His Daughter.)

(I still run into Sammy in town every couple of years or so. She’s one of my favorite people on this Earth. Her dad is still terrifying.)

Neil was another employee at the liquor store. Not a new hire, he had worked there almost as long as me. Neil was a tall, skinny, black college student who always wore shorts and rode his bike everywhere. In the wintertime, when it got really cold, his nose would turn red and I would tease him about wearing shorts.

“You Southern Californians think it’s your God-given right to wear shorts year round, I don’t get it, “ I’d say.

“It’s more comfortable,” Neil would reply with a shrug.

“Oh, yeah, you look real comfortable,” I’d retort. “Like fucking Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

(The two occasions I recall him wearing long pants, I didn’t recognize him at first, I swear to God.)

Neil had a frat brother, Gumby. Gumby was a tall, blonde, ex-Marine. And not just any kind of Marine. He’d been Marine Recon; they’re considered the “Marines of the Marines,” kind of like the Marines’ version of Special Forces. The first time I waited on Gumby, he was a little rude but he became more relaxed after I waited on him enough times. He had a pretty blonde wife, who acted as a restraining influence on him as far as I could tell. They came in together and he bought a six-pack of beer from me. Looking over my shoulder at the bottles of booze on the shelf behind me, Gumby said,”Tequila! Every time I drink that I get into a fight. Don’t never let me buy tequila.” (I wasn’t sure if he was addressing me or his wife or both of us together.) Sure enough, one night he came in alone, in a foul mood and bought some tequila from me. All’s I could think was, Oh shit, someone’s in trouble.

One night Neil and Gumby came in the store on one of Neil’s nights off, they were drunk and laughing about something. After they headed to the back of the store to get beer, one of the scariest guys I’ve ever seen in my life came up to the door and peered in, looking for them. He was all in black, with long black hair and a black beard, he just exuded pure evil and menace. He disappeared by the time Neil and Gumby came back up front, still giddy.

“There was just some motherfucker here at the door looking for you,” I told Gumby. (How I knew it was Gumby, and not Neil, the guy was looking for, I’m not sure. Maybe Gumby had yelled something just before entering the store. Or maybe I just knew that Gumby, the ex-Marine, was more likely to have started some shit than Neil, who was lot more laid-back.)

Gumby sobered up immediately and stared back at me. “You sure he was looking for me?”

“I am not saying this to get you all worked up for nothing. I just want you to be ready in case he’s waiting to jump you outside the door,” I said.

Gumby nodded. “I appreciate that.”

The two of them left the store without incident but Gumby was friendlier to me from then on.

I had another ex-service guy as a customer around this time, a former Army Ranger. He was a beefy, brooding, dark-haired guy who made very little conversation. One night, he and Gumby made their acquaintance and exchanged which branch of the military that they had served in. On the surface, it was all very friendly and mutually respectful. Separately, each one scorned the other to me and their respective service branch. I shuddered to think what would happen if the two of them ever came to blows inside the liquor store; what with all their specialized training, it would have been a hellacious fight.

It was around this time we had trouble with Stu, the shoplifter. Stu was a weaselly, sometimes menacing, long-haired, bearded redneck. He was one of three brothers. Charlie, the oldest brother, was a drug dealer. He was actually pretty cool. Friendly, affable even, he was one of the people who helped out the black motorcyclist whose bike had broken down. Doug, the middle brother, was a mechanic. He was an okay dude, too. I never had a good feeling about Stu. He was pointed out to me early on as a repeat shoplifter. He wasn’t allowed inside the store but he was allowed to stand at the entrance and buy cigarettes or beer. That policy struck me as nuts but it was Freddy’s store and that’s how he decided to handle it.

Stu was sensitive about his status as a shoplifter/local pariah and he looked at me, all hurt feelings, when I explained to Neil that while Stu wasn’t allowed in the store, he could order stuff from the sidewalk and we’d take his money and then bring him his change and his purchases.

“You gotta problem with me?” Stu asked me.

“Nope. Freddy does,” I told him.“I don’t know you. I just don’t trust you.”

One night when Neil was working, Stu, wearing a poncho, came up to the entrance and asked for a pack of smokes. When Neil turned to get them, he heard the clink of a bottle. When he came back to the door, there was a gap on the shelf where a half-pint of whiskey had been and Stu had both hands hidden underneath his poncho. When Neil confronted Stu about the missing bottle, Stu threatened him before leaving.

The next night, when Dave Johnson told Stu he wasn’t welcome anymore, Stu threatened him, too.

“I can’t see well enough to fight anymore,” Dave told me. “So I’m walking home with a gun, in case he tries to jump me.”

“A gun?” I asked, somewhat surprised.

“Yeah, Freddy keeps one in the desk drawer of his office. He says I can borrow it any time I need it.”

“Fuck that guy!” I said. “I’ll eighty-six him, the next time I see him.”

Saturday night rolled around. It was busy. Dave was in the back on his lunch break and I was dealing with the rush. I heard “Hey!” and I looked over and Stu was standing there in the doorway.

“Can I get a pack of matches?” he asked, all meek and mild.

I grabbed a pack of matches off the counter and walked over to the doorway, shaking my head. “You ain’t even supposed to be in here.”

“What?!” Stu snapped, suddenly turning aggressive.

“You ain’t even supposed to be in here,” I repeated, handing him the matches.

“Oh yeah? Fuck you, man. I ‘ll get you after work!” he yelled.

“Yeah? Fuck you!” I said, flicking my hand under my chin.

Stu stepped forward and punched me in the face. It surprised me (Why?) more than it hurt me. Then he charged me. Using my football instincts from Pop Warner, I sidestepped him, grabbed him under his arms and used his momentum against him, taking him the length the counter and throwing him into the far wall. Stu came out firing, landing one punch on the top of my forehead. I hit him in the face with a flurry of punches and drove him against the wall repeatedly. Realizing he couldn’t trade punches with me, Stu tried charging me again but I grabbed him and started body-slamming him against the wall.

“My shoulder! You separated my shoulder! Stop!” he cried.”C’mon, man! Stop!”

Recalling his arm had been in a sling about a month before, I relented.

I still had him in a bear-hug when Dave Johnson strode up, smiling. The customers in the store were just standing there, open-mouthed.

“Hand me the phone, Chris, and I’ll call the police,” Dave said.

I gave him a look, indicating that I still had my hands full with Stu.

“Never mind,” Dave said. He grabbed the phone and dialed 911 and told the dispatcher there had been a fight.

“C’mon, man, let me go,” whined Stu. I was tired of holding him, and confident the police were on their way, I let him go.

Stu was crying and sniveling all the way out the door. As soon as he got ten yards from me outside on the sidewalk, he turned tough again.

“You’re dead, man! You’re dead! Wait ’til I get my hands on you again!”

Dave and I laughed at him.

The cops rolled up and separated us. I had to fill out a police report, giving my side of the story in my statement.

Around me, I could hear the cops interviewing customers. One lady was saying, “I don’t know what happened! There was so much swearing! I don’t know!”

Luckily for me, a college kid corroborated my story, telling the cops that Stu had hit me first (otherwise, they would have locked us both up for fighting).

Then came the fucked-up part: the cops told me that I had to place Stu under arrest; for whatever reason, I had to make a citizen’s arrest if I wanted him to go to jail. I hemmed and hawed about it, discussing it with Dave.

“After all, what do I care? I already kicked his ass,” I told him.

“No,” said Dave. “Freddy would want you to have Stu arrested. In fact, if you don’t have Stu arrested, there’s a chance Freddy just might fire you.”

“Well, fuck that.”

I went over to the cops and told them I was ready to make a citizen’s arrest. They told me I had to point at Stu and say, “You’re under arrest.” So I did, feeling melodramatic and silly.

They put him in the back of the patrol car and drove him away. Dave slapped me on the back and told me I did the right thing.

We closed for the night and Dave handed me a six-pack of my favorite micro-brewed beer.

As we sat in the back room having a couple of beers, Dave told me, “I could see the whole thing on the video monitor in Freddy’s office. I had one hand on the gun and the other on the phone.”

“The gun? Who were you gonna shoot, Dave? You’re blind as a bat!” I said as we both laughed.

I went home and finished the rest of the beer. I was so jacked on adrenaline from the fight that it had no effect on me whatsoever. I pulled an all-nighter because Megan was picking me up early in the morning to drive us to Santa Cruz to meet her parents.

We drove down and I told Megan on the way about the fight. A couple of hours later I was recounting it all over again to her stepfather and later in the day, to her mom. I guess it helped me make a favorable impression.

The aftermath of the fight was crazy. I became a minor hero. Customers and employees were all congratulating me. Freddy beamed like a proud papa at me. (Dave told me that Freddy was offering to hire some guys to really work Stu over if I wanted. “Are you both crazy? “ I said.” That’s a bigger crime than the one he committed. Besides, I already kicked his ass and had him arrested.”) Some people who had been neutral or even hostile to me were all smiles and backslaps and “attaboy”s now. Customers who had been friendly before were even more amiable. A tall, lanky CHP officer, a Dallas Cowboys fan who I talked football with, offered his support if I ever had a problem. So did Gumby, the ex-Marine. There was even a really scary Italian guy, a beefy college kid who worked as a waiter at Red Lobster, a regular customer, who’d heard about the fight from his buddy, the eyewitness who told the cops Stu hit me first. His eyes positively lit up at the prospect of potential violence when he offered me his help in any fight I might have in the future. (I’m just glad he was on my side.) Part of it, of course, was how much Stu had been hated and despised as a local bully. Seeing him get his comeuppance was gratifying to a lot of people in town. This extended even to the police. I was standing outside the store one night with my broom and a cop drove past in his patrol car and gave me a salute. Another local cop told Dave that whenever he felt blue, he went and looked at Stu’s booking photo. (Apparently, I’d given him two black eyes, a bloody nose and a fat lip.)

The week after the fight, a big blonde biker chick (built along the lines of a female Viking) came in the store and looked me up and down. “You the guy that had the fight with Stu?”

I nodded.

“You don’t have a mark on you,” Viking Girl said. “I was in jail the night they brought him in. You fucked him up good.”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling somewhat bashful.

“You wanna go out sometime?” she asked me.

“I already have a girlfriend,“ I told her.

Viking Girl shook her head. “Well, if you ever change your mind…”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Later, Dave told me I was lucky I didn’t take her up on her offer. Viking Girl was notorious for beating up her boyfriends, which is why she was in jail when Stu was brought in.

That was the good part. The bad part was that Stu wasn’t due to go to trial for the better part of a year. He began stalking me. In all weather, he’d be out there in the street after 2 am, waiting for me, one hand in his pocket. Did he have a knife or a gun in there? I didn’t know and I didn’t want to find out, either. I started getting rides home from Jim or Megan. I wasn’t afraid of fighting him again, exactly. I was afraid that if we fought again I wouldn’t stop this time; that I’d beat him to death and have to go to prison. That terrified me. The other thing that scared me was Stu trying to find out where I lived. I was afraid he’d firebomb the house or something while I was at work, putting Kate and Jim in jeopardy. Eventually, I contacted the DA in charge of the case and told her Stu was stalking me. She got a restraining order against him but neglected to inform me. That did me no good whatsoever. If I had known, I could have had him arrested anytime he came within fifty feet of me. As it was, I told the cops about him so they started parking a patrol car outside the store at closing time. One night a cop (looking out for me) busted him for methamphetamine possession, Stu’s first felony.

For all the jokes about Dave’s failing eyesight, it turned out he was actually going blind. At forty years’ old! Some rare eye disease or something. He quit work and started taking instruction in how to live as a blind person. Megan and I went to visit him and it was incredibly awkward. We were this happy young couple and here he was, looking at his future as a blind man. It was unbearably depressing and sad and all the gifts and best wishes weren’t going to make it any better. We never saw him again after that.

Dave’s replacement was this twenty-five-year-old blonde tough guy named Rob. He had spent time working on the racetrack circuit (which was a pretty rough crowd, Kate informed me). He was friendly enough at first as I showed him the ropes and introduced him to my regulars. Over time, however, Rob began to resent the fact that I was popular with a lot of customers, especially the more attractive women. He was also jealous that I had a girlfriend. Rob made a point of telling Megan that I “talked to pretty girls all day.” She was unfazed by this but I wasn’t exactly thrilled by him trying to sabotage my relationship.

He had Buddy the alcoholic arrested for being drunk in public after Buddy gave him some attitude when Rob cut him off one night. I thought that was a little heavy-handed and I told him so. “Well, he won’t be giving us shit, anymore,” Rob said, smugly.

Then came the afternoon when three fifteen-year-old kids dropped by, two guys and a girl. One kid said, “God, what a fuckin’ dump!”

Rob took issue with this. “What did you just say?”

“I said this was a dump.”

“ Yeah? I work here and when you talk bad about this place, it’s like you’re talking bad about my home,” Rob said.

The other two kids all started to edge towards the door. The second kid said, “C’mon, dude, let’s go.”

“Better listen to your little friend,” Rob said. “Better leave now…before I fuck you and make you my bitch.”

Wide-eyed, the kid backed away. I winced and clutched my forehead.

After the kids departed, I turned on Rob. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

“What? He was a mouthy little punk and I put him in his place.”

“You just dissed that kid in front of his best friend and his girl!” I exclaimed.

“So what?”

“So what? He’s fifteen! What’s to fuckin’ stop that kid from going home, getting a gun, coming back here and wasting both of us? Fucking fifteen! How much time do you think he’d have to do?!”

Rob rubbed his jaw. “I didn’t think about that.”

“No? Well, think about it next time. Jesus!”

“Why are you so upset?” Rob asked me.

“ You left that kid nowhere to go. You totally humiliated him. You coulda said, ‘Fuck you! or ‘I’m gonna kick your ass!’ but no…make him your bitch. What the fuck, Rob?”

The incident didn’t improve matters between us. Rob’s veiled hostility towards me became a little more open every day. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t trust him not to come after me. I still had Stu stalking me. To make matters worse, Megan had moved in and was been living with me and Kate and Jim. There was a lot of tension in the house. I had no buffer any more; when I came home from work, stressed out of my mind, Megan was there to see it all. I had no place to be alone. I was cracking up. Megan encouraged me to quit without notice. So I did (and one of the dumbest things I ever did, too). I wrote Freddy and Maxine a note explaining my decision but that didn’t help at all. I was unemployed for the next three months, screwed by my decision to quit without notice. Explaining to potential employers that Freddy was a crook and that I was being stalked just made me seem like a nut.

“These were the bad times.”

— Henry Hill, “Goodfellas”

After the better part of a year of this crap, Stu finally pled guilty to assaulting me without it going to trial. It had taken quite a toll on me, though. I had won the battle but lost the war.

Two things happened that spring: Megan moved out and I got a job. She moved to a granny unit, a one-room cottage in someone’s backyard. I got a job at the mall in Santa Rosa, at Madeline Sports. I was hired as assistant manager (of all things) for this corporate sporting goods store, part of a chain on the West Coast.

My relationship was going bust. I would go visit Megan in her tiny cottage, which somehow managed to feel even smaller than my bedroom. She had a futon that folded out into a bed. I swear it seemed like the bed touched all four walls when the futon was opened up. I spent a few weekends there and I felt like I was dying of claustrophobia. When I would get there after work, I’d immediately have to have a couple of beers (this was unusual for me at the time). Megan had an old turntable and a handful of old records. I’d reach for “Led Zeppelin III” and put on the song “Since I’ve Been Loving You”, a seven-minute blues song of heartbreak and romantic despair. Until recently (when I researched the lyrics for this story) I had always believed the song’s chorus to be: “Since I’ve been loving you, I’m about to lose my world and mine”, which perfectly summed up how I felt about our relationship.

Megan was putting pressure on me to move out and live with her. I was resisting, telling her that I couldn’t just leave Kate and Jim in the lurch, without me there to pay a third of the rent. Her parents were going to help us buy a house, offering a hundred grand as a down payment. I had to go on these house-hunting trips with Megan and this snotty realtor lady. While a hundred grand sounds like a lot of money, every house we looked at was in a gang neighborhood. I’d spot the graffiti tags on the way in. Every house we looked at was off-kilter, the foundations were uneven. I had no intention of leaving Kate and Jim high and dry and I had no intention of being beholden to Megan’s parents the rest of my life.

It turns out the actual chorus of the song is “Since I’ve been loving you, I’m about to lose my worried mind.” (“My worried mind”? “My worried mind”?! Is that it?! Who cares?! I was about to lose my world and mine.)

Megan broke up with me in a three-hour monologue, telling me that since I wasn’t prepared to move in with her and marry her immediately, we were finished as a couple. (She didn’t mention directly that there was another guy but sometime afterwards I remembered how some male co-worker’s name kept coming up in the last couple of months we were together, and how, unlike me, he’d liked to do “fun things” like rollerblade and go dirt-biking).

I was crushed. And I was stuck in a shitty job I hated even more than the liquor store.