1. Freddy Wood’s Market

I have pictures of my troubled past
and they’re shaped like broken glass

– Chris Isaak, “I’m Not Waiting”

Kate, Jim, and I moved down to the town of Shadow Valley in Sonoma County in the summer of 1990. (Shadow Valley occupies a kind of nether region between Cotati, Rohnert Park, and Penngrove.) We found a house to rent on the edge of town near the freeway. It had three bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, two bathrooms and two showers, a front yard with a hedge and a good-sized backyard adjacent to a senior citizen trailer park. It was the nicest place we had ever had. Jim and I got accepted to Sonoma State for the spring semester. After a couple of short-lived employment attempts elsewhere, I got a job at the liquor store downtown about a ten minute walk from the house. Jim got a job at a liquor store in the next town over and Kate began galloping race horses, an extremely hairy way to make a living, to say the least.

The Gulf War (the first one) began that winter with a bombing campaign of Iraq that culminated in the 100-hour ground war that routed Saddam Hussein’s forces from Kuwait. CNN created the 24-hour news cycle. The Soviet Union dissolved into multiple republics. Ken Burn’s Civil War documentary debuted on PBS, introducing millions of Americans to a historical event they hadn’t known they would care about.

David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks” debuted that winter as well, casting small-town America as a place of eccentricity, dark mystery, and unimaginable evil beneath its wholesome facade. “Twin Peaks” would seemingly morph into two other ‘90s TV shows: “The X-Files” and “Northern Exposure”. “ The X-Files” would feature two FBI agents struggling with unexplained cases, some with creatures like vampires, werewolves, and assorted other monsters, but largely with alien encounters of the negative kind. “Northern Exposure” was centered around the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska which was showcased as a place of positive eccentricity, diversity and acceptance (a kind of fantasy of small-town America, created by liberal arts majors).

At the liquor store, I would have close personal encounters with the denizens of small-town America who were often eccentric, though not always warm or accepting of strangers. It was definitely a learning experience; and as they say, the price of education is high.

Working in a liquor store was different from other retail jobs. The customers were often high or drunk (or both) and many of them had criminal records—as did many of my liquor store co-workers over the years. I became acquainted with a sub-culture I hadn’t known existed: redneck stoners or redneck hippies, a kind of offshoot of the biker scene. They were longhaired people who used drugs, may or may not have owned a motorcycle and had racial attitudes and a general outlook on life that had little to do with Peace, Love and Understanding. (While I dealt with bikers from time to time—and there was a biker bar, Butchie’s, just up the street—I wasn’t exactly intimate with them. They were a pretty surly bunch, not exactly welcoming to strangers and often engaged in various nefarious activities that I wanted nothing to do with or even know about. Bikers love to play against their villainous image by doing charity work, pledge drives, etc but even that could go sideways. A biker chick named Vicky came in the store one December and told me they were doing a toy drive over at Butchie’s. If I wanted to participate, I could just drop a toy off at the bar, “under the Christmas tree with the big SS symbol on it,” she informed me. “I think I’ll pass,” I told her.)

My first day on the job I got an over-ring on my very first transaction. An over-ring is a cancelled sale. You might ring up the wrong price or the wrong category (taxable vs. non-taxable, for instance) or the customer might change their mind. In this case, I hit the wrong button. Gus, the cadaverous, fifty-something-year-old alcoholic who was training me, leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Nice going, asshole.” Remembering that I just spent the last two weeks washing dishes at Round Table Pizza, I fought back the urge to punch him and smiled tightly. “Sorry.”

Less than an hour later a 40-something-year-old yuppie wandered in. He asked me where some item was.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. It’s my first day on the job.”

Giving me a disdainful glance, he said, “A customer could say that’s no excuse.”

“A customer could say that,” I replied. “But it wouldn’t help him find what he was looking for any faster.”

Later that afternoon, I tried to make up for it when I found a woman customer wandering the aisles. “Help you find anything?” I asked her.

“Oh, I really don’t know what I’m looking for,” she said.

“Well, that’s okay, I don’t know where anything is,” I told her. She laughed uncertainly and moved away from me.

That night, I had a woman customer whose change was sixty-nine cents. Now this lady actually lived under a pine tree in a vacant lot downtown. She was so dirty her hands were green as if they were covered in moss. They looked more like paws than hands. People thought she was a witch.

“Sixty-nine cents is your change,” I informed her.

“Sixty-nine,” she repeated in a husky voice meant to be seductive. “What a number.”

She was just the first in a series of filthy customers, both literally and metaphorically. It turns out women can be just as foul-mouthed as men (if not more so) and especially if they’re sexually frustrated and drunk. But many of my male customers looked like they had taken a vow to bathe as infrequently as possible. I used to joke that this was the only town in America where soap came with instructions.

I had a regular customer, Animal, who smelled so bad I tried to hold my breath as much as possible throughout his transaction. For some reason, he became chatty during our interactions and I would be forced to breathe in the special funk that encircled him. The smell would linger five minutes after he was gone. I told my co-workers, “ He smells so fucking bad the smell is practically visible. And I think it has fleas.”

Buddy was another regular, a short, bedraggled man in his fifties. He had a scruffy beard and always wore a flat tweed cap. He consumed quarts of Big Bear malt liquor all day (as far as I know he was the only person on Earth who drank it). That was a problem. Not that he was a drunk, but that he drank it all day long and bought no more than two quarts at a time. Eventually, I’d have to cut him off during the evening when he was too visibly intoxicated. This upset Buddy to no end and he would argue with me in a kind of frustrated whine, “Why?” I’d explain to him that if I sold him alcohol and he went staggering out of the store where a passing cop might see him, the cops could hold me liable for over-serving him. So Buddy would pathetically attempt to conceal his drunkenness from me, making a Herculean effort to walk in a straight line throughout the store. It was often comical to watch him, “going up on one wheel” as I called it, when one of his feet would leave the ground as he struggled to maintain his balance. When Buddy got nervous, he would hum loudly as he approached the checkstand, loudly and tunelessly. I guess it was supposed to serve as some kind of audio distraction to keep me from seeing how drunk he was. If he was really loaded, he’d dance in place in front of the counter (it’s kind of how a drunk treads water, to keep himself from falling over). The only other regular purchase I remember Buddy making were quarts of acidophilus milk; “for my health” he informed me in the kind of superior tone aristocrats use when addressing peasants. Someone told me that Buddy had once been a college professor and every once in awhile he’d get a little snotty with me and other employees.

Del was a local drunk,too; a middle-aged, grey-bearded black guy, always wearing a secondhand brown suit, two-tone shoes and a porkpie hat, almost invariably cheerful. He rode a large red adult tricycle all over town. People would honk their car horns and he’d wave back. He was a good-natured souse and customers would yell,”Del!” when he entered the store the way people on the TV show “Cheers” would yell “Norm!” when the character Norm entered the bar. I cut him off maybe twice in the time I knew him. He didn’t argue, he’d just sadly accept it. Del was one of the few customers who ever tipped me. He played the lottery regularly and when he won, he’d tip me out a couple of bucks, telling me I was his “lucky charm”.

The owner of the store, Freddy Wood, was a large, fat, bald man with glasses. He could be jolly but more often his manner was that of quiet menace. He was a crook. He got deals on cases of Budweiser which he had us break up into six-packs. Have you ever manually threaded cans into plastic six-pack netting? It’s hard at first but it gets easier with practice. That was no big deal but he gave employees no breaks on an eight-hour shift (which is how I developed varicose veins in both ankles). Thanks, boss. Luckily, there were a pair of wooden flower boxes right outside the front door of the store where me and my fellow employees would perch whenever we could (i.e., there being no customers or bosses around).

He had a slutty daughter in her late twenties named Freedom. The joke was she was named that because she was free and easy and not very bright. She was a real nasty piece of work. Lazy, entitled and dumb as a brick, she did as little as possible during her shift, which of course, created more work for the late shift, which is to say, me.

I once wrote a note demanding that the day shift do their jobs. My manager Maxine told me later that Freddy read it and wanted to fire me on the spot. He thought it was directed at him.

“No,” I said. “I was talking about Freedom.”

Maxine shrugged. “Well, everybody knows Freedom doesn’t do any work.”

Another time, two of a handful of our regular black customers came in. They were sisters. I had just started my shift and was desperately playing catchup, trying to re-stock the half-empty beer coolers.

“You’re slacking, you hear me?” one of them told me. “This shelf is almost out. You are slacking.”

I flipped. “If the motherfucking day shift would do their motherfucking jobs, the motherfucking shelf would not be empty right now!”

The other sister said, “Ooh, I would not let him talk to me like that.”

But the first woman was cool. She knew I wasn’t pissed at her but with my co-workers.

She stroked my arm. “It’s okay, baby, just let it out…”

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “It’s just really frustrating.”

I developed a habit of coming in a half hour early just to stock the beer coolers and straighten out the walk-in fridge in the back. Maxine would just let the delivery drivers dump their beer anywhere inside, which created chaos. I would organize the beer by type: Coors with the Coors, Bud with the Bud, Miller with the Miller, etc. This was all off the clock. I wasn’t getting paid for this extra work but it felt worthwhile just to save myself all the aggravation when my shift started during the evening rush.

Freddy got divorced and moved in over the store. He had a shower and a bathroom installed upstairs. He also quit smoking and drinking at the same time. Talk about a cranky boss. I still remember the night he fell off the wagon, hard. He came staggering in, smoking a cigar and started talking to me in a drunken slur. I thought, Hallelujah! We’re saved!

There were times when he was drunk, he would get all sentimental. “Christopher, Christopher…stick around and good things will happen for you, “ Freddy would tell me. (It really freaked me out because that’s exactly how my dad talked to me, repeating my full name twice like that.) Not that I believed him. Drunks always say shit they don’t mean or don’t deliver on.

Johanna was an older blonde lady with glasses who I closed with my first week. Every time she walked past me behind the counter she’d grab me around the waist and say, ”Oops, I have to get by.” I thought that was pretty weird but since she didn’t grab me anywhere else I didn’t make an issue of it.

My first night, Johanna was outside smoking a cigarette, talking to some young guy she knew. They were joking and yukking it up so I assumed they were friends or family. He came in to buy a half pint of booze. When I ID-ed him, he said he forgot it or whatever and I just let it go.

He promptly walked outside and showed his bottle to Johanna. She stormed in and asked me why I sold it to him.

“ I thought he was a friend of yours so…”

“So nothing!” Johanna said. “If they don’t have valid ID you don’t sell to them no matter what, friend or no friend, you hear me?! You could cost the store its liquor license and all of us our jobs. I could fire you right now!”

I held up my palms. “ Sorry, it will never happen again.”

“It better not.”

The next night a guy in his late twenties came in to buy a bottle. I asked for ID and he said he didn’t have it. When I told him I couldn’t sell to him, he freaked.

First he pleaded then he threatened me.

I stood firm. “Sorry, I can’t sell to you.”

He left, cussing me.

Johanna came from around the corner of an aisle where she’d been listening to the whole thing.

“You handled that perfect,” she told me. And I never knowingly sold to someone underage again or without ID.

Was it a setup with the guy? Did she tell someone to come in and see if they could pressure me into selling? Maybe. Possibly. Probably. I don’t know.