8. Mean People Suck

Waiting for tomorrow
Never comes

–“Three Imaginary Boys”, The Cure

I’ve been down–I’ve downhearted, baby
I’ve been down–I’ve downhearted, baby
Ever since the day we met
Ever since the day we met

–“Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth with Money In My Hand”, Primitive Radio Gods

There was a bumpersticker popular in the ‘90s that read: “Mean People Suck.” I didn’t think much of it. It’s not that I didn’t agree with the sentiment but the wording was so incredibly lame. You might as well write “Bullies Are Mean.” (Well, no shit.) Saying “Mean People Suck” was just so whiny and ineffectual; such a definitively weak-ass liberal observation to make that it almost made me sympathize with Mean People. ( I’m not really a big bumpersticker guy. I’ve always said I had no philosophical beliefs that fit on a bumper sticker and no political beliefs that rhymed with “Hey-hey, ho-ho.” But I digress.) Anyway—there was a car parked on the same block as the liquor store, a car that I passed every day as I walked to work. It had the “Mean People Suck” bumpersticker on its rear bumper, except that the car’s owner had razored off the word “Mean” so it simply read: “People Suck.”

It always made me laugh. As if I needed reminding.

There was this little old lady who would pick up all the trash and cigarette butts outside the store. Good, right? No, not good. If I didn’t stop her or chase her away, she’d dump the trash and butts in the nearby creek.

I once told a known shoplifter he couldn’t buy a beer and that he had to leave.

He got very indignant. “What happened to ‘The Customer Is Always Right’ ?”

I was incredulous. “You’re a thief, not a customer!”

“Aw, c’mon, man, I just want to buy a beer.”

“That’s too bad. You should have thought of that before you shoplifted in here. Goodbye!”

“Ooh, Mr. Bigshot, working at the liquor store…”

“At least I got a job, motherfucker!”

He gave me the finger as he left. “Asshole!”

We had a customer in his sixties win $3 million dollars in the lottery. He still perused the porno mags without buying one. He continued to play the lottery and called me twice a week to get the winning numbers rather than spend a quarter calling the Lotto hotline. He also dropped a $100 on dinner at the Mexican restaurant across the street and didn’t tip a dime, his indignant waitress told me afterwards.

We weren’t supposed to let customers use our bathroom which caused people to act up in different ways: a college girl told me I should cup my hands together so she could pee in them; a drunk cowboy went in the bathroom after I told him he couldn’t and pissed all over the wall and the toilet paper. Even when I relented, it didn’t necessarily work out.

There was this mariachi band that asked to use the restroom. When I told them okay and all eight of them headed to the back, my graveyard partner Ted asked me what the fuck was I doing?

“I don’t want them to think I’m turning them down ‘cause I’m racist.”

Ted, who was black, nodded and said, “That’s cool.”

So for a couple of months every weekend, these eight mariachi guys would use the bathroom. And everything was cool until one night one of these motherfuckers decided he couldn’t wait and started pissing in the steel garbage can right outside the bathroom door just as my boss Maxine walked back there. She hit the ceiling, bitched the guy out and made him clean the garbage can out with a hose and cleaning products, paper towels, etc. Afterwards, she came up to me and asked me,”What the hell were you doing letting those guys use the bathroom?”

“I was trying to be nice,” I told her.

“You?!”

The next week these assholes showed up again and asked to use the bathroom. “Seriously?” I asked them. “After last time? No fucking way.”

Christmas morning in the liquor store was always super-depressing. The alcoholics would come in to get their half-pints, remember that it was Christmas and ask me if we had a toy section. I’d point to the extremely limited selection of cheap toys we had. The customers would rummage around briefly, inevitably asking me, “Is this it—for the toys?” I’d say, Yes and they’d sigh, then look at the money in their hand and try and calculate if they had enough for their booze and the cheapie toy they were going to give their kid.

I had a woman customer who was eight months pregnant who bought a gallon jug of wine from me every night. I really didn’t feel too good about it but I knew if I refused to sell to her that Freddy would fire me in a heartbeat.

I had a couple who would come in with their child in a baby carriage. They’d buy six 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor which they’d stash in and around their baby. I was told by someone who lived in the same trailer park that they sold drugs out of their baby stroller as well.

One afternoon I watched a drunk couple come staggering out of Schneiderman’s bar. As they crossed the street, they were singing as they swung their infant in the baby carrier they held between them.

At 1 am one night I was sweeping the parking lot outside. A woman drove up, jumped out of her car (with the engine running) and yelled to me, “Watch my kid!” as she dashed inside to buy booze. My jaw dropped as I turned to see a frightened little 4-year-old girl sitting in the back seat.

We had a forty-something-year-old man who would always come in with his daughter, a pretty twelve-year-old girl with long blonde hair. She always walked with her head down and basically comported herself like a prisoner while he glared around suspiciously. All of us employees at the liquor store, independently of each other, reached the conclusion that he was molesting his daughter but what could we do? We had no proof. He never wrote any checks so I never even knew his name. There was never a cop nearby, and even if there had been one, there was no evidence of a crime (other than what our eyes and our guts told us). It was awful to see.

I was working one hot summer afternoon. There had been a big accident on the freeway—a big rig failed to clear an underpass, the driver was killed—and traffic was being diverted through town. I got one pissed-off commuter after another. I didn’t discuss the accident much with any of them. Someone told me the gist of what happened and that was enough. So I had an idea of who and what I was dealing with that day.

I got this surly guy in a business suit. He walked up with a single bottle of Corona in his hand.

“ How much is this?” he asked me.

“ A dollar fifty.” I told him.

“How much is a single Budweiser?”

“ A dollar.”

“Why does this cost more?” he demanded, waving the beer.

“It’s an import.”

“That’s outrageous, why should it cost more than a Bud?”

“It’s an import. Budweiser is a domestic,” I said patiently.

“Well, what’s the difference?!”

“Corona comes from Mexico. Budweiser is from the United States. Imports and micro-brews cost more.”

“Well, I don’t wanna pay a dollar fifty for a single beer.”

“So don’t. Get a Budweiser or go shop somewhere else,” I said, getting fed up with all his histrionics.

“I’m sorry. I’m just having a bad day. I was stuck in traffic all afternoon,“ he says by way of explanation.

“Oh yeah? Maybe my mother’s dying of cancer,” I tell him.

That brought him up short. “Oh my God, she isn’t, is she?”

“No, but you don’t know that,” I said. “If the worst thing that happened to you today is that you got stuck in traffic, you had a pretty good day.”

“I never thought of it like that,” he says, chastened at last.

I shrugged and sold him his tragically over-priced bottle of Corona.

I had this regular customer, a woman who would buy sleeping pills from me twice a week. One night she added a fifth of 100 proof Bacardi rum to her order. That freaked me out, so much so that I said to her (without thinking), “ I guess if the Bacardi don’t get it, the sleeping pills will.”

Oh, she flipped the fuck out.

She called me every name in the book and threatened to have me fired. From then on, whenever I saw her she’d practically hiss with venom.

One night, she came in the store with a guy, someone she’d just met at the bar. They were both drunk and giddy. She spots me and says, “Oh, this guy—he’s a real asshole.”

The man looked at me and I just smiled and shrugged like, Whatever, lady.

She got a bottle of booze and paid with cash. As they started to leave, I realized that she had given me an extra twenty-dollar bill.

“Excuse me,” I called to them. They paused.

“Well, what the fuck do you want?” she said, sneering nastily at me.

I held up the twenty.

“You gave me an extra twenty.”

I made her walk all the way back to my register. As I handed the money to her, I said, “You know, if I was as big an asshole as you claim, I wouldn’t have given you your money back, would I?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” I agreed. “So maybe I’m not an asshole after all, am I?”

“Maybe not,” she said, shrinking a little. (We didn’t exactly become friends but she didn’t give me any more shit after that, either.)

Lance was a regular, a tall, bearded redneck in his late twenties. One night he came in the store smoking a cigarette as I was waiting on these two biker chicks.

“Lance, please don’t smoke in here,” I pleaded.

Lance stopped, turned on his heel and drew on his cigarette defiantly, blowing smoke at me as he approached the counter.

“You know what, motherfucker? I talked to Freddy today and he says I can smoke in here anytime I want so… FUCK YEW-EW!” Lance yelled as he gave me the finger.

One biker chick said (referring to me), “He sure does have a major attitude problem.”

The other biker chick agreed. “Yeah, he does.”

I clenched my jaw and gripped the counter and waited for the two women to clear out. Then I addressed Lance quietly.

“Lance, the only reason I care if you smoke in here is because I, myself, am allergic to it.”

“Shit!” He whipped the cigarette out of his mouth and put it out on the floor with his shoe. “Sorry, man, why didn’t you say so before? So’s my mom.”

I just grimaced and shook my head.

About a week later (Mother’s Day, in fact) I was standing outside at night, sweeping up the parking lot when Lance came wobbling up precariously on a bike, clutching two potted plants, wrapped in brown paper.

I put my broom aside. “Here, let me give you a hand.”

Lance gave me the plants. “Thanks, man. These are for my mom.”

I followed Lance inside and carefully set the plants by the door. He went to the back cooler and returned with two, bulky Bud bottle twelve-packs.

I rang him up and gave him his change.

“Hey, man, do you think you could give me a hand getting on my bike?” Lance asked. “My hands are gonna be pretty full.”

“Sure, no problem.”

We went back outside. As he got on his bike I handed him the twelve-packs first and then the potted plants.

“Thanks, dude,” Lance told me.

I watched him wobble off on his bike in a series of drunken, off-balance zigzags. I laughed to myself as I calculated the remote odds of him making it home with his cargo intact.

The next time I saw him I had to ask. “How’d it go?”

“I fucking wiped out on the first turn!” he said. “Everything broke!”

“That’s too bad,” I said with a straight face, hiding my utter delight. “That’s a shame.”