As I kept working at Freddy Wood’s Market, the store had a pretty high turnover in employees.
Boris closed with me for awhile. Blonde, blue-eyed with a mustache, he was meticulous and very thorough in getting the store looking in tip-top shape.
He was from the Seattle area and had married his high school sweetheart, Natalia, whose family was from Columbia. She was a natural Latin beauty but it didn’t hurt at all that she worked as a beautician.
Despite being married to a real stunner, Boris lusted after the cheap, slutty blondes he found among the porn magazines we carried in the store. He told me he tried to get his wife to dress sluttier but she wouldn’t do it.
Eventually Boris left to become an airline mechanic. It was only after he left that a mutual acquaintance told me Boris was a speed freak.
“Really?” I said. “Wow, I had no idea.”
“Dude,” the guy said, shaking his head in disbelief at my naivete.
I wonder if the marriage survived.
I worked with these young guys, Al and Darren. Al was a tall, skinny, dark-haired kid from Los Angeles, going to college up here in Sonoma County. The two of us used to play impromptu games of soccer in the back room with empty cardboard boxes. Sweaty and exhausted after just a couple of minutes, we’d grab some Gatorade and go sit inside the refrigerated walk-in beer cooler. I discovered that Al had an affinity for bad puns. The first time he made one I told him, “That’s not punny.” So we would have a contest to see who could come up with the most in one outburst, threatening to “punish” each other with our superior “punditry”, etc.
Darren was the first of a type previously unknown to me, a wannabe “white gangster.” These were white kids who listened to rap and tried to imitate the slang and mannerisms of inner-city black kids. Darren, a short, blonde kid with a scruffy beard, wore his baseball cap at an angle, had baggy jeans, a fake gold chain around his neck, and parked his car in backwards (“for a faster getaway” he told me). His favorite expression was “What’s really going on?!” which he would bawl at regular intervals. Darren’s whole shtick was really fucking annoying, especially to me, who’d seen the real thing up close (having lived in bad inner-city neighborhoods and dealt with actual black gangsters) but it was also kind of comical. Darren was really short so he had “Little Man’s Complex”. He was compensating by acting tough.
One night me and Al were looking over the various ads people would post near the store’s front door for guitar lessons, yard work and the like. Al was reading out loud one advertisement for therapy that offered to put you in touch with your inner child. He turned to me and asked, “Are you in touch with your inner child?” I pointed at Darren on the far side of the store and said, “Yeah, he’s right over there.”
We both cracked up while Darren, who hadn’t heard it but knew he was the butt of the joke, reddened with embarrassment. I sort of felt bad about it, sort of not. That wannabe gangster shit really got on my nerves. (I don’t what happened to Al after he left but Darren became a drill sergeant in the Army —and I’m sure, an insufferable prick, once invested with military authority.)
Freddy hired a couple of college girls from the local university. One of them, Megan, became my girlfriend. It didn’t happen right away because she already had a boyfriend, who she was living with. When I was talking to her—as soon as I would make her laugh—she’d walk away from me. It was very disconcerting. Megan explained to me later that she was resisting being attracted to me. She would dump her boyfriend to be with me, something she lied about to me at the time, telling me that he had dumped her instead. This would prove to be significant later because a girl who dumps her boyfriend to be with you will certainly dump you later to be with someone else. (That’s why she lied.)
Then there was Dave Johnson. He was a jaunty, trim, forty-year-old Southerner with a mustache and the neatly-parted haircut of a twelve-year-old boy, circa 1960. Dave had been a wine salesman who serviced the liquor store (among other accounts) when Freddy hired him. He was a friendly, affable redneck. I never heard him use the n-word and he once gave me a tape of a Christmas blues collection by all black artists but he had definite tendencies.
One of the expressions Dave used was “since Lincoln died “(as in “I haven’t seen that since Lincoln died”). I asked him once, “Was that a happy day in the South?” “Oh, yes,” he replied.
I persuaded Dave to buy the Los Lobos album, “Kiko and the Lavender Moon”, by telling him they incorporated a multitude of musical styles on it, from blues to swing to Cajun to hard rock. He bought it on my recommendation and told me angrily afterwards, “It was just a bunch of Mexicans playing.” (Yeah, okay.)
We were discussing the movie “My Cousin Vinny” where two college-age kids from New York are arrested in Alabama on charges of robbery and murder. Dave disliked the movie intensely because it showed an Italian-American couple (played by Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei) running circles around a courtroom full of slow-witted rednecks. He told me that where he was from, they would have just killed the two kids and dumped them in a swamp somewhere. I said, “You know they were innocent, right?”
Dave also made a reference to the two kids as the “two Wops”. I said, “Actually, one of the kids was Jewish.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know,” he told me.
I said, “Well, I’m from New Jersey where you’re either black, Italian, Irish or Jewish.”
Dave replied, “Well, I’m from Florida where we’re ‘All-American.’ “
“Oh yeah? Well, if it wasn’t for those four groups, you rednecks would still be living in swamps, fathering yourselves,” I retorted.
It was sad in a way when Dave confided in me one day that he was going to ask Megan out. He didn’t know that we were already dating (we were keeping it to ourselves) and I didn’t have the heart to break it to him. One afternoon Dave walked into the back cooler where Megan and me had been fooling around. “What are you two doing back here?” he asked suspiciously before the reality of the situation dawned on him.
A very ugly racial incident occurred when I was working with Dave Johnson. There was a black woman and her five-year-old son outside the store. (I don’t know if they were entering or leaving, I was stocking beer in the back coolers at the time so I didn’t see it.) A white man in his thirties spit on the five-year-old child while making a racial insult.
All I knew is there was a sudden uproar inside the store as outraged onlookers followed the guy inside yelling at him angrily while he yelled back. The man was telling people he was a police officer from Marin County. Dave Johnson shouted, “I seriously doubt that!” and took him to task after calling the cops.
The mom went to her car to get a tire iron to hit the guy. A crowd of locals dissuaded her from going after the racist scumbag, telling her, that while they understood her feelings, she would surely go to jail for assault if she did so.
The cops showed up and arrested the guy. While they were questioning him, the black woman’s dad (the kid’s grandfather) came up and punched the racist asshole in the face. The two cops told me and Dave the story later, laughing about it. The cops told us they had to give the grandfather a ticket since he hit the guy in front of them but they declined to arrest him since they understood how he felt.
While the incident was sickening, what surprised me was the reaction of the locals, the cops and Dave Johnson himself. They all couldn’t have been more outraged—and these were rednecks, trailer trash, white trash. The racist guy who started everything was from Marin (although not a cop).
It reminded me of another incident: a black motorcyclist came in the store one night and told me his bike had broken down outside the store and he had just called his wife to come get him. He was very apprehensive so I told him it was fine, no worries. He went outside to wait. When I followed him out there a minute or two later, he was looking cold and a bit nervous so I offered him a cup of coffee. He just gave me a look. I told him, “It’s on the house. I just made a fresh pot.” So then he accepted. After he went back outside with his coffee, a cluster of local yokels (rednecks), stopped by, asked him what was wrong with his bike, and ended up giving him a jump, joking and bantering with him the whole time. (People will surprise you, for better or worse.)
This story develops the theme of paradox that prevails in the first three. The first paradox is embodied in blond and blue-eyed Boris who, in spite of giving all appearances of being the “all-American” guy–married to his high school sweetheart and “meticulous” in tending to his job– turns out to be a collector of porn magazines and a speed freak. The second is Darren, who starts out as a “wannabee white gangster” trying to imitate inner city black kids, but ends up as an Army drill sergeant. The author has his own bitter experience of falling in love with a young woman who turns out to be different from what she first seems to be. The greatest example is that of Dave Johnson, a forty-year-old Southerner who refers to “the day Lincoln died” as a a happy experience and yet, when a white man spits on a five-year-old black child, calls the cops and stands in the forefront of outraged onlookers.
Later in the story, the author sums up his own background by saying,, “I’m from New Jersey, where you’re either black, Italian, Irish, or Jewish.” Dave’s rebuttal– “Well, I’m from Florida, where we’re ‘All -American'”– seemingly dismisses the common slogan that America is “a country of immigrants.” Yet the story itself proves him wrong. In the final vignette, the author lives out the American ideal by offering free coffee to a black motorcyclist whose bike had broken down outside the store, and his gesture proves contagious. Soon the “local yokels” follow suit, giving the guy a jump while “joking and bantering with him the whole time.” The author concludes succinctly, “People will surprise you, for better or worse,”–a statement that sums up the unexpected twists and turns of the whole piece. The reader is left to reflect on which surprising twist best represents what it means to be “All-American.”