by Steve Himmer
Pete comes in wearing a trash bag over his body, a hole cut for his head but arms hidden beneath. He shakes in the doorway like a dog, spraying muddy rainwater all over the magazines and the books and the variety of pre-made sandwiches that all magically turn into one unified lump of almost-meat-and-bread in the microwave I’m afraid of but eat from anyway because it’s the only way to have something hot.
“Got any soap?” Pete asks. “I’m going to take a shower in the parking lot.”
“Please don’t take your clothes off in front of the store, Pete. If you go around back, I’ll bring you some soap.”
“Fuck yeah!”
35
Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth come in to buy cigarettes, probably on their way home from the show in Northampton I would’ve gone to if I hadn’t been working. Or at least would have thought about going to but wouldn’t have because there’s no one to I could’ve invited along. I decide to ask for their autographs, or say I like all their albums or think alternate guitar tunings are awesome because I can’t think of anything better to say, but I remember the story about Kim Gordon pissing on the desk of a record company president so I don’t say anything in case she doesn’t like convenience store clerks and their countertops, either. I don’t feel like mopping tonight.
36
The nicest schoolteacher you’d ever want to meet steps up to the counter in her quilted skirt and Florida! T-shirt, lifts a pair of glasses on a gold chain to her eyes, and peers past me.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” I ask, hopeful it’s good for my karma to be polite to old ladies.
She squints a bit, adjusts her glasses, then points at the new issue of Swank and asks in a Jerry Lewis-loud voice, “What does that say there? ‘Oozin’ Coozes’? Is that what that is?”
“Uh, yes, ma’am, oozin’ coozes.”
“Okay. Lemme get a look at that.”
37
A priest in a black suit and white collar and a monk in a long saffron robe walk together into the store before sunrise, and if I’d spent the summer working anywhere else, if I’d lived this year in some other town where things like this don’t happen, I might dismiss them as the start of a very bad joke. The priest buys a coffee and is liberal with cream, and the monk makes Earl Grey tea with two bags, and neither of them uses sugar and neither of them says a word, though they smile at each other and also at me. We stand in a triangle of mismatched colors—black suit, saffron robe, and blue apron—like stripes on the flag of a country no one has been to before.
It feels like an opportunity of some kind, the two of them there at the counter. It feels like I should have some question to ask, something I really want answered, but it’s been a long night and nothing comes to mind but clichés—I could tell them they’re the start of a very bad joke, or ask where the rabbi is this morning. I could ask them the meaning of life or I can let them walk out of the store with their coffee and tea and their smiles, no wiser than I was when they walked in together a few minutes earlier.
38
“What do you do in the winter, man?” Pete asks.
“Well, I was in college last year but I’m not going back. So I don’t know what I’ll do. I hope it’s not this.”
“You should come with me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Down to Florida! Why hang around in this shit, the snow, all that shit? I spend my winters at the beach like a millionaire. Whole bunch of us go down before it gets cold.”
“Really?”
“Hell yeah! Why would I want to stay here? I’ll get my bike fixed up and ride down to Key West when the stupid fucking college kids start coming back.” He pauses and looks at me like he’s going to say “no offense” or something, but doesn’t. “You should come, man. The fucking pussy, man, you won’t fucking believe it.”
“Oh, I…”
“Yeah, you should at least come to visit. You can stay with me.”
“You have a place?”
“Come down to Key West and ask someone where Charlie’s bar is. Ask anyone. I stay in the alley behind it with a few other guys. There’s plenty of room.”
39
“So you dropped out of college,” Carl says. “You going back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I tried out college,” he says. “Thought I’d get back to it later but went in the army instead.”
I picture Carl in the army, at war, standing still with his eyes drooping while everything explodes and burns all around him. In my imagination he’s wearing his apron and his name tag glows orange with reflected flames.
“You should think about the army,” he says.
40
Benny and his friends crowd around the counter, long after midnight, and one of them asks, “Can we look at a Playboy?”
“Not until you’re eighteen,” I tell them. “Or at least eleven.”
“That’s cool, that’s cool,” Benny says. “How about you look at one with your back to the counter?”
41
Mayo Shirt steps up to the counter with three shoeless children in tow, wheezing after the walk from his car to the door, and he steams up the glass counter with the sweaty heat of his chest. “Can you… sell me… some smokes… for food stamps?”
“You know I can’t, sir,” I tell him, pointing at the sign on top of the register about what can be purchased with stamps and what can’t. “I told you yesterday. And the day before. I think I told you last week, too.”
“Come on, chief,” he pleads as a fat drop of sweat dangles from the end of his nose before swan diving into the bucket of Cowtales. “I need some smokes! Just this once, come on.”
“No way. I can’t. I don’t even know you, you think I’m gonna pay a fine and get fired so you can smoke?”
“Shit,” he mutters, “is your job so great?” Then he turns and launches himself into the turbulent sea between counter and car, a wake of wide-eyed Dorothea Lange children fanned behind his generous transom.
A moment later, as Mayo Shirt catches his breath in his driver’s seat beyond the front windows, his urchins traipse back into the store one after another, each with a one-dollar food stamp, each buying fifteen cents worth of candy then scampering out to their Dad, who heaves himself to the counter again with a fistful of change. “Now give me my goddamn cigarettes,” he demands, and I do because it’s seven o’clock in the morning and my shift’s nearly over and I’m too tired to explain what he just did is also illegal.
42
“Hey, I got you that bike,” Pete says as we lean on our respective sides of the counter and smoke.
“What? Oh, the bike. Thanks.”
“Yeah, it’s across the street, behind the empty garage there, you know where I mean? Just go down the path beside the building and it’s leaning against the wall.” He takes a drag, and adds, “The chain was broken, so I put on a new one. And I cleaned it all up for you, but you’ll have to put some air in the tires.”
“Thanks, Pete, thanks a lot.”
“You can ride it down to Key West with me, if you want to. You could quit your job and drink on the beach. Couldn’t do that if you’d stayed in college, right? Man. Those motherfuckers’d tell you why it’s wrong to live life your own way.”
“Probably,” I say, and adjust my apron strap where it’s chafing my neck.
43
My oceanography professor from last fall comes in to buy milk and Cheerios at two in the morning, and she doesn’t recognize me as the guy who sat near the back of her three hundred seat lecture hall almost a year ago so I don’t say anything. She’s skinny and sharp like a bird, and watching her hands flit from wallet to pocket to purse makes me nervous so I look away toward the glass, remembering how exhausted I was in her class, shoveling one fact after another into my head, no time to slow down or stop to ask off-track questions, no time for daydreams or wondering aloud, and it all stuck in my brain long enough for the exam and washed out like some k
ind of tide the next day. I could ask her which kind of tide but I don’t. I don’t really care what it’s called.
She shoves two handfuls of change across the glass counter and they spill off the edge to my feet. “Oh!” she says, “Oh!” and I stoop for the money and she leaves before I stand up so I dump her coins into the register without counting to see if it’s exact.
44
The miniature fan boat I’ve constructed from an opened (not by me) but unpurchased package of index cards left behind on a shelf and a roll of Saran Wrap glides across the counter as I blow on plastic stretched across a paper ring at the stern. It shimmies a bit on the open stretch of glass between the register and the radio, but straightens out in the run over the scratch ticket case in the sheltered valley behind the boxes of condoms. When it crosses the finish line I’ve laid out with an Original Beef Flavor Slim Jim, I cheer and clap in my head.
My post-regatta celebration is cut short by a clutch of young men in white baseball caps filing into the store in identical clean sneakers and khaki shorts, pausing at the door to swill the last dregs of Budweiser before dropping their cans in the bushes outside. They all look so much alike I rub my eyes to be certain I’m not seeing things.
The last one into the store stops and leans his head against the measuring tape. “Dude,” he says, “get my height, in case I rob you,” and I don’t bother saying I’ve heard it before. I don’t tell him how old that joke is.
45
A greasy-skinned man in a trench coat smeared with the kinds of stains you don’t ever want to be able to identify on sight lingers at the magazine rack, flipping through Redbook and People until all the other customers are gone. Then he advances on the counter, arms pumping up and down at his sides like he’s working ski poles, and at the top of his lungs he screams, “SWANK!”
I check the magazine rack under the counter and tell him, “We’re all out of Swank. How about Barely Legal? Or Just Eighteen?”
He raises his arms over his head so bits of old food and scraps of paper spill from his coat and he shakes his fists in the air, yelling, “SWANK! SWANK!”
While the loyal reader is still dancing, Pete wanders in with a look on his face like he expected to arrive somewhere else when he stepped through the door.
“Pete…,” I say, shrugging my shoulders and pointing toward Mr. Swank.
46
Benny hands over the necessary food stamps for a bottle of one of the thirteen varieties of blue drink from the cooler, gets his change, and stands in front of the counter without taking a step toward the door while the radio station from Connecticut broadcasts the kind of show that’s always playing at two in the morning, the kind it should be illegal to send over state lines. The sort of men who are awake at this hour phone in from their mothers’ basements with mouths full of potato chips to talk about aliens and conspiracies and tin foil and the host alternates between believing his audience and laughing at them, and Benny and I stand in his auditory tractor beam, listening because we’ve got nothing better to do. Him, because he’s a kid who is allowed to wander around the neighborhood at two in the morning. And me, because I’m not.
“What’s up, Benny?” I ask during a break in the action.
“Nothing.”
“What are you doing in here so late, anyway?”
“I was hungry, and Moms is at work. Nothing to eat in the house,” he says through lumps of cream filling. He munches his Twinkie with his head bent below the top of the counter, spilling crumbs into the cartons of candy bars arranged on child-level racks positioned just where kids are most likely to stand while their parents are at the register. Except Benny isn’t here with a parent andtiny pebbles of preservative-rich, nuke-proof yellow sponge cake trickle down the front of his Chicago Bulls shirt to the floor where they’ll remain in some form forever, long after the world has been left to Dick Clark and cockroaches. Then the show comes back on and the two of us learn more about aliens living among us.
There’s a long of stretch of dead air a few minutes later, after a caller finishes telling his story and before the host starts talking again, but between us Benny and I have nothing to fill it with.
47
Carl says, “When I was in Antarctica...,” and I’m so surprised I miss the rest of the story.
“Why were you in Antarctica?” I ask.
“Oh, you know. I’d seen it on TV. There was a job. I wasn’t doing anything else. You think this place is quiet at night.”
I look out the front windows across the empty blacktop, glistening like snow crystals where shinier stones are mixed into the tar. We’ve got the endless nights without days but could use a few penguins or maybe a blizzard to liven it up.
“You should go,” Carl says. “I can see you there.”
“I’ve been to Australia,” I say.
“You were so close. You almost made it, son. Why didn’t you just keep going?”
“I get that kind of a lot.”
48
Gloria asks from under her skunk, its hackles raised in the early-morning humidity, “Have you seen a homeless drunk hanging around here at night? He came in yesterday stinking like a toilet and some customers said they’d seen him going through the dumpster out back.”
“No. I haven’t had any trouble.”
“Well, if you see him tell me, or call the police.”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Good.” She records the number of the last scratch ticket on each roll, then looks up from under the counter where she’s kneeling on a box of last month’s leftover Hustlers to ask, “Why aren’t you wearing your name tag?” and that question is getting old, too.
49
A bald head with two wings of tufted black hair stretching out from its sides comes in above a Barracuda jacket and a guy who looks like he might not know that nobody wears Barracuda jackets these days and might even think he looks tough in it, like he could be a gangster named “Barracuda Sammy” if only it were still the fifties and the fifties really had been Happy Days. He wanders around the store for a good twenty minutes, poking through magazines in a way I’ve learned over the course of the summer means someone is waiting for a pizza to be ready next door. I’m listening to a Dead Kennedys tape and maybe it’s a little louder than it should be.
On his way out, standing in the doorway, Barracuda Sammy turns, pushes his Coke-bottle glasses up his nose and says, “That music sucks.” I’m not the biggest Dead Kennedys fan, so I don’t really care. It was just the first tape I grabbed before going to work.
But a few minutes later, I watch through the glass as he emerges from next door with his pizza. I follow him with my eyes and see Pete standing outside the window, staring in, and I wonder why he’s just standing there and why he’s come back after leaving for Florida a few days ago. Then it’s not Pete, it’s me, with a beard grown out of control and eyes that look wild even across that distance and dulled by the glass, and something makes sense all of a sudden so I vault myself over the counter and run out the door and chase Barracuda Sammy across the parking lot into the night, yelling, “This is my last night working here!” and I’m not really talking to him as I follow his scrawny frame and the square of steaming, white cardboard visible on either side of his body as far as the church parking lot two doors down. I stand on the sidewalk a minute, looking back at the lights glaring inside the store far away across a black desert of parking lot, at the counter with no one standing behind it, and it almost looks beautiful, like a painting Edward Hopper never got to. Then I head back inside to finish my shift.
50
As Gloria settles in and restocks cigarettes, I crumple my apron into a ball, tuck it under the register, and step out from the U of the counter.
“See you tonight,” Gloria says, because I haven’t told her she won’t. “That beard really has to go,” she adds when I’m almost to the door. “I won’t say it again.”
“I know,” I say, and squint against a burst of orange sun peeking
over the black roof of the abandoned garage I’m headed for on the other side of the street.
Standing between two empty lanes of blacktop, on a high wire of white paint, I reach overhead and stretch my back after a long night looking down from the counter. I crack my neck to each side and a loud yawn creeps out on its own. Then I duck through overgrown bushes along the garage’s red brick front and push branches out of my way to slip around the side of the building. There, up against the wall, is the brown Raleigh bike with orange trim Pete promised, the one he said would be here, with firm tires and a newly-oiled chain, sweat-stained cloth tape worn through on the handlebars and a hollow, rusty post where there should be a seat. But I can find a seat, somewhere. It’s easy enough to find a seat once you have a bike.
I wheel it through bushes, pushing the same branches out of my way as before, then swing my leg up and over the crossbar as I ride, standing up, past the store and down the road with the sun on my back. A white dog runs circles in the middle of the street and I head home to sleep through the rest of the day and to try for the night and I’ll see where I am after that.