The World, In A Convenience Store

I lived from Portland between 2011 and 2015. The further away we get from it, the more this time period becomes somewhat mythical to me. I'm sure this happens to all of us for certain periods of our life - childhood, adolescence, and for me, most definitely my early 20s, those years of first hitching out into the world, fucking up, trying to find adventure. This was an exciting time in Portland, the height of the "hipster" era, and while I had fun going to the various bars and house shows, I struggled to find meaningful work. I ended up hopping between a lot of different jobs, most of them menial labor or retail of some kind. I would work a job for a while, quit, and move on to the next one, never expecting to settle, always believing that there was something else out there for me, though I couldn't figure out what exactly it was.

In the middle of it all, I ended up working at a convenience store for several months. A few years later, I wrote this piece about it for my MFA program. I'd gone into the program to write fiction, but quickly realized that writing fiction is... well, pretty hard, with an almost infinite amount of decisions you have to make. I couldn't decide what kind of stories I wanted to tell. For example, after writing one reasonably realistic piece, I suddenly had a thought - what if the characters in it were smuggling machine guns? And so on. Needing to turn something in, I typed this out one evening, my best attempt at stringing together my memories from working at the store. At least with a creative non-fiction piece I knew there weren't going to be any machine guns. (Well, almost none.)

That's starting to feel like a long time ago to me now too. I decided that rather than try to rewrite the whole thing from an older and supposedly wiser perspective, I would try to mostly preserve the perspective of the original, with a few bits rewritten here and there. I am sure that the convenience stores are much different nowadays, what with all the robo-strippers, CryptoGambling, and everyone just smearing NicoGlue(tm) onto their eyeballs instead of smoking cigs. Or perhaps they are not so different after all. Here's what it was like working for one in 2013.

My friend Cynthia did the artwork for this.

Here’s how you can tell a drug dealer if you’re working the night shift in a convenience store.

First of all, he has a shiny ass watch. I know I know, and I don't want to propagate any stereotypes or anything but uh... they usually had a watch. I don't know shit about watches so I have no idea how expensive these things really were but they would look nice to me - gold and sparkling, tiny crystalline dancers under the fluorescent lights of the store. People generally only wear watches these days to floss anyway, right?

So he has a nice watch, but he pays for all his food with an EBT card. Except for his swisher (grape) which he pays for after taking out a fad wad of 20 dollar bills.

The third tell is that he’s always loading money onto those prepaid credit card things. I assume this is because he can’t keep his money in the bank, but he doesn’t always want to have to carry his wad around.

Here’s some things you should know about my area manager. The first is that one of his pinkie finger nails is longer than the other one.

Second: I used to live next to a strip club. Next to two strip clubs, actually….Supposedly Portland has more strip clubs per capita than any other city.

Sometimes if it was late at night and I wanted a drink, and there wasn’t enough time to get to the dive bar a few blocks away before closing, I’d go to the strip club. One of those times, I'm pretty sure I saw my manager across the bar. I say “pretty sure” because we deliberately spent the rest of the time not looking at each other.

The third thing is that when he hired me, he gave me this whole spiel about not wanting to hire me because he thought I would leave. He was an Egyptian man named Youssef, and at the time, it seemed like he was doing this kind of “straight talk” type of thing, like he was being real honest, trying to cut through the bullshit. I'm not sure about you but I'm willing to give you a chance, that kind of thing. Except I knew from my roommate, who had also interviewed there, that he said this same thing to everybody.

Most of the time when I worked there, I wouldn’t interact with him much; he’d sit in his truck in the parking lot and make phone calls and smoke cigarettes. He was the "area manager", which meant that he managed all the stores on Powell up to 39th street, but the store I worked in was his “home store” which meant that was where his office was.

Fourth; after that initial spiel, he slipped into a kind of “good cop role.” He wouldn't give me a hard time about stuff. Once I asked him how to do something on the cash register. “Oh, you know me,” he said and shrugged. “I don’t really have much to do with that.”

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I wanted the job because I wanted a job where I got to talk to more people. Before that I’d worked mostly in the backrooms of places - loading and unloading trucks, unpacking boxes, putting stock on shelves. None of those jobs involved much person to person interaction, just a repetition of physical tasks for 5, 8, 12 hours sometimes. Way too much time in your own fucking head. You start to turn on yourself after awhile. I wanted something that would get me out of my shell, get me talking to people. I didn't tell this to Youssef, but I was planning on quitting after six months.

The plan was, I was gonna to work at the convenience store until July, then I was gonna go to Mexico, and then I was gonna get a bartending job in Montana where my friend lived. I had two pictures in my head. The first was of walking on a moonlit beach in Mexico, a nice three or four drink buzz, listening to the swell of the tide, feeling the sand on my feet. The second was working behind the bar in Montana, snow billowing outside, a collection of crusty but affable regulars coming in to shoot the shit. I could work on my writing, and I’d get bartending experience for when I moved back to Portland. The convenience store seemed like a stepping stone to all that.

Every paycheck, I’d put as much money as I could afford into a savings account. I would use a credit card to buy groceries, go to the bar, other things. I figured I would pay it all off later when I got back, and I wanted the hard cash for my trip. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I was in debt for awhile after that.

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The store had a policy that we wouldn't sell 40 oz bottles of beer because you could get too drunk off of them. Instead, we sold 24 oz cans of Old English and Steel Reserve, 16 oz cans of Sparks, 23.5 oz cans of Four Loko, 6 packs and 12 packs and 18 packs of Budweiser and Coors, 22 oz bottles of locally brewed IPAs, bottles of cheap wine. Also lottery tickets, cigarettes, swisher sweets, cans of chewing tobacco, bags of Doritos and Fritos, gummy worms, microwavable burritos, Monster and Rockstar energy drinks in a rainbow of different flavors, giant refillable soda containers, High Times and Maxims and a couple porno mags we kept behind the counter.

I explained to the girl I was seeing about the different hierarchies of alcohol consumption. At the bottom you got the malt liquors: Steel Reserve and Old English. I put Sparks in this category as well, which had an 8 percent alcohol content. The most popular flavors of Sparks that we sold were grape and lemonade, and they were mostly bought by homeless people and other “down and out” types; alcoholics without much money to spare. These cost around 2 dollars, probably the cheapest ways to get drunk in the store.

A tier above this you had your light domestics; your Pabst, Hamms, Milwaukee's Best, Budweiser, Coors Light. Bud Light. You could get these in 24 oz cans, or in six packs of 16 oz cans, or in 12 and 18 packs of 12 oz cans. These beers have less alcohol content, around 5 percent generally. Of course there was a little differentiation here too; the six packs of Pabst and Hamms were usually bought by working people trying to relax at home, whereas 12 and 18 packs were generally bought by party goers. People that listened to indie rock bands drank Pabst, people that listened to dubstep bought Milwaukee's Best and Budweiser. The Coors Light was bought by construction workers. Roughly. One guy would buy a six pack of Hamms every single day; I'm pretty sure he worked in a donut shop downtown. But this was not common practice for most daily drinkers since it was a bit more expensive and gave you less bang for your buck.

At the top you had the craft beers. We sold these in 12 oz six packs, but the stand alone 22 oz bottles were more popular. These were purchased by a slightly more discerning crowd - people with a little bit of spending money, who crafted personas around their taste in music and art. A lot of them worked in restaurants. One guy used to buy two of these a night when he got off work, and give me the extra dollar as a tip. I’d never heard about people tipping a convenience store clerk before.

Nobody really drank the 4Lokos. In a 24 oz can and at 12 percent alcohol content, they would get you pretty fucking hammered, but they were also 2 dollars more than the Sparks, so people generally ignored them.

The store was located across the street from a section 8 housing complex. As part of their agreement for living there, the residents of the place weren’t allowed to drink alcohol. But they could still buy any of the other stuff. The fountain soda was a popular choice. We sold giant 44 oz reusable thermos’, and there were three or four guys that would come in every day, multiple times, fill those up with fountain soda, then walk back across the street.

One time there was a water crises in Portland; we thought the water had E. Coli in it, so we couldn’t use the soda machine for a few days. On the second day, one of the soda guys came in, a guy with Down syndrome. “Soda?” he said hopefully. “Not today,” I said. He went away looking at his feet.

A little later, another one of the soda guys came in. “Soda machine still down?” he asked. I told him it was. He shrugged, then gave me a sly look. He looked like a kid about to get away with something. “I guess I have no choice,” he said, then bought two cans of Steel Reserve.

The store is open 24 hours a day, so the lights never go off.

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The store manager was named Mark and was also from Egypt. I saw someone ask him if he was a Muslim once. “No, a Christian,” he said. He had a tiny silver cross on his car keys.

Most of the time, I worked the night shift. I would start at 9, work a 10 hour shift and then Mark would come to relieve me at 7 the next morning. He never said hi to me when he walked in. Instead he would spend a few minutes walking through the store, looking for things that I had forgotten to do. He would chew me out about whatever he found. There was always something; I was always forgetting to reorganize stacks of soda so that they were tall enough so that people wouldn’t potentially trip over them, or not pushing all the beer bottles in the refrigerator to the very end so they'd be easier for people to grab, or some other bullshit task that he seemingly made up on the spot.

Once a week a man from the Coca Cola company would come to restock the Coke products, which came in shrink wrapped plastic palettes.The guy was supposed to open up each palette and put the bottles on the shelves in the cooler, but he had a tendency to dump some of the palettes still wrapped so he could get to his next delivery. This drove Mark up the wall. Eventually, he ordered me to start following the delivery guy around to make sure he stocked all of the bottles.

I hated doing it, and if there was a customer I couldn't do it anyway since whenever there was someone else in the store I wasn't allowed to leave the register.

“You can follow me around if you want,” the Coke guy said to me once. “But Mark will never be satisfied. I remember when he was just a cashier like you. He was always getting on everybody’s case.”

For awhile Mark blamed me for the Coke guy’s inadequacies; eventually though he decided it was the delivery guy’s fault, and began developing a small feud with him. Once a week or so he would call the Coca Cola company and complain about the guy's poor performance.

The store didn’t burn down, I would think. What’s the fucking problem?

After the Coke guy’s delivery, I was supposed to sign off on a piece of paper to show that he had completed his delivery. He was always in a hurry because he had a bunch of other stores to do every night. Mark told me that if he didn’t do everything exactly right, I was supposed to not sign off on his paperwork. This would effectively trap the guy in the store until he did his job right, or so Mark's theory went. But the thought of trying to trap the guy in the store with unsigned paperwork was mortifying to me. I decided if he skipped something, I would just do it myself.

When I first got the job I had a picture of just kind of chilling all night, maybe reading a book, but I actually had a bunch of stuff I had to get done. I had to stock all the beer and soda, sweep and mop the floor, clean the coffee dispensers, take out the garbage, clean the windows, make sure there was only a certain amount of money in the cash register, check the freezer temperatures at midnight and write it down on a sheet of paper, lock the beer coolers at 2:30, make coffee in the morning.

If there was a customer in the store, I had to watch them on the security camera and couldn’t get anything else done. There seems to be a phenomenon that occurs when people walk into a convenience store. They always march in confidently like they know exactly what they want... then suddenly they freeze. They start to glance around uncertainly. It's like the bright lights and candy wrappers confuse them and make them forget what they came in for. I’ve seen people spend 20 minutes walking between the 5 different aisles, trying to figure out why the fuck they came in. It was always very stressful for me when this would happen. I would think, c'mon man, buy your shit and get out. I gotta stock the Rockstars.

I was allowed a 10 minute break in which I was able to lock the door and do whatever, and I could take as many smoke breaks as I wanted, though if a customer showed up, I had to go back inside. This sounds luxurious but I soon realized there's a universal law of convenience store smoke breaks:  no matter how dead it is inside, the moment you go outside to smoke, a customer always shows up.

One of my coworkers, Neveen, told me about doing a shift at a gas station owned by a different company. “They let you sit down,” she said wistfully.

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The store that I worked at had a lot of homeless customers. In Oregon, people can turn in beer and soda cans to be recycled for 5 cents per can. At our store, we let people turn in cans once per shift, up to $2.50, which is 50 cans. People would come in with big plastic bags full of them. This one couple, that lived out of their truck, could turn in 100 because they would turn in 50 for the man, and 50 for the woman. Sometimes I would pull cans out of the garbage can out front and leave them on the windowsill for people.

Sometimes the homeless people would buy beer, usually Sparks, but a lot of times they bought food. Sweets and cookies were very popular; I understand that this is because when you're living on the street, it's hard to maintain a good diet and your blood sugar gets very low.

Only one of the homeless regulars that came in seemed like an unmanageable alcoholic, a grey-bearded man named Roman. We weren’t allowed to sell alcohol if someone was visibly intoxicated. Usually I would let this slide, but sometimes Roman was just too shit-faced. “Fuck you,” he would spit at me if I wouldn’t sell to him. Other times he would try to plead with me. When he wasn't too fucked up, he'd be as polite as anybody else. He would always buy two cans of Steel Reserve.

Another guy, Gary, told me he found a pair of sneakers dumpster diving. “What size shoe do you wear?” he asked me. He wanted me to buy them. “They’re as good as new," he said. "Who does that? Who throws out a brand new pair of shoes?” Another time he tried to sell me a guitar case. Once, when I was subbing in a store on the other side of the town, Gary walked in. “Damn, what are you doing all the way over here?” I asked.

He shook his head. “You can’t find any fucking cans over there anymore. These two Mexicans moved in, and started snatching them all up.”

I liked Gary alright, but my favorite was this guy named Andy. Once I gave Andy a piece of pizza and asked him how long he’d been in the neighborhood. “14 years,” he said. He was obviously proud. He’d jerry rigged a shopping cart up to his bike, so that he could hold his backpack and plastic can bags. Sometimes he’d have a boombox in the cart and ride around blasting classic rock. He didn’t drink, and would always use his can money to buy cheap off-brand candy bars and cups of noodles.

One time the cash register stopped working because of some technical issue and a customer started chewing me out for taking so long. Andy was in line behind him and started laughing. It felt like a betrayal. I thought we were in this together, I wanted to say.

Andy would take care of Roman sometimes when he got too drunk. But Andy had bad days too. I once saw him shivering to himself when it wasn't that cold outside.

The stereotype of homeless people is that they are either addicts or have some kind of mental health problem. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. What I do know is that they seemed like they had a sense of community. When Roman was fucked up, Andy would sit with him. They seemed like they watched each other's backs. One night Gary came in, and had somehow gotten his hands on an EBT card. I think he traded for it. Andy was in the store at the same time. “I'm buying cookies and milk for everyone,” Gary announced. Roman came in shortly after. “Hey Roman, you want anything?”

“No, I’m good,” said Roman, and bought his usual. Roman was doing his own thing.

___________________

When I told people I was going to Mexico, they would get this kind of knowing look on their face. I told one of my co-workers, and he told me about driving down the peninsula with his ex-wife. “I was married, but some things in Tijuana, a single guy could have a real good time there,” he said.

I told him I had a girlfriend.

He nodded and gave me a smile like, “yeah sure, kid."

“You’ll have a good time,” he said.

My roommate on the other hand was worried I was going to get my head chopped off. He was worried about the cartels, but there was only one time in Mexico where I felt uneasy; in Tijuana, when a black SUV followed my car for about a quarter mile. I was also in a black car, and I'd read that black cars could attract “negative attention.” Nothing came of it though. Maybe the cartel members didn't care too much about the Scion XB.

I’ve never been threatened more times in my life than when I worked at a convenience store

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Michael was an older man that used to come in and do his grocery shopping. He lived in the Section 8 across the street and used to come in at around 3:00 in the morning once or twice a week. He had a high reedy voice and walked with a bit of a stoop. He seemed very bitter at the direction that his life had taken. He was always using my first name. “Chris? Can you do me a favor?” he asked me once. “Can you tell the world to fuck off and suck my asshole?”

Sometimes it would take him 30 minutes to walk through the store, slowly gathering the things that he wanted that week - cans of soup and cups of ramen noodles and cartons of milk. While he walked through the store, he would tell me stories about his life. He told me that he had served in the Vietnam war and that while he was there he had gotten addicted to alcohol and heroin. He told me that he was sober now except for an occasional joint and a beer on his birthday. He told me about all the different classic rock bands that he had seen (KISS, Ozzy, and REO Speedwagon). He told me he thought that residents in his apartment complex would go into his room when he wasn’t there and steal things, and that the people in charge would ignore him when he complained. He told me about his health problems, and difficulty dealing with the veteran's hospital.

He was nice enough to me in a crotchety way, but he didn’t seem like he got along with the other tenants of his apartment. Once one of the soda junkies came in while he was there. “Hey dickhead!” he said. At first I thought he was being congenial, like how people sometimes insult each other when they’re good friends. “I know you’ve been in my fucking room!”

Oh, I thought. The soda junkie made himself scarce, and thankfully nothing came of it.

Another time a kid came in, probably 18 or so. Nothing seemed that remarkable about him to me, but Michael came up to me after he left and said, “Chris? Can you do me a favor? Can you check on the camera and see if that kid’s still out there?”

“Why?” I said.

“Because I really don’t want to have to shoot a kid tonight,” said Michael.

This was an alarming statement to me. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Don’t shoot anybody!” I knew Michael had a gun, because he had told me.

“That kid that was just in here was eyeing me," said Michael. "I think he wanted to jump me. I don’t want to have to shoot him. He was on something. There’s this new drug that’s been going around the streets that’s a combination of ecstasy and crystal meth. It makes people real dangerous.”

“Don’t shoot anybody,” I said again. I wasn't sure I believed any of what he was saying, but I did think Michael would shoot somebody if he felt threatened enough. I looked at the camera. “I don’t think he’s out there.”

"Ok,” he said. “I'm gonna go out. I'm keeping my hand in my pocket.”

I decided it was probably a good time to go out for a cigarette. I was pretty sure the kid was gone, but I wanted to walk out with Michael so that he’d feel better.

Once outside, I saw the kid standing at the corner of the store, just outside the range of the camera. Oh my God, I thought. Michael was right. Then, oh fuck.

He didn’t try to jump us though, just stood there a little awkwardly, watching. So Michael went over and started talking to him. I stood there watching them, smoking my cigarette. I didn't know what the hell they were talking about, I could only catch little snippets of it. At one point I thought I overheard Michael say something about building a boat. I decided no one was in any imminent danger, and went back in the store. Periodically, I would glance back outside. Michael and the kid stood there talking for over an hour. After the kid left, Michael popped back in.

“He was a good kid,” he said. “Just a little mixed up.”

Another guy seemed to always come in after losing big on a poker machine. He would walk in and start yelling at the top of his lungs: “FUUUUUUUUCK! FUUUUUUCK! GODAMMIT!” One time he tried to sell me his phone so that he could get more money for gambling. “You like it?” he kept saying. “You like this phone? You wanna buy it?”

I assumed he would always be a loser, but one time he came in after winning almost a thousand dollars. He was giddy, vibrating with this kind of frantic energy.

“Look at all this money,” he said, and showed me the stack of bills he had won. Then he looked concerned. “I shouldn’t have this all in bills like this,” he said. I helped him pick out one of the prepaid debit cards so he could load his money onto it. They were all sitting on a rack at the front of the counter.

“I gotta get home,” he said, and took off on his bike. It was like that Roald Dahl movie. Run home Charlie, I thought.

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Day shift could be all right sometimes, but the nights could be grueling. Most of that time I wasn’t dealing with customers, I was just in the store by myself. I would drink coffee and blast episodes of "Coast To Coast" on the radio, but I would still feel the darkness of the night pressing in from the outside like a big black fog.

I’d find myself fantasizing about being robbed, just to break up the monotony. A guy would come in, point a gun at me, and I'd look him straight in the eye and tell him to keep it cool while I emptied the register. I knew this was stupid thinking also; I knew that if I ever was actually robbed I'd probably be so shocked it would be a struggle to even have any kind of reaction at all.  

Michael told me a couple stories about robberies happening in convenience stores. He said he used to work at a convenience store, and that while he was working there, he started to notice this truck that kept driving past. He figured whoever it was was probably casing the store. So the next day he brought his gun in to work with him. Sure enough, two guys came in to rob the store. One of them was holding a shotgun, pointing it down at the floor. He walked up to the counter and tried to bring the shotgun up, but there wasn't enough room and it got stuck under the counter. So Michael pulled his gun out, and covered the guy while he called the police. He held the guys there until the cops came. He said the police congratulated him, and even told him when the shotgun was going to be up for police auction. Michael bid on it and won. This part of the story seemed very important to him. He told me it was an antique.

The other story he told me happened to a friend of his. He said she was holding a heavy can of vegetables that a customer had left on the counter when a guy came in. The guy pulled out a big knife, then unzipped his pants and put his penis on the counter in front of her, right on the glass case where the scratch-off tickets are displayed. “You’re going to empty the register,” he said. “And then you’re going to suck my cock.”

The woman was so surprised she dropped the can she was holding, right on the man's penis.

It went right through the glass, Michael said.

You might say, hey, these stories sound like bullshit, but remember; Michael was right about the kid still being outside.

Nobody ever robbed the store when I worked there, but someone did rob the Pizza Hut next door. One of the employees came in right after it happened and told me about it in a kind of breathless way, wild-eyed and jacked up on the adrenaline. The guy had pulled out an Uzi, he said, and had them empty the cash register into his backpack. The police came into the store soon after and asked me if I’d seen anything, but I hadn’t. Around 4:00 the next morning I watched a guy from a local news station walk around the parking lot, checking out camera angles for the news coverage later that day.

Another time, a bicyclist got hit by a truck and died in the street in front of the store. A bystander kept popping in and out of the store to give updates. He seemed almost giddy, something that I think can happen when confronted with tragedy. It’s like the natural order of the world is tilted, and your first reaction is to start laughing.

Mark was there when this happened, but he was so preoccupied with his work that he didn't notice until I pointed it out to him. He then got a very concerned look on his face, and stood staring out the window, watching the paramedics and the cops holding up traffic. After a minute or so, he shook his head sadly, and went back to work.

_______________________________

By about my fourth month in, all the cashiers who'd worked there when I started had either quit or been fired, so they hired a few new guys. One was this 18 year old kid who’d never had a job before named William. William was real bright eyed and bushy tailed, one of those extroverted nerdy kids who can’t help going on and on about whatever he was into. William’s thing was My Little Pony. He called himself a “brony" - an adult fan of the show. I asked him if he was into anything else. When I was 18, I was more into bands, but when I was younger I was into stuff like Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and Star Wars. I thought maybe we could connect over one of those. He thought for a minute. “Not really,” he said.

He started out with a pretty chipper attitude, but the job started to wear him down. About a year later, after I'd already quit, I ended up going into the store for something and found him working the counter.

“How they treating you?” I asked.

He balled his hands into fists. “Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them!” he said, and gave the security camera the finger. He told me that Mark was gone, but apparently the new manager had been lying to him, telling him one of the other employees was getting more work done than he actually was, and using it as a form of coercion. “They don’t seem to be aware,” said William, ‘that we can actually TALK TO EACH OTHER.” I wished him well in his fledgling rebellion. I never saw him again after that.

Just a few weeks after William came on, I ended up training another new hire, an ex-marine named Sean. I thought he was small and kind of fidgety. He had a tattoo of a diamond on his middle finger. He was so nervous working the cash register at first that his hands visibly shook.

One night, he came in while I was working and told me he’d been at the strip club up the street. I asked him what he thought of it. “Ehh, it was ok,” he said. “The girls there were… Well. I wanted girls with more..” He did kind of a motion with his hands, meaning ‘bigger tits.’ He bought a grape Sparks, which he said he was going to chug in the alley next to the store, then walk to a different strip club.

___________________________________

I had to check anyone's ID for alcohol and tobacco if they looked like they could be under 30. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission would run stings to make sure stores weren't selling to minors. If you got caught, you'd lose your job and be charged a big fee - upwards of a thousand dollars. It was a real pain in the ass for me though because I'd sell booze to guys with beards and crow's feet and need to check their ID. They'd snort, roll their eyes, grumble sometimes. If they didn't have it, sometimes they'd try to argue. One time this young black guy came in and tried to buy a Swisher Sweet. I tried to explain my situation to him, that I couldn't sell it to him without ID, but he was having none of it. "Are you fucking serious?" he kept saying. He was getting more and more worked up. A delivery guy happened to be unloading some stock at the same time, and he started arguing with the kid too. "He can't do it, man," he said. "Just let it go. He said he can't do it."

The kid started getting into it with the delivery guy. "Why can't he do it? What do you know? Huh?" You could hear it in his voice, he was getting more and more upset. Finally, he yelled out: "Is it because I'm BLACK?!"

"Woah, hey, no way," the delivery guy said. He seemed a little startled at the idea. "That's not why at all!" Eventually the kid gave up. As he walked out of the store, he looked me dead in the eye. "Watch your back nigga," he said.

The interaction left me feeling sullied. I should have just sold him the goddamn Swisher, I thought. What difference did it make to me? Instead I was threatened, and had ended up playing the part of the spineless rule follower. The kid could smoke every Swisher in the store for all the shit I gave about it. I just didn't want to get a fucking ticket.

I was still stewing about it when Mark rolled in. Things had actually been going pretty decently between us, partially because I'd gotten better at the job, learned to do the things that would keep him off my case. But because of customers, I hadn't gotten much of the stocking done. I figured this wasn't that big a deal - just a few weeks ago Mark had told me not to stress about stocking that much. Now, he suddenly had a fly up his ass about it. He started laying into me. "You told me not to worry about it!" I protested. "That was then!" he said. "Now you're better. You can do more!" I felt the blood rush to my head, and I turned away. I couldn't stand to look at him.

"Look me in the eye when I'm talking to you," he snapped. Reader, I know what you're thinking, and I didn't but I've never wanted to as badly as then.

"Today will be your last day at this store," he told me then. "We're moving you to the store up the street."

10 years later, working on the edits for this story, this exchange still makes me mad. If I was being moved anyway, why'd he have to lay into me like that?

The store up the street was run by a Chinese guy named Zhi. Zhi and Mark had something of a rivalry going on, but Zhi never seemed to come out on top. He was always losing employees; Yousef kept firing them for some reason.

Zhi's store was closer to where the strip clubs were, and instead of homeless people and disabled section 8’ers, I had a sudden influx of drug dealers and drunken frat boys. One kid used to come in whacked out of his mind on pills, slurring, stumbling, trying to buy cigarettes. The drug dealers were nice enough - presumably they stayed near the clubs because that’s where their clientele was - but some of the customers gave me the heebie jeebies. It was never something I could quite put my finger on, just an overall depraved quality they seemed to emanate. They were like hollow men, or demons wearing skin; dead eyed and uncanny. They would buy their junk food and smokes, and then, I imagine, go howling out into the world, running down the street like madmen, ripping at their clothes, doing unspeakable things in the dark.

My Montana plan had fallen through, but I was still getting ready to go to Mexico, so I put in my two weeks. It was July - I'd started working for the company in January. Zhi was silent for a moment, then said, “did Mark know?” He was worried that Mark had tried to pass me off like a bad penny. “No,” I said.

On one of my last nights, a kid came in, looking like a young Jimi Hendrix. He even had a guitar slung over his back. He chatted with me for a little bit and I asked him about the guitar. “You play?” he asked me. I told him I did.

“Well man, if you want to just go out and play it for a little while, that’s cool with me. If you just want to take a little break or something.”

I told him I couldn’t really do that.

“Yeah man,” he said. “This is all I got right now. I been homeless for about a week now. You know, I don’t fuckin’ mind. But if you want to play it let me know.” He filled up a cup of coffee, drank half, then filled it up again. People weren’t supposed to refill but I let him do it anyway. I could tell he wanted to hang out, but I had work to do. Every second that a customer was in the store was a second I couldn’t be stocking beer or whatever. I didn’t want to ask him to leave, but I guess he kind of got that hint.

“You know, it’s not so bad,” he said before he left. “I like being outside and stuff but… I’m so tired all the time, you know? I just get so tired.”

I don’t think we get to choose the times in our lives that develop a kind of sheen to them, a glisten that seems to permeate everything, giving even the smallest of things a feeling of immense meaning. I remember I kept getting all these weird bug bites that summer. One of them formed into this translucent yellow ball; it looked like a piece of children’s jewelry growing out of the back of my hand. Another one sent streaks of red lines shooting across the skin on my stomach.

Who the hell were those people, I sometimes think. And how was I once a part of their life?