Shoplifters of the World
- November 27th, 2007
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When I was 16, my parents urged me to take one of the most dangerous jobs in America, and by urged I mean forced. Because there was little call in my suburb for smoke jumpers or Bering Sea crab fishermen, I became a late-night clerk in a convenience store.
I was issued a red smock: Short-sleeved and unmistakably game-worn — spumoni-spangled by its previous inhabitant, for we scooped ice cream there, as dense (and overpriced) as Carrera marble.
For one glorious summer, my forearms were Popeyed, though my chest remained Olive Oyled.
In the beginning, I worked days, the manager telling me at 15-minute intervals to “front the milk.” At 16-minute intervals, he chewed me out for not having fronted it.
I had never heard “front” as a verb before and was afraid to betray my ignorance of convenience-store patois by asking him what it meant. This was before “front” became urban slang for “lie,” a usage that is only now reaching my childhood subdivision, like the light from a distant star.
After several days, I inferred the meaning of “front”: I was to keep the oldest milk pushed to the front of the dairy case, a practice based on the FIFO principle — First In, First Out — I had just studied in sophomore Accounting.
I declined to share this double-entry analogy with my co-workers, who would have responded with their favored riposte: A mop handle to the scrotum.
And then one day I didn’t have co-workers. I was working nights, solo, locking up the store when it closed at midnight. Until then, when there were no customers, I’d retreat to the stock room and sit down on its club chair. By which I mean a chair made of Club and Oui and other downmarket nudie magazines.
The magazines came shrink-wrapped in bundles tha were stacked on a shipping pallet. (You’ve heard of an “educated palate”? This was an uneducated pallet, a pallet of epic ignorance, a pallet with a criminal background.) It was the only place to sit in the stock room, this Pallet of Pornography, whose opaque bundles — obstinately unbrowsable in their cellophaned seal — looked like enormous ice cubes.
These were the days before such magazines arrived individually wrapped in plastic. They were stocked on our shelves on a magazine rack that demurely hid all but the title behind a kind of dressing room screen. I can’t recall ever having sold a single issue of any of them, but they were comprehensively thumbed into pulp by the store’s customers, who stood at the newsstand as if it were the stacks of the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
But mostly the customers smoked. Behind the counter, above the register, an infinite variety of cigarettes were racked. I didn’t smoke. When customers would ask for Marlboros, I would hand them Marlboros. And invariably they would reply, “Hard pack, not soft pack.” I’d go off in search again and they’d yell: “The 100s! Menthol! With the filter-tip! No, no, the Lights!” Each adjective sent me off on a new search while the customer sighed theatrically and trembled in their trough of nicotine withdrawal.
Eventually, the customers would leave and I would estimate their heights against the measuring stick on the door frame. Just to pass the time. That measuring stick told customers: You’re not always right; you’re always a suspect.
And well they should have been. Shoplifters of the world had united and taken over. In that very store. And some of them were friends of mine. People routinely walked in healthy and walked out with a Tombstone-pizza-shaped goiter beneath their sweatshirt. Is that a Family Size bag of Cool Ranch Doritos in your pants or are you just happy to see me?
Several customers came in drunk and drove away with twelve-packs of three-two beer and tins of Skol and Copenhagen, a drunk-driving kit. DIY DUI.
I called the cops once — out of spite, not concern. A shirtless drunk threw eight or nine items on the counter — 25 years later, I remember Oscar Mayer bologna being one of them — and as he paid I said: “Want a bag for that?” And he said, “No, I’ll juggle it out the door.” The “Dumbass” at the end of the sentence went unspoken.
My armpits burst into flames, as they often did in that era, and I said: “You’re drunk and I’m calling the cops.” As I picked up the receiver on the phone behind me, he flew out the door, jumped through his car window and laid a patch in the parking lot. And I did call the cops.
And then I returned to the stock room and settled onto my throne of ice cubes, like Jor-El on Krypton, and brooded.
