The morning brings gray skies, so I cower down between the pages of a book, its crisp and warm words weaving worlds away from my own. I take a deep breath and dive in.

I blink and sure enough it is afternoon, and the sun has decided to come out and play for a while.

 

The walk to the convenience store is uneventful. Cars pass by, cars pass by, a car passes by.

The electronic ping-a-ling announces my entry and the clerk, a short round man with thick black glasses looks up, nods, then gets back to his magazine. Something on cigars it appears. Never thought there’d be a cigar aficionado magazine. But it makes sense. There are a lot of cigar aficionados. I know one or two myself. One fellow even has one of those special cigar cabinets… What are they called?

I wonder if they ever use the paper of their old back issues to make a cigar… How do they make a cigar?

I browse the cold drinks, thinking I don’t like cold drinks. I peruse the salty snack aisle, contemplating why I don’t like salty snacks. I tap on the glass of the freezer where they keep the ice cream and Popsicles and think it’s too cold for an icy treat, and then probably too hot.

The electronic ping-a-ling and either someone has gone out or someone has come in.

Someone has come in. It’s a man with dry, greasy hair. Adding to that his pink and bruised cheeks and flaky lips, it looks as if he’s just dipped himself in a deep fryer.

His eyes dart around like a squirrel’s. His hands caress something deep in his jacket pockets. And I think, Oh no, he’s got a gun and he’s going to rob the store. That’s it, this is how my day is going to go. He’s going to begin barking orders to empty the cash register any minute. Order me and Glasses down on the filthy floor. I’ll be tasting grit and grime and bleach in my mouth as the bottom of his boot crushes my kidneys. He’ll want my money too. My lousy three bucks. Hand it over! He’ll snarl and spit, a glob falling on the back of my neck, then streaming down beneath my shirt, sticking to the top of my back, in between the knob of my vertebrae, as I struggle to breath, as he jostles me, hands fingering pockets for my wallet. But I don’t have my wallet; I don’t carry a wallet, ever, well not ever, but not today.

So since I don’t have a wallet he’ll kill me just out of anger, he’ll knock a few lead heads into the back of my skull and I’ll feel the bone collapse in on itself, cutting through bits of whatever comes before the brain, then the brain, destroying my childhood, so I can’t remember anything good in my last moments of life, and then it’ll spring out the other end right between my nose and mouth, at that little weird spot, where those two little ridges of skin grow. Don’t ask me how the bullet travels further south. I don’t know the sick wonders of a bullet’s trajectory.

And with my last ounce of breath and sliver of sight, I’ll witness the clerk taking out a double barrel shotgun from a secret place beneath the counter, blasting the greasy bastard away. KABOOM chink KABOOM!

And then I’ll die and that’ll be that.

 

But the greasy man just asks for a pack of cigarettes, pays with a crumpled twenty and leaves the store without so much as a thank you or a nod to the clerk who so dutifully took his crap twenty, giving him back fresh, crisp one dollar bills and a five.

 

Ping-a-ling. The man is out and the girl is in.

Instinctively I tuck my head as far down as possible in between my shoulder blades.

I notice the girl is pretty, no very beautiful. Too beautiful.

With hair as black as crow’s feathers and eyes as deep and distant as black holes, with skin as pale as cream. She shouldn’t even be in this store.

She should be at the natural food place across town buying tofu and green beans and sprouts and that odd drink that has “good” bacteria growing in the bottom of it looking like some aborted half-plant half-human fetus. That drink that Michael Chino drinks, and says tastes like shit, but tastes wonderful.

She is surely a vegan with her slight frame, so why is she about to buy a thing of beef jerky? No, she’s not about to buy a thing of beef jerky, it’s a can of peanuts; A chocolate bar, a pack of rainbow Skittles, a thing of lighter fluid, a plastic whistle, a carton of chocolate milk, a breakfast burrito with extra hot chilies. 

I’m looking at… I’m looking at the cans of tuna. The magical shelf just full of tuna, with a few cat food cans mixed in for good measure, someone’s idea of a joke, I suppose. It’s a good joke.

Tuna… yum.

The little blue cartoon tuna with a beret stares back at me. He’s wearing the same pair of black glasses the clerk is wearing.

I notice that the two in fact look quite similar overall, minus the beret, and think this must be the cartoon tuna equivalent of the clerk, and then wonder if we all have carton tuna doppelgangers roaming around out there, thinking someone has spent their entire life just going around painting little cartoon tunas of everyone they see. I can’t help but picture the little tuna versions of the girl and myself renting an undersea apartment together. Having a school of baby tunas swimming around us as we do whatever tunas do. Probably making more baby tunas.

I wonder if tunas know how good they taste. Then I realize that it probably isn’t the tuna that has a good taste it is all the other stuff they add into it. A lot of salt, probably. And then I think that maybe it is the taste of the can, the metal can, that I really like. Some people in fact have an affinity for the taste of metal, something about not having enough iron in their diet, or having too much iron in their diet, or so I’ve heard.

 

The girl is now dangerously close to me. Too close. Why would she ever get so close to me?

She’s going to trip isn’t she? She’s going to trip and I’ll catch her and she’ll look up at me and smile – she could kill with that smile – and thank me. I’ll nod and say it wasn’t anything, and she’ll laugh and we’ll spend fifteen minutes just standing there talking about nothing and laughing. She’ll put her hand on my arm when she laughs. She’ll do this three times, and on the third time she will squeeze my arm a little. Then the clerk will snort and then in a gruff voice, ask us to get out. We’ll laugh and apologize and leave the store together. She’ll get to her car and I’ll tell her I walked, and she’ll say walking is good, and ask if I want a ride anyway, and I’ll say, sure, but to where? She’ll suggest her place. Would I like a drink? OK.

We’ll drive to her place, which won’t be very far. It’ll be a hip cool pad. She must be in a band, or want to be in a band, with all the gear lying around. Don’t mind the mess, she’ll say, and I’ll say, what mess? And she’ll laugh and get us two beers from the fridge. We’ll sit on the couch drinking and talking. Talking about school politics at Rutgers University, talk about the discovery of a new Egyptian tomb, the differences between Meryl Streep and Glen Close (if there are any), the general mystery that is Bollywood cinema, and gradually I’ll begin to notice that during all this she has been undressing. It’ll be slowly, almost sneaking an item here or there, and then sure enough she’ll be down to her bra and panties and she’ll press up against me and I will fell very old, much older than her, because I am.

And I will feel fat, and bald and smelly as she pulls off my shirt and notices the tattoo on my back of the Icelandic flag. She’ll ask what this is and I’ll tell her I was in the Icelandic Navy, on account of my father being Icelandic, making me half Icelandic, and that all people who enlist in the Icelandic navy must get a tattoo of the Icelandic flag somewhere on the upper half of their torso, preferably the right side of their chest or back. She’ll laugh at my story and kiss the tattoo, leaving her lips there for a very long time, then slowly pull away, sucking, as if wanting to drink up the ink. The ink mixed in with my sweat and dirty pores and bristly random hairs. Her hand will slide into my pants and find that nothing is going on down there on account of being nervous to death, on account of how this whole act is dangerously close to breaking the law on account of the whole age difference between us.

 

She doesn’t trip; instead she just drops a thing of Pinesol cleaner, looks up at me, and grimaces, as if to say - what the fuck are you looking at pervert?

I can’t blame her. She snatches the Pinesol off the floor with deft pale fingers - fingers with chipped red nail polish - and turns away, huffing to the checkout, giving the clerk a rumpled twenty and without so much as a thank you or a nod, leaves the store.

 

Ping-a-ling.

A rowdy pack of teenage boys come in. They are dressed from head to toe in fresh earth and Polo and Puma products. They laugh hearty laughs and toss a football back and forth, as they begin to own the store with their youthful masculinity and raging hormones, screaming out from every orifice as if to say, CAN YOU HANDLE IT GRAMPS?!!!

I can only imagine if the girl was in the store she would flock to them like in one of those deodorant commercials. Except when she tore off their shirts – and she would – she wouldn’t find old Icelandic flag tattoos under folds of fat, she would find hair-free bronze chests, the stuff of legend, that of the greek gods, and see at attention their little members - not so little because they are greek gods - and she would faint at the site of them, and the boys would laugh and then rape her.

 

The knuckleheads grab a bunch of Gatorades and slam them down on the counter. One of the boys smirks and flashes a silver credit card as if it’s a dagger, saying, look at me. The clerk gestures to slide it, not amused, and the boy does.

His friends are getting very excited now, scrambling over each other, limb entangled in limb, barking like rotweillers, about to hump each other to death.

The card is accepted. The transaction is complete with a teeny beep, and the boys head for the door as if they are about to just carelessly smash through it, the big hollering bundle they are, but instead a hand juts out from within the mass and the door opens and the boys tumble out onto the curb, howling like a pack of wolves as they chug Gatorade as if its beer... or blood. They probably would rather have beer. They are probably on their way to get beer. They probably have already had beer.

The clerk sighs and gets back to that same cigar aficionado magazine.

I wipe myself down because I realize I’ve become very sweaty through all these ordeals. One can exhort a lot of energy just standing still.

I decide on a thing of candy beans, and take it up to the check out. I am about to pay when I realize that I don’t have a wallet, I never carry a wallet, ever, well not ever, just not today.