“Whadaya Mean? I Gave You a Ten!”

I’m surprised I don’t have an exchange like this every week: a customer pays in cash, waits to get change, yet doesn’t question my mental math until I’ve already tucked the bills he gave me into the register and shut the drawer.Today this meat and potatoes guy walked in and asked where the children’s books were. He had a strong Upper Right Coast accent. The way he said it sounded more like, “Hey. Doya know whereda Chil-ren’s sextion-is?” I really want to say he was from New Jersey*. I pointed in a couple directions. Over here and down there. As he moved about the store his square shoulders swung on his torso like concrete blocks joined with a steel beam. I imagined him half-way through a backstreet weightlifting session, no doubt with guys named Govone and C-Chan spotting him. He came back to the counter with a $2.99 Christmas book. Well, $3.51 after tax. I took his bill and gave him change. Then I stuck a Happy Dusty bookmark — replete with our smiling mascot: bespectacled moth (wearing a cardigan) munching on a book cover — in his copy of Rudolph the Red-Noised Reindeer.

“Hey, man, where’s the rest of my money?” he said.

“You gave me a five,” I said.

“Whadaya mean? I gave you a ten!”

“No. You gave me a five.”

“Are you kiddin’ me? Look here,” he said, spreading out a wad of twenties and fives and ones before me like a deck of cards. “I got one hundred eighty-five bucks. I know how much money I got.”

I told that didn’t mean anything to me, and he said yeah, he knew that. But he still wanted the rest of his money.

“I gave you the rest of your money,” I said. “I’m pret– I’m — really sure you just gave me a five.”

Of course I would have stuttered. My boss had told me to be more careful counting out customer’s change. He’d grown impatient with the sometimes five-dollar difference I’d come up with at the end of the night. Either I was giving the customers too much money or I was shortchanging them. But still, why was I doubting myself now? Ever since my boss talked to me about my money-handling I’d made good on my totals. With regards to Jersey I remembered well enough looking at the bill as he handed it to me and as I put it on the keyboard while I riffled through various coinage. Then I shoved the five dollar bill on top of a stack of twentysome other five dollar bills. I popped the register drawer back open. In the slot next to the fives were two worn ten dollar bills. I closed the drawer. There was no real way of knowing.

“See! I knew you didn’t know what bill I gave you!”

I stare at the wall past the cash register. I assume if this guy really wanted to come in here and scheme up some quick cash, he would have at least claimed he’d paid with a twenty. He scrunched up his face and shoved the dollar in change across the counter to me. He made out the store. I called after him, and he stopped. I said, “look.” I told him what I do each night is tabulate the drawer, and if I’m five dollars over, then I’d leave the money out and he could stop by tomorrow and get it.

“I’ll wrap it up in a ribbon for you,” I said.

“Hey, man, I don’t wanna make a big deal about this. I mean, if it was five hundred dollars, then sure, it’d be a big deal,” he said. “Anyway, tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. You gonna be here tomorrow?”

I said yeah. My boss and supervisor order food and along with their loved ones I looked forward to eating well (for free) and sipping (inexpensive) champagne in paper cups. The last thing I wanted was for Jersey to march in and tell my boss what a conniving little prick I was. He asked my name. I sighed. Joey. He stuck out his hand. I wanted to go home. I shook his hand — it felt cracked and leathery. He let go and I pointed to the dollar and change on the counter. He looked at it a minute before scraping it up.

“Might as well. You’re trying to take every last bit of my money anyway!” he said.

I stared blankly at the end of the shop.

“Hey Joey, I’m gonna see you bright and early tomorrow morning, okay?”

He left.

Later that night, after I’d taken out the recyclables and the garbage and locked the door, I tugged on the string hanging from the neon “Open” sign before hauling the drawer upstairs. I thumb through every bill, counting aloud, before conscientiously jotting down each amount in a column. I jab the buttons on the calculator. I finish and hit equals. The liquid crystal screen flashed a number. Now, it’s normal for the drawer to be off by a buck or two. Until this moment, however, I never thought the discrepancy mattered.

I added it up several times more — each time arriving at the same surplus amount:

Two dollars and fifty cents.

*[disclaimer: I've never been to New Jersey. My preconceived notion of a Jersey accent stems from a few stoned viewings of My Cousin Vinny and a run-in I once had with a passable rap group from Jersey City. Their most memorable track was called "I'm So Jersey".]

What’s the Trouble With a Urine Puddle?

“I think that’s a really, really questionable policy you have,” he said. “You can’t just lock up people in a store!

“It’s against fire code, for Chrissakes!”

His voice was rising.

Wearing jogging clothes and still slightly sweaty, the man was slim and vaguely thirty. He stood with a cup of Starbucks, teetering on the precipice between the the safety of the city’s sidewalk and the fiery deathtrap that is Happy Dusty Books. My parents had just flown in from Iowa. I didn’t want to be here at work, let alone incarcerating anyone with 50,000 books–err, several thousand cubic feet of inert — yet highly combustible — energy.

I was growing vulnerable like a five-year-old; I wanted grab the seat of my trousers and do the I-have-to-pee-dance. Instead, I explained the following to Smokey the Square:

I work evening shifts here at Happy Dusty Books. We’re thinly staffed, so that means I’m the sole employee from five to ten p.m. As a result, when I have to use the bathroom (let me say I drink coffee emphatically), I abide by the following protocol established by our manager:

1.) I walk around and let each customer know I have to “go to the back room.” This is a euphemism for “bathroom.” (Everyone understand this; no has ever had a problem with this.)

2.) I let them know I’ll be there for just a minute (this is the nice-person way of informing them I only intend to urinate.)

3.) I inform them that, in the meantime, the front door will be locked.

4.) I repeat, with polite emphasize, that this will take just a minute.

Assuming I don’t mumble or something, two things either happen: they nod agreeably or they ask to be let out.

This evening stood like any other. The usual before-dinner crowd came in a rush and then ebbed away. Two browsing customers remained. Despite going to the “back room” before my shift, I was again feeling very splashy. So, with the shop key in hand, I approached the first customer in the cooking section. I said my sch-peal. She nodded. I continued to the second customer, standing in the math theory section, to whom I recited the same. His eyebrows arched to attention.

Back to the top.

Smokey the Square is standing half-inside the store, and half-outside. My arm is getting tired from holding the door open. I can almost taste the lactic acid. It’s awkward. He stands there, reddened by his recent run and by his rising concern. Little bits of saliva have coagulated on his lower lip, and the way it’s slightly quivering, I’m afraid the froth might land on my face. He spews forth like a fire hydrant:

“Can you imagine the pandemonium you’d have on your hands if this place went up in blazes!”

I accept his invitation. In my head, the pandemonium goes like this:

I pull off my sweatshirt before locking up. It’s hot in the store, I notice, a dry hot heat like the kind you get from a space heater (which I probably left on full-blast upstairs next to a bin of scrap paper hours ago.) I’m rearranging my damped t-shirt as I navigate a store full of customers, several baby strollers and a one particularly loud teenager with Down’s Syndrome. Finally I reach the back room. I close the door. As I unzip my fly, I’m humming some bit of Classical I caught from NPR. Here we have a close-range shot — framed by my legs — of the stream splashing into the toilet bowl. The shot cuts to wisps of smoke that seep through cracks in the store’s stucco ceiling. An ashen wreath, like a particle snake, winds through the Used Literature aisle, just above the heads of several browsers, before receding — much quicker than it had escaped — through a ventilation shaft. Classic back draft effect. Shelves of used paperback editions beginning to tan and crinkle. Cut to a shot of an employee-less front counter: a remarkably thick, very whitish haze settles above the cash register. A sign on the “back room” door reads: Employees Only. We hear the dribble of liquid. I’m shaking out the last drops while, with a permanent marker, I deface the Da Vinci Code poster behind the toilet. The caption above the head of Mona Lisa reads: “Why is this man smiling? The answer is in this book.” I scratch out the noun of the last preposition and write “your hands.” I chuckle as I zip up. At this precise moment we hear a great snapping roar as the store’s leaden vault crashes through the ceiling — its resting place in the attic having succumbed to the transformative properties of intense heat – and crushes me. I die instantly. The Employees Only door caves in on itself and is sucked up by the great vacuum created by a sooty, oxygen-starved attic drawing a giant’s breath of air. Paperbacks flutter like felled doves. Customers scream and heave.

Pandemonium.

From the sidewalk outside we see great walls of flame leaping from the tops of bookshelves onto the huddled mass. A man is smashed against the glass door by the blind force of the mob. He looks a lot like Smokey the Square, and the way his mouth is smooshed up against the glass makes him resemble a puffer fish. He blinks at a few very concerned passerby.

Do the sprinklers go off?

No.

Have shiny red trucks arrived and unloaded men in yellow coats who attach white hoses to hydrants who are ready to douse the bookshop with gallons upon gallons of life-saving water and chop into the windows with shiny new axes?

No.

Things look bleak. People are trampling each other while choking on smoke. One man doesn’t know his hair has caught fire. The teenager with Down’s Syndrome steals a baby carriage and lobs it at a plate-glass window. The window heaves; it doesn’t break.

The store goes up in a fireball.

Everybody fuckin’ dies.

Imagined pandemonium over. I look at the guy.

“Fine. But what do I do in the meantime? Pee my pants?”

I really wanted to know.

“Do Nice People Get Discounts?”

I was busy at the computer just then. Before I tagged about 200 books with a price gun, I wanted to spend a few unadulterated hours browsing copyranter.

Shortly into the action, though, the guy holding a couple books at the counter asked about students.

“Are we discounted?”

I didn’t say anything until I’d punched in the prices: $19.28. I tell him we don’t do student discounts.

“How about discounts for nice people?”

The angelic expression my antagonist wore was almost convincing. I wanted to tell him,while slowly carving up his face with an exact-o knife, that nice people don’t ask for discounts. Instead, I softly tap his books and remind him how discounted his books already were — their being used and all.

He handed me a twenty, and as I fished up his change from the drawer, he handed me another dollar.

“This is for you.”

I stared at him.

“Look, you don’t tip somebody at a bookshop,” I said. “Besides, I didn’t even give you the discount.”

“But you weren’t rude about it.”

Of course I was rude about it. I ran a hand under my stocking cap. What’s with this guy? Is he one of those cheery people who’s appointed himself a mission of frown inversion? But something occurred to me. I smiled at him. Real big.

“You could get me a cup of coffee.”

His face straightened.

“You want some coffee?”

I smiled bigger, and nodded. He said he’d get me coffee next time. Sure, I thought. I knew then I’d penetrated his saintly pretense, and I saw him for the arrogant, terrified, touchy-feely wimp I knew he was.

I said that’d be great.

I went back to the computer feeling righteous and vastly more mature. Sure I was in a bad mood — but at least I had the decency to not bullshit anybody about it. I was clacking away when he came back. He reached over and placed a cup of coffee on my desk.

On top the computer screen, he put a cinnamon roll.

He left.

A little crown of steam rose from the paper cup. I took the cup and popped off the lid and look at the coffee. Black. No discernible signs of spit or mucus, lest they were diluted by vigorous stirring. I put the lid back on the coffee and the cinnamon roll on top the lid and and pushed them both to the far side of the desk.

Prick.

A Model for Fiction

So my girlfriend and I moved to San Francisco together. Me, her, and our cat, Noel Catward. But six weeks into it, she gets flown overnight to Paris. For an editorial internship (she’s fluent in French). She’s been there over two months already, and could very well be gone another a month. We don’t know. We can’t even plan on Christmas together.

Then she’s moving to New York in the new year. Indefinitely (this will all, in time, be another post).

So, as I often do when I’m at work, I sit behind the front counter in front of the desktop instant messaging my girlfriend. My girlfriend (let’s just call her ” my girlfriend”) and I are separated by a nine hour time difference. So that means she and I talk for the first couple hours of my shift before it quickly becomes three a.m. her time and she needs to tuck in before all her castings in the morning. This night was no different. It’s so typical I’m even asking my girlfriend to send me a quick nudie pic to get me through my shift.

“oh, no, sweetie, I’m so tired. The camera’s so far away, too. How about you wait until tomorrow until the lighting is better. It would just be too blurry,” she types.

“C’mon! I don’t care whether it’s in focus or is dark or whatever. I love the dark, blurry one I have of you! Please! Instant messages and nudie photos are all we have!!!!”

“No. G-night. Love you.”

She logs off.

I’m bummed. I am really bummed on my girlfriend and our circumstances and I’m swamped, uncharacteristically, with a long line of customers when the carbon receipt paper runs out. No bother, I’ll just switch in a new one. I can do this. I fiddle with the roll, shove it through the proper slot, wind the yellow paper around a spool, push the feed button and–

whirrrrrrrip!

The yellow strip has torn loose and has been sucked into the little machine. The whole printer is jammed, and judging by the impatient faces of our loyal customers, my little world is a shitstorm, and I’m wearing an asshat as I climb up on the counter and stretch precariously over the computer screen to reach the printer, much to the shaddenfreud of the queue. Somewhere between nearly toppling the little machine off the counter and scribbling down the details of each purchase (title, author’s name, isb number, price) I hear a familiar voice.

Hey, Joey…

I glance over at the new fiction section and see my girlfriend, of whom I become embarrassingly aware is seeing me for the first time in two months behaving exactly like the lunatic she knows me to be. I drag myself off the counter and kiss her. Only I kind of miscalculate and end up mashing my teeth against hers. This happens each time we see each other after being geographically separated. I realize there’s an older man standing by the counter, so I return to my post, ushering my girlfriend to sit at the desk, and vaguely apologize to the customer, muttering a string of words including “girlfriend,” “Paris,” “Two months,” “Horrendous trick.”

“Oh, no! That’s fine. This makes me want to buy more books,” he says. His really wide smile makes me uncomfortable.

The printer is still jammed. My girlfriend and I have intermittent conversation while I fuss with the computer. She complains, though, of terrible jet lag, and decides to catch the bus home to get some rest.

A half-hour after she leaves I get an instant message from my girlfriend.

“I just got my period on the bus.”

Hi! I have a book now, please!

“Hi!”

“Hel-lo!”

“Hi!”

The series of salutations came marching from the children’s section.

“I have a book now, please!”

The little boy hoisted the book above his head onto the counter. Shrek 2. His mother came up behind him with a wan smile and a small stack of books. The smiling faces of Shrek, his ogre wife, and Donkey peeked past his fingers, still clutching the book. As I pull the book from the little boy’s grasp I read a blurb on the back cover:

Join your fairy tale favorites for a hilarious adventure that proves that nothing is quite what it seems and that living happily ever after isn’t easy.

“Have you seen Shrek 2?” the boy continued. “I like Shrek 2 but I like Shrek 3 better. You don’t have any books on Shrek 3.”

He stood on his tippy toes to look at me across the counter. The cold breeze from outside fussed his bowl cut. As the boy moved about I noticed an irredescent smudge of snot that streaked his face like half of the Joker’s smile. I told him I also liked the Shrek movies.

His mother handed me her credit card and I began punching the value of the books into the computer.

“There’s a big crane in front of my dad’s office,” the little boy said. “There’s a big crane there, and when I visit my dad, he has a new toy for me every time.

“I have the best dad!” he continued. He was all blue eyes and confidence. Customers smiled at the little boy. His mother signed the credit card slip and wadded the yellow copy into an overstuffed wallet.

“Well, he’s a father we hardly ever see,” she said to no one in particular. She gathered up the little bag of books. “He’s a good father when it’s convenient.

“Come on, now, Michael. Let’s go home now.”

“Bye!!!” the little boy said to the customers. He choked the Shrek book with one arm while his mother led him by the other.

“I have the best dad, now. Bye!”

“Hey, Would You Do Me a Favor?”

It started simple enough. A small request. A tinsy favor.

“Would you mind turning off the radio?” he said.

I’d seen him in here before. A tallish man in his fifties, with a lumpy, yet not unpleasant face. He wore flannel, and I liked that. I also liked his tortoise shell glasses. He always gave me a smart nod when he walked in the door. I was inclined to like him. But, see, here’s where all the above becomes moot: this guy leans on the merchandise. He will pull a book off a table and, planting his elbows squarely on stacks of nearby books (these books are all new, mind you!) will proceed to bend the spine of the book in hand (ugh!) and read–his upper body slowly squashing the unfortunate merchandise beneath his girth. I never told him not to lean on the merchandise. He should just know. I looked at him.

“No.”

“Well, you see,” he said, making a sort of grimace. “The noise of it interferes with reading. Why don’t you do me a favor? Turn it off.”

I could have gone either way. It really was just background music. But it was already turned down. Anyway, who walks into a store and makes a request like this? Here at Happy Dusty Books we’ll let you read undisturbed for hours and hours — but this ain’t no library.

“No.”

“Why? Is the music for you or for the customers?”

“Look,” I said. “I bet if you worked at a bookshop 25 hours a week, for ten bucks an hour, you might want the radio on, too.”

I regretted saying this last bit. This whole woe-is-me, the-kid-with-a-college-degree-who-bides-his-time- working-at-a-bookshop shtick. Did I really just tell him how little money I made? I rushed to say something to rinse my mind of what I’d said.

“Besides,” I added. “It’s not like it’s hip-hop or anything. It’s NPR, and they’re playing classical music.”

A couple of kids my age browsing the surrounding tables looked at the big guy with disapproving looks. I felt reassured. But even then I was aware they may have been overly sympathetic because I’d just given them a freebie book on paranoia a woman had previously donated.

He grunted and shuffled off to the music section — at the farthest end of the store.

Non-Emergency Profiling

A little into my evening shift, just as the nine-to-fivers begin trickling in for a fresh after-dinner read, a little white something is lobbed through the front door and hits the floor.

Pop!

A bearded customer wearing a ball cap (who looks exactly like Steven Spielberg incognito) and I stare at each other until the sound of laughter seeps in from the sidewalk. Like any good employee I jump up and run outside where two teenage kids are standing, each gripping a little plastic gun. I recognize the toys as the kind that shoot little paper pouches of gunpowder — like the stuff you’d throw at Fourth of July Parades. They stand self-satisfied; little smiles play on their faces. I’m cool. I know how to talk to these kids.

“Man, fuck right off with that shit!”

The kid farther away in a shadow snickers.

“Fuck your weak-ass store,” says the kid closer to me. He says it in a way that sounds like he’s already tired of his game. I tell them I’ll call the cops if they don’t fuck off. I stare at them for an instant, and, satisfied with how legit I must seem. I walk back into the store. I am its ten-dollar-an-hour savior. I nod reassuringly at Steven Spielberg.

Pop! Pop!

Out the door again, this time with my cell phone in hand. The kids are laughing.

“You either fuck off or I’m calling the cops,” I wheeze, my nerves getting the best of me. “Actually, I’m calling the cops right now!”

“Fuuuck you,” the talkative one calls over his shoulder.

Making good on my word, I call the non-emergency number and a police officer shows up at the shop a couple minutes later. A big stout guy with an easy smile. After sniffing at a little paper scrap of firecracker, the cop asks what the kids looked like. I lean against the new fiction section and explain they were mid-teens, both wearing hoodies, pretty baggy, one had a Marc Ecko rhinoceros on it, the other had this all-over print–

“–No, no. I mean, what did they look like, you know, like what ethnicity?” the cop clarifies.

“Oh, man.”

“Black? Asian?”

“Black, they were black.”

The cop gives a knowing nod. I start talking.

“H-hey, you know, don’t arrest the kids or anything. I mean, they were just being dumb, b-but they weren’t hurting anybody. They were just being annoying.”

The cop puts up his hand.

“Don’t worry. We’ll handle it,” he says. He asks which way they went and I point and say they went that way.

I don’t hear any more firecrackers the rest of the night.