Reflections of a liquor store clerk

The liquor store seems to exist only while you’re actually there. Once you walk out the door with your bottles, the whole place dissolves behind you into the brutal heat of an anonymous afternoon. You simply don’t think of it again.

But the liquor store is still there — shiny bottles, gaudy floor displays, cool temperature, tinted windows, quavering fluorescent lights, shuffling patrons, and the clerk who knows you’re the one who’s actually disappeared. The clerk is stuck. He cannot escape that lone fact. It’s tangled up with the procession of seconds, minutes, hours, days: His life is locked up in a cage of bottles.

I used to be that clerk.

I’d just returned to Austin after living in Germany for a time. Near penniless and sleeping on my friend’s floor, I felt like some sort of ghost. I needed bread and a place of my own.

One of the first ads I saw in the paper one morning read, “Needed: Individual with solid wine experience to work at one of various locations.”

I called the number, went in for an interview the next day, and they gave me the job.

Headquarters assigned me to a liquor store off Mesa Drive, in the hills. I was to replace Dan, though Dan didn’t yet know that. They had him train me before they gave me his job. Dan, a nervous, wiry guy, constantly chewed Bubblicious and rubbed his fingertips together until they bled. He gave discounts, large discounts, compulsively. He never missed a free wine tasting (even if it was all the way across town) and never clocked out before leaving to go to the free wine tasting. He routinely bartered booze for food at the surrounding restaurants. And he parked in one of the very front spots so that old ladies had to walk across miles of hot asphalt just to get their Johnny Walker Red Label. Sometimes the old birds would burst into flames. So they fired Dan as soon as he finished training me.

My new manager, Mitch, in his early 50s, stood six-foot-eight, 400 pounds. He was glad to get rid of Dan. Mitch had earned a history degree but never put it to use. You name it, Mitch had done it — run the service and retail gambit gamut. But Mitch knew, like I knew, that none of it mattered. Not one bit. It wasn’t despair, really, but a kind of freedom. It is what it is, he would always say — probably the greatest philosophical cop-out of all time. But try it the next time your mind is blitzed with blinding anxiety or there’s simply nothing more to say. Or when you just have to tell yourself something.

That’s what I told myself when I would come home to the apartment I’d finally gotten enough cash to rent after a month or two. A single, shadeless lamp pitched steep shadows across a rucksack, sleeping bag, pillow, alarm clock, a few half-priced novels, and the empty beer cans that populated my otherwise barren apartment. (It was like living in parenthesis.) I had no immediate plans for the future. I’d met an intelligent, attractive brunette, but things faded out. I read and drank a good deal. Self-loathing and trepidation ensued. The future seemed somehow shortened. It is what it is, I’d say after finishing my last beer but before turning out the lamp and rolling over on the floor to sleep.

As a clerk, you notice that some people forget they are involved in a simple everyday transaction with another human being — they complicate things and lose their perspectives. Some do, but some don’t. And you notice them, too.

This one older guy came in about every two weeks or so. He was enormous with a big white beard, crazy white hair, and clear, pale-blue eyes. A white Mexican wedding shirt stretched across his tumid belly; he wore tattered khaki shorts with slip-on shoes and lumbered on purple, swollen calves and ankles.

“I’m diabetic, but I still get my kicks here and there,” he said, placing a bottle on the counter. “I drink Agave because it doesn’t mess with my blood sugar.”

“There’s no sugar in Agave?”

“Exactly. And I’m not wrecked in the morning, either.”

I gave him his total, and he wrote it on the check.

“Say, that seems a little expensive, doesn’t it?”

Someone had me ring up a bottle of wine earlier to check the price and I had put it on his total. I apologized.

“Hey — it’s a poor skipper that can’t change course.” And he winked at me.

There were others like the skipper. The quiet man in the tie with the sleepy smile who came in almost every evening after the grocery store for his $25 bottle (not exactly table wine); the fellow that came in after swimming at the springs for his lunch wine; the lady who was trying to quit smoking and always trying to set me up with her friend’s daughter who played the fiddle; and the subtly flirtatious housewives buying brandy for cooking. They were all nice.

I felt reassured when I came across sensible people wandering around in the world. People that didn’t act petty. Thank you for being so reasonable, I’d say. Perhaps we’d have a brief conversation or comment on the weather. Maybe we would just smile at each other.

The rest of them were either indifferent or unreasonable. Indifferent was fine with me: They never caused me any grief. But unreasonable… I had to watch out. With fundamentally unreasonable people, the pettier the stakes, the more vicious the conflict.

The day before Thanksgiving is one of the liquor store’s busiest days: all kinds of people — and hordes of amateurs, too.

“There’s this whiskey that my brother likes. He’s coming with his wife for the holidays; she won’t be drinking because she’s expecting, but he really likes his whiskey, and if it’s not the right kind, he’ll be let-down. I can’t let down my brother, can I? Not on Thanksgiving, I can’t.”

“What type of whiskey,” I ask, “Scotch, Irish, Bourbon, Sour-mash?”

“Oh gosh, oh gosh… There are different kinds? Oh it’s the one with the design on the label, you know the one? Red and black, I think. Or maybe, no, red. It’s definitely red. With black.”

I’d been dealing with them for months, but today, the day before Thanksgiving, was my last day. I could make it. I. Could. Make! It. After getting off work, I would drive home to East Texas to have Thanksgiving with my family, see if they had any old furniture they’d give me.

I stood behind the counter steadily ringing people up for maybe nine hours. Nearing close.

The last customer at the end of a long stint looked like a cool operator: gray hair, expensive suit with the tie loosed, collar unbuttoned. He set all his booze up on the counter. Enough booze to kill a few people. Two handles of Vodka, club soda, Scotch, Grand Mariner, Patron. All of it. He was really doing it up. As he placed everything on the counter, I went to get a box for it all. I came back and began to ring him up, placing the items in the box as I went. Ten hours of repetitive service had rendered me an automaton. My knees were stiff and I felt dizzy. A girl stood behind him with a bottle of wine in her hand, her eyes poised to ask a question as soon as I was ready. I swiped his card, tore the receipt.

“Sign here,” I said, and tossed his receipt in the box. He bent to sign. “Can I help you ma’am?”

“Yeah, I was wondering—”

“Do I get a ‘Please’?” the man said, his pen resting on the laser paper. The girl gave him a look. I was confused.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Please. Are you going to say ‘Please’? Are you going to say, ‘Please? Please, sign.’ Or are you just going to throw it at me.” His tone was menacing, and he ended his last sentence without a question mark.

I must’ve checked out 15,000 people over the course of the day. I was just a slut. A retail slut. And now this poor guy wanted it to be special; he wanted me to say, “Please, please sign the paper, sir, please.”

“No,” I said, “You’re not getting a ‘Please’ today. You can sign the paper and take the booze, or I can refund your credit card and take the items back.”

He had a rectangular gauze taped to his forehead, which I hadn’t noticed before, just above his eyebrow. Maybe that’s where they tried to fix his brain, I thought.

“Are you serious?” he asked. “You are not going to say it? You are not going to say ‘Please’?”

“No, I’m not.”

“What is your name?”

“Sir, please be reasonable.”

“What is your name?!”

“James,” I told him.

“Well, James, I am going to remember that. I am going to let someone know.”

“It won’t do you any good,” I replied. “Today’s my last day. Nothing can come of it.”

“Your last day, huh, James? Well it shows, buddy. Where’s your manager?”

“He’s in the back, taking inventory.”

“Go get your manager.”

“You get him, I got nothing to say.”

“I will.”

He put down the box and stalked off towards the back.

“I was, like, here the whole time,” the girl said, “I mean, I guess people will, like, pick their battles, but that guy was, like, totally silly. I’ll totally vouch for you.”

“I really wanted to lay my hands on him,” I told her. “I don’t usually get that feeling.”

He came out from the back. Mitch wasn’t with him. I smirked.

“Did you get it all worked out with my manager? I mean, was he pissed? Am I in trouble?”

“WHY DON’T YOU JUST FUCK OFF, BUDDY!”

“Okay, that’s totally crazy,” said the girl.

“You need to get that under control,” I said as he grabbed his box. “You can’t just go around telling everyone to fuck off. It’s not couth.”

“Looks like someone lost their shit,” chimed a guy in blue sunglasses.

After Mr. Murdereyes left, Mitch came from the back. We all had a laugh, Mitch, the girl, and I. And the guy in blue sunglasses. In the middle of our little joke, I’d have liked for Dan to walk in drunk, swinging a big fucking gun around in the air, blowing pink Bubblicious bubbles, erratic machine gun fire blasting out ceiling tiles. But it didn’t happen.

That night, as I drove the two-lane highway through dark, dark black, passing fields, hills, the rubies of radio towers, small towns left for the lateness alone, and finally back into the deep green of East Texas, I thought how I’d never work in a liquor store again. I wouldn’t have to be around all those bottles for 40 hours a week. I thought then, not about the managers or the clerks or the nice ones or the amateurs or the indifferent or the unreasonable, but the drunks. And I don’t mean just the drinkers, or the heavy drinkers. But the wraiths. They paraded out of the dark, dark black I drove into, dancing like brutalized cartoons along the curving yellow line.

I thought of the soft-spoken lady with the doughy skin who breathed hard like she was constantly on the edge of panic; we weren’t her only store. She always insisted on asking for her half-pint even though we both knew I knew what she wanted. If I took it down before she could ask, she’d make me put it back.

Or the vertigo cowboy, big hat and boots, always talking about buying booze for some ladies — hens, he called them. He’d come in walking funny, jerky like someone in a silent film. “Vertigo,” he’d say, “My doctor says I have vertigo. Astronauts get it, I don’t know.”

Or John the lawyer — a pint-a-day man, Gordon’s Vodka — he told me to remember three things: (1) never get into debt with anyone because you’ll end up having to entertain them; (2) receipts serve as evidence so keep none; and (3) take something to drink from time to time so you’ll be confused enough to be happy about the current state of affairs. John came in once to get some boxes for moving. We were always unpacking boxes and just threw the empty ones away. We hadn’t seen John in a week, which meant his wife had been after him. I think he thought he’d just come in and pick up a few boxes for his things and his wife’s things so they could move them together, and not buy any booze. He was happy-seeming and boisterous. I remember we talked about Looney Toons. About their deranged yet predictable logic and how comforting it is. Bugs Bunny as Carmen Miranda; the way you run on air for a time before you begin to fall. He almost got out the door with the last of his empty boxes, but then he just dropped them in front of the counter. “All right,” he’d said to me, “let’s get this over with: Give me my daily consumption.” Then in a far-off voice, looking at the floor: “Whether it’s good for me or not.” We both knew it was shameful as I handed it to him in the bag.

Or the guy who never drank before he lost his job and his dad got lung cancer; he would sometimes buy two pints in a day, also vodka, and be back the next.

Or the man who had been sharp and savvy before his wife’s infidelity and a brutal divorce broke him, who stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking, chewing a cold cigar, while I loaded up his box.

Or the butcher who smelled of blood — the ghosts of all those animals crowded behind him, in the store, in the bus, in his bedroom.

I am not judging. I am no better than these people. Should I have been morally conflicted about it? I was not responsible for their problem, but I was complicit in it. Complicity is not innocence. But somehow there was nothing else to be done. They paid, and I handed over the booze. It is what it is, we’d all say.

It is what it is? No, see: That excuse doesn’t always work as you roll over in the dark.