There’s a strong case to be made

“We’re not here to save the country from itself, just to get the job done.”

My traveling companion snapped those words at me as we worked to “smooth out” some auto paper “irregularities” at the border. Upon hearing them, I had to stop and reflect, even though in the past I’ve bribed my way from Syria to China, surely lesser nations morally. Maybe we ‘holier-than-thou’ foreigners casting aspersions in Guatemala, and innumerable places like it, are missing the point on bribery.

Before moving to define the issue in depth, I’d like to dismiss a silly argument that always seems to crop up at the beginning of an otherwise serious debate: “How dare you be so hypocritical as to discuss corruption elsewhere when your own country (the United States) is corrupt?”  Of course the United States is corrupt; all nations are. Just because Transparency International concludes that the Scandinavian countries are “clean” doesn’t mean that they are free from corruption, it just means that T.I. hasn’t yet figured out how they are corrupt and how to factor that kind of corruption into the rankings. If there are 215 countries, there are 215 corrupt countries, Q.E.D. Rounding out the top of T.I.’s “clean” list are Sweden, Norway, and more recently Iceland, all of whom in recent history have experienced total banking system collapses, and we defy you to show us a financial system blowup that wasn’t catalyzed by some particularly effective grease somewhere in the system, usually at the top (see Sachs, Goldman, et. al. under the “Current Events” heading in your favorite news source).

In the U.S. there is officially almost no corruption, unless you happen to be anywhere in Illinois, or Louisiana, or California’s 50th congressional district (also known as whitebread San Diego), or the Puritan state of Rhode Island, or happen to know one of the 14,000 registered federal lobbyists (U.S. Senate alone), or one of the 6,000 U.S. corporations employing lobbyists. But the point is this: on any given trip to the local Department of Motor Vehicles, it is highly unlikely that someone will approach you in line and say something to the effect of “You know, there is a much quicker way to get this done, if you’ll just follow me into the parking lot.” Your correspondent’s personal experience stuffing envelopes with $500 each to get an occupancy certificate in Baltimore notwithstanding, there remains very little official corruption of what we’ll call the “petty” kind, as opposed to the embedded and apparently socially and ethically acceptable “institutional” kind, in the United States.

Maybe there should be more.

Before professing your knee-jerk distaste for petty corruption, ask yourself this basic question: “Would I rather go through an official process that lasts up to two days but costs little or nothing, or pay an expediter $50 to turn it into a 20-minute seamless exercise in efficiency, with the same result?” In Guatemala we have that choice, but in the U.S. and other parts of the civilized, western world we do not. We are forced to take a number and stand in line for three days while the large woman behind the counter paints her nails and discusses her loveless life. Social utility. And we all know that Guatemala is a country with vast difference of degrees of wealth. If Robin Hood could understand the social utility of wealth redistribution, why can’t we?  In the case of a few well earned Pesos or Quetzales pressed into the palm of an obliging public servant, officially subsisting on the grandiose wage of $300 per month, it’s simple redistribution according to the will of the first-person distributor – rather than the whims of a politically fickle central government.

In the United States, speaking of ‘holier-than-thous,’ foreign corporate practices are governed by spurious enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, as snickering corporate executives refer to it. Written (probably during those wondrous, morally unambiguous and nationally disastrous Jimmy Carter years) to try, by beginning at home, to regulate the moral behavior of the world’s corporations. And because of that act we were just stung again, this time by those wily French with a bid to snake, successfully, General Electric out of a nuclear reactor contract in the notoriously uncorrupt Philippines. But the FCPA triggers a boring annual lecture by an otherwise incompetent corporate lawyer once a year to parse “Pay them to do what they should anyway, but don’t pay them to do what they shouldn’t.” In case the bottom feeders who inhabit corporate lawyers’ slots can’t figure that one out, some clear thinker — or maybe my kind of wag — when the FCPA was written, even referred in the written legislation to “grease payments.”

With all the current hand-wringing about the national economy in that august and incorruptible body called the United States Congress, maybe it’s time we adjust our Western attitudes toward corruption of the petty kind. Talk about export-led growth: “Hey China, how about a couple of new American-built (non-weaponized) nuclear reactors at $10 billion each?  Just walk with us out to the parking lot and we’ll slip a couple of spare F-16s in your pocket.” Let’s see the haughty French “outbid” us on that deal. Economic utility.

Should we bribe in Guatemala? Well, my border critic got the “job” done, and we made our Mexican hotel in time for the NCAA basketball final (possibly the best ever), re-crossing the border the next day with suspicious celerity, despite the customs officer’s initially Heller-esque protestations that by our passports we were already in Guatemala, so we couldn’t possibly be coming back. Talk about social utility of the very highest order.

But I still have this lingering Calvinistic notion that I am one step closer to Hell.

Guatemalans call their mayors and Congressmen “diez porcientistas” or “ten percenters”, charging 10% on anything with numbers attached that passes within signaling distance of their fiefdoms. There’s a trend, when their duly elected officials get too close to the trough, not to re-elect “veinte porcientistas” or twenty percenters, so the process is self-regulating. This phenomenon also guts the argument that goes “Well, the Maya did it,” since the Maya used base 20, and there is no known glyph showing anyone losing his head over receiving 21% instead of just losing the ball game.

Our car example may have had no wider consequences save that we got to enjoy every second of a particularly good NCAA final, and the tip jar at our favorite border crossing had a little less air in it, but there are also strong social and economic utility arguments in favor of petty bribes. Let’s examine the case of rice. Rice in Guatemala is about US$1.25 a kilo. Rice in Mexico is about $.80 a kilo. It is illegal to import Mexican rice into Guatemala. Is it therefore corrupt to bribe a Guatemalan official to look the other way when a container 20,000 kilos of Mexican rice “avoids” customs on its way across a man-made totally artificial line on a map to beleaguered consumers? I say “No!” The guy looking the other way may have a new 42 inch flat screen TV, but the stretched Guatemalan households at the container’s destination will save $5,000. Corrupt? Or just possibly a moral decision? I say it  provides immediate economic utility of the most beneficial kind — direct to the consumer. And national social utility. This logically airtight argument extends to gasoline, eggs, Coca Cola, Colgate and all those other items so essential to our lives here in Guatemala, especially beer. Beck’s and Heineken cheaper than Gallo?  Now there’s an area that could use a little large-scale cross-border grease.

What exactly is a bribe, anyway? When Caterpillar slips an Illinois congressperson an envelope full of cash to vote to keep out French (those wily French again) construction machinery, is that a bribe?  Or is it precisely what he was elected to do?  Henry Kissinger is adamant that nations do have interests, which, not just coincidentally, is why they are called national interests. Even a lawyer might accidentally grasp that one. Actually Kissinger, perhaps the most practical person ever to have been Secretary of State, is just articulating a mammoth worldwide argument for the primacy of the social utility of grease.

“To bribe or not to bribe?”

Even Shakespeare apparently totally missed the point when he wrote in Julius Caesar, “Shall we now contaminate our fingers with base bribes?”

Come on, Will baby, lighten up and join us at the Mexican border.

I’ve had some jobs in my day.

It always happened like this. I needed some money so I found some way to make it. The thought of a career never really was my thing. Being something – a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief just didn’t ring true. The sense of permanence, grown-up-dom, self-importance, and lack of adventure always had me taking whatever would have me. More often than not this strategy left me broke and desperate and wondering where I would lay my head for the night. Looking back it was not a strategy or a conscious decision at all. I think it just comes down to wiring. I was not wired for the other way. Maybe it was the books I read at an early age… who knows.

Here are the jobs I’ve held in more or less chronological order from  the age of 7 on: I sold seeds from door to door in suburbia, then Christmas and Easter cards, I delivered newspapers, I mowed lawns, I raked leaves, I stuffed envelopes, I built lobsterpots for fisherman, I picked peas on a farm, I taught tennis, I sold marijuana by the joint, ounce, ¼ pound and pound, I worked alongside a bee farmer, then helped train birddogs, and by mistake almost poisoned horses…

I worked in an old folks home, I worked as a night guard in a library, I worked in a copy shop, I framed houses, I painted houses, I tore down houses, I’ve waited tables…

I’ve sold Christmas trees on the sidewalks of NY, I telemarketed shitty magazines from a warehouse in Jersey City, I drove an ice-cream truck in Michigan, I bounced for a brief spell in a bar in Birmingham, I drove a beer truck in Virginia, I worked as a shill in an auction house in Atlanta, Georgia, I taught Latin in a private high school in Mississippi, I opened an illegal bar on top of a convent in Rome….

I’ve  worked construction on a high-rise, I’ve sniveled as a stock broker, I gave blood whenever and wherever they were paying for it, I’ve tutored attention deficit teenagers and written theses for lazy grad students. I’ve scribbled ad copy for Cinemax pseudo porn and styled an urban-rooftop-wet-dream for the Home and Garden Television Channel. I’ve dot-commed with dipshits, transported precious paintings from gallery to restorer to collector, I’ve sold antiques…

I’ve exported furniture from Mexico and overseen the making of hand bags in a state prison…

I’ve helped put together famous boy bands,  I’ve done castings for movies, television, commercials and print, I’ve done location scouting and acting, I’ve opened a bar, a bookstore and a café in Guatemala. I’ve smuggled booze…

I could go on. But the beautiful part of all that, especially in the mid-later years, is that when I was not doing THAT, I was lazing about, reading, bopping into museums, catching a bus to another town, scribbling in a journal, strolling the streets  of a city, looking in windows, going to movies, waking up in another country…

In the breaks between having some money and having none, I’d often go to a used bookstore and buy a handful of books by one author and go on a focused reading binge. Graham Greene I read this way, Bruce Chatwin, Balzac, Shaw, Faulkner, Maugham, Bukowski, Dashiel Hammet, Mickey Spillane, James M. Caine, Celine, Chomsky, Paul Bowles, all filled these glorious  and episodic sabbaticals. (When people would ask what I do, I’d say just that, I’m on a sabbatical, as though I had just taken a brief leave from a teaching position at a prestigious university.)

For some strange reason during these sabbaticals I’d often take to collecting broken chairs that had been discarded in the street. I felt a kinship to them. They were a bit rocky, interesting in an off kilter way and in need of ass. I’d take them home, and with a little glue and sandpaper and paint, I’d fix them up and give them as gifts. Where others would bring a bottle of wine to a party, I’d show up with a slightly cattywampus chair and get an odd look as I passed through the door. It got to the point that briefly I held the moniker, The Chairman.

Illustrations by Juan Pablo Canale Banus

The pain ripped through my chest like a dozen steak-knives, snapping me over at the waist, leaving me staring and grimacing at the floor. I was on a PATH train headed back into the city after a night of house sitting in Hoboken.

Well, this is it, I thought, I’m going to die right here. Fuckin’ typical–dropping dead on a train from Jersey, my pockets empty except for one token, carrying a bag full of dirty clothes and a copy of Jack Black’s “You Can’t Win.” Ain’t it the truth?

I was coming off of four of the ugliest days I’ve suffered through in a long time, staring hard and hopeless into the fifth. It all started sometime in the middle of the night the Thursday before. I was lying in bed, my eyes wide in the darkness, sleep as obscene and foolish a notion as God, when the phone rang. Now, on principle, I never answer the phone after ten, because it’s either bad news or someone I don’t want to talk to. Unfortunately, I’ve given a few people the okay to call me whenever, so I crawled out of bed and went to listen to who it was.

It was Laura, my estranged wife, calling from her new apartment in Harlem. She sounded bad–you learn to recognize these things over time–so I picked up. She was in a state alright–some guy she had been seeing suddenly wasn’t dealing with her anymore, wasn’t taking her calls, was leaving his home phone off the hook. Both of us figured we knew what was going on.

“Look,” I told her, pinching the bridge of my nose, “why don’t you come down here, we can talk about it.”

“Can we order a pizza?”

“Sure, we can order a pizza.” With that, she was on her way. Laura and I were still very friendly, and I’d seen her through the worst of times before, so this was no big deal. So I figured. Of course I also figured that the world was going to end in August of 1985.

Two hours later, pizza ordered, beer opened, smokes lit, we got down to business. Laura’s beau, Chris, you see, worked at the same research lab she did. So did Chris’s wife. It was a pretty sticky situation from the get-go.

It started a few months back, when Laura moved out of the apartment and into the lab, while she looked for a place of her own. Chris would stop and ask her how she was doing. She’d tell him. The conversations grew longer. They’d go out for coffee or drinks. In Laura’s eyes, it all seemed very innocent. Then one night she called and told me that he was pretty hooked.

“He just sits there and stares at me,” she said.

“What about his wife and kids? I mean, this could get ugly.”

“He says that he’s bored at home–that when he walks in the door, he just shuts himself off. He says his wife doesn’t understand him.”

“He actually said that?”

“Uh-huh. He says that he can really talk to me, and that he’s never met anyone like me before.”

“He actually said that, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, my dear–those are the oldest goddamn lines in the book.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Over the weeks, Chris got a little more ardent, while Laura kept holding him off. It was just a good friendship, she figured. I kept following the action from a distance, not having any love life of my own to worry about. Then this Chris character came out and told Laura that he loved her, and wanted to leave his wife for her.

“Yikes!” I said.

Thing is, after all these weeks living alone in a lab after having stepped away from an unhappy marriage, Laura was pretty vulnerable to anyone who’d be nice to her–and as a result, had started to reciprocate his affections.

“So, do you love him?” I asked.

“I could, I suppose.”

A week later, I had no doubt that she did. Still, when he asked her to go to Canada with him for a week, she turned him down. That’s when he stopped talking. The one time she did get him on the phone, he promised he’d call once he got to Canada and explain everything.

“I don’t know what happened,” she told me. “And what’s more, I don’t know what’s going to happen–does it mean I can’t go to the lab anymore? Does it mean I can’t finish my research? He says he’s going to call me, but that’s two days away–two days of not knowing what to think.”

Which meant two unbearable days of panic and paranoia.

“Look, how’s this,” I suggested, “I’ll call him at the lab tomorrow and find out what the hell the story is.”

“He’ll never talk to you.”

“Hey, are you forgetting that I’m a professional journalist? It’s my job to get people who don’t want to talk to talk.”

“He’s not going to talk to you.”

“He’ll talk to me.”

At ten the next morning, I had him on the phone.

“Hey, Chris, Jim Knipfel here–you know, Laura’s husband?”

“Oh…….hi.”

“Tell me, Chris, uhhhh, what the hell’s going on?”

“Whaddyou mean?”

I rolled my eyes and lit a smoke. “Jesus, no time for that now–you know damn well what I mean. Laura’s here and she’s a mess, and I’m not going to wait until you get out of the country to find out what the story is.”

There was a bit of silence on the other end.

“Okay, let’s play it this way,” I stopped myself before calling him “Sugarlips,” “I’ll ask you two yes-or-no questions, then let you go, okay?”

“Okay.”

“When you call Laura from Toronto, which I’m quite certain you’re going to do, are you going to tell her that you can’t see her anymore?”

“More or less. There was a big blow-up at home a few nights ago–”

“Not my problem, Chris, and not one of my questions. Question number two: Will this in any way affect her work at the lab?”

“Absolutely not.”

Unlike most smokers

Neither one of my folks smoked, either. In fact, whenever the subject came up, my dad always told the delightful story about his first experience with tobacco. Seems he’d gotten his hands on some chaw when he was 10, and snuck out behind the barn to find out for himself what the fuss was all about. Of course, while he was huddling back there, chewin’ and spittin’, my grandpa came around the corner with a friend of his and caught him, just as nature intended.

“Pretty good, eh?” my grandpa’s friend asked my dad.

“Yeah, it’s great!” my dad answered.

“You know what you do with it now?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Ya swallow it.”

Well, my dad ended up in bed for the next two weeks, sick as he had ever been, ever would be, and never touched tobacco again, in any form.

Myself, I waited until I was 19, well aware of all the dangers, all the warnings, anxious to engage death in a slow and painful tango. Actually, slow suicide wasn’t why I started, but it’s certainly why I continue today. I didn’t even start with cigarettes. Instead, I began with cigars. Big, cheap, nasty-as-nasty-gets Phillie Titans. And I started, simply enough, because I was a bad man. Smoking fat, foul cigars in cramped public places seemed an easy and evil form of entertainment.

It was so simple to be walking down the street, cigar clamped tightly between my teeth, and just on a whim pop into a high-end sweater shop. I’d only be in there for a minute or two before the (always) dim employees figured out what was going on. They’d ask me to leave, which I did without argument, feigning ignorance (“I’m so sorry – I forgot all about it – I just wasn’t thinking”) – but my presence would be remembered there for days afterwards.

I’d bring a box of five Titans into a local hipster/arty coffee shop frequented by skinny white kids in turtlenecks and berets and pretend to read and drink coffee while frantically puffing away. It always insured that no one would sit next to me, but the bohemian hepcats were too cowardly to ask me to stop. That was a weekly bit of good fun until the complaints mounted and the management at Steep & Brew posted the “No Pipes, No Cigars” sign on their front door. I took that sign as a great moral victory, though I don’t know why.

I discovered another neat little obnoxious cigar trick while it was raining. I was waiting in a doorway for Grinch to show one night, watching all these people traipse by with their umbrellas, when I started experimenting. I found that if you time it just right, you can blow a puff of foul, acrid Titan smoke so that it will settle underneath the canopy of an umbrella, hang there, and travel along with the umbrella-user for several blocks.

Oh, the fun I had!

Before long, I found that I was chain-smoking Titans. By the third one, I could feel what seemed to be a golf ball-sized knot of hot tar sitting just behind my breastbone. It was a good feeling, a good pain. I figured I was onto something.

Unfortunately, the problem with cigars is this – especially in these days of the anti-smoking crusaders – you need a good half-hour chunk of time in order to properly enjoy a cigar. When I was in school, I had that kind of schedule, but not anymore. My day is now cut up into tiny little segments, and I can’t take a half-hour break to go smoke a bad cigar at someone else’s expense.

For awhile in Minneapolis, I tried some little monsters called Dutch Treats. Even more rancid than Titans they were, but they were cigarette-sized and came in three delightful flavors (leather, tangerine and raccoon, as I remember). Better still, they were sold in two-packs for 99 cents. That’s 40 little hate-sticks for less than a dollar! And even better yet, you didn’t have to ask for them the way you had to ask for regular cigarettes – they could be found in the tobacco aisle of my local Snyder’s drugstore, which made stealing them not just easy, but almost obligatory. Best of all, nobody – not even the most smoke-desperate homeless psychos – would ever bum one off me once they found out what they were.

As I walked toward my regular pillar to wait, I passed a young Japanese couple. He was on the payphone, while she wandered in what seemed to be aimless circles around him.

I paid them little mind, took my spot, and stared at the ground. The air was awfully thick down there. After a few minutes of staring at the ground and making occasional pointless glances in the general direction of my watch, I noticed that the Japanese girl was on the move. Her boyfriend was still talking to someone on the phone, but her wanderings were now taking her down toward the far end of the platform. She was swinging her head to the left and right as she walked, as if looking for something.

“Miss?” a middle-aged woman shouted after her. In her slacks and Polo shirt, she looked like she was on her way to “casual day” at the office. “Miss?!”

The young woman stopped and turned around. “Yeah?” she shouted back.

“Are you looking for your bag?” the older woman asked. They were still some 30 yards away from each other, so they had to yell past me. “Did you leave it down here at this end?”

“Yes! Do you have it?” The girl was jogging back toward her now, smiling, clearly relieved.

But as she drew closer, the middle aged woman told her that the bag was no longer there, that the police had come and taken it away.

“What?” The girl froze in her steps.

“The police took it.”

“Ahh!” the girl cried. “But – but can I… where can… Ahh! Frank!”

Then she bolted up the stairs, emitting a small, panicked grunt with each step. I watched her go. Where exactly she planned to start looking up there, I couldn’t really say. Her boyfriend continued talking to whoever he was talking to for a few minutes longer. He seemed more annoyed by all the shouting than anything else. Then he hung up and headed toward the stairs to follow her. He didn’t seem nearly as excited as her. Perhaps he just didn’t care.

It seems the proverbial unattended bag, threat to us all, had struck again.

Jesus Christ.

It was only then beginning to dawn on me that the train was late. No, it was worse than that. Since I’d been down there, no trains – neither uptown nor down – had come through the station. Not a one. And now I knew why. They were either holding them one station away or rerouting them until they knew for sure that the danger had passed, and that the Japanese chick’s bag wasn’t loaded with TNT or anthrax or cow dung. It also occurred to me that even though they were keeping the trains a safe distance away, they seemed to have no problem at all with letting the rest of us wait down there on the very same platform where that potential bag full of death was found.

Not that I was concerned about anything like that – I just found it interesting. Another facet of the MTA’s cut and run policy for handling emergencies.

Now consider for a moment the two major forces at work on the platform that morning: On the one hand you have someone so desperate, so intent on being a Good Citizen and getting a pat on the head from the cops that he or she was all too willing to drop a dime on a neighbor. Or in this case on an unattended purple Hello Kitty knapsack whose owner, in all likelihood, was nearby.

(I can’t say for sure, by the way, that it was a purple Hello Kitty knapsack – but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if it were.)

And on the other hand there’s Ms. Oblivious over there. I realize it was still mighty early – not even 6 a.m. yet – and that not all of us are quite together yet at that hour, but my God. How out of it do you have to be to not only leave your bag on a New York subway platform and wander away, but to not even notice when the cops show up, scrutinize and securing the bag, and take it away? I’m amazed she’s remembered to breathe for this long.

I don’t like the fact that we’re told every time we turn around that we’re supposed to be all jittery about forgotten bags. I consider it useless and dangerous and unnecessary. But we are told that, and people are awfully susceptible. Given that, putting a bag down and wandering away is just plain stupid, and she deserves to have her iPod taken away and stomped on for it. But on the other hand, people who can turn stoolie so fucking easily just sadden me, and cut one more chunk out of my meager faith in humanity.

In a struggle between the criminally witless and those people who can’t ever seem to mind their own goddamn business, who wins? Not me, that’s for sure – I was the one who had to wait an extra half hour for the train that morning on account of their foolishness.

Assholes, both of them.

Later that afternoon, I found myself standing on a different subway platform. It was warm down there, too. It was warm all over.

When the train finally arrived and pulled to a stop, I began heading toward an open set of doors. The conductor was hanging out of his window scanning up and down the train.

As I passed him, I heard him mumble something. Figuring he was just mumbling to himself, I ignored it and kept walking.

“Excuse me?” I heard him say. “Sir?”

Still not sure he was talking to me, I stopped and turned. Then I walked back to him.

“That’s a hot car,” he told me. “This one over here’s got air.”

I looked back where I’d been headed initially, and saw the people lined up to get in. Man, they were going to be an annoyed, stinky bunch before too long…

I thanked the conductor, not exactly sure why he’d chosen to let me in on this, and stepped into the air-conditioned car.

I suppose it was a kind of snitching, sure, a sharing of privileged information. But at least this time the intent was decent.

Jim Knipfel is a free lance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, the Novel, The Buzzing and several other works. His new novel, Unplugging Philco (Simon & Schuster) hit the streets on April 14th of this year. His weekly column, Slackjaw, can be read at www.electronpress.com

Maybe this happens to everybody

Sometimes I step outside the front door of my apartment, and suddenly find myself very confused by the world.

I’m not talking about large-scale issues. I’m not thinking “why do men fight wars?” or “Why don’t people realize that new technologies are accelerating our loss of humanity?” None of that shit. It’s much more basic than that. I mean the world itself – the physical things around me – seem strange and confounding.

Buildings seem to loom at strange angles. Human faces seem to be not just identical, but monstrous and twisted. Voices sound like gibberish. Even walking seems like a strange thing and suddenly requires conscious effort. One leg, then the other.

It’s akin to a mild acid trip, but it’s not the result of drugs or alcohol (that’s a whole different story). It just happens sometimes, usually in the morning. Most of the time things are simple – I shut the brain off almost completely and just go about my business by reflex. Those other times, though, boy. I need to concentrate real, real hard to get where I’m going.

I’ve mentioned things like this before, I think, but it really hit me again this morning. I was out running my usual Saturday errands, and people and walls and fences appeared out of nowhere in front of me. A man in a car stopped and asked for directions to the hospital, and I had to make him repeat the question three times before I could parse things out and point him in what I believe was the right direction. I should’ve known from the start what he wanted – people in this neighborhood only and always want directions to the hospital.

I walked into the grocery store and froze. I knew I was supposed to be there and knew what general principles were involved in “buying groceries.” I knew the process, but still it seemed like nothing I had ever experienced before. All those products, all those packages – the colors and the white noise. It was almost overwhelming. Thank god the store wasn’t crowded at that hour, or I might have turned around at that moment and fled. Instead I grabbed a basket and moved down the aisles, grabbing this and that while everything seemed to flow around me. Thank god the grocery store was big enough that I could cover myself okay. If I’d been in a narrow and cramped bodega, I would’ve been lost.

As I waited in the checkout line, my eyes scanned the magazine covers, and I could find no discernible, qualitative difference between Time, Women’s World, TV Guide, the crossword magazines and The Weekly World News.

“Humans Are Evolving Back Into Apes!,” the Weekly World News headline screamed.

Well, yeah, I thought. It seemed so obvious. I figured everyone knew that already.

Then the woman at the register was asking something of me – demanding, even.

What does she want? I thought, and said “Hmm?”

“Twenty, three, forty.” she said, and it took me perhaps a little too long to figure out what she meant by that odd string of numbers. I looked behind me, hoping there would be someone there to help me out, but I was alone.

Finally, slowly, the old internalized ways took hold again, and I reached for my wallet.

“I understand,” I told her.

Once outside in the warm gray drizzle again, I became aware of what was happening. It didn’t change the fact that everything seemed weird and wrong, but at least I was able to take that step back now and think.Yes, things seem weird from a safer and saner vantage point. I was able to recognize that the problem was one of perception and nothing else. Things were as I’d always remembered them – I was merely perceiving them off-kilter.

It was kind of like the time I woke up in a hospital in Minneapolis after a long drug-induced hallucination and thought, “Oh, I’m completely insane” – only to realize that being able to make that observation meant I wasn’t insane at all.

In this case it didn’t help dispel the crazy perceptions themselves, but I stopped worrying about them. I had a better sense of what needed to be done, even if the streets and storefronts and people around me seemed like a landscape from some distant, outlandish planet.

I got home without too much incident and put the various groceries where they belonged (I think – I guess I’ll find out later). Then I talked to my girlfriend, Morgan, which brought things back around again. What’s more, in my apartment everything seemed familiar and comfortable once again. I knew where I was and what things did.

Part of the problem, I think, was the fact that it was early, that I hadn’t yet had enough coffee, and that my brain was still waking up. Things hadn’t quite snapped into place yet, so the perceptions of a fluid and changing world simply flooded in willy-nilly, without the brain yet able to register things like “perspective” or “depth perception.”

It’s funny how the body wakes up in stages during the first hour or two of the day. Not just the brain, but things like digestion, coordination, the respiratory system. At least with me that’s the way it works. Brain comes last.

I poured myself another mug of cold coffee and downed it, then lit the morning’s eighth cigarette. Yes, things were starting to come around. A glance out the front window a few minutes later revealed that things seemed normal again. Still frightening, still strange, but at least recognizably so.

Meanwhile, I set myself the task of trying not to think about what schizophrenics, alien abductees, or Philip K. Dick might have to say about the morning’s grocery run.

I can’t tell you how often this has happened.

So I sat there a few minutes, waiting patiently. Rain falling that hard couldn’t last long, I figured. And I was right. Five minutes later it petered out to a simple, light drizzle.

Here’s where my logic decided to take a little breather. Since it rained that hard once, I figure, it’s pretty much done for the day. So I went downstairs and headed off to the bank. Then it began to rain again, just as hard as before.

That happens an awful lot, too.

But I was in it now, outside and on my way, so I wasn’t about to turn around and go back inside. It wasn’t a long walk – eight or nine blocks, maybe, but it was long enough when it was pouring out. At least it was early, which meant there weren’t many jackasses with golf umbrellas to contend with. I don’t own an umbrella, and so remain almost utterly defenseless against people who do. (Editor’s note: Mr. Knipfel is legally blind.)

As I approached the bank 10 minutes later, soaked to the bone, I remembered that, early as it was, they wouldn’t be open yet. That was fine – I only wanted access to the machines. (I haven’t dealt with a real human teller in 15 years – nothing but trouble there.) A quick swipe of an electronic card, and I’d be inside.

I began reaching for my wallet, but as I got closer to the doors, I saw a little kid – about seven years old, I’d guess – standing inside.

Now, you’d think that, being inside the way he was, he’d be kind enough to open the door and let me in. You’d think that, wouldn’t you? I sure did. So I put my wallet away and waited.

He just stood there.

I reached out and pulled on the handle, just to confirm for all the involved parties that the door was, indeed locked.

“Pull the other door!” he yelled through the glass. “Other one’s open!”

I looked, though I knew better.

“There is no other door,” I said. and pulled on the locked door again.

“The other door!”

I really, really hate children sometimes.

I sighed in the rain, reached into my damp pocket, grabbed my wallet, flipped it open, and began sliding my ATM card out.

That, of course, is when he gave the door handle a shove, opening it a crack for me.

“Thank you very kindly,” I said, suppressing the urge to push him down as I passed.

“I let you in,” he said. “Some people can’t come in. I don’t like them, they have to stay out there in the rain.”

“Uh huh.”

I headed over to a counter to fill out the necessary slip, but the little bastard followed me.

“I guard the door. It’s raining out. I’ve made a lot of people stand out there in the rain.”

“Don’t you have parents,” I thought, “or did they come to their senses and abandon you here?”

Just then his father snapped, “Adario! Get over here and leave him alone!”

As luck would have it, at that moment another victim showed up at the front door. This time he popped the door right open.

“You have an umbrella, just like me!” he exclaimed.

“Yes I do!” It was an old woman’s voice. One of those enthusiastic, God-fearing old women who wear wide-brimmed hats on Sundays and are always cheery to kids. I’m no fan of them either.

“You’re a very polite young man,” she said.

“My umbrella’s got colors! I let you in!”

Fuck you.

“Adario! Get back over here by me!”

I heard little more from the mini cretin as I deposited my checks, sadly noted what they brought my account up to, then prepared to head back out into the rain. But as I approached the front door, I saw the little gatekeeper outside in the rain, tugging frantically at the handle. While I was going about my business, he’d apparently gotten cocky, and locked himself out.

Imagine that.

Here was the dilemma, however: did I just stand there, taunting him, telling him to open “the other door”? Or did I show him how civilized people behaved?

No matter how tempting the first option was, I realized that if I did that his father and the kindly old woman would kick the shit out of me, then take my wallet. So the second, less fun option it was.

As he was standing mere inches from the door, I fought temptation again, and pushed it open lightly, just a crack, to show him it was open. He stepped aside, and I pushed it open enough to let myself out.

As I began stepping outside, however, he charged in past me, umbrella still open. Then he started screaming.

“You made me poke myself! I hurt myself, and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT!” He then degenerated into a series of blubbering nonsense syllables.

My only concern at this point, again, was being set upon by the father and the old woman who would, of course, take his side. So instead of waiting around for the pummeling, I let go of the handle. The door slid shut on the kid, and I headed down the sidewalk toward the grocery store. The rain was still coming down hard, but I just didn’t care.

Jim Knipfel is a free lance writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of the memoir, Quitting the Nairobi Trio, the Novel, The Buzzing and several other works. His weekly Column, Slackjaw, can be found at www.electronpress.com

My nephew is five years old

“It’s Barney’s thumb,” I tell him. “Squeeze it and you can feel his bones.”

My nephew takes it. The fur is deceptively soft in his hands. He squeezes it and the color drains from his face. He runs inside the house, screaming in terror. He returns a few minutes later, wiping the tears from his face. “My mom says it’s just a rabbit’s foot,” he says defiantly.

“Really?” I ask. “Have you ever seen a purple rabbit?” He begins to cry again and runs back in the house.

Ten minutes later he’s back, his little lower lip jutting angrily. “I just saw Barney on TV,” he says. “He has his thumb.” At the time, I am working in video production. We’ve talked about my job in the past, and I again remind him that programs like Barney are filmed a while ago, then shown on television or videotape for years after. He listens carefully and considers these facts.

“So,” he eventually asks, “where’d you get it?”

‘Well,” I begin, “some friends and I were out at a bar the other night, and Barney comes in drunk and starts acting tough and talking shit.” I go on to explain how we’d finally had enough of his asshole purple dinosaur crap; a friend of mine hit Barney across the back of his head with a pool cue and knocked him silly. While he was unconscious on the barroom floor, I sawed off his thumb with a steak knife. I did it not only because Barney was being a drunken dick, but because I knew how much my nephew would want that thumb.

My nephew’s eyes widen as he now strokes the purple fur. “Wow,” he says. “I’m the only person in the world who has this.” He gives me a big hug and runs back inside, this time screaming with delight. “Hey mom!” he yells. “I have Barney’s thumb!”

On Monday morning, he will proudly bring it into pre-school for show & tell. He will tell his class the story of a shit-talking drunk Barney, the pool cue to his skull and his uncle’s steak knife surgery. He will then insist it be passed around the room. “Squeeze it,” he tells them, “and you can feel his bones.” Many children run from the classroom screaming in terror.

I am four years old. It is summertime, and I am walking to the beach. I wait to cross the busy street to the boardwalk then down to the sand. The sound of big cars passing mixes with the cry of gulls. I can smell the ocean and see the multi-colored pennants flapping in the wind over the miniature golf. My older cousin is holding my hand and I feel its warmth. The sun is bright. From a nearby porch, a transistor radio begins to play “Walk Away Renee”. For the first time ever, I am aware of all my senses being simultaneously alive. It is a moment forever frozen in my memory, a snapshot so vivid that hearing the song even today can inexplicably make me weep.

The elevator door opens on the tenth floor, revealing the six-year-old girl and her pink bicycle. Behind her is a friend with a pink bike of her own. The first girl rolls the front of her pink bike tire into the elevator and stops.

“My friend and I want to take our bikes downstairs,” she says firmly. “You have to get off the elevator now.”

Certainly I am ready to let these girls and their bikes squeeze in, and would have, in fact, helped them. But I know this girl; her parents are notorious building assholes who order around the building staff as if they are disobedient servants. They’re rude, unfriendly and overall unpleasant. Their children – the girl and her younger brother – are known for their loud and public tantrums. And now their daughter is ordering me off the elevator.

I stand there stunned. Somehow, this little girl has traded her innate sweetness for something darkly sour. Certainly, her parents have made the trade for her, their gift to their daughter being an arrogant sense of entitlement that she wields with impunity she can’t possibly understand. Why, I silently ask myself, would a loving parent willfully replace innocence with malice? I look into her cold eyes and see the irreparable damage that has been done to one so young. I suddenly feel deeply sorry for the child. But only up to a point.

The elevator buzzer begins ringing. “We’re waiting for you to get out now, please,” she says impatiently.

I raise my foot and firmly shove her pink tire out of the elevator. Then I smile sweetly as the doors close on her pissed-off little face.

As a boy, I lived at the base of a hill near an open field. I spent most of my days alone in this field, exploring its grasses and trees and flowers and insects. Throughout my childhood, I had recurring nightmares in which I encounter a high fence newly constructed at the field’s edge. I grip the chain links in panic, looking down at the house I can plainly see but am unable to reach. In my just as frequent dreams, I reach the fence but discover that I am able to fly. My home no longer matters, and I fly away.

A beloved ex-girlfriend comes to town with her 7-year-old son. She has a work emergency and asks if I wouldn’t mind taking care of Joe on Saturday afternoon. I don’t mind at all; Joe likes that I can talk about The Three Stooges and subway trains and I like that he’s a smart, thoughtful kid who sees me as a cool adult he can trust. We both really like that he calls me ‘Uncle Gary’. We spend the day climbing rocks in Central Park and gawking at the flashing signs in Times Square before visiting The Museum of Natural History. Around 4PM a change begins to come over Joe, the kind of transformation that would happen to any jetlagged kid who has been running all over the city and was too excited to eat his lunch at the diner. He didn’t whine or cry for his mother; Joe had suddenly become so tired and cranky that he didn’t know what he wanted.

I’d promised him that we could end our day at my apartment playing videogames. “C’mon, Joe,” I said to him, “We’ll take a cab to my house, get you something to eat and fire up the Playstation.” Joe’s eyes are glassy and his surroundings unfamiliar. “Let’s go, buddy,” I say as I take his hand and lead him across the sidewalk. The cab I’ve hailed pulls to the curb. I open the door, but Joe will not budge.

“I don’t want to go!” he unexpectedly screams. Passerby swivel their heads to look. I begin to gently pull him towards the open cab door. “I don’t want to go home with you!” he yells. “I don’t believe that you have Playstation. And you’re not really my uncle!”  These last parts he screams particularly loudly. Parents pushing strollers stop in shock. I shove Joe into the cab. As we pull away, I see several people frantically dialing their cell phones.

Fifteen minutes later, Joe is on my couch happily drinking from a juice box and playing Playstation. I stand at the window peering through the blinds, watching the police cars slowly circle the block.

My father had a small butcher shop, and would use our family station wagon for his early morning visits to the slaughterhouse. Though he would carefully lay the freshly killed meat on thick brown butcher paper, our car would always have a slightly sweet odor. On long family car trips to visit relatives, I would insist on riding in the back where the smell was strongest. If it were daytime I would shut out the constant screaming and squabbling by losing myself in one of my ever-present books, my fingers idly picking at pools of dried blood. If it were night, I would lie on my back staring up through the window into the dark sky and pretend I was traveling through space. By day or night, either spell would only be broken by pulling into the driveway of our house. Climbing out of the car, the fresh air made promises I knew it could never keep.

I am in Los Angeles on business and staying with longtime friends. I’m asleep in their guest room when just before dawn I open my eyes to see my 4-year-old godson standing next to my bed holding his stuffed tiger. “What’s up, buddy?” I ask softly.

“You don’t have anything to sleep with,” he whispers. “So I wanted you to have my kitty.” He tucks the tiger under my arm and tiptoes back to his room. It is perhaps the purest expression of love I’ve ever experienced in my life. I hug the stuffed tiger and drift back to sleep smiling.

Two hours later at the kitchen table, I tell him to eat up or he’ll be late for preschool. He points his plastic cereal spoon at me and narrows his eyes. “Know what?” he says. “I hate you.”

•          •            •

Miles Afuera lives and writes in New York City. Clearly, he has no children of his own.

You could say that my Magic Jew arrived via freak accident,

For my best friend Bill, his came while standing on a corner in New York City waiting to cross the street. Two speeding cars collided in the intersection, sending one’s bumper hurtling into the crowd and hitting Bill below his left ankle with what an orthopedist would later describe as “the force of a wrecking ball.” Several mothers and children standing inches away were completely unhurt.

I’d rushed to the emergency room and sat alongside his gurney into the night, waiting with him for an open room and an available trauma specialist. Though we were able to easily joke about bad luck and good pain meds, Bill was clearly going to need immediate surgery and an extended period of convalescence. And because he lived by himself in a small fifth-floor walk-up, he clearly couldn’t recuperate at home.

True friendship carries certain unassailable responsibilities. Had it been my foot hit by that chrome-plated missile, I know that Bill would have done anything to ensure my recovery. There was no question that he would be moving into my apartment for as long as he needed.

Because I lived alone and worked from home, I could be in constant attendance. The most significant downside would be several high-paying out-of-town jobs that I would now have to immediately cancel. And while the loss of income would sting, it was nothing compared to what Bill was facing. As long as I didn’t have to change bloody bandages or wipe any ass other than my own, it was going to be a relatively manageable time.

I brought Bill home a few days after his first surgery, during which his foot had been completely rebuilt with pins, plates and screws. He was an easy patient who ate little and slept much, and I fit in a few freelance writing jobs where and when I could. His office co-workers were helpful, with several frequently stopping by with home cooked meals. But by far the most concerned was Agnieszka, the office’s elderly Polish cleaning woman. She and Bill had become warm friends, and his accident had affected her deeply. “Is terrible,” was all she’d say to me in those first weeks, her eyes filling with tears. “Is terrible.”

Though still mostly bedridden, Bill eventually felt strong enough to get back to work. “You are such good person,” Agnieszka said to me one day when I’d stopped by his office to pick up some files. “You make sacrifice for friend.”

I too had become friendly with Agnieszka over the years, and she knew that my work had been significantly curtailed by Bill’s recovery. “What you need,” she said decisively, “is Magic Jew.” I was confused; the only Magic Jew I knew of was Houdini, or perhaps the  asshat I’d worked for in the ’90s who’d made tens of thousands of production dollars disappear up his nose.

“Magic Jew is painting of old Jew,” Agnieszka explained, “and Jew is counting money. Many home in Poland has. It bring,” she said with a wide smile, ‘great proos-peer-etty.’” I don’t remember how I replied, though I’m positive I never mentioned that I was Jewish. And evidently, I never dissuaded Agnieszka from what she now felt was her personal responsibility to restore my business fortunes.

Three months later, Bill had returned to work and his own apartment. He was on crutches and in physical rehab with additional surgeries on the horizon, but the doctors assured him that he would eventually walk on his own two feet. One afternoon, he’d called to say that he would be stopping by my place after work with “a gift from Agnieszka.” His voice was oddly stern. A few hours later he tossed a small wrapped package on my desk. “You,” he simply said, “should be ashamed.”

Puzzled, I unwrapped it. It seems that soon after our conversation, Agnieszka had called her son in Krakow and had him commission a Magic Jew from a locally renowned Magic Jew artisan. I now held in my hands the result  – an 8×10 painted canvas in a cheap gold frame – with a combination of revulsion and confusion. It was a simple portrait of an elderly orthodox Jew, complete with long white beard, round black hat and traditional side curls, peering intently over a big nose and pince nez glasses as he counted a handful of golden discs that I hoped were oatmeal cookies but were clearly coins. Bill was right; I was ashamed.

After he’d left, I sat down and considered my new Magic Jew. While the painting was not as cruel a caricature as those prevalent throughout Nazi Germany or even in renditions of Shylock, it was nonetheless a hardcore perpetuation of a hateful stereotype. Furthermore, this stereotype was now imbued with magic powers. But was it really much different, I asked myself, than wearing a St. Christopher medallion, having a statue of Ganesh, clutching a rabbit’s foot, or any other good fortune / lost cause / protection amulet or superstition?

Though my capacity for self-delusion is often admirably huge, this, sadly, was not one of those occasions. Hoodoo is hoodoo, no matter what the naïve cultural application. The appalling fact was that my new Magic Jew was little more than a modern-day, virulently anti-Semitic version of ‘rubbing a pickaninny’s head for luck’. Feeling slightly sick, I put the painting facedown on a bookshelf. I’d deal with it in days to come, most likely by putting it in the trash.

The next morning I sat at my desk and checked my mailbox, which was oddly full. The first email I opened stopped me cold: It was from a prominent corporate headhunter who’d been searching for me for weeks regarding an executive position complete with an annual starting salary that was more than I’d earned in the past 3 years combined. Two other emails from two different clients contained offers of similar high-paying projects. I got up and walked slowly to the bookcase to take another long, hard look at the small, ugly painting.

I ran my fingers over the lumps on the canvas searching for some sort of rationale for random convergences of chance and coincidence. There were no fast answers, and never would be. Shit happens. And when it does, you just have to deal with the realities at hand. I quickly got a hammer and nail and hung my Magic Jew on the wall over my desk. Then I sat down and started returning some phone calls.

A few days later I stopped by Bill’s office, primarily to thank Agnieszka and tell her the incredulous story of the job offers. “It is Magic Jew!” she said, smiling. “This is what he is supposed to do.” She turned and walked away, shaking her head in disbelief.

Mr. Afuera's Meat Slicer

In the past, I’ve had some anger issues. Or as my close friends liked to call them, ’sudden explosions of psychotic rage.’ Almost anything could set me off instantly, but I saved special fits of fury for people who were incompetent, arrogant or blatantly stupid. Often, a little misunderstanding could quickly get out of hand and become a heated and dangerous confrontation. Always, it was an unpleasant and ugly scene. Afterwards, I’d be left with a throat raw from screaming, tension knots down my spine, a throbbing headache and little memory of what had happened.  And while I’d never struck anyone, I had begun to realize that these ‘rage blackouts’ could easily lead to a physical violence that might result in somebody getting badly hurt or killed. Probably me.  Either way, I was concerned. And like any self-destructive behavior, I knew it had to be fixed.

I’d cold-quit a 20 year smoking habit a few years ago with surprising ease and one key realization: You’ve got to be strong enough to want to change your behavior. I now hoped that the same strength could be the key to kicking my rage jones. Leaving a long-term job I’d grown to hate helped a bit. Getting older and wiser helped a lot. The acknowledgement that I had a problem helped the most. When a potentially volatile situation arose, I’d consciously transfer my focus to taking deep breaths and remaining calm. At the risk of sounding trite — or like Patrick Swayze in ROADHOUSE — you simply have to learn to be nice. Sometimes it’s a struggle and I have the occasional rage relapse. But much like any other recovery situation, you take it one day at a time.

Sundays, for example, will rarely rattle my cage. It’s usually a laid-back day for nesting with the papers, doing laundry and at most, shopping for groceries. And as my neighborhood continues to gentrify, the supermarket on my corner – which used to be a dirty hellhole staffed by morons – has tried their best to change with it. But for all the addition of ‘upscale’ products and new signage, the remodeling has helped little. The aisles remain redolent of roach spray and dead mice. The staff stays idiots. The place still sucks. Inexplicably, I still shop there. I think it may have something to do with enjoying the weekly temptation.

I’d dealt with the guy at their ‘new’ deli counter before, an elderly Asian man who always moved as if he was underwater. He’d first have to look for a knife to cut away the plastic on the meat or cheese, which he’d then approach as if he were doing delicate surgery. It could be five minutes before he even got near the slicing machine, which he’d slowly slide back and forth like it was made of fragile glass. By the time he’d get from the slicer to the scale, the small pile of meat or cheese would be well under the weight the customer wanted and the whole process would start all over again.  He was a challenge to anyone’s patience, and one that I’d gradually learned to accept. The woman standing behind me obviously had not.

She was wearing sweatpants and an expensive red parka, hair tucked up under a baseball cap from some lodge in Aspen and her breath sputtering out in a series of exaggerated, exasperated sighs. From a cursory glance, I guessed that she more than likely lived in the new “luxury rental” building that had recently opened half a block away. Hey, if I were stupid enough to pay $4,000 a month for a studio apartment in what realtors are now calling ‘The Upper Upper West Side,’ I’d be pretty pissed off too.

The old guy finally finished with his customer and I took a step towards the meat case. But before I could get “Half a pound of roast beef” half out of my mouth, the woman behind me shoved forward and spoke directly to the deli clerk. “I was here first,” she snapped. “And I want a pound of baby Swiss. And you should learn some fucking manners.”

That last part was directed at me. She had to be fucking kidding.

I instantly felt the blood in my skull headed for low boil.  Many a retort quickly formulated in my mouth, most of them containing the phrase “You CUNT.” But I wasn’t going to lose my temper this time. I could deal with the situation without confrontation. I was going to stay calm.

I gripped the handles of my basket and took a deep breath. “You,” I said evenly, “have got to be fucking kidding.”

When she snapped her head to me, I got a good look. Late-30s, no make-up, a tendril of unwashed hair dangling from under her cap, a painful-looking pimple growing on the side of her mouth and a sour sneer like she had bad gas. No way was she having a good day.  “No, I am NOTFUCKINGKIDDING,” she spat. “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘Ladies First,’ asshole?”

This was clear escalation. My brain now throbbed angrily. I was getting those familiar white popping dots around my peripheral vision. This had the potential to be the first bad one in a long time, and it was going to be a bad one in public. I clenched and unclenched my hands around the wire basket handle and took a series of deep, steady breaths. I had to fight down the feeling quickly. Because ‘what I was gonna do about it’ needed to be – had to be – absolutely nothing. I slammed my eyes shut, kept my tongue still and focused only on nice thoughts.

By the time I opened my eyes, the woman had gotten her cheese and was storming up the aisle, shopping cart careening wildly. An old Hispanic woman who had been on line behind us touched me on the arm. “You did good,” she said gently. I smiled weakly, got my cold cuts and headed for the checkout.

I felt drained as I waited in the short register line and watched the manager – a short and perpetually pissed-off fella – berate a cashier at the front desk. The week before, I’d seen him in the final stages of tossing out a female crackhead shoplifter. As he waved a Polaroid photo he’d taken of her and explained “the next time we call the police,” she nodded numbly and held a hand to her reddening, swelling face. It was probable that she’d just been smacked around in the backroom by the manager, possibly with the help of the burly delivery guys who stood around snickering. In this neighborhood, I gathered that was the best way of dealing with the situation.

I’d finished paying and was walking to the exit when the idea came so clearly that I had to smile. Just as quickly, I turned the smile into a look of concern and stepped to the counter. “You the manager?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied flatly and waved away the cashier.

“Well,” I continued, “there’s a lady back there in the store. Blonde hair, red parka, baseball cap. I saw her stick two packages of hot dogs in her bag.”

“Yeah?” he said, his interest now definitely piqued, his eyes quickly scanning the checkout area.

“She’s still shopping,” I continued. “But she’s acting all crazy and aggressive and shit. You might want to be real careful.”

He was already coming out from behind the counter. “Blonde hair, red parka, baseball cap?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just be careful, man. There’s something real wrong with her.”

“Thanks,” he said. His eyes were glowering as he yelled to two burly delivery guys who had been smoking just outside the exit doors. As they rushed inside he was already in motion, pushing his way up through a checkout line and towards the aisles. I got the feeling that he had some major anger issues, too.

I don’t know what happened when he confronted the woman, but there’s a pretty good chance that she became belligerent when he demanded to search her bag. Maybe the situation quickly became hostile when she resisted or had something to say about his manners. And perhaps the manager and his boys had to take her into the back room for a while. Life is full of little misunderstandings that can quickly get out of hand.

But like I said, I don’t know what happened. By that time I was already home, happily fixing myself a nice roast beef sandwich.