Verse 357
Pleasurable, heady warmth compresses against my face simultaneous to the overhead ding of the convenience store door opening. Camel Light between my lips, comforting topography of a Bic lighter in my right hand, Nada Surf muffles as the pneumatic tube wheezes the door closed. Paratrooper moths scurry, attack, scurry again. Carnage from old wars smear bricks and light fixtures. I lean against the concrete column before the store, watch the few headlights turning off or turning in. A strong hour left in my shift before Sweeney bikes in for the graveyard, which I’ve never worked despite half-wanting to. I’ll close out the lottery, make a fresh pot of regular, graze my way through the bulk candy — giving extra attention to gummy worms and malted milk balls — then stock what’s low in the cooler — milks, Snapples, Veryfines, Arizona Iced Teas, miscellaneous Coke and Pepsi products. After every release of cigarette smoke, nighttime summer smells swell my body buried beneath wide-gauge blue corduroys and a too-long Pearl Jam shirt underneath my button-down white Hen uniform. Most of the evening’s regulars have already been in and out. I saw a few friends, but none of the girls I’d hoped to, including the most desired in her crushing virginal confidence.
Midnight maples rave in riotous pre-thunderstorm energies. They jockey and jostle in turbines of turbulence. If there was no MTV or VH1, no old VHS mixtapes of Ghostbusters II and Wrestlemania IV, the tossing undulation of trees would seem Colosseum worthy — or at least a drive-in, maybe — anarchic vivacity vacillating without warning or pattern on a quiet summer night. Squeezing the smoldering butt between pointer’s nail and the inner base of the thumb, I fling the spent cigarette into the first row of mostly empty parking spots. A familiar but taciturn face exits with a purchased pint of Cherry Garcia as I walk back in, holding the door for Video Store Girl who must’ve just closed Express Video on the backside of the plaza. She brushes her breasts across my sleeve without looking at me and heads for the deli counter. A couple sloppily peruses our thin beer selection encased in three slim cooler doors. Bass Ale, Sam’s, Red Dog, Killian’s Irish Red standout as exotics beside the Budweiser and Miller familiars.
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Officially, the deli is closed. I don’t mind making Video Store Girl a sandwich though — something I wouldn’t consider doing for someone I didn’t know. She graduated ahead of me in high school and has been a quiet presence like so many still living at home, working close-by, bridging a life to adulthood from childhood out of simple time and unnoticeably broadening responsibilities. She wants an Italian, which I knew before asking. The works. Hots. Though I already cleaned the slicer, I begin cleaving and shaving salamis and capicolas to assemble her sandwich while The Sin — my evil twin on the 3–11 — runs the Special Report 22s to close down lottery for the night. Pearl Jam’s new track Who You Are plays for the third time this shift, sounding more and more like the band has begun their Beatles Ravi Shankar phase. In rhythm with the music, my mind drifts in the loose algebra of sandwich crafting before finishing, slicing in half, wrapping it up diagonally in white butcher paper, and sliding laterally past The Sin to cash her out. “All right Matthew,” she says with antecedent assertion to another thought that doesn’t come. She’s out the door, light blue long denim shorts — a trademark high school ass disappearing into the nearing midnight and the mystery of just twenty.
I lost track of the beer shoppers while making her sandwich. Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand leaks next from the Sanyo nestled between the coffee grinders and your choice of breads. Most songs carry the intimacy of poetry or friendship, make memorials of calendar squares of what is coming with fear, or what was left with longing. I pull most of the half-empty burned coffee pots off the twelve warming burners. Irish Cream, Cappuccino, French Vanilla, Kona, Kenya AA, Columbian Supremo — they all get dumped. Anyone coming in for coffee in the middle of the night wants neither flavors nor exotics. I brew a fresh pot of regular and decaf. The Sin finishes with the lottery, jamming a wad of cash and paperwork into the safe’s slot. It’s about ten minutes to eleven and we both lean in our respective terrains, he near the register and me beyond the deli. Butthole Surfers’ Pepper grinds out the first few bars. We each push the other to go, insisting we’ll wait for Sweeney. I take him up on it, buy three Eight Ball scratch tickets and a new pack of Camel Lights, dropping a ten on the counter and getting $1.97 back. Lush humidity consumes me outdoors as I walk to my Hyundai Excel hatchback.
As I’d hoped, no one is home. Parents are in Vegas and brother’s doing whatever he does. In the house, up the stairs, open my bedroom windows, drop a CD in the Sony, and exit the house by the kitchen slider onto the porch outside my childhood bedroom. I climb the railing in two steps and use what upper-body strength I have to reach beyond the gutter and pull myself onto the roof. The texture of the shingles reminds me of Sno-Caps. On all fours, butt in the air, I scramble up the roof to the apex, seamed with metal across the top. The prologue of Phantom of the Opera is blasting from my bedroom, but seems an appropriate volume up here near the bottom of the trees. I don’t know why I’m listening to it, but it feels right on a summer night. Maybe I’m remembering being a band kid, floundering for an identity and grasping backwards. I light a cigarette and watch the tarnished thunderheads glow radioactive in the oblong moon. The trees roil and crash like linemen as the storm nears.
