Working at the liquor store in the off-season was always pretty dead. I’d stand out front and watch the high school kids drive around. Usually a friend would come by and we’d talk about things that happened that day, like one of us having just fixed a window or whatever. We’d exaggerate for effect. “Look,” Bran would say,“I just seen John Winslow run his moped into a telephone pole,” flashing his crooked Jack-o-lantern grin and laying into me with elbows akimbo. The story might or might not have been true, it didn’t really matter.
The local kids would hang out on the corner. They’d smoke in a pack, taking turns looking out for parents or cops. Sometimes there would be a little fight or something. Pairs of pale teenagers would occasionally drift by the store in down jackets, blowing lazily along like stoned tumbleweeds.
My boss Smitty would be at home, snorting coke, sweating, and watching TV or reading a dirty magazine. Smitty was a nice guy, very laissez-faire. Once he gave me a ride in his truck; the soundtrack to a movie called “To Live and Die in L.A” was playing in his tape deck. He was a good boss. For a while he was quizzing people about whether they wiped “north to south” or “south to north.” I told him I alternated, which he said was a bad idea. Though I don’t mind saying that for a guy giving hygienic advice, his teeth didn’t look too good.
Decor-wise, Smitty favored a dark, cluttered, junk shop vibe, which you don’t see often in liquor stores. From time to time the distributors would leave behind life-size cardboard cutouts of pirates, or young girls in bikinis holding bottles. He’d leave them up in his shop for years, letting then fade in the window. Neglected, they’d curl back onto their stands, collecting dead flies at their cardboard feet. Smitty would sometimes talk to them, hang Mardi Gras beads around their necks, or color in their eyes with magic marker, stuff like that.
In late fall, two young girls started showing up on the block. One had a blue Mohawk, which was pretty unusual for a rednecky small-town America at the time. The other had an attractive trash/harlot look built around bright red lipstick and peroxide, probably copied from Madonna. But the Mohawked girl was in charge. She looked bony under all those misshapen clothes and had a skateboard that she couldn’t ride very well. Swallowed up in her Salvation Army overcoat, she’d flop around on the board like a bird soaked in tanker oil. Sometimes I’d borrow her skateboard and jump the white benches out front while she and her sidekick quietly smoked cigarettes.
One night I stepped out into the liquor store’s doorway and noticed the two girls jabbering in an agitated huddle, their raccoon eyes darting my way as if they knew I had done something awful. Mohawk broke off and slunk up. She wanted to know if I could get them some beer. They were definitely no older than high school. But I gave it some thought and didn’t see any great harm in it. I mean I started drinking beer when I was 12. Despite her narrow face and awkward manner, the puffy mounds around the corners of her mouth made Mohawk seem strangely aristocratic, like a duchess cheated out of her domain by royal subterfuge. Perhaps it was a sign of inbreeding, or lack of sunlight.
In any case, I resolved to help the two girls out, partially out of boredom, partially out of compassion for anyone wading through their cloudy teenage waters. So at midnight I came out with a 12-pack of Busch beer. The girls were still milling around the benches out front, waiting around. I guess they needed a ride home, because neither of them had a car. I must confess that to this day, I never discovered either one of their names.
We drove out towards Milltown, and they had me pull onto the lawn of a country house out on the highway. A back door led to the basement, where we started drinking beer and a pint of Wild Turkey pulled from under a linty couch cushion. Mohawk got up and put Black Flag on the stereo, which seemed like a good sign. When she sat back down on the couch, we started making out, mechanically, as if running through a scene in a student film, while the sidekick watched through listless, heavy lids. From time to time we’d take a break and take a sip or two of beer. Eventually Mohawk kind of passed out, or maybe fell asleep, or gave up. So I went over and put my arm around Madonna. She pouted and turned away a little, I guess in deference to the collapsed stick figure on the couch. But even token resistance seemed to require more effort than this girl really wanted to expend. To her credit, she took her chewing gum out.
We moved to an adjoining wood-paneled bedroom, as if following some kind of shopworn script that American kids all seemed to know without ever having read a word. Who wrote it? This was surely not the work of Mark Twain, brimming with clarity and wit; nor Tennessee Williams, who would never pen anything so listless and drained. The ceilings were low and fanless, the air close. Time laboriously crept through a now-turgid passage. We were both getting sleepy.
I woke to a vaguely growling, rumbling sound, something like distant storm clouds. Then in sudden startling proximity, a gruff voice barked out: “WHERE IS HE!” and a clomping started down the stairs. “Shit,” I said out loud. I jumped up and hid in the closet, grabbing my clothes. Within seconds, an old, cabbage-headed woman rolled open the cheap sliding door, jabbing me hard with a broom. “All right, all right,” I protested while trying to pull my pants up. The old woman’s eyes were deep-set and red as she hit me with the bristle end, while yelling sidelong at Mohawk, who was now pleading with her: “Mom. Mom.” I ran out the back with sneakers in hand, leaving behind a pretty nice vintage surf T-shirt and my favorite punk rock mixtape.
(Much later, I found out that the old lady was really the Mohawked girl’s grandmother. She’d raised her granddaughter, because the birth mother was only 15 when she’d had her baby. So the baby grew up calling her grandmother “Mom.” At the time I thought this was weird and significant. However I’ve since come to find that this practice is actually quite common.)
The next day, I went to the record store in the mall where the girls worked, to see if they wanted to hang out and drink beer again. But they wouldn’t talk to me. I guess they had compared notes and decided that I was an asshole. Despite my mild entreaties, there seemed to be little hope in salvaging any part of our little ad hoc arrangement. That was all OK, it felt like it was all part of the script. I did get the Mohawked girl to give me back my Suicidal Tendencies tape on the spot, which I really didn’t think she would do. I wonder whatever happened to that vintage tee. As I turned and walked back down the mall corridor under fluorescent lighting, I felt lighter than air. A barrage of spears whistled past my ears, all missing the mark.