Mean People

The amazing Stewart left his 401K and other benefits behind him in order to help his girlfriend with her shop. That would be me and my store. While some view this merging and mingling as a precarious teetering toward potential disaster, I think that it is just peachy. A) I need the help, because all other wonderful people involved have health, family and educational conflicts, and B) Stewart is a completely excellent human being who knows how to open a cash register and make change.

Twenty one years of a very eccentric retail business has taught me that every day can be weirder than a series of Clerks outtakes. Take our bathroom: our loo has suffered everything from opiate works left behind on the toilet tank to clogged-up leavings from allegedly good friends who neglected to notice the plunger, and you can take both of those facts literally as well as metaphorically. My own daughter managed to open the superglue and taste the contents when she was two years old and another daughter was largely raised in an appliance-sized cardboard box filled with styrofoam peanuts and watercolor markers. They both ran credit card machines while too short to reach the cash register without a stool. I got divorced and fell in love (the latter more than once) while standing behind the counter. I fired one employee who had bragged about having sex in my dressing room, although that was not the particular offense which led to dismissal. I fired several others who sold drugs, stole merchandise, and/or would not leave their vicious dogs at home. Plus, there are the customers.

Stewart is already meeting The Mean People: The Mean Blind Girl, The Mean Dwarf. Any day now he'll meet The Mean Spitting One-Eyed Vietnam Vet, if no one sends him back to jail. Stewart is really nice, so he was trying to describe The Mean Blind Girl to me with compassion:

An interesting girl who couldn't see came in today, and I tried to help her with the rings...

"Oh my God! That mean blind bitch is back! Don't let her waste your time..."

He was taken aback by my nastiness, but I know this girl and her longsuffering older husband/parent/caretaker/whatever. She complains and insists on cutting deals in a charmless way:

Gimme a break, I'm blind... can't I have this twenty dollar ring for twelve? C'mon... God, why don't you have more rings my size... show me all your size nine rings with square stones, I don't like round ones... Harry! make her help me with this....

I try to look at Harry and imagine that he married this girl when she was fourteen and cute and has to face the aftemath forever, sort of how I also imagine Woody Allen and Soon-Yi. So I treat the couple like I would any other unpleasant customers and go about my business, leaving her sputtering and angry. It makes me smile.

The Mean Dwarf rarely comes in, he prefers to intimidate the tourists with a pack of spare-changing gutter punks. He has threatened to kick my ass when I declined to give him a quarter and I avoid him almost as much as the one-eyed Vietnam vet, who once spat on a friend of mine when she didn't pony up some change.

I know that the dwarf and the vet and the blind girl have had their hard knocks. Honestly, I think that they are far more entitled to their bad attitudes than, say, when a rich tourist gets huffy because I don't have a Coexist t-shirt in their preferred size and color. I just think that everyone would catch more flies with honey than vinegar, as my grandmother would say.

Welcome to the street, Stewart. No one but pregnant women and children in our employee bathroom, please. And don't ever let the mean people intimidate you into giving them something for nothing.

NTD