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Boogers

Many of you would like for me to account how I spend my time when I'm not on the river. The answer is: sailing, or at least it would be if I weren't constantly ass-over-elbows deep in the bowels of my boat's diesel engine. This is off-topic, but what the hell?

Last winter I got excruciatingly bored with the clean-cut high-and-tight corporate three-piece toady bit, and I allowed my hair and beard to flower and flow. And now I strongly resemble the kind of big surly guy my sainted grandmother always called a "Booger".

I went with this new motif for two reasons, one being that at this point in my career if having long hair is some sort of invisible downcheck or marker for non-promotability, then Piss Upon It, from a tall altitude....I wouldn't want to work for a company that wouldn't want to hire me, or something like that. And the second being that with long hair and a goatee, I look less like a ten-year-old boy and more like a fifteen-year-old girl with a little mustache problem. So there.

Yeah. But as the summer wore on and my grizzly locks got longer, I realized that I was in danger of being perceived by the general public as a defector from the comfortable well-lit camp of Stock Options and Earning Power and general Upward Mobility to the squalid hovel of Boogers...in other words, used to threaten children, to motivate high-school delinquents to attend college, and to serve as a poster Manky Dude for having my ilk spayed and/or otherwise neutered, preferably with hot smoking irons or hissing vats of acid.

When I say "I realized this", I mean of course that "this pimp-smacked me across the jowls a few dozen times". Viz, a case study in three acts:

Act Ye First...in which our Hero is confronted by the Cashier…

I have just spent a warm and blowy October Sunday afternoon winterizing my sailboat's diesel engine, and my person is foul with grease, automatic transmission fluid, propylene glycol antifreeze, my own blood, and so forth. My jeans are stained with paint, I have thirty-weight in my hair, and what I really, really need is something cold to drink.

So I am contemplating the Slurpee machine at the local 7-Eleven. There is a rainbow of frozen goodness swirling behind the four chrome tap-handles, and the chrome winks at me to try a pull or two. I reach for an empty forty-four oz. plastic cup. That is either forty-four British or Trojan ounces, but either way it adds up to three and one-half Nirvanic pounds of icy fruit-flavored slush. But lo! to my horror I find that some simple mind has filled the forty-four ounce rack with twenty-eight ounce cups, which, if I were to use one, would leave me a pound short by any measure. A pound!

But, har-har, I am clever, and I reach past the clear Slurpee cups for a red Coke cup from under the soda fountain. Likewise plastic, likewise forty-four ounces. And this is when Mayhem rears her snaky head, cloaked in the flesh of the 7-Eleven clerk who has been eyeballing me ever since I first set ugly foot in her place of business. She hoots "Sir! Sir! Sir! Sir!" until I swivel my head owlishly to study her with tiredly unblinking eyes. And I swear, she says: "Them a wrong cup for Slurpees! You can't use a dem!" She is clearly from some arid nation where iced drinks are reserved solely for slaking the throats of martyrs in paradise, and I am a transgressor and a long-haired heretic, besmeared though I may be with her home country's only cash crops...namely, petroleum and petroleum distillates.

I get out my finest one-syllable voice. "You are out of cups in the size I want. I will use a Coke cup, which

costs more, and I will pay you for that same Coke cup. Does this work?"

She is mystified. "No, sir, we a have beeg cup dere. Beeg cup," she insists.

"Will you get one out for me?" I ask.

"See, heer is beeg cup, OK," she says vaingloriously, holding up an aforementioned twenty-eight ounce cup.

"No, no, this is a small cup," I say, straining to keep this one-syllable thing going. "Look...'two-eight', not 'four-four'. I want a beeg...er, big...cup, and I will pay you for a big Coke cup since it costs more."

There is muttering in a foreign tongue, and black eyes flash skywards, or wherever it is that They keep Him. "Well then, I a charge you for deefrence. Is cost more, you must pay. Is wrong cup you a use, is beeg disrespect."

I cut my losses and nod slowly like a glass Drinking Bird would nod. Way down, from the hips. There is no actual malice in me at this point...I am tired and cranky and this whole scene is getting too bizarro world for the likes of me. I top off my beeg red cup of disrespect with a mixture of banana and sour watermelon slush, and I make my weary way towards:

Act Ye Second...in which our Hero is confronted by his Doppelganger...

Whereupon I find myself in line at the 7-Eleven counter behind Manky Dude #2. Manky Dude #1 is me, right? So I am patiently waiting on this guy to conclude his transaction, merrily sipping away at my Slurpee, checking out the impulse buys ($1.99 Roses!), and marshalling my mental energy for the coming struggle, and that's when Manky Dude #2 turns around abruptly to face me.

I check him over. He is rail-thin, maybe five-eight, and he's wearing green coveralls. He's got beard stubble going back five days, his hair is matted, he's got this nervous twitch in one cheek, and the whites of his eyes are this bleary red color. He's damn near my own mirror image. I can tell that this is going to be a Kodak moment.

"Yo, brother...," he begins. He's drawling in this South Bostonian accent that can only be spelled in Gaelic letters. "I needa stop askin' people this, like, in public, but are you a cop?"

Here we go. "No, I'm not a cop," I say. I already know where this is headed.

Manky Dude #2 smiles dreamily and says, "Well, that's cool. Just checkin'." You know where I can get some smoke, then? You smoke?"

Only after fast sex, I think. "No, man, I don't smoke. Sorry." And for a moment, I genuinely am sorry, because maybe a fat joint might open the doors of my perception to the point where all of this makes sense. I seem caught in a giant convenience store game of Whack-A-Mole, and the Mole is me.

"Well, that's OK then," he says. From behind him I can hear the clerk drumming her fingers on the counter in disapprobation of our beeg a disrespect. He pays her for whatever she's cramming into the bag, poring over his change, and he steps off to one side.

I'm up.

Act Ye Third...in which our Hero emerges Vindicated...

A forty-four ounce Slurpee (and I'm just noticing for the first time that the last three letters of that word spell "Pee") costs a dollar twenty-seven. A forty-four ounce Coke costs a dollar fifty-two. The clerk beams at me in fierce triumph as she bar-code scans the beeg cup and rings up the extra quarter, which sum represents approximately 1.923076923E-6 of my annual salary. I am bemused and beyond caring.

She waits, and I hand her a twenty (1.538461538E-4). This is apparently a setback, for there is a return to the muttering and the eye-flashing. "I have to go in safe now," she says. "No change for twenty in drawer. Only in safe box."

This is a surprisingly hugemongous tactical error on her part. She’s left me an opening. With precise enunciation and in perfect overtones I ask her: "You know how to get in the safe?" And I lift my eyebrows suggestively.

She freezes in place, all bugeyed, and I wonder if I haven't gone over the line. Maybe she's heard these words before in the small hours of the night from a guy who's as strange and menacing to her as me. Maybe he forced her out from behind the counter, and maybe he ripped the register right out of the cheap formica with one hand while maintaining a steady bead on her forehead with the short barrel of the .38 with his other. Maybe she lost it then, and started babbling prayers or something while he backed slowly out of the store with the cash drawer under his arm and ran into the cover of darkness, and maybe it took her twenty minutes or an hour to stop shaking long enough to dial 911.

Or maybe I'm just tired and having morbid fantasies. But wherever we've been, there we are...

And I find that I have neglected to mention what Manky Dude #2 has been doing all this time. He has been reading the white cardboard sign taped to the tin bucket: "$1.99 Roses."

We can stipulate from the evidence at hand that the objects contained by the bucket are indeed roses. We can even go so far as to assume that they are for sale. And what should we suppose these $1.99 roses cost? Do they cost $1.74? $2.50? Eleven bucks plus postage and handling?

"How much are these roses?" Manky Dude #2 asks the clerk. She clicks to him from me. I am already laughing. She tries to stifle this big broken-toothed grin. "What's so funny?" he asks, and he's looking like he wants to join the joke, because he's half-smiling and he probably senses that he's defused whatever heavy anti-vibe was hanging in the air a moment ago.

"Do you think these will get me off the hook?" he asks me. And something else clicks...the poor bastard can't find his girlfriend any weed, so he's going to take her a quickie-mart rose instead. And this suggests a moral: where faileth mere chemical delusion, let love enter therein. It’s sketchy, but it suits…and I make my exit with this platitude ringing in my head and about eighteen bucks worth of quarters jingling in my hand.

The Cinnamon Girl, my wife, is waiting outside in her car. "What the hell happened in there?" she asks. She's been here before...I come out of a store chuckling while she's been idling the engine, and it's always some story she missed. She hates that.

I shake my greasy hair, which got me into all of this in the first place. "It’s too much. I have to write it down and send it to you," I tell her.

And I just have.

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