Sandpaper Handjob: T-Shirts and Reading for Assholes

I was working as a mystery shopper for a research firm claiming Texaco and Best Western among its clients. I was also stealing cars and robbing fast food restaurants, because while I made good money doing virtually nothing, stealing cars and robbing fast food joints was fun. It also made the expensive traveling habits I had picked up easier to maintain.

There was a time when I would shop a grocery or motel or service station, come back eight hours later–or eight days, and rob that motherfucker. That was back in ’84 or ’85, before decent surveillance equipment was so affordable and widespread.

Once, up near Spokane, I was in the lot of a Safeway. It was a bit late, cold and dark, middle part of the week in January. Busy enough to get a shitty spot two-thirds back from the entrance. For I could check things out and not look like I was five minutes from speeding out onto I-90 with money flying out the window. A woman came out with two kids old enough not to get hit by a car but too young to shut the fuck up. She put the bread and eggs and that kind of shit into the back of a Country Squire, all the while trying to get them to quit dicking at the bags and get in the car. “AFTER DINNER!” I heard through a slightly cracked window. A light mist turned into a light rain, and one or two drops sneaked in and hit my left hand as I finished a Lucky and waited for the wagon to pull away; no one else was coming out of the store, and if there was a good time to get things started then this was it.

The woman took the cart about fifteen feet to the corral and shoved it in, clearly annoyed and ready to go home and start a late supper. She forgot her purse, but was already shutting the door and starting the engine when a man I had missed in the shadows of the dimly lit parking lot came from the next row and approached the cart. I watched him open the purse and grab a small wad of cash. He then ran around the vehicle as it backed out of the parking space, gently knocking on the back window and yelling for the driver to hold on. The brake lights came on, but what would have been labeled a MILF in the Double-Aughts never put the car in park. Not when the young man was holding up the purse in front of the driver side window, not when he passed it through, and not while she retrieved it. I heard something along the lines of thanks so much and you’re welcome and watched the man head off at an angle that seemed to take him in the direction of a stand-alone sports bar maybe a half-mile from the end of the service road.

I took in the scene for what it was, but later, after I had relieved the Safeway of two grand, I realized how much she resembled the stripper I’d been with in Portland two nights prior. She looked even better the next morning, pretty enough to be Country Squire Mom’s stunt double, living life on the opposite end of the spectrum. I took a shower after she left; when I got out I realized I had left my wallet on the nightstand for the duration of our time together, including my one or two trips to the pisser during an evening of rough coke and whiskey sex. Wasn’t a single dollar missing from it, though the joint I had rolled and set on the desk after check-in was long gone. Bitch.

These days, that same broad is gonna drug me before I can even think about getting off once or twice in exchange for an agreed upon sum of money, unlocking the door to the room so a couple of meth-head hicks or reggies molested by their momma’s pimps can take the valuables on my person at best or turn it into a car ride to an ATM and rape/execution at worst. That same young man with the purse is not only going to take every bit of cash contained within the forgotten purse, he’s going to carjack mom, rape her, and kill her. If he doesn’t shoot or strangle the kids, it’s just a lucky break in the grand scheme of things.

I interned in Cleveland after graduating from the St. Cloud State. Cleveland was the biggest city I had ever lived in. That town on that dirty lake with the filthy river running through, she taught me everything I needed to know about crime’s potential for money and permanent vacation. She also gave me what should have been my wife if the lady in question hadn’t been a lying whore–she married the one she left me for within a month, never looking back.

I didn’t look back, either. I began my life of crime after I killed that bitch in an arson fire, and I say after because she doesn’t count and I didn’t get violent until my very last caper. (I made sure her fella was off at work. It didn’t have anything to with him, you know. Just us.)

My last hold-up was in Corpus Christi, and it got scary when the fat ass manager had a heart attack or something equally catastrophic. I pulled in just short of eleven in the morning and watched her through the glass, the late-morning sun starting to create a good bit of glare. She was showing a young-girl how to unlock the door. The girl was young, what some would call cute, and I absently noted that she had abnormally large breasts for her frame and a rather stupid, mean-looking face. I saw them walk back around the counter area, where some greasy-looking Hispanic hybrid was ready to take it from here, Betsy. I waited a minute or two and calmly walked my ass in there, the two kids sent off to the stock room within my earshot for plastic lids or some such vital stock. Betsy was probably up front a lot to deal with customer complaints, but hadn’t noticed the door chime and looked annoyed when she saw me. I heard her sigh as I stepped to the counter, looking up at the menu board like the clueless, never-tried-this-place-before dipshit mystery shopping required. This particular location, Juicyburger Store #125, would have scored poorly based on my mental notes:

Fat, Uninterested Manager cunt: poor attitude; fell to the floor due to massive heart attack; unable to take order promptly while pair of Moody High dropouts wandered off to smoke dope or molest each other in the stock room. Minus Thirty Points. Audit store, review General/District/Regional Managers; Corporate supervision, 60 days.

I had been on the felonious end of almost two hundred armed robberies, each needing a dash of luck to make it back to my room or the next city. My luck ran out when I pulled my weapon and started the lick with one of my many clever declarations of robbery and Betsy fell to one knee and then to the floor, register key in hand finally falling out of the right palm and quietly to the floor. I had to discharge my weapon for the first time in real life, into the ceiling to get an older black man slicing tomatoes to come open up and open the drawer, then again to get him to call the future parents of five, half-dumb kids from wherever their search for supplies had taken them. I came around the counter and directed the kids to stand next to Tomato. Tits was looking down at Betsy, and Greasy was looking at Tits like he was wondering when he’d be lucky enough to find out if her box would grip as hard he thought it would when he pushed, not so concerned about his forty-something boss who had likely read her last National Enquirer or the armed individual that stood about five feet away. It was very quiet. I had been in the restaurant about forty-five seconds and everyone was waiting on me, so it was fairly easy to hear the static and engine noise of the day’s first drive-thru customer drifting softly from Greasy’s headset, some Bubba ready for a double-bacon-cheese. Make sure to hold the ice on that medium orange coke.

I looked at Tomato’s name tag. It said his name was Will. Will and I knew what could happen next. He reached out to the kid’s waist and held a button on a battery-powered pack that allowed Greasy to talk to the customer at the order box outside. Joe looked at Greasy. In a reasonably calm voice he told Bubba that he was really sorry but we ain’t open till later cause the grill is broken. “Oh. Thank ya, anyhow” said the driver as he put a Dodge or a Ford into gear and headed down to the next fast-food trough.

Will smiled at Greasy approvingly and looked back at me. Tits was still staring at the now dead mass of woman on the floor. I thought that maybe Tits didn’t like her either. Will hadn’t looked at her since I’d summoned him to the front; he had, in fact, spent most of that time looking at my eyes and my right hand. I took an extra step back. I called it Increasing the Hero Barrier, and wished that I could put it on a resume or book paid speaking engagements on the subject.

He calmly finished putting the cash in a paper food sack, then pulled out a tattered pack of Kools, fumbled for a light, and lit one up. He was nervous, but much more in control then I was.

“How bout you just go on and get the fuck outta here, shithead.” He was tall and skinny and old as fuck and worn out, but he was still a business giver in his part of the world. “I got warrants. You get us sent up Eastham way you believe I’ma make your shit long and slow.”

He was right. I didn’t know where Eastham was, but it sounded like a place I didn’t want to be. I nodded, pulling out my keys and tossing them to Greasy. I’d steal a new car within the hour, then ditch it and buy a new one legally. “You wait for the people to come. Don’t be stupid. You look stupid, but you’ll be smart.”

“Yeah.” He and Tits looked at each other. Her tag said Trainee. Make it six half-dumb kids; they were in that instantaneous, deep kind of the love that happens in five minutes or not at all.

I shot Will in the head and chest twice a piece, then shot Betsy twice without looking. Just in case. In baseball they would call these insurance runs.

I winked at Tits. “Now that we’re alone…” No one laughed. No one ever did. “Okay. You and your future husband here are going to deal with the police for me. Use every little bit of whatever brains your Jesus gave the two of you. You haven’t done anything illegal yet, and when you do lie, no one will know. When the corporate people talk to you in a couple hours, tell ‘em you’re scared and don’t want to work here anymore. Quit. Then, later tonight, head over to Sunrise. My car, right out front there? It’ll be parked in front of the Burlington Coat place. They’ll be some money in the glove, assuming one of his cousins hasn’t stolen the car before you get there.” He pointed at Will’s lifeless body, which had finally stopped pumping blood onto the floor, some of which had spread out to Betsy’s other shoe. “Not much, but enough that you’ll keep your fuckin’ mouths shut, because while this job brought you together, he hated it and you like it only because it’s your first or second day and you feel just a bit of a tingle when you see blood spilled in person.”

They look at each other again, then looked back. They nodded and spoke in unison. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Be good to each other.”

Two hours later I was in San Antonio, phoning in my notice of resignation, effective immediately. A week later I was drinking a beer in Seattle, retired and confident that I was in the clear.

As it turned out many years later, I wasn’t.