Jim Gore

24 November 20XX

Convenience Store

25% MORE FREE

“You finished with signs?”

“Yeah,” I say to Austin, “The front’s done. Should I scan down promo?”

“Nah, we’ll leave that for the closer. Dailies done?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” he says, and then he leaves me behind the register. The morning is through, and now I just wait. Fine, I’ll deal.

I borrow some receipt paper and start drawing. I get bored of that and practice kanji. I get bored, so I flip the sheet over and start journaling. And then a customer comes up.

“Hi, do you have rewards?”

“Yes,” and then they punch in their phone number. I’m back on the assembly line, hopefully not for long. All these people, wasting their money on bullshit that’ll end up in the trash a year from now, I don’t know how to feel about myself for facilitating the process.

So yeah, buy your holiday treats. Hey, you, you really think you’re saving money? That’s what I wanna ask. “Deals,” “savings,” I get sick of those words. Go save yourself for once.

You don’t get it until you’re in it. No, the customer is not always right. You, yourself, aren’t entitled to shit.

Me and Austin talk about it all the time. “The public don’t work for the public, we do,” he said once, and there is a distinction. You don’t serve yourself. You’d look down at this kind of work.

It changes you. The music here is bad and customers are like slot machines—you never know for sure but you can always bet on losing—but I still feel elevated, in a way. It’s a confusing, intangible positivity: my simulation of happiness. My job necessitates enthusiasm in the face of monotony, and also nothing at all. There’s no reward, no end, no meaning. Chase your carrot on a stick.

Maybe it’s the profound isolation that makes you better at communicating. You’ll bite at the prospect of any human company; you’re that desperate. And it’s revealed to me how I feel about myself. It’s revealed to me that I’ve been—and still sometimes am—more of a chicken-shit than I’ve known. It makes me wonder how others think I am. My kanji skills don’t correlate to my conversation skills, I’ve noticed, and that’s really the trouble.

Shingo came in today, which was a first. Besides texts, there isn’t much intersection between our “outside” lives. He bought a bunch of bandages, some pain meds, gauze, all that stuff. I can guess who it’s for.

“How ya been?” I ask a question I never would’ve a few months ago.

“Okay. You?”

“Pretty good myself, thanks,” and I say it like I really mean it. Fuck, maybe I do really mean it, even with all my self-doubt. I could tell myself it’s just part of the job description. I could.

He had an absent look in his eyes. Ever since he and Lisa hooked up, he’s just, I don’t know, seemed vacant. Butterfly love, sure, but it’s made him a sourpuss. It went from Shingo and Lisa are in the club to Shingo and Lisa are a club. Duane, Chickarrin and I have all noticed. We haven’t said anything yet, though.

And another thing, Duane and Chickarrin have been leaning that way too. Duane insists I call him “Rock” per Chickarrin’s request, and Chickarrin wants to go by “Chika” now. All they do is babble in their Japanese—which has gotten better actually—but it’s all they do anymore. They hardly talk to anyone else or about anything else. Well, look at me, complaining about people speaking a foreign language in a foreign language club. Some club member that makes me.

Fuckin’ Chickarrin, I always thought that was stupid. You can’t spell that in katakana. It should be Chikarin,  “チカリン.” It pisses me off, but who cares.