Counter Culture: Busted For Books

Adam Matcho

Jim Daniels was the one who got me into trouble.

It’s true. The poet, Jim Daniels, almost got me fired from the novelty store in Monroeville Mall.

It was his book—Punching Out—I was reading while leaning against an ass-high shelf behind the two cash registers and the sales counter between them. That’s when the woman snuck in and busted me.

I couldn’t read every day at work. Only days when I opened the store and the mall mainly consisted of health conscious senior citizens and the UPS delivery guy. I would stand there, behind the counter, and make the multi-million dollar company that paid me, pay me to read. It was great to read Jim Daniels, but to make seven dollars an hour to read him was even better.

I was somewhere in the middle of the book, where the poems are about his factory job, and this woman walked in and approached the counter. All of my senses of perception were invested in Jim Daniels and I jerked back to reality when the woman said hello.

“Hi,” I said, and shut the book. I tossed it onto the ass-high shelf behind me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. She was smiling and wearing glossy, pink lipstick. She was older than me, maybe 50.  She wore an animal print headband to control her hair  – brown curls and coils trying to twist themselves from her skull.

“What are you reading?” she said, smiling. I felt a sense of relief in her smile, as if it was okay to tell the truth instead of instinctively lying, like I did to most customers.

“Jim Daniels,” I said.

“And what kind of book is that?” she said.

“Poetry,” I said.

“And are you a writer?” she said.

I paused. It seemed like a trick question. I did write. All the time. I had my entire life. I was currently in college, earning a degree in English writing. I wrote weekly columns for the college newspaper. So I was a person who wrote things. But was I a writer? That was an epithet I didn’t feel I was entitled to just yet. My life was so far removed from the glamour and epiphanies of a real writer’s existence, it almost made me want to curl up under the counter, right there in the store, and never write another word again.

“No,” I said. “I work here.” I cupped my hands, as if I were anticipating her to fill them with pocket change, then spread them, dramatically, displaying the store around us: the automated talking parrots, the whoopee cushions, the tee shirts with sayings like “I may not be Mr. Right, but I’ll fuck you ‘til he shows up” and rubber chickens and the glowing disco balls reflecting light off of this woman’s shimmering lipstick and springy hair.

“Well, you must be a writer,” she said. “Because the only people I know who ever read poetry are writers.”

I nodded my head and smiled at her. I liked her and her gleaming lips and crazy hair. She knew people who read poetry. If she wanted my job, I would have given it to her. But she didn’t want my job; she wanted a gag gift for a friend who was turning 50. I told her I would show her to the Over the Hill section.

Before I walked out from behind the counter, I looked at the Jim Daniels book, how it was just sitting there on the shelf instead of my usual stash spot: the hidden nook below the register drawer but above the computer tower. It was a useless six-by-six inch cubby hole where I hid my books and my drinks, because, like books, we were not allowed to have beverages on the sales floor.

Lately my choice of drink had been Crunk Juice, which was a green, soda-flavored energy drink. It tasted like lime Gatorade mixed with about 13 pixie sticks. But we had cans of them, for sale, just sitting in a mini-fridge right beside the register. I had been stealing a can of Crunk Juice a day, mixing it with rum (Calico Jack rum, of course), which I always carried in my flask. Because I was a college student, I wore a book bag all the time. I would walk into work and hang up my book bag with all of my books and writings and homework and drugs, if I had them, and a flask.

I had been in the habit of taking one of the red plastic cups we kept in the backroom, snagging a can of Crunk Juice and making my rum-based morning supplement for several weeks. I would then open the store and stand behind the counter and read. When the occasional customer did enter, I gave that person my undivided attention and helped them in every way I could. The energy drink helped. And the overzealous customer service, I felt, would mask the smell of booze on my breath.

With that customer-first maxim in mind, I left the Jim Daniels book sitting on the back shelf, next to an empty can of Crunk Juice, which I planned to write off sometime this morning as a damaged product to maintain the store’s inventory.

I walked with my only customer to the Over the Hill section and began to point out items that mentioned the age 50. There was a coffee mug that read “I’m not 50, I’m 49.95” and a survival kit full of prunes and fake pills and no-tear toilet paper in a coffin-shaped box with a big 5-0 on the outside. There were witty tee shirts and a turquoise sports bra with cups that sagged to compensate for the marriage of age and gravity. All of these gag gifts made her cover her mouth and laugh.

“Thank you so much,” she said, wiping her watering eyes. “I think this mug is perfect, but I liked looking at all of these terrible gifts.”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” I said. “And if you need a 50-specific gift bag or wrapping paper, we have that too.”

That was part of the job that had embedded itself into my brain: the little up-sales, the add-on items that all the bosses and district mangers preached about. It was a sticking point every year on the employee evaluations, where you had to sit through a list of your personal shortcomings before being given a ten-cent raise or no raise at all. 

“That sounds great, and thanks again,” the woman said, as we walked back to the registers. “And good luck with your writing.”

That’s when I saw my boss standing behind the counter, more than three hours early for his shift.

As the woman and I approached the cash registers, my boss walked out from behind them. It was like two magnets repelling each other. He made a beeline for the backroom, without acknowledging me or the woman beside me with her wild hair and effervescent lips, who is somehow able to secretly spot writers and call them on it.

When we reached the registers, she stood on the customer side of the counter and I lifted the magnetic, plastic chain that (supposedly) blocks customers from getting to this side of the counter, the worker’s side, my side. The Jim Daniels book was there, in plain sight, on the shelf, amongst the morning emails and paperwork. There was the empty can of Crunk Juice I had planned to write off earlier standing tall like a monument to potential theft. I knew I was fucked.

“Thank you,” I said to the woman. “I hope you have a great day.”

“And you as well,” she said.

“I tell people that all the time,” I said, hunching down, planting an elbow on the counter space between the two registers, the point of purchase, where we suggest the batteries and the gift wrap or sign people up for some crappy membership card.

“But, for you, I mean it,” I said. “I honestly hope you have a good day.”

“And the same to you, dear,” she said and left.

I looked at the evidence: Jim Daniels and Crunk Juice. This would not be a good day. I had been caught reading at work before. I did it all the time, but I always had my book hidden away in my book bag, behind the rum-filled flask (which I had also written off as a damaged product many months before).   

The other time I got busted for books was Hemingway. I was reading A Moveable Feast for the first time and I couldn’t stop. All the café conversations and horse races and vermouth. Hemingway said things like, “Hunger is good discipline and you learn from it.” He made me want to be a writer, as I rang a cash register every day, bagging dragon fountains and leather paddles.

Ernest Hemingway skipped college and began to travel because he knew he was supposed to do that in order to become a writer. I worked at a store in the mall five days a week and went to school the other two. I had a son and a wife who I didn’t see as often as I’d like. I had credit card debt that was so astronomical I couldn’t really fathom it. I read poetry at work. I was known to spike my Crunk Juice. That didn’t sound anything like a writer to me.

But Hemingway got me bitched out because after hiding his novel in my book bag, behind the flask, I kept thinking  about the way Hemingway wrote about all the places he’d been, with his perfect lines like the foundation of a house of cards, each word relied on the others to make the sentence.

I thought about Hemingway to the point of wanting to see that photo in A Moveable Feast of Ernie in front of the bookstore, Shakespeare and Company. I ran into the backroom when the store was empty and got the book, came back out to the sales floor and looked at the photo. I read the caption underneath. Then I put the book down. Then I forgot about the book.

When my boss came in for his shift, he held up the book and said, “What is this?”

“A Moveable Feast?” I said.

“You don’t get paid to sit here and read,” my boss said, holding the book out with a straightened arm, as if it were a speeding ticket or subpoena.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I see the posters haven’t been restocked and there are some lava lamp colors in the overhead that should come down to the shelves,” he said.

Work was tense the rest of that day. Hemingway did me in. And now, Jim Daniels was about to do the same.

Daniels had taken up that tight prose of Hemingway and made his own house of cards. Except it was more of an apartment complex. Each poem about some small victory in the factory was steadied against a poem about a man losing his finger in the machinery. The poems built upon each other and made a book. A book I had been getting paid to read.

My boss banged through the swinging door of the backroom and brushed past me, rearranging the batteries and the other add-on items hanging from the grid attached to the front of the sales counter. I was trying my best to appear busy.

“What’s going on in here?” my boss said.

I stood up. “What?”

He was standing with his thin arms crossed, tucking his thumbs behind his biceps. He nodded in the direction of the Jim Daniels book and the empty can of Crunk Juice sitting beside it. I didn’t see my red plastic cup with my homemade mix on the shelf.

“Did you pay for that?” my boss said.

For a second, I thought he was implying I stole the Jim Daniels book, which I was quite indignant about. But then I realized he meant the Crunk Juice, which I absolutely intended on stealing.  

“I was waiting until you got in so I could use my employee discount,” I said. Technically, we were not allowed to ring ourselves up for an employee sale, so by waiting for the boss, I was abiding by the rules, not trying to write it off as a damaged product and keep my three dollars.

“What are you doing here this early anyway?” I said, trying to change his line of questioning.  Direct him away from the Jim Daniels. Away from the gray and white cover which depicts the inside of an auto plant, its endless tunnel of workers and machines that always reminded me of that painting by Hieronymus Bosch, his portrait of hell.

“I just got a call from my mother,” my boss said. “Capital One is calling her about my credit card and I needed to come in and get my checkbook to pay these assholes off.”

I nodded. I understood debt.

“Do you want to buy that drink or not?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Will you ring me up for it?”

I paid the three dollars for the Crunk Juice, which was weak for an energy drink, but smooth as a mixer.

My boss started off toward the store’s entrance, out into the mall where there were now teenagers and moms with baby strollers and credit card debt and people who know what it means to read poetry. Then my boss turned around.

“I may be a little late today, depending on how long this takes,” he said.

“Okay. Take your time,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said. “And Adam…”

“Yes?”

“It looks like the posters need restocked. You can do that if you were looking for something to do.”

I said I was and began to restock the posters.      

Adam Matcho regularly contributes to The New Yinzer by confessing true stories of the workplace in his column. His poetry collection, Six Dollars an Hour (Liquid Paper Press), was the winner of Nerve Cowboy’s 2011 Chapbook Competition and will be available at the end of the summer.