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Attention, Shoppers

Mike Malloy

��Danny had his own way of dealing with the awful customers. He told me about it one night—a Monday night—while I was mopping the floor and he was hanging by the registers.
��“I like to imagine that actually, all the really stupid, irritating customers are doing secret guerilla theater performance art that I don’t know about. So instead of getting angry at them, I just get sort of happy and proud, like I’m in on the joke. And I say, ‘Man, that’s a really convincing portrayal of a crazy old lady or controlling business suit-wearing asshole you’ve got going on there.’ It makes it fun, as opposed to depressing.”
��After Danny keyed me into that way of doing things, I started trying it out myself. On the lady who insisted she had exact change, and then made me and three other people wait while she, with agonizing slowness, rooted through her tiny pink change purse, before deciding that really she didn’t have exact change and actually didn’t want one third of the stuff in her cart. Or the two teenage girls who, not understanding how shoe racks worked, asked me where the other half of each pair was as they stood by dozens of shoe boxes. Or the old man who insisted that everything was too expensive and, while standing by the store manager, told his kids not to pay for anything in their baskets. Then they set off the security alarms.
��Every time an alarm goes off we have to write down a coded reason why it did in a little notebook. Possible explanations include “Employee Error,” “Customer Mistake,” and the enigmatic, yet-to-be-used “Phantom.” Actually, alarms often go off for no reason; we just wave the customers through, even if they look suspicious. We could lose far more in some false accusation lawsuit than anyone could sneak out the store in her purse, so really the store is kind of a theft-related free-for-all. The only thing that keeps us going is the assumption that most customers don’t realize this is the case. Also, that they don’t realize the “cameras” in the ceiling are hollow glass orbs with no wiring attached.
��At first I kind of liked our customers. They were sometimes fun or funny, and they gave me something to do with my time. And I liked dealing with them better than sweeping up or moving freight or unloading the truck or breaking down boxes. But after a short stretch of having to deal with the sort of folks our store attracts—bourgeois suburban moms, old folks who grew up during the depression and think it’s still going on and that it’s my fault, spoiled teens who make their parents give them whatever they want, including assaults on my dignity—I lost that early naive glow.
��Our customers are not just annoying. They are creepy. They look alike. They wear the same muted earth tones and chintzy jewelry, smell of the same floral and soap perfumes, buy the same crappy gospel and easy listening CDs, yell at their analogous five-to-eight year-old progeny in a manner that suggests similitude. Coming out the employee-only double doors onto an aisle full of our customers has a “Night of the Living Dead” quality to it.
��They talk to themselves while they shop. Sometimes they say something weird, like “You don’t see spoons like that these days,” and it’s not clear if they are saying it to me, or themselves, or little elves only they can see. They take things out of their boxes, demand to see things that nobody could possibly be interested in seeing (ugly twenty dollar pens, five dollar plastic earrings from China missing half their fake gemstones, golf-ball shaped back massagers); they become fussy over peculiar things, like the comparative erosion of the coins they’re given in change. They ask if products really work (What are they expecting us to say? “No”?).
��But Jerome told me and I believe him, that shopping is about more than meets the eye. Jerome saw shopping as a kind of sacrament, or at least as something significant. He had plenty of time to think about it, I guess, what with all those nine-hour shifts.
��Shopping is more than what you buy. In fact, the thing you walk away with often isn’t important at all. When you buy something it’s so exciting, but by the time you get it home, it’s dull. Pedestrian. It almost squats there on your counter, doesn’t it? Think of how exciting it is to see twenty of something in a store and how dull it is to see one of it in your house. Shouldn’t the one in your house be more exciting, seeing as it’s yours?
��Shopping isn’t what you buy; it’s buying. In the course of the transaction a little drama is enacted in which the various parties assume dramatic parts and social power, if only for a time. The buyer gets to exert control over the employees at the store; the employees get to take the buyer’s money. In the course of the buying, a reversal occurs. The thing transpires in stages.
��A customer enters a store and asks a sales associate if he can help her. He says he can and she proceeds to ask a series of complicated, sometimes illogical questions (I was once asked, with no introduction, what you get when you multiply eight by seventeen). The customer might make the sales associate carry things, embarrass him or herself, cause other people to have to wait. But in the end the transaction must happen, and in the moment when the associate says: “Can I see your card, please?” (and most transactions are with cards), a reversal occurs.
��Now the customer is the one buying. The sales associate is asking the questions and issuing the orders: can I have your card, is that credit or debit, sign here, fill this out, take your receipt. The customer’s control of the sales associate has revealed itself to be just another purchase, a commodity obtained for a short time by the exchange of money. In addition to buying the product the customer has bought the sales associate’s time, and the right to be better than that associate—to give orders, to be a social superior. But that high of control has a price, revealing in the end a kind of parity between customer and employee. Both are tangled together in money, their common medium of exchange. The customer is in the store to spend the money; the sales associate, to earn it.

��Jerome was something special. I remember the first day Jerome came into the store. I could tell right away that there was something different about him. He picked things up fast. He was nice enough, easy to talk to. He asked you questions like he was really interested.
��But what was unusual about him was his gift. He had the ability to understand what people wanted, what they really wanted. He understood what was at stake in transactions, not just what sat on the counter-space by the register. He knew not what people wanted to buy, but why they wanted to buy it.
��He knew, for instance, if a woman were in the store looking for a gift for her daughter, exactly what it was the woman wanted to communicate with the gift: to her daughter, to herself, to the sales team. If the woman wanted to show that she was younger than her age, independently wealthy, understanding about her daughter’s relationship with a boy of a different race, Jerome could figure all that out. And somehow, he could suggest the right product to convey those things. He could turn objects into sentiments.
��And what was really weird was that the connections Jerome could sense were not direct. If a man needed to buy something to prove his masculinity, Jerome wouldn’t suggest something obvious, like an accessory to a muscle car or a leather jacket or a sound system. Because masculinity is different to everyone, and it’s so tied-up in weird old memories that no one understands and half the time people forget they even have, Jerome would somehow know to suggest something seemingly unrelated: a binder set-up to incorporate recipes, a stove-top espresso maker, a curtain rod with silver filigree. Somehow, these products would do more than their boxes and advertisements implied. They would fulfill needs. People would come into the store broken, but they would leave whole. Jerome called himself a money-changer. He turned money into other things, things intangible but nevertheless inescapable. He filled in holes people didn’t know they had. He was a dentist who filled cavities.
��Jerome never claimed he could read minds. What he said was he understood merchandise. He understood what selling meant. He said St. Joe’s Prep was pretty intense, and though he wasn’t much for classes something from Dante stuck with him: in the middle ages, theft wasn’t just stolen goods. It was about identity. What people managed to accumulate in part defined their selfhood. If we can’t be sure what we possess, we can’t be sure who we are. It puts a different spin on “identity theft.”
��One night a woman came into the store pushing a shopping cart. But she didn’t just come into the store; she bustled. You know that phrase, “hustle and bustle?” This woman did not hustle, but she did bustle. She reeked of French Vanilla and Lavender as she rifled through the coarse red and yellow jackets in the apparel section. On the in-store stereo system Santo and Johnny were performing “Sleep Walk.” I was sorting lingerie, always a pain because of all the little hooks and grabby bits on the hangers. I theorized once with the Pakistani midget who also worked up front that there were little gremlins whose sole joy in this world was to sneak into the store every night, go to the lingerie section, and fuck it up.
��About that Pakistani midget: she was my third favorite employee, after Jerome and Danny. She had a theory about Jerome’s powers—that what people really needed to buy wasn’t about the product, but about the molecules in it.
��“Everything consist of molecules,” she said. “Everything once was something else. So maybe when you buy one thing you really are buying something else. Some piece of when you were small child, or something that belong to your parents, or a small piece of dust from country you are from.” She thought that made about as much sense as anything.
��Anyway. The woman rifled through the clothes and then lurched on to the Christmas cards, another section that we never could keep straight. She pawed at the cards in a manner that was almost sexual, or maybe animal—it was like a cat licking itself or a dog chasing its own tail. From Christmas cards she oozed into seasonal goods and then protoplasmed into the barware section. She was fondling wine glasses, sniffing at cutlery, caressing the ceramics.
��When the woman first came in I’d said “hello” to her. She didn’t respond. I didn’t think much of it. Plenty of people don’t respond.
��Jerome approached her. He smiled. He always had to act twice as nice as everybody else because he was black and a lot of our customers have a tendency to clutch defensively at their purses when he appears.
��“Can I help you, miss?” he asked.
��“I’m not sure,” she said. “I just came in here for wrapping paper, but...”
��“Are you looking for anything else?”
��“Well. I don’t know. I like to come by sometimes and see if there’s a bargain. Do you have anything new reduced?”
��Jerome shook his head.
��“No new sales until the first of the month, I’m afraid.”
��“Huhhhn,” said the woman, holding a coffee mug up to the halogen light. “This looks chipped. Do you take anything off for that?” She squinted in a manner that upset her caked-on make up and lined her shopworn face. Jerome looked at the perfectly fine cup.
��“In situations like that we’d take off fifteen percent,” he said diplomatically.
��“Muuuhhn,” said the woman, squinting some more at the cup.
��“Would you be interested in anything in the garden section?”
��“Ugh, maybe. I just don’t know. My car. It’s up for inspection. Well of course I put it off. I don’t know why it’s always up at the busiest time of the year. I take the kids to school and I take the car to the dealership and the guy says, ‘we need to look at your brake pads’ and of course I knew something wouldn’t be right with the brakes as well and I can’t just sit in the dealership all day so I told them I’d make another appointment. Well you know how that is.”
��“Right.”
��“My husband—he don’t like me working—he says why not just get the thing inspected, but I do community reading on Thursdays. And the back seat is filthy. I swear, my kids think anything is a trash basket. Well if I’m going to make it to the school on Thursday and the senior center on Friday—because of course I have to take my mother to bridge group, God knows my sister won’t lift a finger—what was I saying?”
��“I think I should show you something in gardening.”
��“Right. Thank you.”
��I was stocking shelves as Jerome led the woman to gardening, but I kept one eye on him. I was bored and I needed something to pay attention to. I was deep into a nine-hour-shift and I’d used up all my breaks.
��“I think maybe you should take a look at this,” said Jerome. He showed her a cardinal bird ornament that you put on a stick in your lawn. The woman looked at it.
��“Huh,” she said. “That’s nice.”
��She bought the thing. She seemed happier when she walked out.
��What were you expecting? Fireworks? Slapstick comedy? A Marxist revolution?
��But the funny thing is, when we saw her again (and we did see her again—we get a lot of repeat customers) she was different. She was better. Lighter. I credit her change to the cardinal bird.
��Maybe I believe in Jerome more than most people. But I like to believe that somebody understands, that there’s more to this world than what we see. I believe there are deep psychic type things going on in people’s minds, so why shouldn’t somebody be able to read them? And Jerome was always good with people. He understood them, without having to be told.
��Anyway. One night I asked Jerome what I might want in the store. Of all the shit that we sell (and we sell a lot of shit—think of us as a cheaper, worse K-Mart), what should I buy? Me with my employee discount of twenty percent, even.
��He didn’t know. He said I didn’t want anything in the store.
��I thought about that answer later, when I was out of the army and on the junk. When I shot up (and did I ever shoot up), what was it I was looking for? What was I chasing?
��For me it started sensually. The chemicals were secondary. Yeah, I understood that heroin was an opiate and all that. But for me the big moment was when the needle pierced my skin. And the tincture of blood floating upward into the body of the syringe. The melding of the medicine and the plasma. And most of all maybe the sensation of control. For once, I was the doctor. I was giving my own shots. I remember when I was a boy, shoved into the doctors’ office for vaccines and flu shots. It’s not that I resented the doctors, it’s more that I suspected their motives.
��But now I’m getting personal—and depressing. And I ask you—what’s the point of that? I don’t want to talk about myself. I want to talk about Jerome.
��I think about the first night that I ever copped some of the junk. I mean the first night when I was back home. Afghanistan doesn’t count. Over there the junk there isn’t even junk; they treat it like nutmeg or corn syrup. And buying things is really different over there. Unlike here in the states, over there they have shortages. There are things you just can’t get. I knew a guy who sold hard drives of sex scenes they censored from movies. Some kids would just sell fruit, others milk, others bread or coffee or cigarettes. But sometimes I envied them. Those Taliban were crazy but at least they had their beliefs. In Afghanistan they banned the use of paper bags because the paper might be recycled and it might contain what might have once been a part of the Koran.
��Think about it: these people believe that there is something sacred, something more important than anything else in the world, that can’t be bought or sold or manufactured or destroyed. They think it’s so important that it trumps recycled paper.
��I think about that every time I have to say: paper or plastic?
��But I’ll tell you something else. I saw a junk fiend over there once. He wasn’t Afghani. He was Uzbek. A mountain guy. A real sheep-shagger. He got mixed-up in some Islamic stuff but he wasn’t a terrorist, just religious and young and pissed-off. So I guess I could identify. Anyway, he fell off the Allah bandwagon and got into bootleg DVDs and driving his spray-painted truck through the mountain roads and heroin. But I remember him when he was waiting for a fix. He knew exactly who he was and what he wanted. Give a man something to want and you give him the world—just like how I could bust down some poor Afghani’s door if I knew I could skype with my girl afterwards, how I could work six hours if I knew I’d get a fifteen minute break. Nobody is happier than a heroin junkie knowing a fix is coming.
��Maybe that’s something Jerome saw himself, when he looked over the shelves and end-caps of our store. I want to talk about his gift, his magic, the merchandise, the store, the memories. I want to talk about the dreams and the products and the gift and the power and the glory. The last thing I want to talk about is my ambiguities, the way I never could tell what it was I needed. I don’t want to talk about myself, a selectively permeable vacuole drifting through space. I want to talk about something interesting.
��After all, you’re my audience, and I’m sure you must want something.



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