Self-Serve Epiphany

by Jeff Kay

When I left my home state of West Virginia at the age of 23, I hadn't accomplished much of anything.  I was a two-time college dropout and a beer-swilling redneck in denial. I was up to my Electric Light Orchestra afro in confusion and desperation because of the rapidly unraveling, six-year relationship with my first girlfriend. And, on top of it all, I was still living with my parents and earning the emasculating sum of $3.50 an hour working the overnight shift in a convenience store/gas station at the foot of an interstate exit ramp.

During most of my final six months in the Mountain State I was hopeless and absolutely certain something bad was about to happen. I felt doomed and was quickly losing my grip. I secretly schemed to run away from all my problems, and head to the West Virginia version of the land of dreams: North Carolina. But, before I got the hell out of there, I witnessed a real-life illustration of all that I had become. I think of it now as my own personal gas station epiphany. For six months I was Scrooge with a squeegee, there among my coworkers (my professional colleagues, my peers) -- the most amazing menagerie of misfits and small-time criminals I've ever been associated with.

The owner/manager of the convenience store had two sons that worked there, and a wife that co-managed and did the books. It was a modern-day Mom and Pop grocery, but it was no small-time operation. It was a high-volume, brightly lit fillingstation and convenience store that served the many road-stoned travelers who used the freeway that ran through the middle of town. I worked at night with another highly trained cash register engineer, from eleven PM to seven AM.  I expertly managed the gas pumps from an elaborate control panel behind the counter, I filled complicated cigarette orders from the overhead pack-dispenser with the precision of a chemist, and I made change to people too stupid to appreciate my obvious talents. And each week Mom would smile and hand me (the genius) a check for one hundred and three dollars.

None of my colleagues seemed to share my feelings of despair.  In fact, they all seemed perfectly happy with the situation. I quickly dismissed them as dumbass wood-hicks.  It wasn't until alter that I learned they were stealing as much stuff as they could carry, and using the place as a bordello and ongoing party site. They were running scams on the customers, committing acts of violence and vandalism, and smoking huge bags of weed while on the clock.  It's no mystery now why they seemed so content:  they had found their dream job!

I eventually began to admire their energy and inventiveness, and started to join in on the fun.  It didn't take long before I began to appreciate .38 Special, and to see the beauty in a freshly-waxed bigfoot truck at dusk. I mean, these guys were alive!  And I quickly became a pillar in their little community.  It's scary how fast I fell into step, and how easily I was accepted.

Although it wasn't in the employee handbook, everything that was sold in the store was absolutely free to the staff.  It wasn't something you wanted to flaunt in front of Mom and Pop, but it probably would've been OK if you did. We consumed candy bars and sodas like World War II had just ended. We devoured bags of chips like each bag was an individual chip. We drank quarts of beef from white Styrofoam cups while flipping through the latest issue of Penthouse and the Hustler Horny Amputee Special Edition.  Before I knew it, I was in a frenzy of convenience store excess. I even briefly considered taking up smoking so I could take full advantage of every theft opportunity available to me.

Mom and Pop seemed oblivious to it all.  Their semiannual inventories must've been a fiasco ("How could this be? A million dollars short in Frito-Lay products alone?!"), but nothing was ever said about it that I'm aware of. Their own sons were two of the biggest offenders, so that may have had something to do with it.  Maybe they didn't want to know what they would find if they started looking. The sons would routinely load cases of beer into their matching Camaros and screech away with various and sundry camouflage-covered hoodlums hanging out of their windows, hooting and hollering. (I found it ironic that they drew so much attention to themselves while wearing camouflage, but I never mentioned it to the guys. The guys weren't big on ironic observation.)  And both of them smoked dope in the store.  They would do it in the cooler, behind the soft drinks and milk. Whenever a customer would open one of the doors to grab a Dr. Pepper or a Yoo-Hoo Lite, the whole place would instantly smell like a Black Crowes concert. And Pop would just stand there, drinking his coffee, and talking about the rabbits in his yard: "They're fascinating. Just fascinating."

One of the sons was your garden variety good ol' boy:  Billy's Drywall Services cap, hunting license, outline of a Skoal container in his back pocket, etc.  But the older of the two was something more.  He scared the hell out of me. He was big and moody, and carried an air of potential violence. His eyes were like those of a wild animal. I always had the uneasy feeling that if I said the wrong thing to him, he would kill me. And I quickly learned that a prolonged and sustained threat of a beating death, whether perceived or real, tends to detract from the overall work experience. The few times we worked together at night were excruciating affairs. He didn't joke around like everybody else, in fact he didn't say much at all. He just brooded, and paced, like he was struggling to control himself from doing something crazy. I was terrified of the guy.  I was told that he once got into an argument with a customer at the full-service pump who was attempting the old "Why'd you fill it up?  I said five dollars, and that's all I'm going to pay" scam.  Supposedly he pumped a few cents worth of gasoline into the customer's lap then held up a butane lighter, as subtle encouragement for him to pay up.  I don't doubt for a second that it happened. The guy was a ticking time bomb.

Of course, he was running a successful gas scam of his own the whole time. For some reason, stealing gasoline from this place was taboo. It was perfectly OK to drink a hundred dollars worth of beer every week, in fact it was encouraged. But it was socially unacceptable to take three dollars worth of fuel.  Indeed, the other employees would shun a person if they were known to be stealing from the pumps. Repeat offenders were threatened with bodily harm.  I never learned why this was so (I was never able to crack their intricate moral code).  But stealing gas from the customers was another thing altogether.  That was something to be admired. My spooky friend kept a five gallon can on the full-service island, where he always worked. And several times during each day a "yuppie faggot" would pull up in an expensive car and bark the demand, "fill it up with premium" before disappearing into the store. A gallon or two would inevitably make its way into the can before a drop went into the car, and the customer would unknowingly pay for it with his gold card.  And my buddy would smile and wave to the guy as he drove away, while muttering a string of obscenities under his breath. The he'd pour five gallons of yuppie gas into his own car's tank at the end of every shift.

In the spirit of efficiency and shared services, we would sometimes engage in an employee theft exchange program with other local businesses. One night I was working with a big Hoss Cartwright-like gentleman who immediately upon arriving proclaimed himself "hungry as shit." He milled about the store grumbling for an hour, eating this and that, but was clearly not satisfied. Finally he picked up the phone and called a friend who was a dishwasher at a high-dollar restaurant a few miles away. An hour later the friend showed up with two thick bacon-wrapped filet mignon steaks which he had obviously stolen from his employer. After "paying" the man with beer from the cooler, Hoss hollered, "Hell, yeah!" and retrieved a small charcoal grill from the shelf. He took it outside and began grilling the steaks on the sidewalk by the door. Every once in a while he would come inside to get a bottle of steak sauce or salt and pepper, and it wasn't long before we were eating perfectly prepared thirty-dollar steaks off paper plates with plastic utensils.  And Hoss moaned a low guttural, "goddamn this is good..." while wiping the grease from his face.

A few of my business partners also had frequent sex with the sizable local skag population, while on the clock. I never took advantage of this particular perk, mostly because none of the young ladies offered to be my co-conspirator. But a couple of the guys pumped a lot more than gas while they worked. Yes they did. And this is yet another of the mysteries of the place that I don't think will ever be solved. Both of the gentlemen that were most encouraged to freely scatter their fluids over the landscape, like Johnny Ampleseed, were hideously ugly. The gas station groupies just couldn't get enough of them though. Even though these women would seemingly swing open whenever a man got near them, like a grocery store, it was still puzzling to me.  I understood why I wasn't involved, but why were these guys? Maybe it was their dinner plate-sized belt buckles that appealed to the ladies, I don't know. But nearly every night a different cigarette-puffing hussy would show up and begin flirting with my coworker, and before long I'd find myself alone behind the counter. Eventually they'd emerge from the giant truck, flushed and glassy-eyed.  And after the woman left I got to hear all about her oral acrobatics, about how it was a virtual Suck du Soleil. I alternated between being insulted and proud they never looked my way.

Of course, life at the store wasn't always a bed of cheap tube roses. There was the occasional altercation between the employees, that led to the requisite posturing that naturally followed.  One of my regular late-night partners had a big problem with one of the guys on the evening shift, and was bent on getting him fired.  I can't remember what they were arguing about, but I think it had something to do with auto parts or maybe venison.  He sat there stewing about how he could set up his nemesis to make him look like a thief, while sipping stolen Budweisers.  A few nights later I came to work and he pulled me to the side and showed me a cruel-looking three-pronged hook and a ball of string.  I said, "You're not going to kill him, are you?"  He just snickered like an Appalachian Boris Badenov.

At the end of each shift, the cashier was required to zero out the register and print a report, then pull all the money and stuff everything into a bank bag.  The bag was then pushed through a mail slot in the manager's locked office door.  My partner's plan was to feed the hook through the mail slot and fish out the evening shift's bag.  Then he'd remove a sizable chunk of money, and return the bag to the office, thereby implicating Mr. Evening Shift in either dishonesty or incompetency, or both.  He worked on this project for a long time.  It didn't go as easily as he had anticipated, and he came out every so often to give me a nervous update.  At one point he was in a state of panic because he had the hook stuck in the manager's desk chair, and couldn't work it loose.  As he manipulated the string, the chair started rolling away from the desk and toward the door.  "Fuck, man!" was his critique of the situation.  He finally solved the problem, and snagged the bank bag.  I think he pocketed $136.

When Pop came in the next morning to do the previous day's paperwork, we held our breath.  We just knew he'd throw a fit and probably fire the evening worker over the phone.  Pop didn't really like him to begin with, and this was going to be the proverbial straw.  Or so we thought.  After a half hour Pop came out of the office, poured himself a cup of coffee, and said, "I was out watchin' the rabbits in the yard this morning.  They're just fascinating.  There's this one frisky little fella..."

In addition to the staff, there were several non-employees that hung out at the store each evening.  Most memorable was a gigantic fat boy, called Meatball, that was literally the same length across as he was up and down.  He ate constantly, usually junk food from both hand simultaneously.  He would move his head from side to side, alternating between various Hostess products and a 6-ft Slim Jim Meat Whip.  He also talked shit all the time, about he was "going to" do this, and how he was "going to" do that.  He was a repo man and a part-time bouncer at a trashy strip club way up in some holler someplace.  But he was only biding his time, you see, because he was "going to" get on at the Volkswagen plant real soon.  His grandfather would stop in to buy gas every once in a while and Meatball would be standing there, in all his glory, packing food in at an alarming rate.  The old man would just shake his head and say, "If I had another grandson like you, I'd shoot two of 'em."

Of course, everything that goes in eventually has to come out, so Meatball spent a lot of time in the bathroom.  While he was "in the office" one evening, a coworker produced a handful of bottle rockets from his jacket pocket and lined them up in front of the bathroom door.  Meatball started shrieking like a woman as the fireworks ricocheted around inside the tiny room, each of them eventually exploding like a stick of dynamite.  When he emerged, coughing up clouds of sulfur smoke, with his gigantic pants twisted sideways, everybody in the store was laughing hysterically -- including the customers.

It was a hell of a summer.  After starting out so miserably, I was actually having fun again.  I even considered staying.  I remember being outside under the stars early one morning shooting Lemonheads candy at the windows in the old folk's home with a high-powered slingshot, thinking that life was good.  But the euphoria was short-lived.  The next day I found myself involved in an argument about who would win a fist fight between Van Halen and The Rolling Stones, and realized with horror that I had real and passionate opinions on the subject.  Then I heard that that the guy with the three-pronged hook had been arrested for "spotlighting" deer, the disgusting and illegal practice of going into the woods at night and shining a bright light in a deer's eyes, then blasting it with a shotgun after it freezes in its tracks.  That was just a tad over-the-line, I thought.  And to make sure I wouldn't change my mind about leaving, the gods sent me a drunken hick waving a pistol to seal the deal.

He pulled up directly in front of the doors at about three in the morning in a souped-up piece of crap that was vibrating and smoking badly.  The stereo sounded like a clock radio hooked up to a 500 watt amplifier, and it was completely maxed out.  The windows in the store were literally rattling and I could feel the music of Rush in my teeth.  "Sounds good, huh?" he slurred as he made his way to the beer cooler.  "Sounds like shit," my coworker blurted, "And if you don't get it out of our front door, I'm gonna call the police."  Then he added, "And it's too late to buy beer.  Besides, you're drunk already."  The guy's face passed right through red and went directly to a rich maroon color.  Then he started yelling all sorts of belligerence that we couldn't make out, and left.  We were laughing our asses off as he fish-tailed across the parking lot and onto the street.  But we weren't laughing when he returned ten minutes later.

"You don't fucking respect me?!" he screamed as he busted through the doors waving a silver handgun.  "You both fucking tell me my stereo kicks ass...Right now, motherfuckers!!"  I couldn't believe what was happening before me.  The guy was shaking and wild-eyed and EXTREMELY pissed-off.  I actually thought I was going to die on the floor of some shitty convenience store in West Virginia, because of a tossed-off remark about a man's stereo.  We both immediately began heaping on the praise of the amazingly rich and vibrant sounds that were emanating from his vehicle.  We assured him that it was quite obviously the best car stereo we had ever encountered, and could not foresee any car stereos of the future surpassing its superior quality.  "You better believe it's a kick-ass system, motherfuckers," he said, a little less agitated.  Then he was gone.

And so was I.  A couple of days later I was in North Carolina, and a short time after that my girlfriend finally did what I didn't have the guts to do:  put our dying relationship out of its misery.  I had officially entered a new phase of my life.  And while it would be easy to dismiss those final six months as a waste of time, I certainly don't feel that way now.  I have moved farther and farther away from that world during the last dozen or so years, both figuratively and geographically, but I look back with a certain amount of respect.  Those guys were more creative than most of the people I deal with every day in my adult-style office job, and they were a hell of a lot more fun.  My friends and I spent a big part of our teenage years making fun of the many hicks and rednecks that inhabit our hometown (behind their backs, of course), but it wasn't until my final days there that I realized that I was not too far removed from the targets of our ridicule.  My filling station colleagues weren't known for their tolerance, and yet they tolerated me easily -- which was quite a psychological blow when I started thinking about it.  And it's something I'm still working out, day by day.

I think I've grown as a result of the experience.  I've come to many painful realizations along the way.  And now, when I go home, and get together with friends, I don't make fun of the hicks and rednecks anymore.  I think of it now as more of a tribute, a celebration if you will.  Behind their backs, of course.

***

Jeff Kay likes to decsribe himself as a "well-hung outdoorsman" but we just know him as "that man in the flesh parka who cried when Mark had to leave Los Angeles." Jeff is the creator of The West Virginia Surf Report magazine. For the past two years Jeff has been keeping one of the funniest, well-crafted online journals in the world.

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