Tom Waits: Rain Dogs

A college roommate turned me onto Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs album sometime in the early 90’s. I loved it upon hearing the first few bars. I loved the immersive story lines, the colorful characters, the ambience proffered. It sounds simultaneously aged and yet contemporarily relevant. I first heard this during a time when I was also into reading things by Charles Bukowski and Kathy Acker and it felt like a familiar acquaintance. I was also curious about matters that influenced the human condition, cultural decay in general, and the rituals and behaviors of the down and out who heroically survive their constant daily struggles despite overwhelming odds and limited means.

I was an impoverished college student at the time trying to make up for an unplanned gap year a couple years prior. Needing to make up for lost time and motivated to simply graduate, I had loaded my schedule up with as many courses as the university would permit.

It was also during this time that I worked in one of those well known pharmacy chains that dot the U.S. suburban landscape. These pharmacies in the early 90‘s were mostly the same. They remain eerily familiar decades later. Same smell. Same ambience. Same florescent lighting stretching across the ceiling above each aisle. Same general layout.

In the corner furthest from the entrance is the pharmacy proper where you obtain your prescription medication. They intentionally place it furthest from the entrance. The pharmacy proper is the lure that was most likely to have brought into the store. Placing it into that furthest corner demanded that you wander through a gauntlet of aisle after aisle of assorted crap. By design you are tempted and enticed into purchasing several additional items beyond the medication needs that brought you into store. The assortment includes over the counter medications that do not require prescriptions, and also contains aisles of random stuff that serves no medical purposes. This includes items such as batteries, soda, disposable undergarments, cards for events like birthdays or funerals, random toys, cosmetics, candy, condoms, and lubricants, assorted dried beef product and those tiny wieners that one could buy in a small can that nobody eats and always collect dust as they sit on the shelf uneaten for years. These pharmacies are not grocery stores, convenience stores, or general goods stores. They are small hodge podge of each. Frankensteinesque.

I worked a graveyard shift. I am one of the rare folk who chose to do so through intention. I did so because the idea of working through the dead of night fascinated me for a period of time. I also did such because it paid several dollars more an hour than a standard daytime shift. Apparently people are loathe to work at night. I quite enjoyed it. There is a different kind of human creature that roams the suburban nightscape. You can’t understand them without living amongst them during their peak hours.

The shift also had stable and predictable hours and never changed. I reasoned that the job’s hours being at night wouldn’t directly impact my full schedule of classes.

No impact other than the obvious lack of sleep. You know, when you are in your early twenties you can suffer through a lack of sleep if you are motivated. Your body still teams with outrageous amounts of youthful hormones. You possess the energy and stamina to forgo sleep at that age. You can forgo sleep for hours on end until your eyes became blurred with obscured opaque clouds and your limbs became weak and jittery and begged for respite.

I was motivated. I needed the money for rent and food and I needed to graduate and I was going to make it happen one way or another.

The saving grace with this job was that the schedule was a graveyard shift with a weird twist. I would work 7 days consecutively; each shift was ten hours. Then I would have 7 days consecutively off. Then repeat. Endlessly. The shift ran from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. with two fifteen minute breaks and a half an hour lunch in the middle of the shift. All in all I was at the store for 11 hours each of those days.

This schedule was a bit of a gambit to the benefit of the company that ran the store. While the shift paid more than the usual day shift, the hours were scheduled in such a manner that it managed to avoid the regulatory requirement to pay time and a half for any hours of overtime over 40 hours within a seven day retail week.

Normally a shift that ran ten hours a night for 7 days straight would seem to warrant 30 hours of overtime at 1.5 your 40 hour rate.

Some things never change, and grifting by businessmen is one of these things. This company found a loophole to avoid paying the overtime rate. This company reasoned that if they simply had you come in for the first night of your shift on a Thursday; you would work in two entirely different retail weeks were you to work seBen days in a row for ten hours a day. They reasoned that as long as they didn’t schedule you for more than 40 hours in a given retail week, it did not run afoul of regulations that would have demanded overtime pay as the regulation didn’t explicitly forbid working seven days in a row, or even 70 hours in a row. The regulations, they reasoned, merely and specifically forbid you to work 70 hours in a row within a retail week without overtime rates applied.

As such they believed if you started a shift on a Thursday and you worked Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday—- that would be 40 hours in one retail week.

And glory be, a miracle. For the retail week then started over on Monday. Monday would be day one for the next retail week. So working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would be only 30 hours for that week. For them it was clear. You were not working one 7 day in a row work week. Rather you were working in two different weeks. That you were working 70 hours in 7 days was of no matter. While they had to pay you more to entice you to work in the middle of the night, they wouldn’t have to pay you time and a half and that would save them money.

How…. conveniently economically beneficial for them.

I was a poor college student who simply needed more than The $4k I somehow managed to live off of the prior year. It’s a wonder I was never homeless. I did not wish to be. So I took this job.

Did I feel they were takin advantage? Screwed over? Yeah. Of course. I was being shorted a several dollars of overtime an hour via what was clearly a loophole. Compared to modern loophole exploitative corporate practices it was relatively minor. Of course I would have preferred the money as the demands of the job were the same as if the shift had begun on Monday and run through Sunday.

My body and mind felt it was very much 7 days in a row regardless how anyone cared to define a retail week.

This schedule made for a very bizarre lifestyle during the time I worked at the pharmacy.

On the one hand, I had every other week off. Those who have participated in the general workforce would likely agree that this is a rarity. The majority of people working at this pharmacy, for example, were afforded only 5 paid days off per year for the first ten years of employment. Those five days of paid time off were also the same pool of days you would need to pull from if you were sick. If you were sick five days in a row and used all five days of paid time off , well, no pay for you for any other day off. In fact, you were likely to lose your job if you started taking unpaid days off for work. As such, it was rare for anyone to use their paid time off being sick.

There were a surprising number of day time clerks at this location that had worked at this same location for 7 or 8 years surviving on 5 days off each year. In fact most of them had been there for at least five. After ten years they would qualify for 1o days of time off. They were paid minimum wage. Perhaps after ten years they would get a half dollar wage increase. Or maybe, probably, less.

In that regard I felt my position was relatively fantastic as I was paid a couple dollars more for each hour and I had 7 days in a row where I did not have to work.

This meant loads of time to write papers, complete class projects, and study for tests during those weeks I did not have to go to work. My life was relatively normal during those seven days. Provided I was proactive and completed my necessary school related tasks in advance when possible, I could also have a social life during that week. I could afford to go out with the very little bit of extra money that I had available to me. Fortunately I had ins with friends who were in bands and that saved me both money at the door and free beer and on occasion maybe a meal. Because I was adapted to being up all night, I could watch local bands all the time. Those 7 days off were great.

The seven days I was working, in comparison, were an interesting kind of hell.

For one, the graveyard shift was much harder work than the day time shift. The daytime shift mostly stood tediously at the cash register and rang up customers. I too, performed this task. Our customer flow during the graveyard shift would dramatically diminish once the liquor store portion of the store closed, which was at 1 am. At which time began a race to complete a great many other tasks.

The graveyard shift was responsible for everything beyond standing at the cashier. The exceptions to this were that we were forbidden from touching cosmetics and the aisle of assorted greeting cards. These were managed by dedicated daytime staff. Absent those aisles, all of the shelf facing, general cleaning, inventory replenishment, and the management of the stockroom and store room inventory replenishment fell entirely on the graveyard shift. Our graveyard staff consisted of one floor manager and two clerks. With such a lean staff we would finish our tasks in the last moments of our ten hour shift as the sun rose into the sky.

Needless to say, I would be quite tired from a shift. More so as the week progressed.

Then, after my shift, I would proceed to school and attend class. Fortunately Monday, Wednesday and Friday classes completed around noon. My Tuesday and Thursday courses completed after 2 in the afternoon. I have no idea how I survived this schedule and kept my grades as I would then go home and do any critical homework or studying I could not put off until the subsequent week.

If I was lucky I would be able to go directly asleep. If I fell directly to sleep I would be able to get about 5 hours of sleep on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I was unlucky, and had to study or complete an assignment, then I could get as little as three hours of sleep.

And then I would begin the next work day.

All of this aside, what the hell does this have to do with Tom Waits’s Raindog album?

Nothing directly.

Nothing except the people I encountered over the course of that year and a half in which I worked this shift.

I had a seemingly endless flow of interesting and amazing people that would come into the store. They represented all facets of life. They were endlessly variable. They all had their own stories even if they were never shared with me directly. The thing I absolutely loved about working a customer facing retail position was interacting with interesting, atypical, people from all walks of life.

These creatures of the night were the most interesting of people.

Some were regulars. Like the guy with Down Syndrome who worked at a restaurant that served only Buffalo wings and a free appetizer that consisted exclusively of saltine crackers served with a soft cheddar spread. The restaurant was a local student favorite because it also sold cheap beer by the pitcher. The wings were dirt cheap. I think they were something like 20 for $5 and $1 dollar for a pitcher of beer. You and several friends could split the tab and come out full and chill.

I knew where this fellow worked in part because he wore the same shirt that the staff wore at the restaurant and the shirt had the restaurant‘s name emblazoned on it.

I mostly knew where he worked because he smelled entirely of Buffalo wing sauce.

However, that isn’t why I remember him. I remember him because he would come in once a week to get a large box of antidiarrheal medication. I knew that the wings, which he got for free at the end of each shift as a benefit for working at the restaurant, would give him bad diarrhea because he would share this knowledge with me.

I did not question him as to distinction between good and bad diarrhea.

When I suggested that maybe he should, perhaps, consider not eating the wings as they didn’t appear to agree with his constitution so to speak, or to at least go easy on the hot sauce and order them mild, he told me that he would not stop eating the wings and that he preferred them hot.

Some of the regulars were sad stories. The liquor department opened at 6 a.m. and we always had at least 1 or 2 people waiting for it to open. They were expectant, their practices ritualistic and their purchases predictable. They would load up on their usual assortment, rarely venturing into new drinks nor expressing a desire for suggestions that would broaden their pallet.

The old skinny white guy would purchase every single one of our mini bottles of the same cheap brand of whisky. He was also very particular in that insisted that they were all bagged together in our smallest paper bag. Often this was no problem. Though he would purchase every mini bottle we had on the shelf, the shelf was rarely full. As particular as he was about how the bottles were to be bagged, he never insisted on having a certain quantity of these bottles. He would never ask if we had more in stockroom when there were few bottles on the shelf. He would seemingly leave it to the seas of fate and limit his purchase to what was found on the shelf. Some days that would be four. Some days it would be 6. It was as though he were fishing in a pond and sometimes the fish were not biting and perhaps he would obtain two. Once we were stocked out and he left without any. He would never purchase other brands. And he would never size up. I suggested to him once that he would save money doing so. The look returned to me suggested I would be best off keeping my trap shut. He appeared to have made some form of deal with fate regarding himself and alcohol.

On occasion, however, he would strike gold, so to speak, and a full bounty of 8 mini bottles would be on the shelf when he arrived. However, 8 mini bottles did not really fit into our smallest paper bag. No, he would not take plastic. No, I could not place them into our slightly larger bag. No, I could not divy them up between two of the smaller bags. Yes, I would make them fit into his requested bag. I did my best to oblige, the last couple always comfortably peeking out of top of the bag like meerkats scouting for danger.

The woman with missing teeth was otherwise much like a stereo typical grandmother, albeit with the slight cloying smell of daily alcohol consumption and the extreme detox tremors. She would come in every several days to purchase two of our largest bottles of the cheapest vodka we had on sale and also purchase two suitcases of whatever the cheapest beer we had that was on sale. She could barely write the checks she wrote to complete her transaction as her tremors made it almost impossible for her to hold the pen. Even once she managed to hold the pen, her hands remained so shaky during the entire process that her writing was mostly illegible. Her checks always cleared so we were not terribly concerned about the legibility provided we could mostly read the numbers for the valuation of the check so we could correctly balance our register at the end of our shift. Every once in a while I would have to slightly write over her illegible numbers so I could read them later.

Perhaps this was an illegal action on my part when I did this. I was wading into the shallower waters of forgery which is criminal by writing on another persons check. I dismissed this as criminal as my intent was not criminal given my motive. I never changed the numbers on the check. I simply made it clear to me what the numbers were supposed to be so I could balance the register at the end of the shift and to insure the bank could also read the number as it was deposited.

She would complete her transaction without ever making eye contact. Nor did she ever speak to me. She would desperately shuffle out of the store with her cart full of booze as soon as I handed her the receipt.

The middle aged business guy in the cheap suit and tie seemed more together, but he was always nervously chatty in the manner of a teen doing something a bit naughty. He was in the store every couple of days buying a fifth of of the same brand of cheap vodka.

He, like most others, would suddenly cease to reappear. I would never learn if they stopped coming due to sobriety, death, or simply to avoid the embarrassment that I and others at the register had probably figured out at a certain point that they had an addiction problem over the course of their many visits.

The people coming and going from the store were not always tragic. More commonly they were just odd. Interesting freaks would enter the store and behave in atypical manners. They would be uniquely memorable.

One night an older skinny guy with crazy pepper grey hair and a grey suit with a white dress shirt rolls up in a limousine. The limo did not park in the lot. It simply stopped curbside and parked there. The man go out and entered the store. A customer of such a demographic was a rarity in the store.

More odd was that he immediately grabbed a cart. The only people who ever grabbed a cart in this store were women with small children who desperately hoped that placing them into a cart would provision them some form of limited control over their physicality. Perhaps they hoped it would make it less likely that the children would escape from their grasp and run feral throughout the aisles in the manner of barbarians invading a waining republic; frightening the denizens they encountered with ferocity and unreasoned behaviors.

Most people refused to use a cart. Perhaps the few items they intended to purchase were unwieldy, they may be forced to use a hand basket to assist them. What if they wished to purchase 3 discounted 2 liter bottles of soda in addition to the medication needs that prompted them through our doors? Such instances as that could be a difficult challenge and they may resort to using a hand basket.

Most people refused these assistive options and simply carried their items, regardless of quantity, with bare hands and arms; proudly demonstrating that they did not require any form of transportive assistance to ferry their transactional goods to the cash register.

Initially we didn’t think much about this man beyond this: He’s a dude in a suit in our store after midnight, he has limo parked on the curb and he uses a cart. He is a weirdo.

Though odd in this instance, there is nothing innately criminal about being a weirdo. I, at times could be accused of such. Though I do not wear a suit. Or use a lemon. I am also not a criminal.

Regardless, we felt it less likely that this guy in the suit with the limo would steal from our store. Traffic was low that night, making it more difficult for thieves to secretly loot the store. Aside from the three of us working in the store, he was frequently the sole customer in the store with us during that night. He was, therefore easy to monitor.

It isn’t so much that we felt it impossible that a white guy in a suit with a limo wouldn’t shoplift. Anyone could shoplift. We assumed everyone was suspect of such behavior if for no other reason than if they had a body they could theoretically engage in criminal behavior.

A white guy in a suit and a limo on the curb stood out. His atypical behavior drew our attention towards his direction more and left us thinking “I wonder what the hell his story is? What is his deal?” On balance, a suit and a limo on the curb is a poor choice of attire and get away vehicle if one was wishing to appear innocuous so as to attempt to grab and dash a box of cream filled heavily processed chocolate flavored long shelf life baked goods.

Our experience suggested that the people we most had to watch out for were the people who did not stand out. Random people who blended who wore innocuous attire as though it were a sort of suburban camoflauge. These were not the people you forget. You never noticed them in the first place even as they walked through your line of site as they walked into the store. McPeople. These were the people that would likely take five finger discounts of over the counter medications as they watched you watch everyone else except them.

An hour goes by and I notice the man is still in aisle two of our eight or so store length aisles. It appears he intends to visit every single aisle as he slowly pushes the cart onwards. It appears he is going to take his time. This is unusual. Very unusual. Men never engage in this behavior in our store. Women very rarely. Virtually no one walked the entire store shopping as though they were engaged in high end retail therapy.

Most customer trips through our store were short and quick. Even a woman attempting to heard three young children running willy nilly throughout the store; who was forced to make several impromptu journeys up and down several aisles desperately looking for her children in a panic; who desperately resorted to using junk food and juice boxes as bribes to entice them into quasi obedience; would nonetheless complete the disposable diaper crawl that initially brought her into the store and do such in less than twenty minutes. The average visit for a customer was less than ten minutes. Those waiting for prescription medications may be in the store longer than 30 minutes depending on the number of sick people in the store at the moment. Even then, they wished they did not have to be there and they cursed their luck that everyone requiring a prescription had all shared the same misfortune of arriving at the pharmacy at the same general time.

Few people wish to hang out in a pharmacy. Most people come in specifically to purchase a single item and then leave. They were sick and did not want to be there, but had little choice if they were to treat what ailed them. Those who were healthy would likely have purchased that item elsewhere were any other place open as few stores operated 24x7 in those days. A pharmacy at night is a temporary and quick visit in which you are focused at the task at hand.

The plan for most every customer was the same and most resembled a military operation. Enter the store. Expeditiously retrieve the item sought. Perhaps they would incur an inadvertent monetary causality from the buy 2 get one free promotional counter insurgency when they came across that one candy with esoteric flavorings that was rarely found at the local grocery store. Still, be quick and responsive and minimize further such casualties through continued focus on the mission at hand and do such with haste. Complete the transaction after establishing a beach head at the register. Do not get distracted by the hostile agents of live Mexican jumping beans that were placed at register waiting for your final assault. Purchase the item. And those damn candies. Exit the building. Better yet, flee the building lest you find the jumping beans have infiltrated your bagged items.

This man’s behavior was of a different nature. He was an elephant trudging through the savana during wartime. He slowly lumbered each and every aisle, foraging a diet rich in variety. He did so with a grocery cart and he was strange, atypical, uncommon at an expanding rate.

So we choose to keep an even closer eye on him.

Eventually, he asks if he can use our restroom. That required us to give him a key to the restroom. We did not have to permit customers use of our restroom. Technically we could forbid anyone from using the restroom for no reason whatsoever. Forbidding a customer access, though, was a bit of a dick move if the person really had to go. Unfortunately, some people would use the bathroom to support nefarious behaviors, many of them criminal in nature. That could create a mess as well as problems. It was always a judgement call for us. We probably made as many bad judgements as we did good.

If you looked very ill, a commonality in a pharmacy, we would probably give you the key if for no other reason than no one in the staff wished to clean up biological fluids that originated from a customer should they be forced to resort to vacating these fluids onto the storeroom floor. However, if you behaved outwardly suspicious or simply presented an aggressive entitled vibe, we would say no and encourage you to attempt to use the restroom at the 24x7 restaurant across the parking lot.

This man was strange, but not so strange that we felt we should say no to his request. So we gave him a key and hoped for the best. We do tell him that he cannot take the cart into the bathroom.

After 30 minutes we have not seen him exit the bathroom. We realize we no longer see him in any of our aisles and he has not returned the key. The other clerk is sent to investigate and see if he is still in the bathroom.

He is. His pants are off and he is doing what appears some spot washing on his pants using the sink. He isn’t behaving in a manner that is perverted or indecent. He is being as respectful as one can be in a bathroom of a pharmacy with his pants off. He still has his underwear on, to support the notion that he is not engaged in perversions. He is being weird in that it is not typical for a customer to stand at our bathroom sink with their pants off. The other clerk asks him if he is ok, and he says “Sure.” He carries on with his spot washing appearing to be in no hurry one way or the other.

The clerk reports this back to us and we discuss the situation as a team of three employees. It is weird and strange behavior, however it is not obviously problematic. It’s a pain that we must watch him. We are busy. We bitch about how it is impeding our ability to do our jobs efficiently as we all have to take turns keeping tabs on this odd person. We all agree that had he been engaged in some form of perverted bathroom behavior we would have called the cops without hesitation. We actually wish this were the case as it would eliminate what is becoming a huge distraction that we wish would disappear. Direct observations suggests that the man appears to be fastidiously addressing something that required the removal of his pants and taking a long to time to shop in our store. He is in a suit. He likely has certain standards he wishes to maintain and money to burn and nothing to do this night other than wander through the store slowly shopping for whatever strikes his fancy. This is plausible. None of which are criminal behaviors that warrant law enforcement.

Worse situation have occurred in the bathroom. The other clerk shares a story about a huge muscular dude destroying the bathroom in a fit of roid rage after an apparent explosive bout of diarrhea. This old dude not wearing pants, was in comparison deemed benign and we collectively decide to just continue to monitor him indirectly and occasionally directly just so he understands that we are watching him. We hope that this intimidates him in such a manner that he readily infers that he best not try anything more weird. If we are lucky perhaps he will find our behavior passive aggressively hostile and choose to wrap up his shopping trip post haste and go along his merry way.

Besides, what would we tell the cops were we to ask them to come in and assist us? “Officer, there is a man in our bathroom with his pants off. He is spot washing them in our sink. He arrived in a limo and he uses a grocery cart. This is weird. We have other duties we must attend to and he is hindering our progress. Please address!”? What would they say? Likely they’d just ask us questions like “Well, does he have his dick in his hands?” To which we would say “No, he has his underwear on.” And then we would be informed that this is not considered a crime, and that perhaps we ought not have ever let him use the bathroom in the first place. Perhaps they would add “Please call us back if he exits the bathroom without his pants on as that could be considered indecent and we could then assist you in removing this gentleman from your store. Have a nice day!”

He eventually does come out of the bathroom, with pants back on, and continues to shop with his cart. The limousine, now a couple of hours later, is still parked curbside waiting for him to finish. We continue to monitor him indirectly and directly. We see no suggestion that he is engaged in anything criminal. He continues wandering slowly through the store, pushing his gradually filling cart in his unusual non criminal behavior manner. There is no rhyme or reason as to what he is placing into the cart. He obtains seemingly random things like a plush toy; a large broom and dust pan; a variety of cards that express various sympathies and happy birthdays; some cheap plastic clothes hangers; some fruit punch drink mix; a loaf of white bread; assorted vitamins; fiber supplements; the list growing with each aisle he exits.

Shortly after 6 a.m. the sun begins to rise and still he wanders the store shopping even as we are wrapping up tasks despite our continual observations and a new day in retail begins. His cart is now full of random items and in danger of overflowing onto the floor. My largest fear becomes him suddenly leaving the store without purchasing anything. It is a fear because if he does so he will be leaving the now full cart of random stuff abandoned on the storeroom floor. This would suck because someone, me, would have to return all of the items in the cart back onto the shelves in a neat and orderly manner. And that is a problem because the cart is now full of items from across the entirety of the store. The store also becomes busier once sunrise occurs and I can rarely leave the register. I also have an exam that I need to take in my first class in the a.m. and I don’t need this huge unplanned task dumped onto me, even if it means I could acquire 30 whole minutes of overtime at time and a half.

Thankfully, he does not do this to me. Eventually he wanders up the register with the full cart. I ring up his items and bag a couple hundred dollars of his newly acquired random possessions. He is finally predictable in that he pays by credit card. He says nothing during this entire time and doesn’t respond to my attempts at small talk and cordials. I was desperate to have any other information about him to explain why he chose to spend the darkest hours of the night entirely within the confounds of our business. I want to ask if he his attempt to spot wash his pants our restroom was a success. I don't. I do note that his pants appear to be unblemished.

He places the bags back into the cart as I hand them to him. I give him his receipt and he pushes the cart out doors to the still curbside limo that now parks under the morning sun. The driver gets out and places the bagged items from the cart into limousine’s trunk as the pepper grey haired guy in the suit gets into the limo. After the driver closes the trunk, he returns to the driver’s seat and they drive away never to be seen by me again.

There were plenty of physically gross customers during my time there. I don’t judge them as they were sick and I find most people are not trying to be intentionally gross. I confess that I did not love engaging in financial transactions with sick people because they were clearly contagious with some illness that required them to come into the store and find medications that would alleviate or resolve their medical issue.

I hate getting sick. I hate feeling sick. Who has the time to be sick? I didn’t like having the odds of me being sick rise with every financial transaction that came across the cash register. My employment on the retail floor coincided with the years when folks predominantly paid for goods using raw cash. Credit cards were deemed more of a luxury and used infrequently. Digital cashless transactions did not yet exist.

The only thing more disgusting than physical money is the human mouth. Physical money is filthy. Physical money is disgusting. Back then most financial transactions were carried out by exchanging unwashed cash money. This filthy disgusting unwashed cash money was exchanged from filthy unwashed hand to filthy unwashed hand. Children would inexplicably taste the cash, particularly coins, as though it were candy. People with a wad of cash, always overwhelmingly consisting of many single dollars as though their occupation was that of a stripper, would lick their fingers and then touch each bill counting them one by one; periodically they would remoisten their fingers so as to further count out their wad off dollar bills. People would use restrooms and then unwashed, hand you their money with their nasty filthy hands. Since many of the people in the pharmacy came in explicitly because they were sick, they would take their sick unwashed hands and grab their filthy unwashed cash and present it to you to complete most transactions. I would often be handed an assortment of cash entirely wadded up by the customer. In order to count the cash and to be able to physically place it into the till I would have to use my now also filthy hands to smooth out and sort the dirty money into flat piles. Doing so insured my entire hand would be fully exposed to every invisible germ that called the bills in question home.

In short, cash money is disgusting beyond the greed that it also spreads.

One guy came up to my register wishing to purchase over the counter medication that suggested he had some form of very bad flu. His appearance confirms that he was genuinely sick. He looked like shit. He had rheumy eyes and a saggy hang dog expression. He also had a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth as I could both smell it and observe it as his mouth was partly opened as every seemingly heroic breath he exhaled blew into my face. He was horribly congested with snot running out of his nose. He was not doing well.

I wanted to run. Unfortunately duty called. He probably didn’t want to be there either. And I am sure he didn’t want to feel as bad as he looked. I wondered why he could not refrain from chewing his tobacco given he could barely breath.

He then coughed. Spit and phlegm specked with tobacco flying out of his mouth, an action that I did not appreciate as it landed onto me. He followed this up by coughing substantial phlegm and chewing tobacco onto the 5 dollar bill that he then presented to me to purchase his medication.

At least it wasn’t feces. That would be the mother of the toddler who was squatting in the aisle with the toys.

Neither apologized. They simply looked at me expectantly when it came time to complete their transaction.

Sometimes it was my coworkers who would do weird atypical things. These things seemed to involve sexual matters that I was thankfully not privy to witness. One coworker went out to his truck during his lunch break and had sex with his girlfriend in the bed of his pick up. He then fell asleep and failed to return to his shift when his break ended. He explained all of his to the floor manager. He was fired for dereliction of duty. He wasn’t pulling his weight prior to this, was late to work, and it was an easy way to get rid of him.

Another coworker, a small tiny fellow, went out for his lunch break with his boyfriend, a much larger rotund and towering fellow. He returned with what appeared to be strangulation marks on his neck. He didn’t seem obviously bothered or distressed in any other manner, and I gather whatever encounter they had was consensual. Though I wondered if maybe he should fear for his safety a bit consensual or not.

The busiest night of my tenure at this pharmacy was Christmas Eve. By 1o p.m. we became the only local retail store open for business and as such became ground zero for people desperate to save their Christmas with last minute purchases. I did not have a chance to leave the cash register the entire evening and I rang up a line of people from the start of my shift until just shortly before it ended at 7 a.m. on Christmas Day. Simultaneously the other clerk ran his register with a similarly full line of people; something we did on no other night.

It was a madhouse of frenzy with more customers walking through our door than during busy daytime hours. Dads tasked to make last minute purchases for critical Christmas saving batteries. Siblings who forgot to buy something for the sunrise breakfast at their sister’s house. Frantic moms who forgot to purchase something for a stocking for that one kid they always forgot. An aunt who forgot to purchase something for their nephew that they didn’t know was coming to town. Random festive people who want Christmas candy and are loving the spirit of Christmas Eve. Lots of people who needed booze to deal with the in-laws before the liquor portion of the store closed at 1 a.m. and remained closed through the Holiday.

An odd peace took place in the store after the sun rose near the end of the shift and the light poured through the entrance doors. The crowd entirely evaporated and absent the three of us working the shift and the pharmacist in the back, the store was at rest. The store was also in complete disarray and looked entirely ransacked. It was the only night we were relieved of our task to clean up the store. I was going to spend the entire day in bed asleep as everyone else was out of town. I was grateful for the opportunity to rest uninteruptedly. Even better, it was the last night of my seven day shift, so I was starting seven easy days off with no school. A true vacation from both work and school.

On at least one occasion I was the freak. I remember struggling to get through a shift one night when I had a horrible bout of digestive poisoning. Who knows if it was from something I ate or one of the customers? I refused to stay home as “what if I later needed the paid time off for something more urgent?” We were also implicitly guilted and discouraged from doing this as “There is no one to back fill you and you will cause two people to do the work of three. Are you sure you want to inconvienence us with your illness? It‘s not like you are really that sick as you are not in the hospital.”

Though I felt like I was dying, I also felt that I could technically complete the shift as I wasn’t really dying. I felt like completing the shift was just within the realm of what I considered possible given my then current condition.

Nothing ventured. Nothing survived.

I kept my expectations and plan simple. I would drag myself through the night doing the bare minimum of my job and as long as I didn’t throw up again I would make it through the ten hour shift, if but barely. I would then ditch class that next day as I didn’t have a test or paper due. Then, if I was lucky, after a full day of rest and sleep, my digestive system would cleanse and reset itself from whatever had toxified it. I would then return, woozy yet victorious, to work the next night’s shift. Of course.

I left all other aspects of my behavior to follow whatever whims I felt like expressing at the moment. I chose to indulge my worst introverted tendencies by being a subtly condescending prick to everyone so as to discourage people from engaging with me directly. I would utter passive aggressive phrases such as “Is that all?” and say them in a manner that strongly hinted that it had better be so. I excluded no one. If people looked at me odd, I’d say without apology “I am feeling really sick. You should stay away from me.” People would generally heed the advice and move along with urgency.

Even my coworkers were not immune. They put up with it knowing it was better to let me be a prick that was sick than to send me home and try to figure out how to run the store with just the two of them. Better for them was to let me suffer in silence while doing my tasks so they would not have to do so for me.

I confess that I would have taken the same approach were I in their shoes.

Fortunately, I had the easier duties for the shift that night. Each of us two floor clerks alternated each night between managing the front half and back half of the store. It was the Christmas holiday season, the busiest season of the retail calendar, and we were always running hot with the inventory that was necessary to restock the rapidly depleting shelves. This meant the stockroom area of the store was entirely overflowing with goods. The inventory that arrived into the stockroom during the day would have to be brought out to the storeroom shelves that were in the contradictory states of empty and full disarray.

The entire shift for the person managing the back end of the store would be a lengthy dungeon crawl journey up and down ladders in the dark stockroom while engaging in perilous foot acrobatics. Summiting the highest shelves in the stockroom while hoisting large cases of toilet paper over head was required. Once the summit was attained you would then perilously balance your feet onto the six inch ledge that was your footing 10 or so feet above the storeroom floor. Then you would somehow carefully hoist the case of toilet paper overhead as though it were a victory flag, and desperately hope everything went well and the box would magically slot into the space in which it could, hopefully, just barely fit.

While up there the clerk would then pull a similarly sized box of paper towel that was on promotion. We were supposed to carry those boxes down the ladder as tossing them onto the storeroom floor at such heights risked damaging the packaging and that required the product to be sold at discount. And that was a bad thing. And that was a no-no because it harmed profit margin. I confess to doing this. We all did this as long as the General Manager wasn’t around. Most of us didn’t have health insurance and we had already risked enough trying to get the toilet paper onto the shelf. A ten foot fall onto the concrete floor was probably going to create a medical situation we could not afford to pay. Worse, were we injured we would then lose our job as we would be unable to work. Fortunately, the General Manager was rarely around the store during the graveyard shift. Provided you dropped the box so it landed flat onto the floor, no one was the wiser. If you fucked it up, it may not be very noticeable anyways and if management did notice it then “Huh! I have no idea how that happened. It must have been someone else who damaged it.” (My time in this job was blessedly before the years of constant camera surveillance).

Afterwards, the back of store clerk would move the promotional tea bottles out of the way. Our store was overly obsessed with selling a certain brand of tea that was all the rage at the time and this tea was overtaking the stockroom as its popularity had begun to diminish. The clerk working the back would hope to restock as many as possible onto the storeroom floor as they would then need to move other inventory items temporarily into the same stockroom location where the teas were located. It was a live action puzzle game.

Somehow the clerk would need to complete these tasks in a timely enough manner to permit a return to the storeroom floor so as to clean and tidy the back half of the store before the shift ended.

Given all of this , the back half of the store, particularly during the Holiday time of year, was a much more physically demanding shift than the front of store shift.

Thankfully, small mercies, I was on the front of store duty that night. My duties were limited to the running the cash register and tidying up the front of the store. It was a pittance of good fortune as I felt like vomiting the entire shift. I was visibly sweaty, sea sick nauseous, had a general look of unpleasantness, and exhibited unpleasant manners. I was non responsive to the joyful tidings of Holiday cheer. I was sour to customers. I would look blandly back with emptiness and misery. Customers would notice this and uncomfortably conclude transactions and hurry away from me. People would suggest I should be home in bed and I would thank them sardonically for sharing their opinion.

I did do my job.

I did occasionally bond with a few customers who looked as sick as I felt and shared my dark humor.

“You look like crap!”

“I feel like crap! At least I look better than you!”

“I hope you die!”

“I hope to die! I would feel better.”

I sucked it up. I did so even when the shift manager unceremoniously rolled a flat of stuffed Holiday bears up to the front of the store, handed me a few boxes of large paper clips and pointed at a fishing line that was strung up high near the ceiling and said “Attach these paper clips to each bear and hang these bears from that fishing line.” To accomplish this I had to climb up a 15 foot ladder carrying a handful of bears each trip up the ladder. Since I was the head cashier for the night, I would have to scurry sickly down the ladder and back to the cash register each and every time a customer walked through the door. Then, after completing the transaction, I would scurry sickly back and climb once again up the ladder. Often I would get barely up the ladder with an armful of bears only to have to immediately retreat from the ladder as yet another ill timed customer meandered through our doors. The unplanned additional physicality was a dagger to my food poison ridden brain.

At some point during these forays up the ladder my illness peaked. On one trip I was of mind that I must quickly run to the bathroom and puke my guts out. That would be bad. The other two members of the team were in the stockroom and were I to leave my post, the entirety of the store would be vacant to whomever roamed in. Technically there was pharmacist on duty each night. He was always the same of two pharmacists that rotated across the graveyard shift. They were nice enough, but they felt themselves above the rest of the store given they were formally and fully educated. They made it clear that they were doctors and not retail store riff raff like myself. As such they would never do anything that required they leave the pharmacy window proper. Provided criminals didn’t try to force themselves into their domain, it was of no concern to them what happened to the rest of the store. Were a customer to attempt to force themselves into their area, they would push a button that would rapidly close the metal shutters and safely barricade themselves from the imminent dangers of the would be criminal. They would then call the cops and wait it out. Us riff raff working the remainder of the store of course, were left to fend for ourselves.

High up on the ladder with my cadre of bears I begin to heavily doubt that I can make it to the restroom. Could I even get to the key without puking my guts out? “No mind,” I think as another customer comes through door and I force myself down the ladder, bears still in hand, in a haste to get back to the cash register. I think to myself “Try to vomit away from the customer” and recall there is trash receptacle beneath the cash register that I should attempt to use should the need arise.

I don’t vomit.

After concluding another financial transaction, I once again ascend the ladder with the same armful of stuffed bears. I notice my head now pounds with a headache ache and joins the chorus of my other symptoms. I’m likely overly dehydrated as I have not had any liquid for many hours given I could not keep anything, even life sustaining water, down without vomiting it back up. Though I still feel extremely nauseous, I feel a bit less like throwing up and I accept this as a slight improvement regardless of the newly arrived head pounding ache.

The song Miracles by Jefferson Starship plays through the store’s sound system, and my mind shifts from running to the bathroom to quitting outright by just crawling out the door on my hands and knees and and slithering into my truck. I am now one of these creatures of the night. I am now capable of behaving with strange and odd manners. Were I to give into the base urges, I could head home to my apartment. This appeals to me in the same way desert mirage would appeal to a man dying of thirst under a cloudless desert in the hottest part of the day. Home, where I could lie in bed under too many covers in my cool dark bedroom and be closed off from the world like a reptile retreating under a rock ledge for the day. I feel miserable, woozy and delirious, but this idea sounds glorious to me. No more bright florescent lights. No more perilous journeys up ladders. No more interactions with humans. No more Marty Balin singing verses insinuating oral sex.

Maybe insteadbI will just fall asleep in the bed of my pickup and let myself be unceremoniously fired for leaving my post and abandoning the army of bears on the storeroom floor.

Those fucking bears. All garbage. All waiting for some sucker to part with their money.

It wasn’t that the bears didn’t look aesthetically cute or fail to be a reasonable approximation of a stuffed bear. They did. They were also supposed to talk. And their price reflected such. However, we discovered soon after they arrived that many were mute and non talkative. Customers would come up to us and say “What is wrong with this bear? It does not talk as the sign says it should.” They would expect a remedy so they could justify purchasing the Holiday item they did not know existed prior to entering our store that very day.

It turns out that mute talking bears sell poorly.

Upon further analysis, we discovered that the bears were indeed faulty. The springs that held the batteries in place were quite strong. The cheap frail plastic holding the battery compartment together was not strong in any manner whatsoever. Blammo, lots of broken bears with shattered battery compartments as though their heart had exploded in their chest cavity and rendered them dead.

There was roughly a 50:50 chance a given bear would have a cracked battery compartment that was no longer capable of holding its battery in place. And it was just a matter of time before it was a 100:0 chance they would fail given the sorry cheap plastic material they used for the battery compartment. Perhaps they would survive the store. They certainly would not survive the children who were likely going to be the recipients of these stuffed creatures. Hugging, throwing, kicking, dropping, and using them to beat their sibling were all likely to cause the battery compartment to explode into pieces. The batteries simply fell out once the compartment shattered and the chatty bear, once capable of phrases like ”Merry Christmas!” or “I love you” was rendered mute and thereby in violation of the declaration that it was “A talking bear!”

They were junk.

We had several hundreds of these bears. And apparently selling these bears at full price was critical to preserving the bottom line of our Holiday season.

Did we send these faulty items back to whence they came? No, that would mean no item to sell. That would, gasp, mean missing the financial targets for the store’s Holiday season. The Holiday season was by far the season in which the most money was to be made. Even worse, these were Holiday bears there being sold in the Holiday season so there was no logistical time available for a proper fix. We could not return these bears to their birth nation in Asia and have them mended before the Holiday season ended. In a scant few weeks these bears would be obsolete as the Holidays came and receded into the past. This would occur on Christmas day when all Holiday items were flushed from the store and immediately replaced by Valentine’s day promotional items. Not selling these bears before Christmas day would be opportunity lost. Unacceptable. At least so thought the General Manager.

When hinted that no one would purchase them if they did not talk, the General Manager was adamant we fix the problem in house. He felt the best thing to do was hide this problem from the customers and sell these bears at full price as he simply would not comprehend selling these bears below full price. He demanded we somehow fix the bears and sell the bears damaged or not.

His idea? Tape the mess back together and call it good. Mask the issue from the unsuspecting customer. He didn’t even let us use strong packing tape. Or even use the sort of good masking tape which I felt was more symbolically approriate. He made us use the shitty transparent tape that was intended to be used exclusively on paper. This too was a waste as the scotch tape was weaker than the spring. At best you could just sloppily wrap hoards of tape around the battery and hope the battery stayed in place. This bad idea of a solution failed as successfully as the original plastic case. The springs always seemed to always deny the tape. Worse yet, anyone that parted he velcro to obtain access to the innards of the bear seeking the battery compartment would be immediately privy to our dirty deed when they suddenly encountered wads of cheap scotch tape, a mess of cracked plastic and batteries that seemed oddly misplaced. It would remove any notion of plausible deniability that the store was unaware of the defect. Merry Christmas all around!

I thought the idea was an entirely stupid one. A internal polemic occurred within me as I now had to confront an ethical quandary. I had to figure out how to adhere to my nonnegotiable personal ethics while also following orders that begged me to subjugate those very ethics under the orders of the store‘s General Manager in order to keep my income.

It felt entirely wrong to me that we would knowingly attempt to hoodwink unsuspecting customers to purchase these shitty products. Even turning a blind eye felt deceitful to me. What can I say? I have beliefs. I have standards. I have morals and scruples. I have firm notions of what I consider right and what I consider wrong and do not wish these breached. This command that I engage in this behavior felt simply and unequivocally wrong. I may lack perfection in many regards. I try. I try my best to meet my own, carefully considered, learned, standards. This request by the General Manager felt wrong, wrong, wrong, and was an affront to my sensibilities. I felt insulted that he would assume his employees ought to go along with this shenanigan.

The General Manager was a businessman and to the businessman profit reigns supreme. Ethics? Morals? What are these but obstacles to greater profit margins?

I understood that I would be shit canned if I said anything that suggested I was in opposition to this action and refused his command to tape up hundreds of bears. He made his ability to relieve me of my job clear the one time I had fucked up my cash register count and was somehow short $20. He implied that perhaps I stole the $20 and reminded me that this was a fireable offense. I have no idea why he felt his assertion remotely valid given I had consistently exhibited good employee behavior up to that point. I felt it insulting that he would think I was dimwitted enough to risk the hundreds of dollars I earned from a week of employment for a one time payout of $20. I may not be into maximizing profit margins , but I regardless of ethics, but I can do the basic math that weekly wage>$20.

I also knew there was no way I could prove that I didn’t steal the $20.

He didn’t fire me because he agreed I maintained a mostly perfect till and because I was dead honest about it being a genuine mistake so I delivered genuine unwavering conviction as I defended myself defense probably gave him pause. Plus he knew he also couldn’t prove his theory correct. I also suspect that he didn’t want to fire me because I was right, I had demonstrated consistent good employee behavior during my tenure. I had a 100% attendance rate for a shift that was inherently difficult to fill with reliable workers. I was reliable night after night. Week on after week off I came in on time as excpected. Many people didn’t and would inevitably became too unreliable to keep on the shift. Others proved reliable for a couple of weeks only to they find they could not hack subjugating the diurnal sleep habits that are ingrained within our species. A day would eventually come where they ceased to return and management’s search for new blood would begin again.

The implication that perhaps I had stolen the money did egregiously insult me and piss me off. I guess I could have chosen to be flattered that he didn’t just think I was stupid and didn’t know how to count out change.

I couldn’t afford to let the indignity of the insinuation that I had perhaps stolen the money, cost me my job. I needed the job because I needed money for rent and food. I knew I didn’t need a random $20 more than the job and of course I knew I hadn’t stolen it. I knew I had just made an honest mistake. So I kept my mouth shut and kept on working despite the insinuation, knowing I’d have to triple down on being perfect at the cash register.

When we take a job, we take them knowing we are always viewed expendable by management. The higher the management, the more expendable and irrelevant they view everyone beneath them on the organization chart. This appears to have worsened over the years. You not human. You are a human resource. Nothing more.

I became aware of this in my earliest years in the work force. As such I knew there was a limit and I knew pushing back on the General Manager’s request to fix the bears and implying anything regarding whether or not it was ethically right to cover up the obvious quality in the shitty bear was over that limit.

One may think it ironic that he would question my ethics when he insinuated I stole cash; whereas he did not question his ethics about hiding obvious defects in products he intended to sell. It wasn’t ever about ethics with him. It was about money and risk. There are no ethics in business. Business is about making money And every transaction involves calculated risk. If he knew I was stealing from the store, I was a simple cost liability and would have to be terminated. He wasn’t certain, he had to make a calculated risk and weigh my usefulness against my liability. He concluded it less likely I had stolen given my adamant defense and my reliable behavior. He determined this outweighed the risk that I had stolen from the store. He chose for the time to keep me around.

It wasn’t a fair position for me. That was not relevant. Business is rarely fair. Someone is always getting screwed. Business is the practice of grifting money out of others. As another manager at another job told me “It’s nothing personal.”

Except it always is personal. At least to me. The business ledger in my head tacks those who cross my ethical boundaries. Doing so permits me to assess the liability you pose to my margins. I refuse to buy into the nonsense that it isn’t personal. Every transaction involves business is a business transaction. I am not a resource. I am my business. I am not your resource. It is very personal for me whenever I am asked to violate my ethics. It is deeply personal for me when I am asked to behave against my ethics simply for money. Consenting to such actions is to make a deal with the devil. I don’t make deals with the devil. I don’t compromise my ethics. No intentionally. I am not perfect, but I make amends when I fuck up. Jobs come. Jobs go. You have to live with yourself throughout it all. Life is hard enough without the guilt and being placed into increasingly compromised circumstances that permit others to lord it over you and enslave yourself to others. When you do so you create your own personal prison if not the foundations for an eternity spent in hell.

I rarely felt most of my customers were attempting to be unethical towards me. Well, maybe whomever did scarf the $20 bill and shorted my register that one night. That was one customer out of the thousands I registered during my time in that store. If it even was a customer. My customers may have been sick, alcoholic, or simply a pain in the ass. They were not perfect. Neither was I. None of us expected otherwise. Like them, I was mostly trying to survive the day, to not be homeless, to have food to eat. We all had challenges. We were doing our best to over come them.

I have no problem applying the rules applied to me bilaterally. If people want to get funny with me, then I view this as a tacit invitation to get funny with them in return. I am obligated to permit your life, your liberty and your pursuit of your happiness. I am not obligated to buy into your value system, or lack there of, when it seeks to harm others. I’ll do my job, but I will do it in a manner that I see fit. And I will do it in a manner that will not subjugate my ethics in favor of some business grift.

In this instance I made a secret agreement with myself. It would be the first of many such personal agreements I would make with myself throughout my eventual corporate career. The agreement I made with myself was that I would not impugn my ethics. I would personally and directly inform every customer that brought one of those shitty products through my register the deficient quality of those products. Further, I would open up the battery compartment and show them the frail scotch tape and say ”Just so you know, these break all the time and many of them are taped up like this. These are crap. I personally would spend my money on something else, elsewhere.”

Most of the customers chose to not buy the product. Most thanked me for this information. Many looked at me as a bit of a benevolent freak for pulling back the veil on our evil little kingdom. I would suspiciously look around to make sure my floor manager wasn’t within hearing range and then share what was hidden beneath the fake fur of the broken Holiday bears. It was as though I were street urchin sharing a shady deal with them on counterfeit watches. Only I was doing it in reverse. ”Don’t buy my watches. They are counterfeit.” The customer would look at me wide eyed and be fascinated with this new dark knowledge I had shared with them. I would then cooly close up the bear’s battery compartment and shrug, leaving them with their decision. I regret that I couldn’t be there 24x7 to inform every customer who sauntered up to the cash register to purchase one of these bears. I am human, imperfect, and incapable of perfect solutions.

I didn’t feel a need to share this personal business agreement with the store’s General Manger. He made it clear that his priorities lay elsewhere and I was not obligated to facilitate them. I don’t consider this a betrayal because at this point he and I were simply playing entirely different games that entailed very different rules. I didn’t need to win his game. I needed to win my game. Going to war with your customers doesn’t demand that I am required to do so as well. Screwing them over on shitty bears is a form of aggression. I’m a peaceful guy, trying to improve the conditions of others around me. I choose to look out for the victims and avoid criminal behavior.

Despite my personal hardships with ladders, bad bears, and food poisoning, I somehow made it through the shift. My plan to recover by ditching class was sufficient and I as able to eat shitty food foraged and bought from the store later that night during my half hour shift that next night. I quit in June and went to work in the desert tracking Rainbow Grasshopers across the Sonoran desert for the at $100 a week for the summer. It was a very different, great, yet short job and I enjoyed that very much.

Still, what the hell does this have to do with Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs album?

It’s the people. It’s the characters. It‘s the multitudes of slices of life; these kindred spirits of overlooked people. The atmosphere is familiar even if it is also dissimilar. Sometimes you find these characters in an album of songs. Sometimes you find them live working in retail during a graveyard shift. I‘ve always been intrigued by us random people. I do not pretend to understand the people who love to watch and spectate the careful curation of celebrity or rich people. I find famous and wealthy people boring and gauche. Most of these these people are replicas based on a theme. They are unoriginal and superficial. They reek of cheap veneer and lack the patina of grit. Their themes may morph fashion over time, but they always, unironically, demand a large degree of shared of sloppy banal conformity. I am disinterested in this.

I prefer the quirky unique people that are found elsewhere. And everywhere. They are more colorful and more innately human in my mind. There is something I find relatable in random people. Sometimes they have very real problems. Many have struggles. Most of the time they are just different. When they struggle I have empathy for them even when I am unable to help them and they are unable to help themselves.

When I first heard “Singapore”, the first track on Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs, it was like walking into this world of familiar colorful characters. I wanted to join these people as they staggered through their world. These types of people who you may have easily encountered reading Bukowski or Acker and are also people right there in our own communities, suburbia included. It was the timing of these influences and seeing that you didn’t need to be in LA or New York City or some exotic place to interact with them. You could be in a random pharmacy in a random Arizona suburb and they would come to you. Maybe you just needed to work the grave yard shift and rather than judge them, be human to them, interact with them as such, and understand there is a whole world of diversity that the daylight hours seem to sweep aside. All you needed to do is be observant so you could actually see them.

Waits taps into a strange world of characters and gives them life. The characters in Rain Dogs were somehow relatable to me and the characters I interacted with as I did my job. My characters were not in the dim shady parts of a city, but were colorful in different manners. Mine were exposed under the bright florescent lights found throughout western strip malls. And they were frequent enough to keep my job interesting and keep me awake and to provide me a lifetime of memories.

I could be dead tired on day 6 of the shift, and there was always character and a story coming into that store in the middle of the night to keep me awake. Maybe it was that girl that hooked up with a member of a band you were familiar with coming in to buy a pregnancy test. You didn’t really know her. Yet you both knew you were acquaintances via an acquaintance. So you both pretend to not know anything about the other because it is 2 a.m. and no one comes into the pharmacy at 2 a.m. looking to celebrate a pregnancy. Not a college coed who enjoyed the party scene.

No, there is only one news that is good news in that case. You silently exchange money for the product, and place the test in a bag with the receipt and thank her for her business as though you were both anonymous to one another and she was buying a Happy Birthday card. You will wonder if the test was positive or negative out of random morbid curiosity and never know the answer.

And then you turn your attention to the next customer who is going to want you to break a twenty dollar bill into 20 singles; a customer you will squabble with as you do not have that many $1 bills in your till. And no, you can’t give him ten dollars in quarters and ten $1 bills instead. You will want to tell him to go fuck himself. You won’t because you have ethical boundaries, believe in civility and are trying to be a good person even in a hostile situation. Plus they’d likely complain to management and it could cost you your rent, your food and your the meager money you permit yourself to use to support your social life.

Rain Dogs encouraged me to absorb rather than reject these characters as though I were a graveyard shift vampire, draining the essence of these nocturnal creatures wandering into the store; thus enabling me to work night after night of ten hour shifts while managing a full course load during the day. I was fascinated into wakefulness and nourished by these colorful interactions.

Later, when I worked in the headquarters of a more substantial corporate organization, I would lament how the colorful characters were replaced by multitudes of banal ladder climbers with none of the flavor or originality or uniqueness of the customers and coworkers I encountered working in this retail pharmacy. To be sure, the white collar folks did some interesting things, as well as many bafflingly stupid things, but they lacked the genuineness of the people I encountered working in this pharmacy. The white collar folks who rose up through the ranks of the corporate ladders were frequently people cosplaying as other people; they were generic versions of someone else’s marketable idea. The people I encountered and people I worked with in the pharmacy didn’t have that luxury or simply did not wish to pretend anything. Many of them were authentically unlike any other people I would encounter anywhere else. They were not trying to be anything in particular. At least not during their moments in the pharmacy. They were just trying to go from hour to hour and day to day. On the day they encountered me at the register, that day just happened to bring them into the pharmacy where I worked during the heart of the night.

I used to say that I would only return to the corporate world if I could work on a retail floor during the deepest and darkest of hours of night with the few scant people that inhabit it. I doubt I could stay awake now, domesticated and aged as I have become over the years. Regardless, I would prefer the patina of these colorful people over the cheap veneer found within corporate offices.

Tom Waits’s Rain Dogs is an idiosyncratic album and covers the grit of the city, ostensibly New York City. I have no idea if the city is supposed to be NYC. That is where I understand it was recorded. I found I could relate the album to my experiences in suburban America. I think the album stretches beyond its original intent. In suburbia we are not so densely packed together, but grit is all over the U.S. of A. We are not an aesthetically pleasing country. We are all strip malls, shopping malls and gauche replicas made from composites and plastic.

Marc Ribot on guitar is featured throughout many of the songs on this album. Keith Richards also plays on this album (“Big Black Mariah”, for example). I have a more difficult time envisioning the album without Marc Ribot’s playing than I do were Keith Richards excluded from it. Ribot has an idiosyncratic style that accentuates Waits’s aesthetic on songs such as “Singapore” and “Clap Hands”. His phrasing supports the general mood and atmosphere of the album and is present without being central to the composition of the songs. That isn’t to say Keith Richards is a slouch. Of course he isn’t. He’s the original definition of cool. Good or bad, there are many more people attempting to mimic Richards than Ribot, and I feel my thoughts on this album would be very different had Ribot’s flavorings been entirely absent.

Tom’s voice is great. It always is. It is variable within and acceptable range. While always familiar, he tends to provide each song its own narrator of sorts. Each narrator has a somewhat different intonation and behavior, making his vocals a bit unique relative to his peers as well as others across the musical spectrum. I highly recommend watching his Big Time live performance video to those wishing to further explore this perspective.

The cover artwork for the album is a photo taken by Anders Petersen and though one of the people looks a bit like Tom Waits in his younger years, the people in the photo are apparently named Rose and Lilly and neither are Tom. Anders Peteresen still creates art. I saw some recently in video form that was supporting a multimedia project developed and produced by Karl Ove Knausgård and Glen Kotche.

Ironically, the music that played through the music system in the store was entirely 70‘s soft rock Classics. Predictably they played zero songs by Tom Waits. He was present nonetheless if only indirectly through my thoughts.