Although I don’t think the time of the year really matters, I think it was in the summer months when I came across this particular character. It was a routine transaction. Customer puts their items on the counter and I scan the barcode of each one individually. Then I take the customers money, count it out, put it in the drawer and make change. It was no different from any other time. With one slight exception.
“How’s it going?” I asked. I didn’t really care. It’s just one of the things you say when you greet a customer. He could be good, he could be miserable, but in 30 seconds he would be gone and it wouldn’t really matter. This guy didn’t have much to say. He just nodded and put his candy bars up on the counter. He never broke eye contact with me once, staring at me the entire time.
“Ok buddy, $6.35” I should’ve known something was up when even as he counted out his seven dollars, he was watching me the whole time, looking away only briefly to pull out his wallet. He grabbed his bag full of sodas and candy and made his way towards his car, still continuing to make eye contact with me as he passed through the double exit doors.
“What the fuck was this guys deal?” I’m thinking to myself. That’s just not the kind of way people normally act. There’s just something strange about this guy. He gets to his car he puts the bag of groceries on the passenger seat and gets in. What a weirdo. I go back to counting the cigarettes.
Then the door reopens. This guy is back. Perhaps he forgot his wallet. Maybe he thinks I shortchanged him. Maybe he’s about to rob me. Maybe it’s something else. Working overnight at a gas station means you always have to be ready, because you never know what these people are going to do.
“Hey, do you want to go out back?” He asks me. I’m not even sure what that is supposed to mean. “Excuse me?” I ask in return, completely confused as to what he wants. “Um I just wondered if you want to go out back.” You can ask the same question as many times as you want, but it doesn’t mean I understand what you are asking. Does this guy want to go smoke with me? Does he want to fight me? What is this guy asking me? I’m not picking up what he’s trying to say. “I don’t think I know what you mean, guy?”
“Yeah I just want to go out back and suck your cock.”
“Get the fuck outta here!” I exclaimed, snapping my fingers and pointing my thumb behind me like Uncle Joey when he told the Tanner family to “Cut. It. Out.” in the television show Full House. My dad used to use the same hand gesture when I was sitting in his recliner and he wanted to sit down. Without saying any words, the hand gesture makes it pretty clear that you want someone to move. “Go! Now! Get the fuck outta here!”
This guy pretty much sprints to his car and drives off in a cloud of tire smoke. My best friend was working the same shift at a different gas station, so I called him to tell him what had just happened. “You’re not going to believe this.” I couldn’t begin to guess how many times we had called each other and started a conversation with that line. Something is always happening to one of us or the other. You’ll read a bunch of our stories in this series, and most of them started with, “you’re not going to believe this.”
“Call the cops.” Is the first thing he said after telling of my recent encounter. What do you mean call the cops? I wouldn’t want some girl to call the police on me after I bombed in coming up with a pickup line. I guess the difference in this situation, is that my pickup lines aren’t usually that straight forward, and most certainly don’t cross the lines of sexual harassment.
What was I going to say when the police arrived? I didn’t get a description, I didn’t get a licence plate. I have pretty much no useful information because I wasn’t really paying attention. Sure, there might be video of the suspect, but it would be several hours before the manager arrived to give them access to the footage. It all just seemed like a waste of time to me.
The only thing that made the call to the police worth it, was when the officer arrived he kicked the door open like he was about to raid the place. He kicked the door open and points at me and yells, “It was a dude! You know how I know it was a dude? Because if it was a chick, the doors would be locked, the lights would be off, and I wouldn’t have gotten the call to come here!” Well, I guess he wasn’t wrong.
