Yesterday I went down to Fort Hoodrat to buy some aloe juice which they have on sale, and which I like because it reminds me of that time that I snuck into the refrigerator as a little brat and drank from the bowl of gelatin that Mom was letting set up.

The tenth of the month is peak food stamp time and this is a food stamp store. Non-express orders are two carts deep, and even though the mamas usually have about $500 on their card, they cannot do math and rely on the cashier to laboriously deduct items from orders that go over, which is most of them. What we call ‘re-shop’ is at plague proportions during the food-stamp cycle. Clerks are actually schedule just to put back ‘what mama couldn’t add up’.

I had two choices, an express lane with one lady and five items, and the other express lane with about 15 items and two lunch orders behind her. I get in line behind the lady with five items.

Her first item rings up for ‘2 for $5’ and she says, “Oh no, the sign said it only two-ninety-nine.”

The clerk said, “Okay, I’ll go check.”

The second-generation Latino man behind me has bananas, a Gatorade and a six pack of Twix candy bars. He breaks open the pack and grabs a bar and starts eating impatiently.

Two minutes later the cashier comes back with the items and says, “The sign says two-ninety nine for one, two-for-five if you get two. They are two-for-five.”

The woman was aghast, “Oh baby, that ain’t right—you gonna up da price on me ‘cause I buyin’ two. Shoot, take them off the order.”

The man behind me nudges me and nods at the cashier, “Can you imagine doing that for a living?”

“I used to.”

“You used to do that?”

“Worked in retail food for thirty-five years—my three months on the register was hell. This kid is just lucky he doesn’t have to call his supervisor for a card swipe. This place is set up for this. In a chain store, we’d be waiting for the bookkeeper to get done selling a stack of lottery tickets so she could come out and authorize the void.”

The two items are now voided and the total is $14 something. The lady swipes her EBT card and it turns out that $5.96 worth of her order is not ‘foodstampable’. The Latino man breaks out another Twix bar and asks, “What is 'foodstampable’?”

“It must be edible and, if it is a service-prepared food—like a deli item, or steamed shrimp—it may not be bought hot, but must be sold out of the cold case.”

He shakes his head as another customer gets in line behind us, the last three having gone over to the other lane. “Man, we should have gotten into that lane.”

“Yeah, but it’s six deep now. If we cut in front it’s our ass.”

He eyes the two four hundred-plus pound women in the express lane with their seventeen year old male children towering in tow, as Mamma leans on the ill-fated shopping cart. “I got you brother.” This dude is like a buck-twenty.

Then, as the woman fails to find her cash bills down in her cavernous bra cup, where I suppose you’d need a team of Nigerian Special Forces Commandos to actually get in and out alive, she turns to us very sweetly, and says “I’m sorry sirs,” pulls out a plastic zip-lock bag from her purse full of change, and dumps it on register belt!

The poor kid running the register regards the heap of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and other coins and coin-like objects, with a thousand yard stare. Mister Twix eyes a gap in the other lane hopefully and the giant woman opposite glares at him and closes the gap. He then grabs another Twix bar and quips, “Shit, I’ll be done lunch by the time I’m done here. You drink that aloe shit for some kind of health reason or something?”

“No, I like the taste.”

“Are you kidding me! My papa drank that shit right out of the root, pulp and all. Give me a Pepsi!”

He then picks up a bottle and starts checking the settled contents at the bottom, “Oh hell no—man I’ll live a short life before I drink this shit. What kind of work you do now since you got away from this,” he said indicating the kid who was sorting the bus tokens and Canadian coins out from the American legal slender.

“I write.”

“You write books—you wrote a book?”

“Yes, I write an article or two a day for my website and am always working on a book project.”

“How many books have you written?”

“Thirty-one, but I’ve only had twenty-four published so far.”

“What kind of books?”

“History, violence, boxing, horror, sci-fi—seven categories all together.”

“You make a lot of money?”

The kid looks up from his pile of quarters—he has the right idea—so I say loud enough for him to hear in case he is an aspiring writer, “I make a few hundred dollars a year—over six-hundred last year.”

“Mister Twix says, “Damn, that’s all,” as the cashier mouths ‘Fuck that,’ and goes to counting out a stack of dimes, while the customer is helpfully sorting the change into denominations.

“No best sellers?” says Mister Twix as he grabs another candy bar and starts to munch.

“Well, my best seller sold about 3,000 copies I think over about 10 years. When it came out, this millionaire knife maker—it was a book on getting stabbed—asked for a free copy from the publisher, and then wrote an article based on it, for which he got paid two-hundred and fifty bucks, which was about the size of my first royalty check. Ten years later, when it goes out of print some Japanese guy who has held on to ten mint copies sells them for two-hundred-and-fifty a piece. Hell I only got ninety-four cents a piece!”

The kid is now discussing a large coin with the lady who insists it is a silver dollar. He has to take it to another cashier to confirm.

Mister Twix is enjoying our conversation, “Fucking Japanese business man homes, what do you expect?”

“I’m no business man, just a writer. I do have an agent though and he’s sayin’ my stuff would sell better as comics.”

The young dude is back, having confirmed the coin is a half dollar, and gives me a look like, ‘Hello pops, nobody reads books any more—of course comics will sell better.’

The coins, now stacked by denomination like a rugrat’s play pirate treasure, the count proper begins. Mister Twix nudges me, “So what about this stabbing book—what the fuck?”

“I interviewed dudes who got stabbed—in prison, by their wife, in fights. I interviewed dudes who stabbed people. I interviewed witnesses. There was this one really badass knife fight between a guy in a Latino gang in Chicago and this guy from an Italian gang, witnessed by the younger brother of the Latino dude.”

Mister Twix says, “The Latino dude won, of course!”

“Yeah, the Italian guy went down with a perforated liver and punctured lung.”

Now on his fifth Twix bar my new friend says, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Make that shit a comic!”

Finally, with a sigh of relief, the woman collects her unspent pennies and her groceries, and is off. I am checked out in a matter of seconds and turn to shake hands with my new friend, who says, “Nice meeting you man—go write some books.”