I think it was after high school, but it’s been so long I couldn’t be sure. That summer, about 20 years ago now, was blurry anyhow. I didn’t sleep much then. I drank malt liquor more often than I should’ve and I was unmoored from the scholastic schedule I’d been tied to for 12 years. So, that summer floats around chronologically. It could’ve been right after high school, but it could’ve been as late as, what, my second year of college? When we get older, our memories become stories and disconnect from the specific periods that once endowed them with meaning.
Probably the most important detail of that summer was that Matt’s baby had been born. I remember that much because, when I wasn’t working, I’d go over to his place on Lansing Ave.. We’d sit on the porch and drink beers and Anna would come out on the porch with baby Autumn, who I don’t remember ever crying. When I lit a cigarette, magnanimously as hell, I’d leave the porch.
It sounds ridiculous now, but not smoking around babies and children was a new idea to most of us at the time. I grew up around cigarette smoke. The consensus was that it was less noxious than a fart. Through clouds of dad’s Winston smoke, we’d yell at each other for farting in the car. Smoke we took for granted. And now, after high school, in this one way, I tried to improve myself beyond what had been available to my parents’ generation. Taking it for granted, of course, that this was a reflection of the superiority of my generation, rather than just the accretion of knowledge over time.
I walked this line between trying to understand adulthood, and indulging in its liberties. I wanted to make my own way in the world, but I also wanted to be out in the world having memorable experiences that gave my days meaning. Matt’s baby was beautiful, but she had no meaning to share with me. I’d wave to her, pretend to be captivated by an innocence I had no way of comprehending, let alone valuing. I had no idea how vast my ignorance was. Of course, I still don’t. It’s like the spreading dark in the evening, running out of the east. Boundless around my well-lit home of feigned understanding.
That summer, I worked third shift at the Admiral gas station. I guess I thought it a good compromise between responsibility and the indulgent carelessness I was constantly in pursuit of. Yeah, I’d have to work, but I’d also be awake all night. Each shift would be something of an adventure. The perfect liminal space for a 19 year-old.
The reality was that the place would be deathly still around three every night (after everyone had gone home from the bars) and I’d drink sickening amounts of burned robusto gas-station coffee to stay awake while listening to the hum of the refrigerators, the chilling white halogen lights, and the distant highway traffic. I’d try to read, but at that hour, it was almost impossible. To read and not put yourself to sleep. So, I’d pace around the store.
It was a big store for a gas station, but the kind that was filled with a lot of nothing. They had stuff like baseball hats that no one ever bought. It was a bit like a dense forest with a very important tree. A very well blazed path led from the door to refrigerators to the counter, the rest was a wilderness.
People bought three things: gas, cigarettes, and, soda, All the shelves with the motor oil, window scrapers, and whatever else was practically furred with dust. The only time I saw someone else enter these wilds, I’m pretty sure he was contemplating robbing me. It was late and he came in and went straight to the back. I don’t know, there was something in his manner that made it obvious he wasn’t looking for anything, and that he was biding his time, pretending to look at stuff. After a couple of minutes, he started to approach the counter with purposeful strides. It was like two am and just the two of us in the big, glowing store, and, just as he was about to reach the counter, someone walked in and he turned and went back to the back of the store.
That happened three or four times before he finally gave up. But, like I said, I can’t trust my memory much from that time. It may have been a pretty brief episode.
There was one other time when people would end up back in the aisles of miscellany. Admiral was the type of gas station—I went on to work in another one later in college—that was deeply discounted and just plain cheap. They sold generic soda (Shasta) and cigarettes (USA Gold) which were cheaper than what sold in, say, the Shell station. The gas would occasionally be a full 20 cents cheaper per gallon at Admiral. Things would be going normally and then, bam, a call would come to lower the prices, and the line of cars would be snaking down the block to save that extra couple of bucks.
Today, in Northern California, where the gas is possible the most expensive in the country, my wife thinks my mania for finding cheap gas funny. But, she didn’t grow up seeing people get hysterical about gas prices. When I see cheap gas without a line around the block, something tightens in me and whispers: “quick, get in there before everyone else finds out!” It’s a call that would be difficult not to heed. I’ve tried to ignore it, but then it badgers me for half the day for passing up good opportunities—not just this one, but others. When I get cheap gas, I affirm that I take action. And I guess it’s important for me to feel this way.
My shift was 10pm-6am, but the place was so ill-managed that they’d call me in to do other shifts on my days off. Taking these shifts was like a way to prove myself. Yes, I was still a kid, and I couldn’t fully appreciate the miracle of a friend’s baby, but at least I knew how to work, and the way to work was to take any work offered. By the end of the summer, my sleep schedule was completely screwed up from doing all that swing, and I didn’t learn a thing from it.
But there was one little thing. One seed. One event that only now seems to make sense. It’s like my own Sirens of Titan story, that Kurt Vonnegut where it turns out the whole point of humanity was just to make one intergalactic delivery. Maybe that’s my lesson. Our lives are just series of deliveries, exchanges to put things into place and into perspective. We try to learn, but we just move things around.
I think I was on the second shift. And to give you a sense of just how garbled my memory is, it was winter—at least it was cold, and people were wearing jackets. It makes no sense, but there it is, a winter memory stuck in the middle of a summer time-frame.
I’m at the counter, late afternoon, selling discount cigarettes and setting up pre-pay gas pumps, when a guy walks in with a vintage Ghostbusters II baseball jacket. It’s black with red and white cuffs and an embroidered Ghostbusters II logo on the right breast. It’s button up with red buttons and a collar. It’s an amazing jacket; who can tell what wormhole it dropped from. The guy wearing it clearly has no idea how cool this jacket is. I can tell ‘cause I’ve gotten used to watching people walk into this gas station and reading their mood, watching them stand in line and interpreting their movements, and this guy, is just standing there, brushing up against those dusty baseball caps in this shroud of Turin.
When he gets to the counter, our exchange is brief.
“Man, that jacket is so cool!”
“Mmmhmm.”
“That’ll be 14.20. Where’d you get it?”
“I don’t know.” –And he says this like it’s the most inane question he’s ever been asked.
“Would you ever sell it?”
“No.” –no hesitation on this at all. Despite what he seems to regard as the most unimportant of coats, he barters like someone who thinks every piece of junk he owns must be more valuable than gold.
“Oh, well, it’s an awesome coat, man. I loved that movie.”
“Mmmhmm.”
Damn. I give him his change and just watch the jacket go out the door. I’m a little disappointed and, at once, relieved to see there’s nothing on the back. I don’t know if I could’ve handled it if there had been a big embroidered ghost on the back, too.
At the door, the man stops—mind you, in my memory, this is winter in Michigan—he takes off the jacket, balls it up.
“Hey. Catch.”
And he goes out the door with my pathetic “are you sure?” trailing after him.
…
It didn’t fit of course. I tried to wear it a few times, but the sleeves were halfway between my elbows and wrists. It made me look like a zombie. More than a decade later, my wife, who has less freakishly long arms, assumed ownership when we returned from years of living abroad, had kids, and finally got the bags of stuff I had squirreled in my parents’ basement squirreled away into our apartment and then, thank god, our house.
My memory of this period, I can vouch for. Our own babies were growing into toddlers, and it was difficult to not pay out a different kind of attention in observing them. I was still working too much, but my work with students didn’t demand that I prop myself up under 3am halogen lights with burned coffee and rubber mats to feel like I was fulfilling my duty. I wasn’t young, but I was better rested most of the time. I was able to pin memories to a more reliable internal calendar.
The director for Adult and Community Education had been out since September, nearly the entire time I’d had the job of student development advisor. I’d taken on a lot of that work to keep the department afloat. The more of this work I did, the more I discovered the importance of the department in people’s lives, and the more work I had to take on to meet these needs.
Some of our afternoon classes were for the developmentally disabled. Once a semester, to satisfy a requirement of disabled student services, someone had to talk to these students about their goals. It was my pleasure to go into the classroom with a stack of bureaucratic forms and turn them into interesting conversations with students who, for the most part, greatly enjoyed being asked questions and the opportunity to talk to someone.
More than a few of these students had what I can only call a theme. Once Gus was on the topic of Transformers, he was difficult to disengage from. Tim loved fractals, and showed me all the ones he’d made on a program. Another student whose name I forget wrote Tolkien-esque fantasy stories. And there was Rob whose theme was not just Ghostbusters, but, specifically Ghostbusters II. When I squatted down on my haunches next to his desk to ask him about his goals, he told me about Vigo the Carpathian, and the slime under New York. He pointed to his Halloween-costume worn as a shirt and his baseball cap. “Ghostbusters II!” He told me, grinning at the idea, at the phrase, at the way the words sounded.
I am a little ashamed that it took me as long as it did to make the connection. Luckily, my wife didn’t mind when I asked for the jacket back, at least not when I told her what it was for.
Rob took the jacket in nearly the same way it’d been given to me. Unceremoniously. It was almost like I was giving it back to the man who’d tossed it to me the Admiral station so many years before. I couldn’t tell you what it meant, it was just obvious that it was something I needed to learn how to do. And once it was done, there was nothing to remember.
