• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Meanwhile, two men walk into the store at the same time, one old, one young. They proceed directly to the checkout line, the young one first. What I notice about the young one: he’s clean-cut, taller than me (and I’m standing on a three-inch-high platform) and fidgety. What I notice about the older one is that he’s faded, disheveled and kind of lumpy—maybe a bum who after buying himself a beer intends to stand outside and harass the customers?

“… and don’t forget to turn off lottery machine at ten o’clock,” says Kay, “otherwise big problem happening. Okay? Come on, let’s go.” She and Gab leave the store for the night.

Less than a minute later, the young man arrives at the counter and asks for a pack of Newport Lights, “please.” Now, regular smokers don’t say “please.” They say “PACKANEWPORTS!” and flick a crumpled tenner on the counter. Therefore, I will now verify that this person is of legal age to buy tobacco products in the city of New York, even though the law states only that I have to card people who look younger than twenty-five (as if no one ever looked seven years younger than they really are).

However, just then Old Lumpy starts coughing obstreperously. In fact, he sounds as if he’s having some sort of asthma attack.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

He waves me off and seems to recover. I go back to the customer buying Newports, who’s waving a twenty at me and standing halfway through the door. Customers are shuffling their feet again, rolling their eyes at the delay.

“Can I see your—” I begin.

Old Lumpy then starts barking and flapping his arms.

“Is there a problem?” I ask. Lately there have been a lot of problem customers. I even had to call the police for the first time after a youngish fellow with annoying chin hair refused to stop screaming at me or leave the store because I made him show me ID for a pack of American Spirits. He said I was guilty of “age profiling” and threatened to expose me on his blog.

Again, Old Lumpy quiets down. But now the customers have rightly become annoyed, and one person has already put down their groceries and left. So I decide to take the younger man’s money without carding him (it doesn’t matter, I think, because if he’s under eighteen, then so am I), and as he’s walking through the door toward that knot of people I saw on the corner, I have one of those small moments of insight that usually get forgotten in the daily chaos of a store. It occurs to me that the back of the neck is a really revealing part of the body: something about the combination of posture and muscle tone tells you as much about a person as their face, if not more. And as I watch the exit of this particular fellow, who’s wearing what I now recognize as the sort of overlarge blue oxford only a teenager would wear, I’m thinking, Boy, he looks a lot younger from behind. I may have just dodged a bullet.

The next thing I see is Old Lumpy’s hand holding up a detective’s badge. Almost immediately I get an out-of-body feeling, as if I’m watching this whole scene not through my own eyes but via a shaky handheld camera. And in my head a song begins to play—I can’t quite identify it at first, though I know I’ve heard it a thousand times.

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

It’s a sting, and we’re busted.

“Didn’t you see me signaling you?” Old Lumpy—Detective Lumpy, I should say—asks.

“Signal me? You mean with all that coughing and hand waving?”

“I was trying to tell you, ‘Don’t do it. Ask for ID. That boy’s under eighteen.’ ”

“You distracted me, that’s what you did.” My world is deflating, collapsing, running out of oxygen. That omniscience I felt a minute ago is morphing into fishbowl-head, wherein I feel uncomfortably aware of peripheral phenomena I can’t seem to focus on. It’s the same sweaty, off-balance, my-arms-are-too-long, the-world-is-moving-too-fast dysphoria I experienced during my very first shifts—combined with anger: hot, pulsing fury.

Detective Lumpy shrugs and hands me a sheaf of papers that I have to sign either admitting guilt or requesting a hearing