There was a huge ice machine in the back room that occasionally spat out batches of frozen cubes into a giant vat. Once per shift, every employee was supposed to shovel the ice into plastic bags, tie them off, and wheel them up into the front to stack them in a display cooler. It was one of the most hated tasks in the store because it was boring, repetitive, and relatively hard physical labor. Usually you needed to hack at the ice with the metal scoop because it all got frozen together, then you had to spoon heavy scoops of the stuff into a bag whose opening was barely larger than the scoop itself. After a few bags, your fingers would be too stiff with cold to tie a good knot, so from time to time a big would spill and then you’d have to clean that up too.

Once Shantel was bagging ice when I heard a loud crash. I stuck my head back there to see what had happened. She was on her knees in front of the machine with one finger in her mouth wiping up blood from the floor with her other hand. “Are you alright?” I asked nervously.

“Yeah. Lid of that freezer slammed on my finger. It got a piece of my meat.” She proudly displayed the finger, which was indeed missing a chunk the size of a sunflower seed and streaming blood.

“Do you want me to call someone?”

“No, I’m fine.”

I had customers, so I couldn’t really argue with her. Eventually she emerged and again displayed the finger, telling me several times how she’d lost some of her “meat”. She’d secured a piece of napkin to the wound with a rubber band, but from time to time she had to replace it when the blood soaked through. I suggested several times that she go home, but she brushed me off, only to arrive at this conclusion herself about half an hour later.

What really made me uncomfortable, though, was when she asked me to cover for her with her abusive husband. She was getting ready to leave him, she told me, and was going to tell him she was working while she went out looking for a new apartment. If he happened to come by looking for her, I was to tell him that the manager had sent her to another location but that I didn’t know where. It probably wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I was completely unprepared to handle the situation if the guy got angry, which it sounded as if he were prone to do.

Thankfully, it never came up. Given the worry that merely imagining such a situation caused me, I sincerely hope that she did successfully leave him. No one should have to live in constant fear of provoking violent anger from a loved one.

I was one of the store’s best employees, though it’s hard to overstate just how low the bar was set. If I called five minutes before a scheduled shift to say I wasn’t coming, they were just impressed that I called. I was a friend of the owner and his daughter, and once in a while old ladies would go out of their way to tell the manager how much they appreciated the nice young man who knew how to count their change back to them. There was zero chance of my being fired or reprimanded in any way, and I knew it. Consequently, I couldn’t have cared less about Rat Man Carl and his surprise inspections.

He, one the other hand, took great pride in his work. I’m sure he imagined himself a secret agent as he skulked outside the store, waiting like a savanna cat for me to turn my back so that he could slink into the store and surprise me. It disappointed him to no end that I never displayed the least shock or dismay at his sudden appearance nor at the solemn warnings and stern lectures he delivered in a grave tone.

Carl’s son usually worked another store but once had a shift with me. He blatantly stole whatever foodstuffs he wanted and encouraged me to do the same, going to so far as to refuse to ring me up for an ice cream sandwich I ate. I had to ring it up myself, which was itself against company policy but seemed the lesser of two evils.

Several years later I ran into Carl at a Target. We spoke for a minute, and he bragged to me about how he was moving up in the world, making $18/hour as an assistant manager and well on his way to becoming a full-fledged manager. I wished him the best.

Bear was easily 6’6, rippling with muscles, and, as I’ve said, covered in tattoos. Under no circumstances would I have gotten on his bad side, and it’s a testament to human stupidity that anyone ever did. He told me a story once about a customer of his who requested a custom-designed tattoo. They negotiated a price, and Bear spent a couple of hours inking him up. When he was finished, the guy reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, shit, I’ve only got eighty-seven bucks.”

They went back and forth for a bit, but the guy insisted he couldn’t get his hands on any more money and pleaded with Bear to accept much less than the price they’d agreed upon. Bear finally relented and told the guy to leave a warm, wet compress on the ink for 24 hours.

“Thing is,” Bear growled to me, “you’re only supposed to leave it on for an hour. When he took the compress off, the ink would have run everywhere and left a giant brown smear permanently engraved on his arm.”

Gary was a real stickler for directions and procedure. As you might imagine, the operation of a 7-11 is designed to be pretty idiot-proof. There are simple instructions for operating everything and a checklist that every employee is supposed to follow on every shift. Of course, most employees neither used the checklist nor diligently completed all of their tasks, particularly the least popular ones. Gary, however, did everything just as it was supposed to be done every time.

That was all well and good when things were running smoothly. The problem was that Gary had no capacity for troubleshooting or adaptation. He was relieving me once at the end of a shift on the Fourth of July. When doing a shift change, each of the two registers needs to be closed down individually and its contents counted and verified by both employees. Generally this is to be done at a time where there is no line in the store.

That July Fourth was a hot, sunny summer holiday, and we were doing a booming business in ice, charcoal, ketchup, hot dog rolls, and other barbecue accouterments. A line of customers had wrapped halfway around the store since the beginning of my shift, and it was clear to me that there was never going to be a quiet moment for a shift change. We needed to just shut down one register and count the money as quickly as possible despite the line, but convincing Gary to cooperate with this was nearly impossible.

So here I am arguing with this guy who can barely express or comprehend a coherent thought while both of us are trying desperately to keep up with the burgeoning swarm of customers. A kid who looked to be about 15 asked for a pack of cigarettes. I was far from diligent about carding people, but in this case there was a store full of gossipy judgmental soccer moms and a co-worker who was somewhat likely to report me if he noticed, so I asked to see his ID. Plus, the kid looked like an asshole.

He handed me the license of a woman who was several years older than he and looked nothing like him. “Don’t waste my time,” I told him, thrusting the license back at him and turning my attention to the next customer. “Next!”

“What? That’s my license. Man, sell me some cigarettes.”

I didn’t even look up from my next transaction. “That was a woman’s license. Get out of here.”

“You better sell me some fucking cigarettes.” Now I looked up.

I didn’t feel the least bit threatened in a store full of people, but I didn’t want the kid to make a scene or waste any more time. “Do I need to call the police?” I asked, reaching for the phone.

“What the fuck?” he responded.

“Alright, that’s enough,” boomed a voice from several spots back in the line. “There are kids in this store.” The voice belonged to a burly guy with a leather jacket and a bandanna wrapped around his head.

The kid headed for the door, but turned back and shouted, “Man, fuck you both.”

“Fuck me? You meet me out in the parking lot, you little shit,” the guy boomed back. Needless to say, the little punk was not in the parking lot when the man left the store. And, I eventually got Gary to comply with the shift change, though he made clear that he was annoyed by it.

The 7-11 was just a stepping stone for Mark, though. His real aspiration was to be a police officer. Even before he was working with us, he got to know all of the officers who frequented our store. Once he was working there, it was even worse. If there was a cop in the store, it was nearly impossible to get Mark to do any work. There could an empty cooler and a line a mile-long, and Mark would be over by the coffee counter hounding the officers.

Mark was generally pretty law-abiding himself, but I did once see him sell cigarettes to two girls who were no older than fourteen. After completing the sale, he stepped outside and returned a minute or two later. “Did you sell them cigarettes?” I asked, more surprised than scolding.

He grinned. “They showed me their boobies.”

Mark was working with me one day when a group of guys in their early twenties came into the store asking about Pokemon cards. This was at the height of the game’s popularity, and even at $5 a pack we couldn’t keep them in stock. We’d just gotten a shipment, though, so when the guys asked if we had any purple packs, I was able to tell them that we did.

It immediately struck me as strange that these young men were asking about the cards. They seemed to old to play but too young to have kids who played. More strangely, they didn’t actually want to buy any of the cards. Instead, they asked for a carton of cigarettes, which required me to step away from the counter and dig around in a cabinet for their requested brand.

When I returned, the guys were gone. I quickly checked the box of Pokemon cards which was sitting out on the counter with the other impulse purchase items. I never would have known for sure that they’d taken anything, since I had no idea how many packs there were to begin with, except that there were now no more purple packs. Had the guys not specifically asked about them and had me verify just a minute ago that there had been some, I would have had no way of proving they’d stolen them.

Amazingly, they were still sitting out in the parking lot in their car. I jotted down the license, and more annoyed at the brazenness and stupidity of their crime than anything else, I called the manager.

“How many packs did they take?”

“I don’t know.”

“Eight.”

“Huh?”

“They took eight packs. If you don’t give the police an exact number, they won’t do anything with the report.”

I called the police, and they said they’d send someone by eventually. There was less than an hour left in Mark’s shift, but he stuck around for another hour waiting for the police to come. Finally he left but begged me to call him when the police did arrive, which I didn’t.

I don’t know the full story of how he ended up working at a 7-11, but over time I learned a few tidbits about him that suggest a more thorough explanation. He’d lost his driver’s license to multiple DWI’s, for instance, and had to take the bus to work. I lived just across the street from the store, so generally I walked to work, but once I had a car with me for some reason and offered him a ride, which he declined.

From time to time he would recount a ribald tale from one of his recent exploits. Being a teenage boy, I was usually eager to hear more. I asked him if he’d ever been with two women at once. He sighed. “Yeah. Couple of times. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, believe me. It’s very difficult to attend to two at once. A lot of pressure. I couldn’t keep up with them.”

Norm’s aspiration, which was common among those for whom 7-11 was part of a career path, was to get a job with one of the many companies that supplied ours and other convenience stores. He always chatted with the vendors who delivered to our store and frequently asked about opportunities. Norm left without any fanfare, which I’ve always hoped was because he got his dream job wheeling crates of soda or ice cream bars in and out of big white trucks and glass storefronts on a dolly.

Bear was easily 6’6, rippling with muscles, and as I’ve said, covered in tattoos. Under no circumstances would I have gotten on his bad side, and it’s a testament to human stupidity that anyone ever did. He told me a story once about a customer of his who requested a custom-designed tattoo. They negotiated a price, and Bear spent a couple of hours tattooing him. When he was finished, the guy reached into his pocket and said, “Oh, shit, I’ve only got eighty-seven bucks.”

They went back and forth for a bit, but the guy insisted he couldn’t get his hands on any more money and pleaded with Bear to accept much less than the price they’d agreed upon. Bear finally relented and told the guy to leave a warm, wet compress on the ink for 24 hours.

“Thing is,” Bear growled to me, “you’re only supposed to leave it on for an hour. When he took the compress off, the ink would have run everywhere and left a giant brown smear permanently engraved on his arm.”

She was the first person from a vastly different racial and socio-economic background with whom I’d had to interact regularly, but we actually hit it off quite well. She was fun to talk to and laughed at my jokes. Sometimes we played little tricks on each other

When her pregnancy started to show, we talked about the child’s father. He was a few years older, but still in the picture. Her man wasn’t working at the moment, which was why Hatty carried her unborn child thirty minutes each way on the bus five days a week to a 7-11 out in the county. He was looking for work, though, and she was sure they would get married one day.

Hatty asked if I had a girlfriend, and I fabricated a long story about how I was dating a divorced forty-year old mother of two. I let it slip that my little lady was currently locked up at Jessup but confessed that we had great sex during the bi-weekly conjugal visits she was permitted. I had Hatty going until I tried to tell her that this woman was black. She scoffed and replied, “Pfft, you couldn’t get no black girl.”

Hatty left the store when she entered her third trimester, and I never saw her again.

Sam

Sam was the store’s oldest and longest standing employee. A Vietnam vet in his late fifties, he only worked the overnight shift. I heard rumors that he had money and didn’t need to work but was just looking for something to do nights.

The overnight shift could drive you crazy, no doubt, but on the other hand one had to be a bit crazy already to request it. Most of the job was cleaning and organizing the store, receiving deliveries, and standing around idle and lonely (it was the only shift to which just one employee was assigned). The mundanity was punctuated by the occasional visit from the crazies who only come out at night.

Sam was everyone’s least favorite employee. He was a grouch and a hard-ass who would savagely berate whomever he was relieving for the smallest infraction: a sticky spot on the floor, a less-than-full freezer, or an insufficient number of milk cartons on display. I was terrified of him.

No one dared to give Sam a nickname, but if I had the opportunity now, I would call him Scrappy. He was short, barely five feet tall, but solidly built and tough as nails. He was balding but wore a Chuck Norris beard and a twenty-four hour sneer.

The manager once showed me security camera footage from a robbery. A little after 2AM, a huge black guy with arms like tree trunks came into the store. He asked for a carton of cigarettes. On the video, you can see Sam step away from the counter and out of view to retrieve them. Chained to the counter was a donation box for the funeral of a police officer who’d been hit by a car during a traffic stop. The thief grabbed the box and ripped it chain and all off the counter, then ran for the door.

The next thing you can see on the video is Sam coming back into view, vaulting over the counter like an Olympic hurdler and sprinting after the guy. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do if he caught the guy, which he didn’t.

I eventually won Sam’s grudging respect via immaculate preparation at the end of my shifts. Everything was all ready for him, we’d change over the registers in a minute flat, and then I’d spend the half hour that we were both in the store bagging ice and filling the coolers. As I left, Sam would thank me, wish me a good night, and occasionally even smile, which was a hell of a lot more than anyone else could get from him.