Death In Venice and Red Potato Salad

Much-touted July 4th uber-weekend so far a Big Bust. I went back over our numbers and the same thing was true last year. People just don't buy shit to celebrate Independence Day. Of course, they should buy shit – consumerism is integral to the American way of life. But they don't.

Fucking unpatriotic if you ask me.

But of course there were hoards of them not buying anything, wandering aimlessly in and out of the store, and so I spent the day refilling the pretzel bowl, washing the floor, refolding teeshirts, shooing ill-behaved children away the habanero purée, smiling so hard that my face hurts today. We barely met the minimum revenue goal that divides a bad Saturday from a mediocre Saturday and that only on the basis of a sale I made after I finally turned out the lights.

What is it with people who wander into stores when the lights are turned out anyway, I wonder?

The guy who wandered in was sunburned, blond and snub-faced. In my dreams, he was a navy lieutenant stationed out of Annapolis. It's a physical type I've always liked. I let him cruise the shelves while I counted out money in the dark. He was nattering away about his jalapenos. One of the things about owning a chili store is that people feel compelled to talk to you about their own chili experiences, sometimes for hours. Do customers buying all those cheap Monterey logo fleece pullovers bore the sales clerks with anecdotes about purchases of other fine made-in-China garments? I doubt it.

I let this guy natter and wander because I wanted to fuck him.

Since this was the first time I'd experienced lust in ever so long, it was a novel sensation. I liked it. Of course I am an old crone in a size 12 with incipient crepe neck so I doubt very much he wanted to fuck me. No, he just wanted someone to share his boyish enthusiasm about peppers.

Listening to the inflections of his voice and catching glimpses of his eager smile from afar, I got a flash of the kid he must have been once. A kid with hobbies. A kid who built radios and honed up on extinct dinosaur dynasties. That's what's wrong with the kids who'd floated in and out of the shop today, I thought. That's what's wrong with Robin. All they ever do is play video games and go to movies. Their imaginations have been colonized. There's not one little part of it that's all their own.

"The serranos grow like weeds but the jalapenos stay small," he was saying. "I don't get it."

"Where do you live?" I asked.

"Maryland."

Ah! So I'd gotten that part right. "Well peppers are little divas," I said. "They're very particular about their growing conditions. Jalapenos like dry conditions and very sandy soil. Could you be over-watering them?"

"Maybe," he said, nodding. "Maybe. It's been raining like crazy there."

"So I heard."

He was standing at the counter by this point, smiling across at me. And though part of me could have watched him forever, counting the ghosts of freckles long dead dancing across the bridge of his nose, equivocating over the exact color of his eyes – hazel or blue? impossible to tell in the dark – the other part of me wanted to get the hell out. I had dogs to walk. I had Cirque du Méprise to pimp.

"Here," I said. "I'll pour you a shot for the road."

I poured him Marie Sharp's green habanero with nopalas and limejuice. He drank it like a shot of bourbon and his eyes grew wide. "That's fabulous stuff," he said in a husky voice. "Can I buy it? I mean – I see that you're closed –"

"If you pay cash," I said.

And thus the day's numbers were met.

I did take the dogs to the beach but instead of working, when I got home I went straight to bed with a bowl of Whole Foods red potato salad – I am perfectly capable of making red potato salad so this felt very decadent – and reread The Mysteries of Pittsburg cover to cover. It's still the Michael Chabon book I like the best. I've always been a sucker for Coming of Age sagas.