“Hi!” he said, joining the Customer Service line behind me at Wal-Mart (the same store I had robbed a while back). It was my first time in a return line in well over a decade. I just don’t return things, even if I should. Even if they don’t fit or work. But this time, when a pair of pruning shears shit the bed after three cuts of a hydrangea, I decided to exchange the thing.
“Hi,” I said in my most-unamused tone when I finally realized he was talking to me.
“Been waiting here long?”
I had been. “Yeah, I’ve been here half an hour. Well, maybe 15 minutes, so good luck. I’ve been giving that manager dirty looks hoping she would do something,” I said nodding at the sheepish woman with a barbed-wire wrist tattoo who had been over to help for all of 30 seconds before hiding behind other cashiers and pretending to give important orders in any other part of the store.
“Whoa, that long? Hey, when is a good time to plant a garden?” he asked.
Puzzled, as I didn’t even think he saw the pruning shears in my bag, I asked him what he meant before truly ferreting out his kookiness and realizing I shouldn’t have engaged.
“Like can I start a garden now?”
“Sure.”
“But will the plants survive?”
“You can prepare the bed now and plant later.”
“I guess we can grow pot now too! It’s legal right?”
Now it was starting to make some sense. “Well, I don’t think it’s quite legal yet,” I said warily.
“But they won’t charge you, right?”
“I think if you sell it they will charge you, but if you get caught smoking it they supposedly aren’t doing much,” I said, trying to figure out how to end this inane conversation. He went on about the pot and the garden, and how he had been to Denver where it’s legal and he had a Gummy bear with pot in it only it was 100 milligrams instead of 10 milligrams and he ate the whole thing and ruined his entire vacation because he was lying in bed thinking he was dead.
“That must have been scary,” I said in as dry and dead-pan a manner as I could muster.
“Hey, I got this keyboard here for $53 and then I found it on Amazon for less,” he said, showing me a keyboard in a box.
By the grace of God, it was finally my turn at the customer service counter. I won’t be going back.
Back to Blog
