Sunday Night in South Central

"Don't buy anything here today, they're reeeeallly slow today," he bays to a stranger walking in. He wants white wonderbread and a five dollar phone credit. The cashier is trying to get my pay-as-you-go credit rung through. She sympathizes with him, not a shred of apathy, community therapy for minimum wage and free slurpees. His friend behind him whose severe speech impediment is a full adult stutter and then some attempts to make amends.

The people in the store engage with the cashiers like this is a small family business, telling them about their day and making jokes. "Ring them phones! You know? Like a telethon!" one lady says about the phone credit machine before she describes how she only has $10 left so she has to go to a grocery store to get a "ten dollar box of chocolates, it's a birthday gift, he's turning thirteen." Several ask for double bags to carry various liters of soda home, Pepsi and white bread, Pepsi and white bread. One of the fountain flavors is out. In five minutes there are several comments from the expecting, who bring in a cup to refill daily, and the cashier suggests an alternate to a particularly distraught gentleman.

It's not yet time for the night time crowd, much skinnier, to shuffle through the dark alley I don't walk through, on the path through the vacant lot.

Yesterday we needed breakfast and it was incredibly cold. I'd seen a pizza place a couple blocks away, closer than the Vietnamese noodle house. Like a wormhole to a small town, full of ball caps and grandkids having lunch. The waitress congratulates anyone who can finish a plate, and somehow everyone knows everyone. Small talk doesn't venture into the news or the changing world or anything outside of the lives mopping up runny eggs with toast, "Do you think he's gonna sell me that trailer?" The walls are the shade of depression glass, that septic cool green that's never been very current. $3.00 for breakfast, $1.29 for bottomless coffee. I consider outsourcing a meal every day to this place, taking up residence and seeing how long it would take to figure out the game.

Never quite an interloper, though sometimes maybe foreign, in an unmapped unknown place in the middle of everything.