Just a clerk at the convenience store

just a clerk at the convenience store

fiction
edward w pritchard

It was that special hour for those of us on the over-night shift. After the late late bar traffic finally somehow got home and before the old people started their day; 3:25AM to 4:25AM. Darci, a convenience store clerk after the hustle and bustle and constant stream of weird and sad people who inhabited the over night hours in Queens New York, looked forward to her hour of well deserved solitude.

A dozen people had stopped for directions, and five or six sneaked in to try to sell Darci valuable watches, for only five dollars each, from a display inside of the right side of their over coats. Darci was glad it was bitter cold tonight, it would drive the good people inside.

Sitting down, Darci had just began to thumb through one of the convenient stores magazines when a drunk and dis-shoveled man stumbled in about 3;30AM. He didn't look dangerous but he had been fighting, he had the remnants of a bloody nose and his army jacket was torn, as if some-one had held one side of it and thrown and twirled the man, presumably to the ground for his blue jeans were torn and dirty at the seat and knees. His wire rim glasses were bent and cracked.

The man wanted rum, coke and scotch. At least she surmised he did for he had a heavy British accent and was drunk and irritable. Every other thing he said was sarcastic and he made a lot of odd comments. He was a little unsure where he was, although he looked to be in his thirties, and kept joking about the date, December 23,1973. He kept saying it should be 1963.

There was no scotch so he asked for wine, Beaujolais 62, an inside joke he said. Finally he bought a few dollars worth of mints and candy bars and tried to pay with a hundred dollar bill. Rather he tried to pay with eleven hundred dollar bills because they came tumbling out of his pocket when he tried to find his wallet. Actually 2200 dollars in hundreds came out of the man's pocket in total, just before Darci got him to lay down for a few minutes in "her office", the small room behind the cash register at the convenience store there in Queens. She took the man's car keys out of habit for Darci had a lot of friends who drank a lot too, like this man, a mean drunk, and she wanted to protect him. Dropping hundred dollar bills wasn't safe in this neighborhood and the police would put him in the tank if they found him like this.

Darci had to move the car. A 1972 Chrysler Station Wagon. He had said there was a five in the glove box so Darci looked in. Three rolls of hundred dollar bills greeted her in the glove box. Each roll said 400 times 100, three rolls times $40,000 that's $120,000, he had $120,000 in his car. A to do list in the glove box said 1974 goals. There were three. Reconnect with true friends, Begin to write music again, and cut back on the drinking. A business card said John Lennon, ex-Beatle of New York and Liverpool. Darci hadn't recognized him.

Darci awoke Mr. Lennon about twenty minutes before the end of her shift, She helped him clean up his face a little and politely refused a few of the hundreds he tried to give her. Darci just a convenience store clerk was a fan and merely said take good care of yourself John, then he left.

Darci only visited once the Strawberry Fields Memorial to John Lennon in Central Park, New York, about a year after his death and continues to enjoy his music although she no longer works at a convenience store.