Loser-in-a-Bag

It was a Saturday night long ago, and the video arcade in Santa Ana was jumping. The owner, making change behind the counter, smiled at the white man approaching her. He'd come in about ten minutes earlier carrying a McDonald's salad bag (the bag had caught her eye, since most folks brought in burger bags), and he'd wandered around checking out the games. Before she could ask how much change he wanted, he said, "Do you give free games here?"

Her smile never flickered. "No," she said, and went back to her Sudoku puzzle. She could still see the green-and-white plastic salad bag in her peripheral vision, and it wasn't moving away. She looked up. Whiteboy was eye-fucking her. Whiteboy was eye-fucking her in her own place of business, with her own last name on the illuminated sign outside.

"I want a free game," he said.

She had owned the video arcade for twenty-seven years, exactly half her life. The earlier half had molded and shaped her -- abandonment, poverty, threats of violence, actual violence, and narrow escapes; men with hatchets, men with guns, a lunatic with a knife; harassers at bus stops, in offices, at college; and the occasional lascivious boss that most young woman of her era had had to deal with. She felt the molten lava in her core rise up and up and up and it hit her brain. Her eyeballs blasted straight into his.

"You're not getting a free game," she snarled.

Whiteboy tried his best to hold eye contact, keep giving his hard looks, but was hopelessly outmatched by the red-hot, laser-focused hatred of the woman staring him down from behind the counter, who had already clocked his height, weight, and inebriation level, and knew she could take him.

He wobbled backwards and tried for a moment to think of something to say. "Thanks for nothing then," was the best he could do, and he wove his way through her crowd of regulars, men who would have dragged Whiteboy outside and kicked his white ass if he'd been stupid enough to step to her.

"You're welcome," she yelled at the back of his head. "Come back and see us when you figure out how to earn a quarter."

She stood fuming, willing her blood pressure to drop back to normal. Who the hell did Whiteboy -- ha! Whiteman! He was 30, maybe 35 years old! -- who the hell did he think he was, jumping bad with a 54-year-old woman, thinking that made him some kind of tough guy? How pathetic was that? What kind of grown man would be that lame?

She found the answer later that night, as she was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her business. She spotted Whiteboy's salad bag on the bicycle rack. She picked it up to throw it away but it was quite heavy. She looked inside and pulled out an empty short dog of no-name whiskey and two hardcover library books -- no checkout slip used as a bookmark, so probably stolen. She held the first one to the light streaming from her window. "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac, she read, and she grinned. Then she pulled out the second book, looked at the title, and laughed aloud. It was a collection of poems by Charles Bukowski, much beloved by male literature professors of a certain age.

"What, no Norman Mailer?" she said to herself. "But Kerouac, Bukowski, and whiskey -- it's still a flaming asshole trifecta!"