The You-Scan

The “quote unquote” young people line up at the You-Scan, (the store, hopelessly out of date, had not yet upgraded to the much more modern “U Scn”) processing their acquisitions, bounty, winnings, waving name brands over the bright red flashing lights they longed for as children. The employs and janitorial, strolling around for the day’s exercise and pretending to work, chop and sweep.

A tall man in a scarf and his best attempt at “retro” clothing, large glasses with thick rims, waits in the only remaining cashier line, which happens to be of the “10 Items or Less” variety, with two six-packs of non-alcoholics: names no one has heard of, umlaut over every vowel; complaining silently that the sign should, of course, say “fewer” instead of “less,” and aptly failing to mention that he wouldn’t know or care had his friend not mentioned it last week, a friend who read an article (blog post) entitled “7 Common Grammar Mistakes” very particularly, so as to weed out and ostracize “this kind of anti-intellectual behavior.”

The old woman working the till smiles kindly, pretending not to notice the bag boy, paid next to nothing to do next to nothing, staring intently at one of the female customer’s ample posterior, hunting, watching to make sure it made no sudden movements. The old woman, thinking to herself “Young people. They think they invented sex.” The customer tucks her left hand away, hiding the tan line, white in a sea of faux orange skin, each name brand slyly covering her offending digits from the You-Scan.

This woman had spent the least amount of time she could in the Bottle Returns room, filled with smelly, sticky hands that refuse to clean their containers, creatures barely definable as human, more meat than man. Desperate for the extra cash, unemployment running low, Man’s keeping ‘em down, and not even considering using the money they saved to buy anything healthy: no returns on lettuce. Mountains stacked in the carts, thousands of bottles between less than ten sweaty bodies riding in their motorized shopping carts, modified versions of the child’s, collected like a cult in a room protected from the public eye with a tarp.

Avoiding the swarm of these disgusting creatures, the woman sighs in relief, as if obesity was a disease she could catch with skin-on-skin contact, no stranger to her, neck-on-neck, bone-to-bone, she knows every one of her assets and uses them every chance she could, a true Siren song, letting the world in, only to shut them out, as if there was any room inside her for the minds of men who approached.

On the screen next to the woman with the posterior, a suave gentleman swipes quickly, noticing his neighbor not, a mindless fiend with a cold itch, a devilish white-collar black-suited man, nose deep on Rumpelstiltskin’s grind, hair slicked back, eyes darting forward, forward, ever forward. A man who had perfected efficiency so far beyond any other customer that he could go in and out, cart full, in the time it took the semi-frugal, emotionally vapid man with glasses to hastily pick up his drinks, and escape the “intellectual sink hole.”

This man, with judging eyes through 20-20 glasses, seeing the old woman as being just as hopelessly out of date as the sign, the You-Scans, the woman at the scanner with her name brands and her 50% divorce rate, thought of himself as superior, avant-garde, not even referring to himself by birth name, and pretending to worship Gods of an obscure Eastern faith he discovered online last week, vegan for the title, Afro-Asian girlfriend, sexually liberated and romantically repressed.

The woman’s posterior had not made any unexpected transformations, nor had it tried to run away; the bag boy had been eyeing it very intently, with a hot itch and a keen wink. Paid at all was to the benefit of his video game collection and his “ever-loving gal,” Mary Jane. Converted his basement into a shooting gallery, a country club, mission control, wherein he could escape the wrath of his other girlfriend, to whom he endearingly referred to as “whatsherface.” Piles of aluminum cans and plastic bottles, a maze to protect the covertness of his endeavors into enemy camps, the structurally unsound Italiano “Leaning Tower of Empty Pizza Boxes,” the dreaded corner of the room, the dedicated brig of his ship, his holding cell, filled with unfinished assignments: a trash can.

The suit, big cheese, brain boy, fast talker, papa grande, kingpin, head honcho, space walker, pinch hitter, synergy aficionado, gate keeper, and gate-way drug, worldly shoes, winning smile, yes-man, clean mug, cool eyes, street smart, fast track, and in it all, referred to lovingly by his superiors as “a nice scratch on the balls,” immaculate home, immaculate wife, at home two kids, and a white picket life, the other 50% catches himself hesitating on the bag boy.

The old woman, who smiles knowingly, days of futures past, seen-it-all, know-it-all, couldn’t possibly understand the boy, the man, the suit, nor the woman who belonged to the ample posterior, whose very posture could make a man fall in love, did, more than once, if you care to take a knife to love’s jugular, which she did, more than once.