May I Help You?

I would not want to be a salesman because even when they’re just doing their job, they can be very annoying. I took my mom to a store over the weekend and while she looked around I wandered over into the men’s clothing section. To say it was slightly devoid of customers would be to say I mildly question Michelle Bachmann’s sanity.

As I looked over a display of Van Heusen polo shirts a salesman snuck up on me like cocaine found Charlie Sheen.

“May I help you sir?” he asked politely. “Just looking around” I responded. His face kind of squished up as if he had eaten some bad curried goat and it was re-entering his esophagus. I thought I heard him mutter “Great, another just looking asshole. No commission today. Looks like I’ll be eating the mold off my shower curtain for supper again tonight.” He took out a mascara brush and painted a smile back on his face.

“We also have shirts on sale by Chaps, Polo, Izod, Nautica, Aeropostale, Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Artie Feinstein, Jesus the Divine, Sing Sang,Wing Wang, Skip-to-my-loo, Blah Blah Bloo Bloo and on and on and on.”

“Uh, thanks, I guess,” I said, a little weary of the man at this point.

The salesman started following me around throwing rose petals at my feet. He pulled out an oboe at one point to play a Beethoven concerto while I pondered my purchase and was quite good. I wept during the second movement.

I decided on two shirts, paid, and was met with thunderous applause from his meaty hands. “Thank you, kind sir. This is the greatest gift I have received since my father brought me my Xanax from Canada. You are a prince, sir! If anyone ever condescends to you I will wound them with the sharpness of my words. If you are attacked physically I will hire a brute to defend you. If you hunger I will plant for you a field of wheat, if you are cold I will quilt you a blanket constructed of scenes of our newly formed friendship.”

“All right!” I finally yelled, a bit too loudly. “Thank you. I’m going to wander over to sporting goods now.”

The salesman clapped his hands together 3 times. Four burly men carrying a bamboo sledge ran out from a back room. I was lifted onto the sled and carried to the sporting goods department while the salesman sang a madrigal in harmony with a perfume girl. I was taken from the sled and laid on a bed of goose down. The salesman bowed with an exaggerated flourish finally walking away. As he did I heard him say to the perfume girl, “The jerk bought 2 shirts, both on sale. My take is $1.50. Looks like unsalted crackers for lunch.”

I don’t think I’ll go shopping for a while.

Hey Dorothy, Check out My New Shoes

I had to buy new shoes this weekend. I work in an office environment so they needed to be “business casual” and they needed to be relatively inexpensive because I had already spent $52 and my left nut on a tank of gas. Seriously, when are we going to drop the oil speculators on a deserted island and let Ted Nugent hunt them for sport? I think that’s a reality show we can all get behind.

I went to Kmart. I don’t go there often but they have a good selection of nice, decently priced footwear. I found a pair of brown Thom McCann’s that was my exact size, 9.5 wide. Finding wide shoes at a department store can be a miracle along the lines of at least one movie a week coming out that doesn’t revolve around vampires. Considering myself Mr. Lucky I sat down to try them on. Let’s just say Mr. Thom McCann needs lessons in sizing shoes.

My size is 9.5 wide, always has been, still will be on December 21, 2012 when the Mayan calendar kills all of us in an Irwin Allen production. With this shoe I was able to get my big toe and a sliver of my arch inside. Shaking my head, I pulled a 10 wide off the shelf. This time I got all my toes in AFTER having them bound by a Chinese man who happened to be in the store purchasing air freshener and a bocce ball set.

Disgusted, I gave up on the brown shoes, pulling out a pair of black ones who were made by . . . Thom McCann. I thought, different style of shoe, let’s try the 9.5 wide. I was able to dangle my foot inside as though I was soaking it in Epsom salt laced water, but not as though I were actually wearing the shoes to work. I didn’t even bother with the 10s, instead went right to the 11 wides. Viola, my feet have a new home from 8:30 – 6:30 every Monday through Friday.

On the way to the registers I grabbed some new socks because I was feeling capricious. I had the approximate cost in my head when I went through the check-out line so you can imagine my initial shock when the clerk said, “That will be $657.18.” She took my fainting as a sign she may have done something wrong and rang everything up again. I will admit the new total of “3 goats and a lock of pixie’s hair” was better, but I was all out of anything from a mythological being since that Joseph Campbell party a few weeks ago.

I was finally given a total I could pay although it still didn’t seem right. When I was finished I found a quiet spot to compare the receipt to the tag on the shoes and they had overcharged me by $5. I won’t go into my trip to the service desk as I think you’ve had enough of my gross hyperbole for one day. I mean, 500 words about me buying a pair of shoes? Who do I think I am?

Adventures in Shopping

I have a cell phone mainly for emergency purposes. I don’t text, I don’t tweet, I don’t watch Israeli action movies on it, I don’t take pictures of every single thing I see and post it on Tumblr, I can’t land a Harrier jet on an aircraft carrier, I can’t control the route of a city bus, I can’t read John Grisham’s latest tome of good lawyer vs. bad lawyer. I carry the phone with me and occasionally make a call.

To save money I have a Tracphone. There is no $80/a month plan with so many conditions and provisions you need a major in accounting with a minor in international law to understand the contract you are signing in blood. To keep a Tracphone active you add a minimum of 20 minutes to the phone every 3 months at a cost of $20. If you miss your end date, however, then you have to call the company, talk to a man with a Pakistani accent named Steve and jump through hoops to get it reactivated. I believe the last time I had to purchase an elephant and teach it to use its trunk to blow “Melancholy Baby” on a trumpet before my service was restored.

Last Friday was my last day to get a new card to put minutes on before my phone deactivated. I went first to a local grocery store I knew sold the cards. The store was packed with what appeared to be lunatics from an asylum, wandering the aisles, gape-mouthed and drooling. I bobbed and weaved through the throng, got to the Tracphone display stand only to see the $20 cards sold out. Oh, they had plenty of the expensive cards: 200 minutes, a years worth of minutes, enough minutes to connect with the other side and call your dearly departed Aunt Gertrude to ask why Uncle Fred can’t stop farting when he walks. If I had wanted to take out a loan from the man named Murray who sat behind a desk snacking on oyster crackers, I could have had my card.

Instead I got back in my car, fought the traffic to drive through the intersection to the Rite Aid on the other side of route 24. I wandered the empty aisles until I found the display and . . . they were sold out of the $20 cards also. “What’s going on here?” I thought. Have I stumbled onto a vast, global conspiracy to deplete the stock of Tracphone cards? Were their men in black suits watching me, recording my thoughts and catching my skin flakes in tightly wrapped tin foil? Were the Lizard People using Soviet manufactured satellites to track the bar code imprinted on a computer chip that was embedded in my left nostril?

I decided it was all a coincidence and left the store in a huff, giving an odd glance to a man in a dark suit perusing a copy of Global Conspiracy Magazine. I drove to yet another grocery store where finally, I found my $20 phone card.

I should have ended my painful shopping trip right there but no, I made the fateful decision to buy a few groceries. It was during my time in the bread, egg and cheese aisle that I heard the thing that haunted the rest of my weekend. I was happily picking out a package of provolone cheese when a family passed behind me. It was a Norman Rockwellian scene: A mother with her three children in tow, shopping for the family’s basic needs. One of the children asked if they could buy a particular item. I couldn’t understand what the child said but the mother’s response flattened me.

“No,” she replied, “those always loosen you up too much.”

I have never vomited in a grocery store and I was determined to keep that streak alive. The bile that rose in my throat from the graphic image that popped into my head with a devious grin, stayed in my mouth. I choked on it. Choked hard. I ran to the check-out, barreling over an old woman trying to choose between extra-absorbent and super extra-absorbent paper towels. I showed the clerk the items in my hands, threw a wad of money at her and ran from the store.

Once in my car, I wept openly. The world was a darker, danker place and my innocence had been tossed into the trash. I hate shopping on a Friday night.