Smells Like Teen Spirit (And It Ain't Good)

One of the most amazing things about the human brain is how it can recall previously forgotten events due to outside stimuli. Studies show that the strongest recall hits because of our sense of smell. You're walking along and you get a whiff of something wonderful or malodorous that immediately transports you back to the first time that scent graced your nostrils. The smell of baking bread takes me back to my childhood home; the blend of crayons and dirt takes me back to memories of an old boyfriend; the joining of ammonium and dog food sends my nose reeling back to the days of working at a doggie daycare facility, a smell that made me throw away the shoes I wore there. There are things that I've completely forgotten about until my nose picks up on something long-lost and buried. In this particular instance, it was a combination of smell and sound that jarred my memory.

I had been stuck in a federal proposal writing workshop for two days. I know, I know, I get it all the time. People come up to me and ask, "How do you think of these death-defying pastimes?" more often than not. I hate to tell you, finding such epic projects just comes naturally. Anyway. During a break in the training, I walked into the bathroom and immediately heard a soft pfffffft. The smell of violets wafted to my nose shortly after the puff and I realized what the sound was. I had set off the automatic air freshener simply by walking into the room, and I was insulted. I didn't stink and the cheeky freshener hadn't even given me the chance to decimate the bathroom before it just assumed that I would be unbearable. It's a rare day when I allow inanimate objects to insult me so. I bitterly grumbled to myself as I washed my hands, but then I stopped. This was no different than the air freshener that was of almost vital importance at the liquor store.

The air freshener at the liquor store was just as cheeky as the one in the workshop bathroom. It would pfffffft when it didn't have to, and it would refuse to do it when we needed it to. Luckily for us, there was a button we could hit for an immediate burst of Apple Cider or Fresh Vanilla in dire cover-up emergencies. Unluckily for us, the air freshener was far above our heads, mounted high on the wall, taunting us. We would hold our breath until the rank offender was gone before we would grab the broom and start trying to hit the air freshener like a plastic, perfumed pinata. Even on its boldest day, the cheeky air freshener could not overpower the palpable, toe-curling funk that accompanied a few choice customers.

The absolute worst funk came from a customer I only helped once. Dreugh had helped him before and was keeping his distance, a warning sign I should have picked up on. The man was very large, but also very kind when he walked in, so I was unsuspecting. When he got to the counter, a wall of reek slammed into me. The smell of burnt asshole wading in a sea of rotting plums nearly bowled me off my feet. Trying not to be rude to a customer who was actually being polite to me, I carried on a conversation with him, all the while trying to back away as imperceptibly as possible. Jash unfortunately took notice and chuckled as he nudged me back towards the counter with his elbow. I held my breath and tried to hide my grimace behind a smile. The bio-hazard man bid me a very pleasant farewell and left. Fresh air has never tasted so sweet since, and the air freshener got the workout of its life.

My least favorite person-generated odor is one that radiates off of hardcore smokers. I won't lie when I say that I kind of enjoy a little bit of cigarette smell on a person (particularly on guys). I don't want it permeating my clothes, house, or car, but when there's the faintest aroma of cigarette smoke on a guy, I don't mind it. When you smell like you've been rolling in tobacco leaves and festering in chew since birth, I start to mind. Combine the stewed-in-tobacco smell with a set of long, curling yellow fingernails and you've got yourself the stinky GP lady.

If you were to put stinky GP lady in a black robe, you'd only be missing the hat to make her look like a witch. Her voice sounded like her vocal cords had been put to a belt sander and then chucked into a cement truck full of pea gravel for years. Her gravelly voice came with the bonus hacking death rattle that only the most determined near-corpse can produce. Every time she coughed, it sounded as though the gunk in her lungs were trying to crawl out, all the while wetly clunking about her esophagus until it finally breached her mouth, where it became the hack of a tumorous bear that had been lurking in her oral cavity. She was always decent and she had a good sense of humor, but her breath could have singed the hair off a wooly mammoth. That kind of tobacco breath not only smells bad, but you can actually feel it in your nostrils. Stank GP breath feels the way that yellow, grimy smoker teeth look. It lays in your nose like the gunk left behind by years of inhaling tar and nicotine. Thinking back on my encounters with stinky GP lady, I wish I would have had some sort of toothbrush for my nose, some way to scrape the cigarette plaque from my olfactories. 

Everyone smells bad from time to time. It's an unfortunate reality. Another unfortunate reality is that it doesn't matter how nice a person is, you will remember them best for how they smell. Now if only that damn air freshener would stop going off...

Tales of the Underaged and Unbelievable

There is a distinct feel to someone who comes into a liquor store and shouldn't be there. They reek of youth, anxiety, and a hint of adrenaline, and you can feel their nerves standing on end from the moment they enter the store. If the youngster happens to be a male, he swaggers in with his shoulders hunched. Whether he's become a hunchback because he's terrified of being busted or because he wants to appear as though he just don't care is unclear. In either case, people who are old enough to buy alcohol don't suddenly take positions as bell ringers or minions to mad scientists the moment they walk into the store. If the youngster happens to be female, she tries to saunter and hopes to high heaven that the boys are working the registers and not me. Perhaps if she can distract them with her booty wiggle or ditzy slut flirtation, they won't notice that her 21st birthday isn't for another two years. To be fair, I myself have used the wiggle-flirt combo to get what I want from time to time, but not in situations where people are paid to make sure underagers don't buy booze, no matter how slutty and wiggly they are. Not only are the ways the two genders come into the store different, but their approaches at the counter are different as well.

The males do one of two things: they either attempt to distract by chatting you up, or they act like they're in a huge rush. I like to call the first distracting-via-chatter tactic "monkeychatter." Monkeychatter is fast, senseless noise that makes about as much sense as a monkey screeching, cooing, and eep-ooping (a technical term) at a person with no prior monkey experience. For example, a young man came in one day with his fake ID burning a hole in his wallet. He strolled up to the counter with his mad scientist minion disguise and placed his six pack on the counter in front of me.

"How are you today?" I asked, scanning his beer.

"Yeah the weather is crazy today! I've never seen clouds that...moved...like clouds..." He answered, his eyes darting around the space behind me.

I put on my unimpressed, "you're really trying this?" face and asked for his ID. It was a good fake, but if he just turned 21, his ID shouldn't have been styled like the ones issued in the 70's. Needless to say, I told McLovin to hop along.

The other tactic these underage fellas try is acting like they're in a hurry. My best guess behind this is to fluster the cashier by saying, "I had to be somewhere 5 minutes ago, can we move this along?" and causing the cashier to skip the ID check. Either that or the guy is so massively uncomfortable with the fact that he might get his $150 fake taken away (in case you didn't know that, we totally can take IDs away and give them to the cops). Pretending not to speak English falls into this category as well since the cashier obviously has to skip the step due to a raging language barrier. One spectacular instance of language barrier meets an epic fake occurred one night when Rumi and I were closing.

Rumi was closing a drawer in the office loft above the registers where I was stationed. A Hispanic gentleman came in and tried to buy beer. I asked for his ID, and luckily he understood me. What he handed me was laughable. It looked like a real Colorado ID in almost every aspect except one: it was bright purple. I bit back a scoff as I told him that his Barney-colored fake was not an acceptable form of identification.

"Why not?" He asked, genuinely confused about why his grape ID wouldn't cut it.

"Because it's fake." I answered.

He gave me the best "Well, DUH" face I've seen since I watched "Full House" as a kid. I didn't know what was worse: that he was trying to trick me with a fake that awful, or that someone else actually fell for it. He muttered something in Spanish and held out his hand to get the ID back. I shook my head and held the ID further out of his reach.

"Gimme back." He said.

"No. I'm turning this in." I replied.

"No, gimme back."

This exchange carried on until he finally wrote down his phone number so the police could call him to pick it up. Little did he know that the cops would surely call him...for info on who gave him the ID.

It was unusual for me to interact with a female underager. This was because I, as another girl, was not their target audience. In this regard, the underage girls who came in were probably smarter than the underage boys that came into the store. Sure, the girl could try to bat her eyelashes at me, but it honestly wouldn't do much good. Batting her eyelashes at anyone else would prove more effective. Even then, there were warning signs. If the girl looked too young, card her. If she looked overly anxious, card her. If the girl comes in with giant black X's on her hands from where she went clubbing the night before so that the bartender wouldn't serve her, card her. That last one did actually happen, the response to which was "You're kidding, right? Have a nice afternoon."

The one thing I noticed about almost all of the underagers, whether male or female, was that they tended to distance themselves from everything. Not just putting on an air of aloofness in their attempts to look older. Lord knows that when I'm trying to seem mature, I stick my chin up and pretend not to care about anything. It's a physical distance. They stand back from the counters, the registers, the shelves. It's almost as though they hope the distance will keep them from accidentally doing something wrong that would draw more attention to them, but the distance itself is suspicious.

The last group of underage kids I encountered all hovered well beyond the counter, forming a hunchbacked bell-ringer's union meeting in front of the counter.They wanted a keg and a bottle of Grey Goose. There were three of them, the youngest of which was practically out the door with how far away he hovered. The only one out of the three of them that spoke English was underage, and the only one that was at least 21 didn't speak a lick of it. I told them what the total was, and the English speaker turned to the 21-year-old and asked for the money. Rather than the 21-year-old handing me the money directly, he handed it to the younger English speaker. For those of you who haven't taken the vendor training course, this is illegal. Since he touched the money that was paying for the hooch, I had to card the English speaker.

"What? Why?" He demanded indignantly.

I explained the situation to him and they stormed off in a huff. What a bitch I was for denying sale to a kid and ruining his party time. He later sent in two girls to get the exact same thing. This time, they were hindered by the fact that the ID was expired. Yes, liquor stores can deny sale for expired IDs. In fact, they're supposed to. Regardless of gender, underagers invariably act indignant over being busted, as though it were our fault that they weren't smart enough to get the booze for themselves. Those slutty, wiggly hunchbacks probably still shake their fists to the heavens, cursing the liquor store for dashing their underage binge drinking plans. Doesn't that store know that all a teen wants to do is get sick off of Bud, puke everywhere, and probably get one of their classmates pregnant? Sheesh.