FRED

People are transient in Reno. They come and go, I watch new neighbors move in and old neighbors move out on either side of my house at least once a year. I've been here three years, I've known Fred about two, and Fred just learned my name today. This is curious, because after two years of conversation, he behind the 7-11 counter, omnipresent purveyor of cigarettes and bottled iced tea, and I, nicotine deprived and dehydrated on the other side of the counter, I knew his name and he never knew mine.

Through my enthusiastic and numerous epic stories concerning Fred, and what he says and does when I go to 7-11, Fred has inspired a cult following among my acquaintances and undoubtedly others and their cohorts. What usually happens is that when you go to this 7-11, which is on Booth Street if you're interested in having your life forever altered, is that you enter the store, and are immediately stunned by the fluorescent lights beaming so strong that you can hear the faint, high pitch of emanating, artificial light that resembles a choir of mosquitoes singing the high note of "Amazing Grace." Fred's eyes shift, and you are greeted with a friendly solemnity: "Good evening." Or morning, or afternoon. You make a beeline to the back of the store, grab an iced green tea and pivot around to the counter. Fred awaits. He makes a real event of it. First, he stares at you for half a second, turns around, grabs your cigarettes and you don't have to say a word. He puts them on the counter with great ceremony, and here's the best part- when he hands you your change, you should say thank you. If you're re lucky, he'll return your nicety with a resounding "I...THANK...YOU!" It's a tremendous thing to be thanked for your cigarettes and iced tea with such thunderous and decisive delivery, and you are quite bemused as you trip out the door, feeling as though you have discovered the first clue to the secret of the universe.

So I've known Fred for two years and today he learned my name. He took the last pack of Sherman's, after the one that I bought, and put my name on it and hid it in the box below the register because it was the last pack, and the next shipment might not come for a few days. "You'll have a pack with your name on it," said Fred, and I replied what I always do, the password into this alternate universe: "Thank you."

"I thank YOU!" he exclaimed and the fluorescent lights grew brighter. His eyes are shark-gray, and they shift, sharklike, too. Fred is pale, and he has dark lips that he moistens frequently, and he maintains that shifty stare, although there is nothing about it that should take you aback. I find his presence quite calming, and I know that as long as Fred is there, my day will be violently interrupted by a repetitive yet spontaneous interaction.
II
Sometimes when I thank Fred, he responds, “Thank you-very-MUCH,” accenting the last word and shifting his gaze at me. I know he's glad I'm there and I also know that he wonders what's going to emerge from my mouth, just as what he will say to me is a source of endless conjecture and speculation. Shortly after I met Fred, I decided that I needed a butler, and that Fred was the perfect candidate. He would look good in a dark suit, indeed much better than the bright orange prison work-crew smock that 7-11 employees are obliged to wear. The best thing about Fred is his regal air and his discretion. Fred is from Jersey (he pronounces it JOIS-ey) and I got in my head somewhere as a teen, through Wodehouse and his Jeeves, that a proper butler should be British. Fred's utter discretion overshadows his non-British origins. Like Jeeves, Fred smokes, menthols unlike Jeeves, and much to my dissatisfaction, but I have never seen him smoke. His teeth are voluminous and piled atop one another like a caved in piano, which I think makes him look British.

I've never told Fred that once I get out of school and somehow acquire a domicile large enough to require a butler of sorts, he was at the top my list of candidates. There are people who actually go to school to be butlers, to learn about handling heirloom china and vicious dobermans. I wouldn't want a butler who knew more about those things than I, nor would I want to disappoint my butler, because the house would presumably be devoid of heirloom china, or any other heirloom save for the table that my great-great Grandfather carved by hand in Russia. Fred would appreciate this table much more than any dainty breakables. Fred and I are like the table, made to last. Fred sees countless people at the 7-11 every day, and I see countless more at the restaurant where I work up the street. Most of them we never see again, and others we wish that we might never see again, but Fred and I, our lives overlap,and although our paths are presumably quite different, they seem to intermingle.
Fred is discreet, but he asks me questions upon occasion. “Hey, so how 'bout that ashtray that you're gonna make me?” Fred is fascinated with my hobby, melting glass, and he likes to suggest new designs and projects that will make us both millionaires, according to his calculations. Fred would take 20% for his idea and I could keep the rest, which I think is more than fair. Once, he drew me a diagram of the perfect ashtray for his bedstand. It is a roundish glob of glass with a one-inch hole large enough to put out one cigarette. Like I said, Fred and I have a lot in common: we both like to smoke half the cigarette and smoke the other half later. While I see the function of his invention, and would very much like to make one for myself, I'm in need of a bigger torch to make this ashtray, so it will have to wait.
I haven't said a thing to Fred about being my butler, but he must know something, because the last few times I've gone to 7-11, he put on a classical CD as I walked through the door that he had obviously prepared for my arrival. I was enormously pleased, but determined to play the part, I maintained a serious expression, and looked him in the eye. “Good evening, Fred.” “Good evening to YOU!” he responded, and his eyes shifted toward the gleaming object in my hand. “Whatcha-got-THERE?!” he asked, his brow furrowed with interest. I like that his questions are also exclamations. I opened my hand and produced a gleaming marble. “I, um, well I made this for you and I thought, well I thought that it wasn't as good as an ashtray, and you already know about the deal with the torch, so I made you a marble. It's pretty useless, you can put it in a plant, or shoot it across the room and watch your cat spring after it, if you have a cat...” I rambled lamely. “USELESS!” he shouted, enchanted. He turned the small glass sphere around in his hands, and I noticed for the first time that he had small hands for a man of his size, and clean fingernails. Almost the hands of a woman. Butler hands. Not knowing quite what else to say, I mumbled goodnight. “And a good night to YOU!” Fred cried out after me. “Thanks for the MARBLE!” As I tried to put my car into reverse, I felt as though I had lost all my marbles, and I had given my last remaining one to Fred.
CORNER OF RALSTON AND VINE
Like I said, Reno is a transient town. The people who stay, the old timers, they've told me in so many bars and so many words the same thing about the place. People come to Reno to hide from something, to get out of debt, to get married, to get divorced, to shove their money into an unforgiving, blinking machine. Reno is the patron city of low-down stragglers, highway hobos, wayward prophets and underage sweethearts. Sin City's nubile little sister, so to speak...downtown's the only real shady side to the place, the rest of Reno is really beautiful.

What I like most on the way to school is to be stopped by the train. The train and I have similar schedules, and it makes me late for French at least twice a week. The train always stops me right in front of the Sands. The Sands is a gaudy throwback to 1950's casinoland. On a hot summer day when the sky is so blue it hurts, the bright yellow Sands against this backdrop with the train passing by provokes the craziest feeling of holy inspiration. The train makes me late, but I wait in reverence, thinking at least someone is going somewhere else. I love how the train passes by the Sands, the temporary angles they create together against the sky, and I love my coffee and the rings of smoke in my car that I shouldn't smoke in, but the Day and the Sun and the Sky and The Sands! Later, I will try to explain this in broken French to my dispassionate teacher: “mais madame, le soleil et le jour, et le casino, tout ensemble!”
Other than admiring their ravishing, seedy aesthetics from the outside, I mostly stay away from the casinos. I'm a broke grad student and if I lose $5 I get mad. But I digress. Another thing I like about the train crossing is the vagrants. I wouldn't call them bums, exactly. I see bums as sedentary, and vagrants as somewhat more mobile. I suppose that a vagrant is a bum on the move. The particular ones in question walk from one side of Ralston to the other. I wonder, as I watch the train pass by the sands, and the yellow of the casino melting into a cerulean infinity, where they go. They just cross the street and disappear into some corner. When I return from class, they're still there, walking about. I like the Ralston Walkers, as I've named them. I probably should feel sorry for them, or feel revulsion, or feel anything other than a benign curiosity, but I think that they have their patterns and I have mine. Instead of walking from one side of the street to the other, I walk from my couch to the kitchen to outside to 7-11 to schoolandworkandback. Sometimes I get stopped by the train, and I realize that some vagrants really know how to live. Their secret is to keep moving, even if only back and forth from one side to the other on the same street.
THE DEUX
In this town of come and go and come what may, permanency is hard to come by. I am a creature of habit, and I take joy in seeing the same customers at the Deux. The old timers tell stories of a rough and wild Nevada, when Meadowood was a meadow without the mall, where Westfield Avenue, my street, was an unpaved tumblepatch of tiny houses built in the 1930's. They get their own coffee and muse into the afternoon with the newspaper, letting the sun soak into their backs as they sit at the bar. I learn about so-and-so's great-grandfather who opened this restaurant, and the lawyers who ran a drug cartel, and the lady who used to sit in the corner and cast spells on the employees who had fallen out of her favor for any real or imagined transgression. I like to chop the scallions just right, trimming off the ends where the stringy part begins, as to conserve as much of the prized white part as possible. Nolan is telling me a story about how a man flew face-first into the door downstairs, which was mesh wire and glass to begin with, and was so drunk that he not only survived the incredible impact but then brushed himself off and stumbled away into the night. I stopped preening the scallions and set my knife down. Rule number one: never look away from the knife. “They pushed him straight down the stairs, and he flew, face-first, into the mesh and glass window.” The man had been drinking Wild Turkey all night, according to the flavorful accounts around the bar the next morning. He had become dangerous, and the guys who were working behind the counter were hopped up on enough caffeine and amphetamines to project him, missile-style, straight down the stairs and directly into the window with alarming speed and aim. I later confirmed with Chief that the man had indeed destroyed the door, he got up and walked away and was never heard from again.
Deux Gros Nez is kind of like an international embassy of expats, repats, down-and-outs, up-and-comings, cavern of secrets better left unrepeated, house of good repute in spite of what's written on the wall, nothing ventured, nothing gained, all sailors on deck and whathaveyou. You can see a kid with a bright green Mohawk sedately playing chess with one of the attorneys who work across the street on California Avenue. Oh, Deux Gros Nez, great chaotic, churning beast of delirious, long-lost desire, comical half-conceived love child, proverbial phoenix rising and falling again and again, teetering on the brink of disaster and always leaping up from a hastily-placed safety net below it. “This is not a café, this is a war zone,” Mrs. Walley wrote on a crumpled napkin, right before she cursed Duane, who was emulating her bird-sound with the skill of a professional ventriloquist, throwing bluebird squawks across the room without moving his lips.
Out of anyone, Duane had the most respect for Mrs. Walley, and he forbade people to call her the Bird Lady in his presence, and especially in HER presence, which admittedly filled up the entire room and spilled out into the balcony. She was an opera singer before she married and had two children, and she had never quite recovered from the shock of the absence of polite clapping in fashionable European opera houses replaced by the constant wailing of her two small boys. She always wore a veil over her face, and sat perched for hours at the corner table, stage left, and cast spells on anyone who looked at her too long, intermittently writing caustic messages on napkins with a quill pen. She and Duane had an affinity, even though she cursed him often. Once she heard Duane singing opera, his voice floating upstairs from the walk-in, where he was retrieving Cosmic Sauce for the pasta. She cocked her head with a look of dignified surprise, set her quill down and clasped her coffee cup with her talons. Duane had an amazing voice, an inspired voice, but he only sang in the walk-in because he liked the acoustics. I later dubbed his 34 degree concerts as “walk-in opera” and we would pile in the refrigerator and shiver not just from the cold but from the power of his voice in the small space, so loud and pure that the bottled cilantro shook admiringly from the racks.

The Blue Sky Lady
Jill first introduced me to the Blue Sky Lady when I was 19. Jill was my roommate, and she worked on Virginia Street at the Blue Heron vegetarian restaurant. Next to the Blue Heron was Beads Etc, and I'd eat at the restaurant and go next door to the beadstore afterwards and listen to Dawn tell me stories. The second story housed a ballet school, and the building should have been condemned, because the constant leaps and thuds o f the ballarinas above provided a constant fear that at any given moment, twenty little girls in pink tutus would come crashing down on the diners or on the nice old ladies bringing their necklaces for Dawn to repair. Behind the building was a halfway house. In this purgatory between incarceration and freedom lived Christine. She liked to lean her broad back against the briks that separated the bead store and the restaurant, laboriously inhaling her Camel filters while staring unblinkingly at whoever or whatever she was talking to. A lot of people resemble animals, and Christine looked very much like a tortoise, with her tan, leatherey skin and round, calm blue eyes. Her mouth was wide and cracked, and she wore a plaid lumberjack wool shirt. Jill called her the Blue Sky Lady because she always came into the restaurant and demanded a Blue Sky Cola. Sometimes she would pay and other times she would have no money. Once, when Jill turned around to retrieve Christine her cola, she swiped Jill's tips from a nearby table. Jill caught her and kindly said in a low voice, “I know that you stole my tips. I'm not going to give you Blue Sky if you steal my tips.” Christine considered the logic of this, and gave Jill her tips back, apologizing nonsensically. Jill took her money, pushed the can of Blue Sky into Christine's time-cracked hands, and resumed bussing the table. Jill talked about Christine the way that I talk about Fred, and when I had my first encounter with Christine, I was a little timid with the knowledge that I was talking to a celebrity who could, at any moment, morph into an entirely different personality.
When I first met Christine, I had stumbled out of the Blue Heron walk-in. At Deux Gros Nez, I listened to Duane sing in our walk-in. In the walk-in at the Blue Heron, I sampled an endless combination of organic fruit and vegetables ingeniously coverted into a spectacular exhibit of smoking devices. The most brilliant of this display, which included a carrot one-hitter, was a cucumber bong, artfully hollowed out and filled one inch with cold water. The stem was a carrot that was wedged into an airtight hole near the base of the cucumber. The bowl itself had a small nest of sprouts which served as a screen. “100% organic, and you can eat the evidence afterwards,” said Caleb, the usually silent cook who couldn't have been more than eighteen. He was the master carver of vegan smoking apparati. After stumbling out of the walk in, I ran face first into Christine. “A lot of people think I'm a cop,” she informed me. “I am not a cop. Are you?” I had to laugh. I had just fallen out of the walk in with a handful of brightly dressed dreadlocks holding a cucumber bong. No, I was not a cop. “Want to have lunch?” I asked her. She calmly accepted, and we sat at a four-top near the back of the restauarant. Jill came to our table and gave me a look that resided somewhere between “do you know what you're doing?” and “I know what you're doing, and let me know if things get weird.” Christine and I sat, I sedately sipping iced chai masala and she telling me stories about the halfway house. Christine slipped into pockets of absolute lucidity and then suddenly, she would close her tortoise eyes and start murmering incoherent sentences about lockups and John-Jake-Rattlesnake, her alter ego. Jill arrived with our food, smiling widely. Jill has a heart of gold, she has broken nearly every male heart in Reno and is a favorite of local eccentrics.
After lunch, Christine and I smoked her Camel filters, which made me cough, by the dumpster behind the restaurant. She lumbered back to the halfway house, and I got in my car and drove home. A few months later, I packed up my things and went to Spain for two years. When I came back to Reno, the owner sold the Blue Heron and went to work as a postman. Beads etc. moved next to Trader Joe's south of town. Even the diminuitive bombsquad ballerinas were forced to leave, as it was decided that one of them would eventually pirouette through the floor, which was rapidly deteriorating before the horrified eyes of the ballet instructor. The whole building was boarded up, and I stood in front, thinking about time. I heard a voice behind me. “Hello, Nicole.” I turned around and found Christine in her plaid lumber jacket, eyes fixed firmly on me, mouth agape in
terrapin surprise. “I'm John-Jack-Rattlesnake. Want a cigarette?” I accepted, lit the Camel filter and tried not to cough. We sat and smoked, and she asked me for $1. “There's no more Blue Sky,” she said sadly when I gave her the dollar. “There's Blue Sky in another place,” I offered, but I knew what she meant. I was surprised that she remembered my name after two years, but I shouldn't be. Eccentrics have an eye for details. I never saw Christine after that day. The buiding has been remodeled, and the dance school is upstairs once again. Now there's an Indian Restaurant which is actually quite good, and an upscale kitchen store that sells affluent mothers overpriced ladels and dutch ovens. “You're not a cop!” was the last thing that Christine said before she shuffled back to the halfway house. I smiled, agreed, and got in my car.



Convenience Store Karma

I met my friend Sandra's ex-boyfriend a few weeks after he got out of prison for holding up an AM-PM for the ridiculous sum of $2.74. He was drunk, and he accepted a dare from his equally inebriated friends to hold up the convenience store for a stupid, random amount of money. His forefinger cocked in his pocket like a gun, he demanded the cash from the terrified cashier, and when she counted the $2.74 with trembling hands, Sandra's ex-boyfriend ran, laughing and howling down the street.

The police caught him a block away, and he was booked and sentenced to ten months behind bars for armed robbery. He is an intense guy, with really unusual light blue eyes, sort of creepy and hypnotic. He's all very polite and social, but there's just this energy about him. So he's been in jail for ten months and he fell in love with my friend, who is beautiful and aloof. She thinks that hes interesting and brilliant and I think he's like the last one, interesting, brilliant, and ultimately schizophrenic. A month later, Sandra finds that abnormal emanating energy annoying, and he is humanely replaced by a soft-spoken, walking mannequin named Ted.

I never thought of the guy again until last night when I walk into the same AM-PM and who do I see? Sandra's ex-boyfriend, working behind the counter. He sees me as I walked through the door and those crazy Samoyed eyes light up. Big, wide smile. Pasty, convenience store skin, but attractive nonetheless. "Nicole!" he yelled as if we were long-lost friends who hadn't seen each other in over a decade. We were the only people in the store, and he leans over and whispers, "This is the same store that, you know, I robbed." "Yeah, I know," I say.. I really don't know what else to say. "They really like me here. They want me to work more hours. The owners actually lied to me. They said, 'This is the safest convenience store around. Never been robbed.' They don't know that I went to prison for 10 months because I held up this very store."

I wonder about the karmic wheel and the events that lead us to where we are. Guy holds up a mini-mart with his finger in his pocket for less than five bucks, gets thrown in the slammer for almost a year, and returns to the same store to work there thirty hours a week. Thoroughly intrigued by the appropriateness of the situation, and also impressed by that clear, gleaming confidence from those eyes, I ask him if he felt that his karmic slate had been wiped clean. "Well, yeah," he said, never breaking that lunatic grin. "They're really good people to work for. And I'm going back to school for anthropology, so it pays the bills. You know, I haven't had a drop of alcohol in over six months." He explains that he was adopted, and that he had some hereditary disease that inhibited his ability to process alcohol, and it could kill him if he drank too much and so on. I look toward the door as if I were in a hurry, because suddenly, all of this is too much and I just wanted a newspaper and a pack of cigarettes, anyway. He gives me my change, smiling still, tells me when he works, feel free to stop by anytime.

I don't pretend to understand it. I just came in for a pack of smokes and I caught sight of living proof of consequences in action. I look inward, and feel afraid. Why is it my destiny to outlive Jim Morrison, slinging espresso shots and going to school? Why is Sandra's ex-boyfriend working at the very convenience store he robbed? In the absence of religion, this is how we atone. He's righting a wrong, and I just plain work my tail off out of guilt that somewhere along the line I haven't been doing enough, but we both kind of belong where we are right now, and I feel like we're doing the right thing. Its weird how I relate to convenience store clerks, I thought that Fred at 7-11 was the only one, but they're everywhere. Not at every convenience store, mind you, but one in ten has a real sage.