Everyday is Halloween...

My first day at Miska’s was on Halloween. I thought that was so cool. I mean, okay fine, in general, Goths do not get overjoyed about too much, especially Halloween. Like that famous and oft-quoted Ministry song goes, “Everyday is Halloween.”

I guess I’m like lucky to live in the twenty-first century, because I never feel bad for being goth. As my friend Leon says, mopey Goths are just in it to make us look bad honey, don’t let them take you down with them! I used to wear really elaborate costumes for Halloween, the best one was when I was eleven and I was a pink crayola. I still have the headpiece for that. It was hard to sit down in that costume. And go to the bathroom. My mom made it for me.

Anyway, I thought about not wearing a costume at all and just wearing kind of regular people clothes. You know, like some of my old Gap clothes that my mom refuses to throw away because she’s sure someday I’ll wear them again. Yeah right. But then, Halloween happened to be on a Wednesday this year, so I thought it might be fun if I wore a costume to work.

I found this really cool Super Seductive Spider Lady costume and the best thing about it was the outfit was just an allover body suit of thin black mesh that was supposed to look like spider webs, with carefully crafted denser parts over certain areas. I already had little plastic spiders in all sorts of colors, so I plucked out the purple and green ones (to go with my hair of course) and I glued them all over the suit with super glue.

I had so much fun just getting my costume together. Leon and Rachel came over and we all wore our costumes and took hits of LSD and somehow managed to glue our fingers together so that when we woke up the next morning, we tried everything we could think of for like an hour and then we got to the nail polish remover and that worked better than anything.

So anyway, I walked into Miska’s with my costume and of course, none of those losers were wearing a costume. I tried not to wear too much makeup, but the one special thing I did was paint the right side of my lips green and the left side purple. I spiked my hair up to show off the green and purple highlights, which were already beginning to fade, and I feel the spider suit start riding in my crotch and I wondered why I didn’t wear underwear until I remembered that the lines would have shown. So much contemplation involved in costuming. And Everyday is Halloween for a goth like me.

Cy just smiled at me and said “Good Evening.” If he was surprised by my costume, he didn’t show it. Larry, that fucker, said, “Well hello there!” and looked me up and down like I was some Lincoln Park slut who couldn’t wait to get a piece of him and said, “How can I help you?”

“Larry, it’s me,” I said. I cleared my nose and throat indignantly with a sniff of my nose. “Madeline.”

Larry is still smiling at me, ball cap rising from his eyebrows, plaid shirted shoulders drawn in, hands on the counter, and then his grin opened wider to reveal jagged nicotine stained teeth. His right hand rose up to cover these horrid teeth automatically. He finally said, in the sort of jovial voice a ringmaster at a circus might use, “Don’t you look nice today!”

“Thanks Larry,” I said, glad that he was at least trying to compliment me. “So where do you want me?”

He grinned again, his hand shot up, and he said, “Oh boy, it looks like we’re going to have fun tonight!”

Or, I’ll have to wonder if everything I say could be considered sexual innuendo. What a freak.

The whole time, Cy just stood behind me near the vodka aisle where he always stands, smiling perpetually like some sort of garden gnome.

“Well, little lady,” Larry began, and his teeth force his lips to meet after each syllable. “Come on behind here and get to know the register. Have you ever used a cash register before?”

I said, “Yeah, I’ve had lots of jobs like this.” That was totally a lie. I had only ever had jobs that were odd, like painting houses, walking dogs, pet-sitting, babysitting (until I got too Goth for the neighbors and they stopped calling). Sometimes my mom still gave me my allowance if I managed to toss out the trash or pick up my room. I told her it made me feel really vile to take money as an adult, but she didn’t seem to listen. She would just slide envelopes under my door when the music was too loud for me to hear her knocking.

So then Larry said to me, “Well, Cy, maybe I should show her around the store?” I turned around to look at Cy and there was that same wide smile. He sorta looked like a bald genie in a lamp.

“Well, obviously,” he began, stepping off the raised platform behind the register, “you’ve been in the store before, so you can see where things are.” He looked at me like he was afraid I might be dumb.

“Yeah,” and I pointed to each section as I named them, “Beer in the back, wines, whites chilled, bags of ice.” I stepped past Cy and smiled at him as I said, “Vodka, and other spirits, snacks, candy, cigarettes.”

When I was faced the register I looked at Larry, “Fifths, champagnes, and finally, beef jerky.” I picked up a package and held it between my hands like a whip.

“Well,” he said, his smile dimmed. “I can see you’re going to be very easy to train.” He walked down the aisle towards the back coolers. “Ever been behind these doors before?”

“No,” I said in a drawn out tease.

“Follow me," he said. "We better go now before things get too hectic in here.”

“Oh, hectic,” I said, feeling more and more comfortable. “We wouldn’t want that.”

The door to the coolers was kind of like a secret door in the wall in that it didn’t exactly look like there was a door there, but they put one in because they had too. A simple latch on the outside, the kind on a screen door would have, and the long metal part hung limply along the wall.

“We don’t latch this,” Larry said in a serious tone. “Might lock someone in the cooler. That’s no good. Sometimes customers close it and you won’t wonder about where Cy or José or Sayed have been until you haven’t seen them around for a while. Then you’ll find them in here, cursing you and yelling at you. Have you ever had a foreign man yell at you in their foreign language?”

I shook my head no.

He smiled again, and up close, his teeth actually smelled like nicotine. “You will.”