Part Two: "Title dictates behaviour"
Part Three: "Sounds to me somebody needs to visit the gym"
Paradigm
You need to have some degree of self-confidence when working in a shop. It is a certainty that if you have the slightest of flaws, all customers will not only notice but also point it out to you. In Clerks, a customer enters the Quick Stop and tells Dante that he looks a little out of shape. As more customers come into the shop, Dante's critic ropes them in too - totally damaging his ego.
In my case, I had terrible skin. I must have been some freak of nature because, apart from my face, the rest of my body was perfectly clear. I wouldn't have minded acne in places where I could cover it up and hide away from it. But no, I had to have it all on my face.
Now, I'm sure that you are like me and would not go up to a complete stranger and say "bloody hell, what a horrible looking face you've got!" You might think it, but you understand that it would be insulting to voice those thoughts. However, I had the discomfort of being stared at and commented on by Penarth's massive population of indiscreet, ham-fisted residents. Some would try the sympathetic approach of "Oh, poor you, it must hurt so much" ("not as much as your words", I would think). Others would just blurt it out - "God, shouldn't you go and see someone about that?" As if it wasn't bad enough that I already felt self-conscious without anybody pointing out my blatant imperfections, my ego then had to take an additional battering each time a customer came in. You know, just to rub salt in the wound.
I was never sure whether to take it as a compliment when years later, after my skin had cleared up, customers would come in and say "Oh - are you new here?" Even today, I'll see somebody in the street who used to come in the shop and they'll say "Don't I know you from somewhere?" When I remind them who I am, the response is always the same - "Oh, you used to have terrible skin, didn't you? You poor thing!"
Of course, at 6'3" I am also rather tall. You can see that I had nowhere to hide. I had all the usual comments ("what's the weather like up there?") and they grated just as anything would after five repetitive years. Perhaps the strangest conversation that ever occurred as a result of my height was the one I had with three very posh gentlemen on their way to Glamorgan Golf Club. It went a little something like this:
Golfer: I say old chap, aren't you tall? What are you? 6'2, 6'3?
Me: Yes, I'm 6'3.
Golfer: Bally hell! Are you a golfer?
Me: No, video game golf is my limit.
Golfer: Damn shame, old bean. Damn shame. The chaps were hoping you could make up the numbers!
Whimsy
By now it is clear that in the comparison between Clerks and my life, I was Dante and M was Randal. It is only correct therefore that L was Veronica - Dante's long suffering girlfriend. I started dating L when I was 17. She was a friend of LF and we had got to know each other over a number of boring Saturday afternoons at the shop. It wasn't long before she became a regular VIP guest at Club Redlands News each week.
At first, L would run all the errands that I didn't have time to do. Hence her trips into Cardiff to buy CDs or to track down rare vinyl copies of The Best Of David Essex because I had an obsession with the song Rock On. Soon she decided that it would be more fun to hang out at the shop for hours. She had seen the fun M was having and she wanted a piece of the action. So, our Party Of Three was born.
Maybe it wasn't the best idea to have my porno-obsessed best friend and my curvaceous girlfriend in the same room, but we had fun all the same. If staring at L's arse all afternoon kept M away from the copies of Razzle then so be it. Soon the shop became full of flirting and sexual tension. The customers must have noticed too - one night, as I was locking up the shop with L and M, two little boys looked at the three of us and asked "are you going to go home and shag?" to which M replied "Yes!".
You've never seen two pairs of eyes light up so fast.
And in case you're wondering - yes, L and I are still together.
Quandary
Whilst there were many things that I would have liked to have done to the many annoying customers, I never wished any of them dead. That would have just been bad for business. Dante had to deal with a deceased customer and seeing how he coped, I'm glad I never had to be in the same situation.
I came close to having to telephone the undertaker once (and by that I mean the funeral director, not the American wrestler). A man came into the shop, slightly worse for wear after a long day of drinking in the pub across the road. He bought his things and left. However, it was a wet day. A very wet day. The step outside the shop was soaking. As this man stumbled out of the door, he lost his footing and fell on the pavement. Had he been sober I'm sure that he would have just got back up onto his feet. That would have been too simple though (and not a very interesting story). No, in his drunken stupor the man decided that he was in an episode of Starsky And Hutch. As he hit the pavement, he did a full 360 degree roll. Into the road. As a double decker bus was coming along.
I couldn't look.
I hid my face and waited for the horrible noise that was sure to follow. Miraculously, the bus missed his head by less than an inch. It must have been his lucky day. He lay in the road for a minute. Passers-by just stared in shock. Finally he began moving. He slowly got to his feet, brushed himself down and composed himself. As he crossed the road on his return to the pub, he shouted "your shop is a bloody death trap!"
Lamentation
Actually, he was right in a way. The shop wasn't necessarily a death trap but it was certainly a haven for illness. The thing is, our boss was a little bit tight. If something went wrong he would prefer to try and fix it himself rather than get a professional in. That was the reason why an already flickering fluorescent light began to flicker even more, giving me the most incredible headaches after each shift. In the summer, we had no fans or air conditioning (he didn't see the economic sense) so it was a melt-fest for both me and the chocolate. In the winter, it was freezing because a) he would insist on leaving the door open and b) having been told that fans can have a warming effect in the winter, he finally bought a cooling system which turned the place into a freezer from October to March.
I hope that our customers liked rock solid chocolate.
Perhaps the worst moment was the morning of my 18th birthday. It was bad enough that my boss had made mock-up newspaper billboards saying "COOL AT 18 - GARETH SPEAKS!" and posted them all over the shop and surrounding area. However, it was also the day that we suffered one of the longest power cuts in recent history. Rather than keep the shop closed, I was ordered to light some fifty-year-old oil lamps and sell the newspapers from the pavement outside. Strangely, as my shift ended, the power returned. To this day I'm still not entirely sure that it wasn't just one big birthday wind-up.
Randal asks Dante the same question in Clerks as both M and L asked me: "Why don't you quit?" The thing is, I knew that it could be a lot worse. Compared to other shop workers, I was on easy street. Apart from the many annoyances, I was really getting paid to hang out with my friends and eat as many sweets as I liked (well OK, I helped myself to as many sweets as I liked).
So I stayed there, but not for much longer. Eventually I saw sense. But that's another story...
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