I had a bizarre dream that awoke me nauseous. It was part of a much longer more entangled dream, naturally, but I forgot everything that came before when I entered one of those rotating exit doors and there was no opening on the other side to let me out, and when I got back around to the inside of the building where I had entered, it was closed up too, and it was motorized so it was going around on its own and I had to follow it around and around in a tight circle. The glass doors and concave walls were tinted a dark smoky gray to keep the inside of the building cooler so I couldn't very well see who was in the building. There were a few people sitting in chairs like in a hospital waiting room or lobby and they were only silhouettes. The glass was thick and my hands slapping on it weren't making much noise on the inside of the churning capsule I was caught in and I figured even less noise on the outside. I wished that I had on a ring so that the tapping could possibly be heard. I was surprised that nobody else had come along to exit, to discover me in my distress.One of the silhouettes in the chairs in the building reminded me of the black woman who recently came into Treasure City Thrift, where I volunteer two to six on Fridays. She took a dress into the dressing closet, came out with it on, threw her blue jean shorts and T-shirt on the counter as she unraveled two dollar bills and said, "How much you want for that dress?" I told her the dresses are four dollars. She said, "I got two." I said, "Well, it's four dollars right now, four plus tax: four-twenty-five." She said, "That's too much for that dress. It ain't even a designer label." I told her that all the dresses are the same price, that labels don't matter to us. She said, "Well, they do to me."
She threw the two dollars and a cell phone on the counter, opening the cell phone and showing me, I guess, that it actually worked. "I'll leave you my phone and go next door and get you the other two dollars." I was hesitant. She said, "Give me a bag for my clothes." I was reluctant -- it's a store policy not to give out bags because people use them for shoplifting. I started pulling a plastic bag out of the pile then thought better of it, realized I was somehow being played. I told her she should leave the dress in the store, go get her money and come back and buy the dress. She said, "Mother fucker! I'm leaving my three-hundred dollar phone!" I said, "Yeah, don't do that." I told her again that she should leave the dress and come back with the money.
She went off like an X-rated version of Aunt Esther from "Sanford & Son." "That's right, mother fucker, I'm gonna leave the dress here. But I ain't coming back. I'm in this mother fuckin' store every goddamn day! Four dollars for a fuckin' dress, ain't even a designer label." While she was saying all of this, she went back into the dressing closet and was changing. I stayed calm, continued my afternoon job of searching out wire hangers on the racks and replacing them with the plastic kind with heavier metal rotating hooks at the top.
Scott, the guy who essentially runs TCT (along with Tom, the only paid employee), was in Dallas for the weekend, and James, the volunteer who was taking his place for the day, was gone to drop off some recycling at Ecology-Action and then to El Chilito to get us something to eat. Aunt Esther came out of the dressing closet, her T-shirt not pulled down over her oddly-shaped beer belly with the dress wadded up. She tossed it on the counter and walked through the store continuing her rant. "Y'all need to get rid of him," to nobody in particular (there was one other woman in the store shopping). "He's no good; I mean that! He's a bad mother fucker!" I'm pretty sure she didn't mean that last comment in the cool, "bad mamma-jamma" way. Did I mention she wore a frosted blond wig? That's important. Although Aunt Esther didn't wear a frosted blond wig, she did wear a wig, that's part of the image I'm trying to evoke.
After the dust had settled, the other woman asked me a couple of questions about items for sale, bought one of them. Fifty-four cents. As she handed me the exact change she said, "Don't let them get you riled up." I told her I'd try not to, and I'm thinking right now that that sounded kind of racist, though I know that wasn't the tattooed white woman's intent.
Aunt Esther came back later in the day, when James was back, and she bought a different dress. She put four dollars and twenty cents on the counter. I still felt like she was playing me -- hard life, she probably plays and gets played every goddamn day of the mother fuckin' week -- but I felt like I needed to be firm, for my sake as well as hers. I said, "Do you have another nickel? This is four-twenty." She dug into each of her jeans pockets one at a time coming up with nothing. Somewhere in the middle I said, "I can get it out of the penny cup."
She left her four dollars and twenty cents, left the dress, walked out of the store, said, "I'll get it." I offered to get it out of the penny cup again but she ignored me. I wasn't giving her any slack and she wasn't taking my mother fuckin' five-cent charity either! She returned with five pennies. I thanked her, put her dress in a bag and she left without a word, oddly subdued, like she'd stepped out of a dream and disappeared back into it just as quickly.
