F. Scott and the Checkout Guy

I'm at the liquor store, and there's this quarterly publication about things you can drink available, so I ask the checkout guy for a copy—I'm a writer, I say, and I have an idea for a story they might run.

What kind of writer? he asks. He's a middle-aged guy, facial hair and glasses, a hard-to-read face, short, intense but friendly.

What kind? I'm flummoxed; all kinds, I guess, magazines, whatever.

Now he wants to know my favorite writers. I flounder again—if I name one, you get a distorted idea, lacking nuance. Two or three, better, but really I'd prefer to give two dozen at least, so you have the right idea. It's not that I care so much about what people think of my literary tastes—I just don't want to give a wrong impression, it seems like a tiny little betrayal of the capacity to communicate.

Him, he loves F. Scott Fitzgerald, it seems. Someone gave him a book of short stories. He shakes his head, looking off in the middle of the store, shakes his head like he's remembering a long-lost lover, the kind that haunts you forever.

I mention that I've never really been a huge fan, and he recoils in shock. No no no, I say, he's obviously wonderful, just a cup-of-tea thing, not mine, in other words, but I've been meaning to revisit him and see if I missed something the first time around. The guy relaxes, gives me absolution. A woman comes to the counter, he really ought to attend to her, but he can't let it go—seems he's often thought about writing himself, he's got stories inside, that faraway look is on his face again.

I tell him he should, mention classes and writer's groups. And to give him a benediction myself, I say I'll read some Fitzgerald and we'll compare notes next time. This satisfies, and he turns to his customer and I push the door open and leave. One more of those moments—you're in line at the motor vehicles bureau, you sit next to someone on the train, and suddenly there's a whole marvelous inner universe revealed, and you're like Balboa, struggling up hill after hill in a part of Central America Europeans have never seen before, hot and sweaty, slapping bugs, then cresting yet another hill and stopping, silent, upon a peak in Darien, as Keats said, suddenly full of unimagined wonder.