I have a fantastic job. I get to root around in the printed word for fun and profit, day in and day out. It's a sweet gig, in part because of the books and also because of the magnificent specimens of humanity I work with. Booxieland is truly a dream wrapped in a wish dipped in Elton John's golden colostomy bag. Life is gooood.
And then, there are the customers.
These are not your garden-variety homeless war vets and sycophantic homeschool moms that loiter about in the public library asking annoying questions and making BM in the "public" toilet. Our customers are a gnarley lot of confused, genetically challenged inbreds with dubious sphincter control and the occasional bad debit card. They shop in fuck-tard posses generally, bolstered by the comforting nest of stupidity.
We have a few regulars, people who trot in time after time to annoy or frighten the hell out of us with no regard for the restrictions of their probation or the life of their oxygen tank. They acquire nick-names for the same reason children or prisoners do; they are horribly mutilated in some way ("Burned-With-Acid-Single-Mom"), or they have a particular freakish nuance ("Audio Thief", "Home-School Mom", "The Angry Jew").
The only deviants from this group are the singles. Lil' ole' ladies who come in to buy soft-core porn; the greasy "older" men who come in for the hard-core, and the occasional rare socio-pathic possibly homicidal lunatic. These are the loners who drive very clean cars and who say things like "Pardon me, but do you have any true crime books with color photographs?"
For these reasons and more, working in a used bookstore is like working in an Emergency Room. You dress everyday expecting that you may possibly get pissed or shat upon, yet still somehow manage to summon basic human surprise when someone mixes it up and vomits blood on you instead. No matter how many days or weeks on end you work, you just never fucking know WHAT is going to walk in that door next.
Unless you do.
Today is dedicated to you, Skin Suit.
Skin Suit is one serious Doogie Houser looking motherfucker. He's got a satiny blonde pompadour, the kind of glasses Molly Ringwald wears in Roman Polanski's wet dreams, and a genuine passion for genteel creepiness.
He comes in nearly every Monday or Tuesday night, parking right outside the door so we can just make out the orderly row of clean shirts he keeps hanging in his back seat. (Blood spatter is unpredictable and vulgar. Best be prepared.) And with the quiet, subversive air of a surgeon, he moves around us, watching, waiting, and speaking only after he's determined an appropriately fucked up thing to say.
"So do you write? Well I do! I love to write. I'm working on a book now. It's going to be a Horror story. It's not finished yet though. I'm sure the ending will come to me one day... I just have so many IDEAS, you know?"
It's all pretty harmless on the surface, but coming from a guy whom you've already decided has a body in the trunk of his car and who probably makes his own condoms from the discarded inner ear canal of his previous "dates," it can be unfathomably weird.
I asked Ha'pint to offer a quote in regards to the Skin Suit situation. She said "I'm pretty sure that he's going to be the last thing I see before I die. On the other hand, his teeth are pretty amazing."
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