Under the Influence Age

Yesterday I stopped by my convenience store, with a name akin to Voice of the Village, to pick up a quick 44 oz. Diet Coke. I proceeded without incident to the back wall where the eight-foot-long soda fountain holds court. After refilling my refill cup, I headed up front toward the counter. That's where the incident foisted itself upon me.

Carrying my precarious tall cup by the tiny bottom that fits into the car beverage holder, I was nearly bowled over by a screaming heat-seeking missile. Well. Not so much a screaming heat-seeking missile as a slightly-plump blond-haired high-school-age girl darting from behind the Sun Chip endcap. I lifted my cup, though definitely not in a toast, and shrugged a shoulder, allowing her to pass by with my innate bull-fighter reflexes. About three steps past, she turned slowly and said, "Woooaahh." But without the leather jacket and coolitude of Fonzi.

Dud Missile had been lurking near the front door when I entered. I paid her no nevermind. When one works with individuals that age all the live-long day, one is not inclined to greet and befriend strangers of the same ilk. Besides, Dud Missile was talking to a younger boy about some issue for which I could not have mustered less interest. I walked right through the sentence, "Would you still like me if..." and out from under their drama.

After dropping my eighty cents into the hand of the eldest of the clerks, I turned and headed for the door. As my karma would have it, Dud Missile was back on that side of the store. Taking up space. Fiddling with her cell phone in her left hand. I put my 44 oz. Diet Coke in my left hand to protect it with the buffer zone of my body. Much like an all-conference point guard protecting the basketball from the terrier-like advances of an aggressive defender. Or like a medieval gentleman on the street protecting his lady from garbage, chamber pots, and other effluence tossed from windows above.

Dud Missile wheeled around at the instant I inched around her. She jabbed that cell phone deep into the fluffy folds of flesh near my equator. I think her hand momentarily disappeared up to the elbow. I pivoted a bit to facilitate the withdrawal of her appendage from my person. "Excuse me," I said. Not in the Steve Martin manner of, "Well, excuuuuuuuuse meeeeee!" No. Just a simple excuse me. Like that used by teachers who do not suffer bad manners gladly, but who must maintain a modicum of self-control.

Dud Missile looked after me as if in slow motion. "Oh." The encounter itself would have been fairly unremarkable except for one glaring anomaly. SHE REEKED OF BOOZE! Yeah. There's no way that gal was twenty-one. And I don't mean she smelled like her alcoholic mother driving to the store on a booze run had accidentally spilled Pink Panties on her. No. She smelled like when a person ingests alcohol, and the byproducts ferment their way out the mouth with each exhalation. This was at 4:00 in the afternoon. Maybe Dud Missile had been drinking Germ-X all day. Or she had inserted some kind of alcohol-soaked implement into an orifice for a quick buzz. But the fact remains that this little gal reeked of spirits.

I went out the door and about my business. I don't know how she got there or who was responsible for her, or how she managed to careen around that establishment without knocking over merchandise. It may take a village to raise a child, but my voice remained silent on this one.