Majik in the Air

Josh Slocum

writes about an unpleasant scene in his nominally bucolic New England hamlet, and ties it to mass migration from ‘vibrant’ areas.

There are two sides to this coin. One is, yes, the supply of unruly, unassimilated young men has skyrocketed. But the other side is illustrated by the plight of the American girl forced to wait on these miscreants in the course of her job. We as individuals can’t do anything about national migration policy, at least not right away. But we can and must do something to protect and defend the innocents manning the posts that are being probed as weak points. And this would be true whether the source was foreign or domestic.

And now I’m going to tell a story. Once upon a time (44 years ago), in a faraway and exotic land (a low-rent exurb of Dallas TX)….

I was supplementing my meager graduate student stipend by cashiering at Majik Market, a southern 7-11 type convenience store/gas station. (I suppose they might still be around in places; I haven’t seen one since I left Texas.) This was right after self-serve gas became a thing, but years before you paid at the pump, and the low-trust system of cash customers paying in advance was still uncommon. Cashiers monitored the pumps for people who looked like they might pull a drive-off, preparing to grab a license plate — because without that the cops would do nothing, and after too many incidents the theft came right out of your paycheck. That was on top of the regular duties: ringing up customers, restocking, signing for deliveries, cleaning the main store and the bathrooms, breaking down cardboard boxes, preparing cash drops for the safe, and taking the trash to the dumpster.

This was all done by one person. Corporate punished managers who scheduled more than three shifts per 24 hour period. And Majik Markets were open 24 hours a day.

I was a 22-year-old white female who until that time had never lived more than 100 miles from the tiny farm town where I was born. I was kind, open, naive, credulous, friendly, and trusting.

I was a mark.

The harassment started generically: lewd comments, attempts to slap my butt when I was restocking the bottom shelves, arguing about change when I hadn’t made a mistake. It then escalated to groups of men distracting me with this nonsense while their friends attempted to shoplift or drive off without paying for gas. On one overnight shift one guy shit all over — and I mean all over — the men’s room while two of his friends exploded frozen burritos in the microwaves. This was all a ploy to tire me out so they could steal cigarettes while I was dealing with the carnage. Instead of falling for it I threatened to call the county sheriff if they didn’t immediately leave, locked the door behind them, called my manager, and told him I was quitting at the end of the shift.

Astonishingly, that’s not the end of the story. I don’t know what else must have been going on in other locations, but something got the attention of the zone manager and he decided this store needed to be cleaned up and made an example for the rest of the north DFW sector. So he sent in a couple of trusted lieutenants to survey the situation and work out a plan. They rolled onto the scene four or five days later. They had called me specifically to ask me if I would be willing to stay on and help them try to save the store.

They were two of the butchest lesbians I have ever seen in my life before or since. GRR Martin obviously knew one of them because she was Brienne of Tarth, and the other was a wiry bobcat woman who should have been playing shortstop for the Texas Rangers. They meant business and they weren’t about to let a bunch of lowlife rednecks get in the way of their yearly bonus.

They set up an observational perimeter and watched what went on while we worked through our shifts. Somehow knowing that we weren’t dealing with this shit all alone made us braver and more assertive when faced with the predatory behavior. They eventually decided that the loss prevention numbers didn’t support single employee shifts.

By the time this happened I had already accepted an offer to become a Kelly Girl and I was subsidizing my graduate education by being very efficient at filing medical records and typing on an IBM Selectric. But I have never forgotten those two women and how hard they tried to make my life endurable.

There are no illegal immigrants/”refugees” in this story. Every single one of these miscreants was an east Texas/Oklahoma redneck with a homegrown case of maladaptive socialization or some kind of roll-your-own psychopathy. The causes are different but I believe the remedy is the same: you fight back.