I wander around for a little while, touching the sea down on the tiny sheltered beach. Stepping along the boulders that ring the harbour. I walk down the road a little, and step into a tiny run down souvenir shop. A woman is inside, setting up a rack of rings on the counter. I say hello, start to browse.
The shop is just filled with complete junk. Dusty, weird souvenirs I can't imagine anyone buying. Old broken radios and Sports Illustrated plastic box cameras. Dolls and assorted bits of coloured glassware (none matching). Hokey and garish jewellry. It is embarrassing.
She mentions that I was the first customer in the store all day. The rain is to blame, apparently. Though I find it hard to believe anyone would come in here anyway.
She's British, from the sound of her voice. And thoroughly miserable. She radiates misery and nastiness in the little room. A whiner.
I look around. I feel like I can't leave without buying something, but I can't find anything to buy. It takes about fifteen minutes to find something, a little box of incense that doesn't smell too gross. It's two dollars.
Another customer comes in. But it's someone local, a neighbour who wants some records. He just wanders into one of the back rooms by himself and starts looking for things. She whines at him for a couple of minutes, and he says little, just enough to stay in the conversation and be polite.
She's a stooped figure, perhaps in her late fifties or early sixties. Face is awful shape, just a face, the skin all folds and odd hanging shapes. Dark gemlike eyes, dark green, hard as glass and mounted dry in the dry pale face. A mouth bent forever into a pout.
I step up to the counter to buy the incense. Helicopters have been going over the whole time I've been in, flying really low. The windows and floor shudders to the beat of the blades somewhere up above us. Military helicopters. She's complained about them a couple of times already, but now we're talking about them a little. I'm asking a couple of polite questions about the helicopters, and the weather.
And she's talking. I'm finding out all sorts of things. She's not whining, exactly, but telling a sad and sorry tale with herself at the centre of it. I nod understandingly, smile a little, listen, talk a little without saying much about myself. She tells all. She's had the store a year, and the one next to it for five. Last winter and this one it rained, and there was almost no business, hardly any tourists. She started the store next door with a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars worth of merchandise. A few days before Christmas on the first year she was open, someone broke in and cleaned the whole place out. She borrowed another thousand from her mom in LA or someone like that, and started over again.
Her ex-husband has been harassing her by dragging her into court over and over again to contest the alimony. She gets five hundred a month from him, which she pays taxes on and he doesn't. He's been trying to say that she pulls in a thousand a day in the two stores, though she pulls in maybe a thousand a month on her best months. She spends three to five hundred a month on merchandise, and pays herself about five hundred a month to live on. Isn't much, she says, but any more and the store will go broke.
She used to work someplace, but fourteen years ago she got hurt on the job, broke her tailbone right off, and four years later the company ditched her. She got only fourteen thousand from workman's compensation. Before the lawyer's fees.
She wrote a letter to the judge only last night to tell him that her husband is harassing her. She didn't know she could do that, just found it. She says he physically abused her for ten of their fourteen years together, and now he's continuing with psychological abuse. He comes out from time to time, from his home in Dallas. Drives his fancy vehicles and does his thing.
She lives in the mobile trailer park. The other week they had seventy five mile an hour winds with rain, in one of the big storms.
She tells an interesting tale about a place up the road I'd noticed, a hotel that had been closed down. The place was called the Princeton Inn and Restaurant, or something like that. Nothing had happened. It hadn't gone out of business or had a fire. The woman that owned it just closed it down one day and never opened it again. The place had brought in lots of business for the area, people coming in to see music acts there, big names, world class musicians.
I leave as other customers come in, a Donald Trump look- and sound-alike and his cheeso mistress. They'd been in the seafood place where I'd had lunch, and his conversation had made me almost angry. He was a completely insensitive scumbag business type, accusing his employees of all sorts of things. Making all these big statements about the work ethic, about welfare freeloaders and Mexicans. Being a high roller, talking the talk. I wanted to shit in his lunch.
Outside again, I walk over to the Princeton Inn and look into through the partly papered windows at the big room with its wooden pillars and blue flowered wallpaper. No feelings at all. I sniff at my box of incense as though it is a flower, and smile to the reflection of myself in the window. Face, hair, overcoat and white shirt. Pleasing. I glance down at the bumper of an old red pickup truck parked up on the sidewalk.
DON'T LIKE MY DRIVING?
CALL 1-800-EAT-SHIT
