ALL IN A DAY'S WORK...

The shop front next to my place of business is undoubtedly home to some kind of shady shenannigans.

First of all, it doesn't have a name. Nowhere on the front or side of the store is anything even closely resembling a title for the "business." Or an address, for that matter. On casual inspection, it is a mostly empty store that manages to pay its bills by selling weird tuberous vegetables out of baskets, and some kind of foreign alcohol. Oh, and "crunch apels," as the sign says (note: they've been marked down from $.50 each to a mere $.25!)

No cigarettes, no soda, no little cans of tuna fish and pinto beans. Just weird fruit and foreign-y alcohol of some kind.

This might seem sad under normal circumstances- in my quest to avoid turning more cash over to the CVS' and 7-11's of the world, I've stopped in many a heart breakingly pathetic "convenience store" staffed by an overly attentive, well meaning clerk that stocks nothing but grape Nehi, generic batteries and one, sad, mostly deflated mylar birthday balloon.

But this particular shop is filled with surly looking old men who seem to be of some kind of non-descript, thickly Eastern European descent. And they stare you down whenever you walk buy.

Any time day or night- whether it's 7AM or 11:30 PM- there they are, sitting near their baskets of rutabegas and "crunch apels," surrounding a table covered in empty vodka bottles, staring at you with death-wish eyes, hoping to God you don't want to stop in for a nice refreshing room temperature bottle of Zomerzitas beer and a crunch apel.

The other day, I must've caught them at trash time, as I turned the corner to find myself face-to-face with a hair-oiled 60-something, overtly scowly European man in a Cabana wear shirt hauling a garbage can overflowing with nothing but generic vodka bottles, weird foreign beer cans and Little Caesar's pizza boxes. It was their entire existence boiled down into one garbage can (though suspiciously free of crunch apel cores and root-based legumes.)

Somehow- I can't believe this is enough to maintain a business. At some point during the day, somebody's coming in there to get instructions on who to whack, or where to take the bundles of unmarked bills, I'm sure of it.

I'm also sure there was probably a a filed down handgun and human arm or two at the bottom of that garbage can.