A Customer Gave Me Porn
And also a dreambook.
1.
Tuesday afternoon I asked a customer about the strange pendant on his necklace and he said that he made it himself: a star, made of metal, with a gem at each point. “It’s…” he waffled a hand in front of his face like to avoid being a burden, “it’s complicated, it’s based on a guy named Carl Jung.”
He was buying lots of ice cream. “What about him?”
He said with a deep breath that Carl Jung was a —
“I know who Jung is.” Zipped outta me kinda curt. “I mean what’s the thing with the gems.”
He explained that the pendant reflected some theory about the spectrum of masculinity: Postman—Teacher—Gardener—Cop—something else.
I told him the price of his ice cream and I told him that I’d always been curious about Jung’s Big Red Book, a facsimile printing of the oversize diary where Jung sketched his theories about dreams. “I think it’s like $200.”
He nodded, tapping his phone to the console, “It’s pricey. Changed my life, though. Got me into dream therapy, dream journaling. Plus it just changes your relationship to yourself. Like last night: I had a dream about a duck. Well.” He blinked at me. Saucey smile. “What does a duck do…?”
I shook my head.
He waggled his elbows like wings: “A duck navigates the three realms: land, air, and water. It’s very versatile. But it’s not particularly impressive on any of them.”
2.
Thirty minutes later I was there at the register when he came back and handed me a huge J. Crew bag. His posture was stiff and his eyes were wide and he was walking the way I used to walk past cops in college while hiding my drunkenness: straightbacked, dispensing a gallant nod, “Cunstable...”
Like an idiot I took this bag a stranger handed me and held it as my own.
A criminal defense lawyer told me a story: his client is at the airport when a cop walks up, “Hey pal,” nods at his bag, “mind if I look inside?” Guy says sure. Unzips his bag and holds it open: buncha cocaine inside. My friend asked his client, “Why’d you open the bag if you knew it was fulla coke?” Guy shrugged, “I thought I had to.”
Of course once the bag’s in my hand the Jungian taps his jeweled medallion and vanishes.
I looked down into the bag and there were three books inside it.
Two were small and normal.
One was big and red.
3.
I went to the breakroom and hauled the bag up onto a table where people were not eating and I laid it sideways and slipped the book out. It was dressed in library plastic. Pristine. Started paging through it. “Jeebus.” Thick eighteen-inch pages that, when you turn them, say things like schloompf and schlaumf.
Colleagues drifted over, “What’s this…?”
I explained it’s a journal by “a guy named Carl Jung” and talked about the cost and about the friendly philosophical jewelmaker who gave it to me.
My colleague David was there. David is skinny, early 50s, capped teeth. Last year around Christmas I said hello to him and he came and stood close to me and said “I went to see a medium that a friend recommended to me, and we didn’t tell her anything at all about my life, but when she started to do her whole ritual she said, ‘Your father wants you to know that he’s at peace and that he loves you even though you’re working retail.’” I try to stay moving when I greet him.
David sat up over his Tupperware and pointed with his fork: “You manifested that! You made that happen! God is rewarding you for knowing what you want and having the humility to make it known!”
I said thank you David.
He leaned across the gap between tables and wiggled the J. Crew bag. “What else is in there…?” Tipped it upright so that a pair of slim trade paperbacks came sliding out onto the tabletop.
Gay erotica.
4.
Thursday then. I was sitting in the breakroom on my lunch break with Tracy and Pola.
Pola’s talking about a guy who just got hired. He talks to himself and has a really intense vibe. Someone found his mugshot online. “You know they don’t do background checks here?”
I was surprised but it made sense. A job that starts at a $15 wage, eight-hour shifts at a cash register, is gonna hire from a pool of people with opportunity limits. I said something like, “They kinda need people who are broke.”
Tracy on my right, in her hoodie despite the heat, was eating carrots with her elbows on the table and she did offended shapes with her brow and said “speak for yourself,” chewing in slow arcs now, then Pola broke the tension saying, “I’ve been arrested, too, so I should be grateful.”
Says it happened twice but both got expunged.
First time was for punching her mom. “But she’d broke my tooth out like two weeks before.” Second time was for shoplifting from Urban Outfitters. The store had soft tags on their clothing back then and she would take a pile of tops into the dressing room, remove the tags, then stand on tiptoes and tuck them behind the mirror, fingertips grazing other shoplifters’ tags…
Tracy on my right kinda mellowed and smiled at the story and then told us how she used to shoplift every week from a grocery store in New York City til finally she got caught and arrested over a single banana.
“One day, I wasn’t even hungry, I just said, ‘Hey: lemme go steal something.’ So I went to the grocery store and looked around and just grabbed a banana. Whatever. Started waking out. Then the Loss Prevention guy cuts me off, out in this little lobby area where the carts are. And bro,” she smiled at the ceiling, “when I saw that man’s face,” punching a rhythm into her opposite palm, “I said, ‘This motherfucker does not have banana-justice on his face. This man’s coming after me for two years of shoplifting.’”
She had a wad of cash in her pocket and whipped it out and pressed it “please please please” into Loss Prevention’s chest but he just shook his head. “Nuh-uh.” Pushed her money back. “We’re past that…”
Pola interrupted her: “Lookit Alex’s face,” nodding all squinty, wagging a finger, “judging us…”
5.
That was two Thursdays ago, Shavuot, and customer traffic was slow once the sun went down and I was lost in my head about the conversation during our lunch break. Cusomters came up and I scanned their items on autopilot. Little eye contact. Terse hellos.
A guy came and I scanned his items and told him what he owed and saw it was the guy who’d given me the Big Red Book.
“Hey!” Embarrassed, over-enthused, then remembering the porn. “How’s it going?”
We chit-chatted. He told me about the house he and his husband are renovating. I told him the dollar amount. He tapped his phone on the console. It blooped. Asked for his PIN.
He said, “How ‘bout you?” Typing his PIN with one jabby finger. His whole hand shaking. “Any dreams lately?”
PS
Thanks for reading! Later this week I’ll be posting the fifth installment in an ongoing series, based on archival reporting, about how Robert Caro’s THE YEARS OF LYNDON JOHNSON took shape and unfolded across a literary ecosystem that evolved, over a half century, from resisting his work to revering it.
Be prepared - that man's definitely coming back to proposition you at some point...
Jung moment #1 from last week: I'm reading Goethe's Faust with a friend, we call each other each month and update each other on how it's going, and last month he mentioned how Jung was really into Faust so I checked out his "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" from the library and he is indeed really into Faust based on the first few chapters. He's also into phalluses and poop, obviously.
Jung Moment #2 from last week: I'm reading Meaghan Garvey's amazing Substack SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE about going to dive bars in the Midwest (you would really love her) and she dropped a random Jung quote from the same book. I think because Jung is basically just making these (often silly, sometimes brilliant) associations based on random stuff that happens in his life, it's kind of like **everything** could be about Jung, especially if you're documenting extreme behavior like Garvey (and you!).