Supply & Demand
This is the last entry I will likely post to this site, as I am going to be retiring this platform within the next few months. If you’d like to keep up with my writing, you can find it in my journal.
1
Back in the early 2000s, when I worked at the HomeGoods store, I met a lot of interesting people.
I met neurotic people who spent hours sniff-testing seasonal air fresheners, soul-crushed people who purchased pillows for bedrooms of long-deceased family members, shifty-eyed people who tried to get refunds on half-eaten bags of gourmet candy they didn’t even buy from the store, dirty people who slept on the display couches and had to be escorted off the premises, psycho people who marked paintings with permanent marker in order to get the damaged-item discount, and even a few deranged individuals who would literally walk around the store taking small bites out of scented candles, but the most interesting person of them all had to be this one guy named Gregory Pike.
Gregory Pike hated black people.
Of course, he wouldn't tell you outright that he hated black people, but it was pretty obvious that he hated black people.
The first time I met Gregory Pike, I must have been on my second or third week on the job. I was up at the cash register, still learning how to use the machine, and there was this long line of people. I was checking out this sweet older black lady who insisted on paying for a knitting set with rolls of dimes for some reason, and she was having the hardest time unwrapping the coin packages, and this, combined with my inexperience with the cash register, made this lady’s checkout process take far longer than it ever needed to take. And the whole time she was unrolling these dimes, there was this middle-aged white dude wearing a sports jacket behind her, sort of rolling his head back and forth while making these loud, exaggerated sighs, which the old black lady didn't seem to mind. In fact, she was having a very one-sided conversation with me about her grandkids the whole time, paying no attention to anything going on around her, which also contributed to the length of time it took for her to check out, because she would get distracted and go off on these long-winded rambles like, “That Marcus, he my grandson, you know, he always be out there, in the streets, playin’ b-ball with the kids, and he real good at it, you know, real good, can dunk ‘em too, and he tall, real tall, so you know he gonna make it to the pros one day, an’ he such a sweet boy, treat his mama good, real good, love that boy to death,” and so on. And then she’d go back to unwrapping dimes, only to get distracted again minutes later, resulting in another long-winded ramble, and this went on for some time until the man behind her, whose once white face was now tomato red, stormed up right beside her, slammed a fifty-dollar bill on the counter, and said, “This will cover it, right? Please tell me this will cover it, please, for Christ’s sake.”
The old black lady turned to the man, whose eyebrows were slanted at the most wicked angle I had ever seen, and said, “Bless this generous man, bless his soul.” And then she reached into her large purse and started pulling out more dime rolls, trying to hand them to the man to cover the fifty or whatever, but the man had stepped far away from her by that point, his side turned, as if he couldn’t stand to look at her, as if she were a leper or something, and then, in this ominous tone, the man said, “With all due respect, ma’am, I don't want your money, and I certainly don't need your money, and frankly I just wish you’d purchase your things and go.” And then he just stood there silently glaring at the old black lady with those wicked eyebrows of his, his body perfectly still yet somehow giving off the psychic shakes as if he were a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode, and this must have spooked the lady because she quickly shoveled her dimes back into her purse and completed her transaction using the man’s fifty-dollar bill, keeping the change, which was a considerable amount because the knitting set was only like twelve dollars.
After the old black lady left, the man stepped up to the counter and grinned real wide at me, which caused a distributary of wrinkles to flow across his entire face. There was something off about the man that made me tense and nervous, so I said something stupid in an attempt to douse the tension. I said, “That sure was nice of you, sir,” using the honorifics they had taught me to use in training, but the guy just shook his head and said, “Nothing nice about it,” which I thought was a little weird, so I nervously smiled and nodded and, noticing he wasn’t carrying anything, said, “What can I help you with today, sir?” But he apparently didn’t hear me, because he started going on about something totally unrelated. He said, “You know,” then he glanced around slyly and spoke in a low tone, “Those people, you know, they hurt business, no one wants to shop in a store with,” and then he paused and glanced around again, “with that,” and he said that in this disgusted way, as if he were talking about a thing, some non-human thing, and then he said, in an even lower tone, practically a whisper, “They have their own store, you know, it’s called Dollar General, they should go there.” And it was at this point that I was starting to feel something gross bubbling up in my stomach.
I wanted to tell the guy to fuck off, but I was young and nervous and awkward back then, so instead I just nodded and repeated myself, “What can I help you with today, sir?” And that’s when he placed a small slip of paper on the counter, a small slip of paper with a barcode, which I scanned, and then I checked the computer, realizing the barcode was for one of the most expensive couches in the store, so I said, in a shaky voice, “How will you be paying for this today, sir?” And that’s when he rolled his eyes, shook his head, and said, “Well certainly not with that fifty,” in this trying-to-be-funny tone that was actually just vitriolic and sad.
Not wanting to get into it with the guy, I let out a false chuckle and said, “Card then?” which must have signaled some sort of false positive in the man’s brain, like he thought I was on his team or something, because he immediately grinned and said, “See, you know what I’m talking about, you know about,” he paused, lowered his voice, “those people, you get it, you just don’t want to say anything because you’re on the clock.” And then he placed this gold credit card on the counter and slid it my way, like he wanted me to see it or something, at which point I politely slid it back to him and said, “You have to slide it yourself,” then I pointed at the card reader, which prompted him to slide the card, and then I had to gather his shipping address, to ship him the couch, so I asked for his address, which he provided, and while I was inputting his address, he started going on again, “It’s not even a race thing, really. I’m not racist, so please don’t think that. Liberals always think that. I’m just a realist. Those people are poor, and poor people are dangerous, and their culture doesn’t help, that’s for sure. And I can prove it with facts and simple math. For example, did you know that despite making up only about thirteen percent of the population,” he paused, glanced around, lowered his voice again, “those people commit over fifty percent of violent crime in the United States?” And then he paused to watch my reaction, which I had noticed him doing from the corner of my eye, but I didn't want to react, didn't want to give him any more false positives, so I was pretending to be super-focused on my computer screen even though I had already completed processing the purchase, nodding and forcing a smile and typing away on my little keyboard, not wanting to get into an argument with the guy. But the guy just kept going, “It’s all there, in the FBI crime statistics. I’m not making it up. It’s publicly available data. You can look it up. I don't know why people get all offended about this stuff. Damn liberals get offended over everything, especially the truth.”
Feeling like I might explode on the man, I released some tension by smashing ENTER on the keyboard, which caused the machine to spit out the receipt, which I then handed to the man and said, in a tightly wound tone, “Thank you, sir. Have a nice day.” But the man wouldn't leave, he just stood there, looking me up and down, nodding here and there, then he said, “I know, I know, you’re working, but seriously, look it up, it’ll change your perspective, no one will tell you about this stuff these days, no one except people like me, people who do the research, because, let me tell you, nowadays,” he did his signature pause and glance and voice-lowering again, “nowadays, you know, with one of those people as president, you can’t speak the truth about them, you can’t go against the narrative, otherwise they go after your livelihood, because, when you get right down to it, they’re the racists, not us, they hate white people, not the other way around, they want to replace us, that’s the truth.”
By this point, the guy was holding up the line just about as much as the old black lady had been. I tried to fake a smile, which was becoming harder and harder to do, and then I said, “Thank you sir, please come again,” praying to God that he would not actually take me up on that offer. But he still wouldn’t leave, he just grinned and pulled a card out of his pocket, then he slid the card to me over the counter and said, “I know, you’re working, I get it, but if you ever want to talk about the facts, hit me up, here’s my business card, and if you ever need a house, I’m your guy.” And then he flashed his blindingly white teeth at me and walked off, disappearing through the big pneumatic double doors, at which point I let out a deep sigh of relief before turning the card over in my hand, only to see the man’s face again, just minus the wrinkles and facial blemishes because the image was obviously photoshopped, superimposed in front of a fancy three-story house near some stylized text.
“Pike Reality Group. Gregory Pike. 843-397-9293. Exclusive Listings in Only the Safest Neighborhoods. Guaranteed.”
2
It must have been a few months before I saw Gregory Pike again. I remember it was probably the middle of November because the oaks were rusty and the maples were naked and the bike path leading to the strip mall with the HomeGoods and the Books-A-Million and the Dollar General and the Rack Room Shoes was littered with dead leaves and that wistful autumnal breeze, and the HomeGoods sound system was always playing Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” and The Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” at these low liminal volumes, and the whole store smelled of ginger and nutmeg and cinnamon spice like grandma’s house during Christmas break when I was a kid, which was one of the only perks of working at HomeGoods.
I was working the seasonal section, stocking shelves with angelic tree toppers and nativity scene stuff and stockings with generic male and female names sewn into them and tacky wreaths covered in LED-light jingle bells and garden gnomes dressed up like Santa’s little elves and mini Christmas trees that took four triple-A batteries for some reason and advent calendars filled with the stalest-tasting chocolate you’ve ever put in your mouth and all sorts of holiday-appropriate candles and of course Santa figurines of all shapes and sizes and colors, including a whole new line of Black Santa figurines, some of which came with little gag accessories, like Christmas-shaped sunglasses and candy-cane cigars and different hats that changed his hairstyle, one of which, I remember, was dreadlocks that flowed out of the hat to about the middle of Black Santa’s back, another added a deflated afro escaping out of the edges of the hat itself, which reminded me of overgrown shrubbery for some reason.
I was minding my own business, earbuds in, listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer on my iPod, when all of a sudden I felt this tap on my shoulder, so I turned around, expecting to see my manager, Kelly, who didn’t like it when I wore earbuds on the job, but it wasn't Kelly, it was Gregory Pike, staring right at me, grinning real wide, like he had just run into a long-time friend he hadn't seen in ages or something, and he was mouthing something but I couldn’t hear him, because Radiohead, so he lifted his hand to his ear and tapped the air with his finger, so I took the earbuds out and said, “Oh, hello, how can I help you today, sir?” using the honorifics like they had taught me in training.
“Remember me?” His smile triggered a wrinkle ripple effect across his entire face. “Gregory, Gregory Pike.”
“Yes sir,” I said, nodding nervously. “I remember, sir.”
“No need to call me sir, we’re equals here, just call me Gregory,” he said, scanning the shelves up and down. “It’s a wonder you’re still working here. I figured you’d be long gone by now.”
I didn’t know what the hell he was trying to imply, so I did a fake laugh and turned back to my cart, which held all the stuff I needed to put on the shelves, and then I nervously grabbed something at random, a mini Christmas tree, and placed it on the shelf, then I scanned the barcode with my little scanner thing and nodded to myself, trying really hard to look busy.
Gregory Pike looked around all furtively, as if making sure no one was around, then he said, “Considering affirmative action and all those diversity hires, it’s a wonder a man like yourself can even keep a job these days, let alone even get hired, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, and I certainly didn’t know why he felt it appropriate to even talk about this kind of thing in a HomeGoods store of all the possible places, so I just turned to him and did another one of my fake laughs and said, “What can I help you with today, Mr. Gregory,” dropping the sir but adding the honorific prefix like they had taught me in training for this specific customer ask.
Gregory Pike patted me on the shoulder. “Lighten up, kid. I’m just having some fun with you.” Then he stepped over to the stocking shelf, picked up a stocking, stared at the name sewn into it for a good few seconds, and then put the stocking back, turning to me with this sour look on his face. “DeShawn? What kind of name is that? Whatever happened to good old American names, like John, Luke, and Mary?”
“We have those, just over here,” I said, stopping what I was doing and walking over to the stocking area, gesturing toward the lower shelf. “Which name are you looking for, sir?”
“Gregory,” he said, a little pout forming on his face, which made him look petulant and insecure.
“Right, my apologies,” I said. Then I corrected myself, “Mr. Gregory.”
He was looking at me with a single raised eyebrow at this point.
“What name are you looking for, Mr. Gregory?”
“Gregory.”
“That’s what,” I was saying before I stopped, now realizing what he meant. “Oh,” I paused, turning to the shelf. “You’re looking for the name Gregory.” I nodded, then crouched down so that I could reach the lower shelf. “I see.” Then I started rummaging through the stockings, checking all the names. The whole time I could feel his dull brown eyes burning a hole in my back. There was a tense sort of silence between us.
“You know, you’re a funny kid. I like you,” he said after a few long seconds of me rummaging around, not finding his name, although trying my best, at which point I stood up, brushed at my khakis, and forced an empathetic frown like they had taught me in training.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Gregory, I couldn’t find your name, but,” I said, pausing to hold up a stocking, “I did find this one.” It was a stocking with the name “John” on it. I guess I was trying to make a point.
But Gregory Pike didn't get the point, he just thought it was funny. He had this sharp, high-pitched cackle, like that of a hyena, and he was cackling hard, as if this was the funniest thing that had happened to him in years or something. And when he was done cackling, he patted me on the back and said, “Well, thanks for trying, I guess I’ll go to Michaels, see if they have one there.”
“I can order it for you online, custom made, if you’d like, Mr. Gregory,” I said, sliding in my online-upsell offer like they had taught me in training.
“Maybe,” he said, a dark grin forming on his lips, “are they made in America?”
I started stammering a little bit, because I had no idea, even though this exact customer question had been covered in training, and knowing Gregory Pike, I also knew where this was possibly going, so I played dumb and said, “I’m not sure, Mr. Gregory. I can go look that up for you, though, if you’d like.”
“No no,” he said, cackling and patting me on the back, which was turning something fierce in my stomach. “I already know the answer.” He paused, looked around slyly, then spoke in a low tone. “It’s Obama and the fucking Democrats, offshoring all the jobs. If they can’t get some poor violent criminal to do the work, they send it off to China and get some kid to do it. Demonic, is what it is.”
Once again, I didn’t know what to say to that, or why Gregory Pike felt it appropriate to say that in a HomeGoods store of all the possible places. And, being a nervous young man at the time, I was kind of shaking a little bit, because as Gregory Pike was talking, he was emitting some seriously dark waves that were giving me a seriously bad case of the heebie-jeebies. So I gave him a trembly nod, turned back to my cart, and started to put items on the shelf again, doing my whole scan-the-barcode-and-nod-to-myself thing, trying very hard to look busy, and this worked for a few minutes because Gregory Pike wasn’t saying anything, so I had assumed he had walked off to verbally torture some other poor employee, but I couldn’t confirm that because I was too scared to look back, out of fear of getting locked into another interaction with the man.
And it was right when I had started to relax, when I had assumed I was in the Gregory Pike clear and had slipped my earbuds back in, that I felt yet another tap on my shoulder, which gave me the howling fantods, internally. So I slowly turned around, like I was in a horror movie or something, and there he was again, Gregory Pike, only this time he was holding up one of those Black Santa figurines, one of the ones with the dreadlocks-hat accessory, and he had this awful scowl on his face, and he was mouthing something. So, trying to be a good employee and all that, I reluctantly took out my earbuds and said, “How, how can I help you, Mr. Mr. Gregory?”
There was a weirdly liminal moment of silence, which highlighted the Christmas-themed corporate soft rock playing in the background before Gregory Pike answered my question. And when he finally spoke, his tone was that of a deeply offended Fox News anchor.
“You can help me by getting rid of these damn things.”
I blinked at Gregory Pike, then blinked at the Black Santa figurine in his trembling hand, then blinked at Gregory Pike again, who I now noticed had a series of exploded veins in his right eye. I had no idea what to say to him, so I just weakly smiled what must have been the fakest smile in the world and said, “What what seems to be the problem, sir?”
“You know damn well what the problem is. I’m holding it. Look at it. Look at its face. Look at its damn hair. You look at this and tell me, with a straight face, that you don’t know what the fucking problem is. It’s staring right at you. This is not Santa Claus. There is no world in which this is Santa Claus. This is neither Kris Kringle nor St. Nick or even The Jolly Old Elf. This is an imposter, a fraud. This is cultural appropriation, is what it is. Santa Claus is a white man. This is a historical fact. Santa is white. Santa Claus is, and always has been, based on Saint Nicholas, who was born in Patara, which is now modern-day Turkey, where the people are white. W-H-I-T-E. White. Not black, not brown, not yellow, not blue, or red, or anything else. WHITE. Santa Claus was not born in Nigeria or Ethiopia. He was born in Turkey. Not Uganda or Jamaica. Turkey. He was born in Turkey. He’s a white man. That’s the problem.”
“Wonderful Christmastime” was playing softly in the background and I was slack-jawed and speechless and wide-eyed and all the other adjectives indicating total shock. I wanted to tell Gregory Pike to calm down and lower his voice or else I would be forced to radio my manager or have the police called to escort him off the premises, but the words were just not coming out, so instead I just stood there, like an idiot, praying that someone, a customer or an employee or anyone else in the whole entire world, would walk up and save me from this nightmare.
“And it’s not even a race thing. I don't care about race. I care about facts. And the fact is, Santa Claus is a white man, an old fat jolly white man. He does not have dreadlocks. He does not listen to hip-hop music. He does not play basketball. He does not leech off welfare. He does not steal or loot or pillage. He delivers presents, to children, for God’s sake. He does not abandon his children to go score crack rocks off the street corner. He does not smoke NewPort cigarettes. He does not work at McDonald’s. He works at the fucking North Pole, making toys, spreading joy every year, on the 25th day of December, like clockwork, because he has drive and ambition and a real sense of personal responsibility, which is far more than can be said about those people. That’s the problem. Right here. I’m holding it. Santa Claus is not black. He’s a white man. He's as white as they come, and to suggest otherwise is not only factually incorrect but also just plain offensive to all the hard-working European Americans out there that work their asses off every damn day to put dinner on the table.”
I was visibly shaking at this point, and I could tell Gregory Pike was still going off, because his mouth was still moving, but I could no longer hear him because I was visibly shaking and my eyes were super moons and my body had taken on heinous gravity. I was dissociating from the material realm, as if some sort of evolutionary self-preservation response had been triggered in my brain, and my head was starting to feel like it was being squeezed by a terrible pressure, and I had no idea what to do. They did not cover this in training, I kept thinking to myself. They did not cover this in training.
But just when I had thought all hope was lost, by the grace of some merciful god up there, the walkie-talkie radio clipped to my belt crackled, and my manager’s voice came booming through like that of an angel’s over the static hiss, snapping me out of my dissociative nightmare trance.
“We’re slammed up here. Front checkout needs coverage. Please report to front checkout, ASAP. I repeat, report to the front checkout, ASAP.”
Empowered by this sudden call-to-action, I gathered what little courage I had, looked straight at Gregory Pike, gulped, and, out of sheer nervousness, rambled off all the standard pleasantries I had learned during training. “Welcome to HomeGoods, sir. I apologize for any inconvenience, sir. Please let me know if I can help you find anything, sir. Thank you, sir. My pleasure, sir. Have a great day, sir. Please come again, sir.” And then I speed-walked the hell out of that seasonal section faster than I had ever speed-walked before, leaving Gregory Pike and my cart full of Black Santas far behind me.
The front checkout was packed. There were people lined up into the dishware section. The only person at the register was my manager, Kelly, a middle-aged blonde woman with a short haircut and a rainbow flag pin on her name tag, who had resting bitch face and gave off strong dominatrix vibes. She was checking people out at lightning speeds. I took my place at the second register and started doing my part, trying to forget about Gregory Pike, but his wrinkly face and slanty eyebrows were like permanently tattooed on some dark recess of my brain, so he kept popping up in my mind. But the more I checked people out, the more I forgot about him, and there were a lot of people to check out.
One woman had a cart full of pillows and a harnessed service dog that was chewing one of the pillows through the cart’s metal mesh, so I suspected it wasn’t a service dog at all, and the guy behind her was holding candles in both hands, his eyes shifting back and forth every few seconds before furtively raising one to his mouth and taking little nibbles out of the wax, and behind him there were two little kids tug-of-warring a Lilo & Stitch blanket before, who I presumed to be their mother, took the blanket and said something like, “Then no one gets the damn blanket,” which caused those two kids to howl like mad and attack each other like kids do, and behind them was this short older man unfortunately covering his crotch area with a small statue of the Eiffel Tower, oblivious to the fact that it looked incredibly phallic and comical, and behind him all the faces started to blur together.
But I checked them all out, and I rang up about two thousand dollars’ worth of stuff by the time I had finished, and it only took me like thirty minutes, because by that point in my HomeGoods career, I was actually the fastest employee when it came to operating the cash register and associated computer systems, an accomplishment that didn’t fill me with pride so much as something that can only be described as corporate despair, a sort of is-this-what-I’m-going-to-be-doing-for-the-rest-of-my-life-type despair. But at least, by the end of that checkout whirlwind, I had forgotten all about Gregory Pike.
But I was quickly reminded, because off in the distance, I heard a dreadful squeaking sound. It was the squeak of a shopping cart with a bad wheel, coming from far down the dishware section. Somebody was slowly pushing, shoving really, a shopping cart down the aisle toward the front checkout area, their body partially obscured by the cart, which was filled to the brim with very dark objects that I could not identify immediately. But as the person drew closer, their features became more apparent and the shopping cart’s contents revealed themselves, and that’s when my stomach dropped, because it was Gregory Pike, pushing a cart full of Black Santas.
“Take this last one. I need a smoke,” Kelly said, lifting the little gate that separated the employees-only area from the customer area before vanishing into the back of the store so quickly that I didn't even have a chance to protest.
“Last Christmas” by Wham! was playing liminally in the space between myself and Gregory Pike. I was watching him with sweat literally pouring down my face. My body felt like it had suddenly developed an involuntary gulp reflex because I was gulping like crazy. I buried my face into the computer screen and started typing fgsafadsdsafdsgfksaddsgsdgdf into the open search bar in a vain attempt to calm myself, but, without even looking up at him, when Gregory Pike stepped up to the counter, his rancorous aura was so overpowering that I literally couldn’t help but shake and shiver and crack my voice on every syllable of the following scripted pleasantries.
“Good good afternoon sir, welcome to HomeGoods, sir, how can I, how can I help you, you today, sir?”
“You can help me by ringing up all this garbage.”
I lifted my gaze from the computer screen to Gregory Pike in what felt like slow motion. He wore the face of a man whose face was no-bullshit and terrifying. His eyebrows were so slanted that you could roll marbles down them and the marbles would go so fast that they'd shatter upon impact with the floor. I couldn't tell if he was angry with me or with the Black Santas or just life in general or what. I gulped and slowly shifted my gaze to the shopping cart. The Black Santas were systematically arranged in such a way that they made full use of the cart’s space, which made me realize how much time that must have taken, and which explained why I had not seen him in over thirty minutes.
“All all of these, sir?” I said, my voice cracking like crazy.
“Yes.”
“Sir,” I said, pausing, “may may I ask why?”
“What does it matter, why?”
“We we have a ten-item-per-customer limit, sir, and and,” I said, pausing to look down at the cart, mentally trying to count all the Black Santas as if it were one of those count-the-number-of-Skittles-in-the-jar-and-win-a-prize things, but there were so many Black Santas that I just couldn't even fathom a number, so I just said, “There's there's at least like like two hundred Black black Santas in there, sir.”
“I will pay for them all,” he said, his eyebrows becoming even more slanted somehow. “I considered walking the cart out of the store, stealing them, to be honest, but then I thought to myself, Gregory, you're not one of those people, you're not a thief, you're not a thug, you're an honest hard-working man, and you can afford it, so just do the right thing, buy them all, for moral, ethical reasons, so that no one has to come into this store and see one of these abominations on the shelf. So here I am, ready to give you the biggest sale of your life. You’re welcome.”
“But but what are you going to use them for?”
“What does it matter what I'm going to use them for?”
“I guess, I guess it doesn't matter, but we have a ten-item, a ten-item-per-customer limit, sir.”
“Then call your manager, ask for approval. I'll wait.”
At that point, there was a weak sort of eye-locked standoff between myself and Gregory Pike, like a staring contest almost, but I lost after only a few seconds because he was scaring the hell out of me, he really was.
“Call him,” Gregory Pike said sternly.
“OK, OK, I'll call call her.”
“Your boss is a woman? For Christ’s sake.”
As I lifted the walkie-talkie radio to my face and pressed the button down, Gregory Pike just stood there, staring at me. Then, in a shaky tone, I said, “Kelly, there's there's a customer here, and and he wants to buy,” pausing to take another peek at the cart, “like all the Black Santas.”
There was a tense moment of static before a smoky feminine voice broke through the hiss. “What? Why?”
I looked at Gregory Pike. “She she wants to know why.”
Gregory Pike didn't say a word, only his lip started quivering at the end, like he was trying to hold back some sort of terrible rage, so I pushed the button down again and said, “I, I don't know.”
Then there was another moment of tense static. “Last Christmas” by Wham! had turned into Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” for some reason. Gregory Pike had removed one of the Black Santas from the cart and was now squeezing it with such force that the detachable hat with dreadlocks popped off and fell to the floor.
A few seconds passed and Kelly's voice broke through the hiss once again. “Whatever. We're under quota today anyway. Make an exception. I don't care.” Then there was another moment of “Ironic” and static before Kelly added, “Are you OK?”
I didn’t answer her. I just slowly lowered the walkie-talkie and, looking at Gregory Pike’s chin instead of his eyes, said, “She she says I can make an exception.”
“I heard her.”
And that’s when Gregory Pike started handing me the Black Santas, which I rang up one at a time. They each cost $23.99. There was only silence and radio-friendly soft rock and the occasional Christmas song between us for the first hour. I got the impression Gregory Pike was enjoying himself, like he derived some sort of sick pleasure out of forcing me to ring up all these Black Santas, because each time he handed me a new one, he nodded with a smug little wrinkly grin on his face before handing me yet another. And after some time, we had fallen into a sort of rhythmic checkout dance, with him smugly handing me the Black Santas, then me meekly swiping them across the scanner while mentally kicking myself in the crotch for having dropped out of high school because I now knew what Dad meant when he said retail is hell.
The whole thing took two hours and thirty-four minutes, and by the end of it all, Gregory Pike had owed HomeGoods $5,877.55, which he paid in full with his golden credit card.
And after I handed him the receipt, Gregory Pike shoved his squeaky shopping cart full of bagged Black Santas down the checkout lane, but before exiting through the automatic double doors, he stopped, turned to me with an almost menacing look, and said, “Santa Claus is a white man. Never forget that.”
3
Throughout the following week, I had awful dreams, night terrors really, and every dream was the same, those types of dreams where you wake up still in the dream thinking you're not in a dream but you're still actually in one.
In these nightmares, I would be sleeping, and my apartment doorbell would go off, waking me up, at which point I'd stumble to the apartment door and peep through the peephole, only to find the dreadlocked head of Black Santa smiling at me with that jolly plastic smile of his. Then the head would slowly descend out of view, slowly revealing Gregory Pike just standing there with that wrinkly grin on his face, at which point I'd frantically double-lock the front door, run back into my bedroom, lock my bedroom door, and then I'd hear a crash from the front door, followed by a heinous cackling, at which point I'd scramble for my bedroom window and attempt to unlatch the latch, but the latch wouldn’t unlatch. Then suddenly my bedroom door would swing open somehow, and there would be Gregory Pike, just standing there, staring at me, grinning, Black Santa in hand, and then he'd chuck the Black Santa at me as hard as he could, pelting me right in the face, and then somehow another Black Santa would materialize in his hand, which he'd also chuck at me, and then another, and another, all while I was desperately trying to unlatch the window, which, after being pelted by many Black Santas, would eventually unlatch. Then I'd lift the window open and peer down at the parking lot below, because I was on the third floor, and then I'd gulp and jump out of the window, turning midair only to see Gregory Pike’s grinning face poking out of the window, drapes flapping in sudden violent gale, and then, right before hitting the hard cement below, I would wake up, drenched in sweat, only to slowly realize that I was still in the same damn dream. And this would repeat over and over until eventually I'd wake up screaming, unsure if I was still dreaming or not. So for about a week there, I went through each day very cautiously opening every door to make sure Gregory Pike wasn't behind them and occasionally asking Kelly to pinch me, which she did, although she did it a little too hard and seemed to enjoy it a little too much.
The funny thing is, Black Santa ended up becoming a really popular item, mostly because of the demographic location of the store, but also weirdly because of the scarcity of the product itself. Because that same week, people kept coming into the store asking for Black Santa, some even became unreasonably upset when I told them we were all sold out of Black Santa, demanding to know when he would be back in stock. It became such a common occurrence that Kelly even asked me to put in a bulk order for more than double the entire Black Santa supply we had had before the whole Gregory Pike incident, and she even marked up the price by about two dollars because of the high demand, she said. And before you know it, Black Santas were flying off the shelves. Customers loved his little detachable hats with dreadlocks and smushed afro hairstyles. We quickly became the number one HomeGoods store in the entire state in terms of overall profit, all on the backs of thousands of little Black Santas. Kelly even gave me a Christmas bonus and a fifty-cent pay bump, even though she wouldn’t stop pinching me, and she said the whole thing was a great development opportunity for me in my path up the corporate ladder, which was something I had mixed feelings about, but it all helped me put the whole Gregory Pike thing behind me.
At least that’s what I had thought until, a few days before Christmas, it happened again.
Kelly and I were at the front checkout, ringing up customers, when our walkie-talkie radios hissed real loud. It was David, the new guy who started a few days earlier. He said, “Um, Kelly, there’s someone back here, he’s, well, he’s shouting and filling his shopping cart with, uh, Black Santas, and the other customers, uh, they are kinda getting upset.”
I turned to Kelly, my face must have been white as a sheet, because she looked concerned and said, “Do you think it’s the guy, the guy you told me about?”
I nodded solemnly, and then I shuddered, because I heard it, the squeak, and when I looked down the aisle of the dishware section, there he was, Gregory Pike, slowly pushing that same shopping cart with the bad wheel, and it was packed with Black Santas. And I was thinking to myself, oh no, not again, please dear God, I don’t know if I can do this again. But that’s when Kelly, who was wearing the smile of a woman who was totally no-bullshit and confident in herself, stepped up beside me, pinched me hard on the arm, and said, “Don’t worry about it, I got this.”
So, shivering and shaking, I nodded to Kelly and then speed-walked toward the employee lounge, which was near the front checkout area, and then I pushed through the door, closed it behind me, and pressed my back against it, almost hyperventilating a little bit. I was thinking to myself, “C’mon, you can do this, there’s nothing to be scared of, it’s just a bigoted real estate mogul with an insecurity complex and a wrinkly face, c’mon, pull yourself together, man, calm down, you can handle this,” which was a self-calming technique I had learned from the “How to Handle Difficult Customers” training seminar Kelly had signed me up for after I told her all about my encounter with Gregory Pike.
And to my surprise, the self-calming technique worked because my breathing slowed and my head cleared, so I turned to the door and cracked it open, peering at the front checkout area through the crack, where Gregory Pike was standing beside his cart full of Black Santas, and Kelly was standing behind the counter with her hands on her hips, the whole scene looking like the final showdown in an old western movie or something.
From my spot behind the cracked employee lounge door, I could hear Kelly and Gregory Pike’s entire conversation, and it went something like this,
“What do you mean, why? What does it matter? Do you ask ‘why?’ to all your customers like this? Why am I being interrogated about a purchase that I am obviously willing to pay full price for?”
“We have a ten-item-per-customer limit, and if I'm going to make an exception, I need a good reason, for documentation purposes.”
“Well, put this in your documentation then, ‘Man wants to buy 375 Black Santas for moral, ethical reasons,’ and the rest is none of your damn business. I don't need to explain myself to some butch woman on a power trip.”
“I'm going to have to ask you to calm down.”
“I’ll calm down when you ring up my fucking Black Santas.”
“...”
“Well, are you going to ring me up or am I going to have to call your CEO and get your ass fired? I have a lot of influence around here. Pike Reality Group, maybe you've heard of it?”
And it was at this exact moment that something in Kelly’s demeanor shifted. She stood taller, and a little curl had formed on her lips, making her appear both more devious and dignified than usual, as if she had suddenly become a woman with a serious, meaningful goal and was willing to do anything to achieve that goal, and then she said in a totally calm tone, “Sure, I'll ring you up.”
“Finally. Thank you. For Christ's sake.”
“Just give me one moment to check something on my computer.”
“...”
“Thanks for waiting. I'm ready now.”
Gregory Pike grinned his wrinkly grin and handed Kelly a Black Santa from the cart. Kelly scanned it, but when Gregory Pike went to hand her another, she shook her head.
“I don't need to scan each one. I’ll just adjust the quantity on the computer. Give me one moment.”
“...”
“Thank you for waiting,” she said, “that’ll be $224,625.”
Gregory Pike’s grin vanished, replaced with a full-faced frown. All his wrinkles were now reversed, making him look so ugly it was almost comical.
“Will that be cash or card, sir?”
“Two-hundred thousand dollars? That can’t be right. Check again.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Let me double-check. One moment.”
“...”
“Thank you for waiting,” she said. “Actually, I was wrong. The correct total is $226,325.”
“How? The price tag says $25.99. Check again.”
“The price went up, sir.”
“How? How can the price just go up? It says the price right here, on the damn price tag. $25.99. This is the price.”
“There’s a low-inventory markup, sir.”
“But there’s no low inventory.” He was furiously gesturing at his cartful of Black Santas now. “The entire damn inventory is right here, in my cart.”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly?” Gregory Pike looked as if he were about ready to explode. “What do you mean, ‘exactly?’ Explain to me how any of this makes any fucking sense.”
Kelly smiled a perfect customer-service smile and said, “Well, sir, it’s simple really, it’s just supply and demand.”