Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steal Schemes

When I left my first ever job at Blockbuster, it was a lateral move: I shifted to a store called Strawberries a few hundred feet away in the same shopping plaza. The assistant manager, Ginger, said how she and the store manager initially thought I was a thief whenever I traded in CDs and DVDs prior to applying for the gig, the unpredictability of each large box I brought in leading them to debate how any teenager’s taste could be so varied.

Most shifts I worked were with Michele, the manager, a pale, dark-haired woman roughly ten years older than me. Michele meant well, often encouraging me to pick CDs to play during my shift, although she grew tired of hearing the latest Missy Elliott album soon enough. In between rapping along to how I enjoyed putting my thing down, flipping it, and reversing it — “That’s my fremmaneppavanyetto!” — I endured Michele’s stories about her husband as well as her previous tenure as the manager of a FYE store, which, like Strawberries, was owned by the same conglomerate.

One day when I was quoting a 9/11 bit from a stand-up comedy album, it triggered Michele’s feelings about that day of infamy, but not in the way one might guess.

“Did I ever tell you my 9/11 story?” Michele asked me while a regular customer browsed the far wall of cassettes.

“I don’t believe you did,” I said, certain it wasn’t a story I wanted to hear.

“So,” she began in a disarmingly inconsequential manner. “It was a week or so before 9/11, and we’d gotten in a new shipment. We were going through it when a group of five, uh,” and she mouthed the remainder of the sentence, “brown men came in to browse.”

“What?” I asked, unable to read lips.

“They were…Arabs,” she whispered.

“And you cheated on your husband with one of them that night?” I joked.

“Shut up! No. Anyway, so they looked around for a bit and left without buying anything. A couple minutes later we realized that all the box cutters we were using had disappeared. Adam, I know this is going to sound crazy, but those men were the same men who hijacked one of the planes…using my store’s box cutters!”

“Michele…”

She cut me off.

“I studied the photos. I am certain it was them. We even reviewed the security footage from that day, and my co-worker agreed it was them.”

“Was your co-worker a part-time Homeland Security employee?” I asked anachronistically.

She wouldn’t hear any sarcasm.

“Unfortunately, the in-store tapes got re-used, and by the time 9/11 happened we’d taped over that day.”

“Soooo…how did you review the tape before 9/11 happened? Are you telling me that you helped plan 9/11?! Did you call the police?”

“No! We reviewed it to see if they stole the box cutters.”

“And they did?”

“Well, it was never quite confirmed. I think they knew where the cameras were and figured out how to block us from seeing them.”

“This is starting to make sense now that I think about it. They actually stole the fabric used to make their turbans from the Sears at that mall. Tom Brokaw confirmed it.”

“REALLY?!”

“Fuck no, Michele!”

When I relayed this story to Ginger, she said how Michele had told the box cutter story to her as well, but the details weren’t quite the same. Our other assistant manager, Jake, couldn’t mask his derision: “Dude, she’s a pathological liar, but about stupid shit. Like, who makes up something that retarded?”

“A woman with Stockholm syndrome.”

Two months after I started my new gig, ownership announced that our store would be closing in four weeks. One employee took his mid-shift break and called in to quit from his car in the parking lot twenty-nine minutes later, Ginger allowed me to “forget” to pay for a few box sets to stick it to The Man, and Jake and I smoked weed in the back room after locking the front door and taping a “Back in 5 minutes” note to the glass.

However, one phone call lingers in my memory more than those moments. Michele’s oft mentioned but never seen husband called the store, a call I answered before handing her the phone. Unable to determine what was happening, U2’s “Beautiful Day” played loudly as Michele grew more frantic, surely as frenzied as she’d been when the Saudi contingent stole their weapons of mass destruction out from under her managerial oversight. She hung up, panic-stricken and seemingly defeated.

“Our apartment complex is currently burning down!” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

“Damn, that sucks,” I said.

Then Bono sang, You’re on your own but you’ve got no destination…

“Hey, kind of like you after work!”

“FUCK YOU!” Michele yelled, two customers turning their heads to stare at us momentarily.

While I do not believe in karma, it seemed like the most appropriate line at the time. During our last shift working together, Jake and I contemplated placing a box cutter in the safe with a note addressed to Michele, wisely avoiding the potential fallout, especially since she had summoned the police twice following unrelated incidents, one of them being when I prank called the store from a friend’s house pretending to be the distract manager investigating an anonymous customer complaint about mistreatment. Michele’s apartment complex conveniently didn’t burn down, not that it was likely to deter her from crafting a fresh tale saluting her husband’s incomprehensible heroism.

As you might guess, Michele and I never kept in touch, but she’s starred in many imagined scenarios about terrorism, including when I learned that the Confederate flags held by white supremacists in Charlottesville were taken from a Hobby Lobby she managed. The story was told at length by an imaginary friend, a man whose company Michele might one day regret she never knew, a man who could’ve made her laugh instead of solitude dangerously engendering her to concoct tragic apocrypha, details any moron would know were fallacious. The liar’s goal, or so it seems to me, is to make them negligible yet as specific as possible.

For instance, have I ever mentioned how Missy Elliott stole the trash bags worn in her “Supa Dupa Fly” music video from Blockbuster?