A Sticky Situation

Hello. The following event happened to me last night. It involved a collision of police-state anxiety and worries about cultural entitlement. I don’t quite know whether to be angry about it, so I will seek your guidance.

Went to the supermarket to deal with an emergency: I had run out of the only canned food Lexi likes: Purina One beef and brown rice — grain free, classic ground style.

Picked up some cans, plus some impulse purchases, then did self-checkout. Walked out to the street. Got tapped on the shoulder.

“Sir, could you accompany me back into the store?”

It was a guy in the uniform of a hired security guard. I asked him why he wished me to do that.

“Please accompany me back into the store and I will explain.”

I did. I’d rather be in the store, in front of surveillance cameras, if something legally or morally ambiguous was about to unfold.

He escorted me to a table. I put my bag of purchases down on it.

“Can you please empty your pockets?

“Do you think I stole something?”

“Can you please empty your pockets?”

He was being outwardly polite. Big body language, but not threatening. Insistent. Implying but not stating the possibility of eventual physicality in the event of resistance. I had seen this attitude before on TV true-crime traffic stops that go badly. I started emptying my pockets.

My keys, my wallet, an eight-foot length of plastic dog-poop bags. They had been neatly on a roll, but had unraveled. They reeked of coffee because they had unfortunately lain overnight in some wet grounds that were queued for the garbage can. Still digging. Some lint. My cell phone. One quarter and two pennies, and an unopened bag of gummi worms.

“Those,” he said, pointing. Not accusatory. Matter of fact. “Where did you get those?”

“Here.”

“When?”

“Just now!”

“Can you explain why they are in your pocket, sir?’

Apparently, he or some tattletale, had seen me stash it.

Now, I confess I am not without the Karen reflex, and that my immediate impulse was to exercise strategic indignation. Say, demand the presence and mediation of a superior. But I did not. I had my reasons. Still, I wasn’t going to make this easy.

“Yes, I can explain that.”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

“Please explain that.”

“I was planning on eating them in the car on the way home, so I didn’t want to have to rummage for them in a bag.”

“Can you show me a receipt for them?”'

“No.”

Silence. Beat. Beat. I admit I was milking this, being a punk. Finally:

“I threw the receipt out. It will be in the wastebasket near the exit.”

We shuffled to the wastebasket. The receipt was there, all crumpled up. He un-crumpled it. Indeed, I had paid for five cans of dog food, two fresh artichokes, and a bag of gummi worms.

He apologized, I said no problem, and walked out into the night. That was that.

Why had I not shown anger or indignation? There was one reason, and it was foremost in my mind: The guy they were hassling — maybe even unreasonably — was white. It made me feel kind of good about the system, something I have not felt in a long while.

So.

Here’s today’s Gene Pool Gene Pool:

So, my thinking is that you owe me $50 a year for the rest of your life. That is $4.15 a month. You could make it up easily through shoplifting.

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Thoughts, questions, observations:

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