Clerks

[Note: I love that Clerks follows Citizen Kane on my shelf.]

The best part of retail is helping the few cool people you meet. Sometimes you meet someone, maybe someone attractive, and he/she stops and talks to you for a minute, and you spend the rest of your shift floating, hoping he/she will come back, even though you'll never see him/her again. Connection! Yet they never come back.

The worst is the asshole customers, who outnumber the cool people 10 to 1.

Dumb questions. People who can't read a sign. People who think "the back" is this mystical land where we always have more of something, if they just ask over and over and over again. Cherry pickers who come in, buy only the items that are on sale, and leave. Sheep who buy the latest Oprah book, Harry Potter book, Twilight book, and won't read anything else. People who think "The customer is always right" is carte blanche to be a dick.

I took a lot of abuse when I worked in retail. Ten years later, I remain convinced that sociopaths deliberately go to stores and restaurants and abuse employees to make themselves feel better for their empty lives. I hope they went home feeling better. I also hope they tripped.

In nearly 10 years of working in retail, from age 16 to 25, I never once had a customer apologize for being an asshole.

To this day, I treat service employees with a crazy amount of respect. I tip like 30 percent. I thank profusely. I apologize all over myself when I realize I've asked a dumb question. I very rarely argue. See? Working in the service industry is great character building. My kid is totally slinging groceries; that is, someday when I have a kid.

I saw Clerks in college. My old roommate Chris caught on to Kevin Smith long before I did, but he always caught on to things before me — Tarantino, Soul Coughing, MST3K, the list goes on. Chris somehow knew about this stuff, and was sort of the cultural maven of the household. He lived in the basement of our college house. He hung up a Clerks movie poster in that basement. I'm pretty sure he still has that poster.

Clerks came along at a time when I was dreaming of something better than slinging groceries and dealing with assholes all day, and even though I left retail ten years ago and never looked back, I've watched Clerks about once a year ever since.

I used to think working in a grocery store or bookstore was a stepping stone to great success as a writer, a comic, something. I love my career in teaching, but honestly, that's not really what I had in mind when I was 20.

However, I don't consider myself a failure now. I consider myself a failure then. At least now I have my shit together. I look back at that age and feel this overwhelming sense of self-loathing. What was I thinking? I don't just mean the goatee or questionable use of hair care products or the all-night emo rambling about women who wouldn't call back. I mean all the unfounded, unbridled pretension. Acting like my teachers didn't know anything. Furious at the world for holding back my talents. Livid because I had to waste my days and lose countless weekends dealing with assholes in a store while doing meaningless tasks, when I could be home writing my memoirs or changing the world or whatever the fuck. If Randal were there, he would've said the same thing he said to Dante: "You sound like an asshole."

A colleague once told me, "Your students don't know what they don't know." It's true. They know enough to be dangerous, and they're developing skills and harnessing their talents, but teaching gets really hard when students start to shut off and convince themselves they know enough, or don't need to know what you're saying, or if they just get complacent, like earning a degree is akin to imprisonment — just put in the time, do the bare minimum, stay out of the way, and they'll set you free someday. To do what?

I was exactly that way, and that self-awareness informs my teaching. (This is better than saying, "Karma is a bitch.")

Strangely, I did not like Clerks the first time I saw this (on VHS) in 1995. Although I was not great at recognizing bad acting then, I could tell Dante and Randal were reading their lines off the clipboard (that was Dante) and newspaper (that was Randal). I thought the dialogue was too talky, too precious, too contrived. The plot? What plot? I came away from this film with one question: What was that?

The '90s were a time of extremely talky, independent films that seemingly had no plot. I say "seemingly" because, really, the '90s were a time of talky, independent films with strong character arcs — character-driven films over plot-driven films — and they pegged the zeitgeist so well. This is how we used to talk, how we used to think, and what we used to do with our time. Our lives have no plot. We can only hope to evolve along an arc, better ourselves, better our station in life, and have fun doing so.

I did not realize at the time how clearly Kevin Smith's film articulated Gen-X ennui. Maybe I did, but "ennui" wasn't in my vocabulary at the time, so I couldn't have been that perceptive. We were overeducated, or thought we were (can you really be overeducated if you went to Ball State?). Regardless, I didn't want to "pay my dues." I ended up paying them anyway. The world is funny like that. Teachers can't teach everything. Sooner or later, the real world takes the baton.

I'm not sure Clerks helped me in the right way. If I came away inspired, then great. If this film just made me more pretentious and irrational, then that sucks. I'm pretty sure it was both. I can't tell you everything.

Smith's films gave me a ton of hope at the time and made me think I could do the same thing, but success like this? (Hartford? The Whale?) Happens once a generation, to one lucky schlub at random, and the rest of us get to watch. Still, I started writing screenplays, and I convinced myself that if Kevin Smith can do this, that maybe, just maybe...ah, hell.

Sometimes I think this blog is a productivity stopgap because I'm so blocked for a screenplay and/or paralyzed by whatever else is keeping me from writing more. I'm just saying.

How much different are things for today's 18-24 set? I'm around this age group five days a week. The mentality is pretty much the same, but with more gadgets, more Internet, and a slightly more pronounced sense of entitlement. I can't blame them. I can just try to help them, and try to keep my own thing going too. I may never get what I want, but I'm happy just to die trying.