This Town

We saw that bank heist movie last night. The one starring Ben Afflick’s jaw and Jeremy Renner’s twitchy small town mug. A few hours after the movie I found myself in a strip mall parking lot waiting around while all the shops were closing up… the Whole Foods workers bundled up their green aprons and came out with brown paper sacks of groceries and got on bicycles and into metro rideshares and foreign cars. Perfectly normal. But the Office Depot crew came out like they were the original inspiration for Reservoir Dogs. The glass doors parted and light beamed through the forms of seven workers staggered in a majestic reverse-V - all of them dressed in workslacks and white polo shirts, looking uniform, clean, and purposeful – maybe even paper-cutter-dangerous. Their leader had red fuck-you-conditioner hair and a manager’s cell phone belt clip and she motioned for the OD Crew to pile in a white armored van featuring the Office Depot logo (modified slightly with a ammo clip in place of a printer cartridge). One of them did a reverse backflip into the rear of the truck and another kept one foot on the footbed of the passenger side so he could stand up as the driver, the shortest and oldest one of them all, drove them away. I am pretty sure I heard a couple of them barking and loading up their tech-9s in time to pick off a few Whole Foods workers waiting for their rides. You never know where professional take-down crews are assembling. Be nice to your retail worker.