in which i am afforded the opportunity to quote from "my name is earl"

My preferred liquor store lies on the other side of the interstate from Casa Camino. The wider selection and cheaper prices are generally worth the extra time and half-mile of traffic, but there are occasions, like this past Saturday, when the liquor store that sits beside my grocery store will simply have to do. Weekend traffic on my side of the sprawling boro is an ever-thickening bitch that I am increasingly reluctant to battle, and I am therefore, at times, willing to settle for higher prices and a diminished selection to keep from crawling that-half mile in a baking Camino mobile.

So it was that I stepped into this second choice of an alcohol merchant, picked up a bottle of Rex Goliath pinot noir (my standby noir due to it’s name and affordability), and waited patiently in line behind a group of aging blondes as they chose from an assortment of schnapps along the bottom shelf behind the counter. The guy working the register leaned from his stool just far enough to hook each bottle between a couple of nicotine stained fingers, groan for effective, and then slowly upright himself and smile crookedly at each of the ladies.

He’s the same guy who’s always there on the weekends. He’s thin and somewhere in his fifties, with thinning black hair slicked backwards and the top of a pack of Marlboro one hundreds peeking from the pocket of his plaid shirt. He may own the place for all I know. The only thing I’m sure of is that he’s the type who samples from the airplane bottles at the counter when the store is either empty or that aisle of Australian merlots obscures him from the random customer.

Let it be known that I in no way mean to imply that these traits are less than admirable.

I eventually made it to the counter. He took my bottle and turned it around in his hands a couple of times before scanning it into the register.

“Rex was a 47-pound rooster” he gleamed from the label. He then gave me a different, yet equally crooked smile and added, “That’s a big fucking chicken.”

I smiled, agreed with a grunt of some sort, and then remembered one of Randy’s lines from that episode of My Name is Earl containing the subplot of Randy’s fear of chickens (which, by the way, would be officially diagnosed as “alektorophobia”).

“A rooster is a man-chicken” I quoted.

He paused for a moment with my bottle halfway into the thin paper bag and furrowed his brow without looking up.

“Alright,” he said with a nod, “that’s a big fucking man-chicken.”