While buying some guacamole at a store in Kensington Market, I asked the cashier how she was doing. She was perhaps thirty, wore big, round unfashionable glasses, a dull and fading sweater, and had long hair that looked like she might have felt it was a nuisance. Her hands were a kind of grayish purple, as if dyed from the cash register\u2019s ink, and cracked in a really extreme, painful looking way. She responded to my question with great brio and confidence, \u201cAmazing,\u201d she said with disarming sarcasm. I said something like, “Wow, lucky you!” She shrugged, and as I was leaving she shouted after me in a voice still dripping with the sarcasm of a Ghost-World-Girl, “You have a magical day!\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n At Sanagan’s Meat Locker the guy working the cash wore a baseball cap that said Jimmy’s Coffee. It had brownish, indeterminate stains and smudges on it, and somehow this made it look deadly cool. I told him I liked his hat, and he said, “You like all the meat stains on it, don’t you?” I nodded. “Yeah, whenever I’m in the back room I’m constantly getting banged about by all the hanging carcasses, it\u2019s like getting whacked in the head all the time by those pugil sticks on American Gladiators!”<\/p>\n