Dynamic Friction

“Think I’ll go have half a banana,” Gary said to me during my afternoon shift at The Outlet today.

He’s always eating things in halves: bran muffins, pieces of bundt cake, maybe even garbanzo beans. Wouldn’t shock me. Half empty glass? Not in his world, no sir. I usually chide him for eating half a banana while sitting stoically at his desk with a dim light on beside him, the way I picture a monk or maybe his ninety-five-year-old mother eating their respective banana rations.

“I ate mine today while I was taking a leak,” I said. One time I told him how I used to deep throat bananas in front of my co-worker, Jaybird, while he was in the middle of handling recorded phone calls, along with my other preferred banana ingestion method: in the car.

A regular customer in his mid-fifties named Dave walked in, and after he told me how he was too old to attend concerts anymore, I offered to take him to a Four Tops show the next time they’re nearby. He said there’d be too many overweight women dancing to distract him. I ceased half-assing our chatter and got to the point.

“Dave,” I said sternly to get his attention. “Settle a debate: What’s the best item to eat while driving?”

“Uhhh…”

“A banana?”

“Eh…what do you do with the stringy stuff?”

“You eat it! It’s good for you!”

“Then there’s the peel.”

“Monkeys eat the peel.”

It wasn’t my best comeback.

“I’m not a monkey.”

“You’re losing this one, Adam,” Gary said to me, still too distracted to begin eating roughly fifty percent of a single Chiquita.

“I’m gonna start throwing ‘em out the window, blast the Benny Hill theme song, and watch people slip.”

In walked Eric, a longtime regular. I recommended the new Kacey Musgraves album, a mutual favorite singer of ours, and got right to it.

“Eric, you’ve been missing some stirring conversation,” I said because I speak in italics.

“Oh yeah?”

“You’ve spent long hours in the cruiser,” I hypothesized about his days as a police officer. “What’s your favorite thing to eat while driving?” 

“Hmm…”

“A banana, maybe?”

“What do you do with the peel?”

“Dammit!” I said while Dave and Gary laughed.

“A candy bar? A crisp apple?”

Things fizzled and Gary resurfaced from the back with his severed banana resting on the same faded blue-and-eggshell-colored container he’s served himself his banana on for the last twenty years. I had to go to the post office, but not without a final question for Dave.

“Slim Jim?” 

“That might be it!” he said while chuckling. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I stopped eating beef jerky. Too salty, but not as salty as his responses during this timeless debate.

Upon walking to my car, I saw the girl who works next door standing beside her orange Jeep. She leaves the adjacent Fred Astaire Dance Studio each day at 4:30—I’ll save faux editorializing on the misogyny of not naming it in honor of Ginger Rogers—and glances into our fishbowl window. Gary and I see her seeing us because her reflection appears in our Covid-resistant plexiglass. Gary insists she looks like Jenn, the girl who I first worked with at the store in 2003, but I disagree when he inevitably revisits the topic weekly. For the first time I could recall, she had her hair down and it shone in the sun. My confidence shattered by the banana debacle, I abstained from complimenting it, especially since she occasionally delivers our mail that accidentally winds up on her desk. If I didn’t creep her out with a flattering comment about her glistening locks today, what would I say next time?

“Please tell me your name’s Jennifer” would be worse than contemplating fruit consumption in a sedan.

Clearly frazzled, I visited the post office and chatted with Kim, one of my favorite clerks. The man next to me sported a stained tee shirt and strands of hair resembling spaghetti left in the strainer for too long, sloppily hanging to cover a tattoo on the back of his head. He was mailing hand-drawn cartoon stills and insuring them for one thousand dollars apiece but debating with his clerk about if they were technically “media mail.”

“Cartoons are media, right?!” he slyly asked me.

This is the type of situation where I usually thrive, but I didn’t know what to say. It’s likely how I made Dave feel, I realized, and I like Dave.

“Check the manual,” Kim said to her co-worker, tellingly while not deep throating a banana. “Rules will probably say it’s not media.”

Tough day for confidence.

I returned to The Outlet and chastised myself for not bringing my Gala apple for the ride. Upon walking to the mailbox to find nothing—“Jenn” probably hoarded any letters for a drop-off on Tuesday—I strolled back while Dave stood beside my car.

“Your car keeps ticking,” he told me. “You got a bomb in there?”

I regaled him with a pointless anecdote about getting my exhaust fixed by an unknown mechanic while my own mechanic underwent hand surgery, blaming the new guy for the sound, mainly upset I was unable to remember the term for what caused the (hopefully) harmless ticking.

“It’s been ticking like that since August 2018.”

“Should end well,” he joked, and we said goodbye.

Back inside, the day concluded with two thirty-something buddies searching for records. One guy found a Bread album and mentioned how one of their songs soundtracked his first dance with his wife at their wedding.

“Hope it wasn’t ‘Everything I Own’,” I said in jest about a song concerning a reunion with a dead father.

He ultimately purchased compilations by Bread and John Denver, telling me how he hates the Beatles because of their overexposure.

“They’re like the Marvel movies.”

“Desensitized to ‘em,” I offered. “I get it.”

I locked the door and muttered, “Too bad they never wrote any good first dance wedding love songs.”

On the way to my car via the back door, I offered to take the plastic bag housing Gary’s now decomposing banana peel to the trash, but he said he had more detritus to add.

I closed the door then quickly knocked on it. My phone wasn’t in my pocket.

“Let me text it so you know where to find it,” Gary joked after I’d done the same for him earlier following a discussion of Hilary Swank’s startlingly forgettable filmography.

Upon arriving at my car, the ticking sound was gone but suddenly the term came to mind: dynamic friction! I opened the text Gary had just sent: “Cccffffffff.”

Poor guy had overdosed on potassium. No half measures.