A River in Egypt.

There's a low-rent apartment complex near my station, colloquially referred to as "the Glen." The residents use my store as the local grocery, which in turn gives my job its unique and delightful character. The handy walking distance allows for Glen residents to visit my store three or four times daily. Luckily for me, they joyfully embrace this opportunity, allowing our staff to chart how drunk, high, and cracked-out they are over the course of the day. To anyone who thinks I'm using unfair blanket statements or painting a willfully bleak view of the patronage--there's a standing invite to come work with me any given Friday night

One of my favorite Glen pastimes is witnessing the purchase of small quantities of alcohol, by the same people, many times daily. The drill goes: purchase one or two 24oz cans of some asphalt-tasting toxin like Steele Reserve or a forty of Schlitz; pay in a manner so exact as to suggest that the sum of coinage handed over represents the fruits of scouring the furniture cushions; go home (or to the alley, or whatever) and consume the beer, along with copious portions of pot, crack, meth, or some combination of the above and a pack of Newports. Return to my store and repeat said process at two-hour intervals until closing time.

I'd say that I want to know why my friends don't just buy a whole lot of beer to begin with, since, inevitably, they're going to drink a whole lot of beer, but actually I don't. Not knowing, and the gloriously fun conjecture that entails, is probably more entertaining to me than having the actual 411 ever would be. To put this in a properly male perspective (Warning! Politically incorrect comment!), it's like that girl at the bar you're dreaming of doing the business with: she's never going to look as good naked as your imagination has her looking. (I don't know--do women think like that too?) The real reason for the walk-by drunkards is in all likelihood more mundane than I suppose it to be.

In any case, I've worked out a list of theories as to why this booze circuit works the way it does. In no particular order:

1) Drunkard doesn't have a refrigerator, and hence leaving future beverages in our cooler keeps them from getting warm. This would make more sense if most of the clients weren't apartment dwellers with furnished appliances. Finding places without refrigerators isn't even very common anymore, so this can't explain more than a few instances. Well, a few instances beyond the landscapers, who are obviously drinking on the job.

2) Small quantities are easier to hide from the wife/cohabitant and younguns, who might complain about drunkard squandering the rent money, or worse, not sharing. I suspect this might explain a few more instances. The fridge would be considered fair game for the eight other people living in the apartment. Hence, buying what you can keep in your hands is just an elaborate and well-planned method of hoarding.

3) Busking $1.39 in change takes about two hours. This adequately explains those drunkards who feel that all twenty cents in the "give a penny, take a penny" bin are specifically alloted to advancing their alcoholism. Hey, the people that left them there were leaving them for somebody, right? Why not them?

4) Unspeakable acts were performed in exchange for twenty dollars. Since the walk-by drunkard phenomenon is an overwhelmingly male one, there's probably an awful lot of cellmate love performed for the local drug dealers in exchange for cash. Nevermind...that twenty would go right back to the dealer. Who exactly would pay cash? Is there really a sizable contingent of undiscerning homosexuals with disposable income wandering Tennessee? 'Cuz the number of dirty chidren that get dragged into my store by crack moms indicates that the local ladies certainly didn't have to pay for it.

5) I deliberately left this one for last, based on its preponderant improbability: they really think that one forty is all they'll be having tonight. This one keeps flitting through my mind, like the memory of an itch. I can't banish the possibility that some of these folk are actually convinced that tonight will be different from every other Friday of their lives, that tonight they're going to kick back with a single deuce-deuce, tall boy, or 40 , smoke some seedy brown Mexican weed out of their 50-cent, modified Black and Mild blunt, and call it quits when they're done with it. That's right. This time it'll be different.

As Stuart Smalley used to say: "Denial. It ain't just a river in Egypt."