Shoeless Joe.

Some college jackass comes into my store on a weekend night, with friend. I'm outside the counter sweeping, and I notice his filthy, unshod feet as he stares doen into the ice cream cooler in a pot-induced frenzy of dairy lust.

"Hey guy, you need shoes to be in here." My tone is officious; it's late, and I'm tired and being a jerk.

He replies, in brokenhearted inquiry, "Can I buy my ice cream first?"

"Nope."

He sniffs angrily and storms out, instructing his equally baked friend to buy the ice cream for him on his way to the door.

"Why'd you tell him to leave?" Vicki asks, heading tilting in puzzled-dog expression.

"No shoes. It's not my rule, it's the health department's." I can hear his friend mutter something under his breath about this assertion being bullshit. Although he is unwise to contradict someone who can revoke his walking-distance convenient store privileges, he's probably right. He buys his friend's ice cream, his own soda, and leaves. I see as they head back the Glen that Shoeless Joe has ridden a skateboard barefoot to get here. Underclassmen and their vestigial high-schoolisms crack me up.

I have no idea if there's anything about compulsory footwear in the Tennessee health code, and frankly, I could care less. This isn't exclusively about that, although I would certainly prefer not to have ringworm and athlete's foot slathered around my floor by anyone's fetid, sweaty dogs. It's about acting like an adult.

College kid apparently didn't pick up before leaving for school that the public world is not in fact an extension of his home. It places expectations on the individual that aren't present whilst strolling around the shitbag apartment hungover in one's boxers. One of these is, of course, that in the huge majority of indoor service establishments he's going to be expected to get dressed before partaking of their bounty. I could care less that he wants to skate-punk around the parking lot of the Glen, repelling coeds with his bare feet and atavistic juvenelity. He's outdoors and in his rental property in that situation. If they have a problem with his annoying the drivers coming to and fro (as they almost certainly do) then it's their problem to correct it. Seeing as limiting the inflow of crack into the complex is among the Glen management's competing priorities, I imagine that they perceive skateboarding to be a comparitively minor threat. Fair enough.

But in my store, he's going to be given an ettiquette lesson. He's going to miss it, of course, and probably all the rest of them he'll receive before failing out of college and skating home to his parents, but I feel it's my didactic civic duty to see if I can't create that crack that floods his brain with light--to impart to him that strangers have different expectations than the people he hangs out with, and that he's going to have to learn to play ball if he wants his ice cream on the first trip. His upbringing really should already have instilled this understanding, but since it didn't, epiphany by coercion is now passed on to luckless dupes like me, who are still brave or stupid enough to attempt it. He'll no doubt curse me all the way home, or mock me in that ubiquitous amateur-night college mode of sarcasm, because, like an unwise Zen novice, he's looking at the matter all wrong.

The fact that the raging alcoholic Mexican day-laborers that live alongside the students in the Glen, people who are often new to the country and the language, can understand playing by the rules better than the college kids is a source of enduring wonder for me. Is it fear of deportation or just better parenting? Many to most of them are legal, hence I am left to wonder if there's something in the water, or in the homestead, in Mexico that teaches people to interact with strangers is a manner expeditious and courteous. They picked up somewhere, perhaps by being strangers in a new land, that they don't carry the ground rules with them from home anymore than they carry their physical haciendas themselves. And maybe that's why they often comprehend, even 20 Coronas in, something that the college kids rarely get at all: when in doubt as to proper courtesy in a situation, defer to the people in charge. The college kids have this dynamic inverted: assume yourself to be the person that sets the rules, and then pout when you are informed otherwise. They retain that childish egotism that views rules as conspiritorial infringements on their personal liberties. To be sure, some rules are like that, but most rules are simply tiny, agreed-upon sacrifices of convenience we make for the mutual benefit and smooth running of society. I have to wait at the stoplight so you can pass through the intersection with minimal fear of property loss, death, and disfigurement. You then in turn do the same at the next intersection: quid pro quo, in all its beautiful simplicity. I would very much like to never stop at an intersection, but given sufficient traffic, that suggests that someone else will always have to stop at every intersecion. I can, nevertheless, elect to break the rules and never stop, but sooner or later the police cruiser or ambulance driver is going to explain the consequences of that decision.

Consequence, as a word in our privilege-obsessed society, has taken on a pejorative connotation that it doesn't deserve. It has come to be associated with words like "punishment" and "retribution" as in "suffer the consequences," when in fact it means nothing more then "effect" or "result." Rules, like traffic laws and no-shoes policies, are there to inhibit negative consequences like collision fatalities and fungal sprawl, while promoting positive consequences like smooth and predictable transit and public health. Most people never contemplate the idea that they live in no fear of measles due to rules governing vaccinations as they blow through red lights because they're late for work, just as college kid thinks that it's my personal bad attitude and not his lack of foresight that's kicked him out of my store.

He's right, of course, but he's missing the part where he's wrong. He made a decision to controvert the rules, when asked to do something as mundane as putting on a two-dollar pair of flip-flops before entering my establishment. I taught him that his behavior results in public embarassment and delayed gratification on his ice cream. He won't learn that lesson today, but maybe if enough other people teach it to him, he still stands a chance of becoming a decently considerate adult--the kind of person that doesn't habitually shed blame for his miscues. His parents, like most parents, didn't do a very good job of raising that kind of person. Perhaps the rest of us still can.