Spaces.

Tails. I lose. Shit.

My coworker Mike and I have just settled matters in the time-honored, if somewhat pacifistic, death-duel that is the coin toss. I’ve chosen heads for as long as I can remember, and today the god of dichotomous transactions, or at least random mathematical chance, has frowned upon me. I have to clean the pumps.

When there are two staffers on at night, the wicked Ethel (our store manager), likes to, understandably, leave lists of chores to be executed during down time. Cleaning the pumps is among the least desired of these. It’s not really hard work to fill a bucket with warm water and to wipe down the grimy fuel stands with a rag, but it leaves one smelling of exhaust until a shower and a trip to the laundry become available, which does not occur until at least the following day. Flirting with the college girls is problematic enough when your cards are on the table as the guy selling them cigarettes, but smelling of blue grade fuel? Come on.

What’s worse, being caught outside by the customers compromises the spatial hierarchy that we’ve worked so hard to establish in the building itself: the six-inch dais that exists behind the counter grants us a weird air of authority that animal-level rules of eye contact and head position have ingrained into humanity; I’m taller, and hence I’m in charge. Outside, when I’m revealed to be a slightly-above-average height six-oh male, my authority evaporates like spilled gas on a hot Summer day in Tennessee. I now have to deal with the folk who drive up while I’m thus exposed like they are, quite literally, on equal footing. (It’s the same feeling I get when I run into them at the bar, but at least there I have alcohol to ease the transition.) That means no sneering, no rushing them, no condescension. I might even have to do more than say “hi” and ask them how they’re doing, winging my way through actual conversation while they pump gas, as if it were something I’m versed in, as opposed to something I’ve learned to feign. Damn.

But I also get to see a little bit of what happens outside the lines, if you will, the things that I normally only see the results of. So I watch the locals passing bottles of Bud Light and Corona in the car, taking that last hit off a joint, pooling money, arguing with spouses, emptying their trash from home into our garbage cans—the little bits of reality that make up our patrons’ lives immediately before and after my brief and highly ritualized indoor contact with them.

And today, as I’m finishing the last pump, I see a striking Russian girl who lives at the Glen walking toward the store, and feel a twinge of envy that Mike, and not me gets to deal with those fetching eyes and supple form and that voice. Oh my, the timbre that is a Russian girl’s voice. To sound more exotic she’d have to be from Mars.

As my eyes follow her into the store, I notice something entirely less welcome: some jackass at the front counter with a lit cigarette in his hand. I look over and wave a frantic, beckoning wave in his direction.

But smoker, like most militant smokers, clearly pines away for the glorious days of the seventies and eighties before the scientific community could prove that his suicidal, filthy habit was also a homicidal, filthy habit, and he could still pollute everyone’s air so long as he sat in the in a confined area of Taco Bell. So he’s passive-aggressively venting, literally, his frustration that this is no longer the case by carrying lit cigarettes into places he’s not allowed to and then acting surprised when he’s told to stop. We’ve all seen the type: they’ll take one last monster drag before discarding a butt and getting on the bus, just so they can exhale smoke everywhere once aboard and thereby assert their territorial pissing rights—as if smoking, any more than breathing, were exclusively the act of inhaling. And so I waved at this one.

“Why you got to wave at me?” smoker asks after charging through the doors. He’s clearly furious at this perceived slight, and he’s standing on the step before the door, about six inches up from the lot that I’m standing on. He has, Annikin, the high ground. The rage in his eyes and his superior strategic position are, I must admit, a touch intimidating. The advantage I carry for nearly all of each day at work has been, quite rudely, inverted.

I could, at a later and better opportunity, explain that I used gestures because shouting at bulletproof plexiglass, which absorbs an awful lot of noise, from twenty paces would be about as effective as treating advanced sarcoma with asprin, or that the burden of non-smoking in indoor spaces has shifted, palpably and obviously, onto smokers in recent years, or that I waved instead of spoke because his presumptuousness obviated the standard rules of etiquette. But none of that matters right now. Right now, a white man had the unbridled gall to wave at a distance to a black man, and the black man is all in a snit about it. Cracker invaded his racial space.

Wild guess? Blind, bigoted thinking? Pointless theorizing? No. Mike, the guy that I lost the coin toss to, as I found later, had told this guy to leave the store moments before I waved at him, and got no grief at all. Mike’s black, by the way.

“You’re not allowed to smoke in the store,” I say, with what I hope is a firm but uninflammatory tone.

“Why you got to wave at me?” Obviously, this is an issue for him.

“Sorry. Please don’t smoke in my store,” I offer, trying to be appropriately firm yet conciliatory. I have no idea if I’m pulling this off or not.

Smoker gives a shrug and a snort seemingly meant to convey, “was that so hard?” before turning and going back to his car. He got me to apologize, which is far more than he deserved, as he, not I, was the one doing something he knew he shouldn’t be doing. But sometimes that’s how it works when you have the high ground.

Since I’m done cleaning the pumps now, I take the six-inch step up before the doors, head through them immediately smelling the leftover Newport smoke hanging in the air from my angry departed friend. I wash my hands and step the next six inches up behind the counter—back onto the command perch. One total foot and a world of difference.

“What was that guy saying to you out there?” Mike asks me.

“He was yelling at me for waving him outside because he was smoking in the store.”

“Yeah, I told him the same thing right before you did.”

I look over at Mike. Maybe smoker’s beef with me wasn’t racially charged at all. Maybe Mike just had a better way of asking, or at least the illusion of superior height. Perhaps I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, although smoker’s very different reactions to two people giving him the same message is a bit suspicious. But I would have given that same wave to anybody in that same situation, and suspect most people wouldn’t have taken it as a personal insult. Ah well. Who knows?

Oh, and I smoke, by the way. I’m not some anti-tobacco zealot; I just understand that we’re the minority and need to accommodate others, not the reverse. But it’s a simple matter of courtesy to understand that lighting up on other people’s property, be it their homes, their businesses, what have you, without permission is just plain ignorant and rude. Just like I don’t assume I can smoke in other people’s apartments, they aught to extend that consideration into my store. To do otherwise is an invasion of people’s space.

With little more to do, I ruminate for a few minutes on this very idea of nearness and distance, insides and outsides, of high and low, and Herve Vllechaize and his suicide, on clashes of spatially segregated cultures. I wonder about odd ideas of personal definition and personal space flying under the radar of consciousness, defining the way we approach and react to people and situations, before the welcome interruption of a girl from very, very, far away breaks my train of thought.

“Hel-lo,” begins my Russian angel, in that mesmerizing, drawn-out way that Slavs pronounce multisyllabic English words, as she approaches the counter with her 20oz bottle of Diet Sun Drop. I guess Mike doesn’t get to serve her after all.

“Hello,” I return, with an actual sincere smile.

If only I didn’t smell like gas.