Ted happily waved back. He was always happiest when customers left. This one was maybe twenty years old and wore a white T-shirt with the face of Kerouac stenciled onto it. He had bought a Beat Poets Map, studded around the perimeter with ill-drawn faces of San Francisco writers and red X’s to mark the spots where those luminaries had eaten and drunk and lived the Bohemian high life. The aluminum-frame door swung shut behind him and clipped his elbow, and Ted heard just the first note of a stifled grunt. For a moment he was cheered by the whole episode, but then he was a little ashamed. He had embarrassed the kid by asking him about the black beret that had been shoved into a back pocket of his Levi’s so as to be casually displayed. And then he had made up a transparent lie about his own days in North Beach, which the kid was forced out of politeness or stupidity to swallow. It was cheap as dirt to humor a customer, but somehow Ted couldn’t manage it anymore. He was out of patience all the time these days, and he hadn’t any reason to be.
