Last night I took the wife and boy to a fair.  Fun times were had by all.

It had been a long, hot day at work, I had a indulged a little at the biergarten, and then had a walk around the fair until I was in condition to drive.  Needless to say, at the end of the day, I was a bit dehydrated.  I made the executive decision that as soon as I found a convenience store outside where the fair was, I was going to stop and get a Gatorade.  Where the fair was held was … not on the nicest side of town.

As soon as I got to the main road, I was greeted by two gas station/convenience stores,  One was a sketchy looking, nameless place that looked like the only thing holding the building together was hepatitis.  The other was a Citgo station.

I chose the Citgo station.  I parked the car, my wife locked the doors, and I went inside.  There was more OE 800 than Soft Drinks.  The place was rundown.  The register was behind an inch of ballistic glass, and that was the only clean surface in the place.

One of the customers had spilled a big gulp something on the floor.  There was some sort of argument going on with him.  There were a couple of women in the store buying a large volume of artificially fruit flavored malted beverage, and a man in a filthy tank top hitting on them and trying to invite himself to whatever they were going with that much booze.

I started counting to 60 in my head.  If I didn’t get to the counter and pay for my beverage in the next 60 seconds, I was going to abort the mission.

No, I was not carrying.  The fair was on government property that forbade the  presence of guns by unauthorized persons at all.  Couldn’t even have one in your car.

One of the two clerks behinds the counter says something to the other clerk and then goes out the back door of his bunker.  He then enters the store through the service door pushing a mop bucket by the mop.  He turns to face the guy who is spilled the drink and is still griping about something and *BOOM* strapped to his hip is a Lipsey’s Exclusive, Vickers gray Glock 17 (can’t mistake the color) open in a Kydex holster.  A cold and sobering wind blows through the store.  Everybody shuts up and forms an orderly line to pay.

Yes, this place had the look of the quintessential Stop-n-Rob.  Doubtlessly it had been hit several times before.  It was in an area were police response times can be described as “we’ll send the coroner in the morning.”

This particular clerk looked like he wasn’t about to put up with that type of BS on his shift.

I payed for my refreshment and left with a very a knowing grin on my face.  Remembering a time when I was the guy working in the convenience store with a gun on my hip.