99 CENTS STORE

Today I talked to Ricky.

For the first time ever, I enter the 99 Cents Store on Sunset Blvd. Here, you can find everything for less than a dollar. Canned food, tomato soup, chicken noodle, Vienna sausages, pork & beans, incredible Hulk candies, and Halloween costumes. It is the American Dream in a supermarket.

Families, couples, friends are roaming around the store. They are hunting for any object that might be useful to them. The shopping carts are moving to a mellow country song that plays in the background. I am looking at the Halloween costumes when a tiny girl stops next to me. She talks with a lisp: "This is Halloween," she says. "It's not today cause I'm scared." Then she points at a skeleton head. "Look, it has only one eye." And she disappears as fast as she came. 

On my way to the cash register, a teenage girl wearing a purple t-shirt and a lot of eyeliner is seating on a miniature plastic chair. She laughs with her girlfriend. Then she grabs a pack of tortillas. "Green cactus tortilla!" She turns to me: "Have you ever tried that?" I tell her I never did and we share a few words about the strange food around us.

I pay for a pack of cellulose sponge scrubbers, a Virgen de Guadalupe candle, and two Pez candy dispensers. My total is $4.19 - tax included. The place does keep its promises.

At the front door, I meet Ricky. He has a Diet Coke and two dozen eggs in his cart. "The eggs are just for the whites," he says. Ricky is from London and works as a bouncer in a pub. He wears a brown flat-cap on a shaved head and a short leather string with a silver star around his neck. "To do this job, you need to be good at public relations and have communications skills. You should talk kindly and if it's not enough, you just tell them to fuck off," he says laughing. The other night, a group of girls asked him if diner was still being served. "You're awfully a bit late, aren't you?" Ricky told them. But the girls didn't understand. "People don't get it when you speak politely. And they don't understand my accent neither," he says, and he smiles. I ask him what is the meaning of the Hebrew letter tattooed on his neck. "Life and beyond," he says. "I was dating a Jewish girl and she loved me very much. One day she said: You're a man and I want you to have this tattoo." I ask him why they are not together anymore. "She died," he just says. I feel awful, and tell Ricky I'm sorry to have asked. "Don't be. If you don't ask questions, you'll never get any answers." His eyes are full of kindness and pain. 

Then Ricky tells me that he is a super light middleweight boxer. When he boxes, he "hits the bag with all his might", he says. And he makes an imitation of Stallone in Rocky but I mistake it for De Niro in Raging Bull. Ricky's idols are Stallone, The Pope, and Richard Branson. He is a catholic-Jew from Indian, Italian and British origins. When he goes to mass, he finds it so powerful that "it is like being on steroids," he says. He asks me if we can hug. I accept. So we shake hands and kiss each other on the cheeks. "It's a good European hug," I tell him. We both smile and go our separate ways.