One of the sons was your garden variety good ol' boy:  Billy's Drywall Services cap, hunting license, outline of a Skoal container in his back pocket, etc.  But the older of the two was something more.  He scared the hell out of me.  He was big and moody, and carried an air of potential violence.  His eyes were like those of a wild animal.  I always had the uneasy feeling that if I said the wrong thing to him, he would kill me.  And I quickly learned that a prolonged and sustained threat of a beating death, whether perceived or real, tends to detract from the overall work experience.  The few times we worked together at night were excruciating affairs.  He didn't joke around like everybody else, in fact he didn't say much at all.  He just brooded, and paced, like he was struggling to control himself from doing something crazy.  I was terrified of the guy.  I was told that he once got into an argument with a customer at the full-service pump who was attempting the old "Why'd you fill it up?  I said five dollars, and that's all I'm going to pay" scam.  Supposedly he pumped a few cents worth of gasoline into the customer's lap then held up a butane lighter, as subtle encouragement for him to pay up.  I don't doubt for a second that it happened.  The guy was a ticking time bomb.

Of course, he was running a successful gas scam of his own the whole time.  For some reason, stealing gasoline from this place was taboo.  It was perfectly OK to drink a hundred dollars worth of beer every week, in fact it was encouraged.  But it was socially unacceptable to take three dollars worth of fuel.  Indeed, the other employees would shun a person if they were known to be stealing from the pumps.  Repeat offenders were threatened with bodily harm.  I never learned why this was so (I was never able to crack their intricate moral code).  But stealing gas from the customers was another thing altogether.  That was something to be admired.  My spooky friend kept a five gallon can on the full-service island, where he always worked.  And several times during each day a "yuppie faggot" would pull up in an expensive car and bark the demand, "fill it up with premium" before disappearing into the store.  A gallon or two would inevitably make its way into the can before a drop went into the car, and the customer would unknowingly pay for it with his gold card.  And my buddy would smile and wave to the guy as he drove away, while muttering a string of obscenities under his breath.  The he'd pour five gallons of yuppie gas into his own car's tank at the end of every shift.

In the spirit of efficiency and shared services, we would sometimes engage in an employee theft exchange program with other local businesses.  One night I was working with a big Hoss Cartwright-like gentleman who immediately upon arriving proclaimed himself "hungry as shit."  He milled about the store grumbling for an hour, eating this and that, but was clearly not satisfied.  Finally he picked up the phone and called a friend who was a dishwasher at a high-dollar restaurant a few miles away.  An hour later the friend showed up with two thick bacon-wrapped filet mignon steaks which he had obviously stolen from his employer.  After "paying" the man with beer from the cooler, Hoss hollered, "Hell, yeah!" and retrieved a small charcoal grill from the shelf.  He took it outside and began grilling the steaks on the sidewalk by the door.  Every once in a while he would come inside to get a bottle of steak sauce or salt and pepper, and it wasn't long before we were eating perfectly prepared thirty-dollar steaks off paper plates with plastic utensils.  And Hoss moaned a low guttural, "goddamn this is good..." while wiping the grease from his face.

A few of my business partners also had frequent sex with the sizable local skag population, while on the clock.  I never took advantage of this particular perk, mostly because none of the young ladies offered to be my co-conspirator.  But a couple of the guys pumped a lot more than gas while they worked.  Yes they did.  And this is yet another of the mysteries of the place that I don't think will ever be solved.  Both of the gentlemen that were most encouraged to freely scatter their fluids over the landscape, like Johnny Ampleseed, were hideously ugly.  The gas station groupies just couldn't get enough of them though.  Even though these women would seemingly swing open whenever a man got near them, like a grocery store, it was still puzzling to me.  I understood why I wasn't involved, but why were these guys?  Maybe it was their dinner plate-sized belt buckles that appealed to the ladies, I don't know.  But nearly every night a different cigarette-puffing hussy would show up and begin flirting with my coworker, and before long I'd find myself alone behind the counter.  Eventually they'd emerge from the giant truck, flushed and glassy-eyed.  And after the woman left I got to hear all about her oral acrobatics, about how it was a virtual Suck du Soleil.  I alternated between being insulted and proud they never looked my way.

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