David Jett Explains Convenience Stores
Fill up on Slurpee's and microwave burritos.
News recently hit that that a Buc-ee’s travel center was opening up around 45 minutes from where I live. People here lost their shit. “oh, my god, we’re getting a Buc-ees!” I viewed this in the same way as the scene from Steve Martin’s The Jerk, when Navin ran around like, well, a jerk exclaiming “the new phone books are here!” The joke was, why would someone get so excited about a phone book. I thought the same thing about Buc-ee’s. Sure, if I were traveling on the interstate and needed some food and beverage, maybe needed to pee, I would be happy to see a Buc-ee’s. But people in my city were making plans to drive 45 minutes specifically to go to a Buc-ee’s. People in a city that had numerous stores and restaurants that offered far superior products.
Country singer Keith Urban recently performed a free, surprise (pop-up as the kids say) concert in a parking lot next to a Buc-ee’s in Alabama. 6,000 excited fans showed up to hear songs from Urban’s new album and to test whether the convenience store really had what are claimed as award-winning bathrooms and the best and cleanest toilets outside of Lionel Richie’s house.
Buc-ee’s (I liked it better under it’s original name, Winter Soldier) is a conglomeration of a convenience store, Cracker Barrel, and Stuckey’s. It was founded by Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, which sounds like the name of a villain in an Adam Sandler movie. It’s basically a glorified truck stop which is ironic because they don’t allow 18-wheelers at its locations. Their travel centers typically have 80-120 gas pumps. That’s a lot of gas pumps. They also offer a lot of signature food items, such as Beaver Nuggets, which are tiny corn puffs coated with caramel and sugar. But that’s an unfortunate name. Beaver Nuggets. It made me think of a time when I drove by a Jack In The Box and the sign out front read “come in and get a Breakfast Jack!” It’s a good thing Buc-ee’s doesn’t offer a Breakfast Jack or their bathrooms wouldn’t be so clean.
Most of my youth was spent in movie theaters, arcades or convenience stores. One of the convenience stores was a neighborhood business owned by a Pakistani immigrant named AC Patel. It was called Quick Stop. I think. Maybe. Or something like Pac N Stop. Or Stop N Quick. Or Frank N Stein. I don’t fucking remember. All I know is that it had pinball machines and video games, and we spent so much time in there he should have charged us rent. Me and my buddies were very serious about our pinball and video gaming. Often when we would get a little too physical with a game, AC would shout out “Hey, you bang on my machine, I’ll bang on your head!”
An adjunct buddy of ours who was a year or two above us in grade worked there at night. It was like being at a bar before we were old enough to be at a bar. We would play Missile Command and Donkey Kong and watch a parade of older students come in and out in a most ridiculous manner. One night there was an older student who came in to get to a coke for his girl who was puking her guts out while sitting on the curb in front of the store. Obviously, they had been drinking. The dude saw us looking concerned over his girl’s condition. He slowly turned to us and in a slow, stoner drawl that would make Matthew McConaughey jealous, said “never feed a young girl wine.”
Another time, once again, a student older than us came into the store. Somehow, and I don’t remember why, we started talking to him and the subject of reading came up. He proudly said he had never read an entire book in this life. I tried to give him an out. Maybe a short story, maybe a magazine. Nope, he said, I’ve never finished reading anything. And he said it in a prideful manner, like he had just won the Nobel Prize. It reminds me of people today who have disdain for science or academics or just not being a dumb fuck.
AC Patel sold me my first nudie magazine. I was only 17 and was not legally allowed to buy anything like Playboy. But he sold me an issue of Penthouse. Young people today might not understand how big of a thing this was. Today you can call up free hardcore porn on your phone in a matter of seconds. When I was a kid, the only thing you had was looking at the bra section of the Sears catalogue. And maybe a few years later you got dial up internet and you started downloading a pic of what you thought was a topless woman and you sat, and sat, and sat while the glitchy little download bar kept getting lower, and lower, and, what the hell, she’s wearing a tube top! I’m calling bullshit.
I really had to talk AC into selling me this Penthouse. But I had a good reason. I had to convince AC that selling me that nudie mag was for research. That year I was the editor of my high school newspaper. I was a straight A student, but it came so easily to me that I got bored. And I always had a creative mind. So shit happened. That month, a former student at my high school, who now lived in Los Angeles, had come back to visit her family and promote her being the Penthouse Pet Of The Month. I managed to get in contact with her people and, without telling anyone on the faculty, brought her into the high school one afternoon for an interview for the school newspaper. She came in, immediately plopped down her portfolio in my lap, and I tried to keep my shit together as I interviewed an older woman who was showing an underage kid naked photos of herself. School officials got wind that she was there, stopped the interview, and my article about her was not published in the school paper. It was what it was. They really couldn’t let that article go in the school paper just because some kid had watched too many episodes of Lou Grant.
My interview subject on that day in 1981 was named Sheila Kennedy. She was only two years older than me but seemed like she was 30 years older. She was also, as I suppose a lot of the models were, a live-in lover of Penthouse founder Bob Guccione. Years later she sued Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose, saying he raped her in a 1989 attack in a New York City hotel. Now that would have made a great article for a high school newspaper.
7-Eleven, just like Buc-ee’s, was founded in Texas. And in 1991 was purchased by a Japanese supermarket chain, which seems appropriate since for much of my teen years, 7-Eleven was the Godzilla of convenience stores. There are no 7-Elevens where I live now. They were all over the city when I was young.
My neighborhood 7-Eleven had a small room off to the side that housed exactly two pinball machines. One was named something like Starlight or Starbright or Moonglow…I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter as we considered that game to be a consolation prize of sorts. Something you might pluck a quarter in while you were waiting for you turn on the Main Event of pinball machines: Tri-Zone.
We spent so many hours there, playing pinball and eating cheap microwave burritos, that we could put in one quarter and then win so many free games that we could play for three hours without ever putting another quarter in. We often maxed out the number of free games you could have on the board at one time. This was back when pinball machines didn’t tilt if you breathed hard on them. I remember one game in which the ball came down to that little metal divider to the side of the flippers. If the ball fell one way, it went back to the flippers. If it fell the other way, you lose the ball. The ball was almost suspended on this divider. I took my hands off the flipper buttons, jumped to the side of the machine, gave it a good shove to ensure the ball went in the right direction, and then, like a pinball ninja, leapt back in front and got my hands back on the flipper buttons in time to hit the ball back into play.
One Saturday afternoon we were in there playing Tri-Zone when a man in his mid to late 20’s walked in the doors of the 7-Eleven. He was wearing a tuxedo. Damn, this convenience store had a strict dress code! He nervously came into the pinball room and asked if he could slot himself into the player rotation. We’re like, sure, whatever. He played pinball with us for about an hour and a half. Then, like they were the FBI or Secret Service, two other guys wearing tuxes came in. They grabbed him by the arms and said “we gotta go!” Turns out the first well dressed man was the groom in a wedding taking place down the street. He had gotten nervous and left to get a Slurpee and clear his head. The other dudes were dragging him back to his wedding. I wonder if the bride was at another convenience store playing Ms. Pac Man.
This may sound like blasphemy to some, but I never liked Slurpees. They were too sweet for me. But I did love the Slurpee cup promotions. 7-Eleven often had superhero Slurpee cups and I delighted in collecting them. Recently, I was thinking about those plastic cups and wished I still had them. I decided to look on E-Bay and such sites and look at what I found. There’s someone selling 107 of these cups for only $1000. Would you guys be willing to chip in to a GoFundMe so I can buy them?
My favorite 7-Eleven product was the Big Gulp, a giant cup filled with your favorite soda for only 39 cents. There may have been more moments in my teenage years where I had a Big Gulp in my hands than when I didn’t.
My high school buddies and I were excellent students. I grasped the lessons so quickly that I often got bored. One year we had a new math teacher. He was a relatively meek, nerdy guy and had no control over his classes. There were students that liked to be disruptive, in a very harmless way, but still disruptive. We hated this at first because we actually wanted to learn. But after months of this, we realized that this teacher wasn’t ever going to be able to do his job properly so we kind of gave up. One day before his class, we took Big Gulp orders from the other students. Three of our gang drove up to the 7-Eleven and bought around 25 of them, including one for the teacher. They were a few minutes late for class. But they arrived with several large boxes full of Big Gulps. One of us stood at the front and called students names. “Randy Johnson, please come get your Big Gulp.” Like we were handing out graduation certificates. So then you had an entire class of high schoolers sitting there drinking Big Gulps. This sounds too ridiculous to have actually happened. (it actually happened.)
As I’ve written, convenience stores were mostly neighborhood affairs in those days. I was driving to drop off something at my grandparents’ house. I stopped in a random convenience store to get a Dr. Pepper (the whiskey of colas.) I immediately spotted a Pac Man machine. I was stupid good at this game. I put in a quarter and immediately got the high score. You might think that the greatest achievement for a high schooler would be graduating Valedictorian (which I did) or being the charismatic quarterback for the football team or being the cutest head cheerleader ever. It wasn’t any of these. It was getting the high score on a video game and getting to enter in your initials for all to see. I got the high score on this Pac Man and put in my initials. There was an older couple behind the counter. Probably a husband and wife who owned the store. As I left, I heard them say, “Jimmy is going to be heartbroken that someone beat his high score.” They sounded so sad. This neighborhood kid’s score had been supplanted by a stranger. A drifter. I wish I had been wearing a black Stetson so I could have tipped it while saying in a western drawl, “sorry, ma’am. Sir. I don’t take any pleasure in it, but it had to be done.”
This is how much getting high scores on games meant to me. I was with friends at a local video arcade, and I was playing Stargate Defender. I was within reach of the high score when a very minor incident occurred. The building caught on fire. Black smoke started pouring from the ceiling like that smoke monster in the tv show Lost. My initial (and total) reaction was to keep playing. Finally, a fireman grabbed me by the arm and shoulder and dragged me out. I didn’t get the high score. I suppose I was going to keep playing until me or Stargate burst into flames.
Back when I worked as a professional wrestling announcer, I was going to wrestling shows in small towns all over a tri-state area. Often, I rode with wrestlers. The first thing we would do after a show is find a convenience store or truck stop where we could get something to eat and drink. Places like this along the highways always have tater logs. We stopped in a place one night, and a wrestler named Curtis Hughes (he was also known as the Big Cat when he was in WCW) walked up to the food counter and spied catfish. He asked the lady behind the counter “hey, could I get some catfish?” She asked, “how many do you want?” and he said “a whole mess of ‘em!” Not exactly an exact measurement or anything from the metric system, but what the hell, we were in the south. She probably knew what he meant.
Stores like Buc-ees are designed to appeal to a sense of neighborhood. Just good folk having some brisket and gassing up the car. But they are designed to service the most people in the shortest amount of time to maximize profits. People may only go to one once. Just a stop on their trip. When we used to go to convenience stores, it wasn’t a stop on the trip, it was our destination. Maybe that’s why people in my city are so excited to go to the new Buc-ee’s opening. Maybe they were like me and hung out non-stop in neighborhood convenience stores in their youth. Or maybe they just want a fucking big Dr. Pepper. Maybe someone just wants a big mess of catfish. Maybe I could etch my initials onto a bathroom stall but that might screw them come bathroom awards season. All I know is, if there’s not somewhere there I can put my initials, I’m not interested. Unless there’s a Buc-ee’s somewhere with a Tri-Zone. Then even Keith Urban wouldn’t be able to get me out of the place, even if it were on fire.