yancey managed.a small convenience store on the outskirts of the great city of memphis in the middle of the desert.
the desert had no name - it was just “the desert”.
the city had the name of memphis because it had been founded by devotees of elvis presley. these people no longer existed or controlled the city, elvis was forgotten except by a handful of nomads in the desert, and nobody cared why or how the city had been named.
the convenience store had no name. it was very small, and no more than one person, usually yancey himself, was needed to work in it at one time.
despite being on the edge of the city, there were no gas pumps attached to the store. on an average day, two or three people would come in to the store looking for gas and asking yancey or whoever was on duty why the were no gas pumps.
yancey or whoever was there would explain that the store did not have a license to sell gas and that , with the decline and inherent vanishing of the automobile, there was no longer any authority or government agency to issue it one.
most people were satisfied with this explanation. 57 percent of them would buy something - potato chips, beef jerky, a cold can of mountain dew.
yancey always made sure the mountain dew and the other soft drinks were good and cold, and that the air conditioning was turned on and keeping the store properly cooled
mona would sometimes gently suggest that a few cents might be saved if the air conditioning was not kept quite so high, especially late at night or when business was not at its peak.
yancey would point out in his reasonable way that the concept of “night and day” was almost obsolete, and the concept of “peak hours” of business even more so.
oliver, when he visited the store, would sometimes make the same suggestion as mona about the air conditioning, but in a somewhat more forceful manner.
yancey would reply to oliver with the same arguments, in the same reasonable manner.
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