Business Review: Royale Junior Liquor Market, Echo Park

Image stolen from Flickr user “OrangeCounty_Girl”

(Originally posted on Yelp.)

I must say I like the lack of personal interest the clerk at the Royale Junior Liquor Market has in my purchasing habits.  I mean, he may not even notice– he’s working at the type of place where he’s in front of a giant wall of Old Crow pint bottles and novelty skull and pistol shaped fifths of tequila, behind three quarters of an inch of GE® Lexan™ bulletproof plexiglass.  He faces a large shelf of pornographic DVD’s specifically tailored to the prurient interests of working-class Mexicans, whose bright eye-catching covers leave nothing to the imagination.  Shit is distracting. He has more things to worry about than my weird unnecessarily frequent and expensive daily purchases of small bottles of alcohol.  He has to stock nine different kinds of non FDA-approved herbal pill packets designed to enlarge your penis, give you bigger and more meaningful erections, enhance your sexual desire until is as that of el tigre.  He has to eyeball stumbling drunk day laborers as they come dangerously close to shoplifting a Payday; ward off these miscreants with merely the shaming power of his gaze.  He has to vigilantly head off customers steering toward the inoperable ATM machine in front– he clearly prides himself on sparing them a useless button push and confounded few seconds of bewilderment– “Hey! Is not working.”  The ATM is never working, but the giant glowing sign telling the public that the store has an ATM is always working.

Anyway, he doesn’t give a shit that I only buy 4-8 shots worth of booze per day, every day, in spite of the obvious savings and convenience of buying in bulk.  He probably doesn’t speculate that it’s because I have severe alcoholism but also enough self awareness to know that if I am given a handle I will drink myself to death like a cow left in front of a grain trough will eat herself to death.  That when I break this small bottles only rule I habitually wake up, on, like, a Tuesday, so hung over that my eyeballs hurt.  That I must nonetheless drink to the point of intoxication every single day, pounding the entire limited stash of liquor as soon as I walk into my apartment, or my hands will shake and I won’t be able to sleep and I’ll be up all night having harrowingly clear and detailed visions of people I love being mangled and burned alive in car accidents.  Or if he has caught on to these things, he doesn’t appear to judge.  This is precisely the attitude you want from a man of his profession.  Calm ignorance and/ or dispassion w/r/t the personal pain from which his wares provide maddeningly brief succour.  And every day it’s the same fucking guy; he works seven days a week.  So, consistency.

In conclusion: three and a half stars.

Tags: alcohol, echo park