The Bottle Return Boogie, Napa Beverages

Picking on Port Huron seems way too easy. Like kicking a baby across the room. We still do it, primarily because we've never met people so STUPID that they can be made fun of and not even know they're being made fun of. 

So let's head south on the map, about 40 miles to the multicultural land of ((( diversity ))), Sterling Heights. 

Sterling Heights has a boutique food and wine shop called The Napa Valley Beverage Company. It's actually a tarted-up party store at 16 Mile and Mound Roads. Their advertising indicates they stock a diverse assortment of booze, including -- we hoped -- some of the (10c Michigan deposit) microbrews whose empties our city friends leave behind at the state park in Lakeport, that no one up here sells or has even heard of. (Beer is a mystery. It's all the same to us. It gets you drunk, and that's the whole idea. Why so many brands, we have no clue. However, if you think drinking Screaming Pink Possum IPA makes you a better snowflake, go for it. But we digress.)

A drive south had already been planned. I gathered my outlaw cans into two large plaid shopping bags, that you see here --

 -- loaded them into the Jeep, and took off. Ten cents is ten cents, and the other reason for the road trip justified a can run. 

Found the place, went in, and quickly noticed I was being ignored while the dude in the shiny suit behind the counter shot the shit with another suited dude who was showing off some pictures he had on his phone. 

Another shiny suit appeared. The conversation went something like this:

Me: I have two bags of cans, can you take a look at them? 

Shiny Suit #2: (in Arabic-accented English): We don't sell cans. 

Me. Well, at least one of these cans has YOUR price sticker on it (and if you sell it and it has a deposit on it, the Michigan bottle law says you have to redeem it, you fucking god-damned camel jockey, but I didn't say that). 

Shiny Suit #2: Do you have beer cans?

Me: Beer cans and pop cans.

Shiny Suit #2: We don't sell pop. We only sell beer. And we don't give cash for cans. We only give merchandise.

So: if I didn't want to haul the cans back to Lakeport, I'd have to buy alcohol. No fucking goddam way Jose am I driving 60 miles home with booze in the car. 

Here, I must interrupt the narrative.  Reason Number One for the trip was to visit the attorney who's representing me in probate court re my sister's (remember her?) estate, and to pick up this:

Yes, it's real. Partial distribution. So there's more coming, in addition to what I already have. (But ten cents is still ten cents.)

This piece of paper is what was in my coat pocket when I walked into Napa Valley Beverage Company, where the shiny suits eyeballed me and my bags and decided I looked homeless enough to not be worth the time or effort. 

Fucking god-damned cocksuckers, park their shiny-suited asses in my country and treat me like shit, with a check for $166K  in my coat pocket. I'm sure they don't get many folks walking in the door with that much in negotiable paper on them. And I already know how they react when they're profiled and lumped in with their bomb-making, airplane-hijacking brethren back in the land of sand. Or compared to this fellow: 

Back in the day, I laughed my nine year old ass off when the radio played "Ahab The Arab" (pronounced AY-rab). It's still funny as hell. And useful.

Refusing to look at cans (and bottles) with a Michigan 10c deposit on them, and refusing to redeem 10c containers in cash, are violations of Michigan's bottle deposit law. Worth a letter to the Michigan AG's consumer protection folks, I thought. Plant a seed in the suits' minds. Make them waste time writing a response. And here it is. 

Fuck you, Sammy. If you hadn't developed the bad habit of judging people by how they look, this wouldn't have happened. And fuck you, again. Fuckhead.

As you might expect, this isn't going any farther. Here's why:

So that's that. If I was a Negro or a queer -- or a towelhead -- I could cry racism, or sexism, or whatever ism works best these days. But I'm not. So much for White privilege. One of the very few times when I've wished I was a nigger. 

Why? I hear you asking. 

Because I've really HAD IT with getting the brushoff from people who give me a two second lookover and decide I must spend my nights sleeping under a freeway bridge. 

And because . . . well, if this is how the game continues to be played, I can play it too. And very well. Way better than any fuckhead I'll ever meet in or out of Port Huron. 

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