Smoke shop etiquette. There is no such thing as a head shop anymore. There are no bongs since Tommy Chong did deuce on a nickel for using the “B” word on his line of water pipes for tobacco use only. Madam I don’t know anything about urine test. Sir, I don’t want to hear about your parole officer, insurance company or the state bar. You’re being tested tomorrow, you’re high right now and you want to know what you can do. Nothing. You’re riotously fucked. I don’t know why that guy with a hickey on the back of his neck wanted a bottle of videocassette head cleaner and an inhaler? No, we don’t sell single beers or single cigarettes. May I suggest the Quickie Mart. Goddamn it I just broke that 14 millimeter ash catcher with the blue perk chamber and a 14 to 18 down stem diffuser on the perk, thank god it was some 50 dollar no-name generic piece of glass and not a GOVERNTMINT. If I were you I would buy my salvia now. The purple sticky’s already banned in eight states and will be banned nationwide by February next year. I see you have a passport, remember its twenty years federal offence for bringing a water pipe into or out of the country. So if you’re going to travel abroad and take your six hundred dollar glass Illedelph water pipe with you ship it to your hotel room UPS. I got it. Hello Ye Olde Smoke Shop Steve Ward speaking, how can I help you? Yes were open until midnight tonight. Yes, we have every type of dispenser. I don’t know what a cracker is? Yes, you can make a lot of whip cream with three cases of nitrous. Salvia is an incense. No, I bought the last vial of sage oil yesterday. Uh huh. No, I don’t know when the manager’s going to order more. Yes, I’m sure you do spend a lot of money here and I’m certain that if you were to take your business elsewhere we would be out of business in a matter of minutes. No sir I’m not blowing smoke rings up your ass sir. I was merely agreeing with you sir. Yes sir. My supervisors not in right now, he’s only here 7am to 11am then he’s out of here. Yes, his name is Reilly Freeman. Yes, thank you sir. No, I don’t think I’ll do that just yet sir, but thanks for your suggestion. OK, bye bye. Ye Olde Smoke Shop, how can I help you? Yes, we’re open from noon to eleven today. Yes. Yes, we do have a large variety of strap-ons. Yes, glass led lights inside, vibrating, dancing dolphin; we’re out of the surgical steel 18 inch right now. Yes, we have it in black latex. Well, I don’t know if we carry the horns of Venus in the three inch diameter. However, the matches are free. The two quiet ones broke one of the telescopic batons on a guy last week. In was a POS made in China. If you want to really see the world work retail, see what people do for kicks. The schoolteachers who forgot to take off their nametags bought a crack pipe, excuse me an incense burner the other day. Those are jewelry bags. Yes, what size do you need? What style? We’re out of the eight balls in the ¾ x ¾ all we have left are the Heavy Ds and the Blue Devils. Yes, our gay and transsexual DVDs are the same low price as all of the rest of our adult features. Yeah, hundred to a pack, it’s buy three get the fourth free. No, we don’t carry synthetic urine. Try the internet. No we don’t sell chillums, those are glass bats. I’m sorry mam, I won’t be able to serve you because you’re inquiring about drug paraphernalia. This isn’t stomp or cut and no I don’t know which of our nutritional supplements goes best with ice. I’m going to have to ask you to leave the store. But, most of the guys with mullets, mutton chops and Fu Manchu’s wearing confederate battle flag bandannas usually buy this in the crystallized form rather than the powder. Have a nice day. Yes, it acts like a little convection oven. No, it doesn’t incinerate it. It goes gaseous at about 290 379 degrees Fahrenheit. No, we don’t carry that brand but everybody else does. My wife says we just about have the market cornered on the dream jobs of every breed of slacker, artsy stoner type in the world, the dream job triumvirate being; number one, the record store. Neither one of us works at a record store but my old lady get’s us free screenings of the used movies, video games and comics that come into the book store where she works. She has the same arrangement with movies as well. It’s one of the advantages of working for an old hippie. Of course for us the ultimate perk is the books, because we’re both writers. So, it goes without saying that we’re both readers. But, it is I who has the ultimate in underachiever chic job because I work at a smoke shop. A job for which a lifetime of using my body as a chemistry set and my mind as a science experiment make me uniquely qualified. It took me six months to get this job but with a pinched nerve in my back the moving trucks are out of the question. And in this economy the galleries are closed up tighter than a nuns pussy. Of course, I was ready for everything from the entrepreneur to the end user. I possess an intimate understanding of our clienteles’ ummmm dare I say… needs. But, what I wasn’t prepared for was the way we talk around everything using the language of the weak, talking around everything. But, I gotta keep the shop open to pay the bills. So yeah, I sold that couple that came in at the last minute looking to spend around a hundred on a no name POS from china a 30 inch piece 9 mill half frost, ash catcher with a diffuser on the down stem, glass on glass Amsterdam Design Studio. Made from German Shot glass. They manufacture lab equipment. The highest quality scientific medical grade glass. Just three hundred dollars. It’s okay, just leave at least twenty-five percent down to put it on lay-a-way. What’s lay-a-way? You are kidding me right? No, the pipe stays here until you finish paying for it. We ain’t in Amsterdam. Mother fucker. Yes, were open every day except Christmas.