Oliver's Was Hijacked

Gentle Readers, I am deeply distressed. I am in a state of emotional shock. I have never in my life offered to help friends, as a friend, free of charge, and had my help rejected in such a hateful way as happened recently at that new store I've been promoting here, Oliver's.

The outburst of hate that I personally saw was not directed primarily at me; it contained some obvious guilt and some sheer insanity. However, subsequent conversation with the family who opened this store does reflect hate directed at me--as a Christian? as a woman? as a conscientious person who observed some unethical behavior?--from a near-total stranger.

This individual answers to the name of Thomas. He does not belong to any family in Gate City. He comes from Dungannon, one of the quaint little settlements that explain how it's possible for a town whose population has never exceeded 2500 to be called "Gate City." I was always taught that Dun Gannon means "Gannon's Fort" in Irish, but some people pronounce the name of this town as if it had something to do with dung. Probably they met Thomas before I did.

Apart from him, the other people operating Oliver's are an extended family group. Oliver is the dog; one of his humans approached me last winter, with many flattering words and non-cash gifts, about bartering for my help in launching their business. For six months this person has been requesting my help to get pictures and stories from the store online. Well, there are more effective ways to set up a store-specific web site than advertising on a friend's blog, but I've been willing to do what I could. I can't say a great deal for the loyalty or gratitude of this family.

I will say that, from what I've seen, they are the kind of sane, sober, harmless eccentrics that attract shoppers to small towns. You may or may not enjoy talking to them, and they may do weird stuff like putting their prized personal possessions in a display just for the look of it and then refusing to sell their possessions to you, but they're not likely to go completely crazy on you.

However, yesterday I had some time to kill in town, and the family member who has a working digital camera was supposed to be in the store, so I went into Oliver's to post some pictures. The door was open. The cash register was wide open. Presumably there was at least a hidden camera somewhere. I looked around in the back corners of the store, but couldn't find the person I was looking for, or anybody else.

After five or ten minutes a senior citizen walked in. He noted the vulnerability of the cash register, but didn't touch it. He and I stood just inside the door and chatted, waiting for this person to return to the store.

She didn't. Instead, Thomas walked in, and proceeded to throw a fit, accusing the senior citizen of crimes and ordering him to remove his merchandise from the store. In view of the things Thomas said about me, I'm inclined to suspect that all these accusations were outright lies too; I certainly have no right to discuss the accusations here.

What Thomas said to me, directly, was a random personal insult (that would have got him physically thrown off a Greyhound bus if he'd been riding on one) and the claim, "I pay the bills! They have no control in this store!"

What he said about me, apparently, in phone conversations with two members of the family, were two outright lies.

(1) He told Oliver's human's mother that I had been giving him a hard time about a book he was supposed to have sold on consignment. This may reflect guilt, since he has moved in the kind of big fat cushiony fabric-covered sofa that no sensible person would buy secondhand, anyway, in front of the shelf on which the books are displayed, and most of the books on that shelf had been bought from me, outright. I don't do consignments. And in fact I'd noticed the sofa in front of the books and thought that moving merchandise around never hurts a store, and if some browsers missed a book, that might motivate them to buy it later. On the other hand, Thomas's story may reflect some muddled memory of the senior citizen's having asked what price Thomas was asking for a book the senior citizen had placed in the store on consignment.

(2) He then told Oliver's human's sister that I had said to him, "I hate you." This is probably evidence of schizophrenia. Of course, when people have lived in small towns for forty or fifty years, who knows what they may remember. "I hate you" is not a thing I've said to people as an adult. I didn't know any little boys called Thomas as a child. There aren't a lot of people from Dungannon, period; I wouldn't have been likely to have seen any of them in Gate City. Then again, there are people all over southwestern Virginia who look a bit like me, who may be anything from second to seventh cousins, and who knows whether any of those people have found some reason to tell Thomas they hated him. He certainly seems easy to hate.

But in any case I hadn't said that I hated him. I hadn't thought or felt that I hated him. As an introvert I don't have many emotional reactions to people I've just met, and as an older woman I'd thought that he was an unattractive, awkward, pitiful-looking young man, and as a friend of the business owners I'd thought that he was likely to be a liability...but those things tended to make me feel sorry for Thomas, to the extent that I felt anything for him at all. I had had no intention of making his life harder than he's already made it for himself.

So, who knows what else Thomas has told other people I've said or done to hurt him. Who knows what the voices in his head have been saying. His outburst in the store sounded like Prozac Dementia, or Tourette's Syndrome, or paranoid-schizophrenia, but his two different rationalizations show that he is consciously aware of what he's doing and feels some sort of need to justify it, which I believe would be taken as proof that he was sane enough to stand trial. The bottom line is that he verbally attacked a friend of his partners who hadn't even spoken to him, and he'll tell people anything he imagines they might believe by way of an excuse.

I told the owners that I was going to have to warn readers that Thomas is insane and, if only because he's big and clumsy enough to injure people by falling on them, he may be dangerous.

"Oh, don't do that. That might hurt the store."

Well, I said, I could warn readers about Thomas the Liability and recommend that they call the other people at Oliver's to make sure that they did business with someone mentally competent to run a store. Now there are some merchants in Gate City, as in many small towns, who make "being a character" into a selling point. People have taken me into stores, and even bought me prezzies for my time, just to listen to a storekeeper's endorsement of the Arab point of view (during the war), or another storekeeper's argument in favor of reviving the military draft. I would not have posted either of those speeches on this site. I have posted other things favorable to both of those stores. And if Oliver's human godparents want to make pitying poor Thomas their selling point, I could picture that working, with some people, for some time.

Pity poor Thomas? "He had such a stressful flight with Delta during the storms. Oh, and he's just beginning to recover since his boyfriend died." This person did not actually say "And he's losing his youthful sex appeal." That is the most noticeable thing about Thomas, and doesn't need to be said.

This needs to be stated for the record: I have claimed lesbians as friends. I've never claimed a male homosexual as a friend. Some people say "Oh, everybody knows one," but I've never had the opportunity to know one well. Like really unattractive women, male homosexuals seem to look at me and instinctively go into avoidance mode. But you need to understand that introverts aren't "hurt" when uncongenial people avoid us. If anything we're relieved. Life is too short to spend time in relationships with uncongenial people.

I have no more problem with good Baptists hiring a burnt-out homosexual male than I have with good Pentecostals hiring an alcoholic...back in the 1990s I worked with a Pentecostal family in Kingsport who had hired an alcoholic, and although they left Kingsport the alcoholic and I are still friends. This particular homosexual male happens to be either a lying jerk or a sociopath at risk for violence.

This also needs to be stated for the record: In addition to slandering me, during the one conversation I've ever had with him Thomas expressed disrespect for Oliver's human's mother and described Oliver's human's sister as a "young girl." (Oliver's human's sisters range in age from 47 to 28.) Most active homosexuals have serious, complicated emotional problems with the opposite sex. Thomas has not demonstrated any effort to learn a healthy respect for women.

In order to keep me as a friend, Oliver's humans would have had to dissolve their partnership with Thomas, citing moral turpitude as a reason if their contract required any, and take out a restraining order to keep him out of the store.

"But we nee-ee-eed the money."

Different Christians understand the Christian virtues in different ways. My belief is that we should never accept money from people who, given an opportunity, will compromise our standards of loyalty or honesty.

Plenty of people in Gate City still think they have some sort of moral duty to hate Thomas, merely because they have heard, not necessarily even from him, that he used to have a boyfriend. Others who may not have hated him for that reason can certainly laugh at him, now, for being a fool, because I'm one of the minority who have always said that his personal private sins are no worse than the rest of ours. Well, that applies to his moral sins against God--I didn't know, until this week, that he was also a dangerous mental case.

And I think one of Oliver's humans does understand just how bad a mistake becoming involved with Thomas was, because this person went into a guilt spin when I showed her a rough draft of this article. I was willing to add her phone number as a number people could call if they wanted to support her business without dealing with a lunatic. This was the one who had previously asked me to be a partner in the store, before realizing that I didn't have money to sink in it and Thomas did.

She started screaming about certain people who, not that this is any surprise to anybody, don't like me much. Not that I've actively done anything like insulting them when they walked into a store I was keeping, but in a small town people who are not learning anything have a need to attach emotions to the people with whom they do their routine business, and that kind of people usually don't like me--because I don't like them, or dislike them, or talk to them, or look at them long enough to know one of them from another. Whether these people shop in Gate City I don't know; I happen to know that two of them don't. One of them has been heard to express ill will toward my whole "mean, snobby" town. So I doubt very much that their dislike of me could harm Oliver's as much as Thomas will--although I don't have a lot of money, and if I did I wouldn't invest it in secondhand furniture.

Being an introvert, I don't have emotional feelings about people until they have given me some real reason to. The only way I can understand the concept of liking or not liking a stranger, or the kind of casual acquaintance who browses in a store, is in the sense of being sexually attracted to the person--and I tend to like one man at a time. I don't offer emotional warm fuzzies to those who feel a need for them. I don't have warm fuzzy emotional reactions to people who try to press warm fuzzies upon me. If you want to be my friend, you need to spend some time working with me, whether on a paid job or a hobby or some sort of charitable effort, and demonstrating that you can make a positive contribution to something I want to do. That's where the bonding process starts.

Like many people in Gate City, I have a very negative reaction to anything like "salesmanship" when I'm shopping. Gender and background tend to dictate how this reaction sounds. Ladies usually try to make it as warmhearted and cheerful as possible. "Do you mind not interrupting while I shop?" I have heard men whom I would have described as gentlemen, based on their background, go into Total Redneck Mode when someone is trying to sell them something. Women whose background really qualifies them for redneck-ness usually don't think there's anything chic about it, and react to a sales pitch with a grunt or a scowl. I was brought up as a lady, but due to my astigmatism I can't guarantee that I won't seem to be scowling, or even glaring, while discouraging the sales pitch.

I do appreciate, and thank, customers who pay for what they buy. I do expect people to whom I hand money, while buying something, to thank me. And if cashiers don't go into the sort of gabble routine that has, unfortunately, become familiar to those who used to shop at a certain store in Kingsport as a cover-up for a sequence of "mistakes" always in the store's favor, but just ring up my purchases without saying anything other than "Thank you, Ma'am," I even thank them for that. I prefer to hand money to a cashier rather than feeding it into a machine; I don't need the cashier to say anything the machine wouldn't say. Having a human brain on call is sufficient.

What am I like as a storekeeper? I feel a need to go into this, because I've been warned that Thomas is going to be spewing out hate-based fabrications. (So far as I know, I've spent a total of six minutes around this creep, on two separate days.) People who shop in Gate City and Weber City know what I'm like as a storekeeper. Apart from a few ill-advised experiments with sales pitches, recommended by consignors who weren't from here, I'm quiet, unobtrusive, reliable, dysnumeric, honest, and most likely to be seen either moving merchandise around or knitting.

But I'm one of those who think it's not really ethical to try to "sell oneself," in a store. ("Selling oneself" in an alley is illegal and dangerous, but manipulating people into thinking they ought to buy an overpriced object because they like you, personally, is dishonest.) I'm not saying that every time a customer has ever said something like "I don't need another lamp, but I'll buy this one because I like you," I've refused to sell the person a lamp. I am saying that depending on some sort of personal attraction to sell merchandise is an indication of something wrong with your business, and with you. If your reason for selling lamps is not that some people in your community do need lamps, or want lamps, you should at least be selling something else.

That's why I wouldn't have tried to make things more difficult for an unattractive outsider in a town full of people who disapprove of his personal life...if only being unattractive, an outsider, and known to have a personal life of which people disapprove, had been the worst of Thomas's problems.

So what can I say to readers who may have wanted to see all those charming, decorator-like arrangements of secondhand furniture in Oliver's? Well, you won't see them here. Probably you won't be seeing them on the site Thomas promised to set up, and hasn't set up, either. I can practically hear him now--"The web hosting service didn't work for me-e-e because they ha-a-ate me!" (And never mind that I have yet to see a free web hosting service that has worked smoothly for anybody.)

If you are brave, you might want to surround yourself with a posse of friends, equipped with cameras and sound recording devices, and go into Oliver's just to see the lunatic in action. If enough people go in there just to laugh at Thomas's antics and not actually buy anything, and if the business is basically honest, that might be enough to motivate Thomas to leave Gate City. Knoxville's or Atlanta's loss would then be our gain.

However, there is an illegal drug trade in town, and in the past, when storekeepers have seemed unaccountably hostile to me, that has turned out to be what was going on.