The other day I went to the local warehouse club to buy some diapers and to send some film off for developing. The warehouse’s checkout lines are notoriously slow, so I decided to use my time in line to fill out my film envelope.
The cashier, an ebullent, middle-aged black woman, was kidding with her customers as well as proving my slow-line theory wrong.
Suddenly, it was my turn to pay. I didn’t want to slow her down, so I punched in my debit card pin number in a frenzy.
As I was sorting through the keypad’s prompts, she asked “no pictures today?”
I had to pull my head out of prompts and pin numbers to decode what she said.
“Pictures? Ah! She thinks I’m pretty hip,” I thought. “She can tell I’m down with the brotherhood.” After all, any street-smart homeboy knows that “pictures” is slang for cash. I smiled a knowing smile and answered “no.”
A few beats later, I realized I had gone through her line carrying my empty film envelope. She wasn’t talking cash, she was talking photographs.
I hung my head and drove my lily-white-feeling self home.