Willie Wallace

Willie Wallace.

The lady at C-Spire thought it was “adorable” that I had bought the exact same phone case for my new phone that I had for the old. Both phones had little blue cowboys on them. She showed them to her manager. “Looka there. She got the same case. Aw.”

But the manager and I were having a bit of a disagreement over the terms of my new phone. “You can’t trade in your old phone after the transaction,” she said. “You should’ve done that when you bought the new one.” The other woman continued to coo over my little blue cowboys. “OK,” I said, “but Willie Wallace said I could trade my old phone later.”

Dropping his full name was pointless. But Willie had a name that linked as naturally as two train cars, and I liked saying it. Willie Wallace. When Willie Wallace sold me my new phone two weeks earlier, he did it with a charisma befitting such a name. He was a big man, uncommonly big, and I mean that not in the sense of flesh—he was tall and heavy—but more in the manner of a dynamo. All of his presence powered an electric smile. He had pronounced cheeks that crowded his eyes into half moons. But…luminescent moons. He was big and bright such that his dark skin glowed like a thin lamp shade over a hundred watt bulb. Yes, that’s it. Willie Wallace was radiant. And it didn’t hurt that he was named Willie Wallace. It all made him unforgettable. I said his name out loud as I left the store with my new phone and when my new cowboy phone case arrived in the mail, I remembered him yet again. And it was Willie Wallace who told me I could come back and trade in my phone after I purchased the new one.

When I mentioned his name to the store manager, she stabbed the buttons on her iPad and shook her head once as if to dispel a thought. I thought now that perhaps Willie Wallace had made empty promises to other customers.

I did not want to be confrontational, despite the fact that only one day earlier I sat through a mandatory, two-hour seminar on being confrontational. This petite woman in a blue suit named Marjorie Box came to our school. All the teachers were herded into the auditorium, where Box told us that if we didn’t say what was bothering us out loud, we weren’t allowed to be mad. She felt so strongly about it that she stamped it as a quote at the bottom of her brochure and attributed it to herself with the little dash, as you would Confucius or Gandhi.

“If you don’t give voice to what’s bothering you, you’re not allowed to be mad.” - Marjorie Box

Had I traded my old phone during the appropriate window, I would’ve gotten $100 for it, and—maybe—if I had pressed the issue to the manager and been a little more insistent, I still would’ve gotten that money. But I let it all go. By way of a loophole to Marjorie Box’s rule, I decided I wasn’t going to voice my complaints and I wasn’t going to get mad.

But at that moment, Willie Wallace himself was called forth. Like a latent evocation, in he walked from his lunch break or maybe some internal training where he was just about to learn how customers cannot trade in their old phones two weeks after buying a new one. He was led in by another clerk, and I worried he was being reprimanded, marched out to the dock by his bailiff and forced to look upon me as his victim. Because Willie Wallace stood there looking considerably diminished. Dimmed. His eyes were cast to the floor and he shook his head.

Compelled out of guilt, I said, “It’s entirely possible that I heard wrong,” which I think would’ve irked Marjorie Box greatly. The manager, however, was happy to accept it as a valid theory. She closed the case on her iPad and flipped the tablet under her arm. I briefly considered the idea that I was the one on the dock and not Willie. Maybe he was trotted out as a great block to my conspiracy. I took both my cowboy phones and holstered them in my coat pockets.

In that entire experience, I was never mad. Let that go on record. In fact, if it had occurred to me how I could’ve been happy about the situation, I would’ve been. But as such, I merely left indifferent—bummed at most. The manager sent me on my way with a little emblem of good will. She suggested I give my old phone to my grandmother, but I have no grandparents anymore. Sad, yes, but I’m allowed to be sad. It’s still well within the confines of Box’s rules for human confrontation.

Willie Wallace.