An excerpt from something else I'm working on tonight:

I took over as manager of my first gas station on a cold weekend in February 1993. The previous weekend, the station had been robbed, and on Sunday evening my boss requested that I go and sit with Jay, who was working at the time of the robbery. Jay was grateful for the company. We served the occasional customer, and listened to the Sunday Night Sex Show on the radio. Len, a man who had once sold me a van, came in and wanted to talk to Jay about the robbery, but Jay didn't have much to say about it. At about 10:45, while we were counting the cigarettes, someone wearing a black hooded sweatshirt burst into the store and poked a gun under the glass partition. I thought, for one wild minute, that it was Len, trying to be funny. Then it hit, it was real. The person with the gun was demanding that we open the door. While Jay opened the side door to let them in, I ran out the back door, planning, somewhat fuzzily, to head for a payphone at the strip mall behind the station. Someone grabbed me and dragged me back inside. Since I had disrupted the script by trying to leave, they felt it necessary to make me lie down on the floor in the back, and the one with the gun held it to my head.

The little group, probably four in all, cleaned out all the cigarettes and money, and left. Jay fell to bits, pacing up and down, repeating, �Not again. I don�t believe it happened again.� My own relief at still being alive made it possible to deal with the police and to call the owner and tell him. Later, on my way home, my calm broke, and waves of adrenaline kept cresting and breaking over me, and I put Pink Floyd in the tape deck and turned Comfortably Numb up really loudly. It was a ritual I was to repeat numerous times over the next month or so. It reminded me that I was alive, and that they couldn�t do anything further to me.