A New Path.

Once again, nighttime sounds fill my ears.

Insects, amphibians, all calling out in primal desperation. Mammals prowling in the shadows, eager for a plaything, maybe striving to hone in on potential food, perhaps only seeking an intense, revitalizing piece of ass.

Or perhaps it goes deeper. It could be that they’re hungry for something even deeper. Yearning their other half.

In any case, I won’t judge.

Pleasant numbness fills my veins. My eyes drift up to the sky just in time to spy a shooting star against tonight’s star-spangled backdrop: a brilliant streak, a tear amidst an expanse of faraway suns twinkling at me, blazing away at varying distances, shimmering as they once were at varying periods of time ago.

All three eyes of mine fixed on this, the breathtaking void of once was stretching above, around me. These visual echoes of history, of a past that is far, far gone yet omnipresent.

Spectra forever haunting. Ghosts eternally looming. Cosmic nostalgia caught like insects in amber.

A vibrant graveyard above us in hope and in warning.

The past is always present. Both a prison and gift for your choices now. All forever above you, the cosmic graveyard, where the dead tell tales, if only you listen.

Fight to break out, plow to push forward.

Yesterday need not come to define today.

I can plow a new path.

A Mixed Bag of Weird.

Jettisoning load after load of liquid bleach all over the base of that gaping, porcelain piss pot, using a scratch pad to aggressively scrub off the piss scum. Chiseling poo-turned-concrete off the fat lip of that toilet. Collecting the depressing amount of litter people dump in the parking lot and in the dining room on a daily basis.

Being the only one unable to screen out the incessant beeping of the various, typically-malfunctioning machines scattered all throughout the restaurant.

Hearing my name being called from a distance, and in that tone that immediately makes me wonder what horrors await me.

How bad is the mess I’ll have to clean up? Do I need gloves, towels, and sanitizer? A mop? A fucking HAZMAT team? Should I contact FEMA?

Going home so coated in grease at the end of a shift that if anyone dared to bear-hug me I’d violently yeet into the heavens above like a wet bar of soap in a moist death-grip, likely achieving escape velocity.

Yes, there are things I won’t miss, but there are other things I surely will, and I’ve made mental note of them my last few shifts.

At some point, I remind myself, there will be the last time she will brush her massive mammary against my forearm as she walks past me during our shifts together, seemingly oblivious to the fact.

There will be the last time he’ll call me Craig several times a shift for reasons that still escape me, and the last time I’ll respond by referring to him as Sugar Tits.

And him, with his typically stoic and difficult-to-read body language, there will be the last time I’ll overhear him provide intriguing political analysis and bitter but on-point critiques on the state of our species in between assembling sandwiches for ungrateful customers.

And there will be the last time his fiance will feel compelled to ask me to drop fries in the fryer or put pies in the oven while I’m in the midst of changing trash.

She really, really loves that shit, and it irritates the hell out of me, but I know a part of me will miss it.

And him? There will be the last time I’ll hear him cough up a lung and hawk tuah an uber-loogie onto the pavement several times a shift, all as he bellows smoke from his dirt-cheap cigarettes, barking at every customer that pulls into the lot to “go home!” with as much force and volume as his raspy whisper of a voice will allow.

There will be the last time he’ll tell me, in the midst of a shift, about a cool science article I might have missed, or randomly give me some food he bought from across the street.

“Having fun yet?”

Then there’s this motherfucker. The Man of a Million Questions, the Dish Boy. All right, I won’t exactly miss this one, but I will miss how my irritation with him fueled some writing. I’ll miss how another coworker and I would keep score, count the number of questions he would ask either of us, and compare our numbers after he left in an effort to transmute our mutual misery into an amusing game.

May he one day find satisfactory answers to all those difficult questions in life, such as how to do that thing he’s already been shown how to do fifty fucking times already.

There will be many things I’ll miss — most of all, the people — after today, my last day on the job. I’ll still see them, but it’s not the same as working beside them day in, day out.

Today, well, today is going to be a mixed bag of weird.

An Uber-Pooch & the Unnecessary Drum-Roll.

7/23/24

Twirling, leaping, putting one leg up in the air, jumping through a hoop: this dog would echo the woman’s moves as perfectly as possible on stage, before the live studio audience, with a few solitary tricks thrown in for good measure. My parents had shown me this, a clip from some show they watched, when I had gone over to see them one day.

It was damn impressive.

Thinking back on that now, I’m utterly amazed that a dog could be trained so well, to execute such a complex series of behaviors, and I can’t get fucking Dish Boy to master the simplest of tasks.

With as much patience as I am capable of conjuring, I explain to him how to do it, as I have during countless other cycles of this agonizingly dizzying time loop I’m evidently trapped within. I’ve done it myself and had him observe. I’ve observed him as he’s done it. Nothing has worked, so this time I even go the extra mile and tell him not only how it’s done, but why.

This goes here and that goes there so the other thing can work and then this can happen. See? See the straightforward logic behind it?

Later on, I check to see if he got it. Unnecessary drumroll: no. This was put upside down. That was put on backwards.

Clearly, the Dishboy Whisperer I am not.

I can’t imagine what his sex ed teacher had to go through. Even on the last day of class, having retained nothing. Questions reflecting his total lack of the most fundamental understanding.

“The left testicle goes in the right ear-hole, right, and then the man boops her on the nose? That’s how babies are made, right?”

Thing is, I don’t tell him the hows and whys in a condescending way, either, despite the fact that even if a drooling, knuckle-dragging, lobotomized space monkey from the crusty bowels of NASA were locked alone with it in a room for the length of an average work shift I’d put money I don’t have on the silly little simian putting it all together on his own.

Meanwhile Dishboy here, even if he had lived amongst the wild monkeys since birth, surely couldn’t put together how to peel a banana or fling a handful of poo.

Cig, Cell, Handgun, & a Rack.

7/25/24

About a ten minute drive away is the county jail.

And just a hop, skip, and a stone-throw down the road from our lovely distribution center for artery-clogging consumables and cavity-causing beverages there’s the county courthouse.

And when their jailbirds are to be set free, the coppers like to drive them here, to the diseased heart of this town, and yeet them like draft beer from out of a frat boy’s tum-tum the morning after a killer fucking party.

These jailbirds, they aren’t the least bit shy about where they’ve just been, either, throwing out the fact in casual conversation with as much ease as they might make a passing comment regarding the weather.

Hell, for some I’ve met here over the years, having a record almost serves as a rite of passage.

“Before this, you were but a boy. But now,” says the imaginary, aging father, face betraying pride, eyes welling with tears he must fight to hold back, “now, my son? Now you’re a man.”

I swear, this fucking town…

Anyway, so I’m not surprised when two guys looking rather lost approach me from around the corner of the building. The one with shoulder-length dreads in a cool-looking hoodie sporting Rick from the show Rick & Morty, he’s the first to break the ice.

Almost immediately, he strikes me as one of those laid-back, “it-is-what-it-is” kind of guys. The type who takes things as they come. For whom troubles and tragedies roll like rain off a duck’s back. I find I like him.

I think he mentions he’s from Cleveland.

He asks for a smoke, but after looking, I tell him I only have three left in the box. This is not a lie. Do I leave out the fact that I have another pack of smokes in the truck? Yes. So is this misleading? Also yes, but it’s still not a lie. Not technically.

Oh, forgive me already.

So of course he then asks for a lighter. As he digs it out of his pocket after what I presume to be a characteristically casual yet determined quest, he explains how he has a partial cigarette, which as he pulls it out I see is basically a butt with maybe four salvageable hits.

This guy, fucked up on drugs, presumably meth, that he and his friend were in jail with: he was the one who had given it to him, it soon becomes clear. This guy, the same guy who had evidently promised them a ride and then vanished as if by mysterious meth magick.

This cigarette is reportedly horrible. And yes, he’s surprised.

The other guy, his friend, is visibly and rather audibly pissed that the cops had just dropped them off here. Assuming it won’t serve to make him feel the least bit better, I don’t enlighten him to the fact that this is standard procedure.

This guy, I come to learn, he’s from Pittsburg.

He’s not like Dreadlock Rick over here. Quite the opposite, in fact. Frantic, frustrated, leg bouncing as if to the tempo of a thrash metal song when he later leans against the wall beside me. He’s at war against the world.

Getting off his phone, he approaches me while asking if I myself have a phone.

Well, shit. Can’t get out of this without blatantly lying.

Before I can answer, he’s already trying to quell the assumption he assumes I’m making that he’s going to steal it. He tried to make a call through our free Wifi, he says, but it’s not working — which given my own experience I find it easy to believe.

I can hold his phone as he uses mine, he says. I can stand right here. He’s not going to run away with it, he says. I finally hold up my hands, gesturing for him to relax, to take a breath.

What he fails to understand is that what I really fear are the consequences. Namely that the people he would be calling and who would not immediately answer would inevitably call him back on my phone after he’s gone. It’s annoying, and it always happens.

In fact, it did happen. Half an hour after they leave, I get a missed call. After I get home from work, a text message.

“Who’s this?”

With confidence, I called it. Yet I let him call them just the same, because I’m a softie. A fucking mark.

A stranger calls with urgency, I pick up with empathic dumbassery.

Opening up the keypad, I then hand it to him in defeat, and in the time it took me to finish my cigarette he calls three people. One, I haven’t the fucking foggiest clue who it is. The other is his sister, who doesn’t have her license, “and I know that’s going to be her first excuse why she can’t pick me up.”

“I mean, dude, that’s a pretty legitimate excuse,” I don’t say, because I’m not that much of a dumbass.

Then he calls his girlfriend, at one point changing his voice so it sounded like he was going to cry, that he was fighting with himself so as not to break down while on the phone with her.

Baby, I need you, he says. I’m in a bad place right now, he says.

Baby, you’re all I’ve got.

All an act, needless to say. Grade-A horse shit. Merely an attempt at manipulation. You know, just like how the motherfucker got me to give him my phone in the fucking first place.

In between the calls, he’s talking to Dreadlock Rick, telling him how he feels uncomfortable here, like people are looking at him weird. How he feels out of place.

Inside, I laugh. He doesn’t know how effectively he’s just articulated how I’ve felt my entire goddamn life.

He then goes on to reference how he was charged with murder, how he was supposed to get life. How if only this one girl they were talking about would just pick him up so he could get the hell out of here, “dude, I’ll give her a handgun and a rack.”

Wait, what? A rack?

Like, a gun rack? A bike rack? Or, like, tits? Is he really saying he would provide new tits for her? That he would not only gift her a firearm but go so far as to fund breast implants if only she would be willing to play taxi for a day?

So strange, what passes for currency these days.

I swear, not a day passes that I don’t hear someone younger than me use lingo that makes me feel like some out-of-touch, left-behind, ever-aging fossil of a fuck.

And not to just pass it by without mentioning it: yeah, there was also that murder thing he mentioned.

For the record, yes, it made me wonder if he was always so open and honest when speaking around total strangers — or if he perhaps only openly confessed to being suspected of homicide after they lent him their phone.

Again, it’s so strange what passes for currency these days.

Really, though: what a fucking town I’ll be leaving.

The Essence of Orientation (The First Sentence of a New Chapter).

7/26/24

Around these dirt-brown irises, the surrounding sclera is plagued with mud cracks like a dreadfully dry desert floor. Only here the once-bleached desert has gone pink, broken by winding networks of veiny, itchy, aching red. Behind them both — the broken deserts of pink and the dirty moats — and deep within those black hole pupils, my consciousness feels uncomfortably altered and unstable as I desperately try to focus.

To power through this eight-hour, wayward orientation before a goddamn computer terminal where I’m watching videos, reading things, taking quizzes, increasingly uncertain I’m even doing what I’ve been all-too-vaguely charged with doing.

The guy that interviewed me the other day, the one I naively assumed would be supervising me throughout my shift or at the very fucking least provide for me a rigid structure and clearly-defined goal? Well, he seems to telepathically pick up on my assumptions and elect to stubbornly embody the antithesis, all just to spite me.

Some people, they just like to see the world within others burn.

And during the interview, he seems like such a nice guy.

Today, though, he basically just tells me to sit here and do this. To make sure and take my two fifteen minute breaks and my hour lunch. And then he disappears, poot, poof, like a phantom fart swiftly carried upwind, never to be seen or smelt again.

I try to relax, try not to care. Try to ignore the fact that the real issue isn’t the absence of a game plan but my anxiety, which is just one of several issues I’m forced to deal with due to the fact that I didn’t sleep last night.

Not. A fucking. Wink.

I’ve always been a night owl, an insomniac, even as a Li’l Ben, sure, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to rely on sleep aides to provide some vague semblance of a schedule.

Some vague semblance of sanity.

I need this job, though, even if it’s just the first foothold to a better job, and I got off work at my present job last night at eleven in the evening and had to be here, at what will be my new job soon enough, which is an hour away, at ten in the morning. And, well, I fear if I take a sleep aid I’ll sleep in. Fuck this opportunity up — hardcore, DP-style — before I even clock in for my first official day.

No way can I let that happen. No, no, I have to be responsible. So I decide to try to pursue sleep via what has undoubtedly become a foreign avenue for me. A road I have not traveled in some time.

I go the way of au naturel.

I don’t stay up till five in the fucking morning, pursuing my passions or engaging in catharsis.

No.

I don’t research. Don’t write. Don’t produce artwork. Don’t engage in any of that soul food and spiritual bloodletting at all, no, I just climb into bed and put that chaotic gourd of mine that never shuts the bloody fuck up on a pillow and wrap myself in blankets like a human burrito.

This? This should end well. No doubt.

I’m an idiot.

I try to just witness the thoughts, view them as a detached observer as I focus on the breath, but I’m out of practice when it comes to mindfulness meditation due to being, like, a lazy, stupid asshole.

I analyze the day before. Contemplate plaguing questions. Delve deep, deep, deep into the psychology of those I know. Revisit memories from childhood. Feel the gut-punch of guilt for stupid decisions, fearing what consequences ill-advised actions in my history may, or at least should, deliver to me in the future.

In short, my weak ass becomes a slave to those compulsive, emotionally-charged avenues of thought — fighting them as I trapeze on that tightrope in the twilight betwixt the dream and the waking, though never to fall into soft, numb slumber of the Other Side.

Then I make coffee, have breakfast, take a shower, get dressed, and drive an hour to orientation, delirious from insufficient shut-eye — and here I am.

Though intermittently, at best.

No. Keep your eyes open. Absorb the data on the computer monitor. Pretend all is well. Fake it till you make it. Everything is a-oh-fucking-kay.

Nope. It is not.

Honestly, this experience brings me back to high school. Getting by on, at best, three hours a night, chugging Pepsi and coffee to defeat the enemy of sleep, the horrifying vulnerability that came with slumber, and disturbingly often enough coming out the other side, triumphant and exhausted but still pushing through into the warmth, comfort, and security that came with dawn’s light.

My agonizing experience, right now: that had been my goal. How could I have been so bloody mad? How had I done this — hell, accomplished this through intense effort, met this as a fucking goal post through mere will and caffeine — for so, so bloody fucking long back in my teens and twenties?

Then I remember.

I recall in clarity all of the weird things in my life that fueled that sleeplessness, horrors of which I shall not speak lest you come to consider me even more insane than you think I am, and then it all makes sense.

It’s not like that weird shit has abated, either, but you can adapt to even the strangest of the strange over the years, let me tell you.

“We grow up to give up,” he sang.

Despite that, or perhaps as a consequence of it, you clearly lose your admirable tolerance for the delirium of insomnia, too.

I mean, fuck, the pull to collapse like a dying star under the weight of my own gravity is utterly indescribable. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I now realize, got the pecking order of desires all wrong. I mean, the urge for sex? Even for food and water? It all pales in comparison.

All else loses the value it once held in a more rested state of mind. Everything falls away. The chain of command collapses until there are only two.

Awake. Or asleep.

Oh, how I want to submit to my bed like a weak little bitch. Lick my pillow like a boot. Be swaddled by blankets and sheets in the midst of restless sleep like an ignorant, pathetic, vulnerable fucking infant. Serve as a gimp for the goddess of dreams, let that luscious, insatiable, morbidly seductive and undeniably divine leather-clad dominatrix lead me by her hypnotic, tranquilizing leash unto that blessed land of rejuvenating sleep.

Even so, I strive to overcome the overwhelming draw of her magnetic enchantment.

“Hold on until your second wind comes along.”

Sing it, Billy Joel.

The shift is over. He’s not in his office. He’s nowhere to be found. Did I do it right? Am I a good boy?

For the lack of god, I fucking hate myself.

I clock out, still feeling so surreal, and leave. Still blind to where I am, where I’m going, what I might mean, I’m satisfied enough that I made it to the end. That I pushed past the initial stages of this new beginning.

The first sentence of a new chapter.

Of a Goth Girl Caught in a Tractor Beam.

He’s leaning on, partly over the front counter, openly and easily expressing himself to some cute goth chick in the dining room who’s just quietly and patiently waiting for her food.

Without stuttering. Without losing his voice. Without having an acute anxiety attack. Not while red in the face, not in the midst of gasping for air.

Not a bead of sweat on his porcelain forehead, which stretches all the way to the back of his fucking neck.

No. Calm as midmorning waters.

Son of a bitch.

Such innocence, such ignorance, such confidence. How liberating it must be to be so goddamn simple. For a moment I almost envy his clear lack of self awareness.

Then I snap out of it and proceed to condemn myself for my simultaneously patronizing and self-loathing thoughts and emotions. Really, I’m such a double-edged sword of a dick.

Finally, I observe the pretty goth girl herself, sip from her vibrant vibe. Feel how awkward he’s making her feel, see it reflected in her body language. And finally I feel slightly better about being an anxious, hypersensitive introvert.

Me? I’m surely the better loser. Right?

Neither of us are getting laid, but at least I’m not making pretty women want to collapse into themselves like a dying star just so they can dissociate away from my incessant barrage of bullshit.

Am I?

In any case, my condolences. I truly sympathize, my dark dear. I don’t know what questions he’s asking you, but please believe me: you are by no means alone in being subjected to this relentless, agonizing horror…

Dish Boy & Politics.

Last time Dish Boy brought up politics with me I got him so pissed off he didn’t ask me a single question for over an hour.

So naturally, as he does it again, the temptation to deliver words that would serve as the verbal equivalent of throwing a gallon of gasoline on this conversation and striking a match as I calmly walk away from the explosion like the cool guys in the movies is bloody overwhelming.

“Did you hear they assassinated the president?” Dish Boy asks. “They caught the guy the day after, though.”

Just as it was the previous occasion, he speaks about it now with so much conviction it irritates me, but I remind myself that his memory is like an Etch-a-Sketch suffering from a perpetual Grand Mal seizure, so the fact that he retained even a garbled rendition of the truth should probably be applauded.

Deep breaths, Tim. Deep breaths.

Calmly, I explain to Dish Boy that it was technically an attempted assassination, as the guy only managed to Van Gough our former (and, it increasingly seems certain, future) but-not-present president, and they shot the Bullet-Riddler on the Roof dead that very day.

You know, shortly after that Secret Service group-hug with the spray-tan raisin in the middle known as The Donald who, once acquiring his lost loafers, defiantly fisted the heavens before a roaring audience, leading to what will undoubtedly be an iconic photograph.

“Oh,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”

Please don’t bring up the suspicious aspects of the incident, I think at him, as I’d hate to agree with you and you’re the last guy I’d want to leap down a rabbit hole with.

Thankfully, he does not.

No, then he tells me about Trump’s pick for vice president, that he’s a “good guy,” and I want to ask him why, but these aren’t really his thoughts, I realize. He’s adopted what little he could pick up from what his parents have said, I’m guessing, so that conversation would just be awkward for him. And, yeah, me.

I just say that Vance’s values and ideals don’t align with my own and hope that’s enough, but Dish Boy insists, “no, no, his values are good,” as if this was just a simple, honest misunderstanding of mine.

As if these weren’t subjective judgements but objective actualities.

As if I’d clearly just not gotten the memo about which values were the holy, singular, right ones. As if I must have simply missed that meeting where I was informed of what values I’m supposed to adopt.

Didn’t you attend the brain-washing seminar?

I hold my tongue between my not-so-pearly whites and just take out the trash, knowing that by the time he sees me next, in roughly ten minutes, he’ll likely default to his usual, stupid questions.

He does.

And relatively-speaking, it’s fucking euphoric.

Brad Pitt, Purses, & Fever Dreams.

This is when the day begins to go downhill, ultimately to meet it’s terminus in a surreal, comical sort of hell.

It begins when Marjie, one of the managers, comes back to the stock room to ask me if l want to kick someone out of the dining room. The frustrated sigh that erupts from me is involuntary. Save for rare, repeat, bat-shit crazy offenders like the Cave Man or the Alien Chicken Guy, kicking people out is always an awkward ordeal and I inevitably end up feeling like a total fucking asshole.

Can I, like, not?

Some new guy from the kitchen, though, his eyes light up like a pair of goddamn supernovas as he overhears our conversation and asks — all-too-eagerly, it seems to me — if he can do it. Marjie then gives the go-ahead, and boy, am I relieved, but I decide to observe nonetheless, just in case he needs back-up.

I’m not that much of a pussy, after all.

Evidently they’d kicked this homeless guy out twice during the morning shift, and now he’s back, laying down in one of the booths, lost in slumber.

From a distance, I watch as the new guy talks to him, from what I can tell in a kindly manner, and while the homeless guy takes his merry fucking time, he was reportedly polite about it. As he finally gets up and approaches the door, however, he suddenly locks eyes with one of my many coworkers behind the counter and wishes them — and them in particular; no one else — a good day, and then turns to leave.

Is there, perhaps, a backstory here that we’re all unaware of?

Motherfucking nope.

Judging from the vibe and body language of the particular coworker he targeted these seemingly kind words to, he is as confused as the rest of us as to why he was singled out.

An hour or two later, the tall, slender, bushy-bearded vagabond returns, and immediately starts exhibiting some utterly bizarre behavior.

He picks up one of the wet floor signs in the pathway along the booths and walks it up to the shelves where we place the Doordash orders, leaning it up against the wall. After that, he picks one of the empty brown trays up off of one of the tables and places it on one of the Doordash shelves.

But wait: that’s not all.

Then he moves towards the counter, where we have multiple stacks of those plastic, numbered tent signs we use for dining room orders, and he proceeds to rearrange them.

I hide around the corner, out of his sight, and stare intensely at Marjie until we meet eyes, and then point with dagger pupils towards the counter, returning to her own pupils for emphasis.

This? This works.

Approaching the counter, she politely says, all the while calling him “honey” in that sweet way, that if he doesn’t order something, well, honey, she’s sorry, but he needs to leave.

That’s all that I catch, though she subsequently informs me that he was rearranging the tent signs because “things like that bothered him.”

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that we have ourselves an obsessive-compulsive vagrant on our hands.

Interesting, to say the least.

As I go on about my work duties, I can’t help but imagine what special type of personal hell it must be to be a homeless obsessive-compulsive, at least judging from the traditional depictions.

Washing hands. Locking doors. Creating and sustaining some semblance of strict, preordained order. Squeaky-clean sanitization. Perfectionism to a tee despite living on the streets.

Anal-retentive conscientiousness in tandem with the contrary conditions inherent in homelessness.

Sweet mother of fuck.

The notion of being plagued with this mental disorder coupled with his apparent circumstances, it sends me into an endless rabbit hole of utter horror. Visions of a prison of endless, self-inflicted, hypnotically-compelled torture.

By the time I make my way back out to the dining room to sweep and wipe down tables, however, he’s seemingly gone.

As I proceed to clean, I see a purse sitting on one of the seats at the tables. You’d be amazed what people leave at a fast food restaurant — phones, wallets, laptops, bicycles, a single shoe, plush animals, a full diaper forcibly wedged between the seats — so a purse isn’t out of the question.

There is one woman in the dining room, and she’s waiting at counter, and when I ask her if the purse is hers and she responds in the negative, I take it behind the counter, placed it in the storage area beneath the register, and tell Marjie what and where it is in case anyone comes looking.

You’d also be surprised how often no one comes looking, even when the item is seemingly important. Yeah, in such cases that might suggest it’s been stolen then abandoned, or at least you’d think so if we happened to live in a universe that operated in accordance with logic.

Unfortunately, we live in this one.

So anyway, I go on about my other work duties. In passing, Porky, a coworker, tells me that it belongs to the homeless guy, and I initially respond with a tilted head, quizzical look, and lifted brow.

“You mean the purse?”

“Yeah,” he confirms. “He was carrying it with him when he came in.”

I immediately flash back to the movie The Hangover, where they tease Zach Galifianakis’ character for having what they refer to as a purse, though he’s adamant it’s a sachel.

This, though? This is a purse.

The homeless guy is seemingly absent from the dining room after my smoke, though, so there’s shit I can do about it, so work continues.

At some point I’m coming in the doors from outside, on my way to do something, when I see the homeless guy in the dining room, clearly looking for his purse. He’s apparently even acquired help from some random customer to assist in the search.

And yes.

Yes, I could stop and inform them that it’s behind the counter, explain to them why it’s there. And yes, later I’ll feel incredibly guilty for not having done so, but I feel confident that they’ll eventually come to the counter and ask if anyone brought it there, okay?

And as I said, I’m in the middle of something.

So now I’m on break, sitting in the truck, trying to read a book as I sip from my java and chain-smoke cigarettes, when I can’t help but hear some girl just beyond some cars to my left, by the side door, sitting on her bicycle and talking on her phone.

The voice, the vibe, it all conveys that she’s one of those bouncy, energetic people that are so open, honest, and unfiltered — of such a wild, innocent, and carefree spirit — that one can’t help but be attracted to them, even if that energy swiftly becomes unbearably overwhelming, at least for types such as myself.

In any case, she’s grabbed my attention.

After break, I’m changing trash in the dining room when I notice that Free Spirit and the OCD Vagabond are sharing the booth right by the side door. On the table, amidst food and drinks, are two purses. One of them is a purse made entirely of transparent plastic; the other, well, it’s the purse I put behind the counter earlier.

The fact he got it back strangely put me at ease. The job is done. All has been put right. I could have made it easier, sure, but forgive me. I’m off the fucking hook.

After I gather all the trash and take it out to the dumpster, I do some dishes and decide to clean the dining room again. As I wipe down the second booth from the door, the Free Spirit at the first booth is talking with OCD Vagabond about exchanging purses. He temporarily gets up and walks away from the table, however, so, lacking any other target, she turns her energy towards me.

She likes her transparent purse because she used to date this guy who shoplifted, she tells me — he’s gone now, she assures me — and she’d gone into this store one day and on her way out, the alarms had gone off. Though they didn’t search her, it made her nervous and self-conscious, so she’d dumped out all the contents, purged her purse.

This see-through purse? She likes it because at a single glance they can tell she hasn’t stolen anything.

Judging from this, I surmise, her purse serves as an accurate reflection of her clearly transparent soul. However envious in a way, the thought of being like her, given the truly alien nature of my own soul, delivers unto me spasms of utter terror.

Some of us, my dear, are better left opaque.

Later, out the front door, I’m speaking with Porky when I reference the OCD Vagabond sitting with “that cute girl.”

His eyes bulge in alarm.

“Don’t,” he says, and when I ask him why, he only says that “she’s a crackhead,” though he never details how he came upon this information.

I’m inclined to believe this is just the nature of her personality, but I confess this is due to my naive reaction to the coupling of how she acts and how she looks, and how she looks physically, at the very least, does not at all resonate with the appearance of those that I’ve encountered in this town who were clearly on some sort of speed.

Maybe he was prejudging.

Maybe he was right, and she was just a newbie, and I, ever-shallow and shamefully superficial, was just failing to accurately judge her based on her presently pristine physical appearance.

I didn’t question him further on the matter, so fucked if I know. Figuratively-speaking, of course.

Which brings me to what I impulsively and under some consideration still choose to interpret as a compliment. His reactionary response of “don’t,” the broader context of which I confirmed in the course of our conversation, went far beyond merely suggesting that I’d have a chance with this girl.

I’m honestly delighted that he so confidently overestimates my capacity to get laid.

If only, dude.

This was undoubtedly the highlight of what turned out to be an incredibly surreal evening.

Later, as I’m smoking out front again, the OCD Vagabond appears out of the ether, approaches me, and asks if he can pay me fifty cents for a cigarette. With him being this close, I can feel his present vibe, and he seems forlorn and contemplative. I take out a smoke from my pack and tell him he can just take it, but he hands me the fifty cents anyway.

“I’ve been to jail a few times,” he says, after lighting it up. “I’m trying to help people out.”

The vibe I sense from him in this moment, how he says it, all of it is in total congruence. He seems not only forlorn and contemplative, but sincere. Nothing about him or what he says strikes me as threatening, dangerous, bat-shit crazy or worrisome, and the last line struck me as stemming from the heart of true empathy.

He walks away after that, and I’m left stunned, honestly, and feeling rather guilty. Feeling as though I’d prejudged him from the dawn of my shift.

All throughout this shift, I’ve been thinking about how all my years of working in this town has changed me from this open, trusting, naive, and broadband empathic asshole into this suspicious, judgemental, jaded and cynical asshole determined not be manipulated, exploited, used and abused as I have been in the past, and that however depressing that shit might have been, and however nostalgic I am for who I once was, this is simply the process of embracing realism through accepting and adapting to the way the world truly is rather than hanging on to your insipid, idealized notions of the way you perhaps selfishly think it should be.

Now I start thinking to myself, maybe I really have just become a prejudgemental asshole. Maybe it really is that simple.

Then it happens.

It’s probably twenty minutes to ten in the evening now, and just as I’m finishing up mopping the dining room and on my way out for a smoke, I see him at the door.

The OCD Vagabond.

This tall, bushy-bearded, clearly obsessive-compulsive homeless guy we kicked out earlier — who apparently carries around a purse with him.

No, not a satchel. A purse.

He tries the door, finds it locked, and a moment later I step out and tell him that we close inside at nine. Arby’s is still open, though, and they at least used to take walk-ups in the drive-thru.

He’d paid me fifty cents for a cigarette earlier despite my protests, as I mentioned, so when he asks me for a smoke again, I just give him one. Then he asks for a lighter. After he hands it back, he walks around the corner, and I begin to sink into my thoughts, as I tend to do.

Then I’m jolted out of my head when he asks me a question, and while I’m sure I heard him right, at the same time I had to have misheard him. Nothing else makes sense.

“What?” I ask.

“Are you Brad Pitt?”

I’m looking for signs he’s joking. A smile, a twinkle in the eyes. Nothing.

“No,” I say with a little laugh and, to set him up for what I hope is a punchline, I then ask, after a pause for dramatic effect, “Why?”

“Somebody told me he wanted to lick my balls,” he says. “I was gonna be, like, ‘I’m not gay, dude.'”

Then he mumbles to himself as he walks across the street to Arby’s.

So it was a satchel after all. Got it.

Honestly, sometimes this town is like a fucking fever dream, I swear.

The One Who Knocks.

Aggressively tapping my knuckle on the tiny window until it hurts, pounding my fucking fist on the shaking door as I call out his name: nothing works, and my anger is temporarily outweighing my concern here.

Move over, Walter White. It is not you, but I. I am the one who knocks.

At least when it comes to this particular door every time this coworker of mine fails to both show up for work and answer his fucking phone. Likely scenario, he’s blackout drunk like last time. And the time before that.

Even so, I can’t shake the haunting image out of my head: that on the other side of this door, beside a variety pack of empty beer cans and a half-smoked pack of dirt-cheap cigarettes, there resides the wiry-bearded, booze-infused corpse of my perpetually-grumpy coworker, his Crypt Keeper bed-head hair sprawled out in tangled strands over the couch where he rests his vacated head.

If he’s not dead, I swear I’m going to kill him.

I look to my right, politely nodding and saying hello to the neighbor of the unresponsive Captain Boozebeard, who’s been walking back and forth between the door and the red car haphazardly parked on the lawn behind me, arms full of boxes, in a dress that seems ill-suited for the activity.

Something else seems off, and I can see the neighbor picks up on my confusion as it involuntarily flashes across my face. A second later I realize it’s the face behind the heavy make-up — that and the Adam’s apple — that threw me off, and I feel like a douche.

I admit defeat and return to work, where after getting my coworker’s number I call him four times, leaving increasingly threatening messages on his voicemail.

Then I’m asked to check the women’s restroom, as a woman has been in there for roughly an hour.

I knock on the door, asking if anyone’s inside. No answer. Walking in, I look through the open door of the handicapped stall. Unoccupied. The small stall door is locked, so I knock. Ask again. Dead air.

Peeking a little under the door, I see a moving shadow. I repeat the question. No answer.

Five minutes later, as one of the managers is in the midst of calling the cops, I open the door and say, “if you don’t respond, we’re calling the police.” I say this two, maybe three times. Nothing.

Another drug overdose? Heart attack? Is she deaf and got lost reading a good book while taking a massive shit?

A cop pulls up in record time, and I unlock the door for him and step aside. He looks within the stall, asks if everything’s okay, and I hear a woman’s soft voice respond.

Hanging my head, I sigh in frustration. What the shit?

For some reason, the shift manager beside me asks if she’s naked. I look at him, one eyebrow raised, and shake my head. Bitch’s pants weren’t even down, and from what I can gather from the restroom door, she’s frightened because people she doesn’t know are trying to kill her.

I seriously hate this town.

Later, I go back to Boozebeard’s residence — after the cop also knocked on his door without response, and after we also unsuccessfully called him a couple more times.

The red car is now in the driveway. The neighbor is sinking into the ratty couch on the porch, wig off, makeup smeared, still in the dress, smoking a cigarette in slow motion, wearing a look conveying a disinterest so pervasive it nearly qualifies as catatonia. I decide to take a chance anyway and ask if he’s seen Boozebeard at all today. He manages to conjure up the energy to not so much turn, but roll his head towards me and so-mo shake his gourd from side to side.

So I start pounding on the door again, trying to drown out that worst-case scenario that’s been haunting my mind all day in the process, yet hear not a peep in return.

Yes, I am surely the one who knocks, but no one fucking answers.

He answers the phone for the closing manager hours later, though, so now I am the one who is going to knock his remaining teeth out.

Bird-Brains of a Feather.

On the floor before me, beneath the fryer I just moved, a pool of oil I’m mopping up — and it’s taking forever.

In the kitchen behind me, a loud kid with a big ego — one of those people that are territorial over territory that is not their own, assuming authority they are neither qualified for nor officially recognized as having. One of those people who suffer from the grandiose delusion that they’re King Shit when in reality they’re just, well, shit.

I keep waiting for him to do that to me so I can put him in his place. For now, I’m just a background character observing with pure rage how he’s treating my fellow coworkers.

To my right, Dish Boy appears, his bald head shiny beneath the fluorescent lights. Reaching for the fry baskets, he asks me if he can take them to clean. Like countless nights before, I tell him yes, but just take three. They need the other three so they can drop fries when necessary.

He says okay. He takes the three.

Five minutes later, he returns. I’m still mopping. He reaches for the remaining three fry baskets, asking me if he can take them to clean.

Really, is there a glitch in the Matrix?

I look back up at him, at his glistening gourd, free of follicles — plenty of room for a neon sign announcing “Vacancy,” I might add, just to serve as a bald, heads-up to others. To warn them what they’re going to be dealing with when it comes to him.

No, I tell him, they need those three.

Finally done mopping, I go out for a cigarette, and upon my return find two coworkers taking fry baskets from the table beside the dish sink back up front with exasperated looks on their faces.

I go back and look: he had cleaned all six of them.

I am Bill Murray and this is Groundhog Day in fucking July. He is Guy Pearce’s character in the movie, Memento.

Am I expecting too much out of people?

I look up at him, at that gleaming gourd, where maybe a scotch-taped piece of paper announcing “Out of Order” might be more appropriate, and explain yet again to Goldfish brains about the baskets. This time with some barely-concealed, rage-fueled emphasis.

Later, up at the counter, I see Dish Boy and King Shit talking, bonding. A meeting of the minds melding into a singular, energetic entity of multifaceted irritation right before my very eyes.

Birds of a feather flock together, I guess.

Kind of wish this bird-brained flock of two would soar away high into the sky and get sucked into a fucking jet engine, honestly, but maybe I’m just an asshole.