Weenie-Beanie Sunday.

6/2/24

Maybe a quarter of the way through mopping the stock room, I hear her way-too-happy voice from behind me. Turning around, I find her smiling with lips as well as eyes, body language unable to conceal her excitement. And she’s holding a small bag. In a giddy manner, she tells me to stop what I’m doing, to follow her. She’s got a mess for me to clean up.

None of this bodes well.

As she almost skips along, I follow slowly behind her, and she keeps stopping, turning around, urging me to catch up. Laughing, she tells me I might want to grab gloves.

Once we get to the dining room, she points to the area where I’d seen those kids sitting earlier, finger aimed towards the floor.

And there it is, like a small snake had shed its skin. A discarded shroud for the ol’ domed flesh-spout.

While the sight of the salami-sock enrages me, at the very least it presents suggestive evidence that those idiot kids were taking measures to ensure they didn’t produce more of themselves. If nothing else, I could be thankful for that.

Walking up to it, crouching down and angling her head in such a way to examine the weenie-beanie more closely, she says, “It looks used.”

And so the work week begins.

The Good Father.

A sauce packet detonates, exploding like a BBQ firework as it’s thrown against the wall. Wrappers and stray chunks of food litter the tables and floor. They yell over one another, louder and louder, a positive feedback loop that can only end in the rupturing of eardrums. One kid walks across the seat cushions right in front of me, from one booth to the other, like the floor is fucking lava.

As I’m mopping up a large drink one of the kids spilled, just beneath another litter-filled table, one member of this gaggle of giggling idiots darts by at Mach 10. In the process of doing so, he catches the leg of his shorts on the mop handle, almost de-pantsing himself in the process.

I bark, “Hey!,” and after stopping a moment to apologize and catch a breath, the jacked-up poster-child for pro-choice just picks up where he left off.

Where are the parents, you ask?

Probably at home, their negligent fathers still convinced their pull-out game is strong despite evidence to the contrary, so both them and the wives consequently busy making more unsocialized crotch-goblins they’re not prepared to care for.

No matter, they’ll just send their little sociopaths to the local fast food joint, where a 45-year-old, childless bachelor with bleeding ears and rising blood pressure will be forced to clean up after them and carefully bottle up his rage so he doesn’t go ape-shit on the little spidermonkeys.

I should’ve been a fucking librarian.

After wheeling the mop bucket into the corner, I take a deep breath, averting eye contact with anyone, and approach the door at the front of the building. Slipping out, I proceed to smoke a cigarette and reconsider my life choices.

A few puffs in, a girl walking down the sidewalk turns her head towards me, makes an “o” face, smiles, and laughs in apparent lunacy. Even given the tell-tale signs, it takes a moment for me to realize who this is, as I’m not accustomed to seeing her in anything other than her fast food costume.

It’s Psycho.

A pretty girl of perhaps seventeen years of age, she’s been a coworker of mine for the last two months or so. She’s prone to dramatic outbursts of energy which marijuana either serves to quell or exacerbate, depending on the day. As she walks up to me, I ask her why on earth she’d elect to come here on her day off, and she doesn’t hesitate to tell me that she’d much rather be here than home.

Then she bears all. Cliff’s Notes of her life story comes rushing out in firehouse fashion.

She tells me how her father and step father have both raped her. How her step-father would frequently do so when she took a shower. How her father would hold her and her nearly half a dozen siblings at gunpoint when any of them left the house. She explained how he’d walk behind her, keeping the handgun under his shirt, pointed at her back.

One day, she finally called the cops on him, and that’s how she escaped that fucked up circumstance and the state of South Carolina and came to live with her mother and her mother’s wife here in Ohio. Her mother who, while not physically abusive, at the very least, isn’t much of a mother, either. Her wife? Evidently a total bitch.

I know she’s not lying about any if this, and so it blows me away how she tells me all of it so casually, without teeth clenching, devoid of teared-up eyes. She just says it matter of factly. As if to say, hey, this is just what happens, isn’t life crazy?

It fucking breaks my heart. I feel myself crumbling inside.

It’s no wonder she has issues with men. It’s no wonder she gravitated towards that negligent and selfish bitch, May, who takes delight in lying and excuses her habit of constantly cheating on her girlfriends and obsolving herself of guilt by referencing her “abandonment issues” and other psychological glitches.

Shitty relationships is all Psycho has ever seen, ever known, and the familiar provides comfort, which is a more reliable source of psychological security than the risk of the unfamiliar, however much higher the odds of attaining happiness might be.

I was again reminded how some parents just shouldn’t be parents, which immediately brought my mind back to the circus of amphatamine-fueled midgets occupying the dining room on the other side of the window to my back.

Had my assumptions been too harsh?

When I was a teenager, I suddenly reexperienced — as opposed to simply remembered — something that had occurred earlier in my youth. This kind of thing had happened before, but this particular instance was different.

I was at my friend’s house, in the bedroom he shared with his four other siblings. It was a rare instance in which they were left alone, unsupervised by their strict parents, and apparently all the energy they’d been forced to repress had built up a surplus so that when they were finally alone for a brief period, it all exploded.

They were running around like lunatics. The youngest, a boy, climbed atop the toy chest, wrapped a blanket around him and lifted a flashlight high into the air with one hand, pretending to be the Statue of Liberty, and began singing the Star-Spangled Banner at high volume.

Given I knew what was coming, this must have happened before. I dropped to my belly, scooted beneath one of the bunk beds, and awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait long until the door burst open and in came the father with his belt.

For all I knew, maybe it was the same with these kids. Maybe their parents were as insanely violent as my friends father was, and now that they were unsupervised, the volcano of energy erupted.

When the cat is away, the mice will play.

Maybe I just don’t understand because, unlike them, I had loving and present parents. It’s true that my mother and I had serious issues up until maybe my mid-30s, but it’s clear as day to me how lucky I was — how lucky I am — and certainly in a relative sense.

Many boys have fathers that are abusive, negligent, or altogether absent. I can say without hesitation that my father is and has always been my favorite fucking human being ever. I could never hope to express how much I love the man.

So yeah, I’m lucky, so maybe I’m just being ignorant given my different, personal, historical context and I really shouldn’t be mad at those untamed circus monkey children that invaded our fast food dining room.

Later, I was talking with Brian, another maintenance guy, back in the stock room. In the midst of conversation, he tells me he thinks I’d make a good father. This is a strange coincidence, as I’ve told him nothing about what occurred that day or the shit that had been going on in my head as a consequence.

My immediate response was that he shouldn’t say that.

I tell him that I’ve finally settled into the thought of being alone, and that it probably suited me best. I need my alone time, and that never went iver well on the rare occasion I had a girlfriend — it sure as hell wouldn’t make me suitable for a wife and kids, and at 45, I’d dodged all that thus far.

Come August, I’d be quitting this job, hopefully landing in a better-paying one, and moving into a trailer close to my family where I’d likely live alone until I die. I was good with that.

Maybe I’d get a cat, that was it.

I calmed a bit and thanked him, and confessed I’d been told that before, but it always perplexed me. Plus, I’m not sure I’d want to bring a kid into this world, particularly given it’s trajectory, at least as I see it.

He tells me that this mentality is part of the reason I’d make a good father.

Then he jokingly says this conversation almost seems like a flashback sequence. That we’ll both be looking back on this moment sometime in the future and laugh at my reservations.

“Oh fuck no,” I tell him. “Please, please don’t say that.”

I’ll settle for a cat. I’m just fine with a cat.

On the Sloth & the Dynamics of Mutual Paranoia.

It’s an all-too-common workday. Outside, probably around four or four-thirty in the afternoon, I’m sweeping the lot — my usual routine at about this point in the work shift — and this older woman comes out for a smoke. Skinny, skin wrinkled and sagging over her boney frame, in between siphoning the life out of her cigarette, fumes seemingly bellowing out of every orifice above her neck, she asks me about that bicycle parked way out there, in far the corner of the lot.

I tell her it belongs to the Sloth. I don’t say that, of course, I give her his real name, but even so, she doesn’t know who I’m talking about at first.

I first saw the guy when he worked behind the register at the Circle K I often stop at on my way home from work. He was overweight, low-energy, and moved at a snail’s pace. Aside from his apparent lack of happiness, he both looked and moved like a Sloth.

Anyway, I describe him to her and a little light bulb flickers on just above her disturbingly skeletal cranium, and this in turn sets off highly-pressurized diarrhea of the mouth.

Oh, him. That guy. He’s disgusting, she tells me, blowing a thick stream of pollutants into the dying sky above her. He wipes his face, doesn’t wash his hands, and he gives her the creeps. She’s told him constantly, wash your hands. And the looks he gives her, she says, it’s like he wants to kill her. Something’s not right about him, she can tell.

And she kind of smiles.

Between you and me, she says, blowing out another puff, he won’t be around for much longer. Margie, a shift manager, she already got permission from Kelly, the boss, the store manager, to fire him.

I don’t tell her that I already know this. Even so, I do tell her what I had guessed was common knowledge. How he had worked here before, months upon momths ago, and did a no-call, no-show, and was subsequently fired.

Then, given the fact that we had such a low number of employees — that too many people were leaving, essentially, and we were too selective in who we hired — one of the high-ranking members of the franchise was called to step in. Sarah, a wonderful woman with an awesome stoner daughter we used to work with. Anyway, she was brought in to hire people en masse. Unaware Sloth had worked here before, she rehired him.

Unaware he had worked here before — which to my mind was totally understandable, given our truly epic turnover rate as of late — one of the assistant managers subsequently put him on the schedule. And now he was here on most nights I worked.

She was amazed at all of this, and I was amazed that she was amazed, and upon recognition of that fact I instantly felt guilty for being an unintentional rat and further feeding her clear loathing for the guy. I try and be a polite guy, force myself to engage in small talk with a creepy woman, and this is the result. I felt so ashamed of myself.

Time goes on. The night proceeds.

Between ten and ten-thirty in the evening, I go out back door, broom and dustpan in hand, my intent being to give the parking lot a final sweep before I leave at eleven. As a slither out the back door, I see the Sloth, holding a clipboard by the side door — the main entrance — with a cop just behind him, his cruiser in the parking space just behind him.

This is unexpected. I’m curious, and my body language, my facial expression, evidently conveys that with crystalline clarity, as after I greet him, the Sloth proceeds to fill me in.

Someone has stolen his bike, he tells me, and the minute he does, my face falls. I felt bad for him, but really, how didn’t he see this coming? Parking it way out there was stupid. He could’ve hid it behind the storage shed, like that skinny old guy with the mustache, or hid it back in the corral that contained the dumpsters, or even — hey, here’s a radical idea — gotten a chain and locked it to the gate in front of the building.

I hate to be a dick, but you must know the town you live in. Come on, man, it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, he just wanted to come into dining room to sit and write out his report. I tell them to give me a minute, and I go back inside and ask Sean, the closing manager. He seems annoyed — evidently the police already spoke with him, I’m assuming through drive-thru, wanting to see the camera footage he didn’t have the authority to access — but in any case, he said yes. Sure. Whatever.

So I let him in through the main entrance. I talked with him a bit, sensing he needed that. I confessed that I’d just been saying that I was surprised it hadn’t gotten stolen yet, given where he put it, and he more or less agreed. His justification for putting it there struck me as surprisingly stupid, however. Essentially his logic, as he explained it — and admittedly, I’m summarizing in my own words here — is that if the bike was chained, it probably wouldn’t stop someone who realky wanted to steal it, anyway, so fuck it.

But leave it far out there, in the corner of the lot? No offense, I thought, but that just seemed stupid.

As to his prospects of ever getting it back or identifying the perpetrator, I only hoped he realized how unlikely it was. I kept remembering that scene from The Big Lebowski when The Dude’s car was stolen, he spoke to the cop, and the officer mocked him and laughed in his face uncontrollably.

That bicycle of yours? It’s gone, man, I wanted to say. I’m truly sorry, my Sloth-like, apparently only temporary coworker, but it’s just fucking gone.

I then went out the door to tell the cop Sean couldn’t access the footage, but added I didn’t think it woukd show that corner of the lot, anyway. He said it was a pretty unique bike, so it should be easy to identify.

The following day, towards the end of the night, I pass by the Sloth and say, I don’t imagine there was any luck regarding your bike. He said no, but that he’s been checking Craig’s list and Facebook marketplace — and I smiled and laughed, because I was just going to recommend he do so. He said they probably wouldn’t try to sell it online for a week or two, and I said, yes, if they’re smart, but this us Ravenna. You might even see them biking it around town. He seemed to concede this was true.

There’s something fishy, though, he said, about how they can’t access the footage.

At this point I assumed he’d spoken to Kelly, the store manager, and based on this assumption, I said that it was possible that the camera doesn’t record, and if it doesn’t, they don’t want us to know it doesn’t record, and confessing that would blow their cover. He seemed to get that look on his face that conveyed, good point, I should have thought of that.

Then I asked him the question I should have asked him to begin with, which was whether he’d spoken to Kelly. He said he hadn’t had the opportunity to yet. That may change things, I told him.

After I smoked and locked the doors, I found there was a customer inside, still waiting on his order. I recognized him immediately. He was a great guy and used to be a regular back in the day, but now frequented the local GetGo, where a fellow employee of mine often saw him. They had talked about me the other day, and he brought up what was said. It regarded by 200$ rent increase, how I could barely afford it, and how by August my plan was to move into a trailer near my family and get a job nearby.

He left and a while later, as I was cleaning the dining room, Birdie, a young, short-haired, bone-thin girl I work with leaned on the counter and wagged me over with her finger. Curious, I walked over and leaned in as she whispered to me what had been going on beyond my eyes and ears.

Sloth thinks someone that works here stole his bike, she says, and that’s why Kelly won’t show him the footage — she’s covering up for them. Then Sean evidently said to Sloth, in jest, that I’d stolen the bike because I needed the parts.

I laughed. Really? I confessed to her that aside from “stealing” food from this place, I think I stole one thing in my life — a candy bar when I was a small child, and when my mother realized what I’d done he’d scolded me, made me return it, and I’d never done it again.

My conscience just wouldn’t allow it. I’m so sensitive the guilt would kill me.

Now I felt bad, though, that he might actually think I took his bike. It would be an illogical conclusion, of course, as I was working at the time of its disappearance, but if he was so paranoid as to concoct the Kelly conspiracy on the basis of such meager suggestive evidence, he might believe I’d somehow pulled it off, or got someone to do it on my behalf.

He’d also heard my conversation with the ex-regular, I soon realized, and so would know I was short on money, so stealing and selling a bike would fit right in to that sort of paranoid suspicion, too.

Now I was paranoid he was paranoid about me. His paranoia, it was contagious.

Not wanting to further reinforce his paranoia, I found myself instinctively avoiding any opportunity to do so. If I tried to blatantly tell him, convince him it wasn’t me, that might just amplify his suspicion it was me — or plant the seed if no paranoid flower was already sprouting.

So I said no more to him. Avoided eye contact with him. Deliberately tried to not make it look deliberate. Which I realized, in the process, was also likely to increase his suspicion of me if he already had it and generate it if it wasn’t already there.

I felt trapped. There was no way out.

This was worse than when I found myself driving behind someone who for whatever reason was taking the same, often long and elaborate route somewhere as myself and I became paranoid that they were paranoid I was deliberately following them for some reason, rather than just incidentally following them.

This circumstance, it was almost exactly like the positive feedback loop you find in the area of racism paranoia.

Here in the US, the history between blacks and whites is ever-looming, and both black people and white people are acutely aware of it. This generates a fucked up psychological dynamic between blacks and whites — mutual paranoias that feed off of one another in a horribly negative cycle.

If you’re a pastey fuck like me, try and put yourself into the mind of a black person — not just their shoes, mind you, but their minds.

You walk into a convenience store one night. No one else inside, just you and an old white guy at the register — an old white guy who, for the sake of argument, let’s say isn’t racist, but fears being labeled as such. Even so, shoplifting is frequent in this area, and so he’s on the lookout for anyone who looks suspicious.

As the black guy, you fear potential racism and you don’t want to just assume anyone’s racist, but if the white guy is racist, you don’t want to feed it, either. So you deliberately try to act calm. But trying to act calm typically doesn’t look calm. You also don’t make eye contact for awhile, but you’re curious if you’re being watched with a suspicious eye, so you involuntarily look towards the old white cashier — and that look conveys your anxiety. This, in turn, makes you look suspicious to the clerk, who happens to catch your eye, sense your anxiety, and so he gets anxious as well. Sensing his anxiety, fearing you’re being discriminated against, you avert eyes and try not to meet his eyes again, but your anxiety is elevated now, and on top of that you’re angry due to the indications of what you fear is racism. He interprets your anxiety and act of averting your gaze to mean you’re going to shoplift.

And so on. And so on.

You can see how these paranoid perceptions — mutually paranoid, yes, however distinct their sources given the individuals involved — seemingly reinforce the paranoid suspicions of the other.

I fear I am the innocent black guy here to the whitey honkey cracker Sloth, and that only feeds this horrible cycle and I don’t know how to break out of it.

Once finished cleaning the dining room, acutely, painfully aware now of this potential dynamic betwixt our mutual paranoias and the dire positive feedback loop that could be at play, I roll the mop bucket, wash cloth, broom and dustpan through the door separating the dining room and the area behind counter all at once, because I’m no two-trip bitch.

Once I make it to the back, far away from the Sloth up front, the circumstance becomes even more dire. I am accosted by at least half of the remaining employees in the store before I even unload by cleaning supplies. They want to share with me how weird his conspiracy theory regarding Kelly and the mysterious bike-napping coworker is, they want tp tell me how he thinks there’s “something fishy,” how he’s been texting with the police all night, and they all tell me it in whispers. None mention the joke Sean told, but that is to be expected, but everything else is downloaded into me from countless directions.

This is not uncommon. I am a walking confessional with a pulse. People spill things to me.

But I suddenly see what it might look like from the Sloth’s eyes up front. While I can’t confirm he’s looking, as I refuse to look in that direction, my paranoia regarding his paranoia is still there. To him, people are whispering things to me like they’ve been dying to tell me. To him, they’re likely telling me he’s onto me, that he’s onto the conspiracy. The jig is up. Disclosure is imminent.

To him, this only reinforces his paranoid, erroneous conspiracy theory — or so my paranoia tells me.

Inside is Closed.

We just closed, and I’m waiting for two customers to finish up and leave before I start cleaning the dining room, so I sneak out for a quick cigarette. A few puffs in, I look up from my phone and see an old guy walking towards the building from the sidewalk. I’ve seen him once before. He was nice enough. He talks to himself, though, and either has a speech impediment or he’s drunk all the time. Both, for all I know.

So that he doesn’t waste time and energy coming any closer, I yell out to him, “Sorry, man, just drive thru.”

He dismissively waves his hand with an, “eh,” as if he didn’t believe me, or was pissed off about us being closed. I shrug it off and look back down at my phone. When I look up again, he’s still approaching.

I give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, sometimes people develop a speech impediment due to poor hearing, so maybe he legitimately didn’t hear me despite the fact that I had yelled it to him, so I say it again. “Sorry, man, inside’s closed.”

“I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

Arby’s is right across the street, inside still open. Just saying.

I shrug and shake my head sympathetically. “The inside is closed.”

“What do you mean the inside’s closed? I come here all the time.”

As I struggle to see the relevance, he adds, pointing through the windows, “They’re in there.”

“They ordered their food before we closed.”

Then he steps forward and gets in my face, chest out and arms back, all ape-like. I do not back up. I don’t size him up. I’m not going to escalate. I refuse to give this childish twat what he wants, just like assholes who ride my ass on the road: I refuse to go faster. If the mood strikes me, I may let my foot up off the gas, go slower.

No, he cannot affect me. My inside is closed.

And I’m certainly not going to throw the first punch, either.

Having said that, Please.

I’ve never been in a real fight and I’ll probably walk away physically damaged if it happens, but I’ll fight tooth and nail, right on down to the ground. And hell, maybe I need it. There’s nearly four-and-a-half decades of pure rage bottled up in here, just itching for a justified outlet. Hungry for a reason. Oh-so patient for the right opportunity to discharge.

In my head, I hear Tyler Durden from Fight Club: “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.”

“I’m sorry, man,” is what I actually say, tone not changing in the slightest, not entirely ignorant of the fact that revealing he’s not getting a rise out if me will probably enrage him further. “I can’t let you in.”

“Well,” he says, “I’m going in anyway.”

Here we go.

“No,” I calmly tell him. “You’re not.”

So then he tries to pass by me and go towards the door, which I have propped open. I step in front of him and the door, and he steps back immedeately.

Huh. Interesting.

In my efforts to get inside the door quickly, I drop what was propping the door open — a roll of trash bags — so I bend down slowly to pick it up. I could’ve kicked it inside, but I decided not to. I knew he could’ve kneed me right in the face as I bent down. Somehow, I felt he wouldn’t. And he didn’t.

I stand up, flick my cigarette to the ground, and say, with a smile, “Have a nice day, sir.”

After shutting the door as he’s still scream-mumbling bullshit my way through the window, I go take a piss with my adrenaline-shaky hands, laughing to myself.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this town?

Monica’s Rut.

2/16/18

As I walk in the door to begin my shift, a young coworker is changing the trash, and as I go to throw away my coffee her eyes meet my own. She tells me she’s upset. Naturally, I ask her why, and she responds by telling me I should just look at Monica’s face.

Monica is a shift manager and a rather unique woman, to say the very least. Though I’ve never been good at judging age, I imagine that she’s in her sixties at best. She has three daughters and a few grandchildren. Her life has been riddled with drug use, criminality and prison time. Currently, she’s a pill-popper (and snorter), often engages in heavy drinking, and on occasion cocaine — which used to be her drug of choice, though, as she has told me on a few occasions, she gave it up long ago.

When I asked her how she managed, she told me, quite blatantly, that she just began using other drugs.

While a hard worker, her work patterns are inherently chaotic; she is a dedicated multitasker who is not at all good at multitasking. She often sings songs at high volume, typically ones she has created on her own, and is known for her dancing. She also has the tendency to mishear what others say, thinking that they said something far more absurd and perverted — which is often amusing, but not when you’re attempting to have a serious conversation with her.

She has a live-in boyfriend, Chuck, who she essentially saved from homelessness years ago. He is still out of work, allegedly because he hurt his back, and he’s addicted to pain pills. She supports him entirely, and as a token of his appreciation he consistently steals money and drugs from her. They’ve also frequently gotten into fist fights that also involve breaking furniture, biting, and pulling each other across the floor by the hair.

So when my coworker told me that I should just look at Monica’s face, that was really all I needed to hear.

As I walk behind the counter on the way to clock in, I say hello to Monica and take a look at her face, which is black and blue like rotting fruit, the bill of her cap pulled to the side to hide her shiner in the shadows. I turn away and walk to the touch-screen in the back to clock in. When I go back up front to change trash, I ask her the question I’ve asked two or three times before – needless, I suppose, as I’m always aware of the general answer.

“What the fuck happened?”

Her and Chuck got in another fight, she explains. He ran out of pills, went into withdrawals, borrowed money from a friend, got drunk, beat the shit out of her and subsequently attempted to smother her with a pillow. She tells me all of this in that “shit happens” sort of way that at once blows my mind, enrages me, and plunges me into the depths of depression. This time, though, she refused to fight back, she tells me, as if this is a heavy leaf she’s turning and the clouds are parting now and it’s all rainbows, cheesecake and blow jobs. Ever the skipping fucking record, I tell her that what she needs to do is to get the fuck away from him.

When one of her beautiful daughters — the one out of the three I honestly really like, as she’s an entriguing cocktail: compassionate badass — comes in and goes up to the counter later on in my shift, I beg her to convince her mother to leave. This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed this to her. I more or less said this the last time she came in, which was the last time her face looked like this thanks to Chuck.

In a conversation between the three of us later, as we’re all standing outside in the cold, Ohio rain, Monica proceeds to provide the usual excuses as to why she can’t just up and leave or kick him out. How if he catches her in the process of moving or she tries to kick him out or she calls the police that he’ll start wailing on her again, maybe even kill her.

I feel the pain of her daughter as she says all this. All the hatred. All the fear. All the exhaustion that comes from dealing with this endless cycle of pain. From dealing with and impulsively caring about Monica and her apparently inescapable rut.

I tell Monica she should save up money and buy some muscle to protect her in the process, or get him sent to jail for a day or two as she, with some help, can throw her belongings into a U-Haul and get the bloody fuck out of dodge.

All this falls on deaf ears. Just pissing into the wind. And it arises again in my mind, how fucking lucky I was, how lucky I am. For though I know it appears very unAmerican of me, its true: I was never physically or sexually abused as a child and my parents never divorced. There was no drug use in my family save for the occasional alcohol and my maternal uncle, who used to smoke. Only as I grew older did I discover that what to me was normal was, in fact, rather atypical.

The kind of lives — childhood and adulthood — many if not most of the people I’ve encountered in my life have lived and are living, especially in this cesspool of a town I work in, are depressing and enraging, to say the least. I can’t seem to offer a damn thing but listen to the stories, offer an open, empathic ear and hopefully some comforting words, and try not to fall into the same traps myself — a plaguing, conditioned fear in me despite my blessed lack of those wretched, foundational experiences.

In the end, I face the inevitable. That endlessly fucking frustrating and heart-wrenching fact that I just can’t, just can’t manage to find a way to really truly help them.

I feel like Superman, hopelessly trapped and frustratingly impotent on a planet composed entirely of kryptonite.

Just Another Overdose.

6/20/22

I go to sweep the bathroom at work and, opening the door, I almost walk into manager Steve. He’s holding back laughter, and it’s not due to him nearly making me shit my pants, either. He scoots passed me to let his laughter go as I lean in the door, and quickly discern the origin of the giggles: some guy in the men’s room stall is moaning, grunting to a steady beat.

Steve suspects he’s humming while pooping, maybe even sleeping. Despite hearing no wet, meat-slapping sounds, my immediate assumption is that he’s masturbating, and instantly I’m irritated about what I might have to clean up after the presumed potty-jacker is done with his deed. So I go to sweep the rest of dining room, hoping the guy exits the shitter soon.

Spoiler alert: he does not.

Maybe ten minutes later, I go back into the restroom to find the moaning has ceased, and this disturbs me more than the initial moaning. The silence is penetrating. And that’s when I begin to suspect what my dumbass brain should have initially suspected on default.

I leave the restroom and walk a short distance, step outside the front doors and hail Steve, as I want someone there to share in my horror, whatever it is that might be awaiting me beyond that stall door.

A corpse, perhaps. Maybe a half-naked guy taking a post-masturbatory snooze with his strangled dong now held loosely in his hands.

We walk into the men’s room and I knock on the stall door, yelling, “Is anyone in there?” No answer. I ask it louder. No answer. Steve asks if he should call 911. I tell him I don’t know. I announce, yelling again, that I’m coming in as I unlock the door.

I push it open.

On the ground, lying on his side, is a tall, lanky guy, his long, brown hair tied back in a ponytail. His face is a deep red fading into purple.

“Yup,” I say. “Call 911.”

One of the girls behind the counter called 911, as it turns out, and whoever she is talking to on the other end is asking her if anyone is administering CPR. No one is, as no one knew how, and I have that overwhelming feeling that I should be fucking doing something but didn’t have the vaguest fucking clue as to what.

I’ve never had this feeling before: that given I work in a fast food restaurant in this fucking town, I should probably be trained in CPR.

Props to the cops. They reacted as my dumb, idealistic ass believed they should have — they promptly arrived, and in numbers (in the end there were four or five cruisers), and wasted no time bolting through the doors Steve and I held open for them and directly into the bathroom to do all they could to revive the overdosing numbskull turning purple as Grimace on the restroom floor.

The firefighters that arrived with the ambulance, on the other hand, immediately pissed my likely overly-judgmental ass off. They arrive some time after the cops, pull in to the lot comparatively slowly, take what seems like a goddamn eternity getting out of the vehicle with their equipment, and when they finally do so they both move in a slow, lethargic, almost reluctant manner.

I realize I’m being a judgmental asshole here — please keep that in mind. As much as I feel goddamn certain I know how a long, bad day at work is, I could never imagine the shit they have to deal with on a daily basis, particularly in a drug-addled, cesspool of a town such as this. After long enough, you’ve got to become desensitized, just as a psychological survival strategy. You have to get tired given the frequency of overdoses in your active area, and perhaps today was a rather straining fucking day, at least for the two of them.

Maybe they are grossly underpaid and under-laid: again, I deeply sympathize, as I know the state that breeds all too non-fucking well. But damn it, chug an expresso, take your job seriously and execute it to the best of your ability. Lives are on the line.

You could argue this guy lying on our floor tiles asked for it, that he was flirting with death by sticking that shit in his veins, but this isn’t some convenient, no-skill job you picked up because you’re a deadbeat like me who, despite being unfit for the world in which he was born had to find some way to pay the rent and food and so on. No, you trained for this. You specialize in this. Do what you chose to do with your life and do it the best you can.

The cops did it. You can do it.

Assholes.

Peering from some distance at the open door of the men’s room, I see more occupants than I have ever seen, and ever wish to see in there. I then proceed to go outside, light a smoke, and suck down passionately on the butt of my cancer stick, staring off into space, trying to mend together coherent, rational thoughts in the midst of the hyper-violent, emotional maelstrom wreaking havok within my dismal fucking soul.

I’m right where I often find myself — stuck between wanting to help, wanting to play a more meaningful role in the world around me, and wanting to distance myself from this endless chaos, run away and hide in peace, in nature, in two parts solitude and one part among family and close friends, feeding and brightening the dimming glow within and around me as I strive to find some deeper meaning in this ever-chaotic bullshit world we humans have — in our niavette if not in our irreversible idiocy — built for ourselves on this otherwise-beautiful biosphere.

Crouching down, smoking my smoke, I feel sad and angry. Hopeless yet defiant against that hopelessness. I feel disgusted with the world yet determined to ease and overcome this existential nausea.

Cigarette extinguished, I proceed to the door to find the man who had been dying on the floor seemingly miraculously on his feet again, though just barely, standing on the opposite side of the glass door, which I subsequently opened for him. The cops proceeded to guide the guy out, who was a little wary on his feet and seemed like he’d just been prematurely awakened from a deep sleep as he held some clear tube up his nose with one, unsteady hand.

In the parking lot, in the booths in the dining room, and yes, in the bathroom, this has happened before — countless times before. And I’ve often seen the aftermath of ODs, or at least heard of it, but I’ve never been party to the discovery, to the whole of the process. This is a new experience. This burst my goddamn cherry.

I’ve already had enough of it.

Another Ruined Break in Discount Gotham.

6/16/22

All I want to do on break is be alone and write, so I move the truck to a space in front of the building so I have some shade. I’m not there thirty seconds when I see a guy approaching. A big-bellied man in a red and blue, long-sleeve shirt, a blue hood over his head, and white Winter gloves.

In 80-plus fucking degree weather, mind you.

He wears a red Buckeye lanyard around his pasty white neck, where he’s hung his bright yellow sunglasses. He has a blue bookbag strapped to his back and two tote bags — one red, one blue — hanging around one arm.

It’s ‘Murica Man.

He asks for cigarette. I regretfully inform him I have a limited supply, which is technically true. Then he asks for a lighter because he had a half-smoked cigarette on him somewhere. I dumbly say sure and he spends the next eight minutes going through all his shit on the curb, holding an enduring coversation with himself as he does so. Loudly. And he references superheros more than once.

Finally, he finds it, approaches my driver side window, and I hand my lighter to him. As he unsuccessfully attempts to light his cigarette for the next five minutes, likely a challenge at least in part due to his fucking gloves, he tells me his name is Shawn something. He tells me this twice, just in case I ever “hear” of him. He tells me about how they discovered he has RH negative blood when he was a child, but he only started noticing changes a few months ago.

Eventually he gets bored talking at me and begins talking to the wall of the building.

So yeah. I guess I met a superhero today.
It makes me wonder if there are other wannabe-superheroes or supervillains in this shithole of a town — if this place could turn into a kind of discount Gotham.

Of Jabba the Hutt & McGruff the Crime Dog.

It’s roughly ten in the eve and I slip out the door for a smoke, having just gotten done mopping the dining room. I hear a noise in the parking lot. Looking up, over by the drive-thru I see a half-naked guy staring at the ground. Jabba the Hutt in human flesh. He’s kind of wobbling, unbalanced, undoubtedly fucked up on something.

I smoke faster.

By the time I get inside, Natalie, the manager, informs me that Jabba is reportedly making the woman who just pulled into drive-thru uncomfortable. I don’t see him out the window anymore, but one of the girls tell me he’s on the other side of the store.

I unlock the back drive-thru window and stick my head out. And standing in between cars, there he is: dirty man boobs, jiggly beer belly, and all. He’s wearing two different kind of shoes and has a cigarette butt burning passed the filter hanging out the side of his super-slug mouth.

“Hey man,” I ask him, “what are you doing?”

This seemed like a reasonable opener.

“I wanted some food,” he says, holding up his baggy, stained shorts with one hand.

“Well, the inside is closed and you need a car to go through drive-thru.”

On a side note, I hate that I’m forced to point this fact out so often. The very presence of the word “drive” in “drive-thru,” I feel, should make this a no-brainer, but alas…

“Can I talk to the manager?”

“She’s busy right now. Just give us a call.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

I shrug. “Sorry man.”

This, of course, is not the end of it. He keeps pressing to talk to the manager, so I ask him kindly to step aside, out of the line of cars, and I’d let her know. I close and lock the window, go back up to the active drive-thru window and give Natalie the run-down.

We look out the window and Jabba is now sitting on the curb, leaning, splaying his filthy tummy to the growing line of increasingly uncomfortable customers. She confesses to me that she hopes that if she only ignores him he’ll go away, but I just stare her dead in the eyes as I slowly shake my head from side to side for dramatic effect.

I’ve seen Return of the Jedi countless times since I was a kid. I know all to well that he is immune to our Jedi mind tricks.

A few cars pass and he approaches the window, evidently having grown impatient. Natalie approaches and I hang close by, trying to find out where the broom is so I have some object to use as a weapon, just in case shit goes south. I find one. He asks her for food, free food, and she apologizes, informing him that we can’t do that. She then politely asks him to back up so the next customer can pull up and slowly closes the window.

I’m sure this comes as a surprise, but he does not back up. He merely crouches down, picks up an old nugget off the ground, stands back up, pops it in his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, and starts chew-chew-chewing away at it like a cow to cud.

Natalie’s anger finally overcomes her uneasiness. She opens up the window again, and this time firmly says, “You’re in the way. If you don’t move, I’m going to have to call the cops.”

“Call them then!”

And with Jabba’s blessing, she does, and she asks me to lock the drive-thru window as she holds the land line to her ear. Broom close by, I latch and lock the window, avoiding eye contact with the angry, bloated slug-man as I do so. He backs up to let the next car pull up, but stares back at me from beyond the car, yelling shit at me that I couldn’t hear. The guy in the car looks nervous but understanding and says he’ll pull around the building for his food.

After that, Jabba seems to vanish. Once I see the three police cruisers pull in from the other side of the store, I feel it’s safe to take the trash out the stock room door, and so promptly do so.

Back in the dark corral that houses the dumpsters, I hear defiant though indecipherable yelling through shaky, rhythmic gurgling. I imagine this is him getting tazed. Once back inside, I learn I’m right. At some point he was evidently also lying flat on the ground. The cops tried to pick him up by his hands and feet, at which point he bit one of the officers.

Sometimes, McGruff, crime takes a bite out of you.

I mean, I guess it makes sense. He did say he was hungry, after all, and almost anything — even raw bacon — had to taste better than that fucking filthy ground-nugget.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate this town?

Of Broken Smoke Breaks & Acid Trips.

Out the front doors at work, crouched down with my back against the wall, I light a smoke. The street is quiet, the town is dark, and it just stopped raining. No one is likely to even see me, much less bother me. Now I can just enjoy my cigarette and commune with my thoughts for a few moments, uninterrupted.

“Havin’ fun,” I hear someone yell half a moment in, “sittin’ on the wet ground?”

Motherfucker.

Its some guy way down the sidewalk on the other end of the street. Some evidently eagle-eyed bastard. I tell him I’m just hiding. He laughs, tells me that if he worked here, he’d be hiding behind the counter inside, eating cheeseburgers.

He crosses the street as he continues talking with me. Like a moth to a porch light. Like a fly to a pile of shit that only wished to pollute its blackened lungs and collect its shitty thoughts in private for maybe ten minutes.

Now its story time, and I am the captive listener.

His father went to Cleveland to get his mother — rescue her, he makes it sound — who was doing coke with some guy at a bar. Before his father left, he had some LSD in the house, and allegedly in fear that his two sisters would take it while he was gone, he gave it to him, his son, and dropped him off downtown.

“If you can make it home without getting arrested,” he told him, “I’ll give you a hundred dollars.”

Top tier parenting, right there.

He tells me how he’s glad his father went to get his mother, because if he went, he’d hunt down and kill the guy that got his mother doing coke, and he can’t end up in jail, not now, as he just managed to get his kids back. I had the burning impulse to add that this probably made walking around town with a head full of acid an even worse idea than it already clearly was, but I let it go.

Different strokes for different folks, and all that rot.

On his way home, he went on to tell me, he planned on stopping by his “baby mama’s house” to “bang the shit out of her,” but apparently he collapsed when he saw the steps to her place turn to lava before his very eyes. And, I mean, I empathized with him quite easily here. I haven’t had sex in an excruciatingly long time, but if spontaneously manifesting liquid rock suddenly presented itself as a barrier between me and a desirable woman’s lovely lower lips, it would undoubtedly serve to dissuade me as well.

If the pathway to pussy is obstructed by lava, just go home and rub one out, you know?

Safety first.

On his way passed the bar, where a guy he didn’t know tried to fight him because he didn’t like the way he looked, he also saw a police cruiser — and saw it melt into the road, he told me.

I find myself silently confused, for while I have had limited (and safely-controlled) experiences with psychadelics, I’ve never before had the high caliber of hallucinations he was allegedly experiencing. When he goes on to explain how he’d done shrooms before, but never acid, and then explained that he had not only been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD but schizophrenia as well, things suddenly became a bit more clear.

I suggested that he be careful. Psychedelics have been known to trigger a latent psychosis, after all — even marajuana — and his psychosis evidently wasn’t so latent to begin with, so this might be the equivalent of throwing gasoline on an already-blazing fire. He then goes on to explain some disturbing behavior of his while on weed when he was younger that seemed to reinforce my point, but my point had clearly grown wings and flew right passed the poor guy, or so it seemed. Even after he tells me about a friend of his that went on his first acid trip and never came back. A friend that took a tab that ended up lasting a lifetime.

Finally, my smoke is down to the filter, so after I let him bum a smoke I tell him I had to be getting back to work, and that he should be careful. He assures me he will be and that he’s on his way home.

In both senses, I sincerely hope he makes it back safely from his trip.

Of Anxiety Attacks, Snowdays, & Eternal Dissatisfaction.

Winter was coming.

And predictions were that it was going to blow an epic, frosty load all over the face of Ohio, so I was psychologically prepared. In a way.

As it kept coming to mind Friday and Saturday, my weekend, I comforted myself by telling myself that if my omnipresent anxiety was too high, I could just call off work. I really didn’t want to lose out on the money, but I didn’t want to drive in unsafe conditions or fight off an intense anxiety attack, either.

Sunday came and I awoke and proceeded with my routine, reminding myself all throughout that I only had the option to call off two hours before my shift was scheduled to begin. After that, I was committed to going to work — and to driving home in the snowstorm.

And I kept telling myself to just endure the plaguing fear. Running away, avoiding it, that bullshit just feeds it strength. So just face it, endure it, manage it, plow yourself through it.

That last part, likely literally.

I fought with myself until it was too late, passed the two-hour limit, and my fate was sealed. I knew I’d have to deal with the drive home that night. That’s when the anxiety I felt infecting me as soon as I woke up achieved a new level of intensity. Observing this in myself, I got rather pissed off.

It kept hitting me how stupid this was, how utterly nonsensical. The anxiety I was destined to have flooding me tonight would be bad enough, why was I compounding it with anxiety over my coming anxiety? If “fear is the mindkiller,” I thought to myself, than fear of fear is overkill.

So as I often do when somethings bothering me, I wrote about it on the word processor app on my phone. How anxiety attacks felt to me. How I felt so anxious about my anxiety attacks. How I felt about how anxious I felt over my anxiety attacks.

Mouth as dry as the Sahara, skin laminated in cold sweat. Throat as narrow as a straw with a massive lump inside you can’t swallow down. Eyeballs stuck on high-beams. Your entire body, feeling like a fist so tense the knuckles are white and your fingernails are digging into your bloody, fucking palm.

Teeth clenched like a vice. Movements jerky, breathing choppy, voice flailing and failing like its regressed back to puberty.

I boldly pronounced that anxiety sucked. How fear over a present circumstance was plenty enough, and how unnecessary it felt for my mind to subject me to additional torture by anticipating that anxiety and delivering nauseous, psychic gunshots of pre-anxiety anxiety.

Yes, I confessed, I’ll feel like I’m dying as I drive home tonight from work in the midst of a snow storm, where the relentless sky dandruff will obscure my vision and the frosty, white death blanketing the ground will render me incapable of discerning where the road begins and ends, but does it have to ruin my entire day?

I hemmed and hawed, but ultimately posted it on social media. I got an all-around sympathetic response, and in a way it felt good. That people got it, even understood it through personal experience.

All throughout the night at work, though, I kept coming back to it in my mind and feeling that what I wrote and displayed to the world wide webworks just made me look weak, pathetic, childish, unmasculine, and attention-seeking, and that in turn fed my self-loathing. At the same time I realized that if the responses had not been kind, supportive, and sympathetic but rather brutal, mocking, and downgrading, I would have felt even worse.

This reinforced my suspicion that nothing can ever satisfy me. And that, in turn, fed my self-loathing, who had hardly had time to digest its former feast.

So closing time came. The filthy, icy, sky jism had already rained down several coats across everything in sight by that time, a sight that was in part obscured by the relentless snow that continued to fall. I warmed up the truck, brushed it off, clocked out, put it in four-wheel-drive, got gas, beer and cigarettes at the Circle K, and proceeded down that long, dark road towards my one-bedroom apartment.

My dreaded journey.

Quite often when I’m wrong, I’m rather embarrassed about it, but I accept it as necessary suffering given my desire to grow my body of knowledge, to increase my overall understanding. Quite often when I’m proven right, I’m disappointed and pissed off.

Nothing can ever satisfy me.

I was right. The drive was horrid. My speed rarely climbed above 30 miles per hour, never above 40. Gripping the steering wheel so fucking tight my fingertips went numb. Forehead way too close to the windshield as my unblinking eyes fought to maintain concentration on the road.

Trying to relax my breathing. Fighting back against, talking back to the violent mob of automatic negative thoughts.

Striving to see through the slush that my shitty windshield wipers increasingly failed to wipe away.

And finally parking in what I could ascertain by the unblanketed landmarks was my usual parking space, and then carefully making my way across the winter tundra to the security door of my apartment complex.

Once inside, I responded to all the comments I’d recieved on social media. Then I drank and smoked and smoked myself out of the tension that may have otherwise imprisoned me all night long and on into the early morning.

I awoke happy that it was all finally over, as anxiety is so exhausting and time-consuming. If only I could harness the energy expended in my states of anxiety, I truly believe I could get this civilization off its reliance on fossil fuels, I swear.

From beyond my third-story window, I could hear the whirring of angry tires spinning against snow, vehicles aggressively striving to free themselves of the wintery graves Old Man Winter had fashioned for them the evening before. That dick. Parting the curtains, I looked outside and below and knew I’d have to get out there early to excavate the truck.

It was a pain in the ass, but I finally brushed off the truck sufficiently and, after some four-wheel, drive-and-reverse struggling, managed to free the Tacoma. The parking lot was barely plowed, which was also the case with the road I live on, though I had anticipated both. It’s just a left onto that road and then a left at the intersection, though, which should be plowed and cleared by now.

In my anxious pessimism, even I had confidence in this the previous evening, confidence that was reinforced by my coworkers, who freely offered up the same prediction.

“At least by tomorrow,” Jerry had said to me, “the roads will be clear.”

The roads? They were not clear.

It was akin to the terror of the former evening, only with daylight. I arrived at work, where the parking lot was also not plowed, and planted myself next to two vehicles I knew to be Kelly’s, the store manager, and Marcy’s, one of the assistant managers. These were the only two vehicles in the lot.

I tried to relax for about ten minutes, after which I planned to do my usual: enter the doors, go to the restroom, and stare at the time clock for a few minutes before I clocked in and my miserable Monday shift began.

At least by the time I leave, I told myself, the roads should be cleared.

I got to the doors of the building. They were locked. This isn’t too unusual. Since the pandemic, we frequently close lobby due to being short-staffed. I pounded on the doors for what seemed like forever before Marcy answered, and she did so with that smile that prepared me for news that I would not like that would subsequently be coming out of her mouth in that sarcastically sweet voice. I was not to be disappointed in this respect.

“Don’t be mad,” she said, hanging out the doorway, “but we’re closed.”

Wait, what?

“Everybody on night shift called off except the new guy.”

You didn’t think to tell me?

“I figured you’d call off like everybody else,” she said, “because of the snow.”

So I forced myself to come here despite my agonizing fears and I didn’t fucking have to? And now I have to turn around and do it all again?

Fuck. Fuckity-fuck.

So, yes, I had to endure the drive again, though in reverse this time. And the roads were slightly better. I decided to stop and get beer. And then, since there were still no cleared parking spaces, I had to plant the Tacoma right back into its former grave of death.

So I’m home now. On a fast food snow day. Drinking beer, smoking weed, writing all the fuck about it. Still kind of frustrated.

Really, dude: nothing will ever satisfy me.