Tag: fuck this town

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?

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.