Tag: police

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.

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?