The Buford Pusser/Michael Meyers Effect
A group of six Hispanic kids walked past the front of the store. They looked about 14, old enough to be a physical problem, but not smart enough to keep their eyes open and their mouth shut. The loudest, also the ringleader, was bringing up the rear, and he came toward me.
“Hey, it’s St Patrick’s Day and you ain’t wearing green! Can I pinch you?”
I smiled at him and gave him my stock response. “I’m Irish and I’m sober. Pinch me and see what happens.”
“Is that how you got all your teeth knocked out?”
Someone’s fluffing his feathers.
I went back into the store, and all six were following. But I had a backup plan. I yelled “SKIPPY!” into the back of the store, and here comes the manager.
“What’s up,” he asked, following my eyes as I watched the kids pass the sodas and aim for the general area of the alcohol.
“Just babysitting. They might think they’re tough.”
Skippy said just loud enough for the leader to hear, “They know we can’t hit them.”
“Yeah, but who’s gonna come looking for them little shits? We lock ’em in the basement with the Gimp and it’ll be ‘problem solved’ before it’s even a problem!” Leader of the pack heard what I said, drifted back toward the group, then one bought a candy bar. They called Skippy “Sir” and left the area.
“Thank you Skippy. You just saved me an hour of cleaning and the store $200 in merchandise.” He laughed and went back to the office.
Settling in for the bus ride home, I put in earphones and smiled at my lovely bus buddy across the aisle. Her returning smile was interrupted by an old drunk with a backpack. He crashed into the safety pole before ending up in the seat in front of me. He said something but I ignored it, like you do on the bus with strangers after midnight. He waved an unopened pack of Marlboros in my face, but I looked away.
Toward the end of the ride, after a couple unsuccessful attempts at eye contact, he said something directly at me, so I pulled out my earphones. “WHAT?”
It was not a pleasant “What?”
“Where we getting off?” he asked.
“We’re not getting off anywhere. I don’t know you. Leave me THE FUCK alone.”
I plugged my earphones back in, but he kept talking, so I removed them. He shut up, and we approached the end of the line. I moved a couple stops early to test the waters, and sure enough, he was watching to see when I departed.
I got off the bus and across the highway quickly, watching Drunkymon look both ways and then start walking after me.
A half-block ahead, there was some windstorm debris in the street and on the sidewalk. I scanned until I saw the right piece, about three feet long with a hook on the end, and the girth of a tennis racket. I picked it up, turned around, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk, watching Drunkymon approach.
He stopped about ten feet from me. “What’s up?”” he asked.
I looked him square in the eye. “Walk another direction.” I brought the stick up and gave the air a couple swirls.
“Walk another direction?”
I narrowed my eyes and said nothing.
“Okay.” He turned and walked back toward the bums at the bus stop.
I had plenty of adrenaline going home. Every few steps I’d glance back, but he was last seen heading back toward the homeless encampment by the freeway.
Now I’m in, where it’s quiet.
The only comic violence I’m looking forward to is cat-rassling in the back yard.
Sidekicks
Thursday is my Monday, which is also freight day. The store turns into a trash pile for a few hours while the crew reloads the gummies, peanut butter cups, and Mountain Dew. Beer comes Friday. Skippy will have six people working, and we get it done in a few hours.
“We”? My ass. I watch them work and DJ with my Wonderboomer and Spotify account. Honk is reluctantly reducing the volume on his dubstep soundtrack, which I not-so-lovingly refer to as the Disco Jackhammers.
Skippy emerges from the office as I come in. “I guess you heard about Jedeye?”
Hmm. “I saw a cryptic thing on Myspace, but I haven’t talked to him. Whazzup?”
Skippy handed me his phone, with the text message open. “Sorry for the short notice, but I’m moving to Idaho. Bye!” (Edited for brevity.) I’d figure something was up, but nothing this final.
“Well… shit. Just when you get ’em broke in.” I went into the office and prepared for the night.
I’d watched 50 people die slowly over the past few years, but none was the gut-punch of losing my little buddy to fucking Idaho? If you’re gonna move to get away from it all, Idaho? You’ll get away from all this, that’s for sure.
As the days rolled on, it became apparent how much actual work and responsibility Jedeye had taken on. Graveyard’s quieter calm was slipping away. Arguments over donuts. “I’m doing the fucking donuts tonight. Touch ’em and I’ll send you home!” Chai thought I was actually pissed because I said that, but I wouldn’t send anyone home for doing my work.
Now they leave them for me. Or at least ask. The donuts arrive about the time DICK, my new sidekick, arrives. Aah DICK.
I’d worked almost exclusively with Jedeye since the remodel of the store. I got used to looking over to bust a thief and see a shaved head doing the same thing. I’ll give it to Skippy, he followed the aesthetic. New sidekick looks very much like Jedeye, but it’s like they ordered him from a different company.
DICK has the same haircut, (none) loose clothing and is about three inches taller and 60 pounds heavier. He’s white as the driven snow, but has a hip-hop flair about him. (He rocks out tho, so no conflict.) Another connection? If you go back on this blog about fifteen years you’ll see me pining over a girl named Angel. DICK was married to her best friend. It’s a small world, after all. But not when he and I are working.
I’ll roll a joint right there at the cash register, step outside, smoke about half, and pass it off to Chai or DICK or one of the girls outside the door. We’ve really run off the foil crowd, replacing it with a bunch of stoners whose worst offense is wrinkling the noses of the White Claw Karens’ because they “hate the smell of weed.”
Too fucking bad. We’ll have four beers and wait on you. See who’s nicer?
Properly ‘breaked’ I go back inside. Chai has the donut trays washed, and the few remaining donuts from yesterday are put to the side. I la-de-da the donuts into the display all purty and stuff. One time we ran out of plastic gloves, so I washed my hands and did them bare-handed.
Jedeye, who loves to do the donuts as much as I do, and did until he left, looked at me. “Are you going to touch every fucking one of those?”
“I’m not spending half an hour using tongs. And I don’t know why YOU are bitching. You drop them on the floor just so you can eat them!”
“Fair.” He slunked off in awesome comical fashion.
It’s a season of change at the store. Graveyard has been problematic since before the pandemic, and we’re going to make a surge. Jedeye was so good at walking the line between criminal shitbirds and folks just down on their luck. A fresh-faced kid who would walk right up to you and slap the shit out of you if you deserved it. But he would also sneak a whole box of day-olds to the homeless chick under the sleeping bag, so she can eat and barter the rest for dope.
Having spent long evenings together, I guess I knew it was coming. Like in Elmore Leonard’s Justified, where Raylan says, “You get to know a man when you dig coal with him.” Jedeye and I spent a lot of time digging coal. He’s way too smart and personable to spend his life babysitting the universe when he should be out there conquering it.
I didn’t hear from him, so I sent a wish you well text. I figured he felt guilty for leaving me alone at work. (They make a big deal of it now, but I’ve been doing it for forty years. I’m okay.) At first I was hurt by the quiet, but not really. I’m the old guy, I’m a boss whether I get paid that way or not. They jump to attention when I tell them to, and I tell them when I train them. “I’ve been here 20 years, They expect me to say something when I see something.” I don’t have to say it twice, usually.
I didn’t have to say it once with Jedeye. He was the first person other than my sister with which I could rationally discuss religion. Thee were so many instances where it felt like we were cut from the same cloth. And until I met him, I never understood the relationship between Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads. I get it now.
Raising cats, I’ve gotten better at letting go. They’re here, love ’em to death, but don’t let it stop your world. I’d made the joke many times, that working with Jedeye is like working on oxycodone. It’s absolutely fun as hell, but if you get to depending on it, it’s gonna hurt like hell when it goes away. But then you forget, life carries on, and you remember all the fun you had, The sickness (oh wah-ah-ah-ah-ah) goes away,
And you look forward to the day your oxy scrip gets refilled.
Roll easy, young man.
Welcome To The Persian Palace!
“Didn’t this used to be Master P’s?”
“Yepper! The old guy finally retired, and new owners have taken over.. What’day think? Kind of an upgrade, eh?”
The customer usually looks around, and says, “I can’t believe it’s the same place. The new owner seems like kind of an asshole, though.”
“The first thing he did was give me a raise and a vacation, so yeah, I’m okay with him. He’s a sweetheart when he’s not dealing with criminals and idiots. We have a plethora of both.”
“Fair.” Then the customer notices, “You sell pineapples?”
“We sell all kinds of crazy stuff.”
There was a time when Master P would not sell anything drug-related. Weed was even a no-no; no Zig Zags, no bongs, and certainly no hard drug paraphernalia. Now we have the Recreational Pharmacy, with dab rigs and nitrous gas, as well as bubble pipes, glass tubes for all kinds of things I dunno about, and the best selling item, the “incense burner.”
“It’s a bubble pipe, kids. You ain’t fooling anyone. It’s for meth, and we don’t care, six bucks. You ain’t got six bucks? Bummer, we’ll be here when you do.”
Their cost, six dollars. Our cost, buck twenty. apiece, and less when we buy five buckets of them. Which we do. I sell about ten a shift. I’m allowed to refuse anyone unsavory, and no price breaks. “I’m not subsidizing their fucking drug habits!”
There’s also vapes, the disposable kind that look space-age when you turn them on. (Mine has weed in it, and we don’t sell those.) But the kids really love their flavored steam, and they have these cute little tiny dildos that we leave hidden around the store.
The other two changes that have made the place downright fun to work? It’s absolutely okay to step outside and puff some weed if it helps you get through the day, and it usually does. This may shock you, but I’ve used weed at work probably every day I’ve been there. But now I don’t have to worry about breath mints. I just have to worry about Skippy stealing my roaches.
And then there’s the music. The moratorium on personal music hath ended, and we can jam on whatever we want as long as it doesn’t bother our coworkers. Honk’s Disco Jackhammer stuff (I believe the official classification is Dubstep) gives me a fucking headache, but Trex’s pandora channel sounds like it was programmed for me. And Jedeye, who is usually the one subjected to my musical whims, is a stash of new music that I’m rather enjoying. He gets bonus points for being 25 years old and having 75% of my musical knowledge. I have the speaker and the Spotify account, so I’m always jamming on something, and busting out timely but inappropriate “soundtracks of the moment.”
So yeah, it’s been a kick in the ass lately. There was some sketchy stuff going on that I may address at some point, but for now we’re cleaning up the sidewalk in front of the store, and hoping the attitude is contagious.
Keep Portland Weird, but not that weird…
This Kiss This Kiss!
“Do you have any Narcan? There’s a dead guy on the corner.”
Normally I’d say no, because all the druggies carry their own Narcan, but this request was coming from Travis, the newest trainee. He seemed concerned, so I reached down next to the broken tazer billy club and grabbed a box of Narcan. “Ever seen an OD come back before?”
He was nervous. “No.”
Jedeye was working with us, so we left him in the store and went to the corner. Ten o’clock on a Saturday night, and cars are zooming by feet away. Son of Sonny, a dropped-too-much-at-birth meth-head who claims to be the spawn of biker royalty, was yelling and kicking at the man trying to administer CPR to the dead guy laying in the crosswalk by the gutter.
“I can’t do this with people attacking me!” It was Fingerbang. My first encounter with Fingerbang involved what I originally thought to be a bit of crystal meth left on the counter, that turned out to be part of the tip of his finger, which looked like an exploded cigar. I banished him fom the store until he went to the ER and got it covered. He kinda looks like a filthy hunchback Gomer Pyle.
Mister Dead Guy looked like Tucker or Dale Vs Evil, and talked like Roscoe P Coltrane. “Goop goop goop goop.” He’d been hit once already with Narcan, and a pretty lady in a miniskirt kneeled down and gave him another blast. Several onlookers were calling 911, and I could hear sirens in the distance.
I looked over at Travis, who was a pale green. “Is he gonna be okay? What’s going to happen?”
“If it goes like normal, he’ll belch a little, maybe throw up, then he’ll snap out of it and be all pissed off that his high is gone. It sends the regulars into immediate withdrawal, and they don’t like that.”
Fingerbang had pushed Roscoe P onto his back. “He’s gonna suffocate! Get back!” Fingerbang grabbed Roscoe by the nose, opened his mouth and…
…then their lips met.
It was almost loving, the way Fingerbang breathed for Roscoe. Two or three breaths, chest rub,chest rub. He pulled back, and a spaghetti-string of drool connected them like Lady and the Tramp. It only lasted a few seconds, because Son of Sonny came running into the intersection yelling, “Stop kissing him, you weirdo motherfucker!”
“Get away from me you fucking retard!” Fingerbang scream-sniveled as he struggled to his feet, leaving Roscoe on his back. “I save lives ten times a day, I’M NOT KISSING HIM, YOU IDIOT!”
About this time we heard the familiar ‘glurp-glurp hur-r-l’ of Roscoe dry-heaving as he struggled to his feet. He stumbled into the street. Traffic lights were on his side; he was down the way before the ambulance arrived.
Fingerbang was still mad. Nobody had given him any money for being a hero. Sheeeit.
Travis and I went back into the store to regale Jedeye with our adventure. “How was it in here? Store didn’t burn down.”
“It’s been chill,” he said. “I even got a cool tip.” He popped a joint container and poured out two pre-rolls. “Dude in a mask gave me these. Not sure I’d trust them.” We are brave, but can afford our own weed. Street drugs are always a cautionary tale.
They appeared to be regular $3 dispensary joints. “Do you know the guy?”
“I think so. He’s kind of a gangster, but he likes me, so I don’t know. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
It was almost quitting time. “I’m tempted to go burn one before I count out,” I said.
“Go for it!” Jedeye is always up for allowing me to have a good time.
“Hmm…” I looked it over. “It’s probably fine. And if it’s not, you guys will Narcan me, right?”
Jedeye said, “If you fall out, we’ll be right there to take care of you. And when you come back from the dead, and open your eyes, there will be Fingerbang, giving you mouth-to-mouth.”
I’m smoking my own joints tonight.
Prevues of Coming Attacktions…
<Fade into shot of downtown Portland, as approached from the eastside on the Hawthorne Bridge.>
Cue Carl Douglas song, Kung Fu Fighting.
(Voiceover, in thick Middle-Eastern accent:) “There’s no WELCOME on my sign! No open bags or bicycles! I don’t need your two dollars!”
As POV shot moves toward store, we see Mister Shaw (Dustin Pacino) giving the camera a stern look.
(Voiceover, in thick Middle-Eastern accent: “I’m not spending forty cents of my hard-earned money so these cocksuckers can smoke cigars! Fifty cent surcharge!”
<POV of cashier, looking right to left:>
Teenager with half-case of White Claw runs past the line of customers, and slams into a locked door.
(Voiceover, in thick Middle-Eastern accent:)”Take that, you little piece of shit! You will not steal from me! I have the magic lock!”
<NARRATOR IN DAD VOICE> “Times have changed at Li’l Pepe’s…”
The Great Escape
Have I mentioned that we have cats?
I love my little buddies. They are almost two years old now. The smallest, Stevie Ray Wonder-Nix, is about ten pounds. The biggest (Waffle) is about twenty. He’s “beef-noodle hearty.” Dot looks like a little white panther, with big grey dots on his torso. He’s the Ambassador. First out of Mama cat, he’s the one that leads the way when other species are involved. They are all males.
Hallow is our female “kitten,” along with Trixie, the old bat of a cat. (She’s about 17 now…) Hallow is solid black, with grey tufts along her claws. (Two tufts come out of her ears as well, giving her a Grandpa Munster look.) She channels the spirit of Mama the most, and we worry about her and Luna the dog going at it. And not in a good way…
So imagine my surprise when, as I sit in my room making my morning edibles and shaking off the cobwebs, I look down and see a fluffy black cat staring up at me. My first thought is “What’s the neighborhood tom cat that fathered half our kittens doing in my bedroom?” Then I notice Luna, our big black Labrador/boxer combo, staring down into Hallow’s eyes.
Oh… Shit…
My first reaction was not to react. Luna could take her out with one snap, but it’d be more like a hand saw fighting a chainsaw. If nothing spooks them, maybe we can get through this unscathed.
I called for Sister. Nobody was responding, probably thinking I wanted to show them something on TV. When my niece saw the cat walk out of my room, she said, “What the…?” When the dog followed, it was “Oh gawd…”
Hallow, with her poofy tail and mutton-legs, marched out to the living room and jumped up on the bed, where Luna holds court. We got ahold of Luna’s collar before she could snap, but she remained calm. Her tail was wagging, and she seemed excited to meet a new friend.
With Luna locked in a back bedroom, the usual procedure for feeding time, we got all the cats corralled and back where they belonged. We’ve been meaning to introduce them, but fear of violence or mayhem has kept us from doing so. Every introduction has gone well, but it only takes one car backfire to set off a depth charge and freak everyone out.
How did she get out? Through the mouse hole…
The Dad Voice
It’s ten o’clock at night, and I’m alone again. The latest hiree, a rehire actually, has been a drunken no-show for about a week. So I get to be cashier, security, and bottle drop counter. I can do all three jobs at once, but I cannot be everywhere at once.
I’m serving one of the local street dudes, a dredded, gold-toothed roller with a taste for Black & Milds. (Stinky-ass ninety-nine cent single cigars. The Jazz ones smell like a camel dump.) I reach for his dollar, but he says, “Let me give you some change instead.” He’s holding a fistful of bills in every denomination, but he dumps out 71 pennies onto the counter. “Let me go to the car and get a quarter.” And he leaves us standing there, blinking. I can cancel and undo everything, but it’d be just in time for him to return, so we wait…
I noticed a guy shopping the beers. He’d been over there a couple hours before, and had walked out, muttering something about how we didn’t have his brand. This time he took a Pub beer of the 24 oz variety and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He picked up a Mike’s Hardon Lemonade and started walking toward the back of the store, presumably to conceal that one as well.
“We’re not gonna play that game,” I yelled across the store. “Put that can down, take the other one out of your pocket, and get out of the store.”
He pretended not to notice, so I yelled it in my Dad Voice. “PUT THE FUCKING BEER DOWN AND GET OUT OF THE STORE!”
I now had the attention of everyone, including the pimp-daddy trying to fund his cigar habit with ashtray change. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he said in a defensive tone.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” I slid the cigar to him and took the quarter. “Thank you.”
Back to business. “Are you gonna put that beer down and leave, or are we gonna have to do the cop thing? Put it down, get out.” All business had stopped, and everyone was staring hard at our perp; a rather large young man with long, curly black hair. A baby-faced Hagrid, if you will.
“I’m gonna buy it.” Smug, smirking.
“No. You’re not. If you don’t leave now you’ll be arrested. Just put the drink down and leave.” Calm, but firm. They love it when you get excited. Calm, pissed off and ready to shoot you? I have that vibe in me, and it comes out easy and often.
By now he’d put the Mike’s down. (It was stolen later on by someone else in the melee.) As he walked by the register, and the five people he’d been delaying, he said, “That’s okay, I’ll just go down the street…”
Return of the Dad Voice. “Yeah, go steal from them, you cheap-ass piece of shit!” Someone in line applauded.
He stopped and turned to look at me. “I know where you stay, motherfucker.”
I was around the counter at a pace that surprised even me. “And if you come to my house, I will put a bullet in your fucking head! And feed you to my dog!”
He was a good half-block down the sidewalk by the time I got outside. I could only talk him to death anyway, so I took a deep breath and went back inside. To a bunch of wide-eyed customers.
Of course, my next customer is this cranky old bastard that plays Keno for hours at a time, and he’s got all these complicated requests I’m listening to while watching another fellow at the soda fountain. The Piss Factory, as I call it sometimes, is one of my smallest concerns. Sodas make great bribes, it’s a small financial loss if they steal it, and most importantly, it’s right in front of me. Something easy to monitor… Unlike the $5 cookies on the rack behind the post…
This fellow must have just came from a ’70s themed rave. Dressed in a matching salmon/purple silk shirt and Capri pants, with a mop-top hairdo and Fu-Manchu moustache. He had a double-cup he’d filled, and was chugging as fast as he could. He’d probably drank a third when he saw me staring at him. He threw up his hands in a Let’s go! motion.
“You got money for that?” Firm, polite, no-nonsense.
“Huh?”
Stoopid always plays so well with me. “If you don’t have money, put it down and get out.”
“Oh, I have money. Here!” He presented 41 cents, in a grime-covered palm.
“Get the fuck out.” Firm, polite, no-nonsense.
He did. And back to the line.Those who enjoyed the show thanked me. I usually make a couple bucks in tips from the line-dwellers, and the girls are often impressed. I explain how bipolar it can be when you go from sweet-as=pie to GTFO back to “How you doin’?” in the span of three minutes.
As I’m chatting and flirting, I notice ’70s guy has snuck back in, and is filling up another soda. He’s capping this one, and looking for a straw. “Hey!” I am not amused.
“I have money!” He holds up a fiver; I may get paid yet. He’s got another soda cup and a candy bar. “I need a Backwoods too.”
He’s not getting the cigar, and he *might* get the candy bar if he cooperates. “Okay, just set everything down so I can ring it up.” He hesitates. He’s not as stupid as he looks.
He tosses the five on the counter. “I need the cigar.”
“Two sodas and the candy bar is $5.28. Give me the five and we’ll call it good.”
“But I need a cigar.”
“Then put the candy bar back, put the soda down, and get out.”
“No.”
I’m boiling over at this point. He put the soda on the counter, and I grabbed it by the lid. I wadded up his filthy five-dollar bill and threw it at his face. “You GET THE FUCK out of here before I beat your ass bloody!” As I came around the corner of the sales counter, I popped the lid off the 44 -ounce drink and threw it at the fountain drain. The smell of thrown-up peaches told me where that can of Mike’s Hardon, mango flavored, had disappeared to.
I cussed him up one side and down the other, then reassumed the position. I burned through the line, and locked the door for a couple minutes.
I mopped up the Mike’s. Took a hit on the pen. Spent a minute in the bathroom doing nothing.
Back to the front. Three people with bags of cans are waiting for me…
Ginger Sunrise
Sometimes our smallest friends make the biggest impact.
We had to say goodbye to Ginger yesterday. In a span of about four days, he went from rowdy, rambunctious kitty to couch potato to poor miserable little guy. We thought it was constipation, but it turned out to be much worse.
We noticed he stopped running out of the cat room a few days ago; moved slowly, kinda wide in the belly. After the usual cat routines we put them to bed for the day. The next day, same thing but moving slower, no longer interested in food. (He’s first to the bowl and a big eater, despite being 4th in size.) He was bigger, and obviously uncomfortable.
Day before yesterday, Sister kept him out of the cat room for observation. He was moving around a little more, but we were still waiting on a poop delivery. She set him up with his own box for monitoring. (The other cats would use it when we let them out.) We’re also detecting notes of jealousy from the cats who think THEY should be able to hang out with the adults. Hallow (female fixed) is hissing a lot, and they all sniff Ginger’s butt in a “Sorry dude” kinda way. They seemed to commiserate.
The next morning, he was still backed up, mostly sitting still, but he’d managed to pass a ping-pong ball sized nugget. He didn’t seem as tight, and less uncomfortable. From what I’d read, time will take care of it eventually, unless it’s very serious. He seemed to be stable, if not improving.
As the day wore on, he became lethargic. Quit getting up for water, or anything else. Bro-In-Law, who is not the softest touch, was telling us that money is no object, and to take his credit cards and take him to the vet.
When I awoke, Sister was gone with a note. I decided to run an errand instead of just sitting around waiting. When i got home, Sister was already home.
“Well, what’s the word?” I asked.
She puddled up. “He’s gone over the rainbow…”
It appeared to be cancer, either stomach or bladder. The vet told us that we could spend thousands on treatments and tests, but he probably wouldn’t survive the first round of tests. Instead, they gave him an IV, a big shot of dope, and a few minutes of happy time with Sister before they gave him the last shot. It took 2-3 seconds.
I’d prepped for this on my bus ride. I’d also prepped for a happier ending, with stories of enemas and a happy, perky kitty just like old times. Not this time. We all met for a big group hug; even the dog was in the middle. We let the kitties out. They took turns saying goodbye. Hallow, who had never hissed in my presence, was hissing at everything but the humans. Her normal “aloof-feminist” demeanor melted away with me, but she took it out on a cardboard box. Rest in pieces, box.
And you too, Gin-Gin. With your kinky tail and bony butt. We all look for you, including your brothers and sister. Maybe we’ll see you again someday.
Old Home Week
James, the bouncer at Portland’s finest strip club, clapped me on the shoulder and slipped me a $5 as I was leaving work. “Where you been? It’s not the same at 2:30 without you sneaking me to the front of the line.”
I gave him a half-hug as I pocketed the five. James is one of many who push the limits of the OLCC’s time restrictions. (But one’s liver doesn’t care what time it is, and he’s tipped me enough to buy a big-screen TV.) “Thank you sir! I miss the generosity. But I don’t miss graveyard. I love staying up all night. Just not with them…” I nodded toward the crowd of blue-heads just outside the door. “I get outta here about the time their drugs reaally kick in.”
James will be seeing even less of me. Starting next week, I’m going back to my old schedule.
It’s been a while since I’ve been here. I write in my head all the time, but after a while it seemed to be the same old stuff. How many ways can I bitch about working with the public? “Well, if you don’t like your job… maybe you should find a new job…” (Say it in a nasally whine for full effect.) That usually sets me off.
“I like my job just fine. In fact, I love my job. WHAT I DON’T LIKE is some shit-covered crackhead giving me career advice at 4 AM! Now get the fuck outta here before I lock the goddamn store. Again.”
There’s been a lot of improvement in regards to the homeless/fetty/POS bum problem near the store. We get actual cops coming in to say hello. Clean and Safe comes without our calling, and some of the homeless will beat the asses of other homeless because “you don’t fuck with the store.” I get quite a kick out of seeing kids (now grown) I’ve 86ed for theft now chasing off shitbirds on my behalf. Sometimes growing up takes a while.
Staffing has been an issue. Lack of staffing, more like it. After Mrs Brady bailed for the good life at Freddy’s bakery, we’ve been razor-thin in the people dept. TRex, a parolee with 24 mugshots on file, is our newish day person. He’s training a guy who looks like Slash’s skeleton. Southie is back, and works a lot of nights with me. Giggles is around, but we don’t interact much. Our best communications are the unspoken ones.
So where do I fit in? Mister “I’ll work anywhere, any time…?” Cue up the Maxine Nightengale, cuz we’re gonna get right back to where we started from… I will be the Wednesday through Saturday swing shift. My week starts just past halftime, and ends Saturday at midnight. Yes! I can watch all the football, and no more fucking Sunday night.
Why you so down on Sunday night, they ask? Seems great, nobody out, just a few security guards and the folks watching football and gambling at the bars nearby. Oh, did I mention that we’re about the only thing open anymore?
Target got the fuck out in a big way. Rite Aid is bankrupt. (Wonder if it had anything to do with all the armloads of unpaid-for shit people hauled out…?) 7-Eleven closed both its stores before the pandemic was over. Plaid Pantry closes before Safeway does. CVS, after being burned out during the riots, is still open by Pioneer Square, but the one time I went in there, I did not see a sales associate for three minutes, so I just left. I realize good help is hard to find, but non-existent? A lot of people offer to work, but then the drugs kick in and they are useless again.
The shiny penny in all this? I get to go back to a more normal crowd. God bless Portland for its weirdness, but can we get some goddamned “normals” around here to counterbalance the stupidity? Trust me, it will make the weird a lot more palatable…
I Just Want…
Finally, I get everyone out of the store. As I approach the door with the key out, one of the foil-heads runs up to the door.
“Sorry, I have to close for a minute.”
“Huh?” Slack jaw, droopy eyes.
“I have to close for a minute, and I can’t do that with people in the store.’
“But I just want a soda.”
“I will be right back.”
“Huh?”
“Is that rhetorical, or can you really not hear me?”
“Huh?”
“I’LL BE RIGHT BACK!”
“Well, you don’t have to yell.”
“Well, apparently I fucking do, because you keep saying,”Huh?”
I try to be patient. But this is how it is, nine straight hours of dealing with fully-grown four-year-olds. If I am working alone? It’s impossible to remain upbeat. I catch a shoplifter every five minutes, and maybe actually stop one once an hour. Help…?
Fortunately, Southie, a former manager and, as one foil-head described him, is a brawler, and loves chasing shoplifters. He taught me how to break a guy’s finger, legally, and best of all, he’s there almost the whole night. We are absolutely giving lessons in, as the kids like to say, fuck around and find out.
So, feel free to drop by for some gummys. Just be sure to stop by and pay on your way out…
Dingleberry Gazette 
