Fuck Them
The summer after I graduated college I decided I needed to quickly move from the seaside of paradise of Santa Barbara (sometimes called “the Vagina of the west coast”) back to Los Angeles (obviously “the asshole of the west coast”) to begin what I thought would be my life. After hitting a few snags I realized I had better get a part-time job so I could move out of my moms house or at least afford a hotel for a night so that I might have chance to get laid one day. Without too much trouble, I got hired working at a specialty grocery store known for their discounted wine, distinctive frozen foods and decent wages. This store applied the metaphor of a ship to their operations and used ship lingo for everything they could. The assistant manager was the first mate. I was a ship’s hand.
I hated the job and was awful at it. Everyone else seemed so good. They worked with speed and a smile, humming a helpful tune in their head and visualizing smooth seas. I was constantly fuming because I was ready for more responsibility and a real job where I wasn’t given the choice of wearing either a t-shirt or a Hawaiian shirt. I constantly made scheduling demands so that I could go to interviews for my real career goal, a teaching position. My shipmates constantly tested me by giving me the hardest jobs during closing which inevitably result in an experienced hand coming over to assist me so that we could get out of work on time. I didn’t study Modernist Fiction of the Early Twentieth Century and Calculus for non-science majors to be a good stock boy. Before college or even during college I would have kicked ass at this job, but I didn’t have it in me anymore: I was educated.
The only other employee that I liked was a guy named Joe, who hated me. He reprimanded me like I was his stepson. “You gotta say the prices clearly so the customer knows he’s not being cheated,” he told me about fifty times. He wasn’t my boss just a full time employee who had been there for years and made about fifty thousand dollars a year. I would tell him about my job interviews. He’d nod and ask questions and then shame me for not checking an ID on a check or being so slow it made him want to die. “You don’t give a fuck about this job but we do,” he told me once. He was right.
I would do anything I could to work with Joe. I’d trade shifts, take harder assignments. I don’t know what his appeal was. I was just obsessed with getting him to say something positive about me before I quit and got a real job. The kicker was I didn’t want him to praise me for how I worked. I wanted him to praise me as a person, despite my obvious lacking as a sailor.
So, I volunteered for icebox duty with Joe for a straight week. I think he took the duty to get away from me. But I followed figuring I could spend all my time with Joe and be free each day by ten to interview with schools. It was the middle of summer but I had to show up at five AM in the clothes I bought when I was seventeen to go skiing once so I could stock the frozen foods. It was thirty something degrees in there, but Joe wore a sweatshirt and shorts. Within about five minutes he would be working so hard that he was almost out of breath. And he would yell at me all the time. It seemed everything I did created more work for him. He told me that I was the worst employee he had ever met. But, what kind of person was I? That’s what I wanted to know.
At the end of the week he asked that I be moved outta the icebox. “I could do better alone,” he told me.
I don’t know what he told the manager, the captain, but old cap told me, “You have one more chance.” But, only after I begged him for a few minutes while customers built up in lines all around the store.
That last day in the icebox I tried very hard. Joe was very quiet, watching me like he was detecting human replicants. I was filled up with the feeling that he could like me even if it meant I had to be a good worker until… Until, I dropped a tray of ten two gallon milk containers all over the floor.
I looked at Joe and started saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over. He just sat down and looked at me.
“What do you really want to be?” he asked me.
“A teacher, “ I said because that was my real-life goal at the time.
“I hate kids,” he said.
“Why?”
“Fuck them. I don’t like how available porn has become over the last 5-6 years. Kids today have no idea how difficult it used to be to see a picture of a naked woman. When I was a kid I remember finding a singles paper with small pictures of naked women. I brought it to school; my friends and me examined it like it was the Shroud of Turin. It was all-cheap and newsprint. You could smudge a nipple off just by touching it.” He was on a roll.
He actually seemed to be smiling. “Now a kid gets 15-20 porn emails every time they open their hotmail account. It’s like, ‘How did they know I have an insatiable appetite for porn?’
“And all the fucking animal porn? You know what, I don’t think animals are putting this shit on the net.
“I don’t think a fucking horse would stoop so low. And even if horses did put porn on the net, you know they wouldn’t put themselves fucking a girl. That would be like a human fucking a bird. Horses would put themselves fucking elephants or rhinos or giraffes. Fuck humans.”
My ass was grafting to the cardboard box I was sitting on. Joe finally stopped for a second and then continued. “I think there should be a separate Internet for all you people who are actually into animal porn. So then all those animal porn buffs wouldn’t have to be repulsed by all the sick human porn.”
Joe stopped talking and looked at the floor for a sixty frozen seconds and then at me. Then he got up and walked out of the icebox. Two minutes later the Captain came in and relieved me of my frozen duties. I was made to swab the deck until the store opened.
The next day I was working cashier. A cute girl came up to me with one beverage in a can. I sold it to her and she left. Two minutes later the Captain came up to me and told me that the girl was part of a sting. She was nineteen and had bought a beer. I didn’t check her ID. We need to meet with you tomorrow, he told me. Aye, aye sir.
That afternoon when I got home, my mom told me that a high school in the city had called me. They wanted me to start teaching the next Monday. A teacher had just died and the needed a warm body. That was me.
I went into the market the next day and was fired immediately. They gave me the rest of my pay they owed me in cash and thanked me. I asked them if they had targeted me the sting. I wanted to know if they were trying to get rid of me. They denied it, said it was random. They wanted me to think that I had walked the plank.
I found Joe before I left and said goodbye. He was working the icebox with a lightness and ease that he had never had before. He said, “Bye,” twice but I wouldn’t move. I needed more.
“Hey, Joe. Do you think I’ll make a good teacher?”
He didn’t even think about it. “You better hope so because you suck at everything else,” he said.