Box Store Drama – Early 90’s Style.

My first “real job” was as a cashier at what used to be Price Club. This is what I did during my last year of high school. My next job would be the Army, so I was milking this for everything it was worth.

I made friends here. We smoked weed in the parking garage. We stole shit from the store. And we tried to pick up every girl who came through our line. Every girl. It was just something we did to pass time.

Rich or poor chicks. Fat or skinny girls. Pretty or fugly women. Even the transgendered. It didn’t matter, we were passing the time and their horrified reactions to a 17 year old boy trying to get them in bed were priceless.

Some acted mildly indignant, rolling their eyes and sighing loudly. Some got livid and complained. Some laughed it off as a joke. But once in awhile…once in awhile you’d strike gold. This was before MILF or Cougar entered our collective lexicon. It was, as my coworker James called it, “Old, needy pussy.”

We’ll stick with Cougar, which is comparatively more dignified.

James was a master at picking up Cougars. The secret, he said, was watching for the signs. James would toy with the housewives he knew he’d never get, and thoroughly aggravate the ones who needed what he dubbed DDT: Deep Dickin’ Therapy. The third group of women were the ones he knew he could get in bed.

His exploits were legendary. James had slept with hundreds of depressed, neglected, lonely, sex-starved housewives, single moms, divorces, estranged wives, and, yes, even a few grandmothers. Working there was like Employee of the Month meets Debbie Does Dallas. Only less glamorous, for minimum wage, and with VD.

I had success with a few younger ladies. I’ve always preferred younger women; figuring, if I can’t find a good woman, I’ll raise one.

The only older woman I ever dated was Jennifer. She was from Pennsylvania, which meant she was insane. I know not a single female from PA who is not nuttier than a shit house rat. Jennifer was the Queen Rat. But she was a petite, vivacious, cheerful rat. And she hailing from a very strict, very religious family — Jennifer had lead a sheltered life.

Yes. Like bunnies.

Problem? Just one. Jennifer was my supervisor. Oh, and that I was madly in love with, and hopelessly pining over my ex-girlfriend.

In a tip of the hat to Jane’s Addiction, we’ll call her Jane (think Jane Says).

Jane was the love of my life. In fact, for years and years, and years after we split, I still longed for her. I rushed into my first failed marriage in an asinine attempt to preoccupy my heart with someone, anyone else. In case you scored low in reading comprehension, it was unsuccessful.

Anyway, Jennfier and I are dating. This is nothing serious for me. I’m leaving for the Army in a few months and Jane is always on my mind.

Jennifer? Oh, she thinks I’m “the One”.

One day Jennifer catches me in the breakroom, where I’m hearing about James’ most recent escapade. Seems he had one of our former junior high school teachers (not Mrs. DeFries, in case you’re following closely). Only, she had no idea James had been one of her students until afterwards. “So I pull my dick out of her ass and I’m like, ‘I’ve wanted to do that ever since you gave me detention for…’”

Jennifer says her family is coming to town. She’s having a dinner party and would I come?

A) You just ruined the end to a great story, and B) I don’t do parents, I tell her. Seriously. They hate me. They can sense my worthlessness. They know I’m shtooping their daughter. They know I’m like the democratic party:pathetically stumbling along, hoping for any sort of inspiration, praying no one notices my complete incompetence, and surviving on the kindness of malcontented strangers.

Still, after some whining and cajoling, I say “Yes, fine.” And Jennifer flits away like a butterfly on Prozac.

Endless days of ribbing from James follow.

I’m awful at segues, so just know that a few days later, in the middle of the night and totally out-of-the-blue, Jane calls. “I need you,” she tells me. In the blink of an eye, I’m there. We spend the next three days together. There was great music — early 90’s music was awesome. Excitement when I nearly kill us in my car. There was romance (of a sort)…we got busted going to third base at a public playground at 3am. And there was deep, meaningful conversations by twenty-something actors playing teenagers, meaning we talk endlessly about how we should be together. It was like a 72-hour John Hughes movie.

Then Monday came. And the responsible amongst us are asking, “Corey, what about work? And Jennifer? And her parents?” To which I reply, “Yes; what about those things, indeed?” Truth is, I hadn’t given them a single thought. Jane made me stupid like that.

But, come Monday I show up for work.

I’m standing there, scanning double gallons of milk and forty-pound bags of chicken quarters when Jennifer comes up. She’s looking a lot like Droopy Dog’s little sister: her clipboard clutched tight against her flat chest, her sad eyes swollen and red, and her “I’m a little bit country” voice oh-so soft.

James warns me.

She’s snizzeling, simpering.

I’m emotionally ambivalent.

She wants to know where I was, why I missed dinner, and…

And what, I’ll never know because she hit me.

HARD.

ACROSS MY FACE.

WITH THE CLIPBOARD.

I crashed to the floor, holding my face and wailing. I’m did the Angus Young thing, laying on the floor and spinning in circles while making a hideous face.

The lady in my line, no lie, she said “Oh my. Did that hurt?” I wanted to bite her freeaking ankles, the cow.

Stars. I saw fucking stars. But when I did manage to focus, I found James standing over me.

“Nice hikkie,” he said. What? Cue the my Wayne’s World-esque flashback: Yes, there was hikkie giving. Damn it!

Eventually I recovered, but I’m paged to the office where, get this: they fucking fired me. Price Club fired me!

And for what reason? Well, apparently, 1) fucking your supervisor, 2) missing three days without calling in, and 3) harassing your customers is grounds for firing. This doesn’t count the fact that they had me on tape doing things…things I won’t admit to because of statute of limitations and the fear of losing my current girlfriend.

In the Store Manager’s office, my Union rep is there.He says that I’m a complete fuck up, a liability, an immature, irresponsible child who is beyond help. This isn’t an aside, this is what he tells the room of people.

I’ve heard this before. I’m six years old and my parents are giving me a pep talk. It ends with being warned that my behavior leads to a life of “eating government food, smelling like sour milk and wearing second hand clothes.”

Yea, whatever. You can’t fire me, motherfu…and I was escorted out.

It was like Norma Jean. The whole front end line came to a halt. My (former) coworkers clapped and cheered me.

I threw my best John Bender/The Breakfast Club fist-in-the-air pose.

Once outside, reality set in: I was unemployed. The clapping had ceased. The Cougars found me considerably less charming. Jennifer had simultaneously beaten me up and dumped me (you little multi-tasker you). And Jane didn’t speak to me for nearly 8 years.

My god, I wouldn’t change a single thing.

This Little Piggy Went to the Library…

Oddly, many of the friends with whom I grew up now teach at the very school where we first met. Of course, the name has been changed from Martin Luther King Jr. Junior High School (yeah, Jr. Jr., brilliant), to Neelsville Middle School. I’m not certain why they changed the name, but perhaps it had something to do with my giving Mrs. DeFries a nervous breakdown during my 7th grade year.

It all started in 8595 days (or 23 years, 6 months, and 13 days) ago in Germantown, MD. It was in Science class at Jr.Jr., and our teacher, a wiry, nervous bird of a lady with frazzled gray hair and a wardrobe that said “I stopped caring long ago” had to step out of the room for just a moment.

For the record, “just a moment” is precisely the amount of time required to perpetrate a crime so heinous that I’d be suspended, forever labeled a miscreant, and to drive old Mrs. Agnes DeFries off the proverbial deep end.

Beyond “just a moment”, all that was required were 1) a willing accomplice (not in short supply — I had at my disposal: Mike, Cameron, and Shawn), and 2) a ill-advised, half-formed, plan to do something totally inappropriate. Check and check.

We got to rooting through the cabinetry, pushing aside vials of this, beakers of that, until I found something promising. It was something right out of Exorcist meets Aliens. A big hunk of pinkish-brown and leathery slop immersed in fluid … and it had a face. Holding the Costco Pickle-sized jar, I stood and turned towards my classmates, all of whom recoiled in horror. This told me I’d picked a winner.

The next part is a bit blurry, but the pig fetus (I didn’t learn that until later) somehow got out of the jar. Once out of it’s watery cocoon, none of us wanted to touch it, so Mike, Cameron, Sean, and myself passed it around like Pele. The soccer drills led us to the hallway, where we kicked the rubbery little creature back and forth while disgusted students looked on in shock, horror, and envy. Oh yeah, they all loved my piggy.

After a while, Mrs. DeFries returned to find us in the hall. She was wailing. “What are you doing in the hall,” she asked, her arms waving madly above her head. “What are you children doing,” she demanded. Ignoring her, we continued to kick this slowly disintegrating pig fetus about. As she approached, those of lesser wills and better judgment scurried back to the classroom, leaving me, Mrs. DeFries, and a hunk of pig fetus in the hallway.

She looked me right in the eye, and with a plain and serious voice, she said, “You are an awful, awful little person.”

I don’t know what I was imagining. I don’t know where I summoned either the strength or the idea, but I put every ounce of my being into kicking that pig fetus and what didn’t come apart across the top of my foot exploded as it decelerated from Mach 2 to zero in a millisecond as it impacted the glass wall of the library.

The was silence as an unrecognizable but astoundingly horrid smelling hunk of blubber slowly slid down the glass wall and into a puddle at our feet.

To say that Mrs. DeFries came “unglued” that she “suffered hysterics” or that she “snapped” would all be gross understatements. Please, if I may be both crude and accurate, allow me to say that: the bitch lost every bit of her fucking mind.

I was suspended, and even the bad kids thought I was twisted. It actually led to me meeting my first grown-up girlfriend, epic parties at Nada’s, and fun with leafy green things. This is what you call negative reinforcement gone awry. Ultimately the notoriety led to even more daring and idiotic exploits…such as the time I caused a school evacuation by opening all of the gas jets in the Science Lab.

What I’ve learned is that what I did is what is known as “wrong” and “bad”. I’ve also learned that, when you spend your entire academic career (including that double tour of 8th grade) trying to be the world’s biggest screw up, 15 years away doesn’t erase people’s memories of who you were. And though I try with all my might to explain away their misgivings of me, I have to say I can’t blame them. And so I find myself reconciling a lot of dumb stuff, both with people like Becky and Lindsay, as well as with with myself.

On the bright side, when upon my return I reached out to these people who had no reason to like me, they welcomed me home and at least gave me that chance to explain. People are good. I realize this now. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by so many friends who knew that all along.

Sorry Mrs. DeFries.

Becky’s Birthday & Brandon’s Ribs

This past Friday night, Cindy and I made the three-hour drive to Frederick, MD in order to celebrate Becky’s 33rd birthday.

As is the theme of this whole blog, I hadn’t seen Becky in 15 years. I remembered her for who she’d been a decade and a half earlier: a bright-eyed, freckle-faced, high school pom-pon. And while we’d never been especially close, we’d known each other and been friends of friends. Still, through the magic of online social network sites, we not only reestablished a friendship but made it stronger.

If there was a hiccup, however, it came during Becky’s bday party at a local crab shack. It was here that a mutual high school acquaintance, a longtime friend of Becky’s, flatly announced that she didn’t care to be my friend because she thought me an asshole.

The foundation of her charming accusation was that I’d broken the ribs of a boy she liked. This is both true and fair. However, what was neither true nor fair was the way that everyone remembered the story. So, with my face shiny with melted butter, hands stained by Old Bay seasoning, and a calmness by way of several Amstel Lights, I explained myself.

The boy’s name was Brandon and he’d spent years writing this girl, his unrequited love, notes of passion that only a naive, inexperienced high school boy could write. But being the snobby sort (something she hasn’t grown out of), she turned her nose up at his advances. Brandon’s infatuation became animosity, which meant Brandon’s letters changed from love notes to loathe notes.

“He was angry and had quite a temper,” she acknowledged with a toothy grin.

Yes, please force me to explain myself to you, Ms Thing, right here at Becky’s birthday party. Make me explain, 15 years after the fact, why you shouldn’t continue to hate me for breaking the bones of the boy whose heart you made a game of tormenting.

As was our custom, each day after Junior ROTC Drill Team practice, a group of us made our way down the road to Roy Roger’s restaurant. Roy’s is like Arby’s with a western theme, as designed by someone who’d never been west of the Mississippi but had seen an episode of Gunsmoke.

Roy’s had cheap french fries and a salad bar with delicious and FREE pickles. So we’d load up on fries and pickles, hang out for a while, then leave. For reasons completely unknown to any of us, we’d always go sit behind a restaurant just next door, a Mexican place whose name roughly translated meant The Rusty Chariot.

It was here, on some random Spring day, that I spawned 15 years of loathing from this girl.

As we sat there, discussing those things that teenage boys discuss, Brandon inexplicably threw my bookbag in the restaurant’s dumpster. When I retrieved it, my bag was covered in strips of wilted lettuce, gobs of refried beans, and splatters of guacamole dip. In an attempt to knock some of that tastiness off, I threw my bag to the curb and it glanced off of Brandon’s shoulder.

Thinking nothing of that, I walked towards my bag and without warning, was punched squarely in my nuts. Brandon, sitting on the curb, had his arm at near-perfect height to connect with me and cause my nuts to shrivel and pull upward into man-ovaries. The pain, for those of you who may be unacquainted, was excruciating.

In a blink of an eye, before even I knew what had happened, I delivered a sternum cracking kick straight into Brandon’s chest. He toppled over like a house of cards, clutched his chest and made the sound my cat makes as it tries to cough up a hairball the size of my other cat.

Despite not being the best student ever, I knew that this was what was commonly known as “bad”. Oddly enough, one of our friends knew a lot about medicine and quickly determined that Brandon had a Sternum Crepitus.

There were police involved, though I was never charged as both the authorities and Brandon’s family said it was tit-for-tat, essentially. However, this couldn’t assuage ill-informed public opinion, especially when Brandon walked about school in a flexible body cast for the next three months. Teachers and students alike quickly labeled me as this chest-crushing bully who hangs out by the dumpster of the Mexican restaurant. It was the modern-day suburban version of Three Billy Goats Gruff and I was the Troll. Lovely.

At story’s end, everyone at the table says, “Ohhhh,” thus clarifying 15 years of misplaced animosity.

Becky says, and I wish I were kidding, “So that’s why Michelle and I had a voodoo of you.” While my story may explain a lot of things; however, it doesn’t explain two teenage girls making a voodoo doll of me. And people said I was twisted?

All-in-all, it was an excellent evening. Cindy, Becky and I went back to Becky’s house and spent a few hours talking about who we ARE versus who we WERE. This was a welcome change. I even sent Brandon’s unrequited love interest an e-mail thanking her for allowing me to explain myself, and her humility for accepting my recollection. It was nearly 130am when we shuffled off to bed.

The next morning, after breakfast, more talk about our adult lives, and making plans for future get togethers, Cindy and I departed. Driving away, I watched the shadow of someone I was, both in reality and other’s perceptions, grow fainter. Without saying a word, Cindy’s smile and loving grip of my hand told me that the person I am had become infinitely clearer.

5577 days later…

August 18th, 1992 was a miserably humid day, which made leaving Maryland –for what I was certain would be the rest of my life– an easy task. So I took my seat on an American Airlines flight bound for Louisville International Airport and, after takeoff, watched Maryland shrink away into oblivion.

I was 19-year old, socially inept, black-sheep-of-the-family, misguided, angry, reckless, friendless , know-it-all running to get as far from everything I’d known as quick as possible. Naturally I joined the Army.

Five thousand five hundred seventy seven days later (15 years, 3 months, and 7 days), I returned. And despite being a totally new person, I found myself immediately answering for old crimes, reconciling old misperceptions, and avoiding the old pitfalls.

This is my mostly true story.