Truesday: Pushing Problems On Out

And it was our, me and my friend’s, unlisted responsibility to neutralize these threats before they could get worked up to a full creep-out.

[I honestly can’t remember whether I’ve already told this story here, so if I have, then you’re getting it from another angle. Sweet.]

A full creep-out might include some mental patient beating off on the papasans while staring at people’s children. Perhaps pooping on the floor of a dressing room. Maybe following coeds around and periodically copping a feel or lingering far too long to extend an “accidental” brush-rub on an aisle pass-by. And then the utterly confounding: pissing in the ornamental glass perfume bottles of the bathroom section.

I don’t know where they did the actual pissing, but the openings for those colored glass pieces measured less than a mere centimeter. They likely took them into the bathroom for filling, but I always imagined that they did it right there in the aisle, like the jack-off guys. Real brazen-like. Real loon-like. I’m still not clear on exactly what those guys were trying to accomplish. Was it a social statement? Some sort of protest against the bourgeois sense of luxury entitlement, which in their mind was apparently epitomized by a crappy replica of an antique French fragrance jar on the pristine shelves of an overly-hyped bric-a-brac chain store?

Bourgeois indeed. Gauche even.

Whatever their purpose might have been, the end result was always the same: some lady would sheepishly walk up to the registers and quietly whisper “I don’t think that’s perfume in those glass jars back there.” She’d blink a couple of times, and then blankly vacate the premises, likely to go home and steel wool herself for a few hours.

So it was our job to “hover” over these dudes before they could foul something, or someone, up. The girls at the front counter would run front-end recon, essentially: creepy-guy-profiling, and if some dude walked in who looked as if he might be down to release his humors onto something for kicks (these Pier One girls were constantly under the impression that they are fully capable of judging such books by their cover), they would page us up from the depths of the stockroom to start trailing.

No one ever spilled themselves on our watch. We were like Dobermans, pinching off the desires of deviants merely by being present. It was an easy job to fill.

But for all his abilities to help curb dudes pissing in public, my coworker had some issues with being prompt to work. Sometimes he’d simply be absent even though scheduled. His excuses were either fantastically absurd (I woke up in a Nuevo Laredo parking lot without any pants) or oddly mild (I fell asleep in my car while waiting for a train to pass, and my car ran out of gas before I woke up). I did everything I could to keep him on the payroll by throwing my weight around and making impassioned pleas for clemency or understanding. He was my brother in booze. My pure presence of unapologetic personality. My Id.

But the others we worked with weren’t so supportive. And their frustrations with him took the form of a constant effort to have him removed from the employee roster, which I understood. Dude was mad-undependable, and no one appreciates covering for the careless. Especially the ridiculously careless.

But he was my Other. So I had to stick up for him. And I held on as long as I could. Until the dark day of the thunder turd.

Every day at opening, a certain non-customer person would enter the store, allegedly from an adjacent bus stop, and fully evacuate themselves in the restroom. They never even pretended that they wanted to buy anything. They simply wanted to bomb the joint every morning. Like clockwork. But for one fateful week, our store had been fully closed for a remodel. So that daily morning delivery had nowhere to go for a full seven days. On the eighth day, we reopened, less one Women’s toilet due to plumbing issues arising from the remodel.

So we had one working toilet.

Apparently our daily visitor had stored up their volume in anticipation of our doors being unlocked, and they proceeded to deposit the largest mass of material I’ve ever had the horror of witnessing. That foul, brick of marbled dear-lord-on-high bowel-product had clogged the ENTRY hole of the toilet. Like someone had chemically welded a brown softball in there, making an airtight seal.

Needless to say, we were called in to investigate and relieve the issue, as we would need at least one functioning toilet in order to keep the operations going for the day. Further needless thing to say, neither my cohort nor I were willing to alleviate the situation. We never minded following around guys who might have been tempted to massage themselves in public, but we wanted nothing to do with that monster of the deep. So we abstained, thus forcing the store manager to push the issue on through by herself.

Push. The issue. On through.

It wasn’t much later after that day when I was informed that despite my expected counter-efforts, my workmate and drinking buddy would soon be relieved of his duties. My guess is that as long as we were both willing to do the dirtiest of dirty work, our lesser attributes would go ignored. But the moment we were to push back on that pushing responsibility, the consequences would be as harsh as could possibly come. A full flushing.

And so it came to pass that I was stuck there by myself, to finish out my numbered days in that crappy position alone, and entirely without my partner in ridiculousness. The number two to my number one. I only wished they had given the guy a chance to resign.

You know, to save some dignity.