The Trouble Way (28 page)

Both he and Candy must have laughed their butts off later because we looked all night and couldn
’t find one lousy carcass for the effort. Pissed ol’ Peter Hedd off having to pay the both of them time and a half for no results. Me, I was on salary. Didn’t cost the bastard shit outside of my regular pay. I had to work that entire next day too; you don’t forget getting screwed like that.

Well, the health department inspector found an abundance of carcasses. He brought along his dog for the search. Christ, if I had a dog, I
’d have found plenty myself. He and his bloodhound found eighteen dead rats and. what was left of the stray Calico cat the garden shop manager, Bertie, fed on the sly. It had been missing for a while. All that remained of it was a shifting mound of orange and black fur heaving with squirming maggots when he discovered it under a pallet of dog food.

That old health department inspector quarantined the store for a week. It took that long to for a huge crew of employees to disinfect and scour the stockrooms, get rid of the contaminated food, and pass another inspection. That cost ol
’ Peter a weeks’ worth of sales, a butt-spank in salary expense, and damn near his job.

Braunswine, the DM, came close to firing old Pete over the fiasco. As it turns out, Braunswine was the one who ordered ten pallets of assorted dog food that we didn
’t need and couldn’t sell fast enough that attracted those rats in the first place.

When the regional manager found out who ordered the dog food, Braunswine must have kissed a bunch of butt that week because the whole brew-ha-ha was forgotten pretty damn quickly.

I remember Ann had the hots for another employee, the Jewelry Manager, Linda. I suspected but didn’t know that for a fact for quite a while. I’d been sleeping with Ann and, one time, I bumped into Linda at the grocery store and asked her for a date. I took her to the beach and when we got back to her place, Ann was there. I remember leaving and was actually down the stairs when Linda opened the door and called me back. I was already horny as a mink; Linda and I had almost done it on the beach earlier that evening. If it hadn’t been for other people on the beach, we probably would have. Anyway, it didn’t take much coaxing to get me to return to her apartment.

Turns out, I wasn
’t the only one who was horny as hell. We’d been smoking Linda’s magic pot all evening. That shit not only makes you horny, it makes you feel invisible. They decided to show me what they liked to do. It didn’t bother me. Hell, they invited me in on the whole thing. If you don’t know, some pot makes you horny, other weed makes you have the munchies. Actually all pot make you have the munchies. Some just makes you horny and have the munchies. Linda and I were already stoned and it turned out that Ann was too. She’d been tokin’ the horny pot before we got there.

Seemed like Linda had a never-ending supply of weed. As it turns out, she did, in fact, have a never-ending supply. Some people she met in Hawaii supplied her with as much as she could sell. She had a nicer apartment and car than any of us, including the manager. She was quite an entrepreneur, and she was one good-looking honey.

Ann was close to naked when I walked in, she had on a purple nightie, I remember. Matched her toenails. She sure was far from invisible.

The two of them sat next to each other and started fooling around and pretty soon, there was a touch here and there and pretty soon there was a some kissing and eventually Ann fished around in her purse and brought out her little silver vibrator. Anyway, at first, I was mostly just watching but eventually Ann invited me to get into the mix. Then it was kissing, the silver vibrator, and ol
’ Jake. We eventually ended up all tangled together on the Linda’s bed like a plate of spaghetti.

Ann and Linda were attracted to men also. I know that for a hard fact, if you let your mind wander a bit. They liked doing it, they liked drinking beer, and they liked smoking pot, and they sure as shit liked that little vibrator Ann packed around. She even had a spare set of batteries she kept in a little leather cinch sack; she showed me. The sack had colorful beads on it to match her roach clip.

We all got some hands-on time with that handy gadget. There’s nothing like watching a babe get off with a vibrator, especially if another chick is at the controls. Each of us watched and helped the other with that contraption. They leveled that little sucker on me when my turn came.

I
’ve thought of that goddamned evening nearly every night for the past umpteen years, I shit you not.

My mom always used that word, umpteen, to exaggerate things. Like:
“I told you umpteen times to take out the garbage.” She never once told me umpteen times about anything. She could really lay the ol’ guilt trip on a guy; it was rarely even into the high single digit times, max. But that would sound weird if she said: “I told you in the high single digit times to take the garbage out.” It wouldn’t be clichéically correct. Well, when I use umpteen, it’s no exaggeration.

It was a good thing Ann did carry an extra set of C-cells. We drained the first set on Linda and half the second set on me and when it was Ann
’s turn to ride the pony, he slowed to a walk just when she began screaming for us to spur that little mustang into a gallop. Linda came to the rescue and rode Ann bareback, full out, and they both hit the tape neck and neck, in a perfect tie.

The thing that sticks in my mind is another thing that happened that same night when Ann and Linda used Ann
’s little battery operated gizmo. It’s hard to remember all the details but the essence of it is that the three of us were fooling around and we were all pretty stoned and everyone was getting off a bunch of times over the evening. Linda decided that she wanted to hop on my back while I was intimately engaged with Ann. It was pretty kinky but, what the hell, that’s what we were all like back then. Besides, we were invisible. Turned me on like mad. Ann was up for it, as if she had a choice anyway, because Linda just slid up there on my back hugging me like a monkey clinging to its mother. Apparently it turned Ann on too, she loved it, she wrapped her legs around the both of us, you know, like a toddler wraps its legs around its mother in the grocery store, and didn’t miss a beat. She ended up with a screaming orgasm. I don’t scream, but I came out okay too. Linda got another chance to scream her brains out after we took some time to catch our breath.

No. Umpteen
’s no exaggeration. It was sure as heck more than a high single digit number of times I thought about that night.

I suppose I should have said she was
“light as a feather” instead of “light as a Lemur,” when she crawled up on my back, but if I’ve heard that one once, I’ve heard it a Brazilian times; clichés really grate on my nerves. Makes you wonder what’s going on in my head if I’m thinking of clichés with Linda clinging to my back and I’m screwing Ann. But then the whole thing was not your typical run-of-the-mill boinking. I bet you a dollar to a miniature donkey they weren’t thinking about lame-ass clichés. Especially Ann, she was screaming her ass off there at the end. The next time I went out with Linda she said, “What’s a Lemur?” Linda was probably wondering what a Lemur was the whole time.

I don
’t think Linda and Ann were full-fledged lesbians; they just turned each other on. I don’t know what you’d call that, maybe hybrid-lesbos or something. I never did get them straight. Probably “straight” is not the right word there either. Wonder what that makes me. Normal, probably. Doesn’t matter, I was invisible.

Back in those days, the fact is, everyone smoked pot. I don
’t care what you say to the contrary, everyone did.

I
’ll admit, maybe the tight asses didn’t, like ol’ Peter Hedd or Brawnswine. But they were alcoholics. Christ, Peter’s nose had a butt-spank of broken capillaries, most likely the result of drinking hard stuff in order to get the stomach to be able to force it between Brawnswine’s fat hairy cheeks. That repulsive visual would most likely be enough to make God drink out of a cat dish.

The rest of us smoked. Not just a few of us ... all of us, the entire working class. The ones I knew of, anyway. We all drank beer and we toked joints. Damn near daily. There was some vodka and orange juice thrown in, but not much other hard stuff.

The thing is, there was never a shortage of pot in every store in every city I worked in, and I worked in a bunch. It wasn’t even two days and most of the time it was just one before someone produced a joint and shared it with you. People just have a sense of who smokes and who’s a tight ass. I guarantee you, all retail workers smoke pot.

One time, I bought a lid from Ann and, like a high school dumb shit, I walked out of the store with it inside my paper lunch sack. At any rate the door greeter, Don, asked to look in the bag in my hand. I damn near crapped. I just said it was garbage and squished it up real good and made like I was going to toss it in the trashcan on the sidewalk and kept walking sorta fast and looked back once before I got to my VW. Don was not that old, about my age, but had a gimpy leg from being wounded in the war, so he just hollered,
“Mr. Forest,” but I made like I didn’t hear him. He couldn’t run for shit and gave up after about three steps. And besides, I was an assistant manager. I wasn’t supposed to be walking around with a lid in my lunch sack. You can bet your sweet patootie I never walked out of the store with a lid of pot in my lunch sack again; I kept it stuck it in my sock, like when I learned in the Air Force. We’d put a pack of Marlboros in one sock and a Zippo in the other. Never any pot back then. I’m sure that would have been different if I’d been shipped to Vietnam. I didn’t start smoking pot until I got discharged and went to college with all those hippies. It wasn’t until I was at Big Richards that the supply became readily available.

That
’s another thing, a military uniform has about a thousand pockets, but the bastards never allowed anybody to put anything in any of them. Look at a GI sometime, even Generals, not a damn thing in their pockets. Well, that taught me where to hide a lid of pot, that’s what it taught me. It probably would have been better if I’d been caught and canned on the spot, if you want to know the truth. Too bad ol’ Don took a shot in the ass in ‘Nam and had that gimpy leg. I should have let him nab me.

People might think I
’m just being paranoid when I say the employees were in a conspiracy to get
The Man
. I’m not paranoid and I’ll tell you why. There were things happening all the time, weird things. People might think those things could happen to anybody. Well, they might, but there were too many things.

I hardly remember some of the crap it was such a long time ago and I have other things on my mind now and there
’s not all that much time left to be dwelling on a bunch of insignificant stuff.

It
’s like Bella said, “You are one, then two, then three, and when you use up all the numbers, you die.”

Well, I
’ve used up quite a few of the numbers so if I’m going to say anything, I’d better say it soon.

There was another thing involving Bertie, the garden shop manager, getting back at the company. She was an excellent forklift driver. She used it every day unloading pallets of plants and potting soil in the garden shop. One day, she went to retrieve the forklift from the receiving manager and she wiped out one of the fifty-five gallon drums being stored behind the building … jammed the forks straight through the drum. She and the stockroom manager, Dwight, said it was an accident. Accident, my silly ass. She was better forklift driver than Dwight. I found out later she did it on purpose to get back at the manager, old Peter Hedd. He gnawed her behind about some dead plants one time. He really reamed her. It turns out Dwight sprayed the plants with vegetation killer; getting back at Mr. Hedd for screwing him over for not promoting him to assistant manager. I don
’t know if Bertie ever found out it was Dwight who killed the plants. Really doesn’t make any difference.

Like I said, it was a damned conspiracy. A bunch of the employees were in on it. That little
“accident” cost ol’ Peter over seven grand to have the contents of that barrel analyzed and disposed of at a hazardous waste site. Know what was in it? Concrete sealer just like everyone knew; there just wasn’t an official label on it. It had been sitting behind the store since it was built. That was a pretty crafty move on Bertie’s part. Dummy, hell ... she was smarter than the entire management crew combined, street-wise as hell.

Just a rough estimate of the problems with rats, concrete sealer, Christmas tree, and refurbished lawn mowers; it had to have cost Big Richards twenty-five thousand. Kick in salary expense for correcting the problems, double that, easy … maybe even triple. That
’s only counting what I know about.

You can
’t tell me that minimum wage earners are a bunch of Dusters. Look, it’s not rocket salad, they know how to look out for each other, don’t cross ‘em, if you want my advice. Worker’s treachery … sure explains a butt-load.

They look out for themselves too. Ann
’s a prime example of that. Ann set Candy up and got her fired in revenge for stealing a load of money from her. Candy not only stole the money, she skipped out on a couple months’ rent. Plus, she kiped her stash.