11
“Listen up, bitches” Sid stammered into the bathroom mirror. He was drunk. And Ben was trying to get him to wash his hands, but he kept waving them around and threatening his reflection.
“Wash your hands so we can leave. And no more drinks.” Ben said as he rolled his eyes.
Sid, Ben, and Sherri had decided that the best place to look for Matty and the “cheating guy,” as he was now being called, was at all the local bars within walking distance. None of the three were particularly familiar with the drinking, mating or bar-hopping habits of Matty Sanderson, but Ben had decided that he needed a drink and no one else had an interest in disagreeing. Sid had initially refused all offers of liquor from Ben and Sherri, but after the third bar on their Matlock Crawl, he could no longer resist the call of liquid refreshment. Sid had a weakness for the fruity stuff. He went from no sheets to three in a matter of daquiris.
“Excuse me, miss? Can you tell me where to find Satty Manderson?”
“Sid!” Ben hissed. “That’s still your reflection.”
“Oh. Didn’t mean to bother me then.” Sid said and then collapsed on the tile floor in laughter.
Disgusted, Ben grabbed Sid by the arm and drug him from the bathroom. He pulled him up to a barstool and politely asked the bartender to keep an eye on him.
Ben had already had his Yuengling and he’d asked a few bartenders if they knew the whereabouts of Matty, but they weren’t much help. He looked around for Sherri to see if she was having more luck. He spotted her in the corner. It appeared she was having quite a bit of luck. She had a collection of college age boys surrounding her and they all seemed to be paying her quite a bit of attention. He tried to calmly tuck in his shirt and check that his belt was properly buckled, but Ben felt his hands start to clench together. He gave a quick look to Sid slumped over the bar and then moved closer to the recently developed glaxay Sherri. Ben couldn’t believe how much she had changed in a year. It was obvious that he wasn’t the only one noticing the difference. Just last year she had been such a wallflower that he’d nearly forgotten she was a woman. He actually remembered a conversation to that very effect. “That’s not insulting. You’re one of the guys,” he’d said after an unmemorable joke about ironing and vacuuming. She’d left in a huff with a tear in her eye. He was careful after that not to make the same mistake again. She was still one of guys until recently, she just didn’t enjoy the same jokes. But, lately it was like her pores had started leaking feminity and it seemed to be oozing all over everyone. Ben didn’t like it a bit. Especially the way it was oozing right now.
“I don’t have any tattoos,” he heard Sherri giggle, as she twirled her hair.
That was enough for Ben. He stepped into group and toward Sherri with explosive quickness.
“Let’s go,” he said as he grabbed her wrist. Some of Sherri’s margarita spilled on her as she got up to follow Ben. Between the cold and Ben’s grip, Sherri squealed just a little bit. The group of boys heard less squeal and more scream. So they pounced on Ben. Ben was no match for five angry liquored-up twenty-somethings. As they punched and kicked, Sherri’s screams grew louder. They got so loud that they roused Sid from the bar. He stood up and even in his drunken stupor he could see that his friends were in trouble. Valiantly he stumbled toward the melee. There was a lot of movement and Sid was having a terrible time focusing, but he found the middle of the fight and he dove in. He bounced off one of Ben’s attackers stunning him for a moment and then Sid landed with a crunch on the floor, where he stayed as Ben’s beating continued.
The bartender and several very large bouncers were not far behind Sid, and they were able to pull apart the fight from the outside. Ben had fought back ferociously, but he was only the worse for it. He was bleeding in more places than cuts were clearly visible. He now lay in a heap next to Sid. One bouncer had managed to stop Sherri’s screaming, but at the cost of a mouth-sized bite to his hand. Sherri was wimpering against the same bouncer as the police arrived. An ambulance came blaring to a halt moments later.
No one was arrested, only warned. Sid and Ben were carted off on stretchers, though Sid was likely just asleep and not in need of a stretcher. Sherri got to ride along in the ambulance, since she was not looking stable enough to leave alone.
***
As J entered McCormick’s room he couldn’t help but notice the darkness. All the lights, save one small source were out and McCormick was clearly asleep. J tiptoed quietly in so he could have a better look. When he looked he saw an old man, his ponytail hanging drowsily off the bed. He searched his face for signs of stroke, but found only wrinkles. The air smelled of antiseptic and urine. It’s no wonder people die in hospitals, J thought. With the neon lighting, horrible smells, processed food, bad vibes, poor ventilation, the list could go on for days. He wondered if the morgues actually made deals with the hospitals, or better the state governments that funded these hospitals. They probably had a death quota. It was all very disgusting, but then J remembered that a moment ago he had been having some kind of realization and his thoughts had interuppted him. This man, sleeping before him, with no one to call except for J, looked old. He was in a hospital bed, tucked under hospital sheets, death possibly knocking on his door and he had reached out for J. The weight of it hit J hard. McCormick had nobody else. At least J had Ben, Sid, and Sherri. And if he was really desperate he could call his parents. At least he thought he could. It’d been so long he wasn’t really sure anymore. Maybe McCormick was a warning, or at the very least a reminder. A tear traced a path down J’s cheek. No others would follow, just the one lonely tear on a brisk walk to the place where moustache meets beard. The room was silent save the drip of the drip. J stood and watched McCormick sleep for a few minutes before touching his cold bumpy hand and then sneaking out of the room.
The next morning, J returned to the hospital with a little bottle of whiskey hidden in his sock. He had no trouble convincing the morning nurse that while not related to McCormick he was as close to family as anybody around here was going to get. His charms must work better in the morning. When he arrived in 607, McCormick’s eyes were closed even though the sun was peeking through the window. J stopped again to consider the age of the old man and to consider his own mortality. His thoughts were brought to a screeching halt when McCormick asked, “What kind of pervert stares at an old man in a hospital bed?”
J found it especially difficult to find his sense of humor with McCormick layed up like that. He smiled a pathetic little smile. McCormick would never let him get away with such a half-hearted grin.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said as he clutched his chest. “J Jones is speechless. I must be dying.”
J couldn’t just stay silent, but McCormick looked so old and small.
“They tell me, you might live, if you stop chasing the nurses,” he barely managed to kid.
“What kind of living is that?” bellowed McCormick with a little more bravado than his body could handle at the moment. He winced and lowered his head back onto his pillow. “Those nurses make me dizzy with desire,” he whispered as he closed his eyes for a moment.
The tear was over, but J still felt so small and helpless. McCormick couldn’t help but notice.
“J,” he said, “Come here.”
J obediently came closer. McCormick’s hand twitched like he was about to reach out, but then he thought better of it.
“There are some things you can’t fight.”
He paused and J sensed that he was listening for something.
“I don’t think this is one of those things,” he said calmly. “Now go home and get me something to drink.”
J started to leave solemnly and then with a smile he turned around, reached down and pulled the whiskey from his sock. He gave it to McCormick with a laugh.
“Alcoholics are so predictable.”
McCormick started to respond, but took a swig instead. A twinkle returned to his eye at that moment. J didn’t care if it was alcohol-induced or not.
Across the city in another hospital alcohol was having very different effects on Sid and Ben. Sid had spent half the night in the hospital bathroom reviewing the contents of his dinner and the daquiri binge thereafter. The other half of the night he had spent curled up at Sherri’s feet. She slept in a chair next to Ben, who would wake up shortly feeling bruised and beaten, which unfortunately enough was exactly how he looked. For a while during the night Sherri had held his hand nervously, but he hadn’t responded and finally she had given up and gone to sleep. By morning she had squirmed and squished herself into the chair so completely that they had nearly become one. With Sid at her feet, it looked like a two-headed paisley monster of patheticness was waiting to attack an already-attacked Ben.
**
J headed back to Sid’s kitchen and was surprised to find it looking very much the way he left it, only empty. J went in to Sid's room and saw that the bed had not been slept in. He tried to
remember where Sid had ever spent the night other than home, but couldn't.
Maybe there'd been a sleepover at Ben's. He shuddered at the thought of Ben,
Sid and Sherri in uncompromising positions.
That image and the emptiness gave J the urge to clean. He started with the
glasses they'd left on the table the night before. First he moved them to Sid's
sink. Then he wiped the crumbs off the table. When that wasn't enough, he took
to scrubbing the glasses with Sid's soap-squirting sponge. J had to admit that
a few things "the Man" had come up with turned out to be pretty useful. It's
quite ingenious to combine soap and sponge into one contraption. J had to give
them credit there. The cleaning frenzy was over as fast as it started, but J was still filled with
nervous energy. He considered his options and decided that maybe a brisk walk
would do some good.
He was walking briskly again, with the look of purpose and still none to speak
of, when he recalled the plan that had started to emerge the night before.
There's nothing like a little revenge to give a man a little reason to keep
walking briskly. J wondered if the others had had any success tracking down
the cheater. It was interesting that only he was the cheater, somehow Matty
had managed to elude blame almost completely.
One advantage of being mostly unemployed was that the coffee shops were never
that busy at 10 in the morning. The disdavantage for J was that chain coffee
establishments were like boiling pots of society's ills. Usually at places like
Cup O' Joe, he found immigrants working low paying jobs serving the white, and
white collar crowd. The coffee was so processed and fortified and whatever else
they did to it, that it was barely recognizable as coffee anymore. Coffee had
become so commercialized, so regulated, that it had lost almost all its
character. Yet every so often, when the air was brisk like his gait, J found himself
inexplicably drawn to the drink. Called by coffee and tugged by consceince, J made his way into Cup of Joe, feeling around in his pants for the price of a tall cup of the house coffee. At first he had despised the size system, tall, grande, megaplex; he could never seem to remember what was small and what wasn’t. For a while he’d boycotted Cup of Joe on that principle alone, but he got tired of fighting a battle of semantics and eventually took to pointing at the cup as if he spoke another language. “I don’t speak corporate coffee” his eyes said as he ordered. His taste buds spoke it though and spoke it fluently. The hot black coffee filled his insides with warmth. Coffee as bitter and sweet and hot and delicious. He was enjoying his indulgence when he noticed a familiar face in the cushy chair in the corner. It wasn’t a really familiar face. The man in the corner didn’t look like a family member or a friend. He just had a fuzzy familiarity about him. He was like the friend of a friend, or maybe an enemy. J really didn’t have any idea, but he had long since passed appropriate glance length and had passed into inquisitive staring territory. Realizing this, he averted his eyes before being noticed.
J considered sitting to figure out who this chap might be since it was obviously going to plague him, but the thought of being caught lounging in a coffee shop was just a little more than J could bear. He did have a reputation to uphold, even if that reputation was primarily to himself. As he was leaving, he heard the phone ring and the man in the corner say, “yea. Who’s asking?”
J froze in the doorway.
“Shut the door. We’re freezing,” a couple next to the window moaned.
J came to his senses and stepped outside into the cold. It was the cheater. J couldn’t believe it. It was like the cosmic forces in the universe had lead him to the very coffee shop to face off with the very problem that had plagued him for weeks. It was a cosmically engineered coffee date with destiny. He’d read about this sort of thing somewhere. He sipped his coffee and wondered whether he should confront the oaf on the spot or follow the much more sensible route by following the cheater. He had already loitered for too long, when he noticed that the cheater was headed for the shop doors. In a fit of un-smooth, J dove behind a trashcan. Somehow, the cheater didn’t notice J cowering behind the can. J was insulted that someone could be so self-absorbed that they wouldn’t even notice him crouched next to a trash can. He counted it as another strike against the cheater. J was sick of calling him the cheater and decided to call him “Nasty Ned” from here on, but when he realized that “Nasty Ned” was nearly as syllabic as the cheater, he shortened it to Ned. Following about twenty-five meters behind, J followed Ned down the street. When Ned zigged, J zagged. When Ned turned to look back in J’s direction, J nonchalantly stared up into the sky. J examined Ned closely on their walk. Ned was a bit of a slow walker, J figured it was partly because he was dragging his monkey knuckles on the ground. Regardless of the reason, it was driving J nuts to walk so slowly. He had a mind to just run up on Ned, jump on his back and wrestle him to the ground. The 150 pounds Ned had on him prevented that course of action. He was stuck with the slow crawl to Ned’s mid-morning destination.
***
The sunlight poured across Ben, but left Sid and Sherri in a dark corner of the room. Nature roused Ben from his slumber to his painful awakening. His head pounded. He looked down at his black and blue body with his left eye. The right one seemed to be swollen shut. Rotating his head slightly he was able to see the top of Sherri’s head.
“Sherri,” he was able to say through fat lips.
Sherri woke up with a start. She leapt to her feet, which unfortunately for Sid landed on his back. He howled. She tripped and fell on Ben, who added his own howling. Three nurses arrived by the time the howling had ceased. Sherri looked at the nurses sheepishly. Ben just waved them away. Even hospitalized, Ben had very little patience. Sid remained curled up on the floor, hungover, and now with a hurting back. Sherri went over to kiss Ben, but he wasn’t in the mood to be coddled or cuddled for that matter. He was fuming. He wanted out of the bed and onto the streets to find the punks that did this to him.
Sid sat straight up and said, “We never found the cheater.”
“No.” Ben replied through clenched teeth. “We got distracted.”
“I’ve got an idea.” Sid said quietly as he lay back down.
Ben and Sherri ignored him and continued quietly talking, their hands ever so slightly touching, sending electricity and its accompanying wattage straight to their smiles.
“We call Strayer, Mayer, & Braun,” Sid mumbled from his sprawl on the floor. “We ask for Matty and then when she answers we pretend to be the cheater until she says his name.”
“Who will call?” Sid asked himself out loud. Then hissed, “I don’t know I just come up with the plans.”
Sherri bent down slightly and stroked Sid’s hair. “There, there. Let’s rest a little more before we start on any plans, ok?” She asked very sweetly. In the future they had to keep Sid away from the daquiris, she thought.
***
J watched as Ned entered the MegaCorps building. Now he at least knew where Ned worked. He could also stop with the slow walking. He wasn’t sure he could have handled much more anyway. His plan to just physically attack still seemed the most effective except for the part where he envisioned Ned flattening his face. He decided to let it go for the time being. They could bring the fight back to MegaCorps. He knew Ben, Sherri, and Sid would be up for that. MegaCorps, like most big companies, was a vat of steaming injustice.
To amuse himself on the walk back J started to picture vats of steaming injustice. He wondered if it would sell better as cans of steaming injustice, an injustice soup, Cream of injustice. That sounded dirty. He liked it. “Cream of Injustice soup, mmm. mmm. Bad.” he thought as he shook his finger scoldingly in the air.
As his legs churned along and his mind wandered to places other than nature’s oldest combination soup and revenge, he heard the words McCormick had spoken that morning. “Some things you just can’t fight,” echoed in his ears. J tried to think of something he couldn’t fight. He felt like he’d been fighting for years and there was still a lot left to fight. If he was going to be honest, he was a little worn from the tussle. “Was there another way?” he wondered. He quickly tried to put that thought out of his mind.
The chants of “Fair wages” snapped him back to a more comfortable reality. It must have been his lucky day. Local Union 539 was picketing the Kroger demanding better pay. The chants put a bounce back in his step and he sidled up to the nearest union worker.
“What’s the scoop?” J asked.
“We’re overworked. We’re underpaid,” the older woman said as she straightened her back and stood tall, her voice gaining momentum. She straightened her green vest, covered in Union buttons and said, “And we’re not going to take it any more.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” J said with a smile. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Another striker happened to overhear and said, “We’re starving. Do you think you could go inside and get us some snacks?”
J stared back horrified.
“I’m kidding.” the man said with a smile. “Relax.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” J said. “Not the snacks, but maybe I could go inside and see how it’s going. I can report back to you if you like.”
The older woman and the man looked at J and then looked at each other. That weren’t quite sure what to make of this fellow. This was their fourth strike in the last 15 years and nobody had ever offered more than a clenched fist of support.
The woman, Myrtle, guided Steve into a conference.
“He’s got spirit” she whispered. “What harm can it do?”
“What if he works for Kroger? What if he’s a spy?” Steve shot back.
“Look at those pants. Do you think a corporate type would have pants like that?” Myrtle said.
J could see them whispering; he heard “spirit” and “spy” and “pants”; he could see them tossing nervous glances in his direction. Rather than wait for a decision, he decided to argue his case a little more convincingly.
Stepping toward Myrtle and Steve, both union workers and both 15 year employees of Kroger, J explained, “I understand that you’re hesitant to trust an outsider. Kroger has burned you.” He waited for them to nod before he continued. “You’re upset and angry. But I’m not a spy. I don’t work for Kroger. When I can help it, I don’t work for anybody. You’ve got nothing to lose. Send me in there, let me poke around like some nosey customer. If I get back and you still don’t trust me or you think they’ve turned me,” he said with a wink. “Then you won’t have to listen to me. You can just drown me out with your chants. Fair?”
By this time several of the other protestors had come to listen to this curious man with his worn green pants and his coatless layered look. He looked a little like a walking Salvation Army with his mish-mash of sweaters bulging around him. All of that was set off by his blue on blue knitted stocking cap, complete with ball on the top. Yet when they looked in his eyes, the Local Union workers 539 could see sincerity in his face. The goatee, often the choice of ragamuffins, hooligans, and motorcycle riders, seemed to radiate genuiness. After a brief pause, the small collection of tired grocery workers started to shout, “Send him in!”
They watched as the walking Salvation Army walked briskly to the doors. They watched as the automatic doors opened its jaws, and swallowed their new champion. All they could do now was wait and chant, which was pretty much what they’d been doing all week. They chanted with the enthusiasm of the first day. Local 539 sensed that something was about to happen.
At first, J just strolled around the store, taking it all in. He hadn’t been to a chain grocery store in quite a while. He shopped at the Farmer’s Market when he could and frequented the local stores when that wasn’t an option. Now he found himself in the land of the processed. Aisle after aisle of consumables, sliced and frozen and fortified and mineralized. This was a monument to capitalism, an ever-changing, shelf-space to the highest bidder, spoiling food “ON SALE NOW” kind of monument, but still a monument. J knew his first priority should be the workers outside. They had lured him in here. They had trusted him for reasons even he couldn’t comprehend. They were waiting outside, but it all seemed to matter just a little bit less. J’s enthusiasm, his disgust, the fibers that ran through his body were crackling. He was in a nearly empty store filled with employee scabs. His mind reeled as he thought of all the ways that he could make a statement about fair wages of course, but also about consumer culture and the way that Kroger was contributing to society’s downfall. A tiny smile crept onto his face as he sprung into action.
This way to 12
“Wash your hands so we can leave. And no more drinks.” Ben said as he rolled his eyes.
Sid, Ben, and Sherri had decided that the best place to look for Matty and the “cheating guy,” as he was now being called, was at all the local bars within walking distance. None of the three were particularly familiar with the drinking, mating or bar-hopping habits of Matty Sanderson, but Ben had decided that he needed a drink and no one else had an interest in disagreeing. Sid had initially refused all offers of liquor from Ben and Sherri, but after the third bar on their Matlock Crawl, he could no longer resist the call of liquid refreshment. Sid had a weakness for the fruity stuff. He went from no sheets to three in a matter of daquiris.
“Excuse me, miss? Can you tell me where to find Satty Manderson?”
“Sid!” Ben hissed. “That’s still your reflection.”
“Oh. Didn’t mean to bother me then.” Sid said and then collapsed on the tile floor in laughter.
Disgusted, Ben grabbed Sid by the arm and drug him from the bathroom. He pulled him up to a barstool and politely asked the bartender to keep an eye on him.
Ben had already had his Yuengling and he’d asked a few bartenders if they knew the whereabouts of Matty, but they weren’t much help. He looked around for Sherri to see if she was having more luck. He spotted her in the corner. It appeared she was having quite a bit of luck. She had a collection of college age boys surrounding her and they all seemed to be paying her quite a bit of attention. He tried to calmly tuck in his shirt and check that his belt was properly buckled, but Ben felt his hands start to clench together. He gave a quick look to Sid slumped over the bar and then moved closer to the recently developed glaxay Sherri. Ben couldn’t believe how much she had changed in a year. It was obvious that he wasn’t the only one noticing the difference. Just last year she had been such a wallflower that he’d nearly forgotten she was a woman. He actually remembered a conversation to that very effect. “That’s not insulting. You’re one of the guys,” he’d said after an unmemorable joke about ironing and vacuuming. She’d left in a huff with a tear in her eye. He was careful after that not to make the same mistake again. She was still one of guys until recently, she just didn’t enjoy the same jokes. But, lately it was like her pores had started leaking feminity and it seemed to be oozing all over everyone. Ben didn’t like it a bit. Especially the way it was oozing right now.
“I don’t have any tattoos,” he heard Sherri giggle, as she twirled her hair.
That was enough for Ben. He stepped into group and toward Sherri with explosive quickness.
“Let’s go,” he said as he grabbed her wrist. Some of Sherri’s margarita spilled on her as she got up to follow Ben. Between the cold and Ben’s grip, Sherri squealed just a little bit. The group of boys heard less squeal and more scream. So they pounced on Ben. Ben was no match for five angry liquored-up twenty-somethings. As they punched and kicked, Sherri’s screams grew louder. They got so loud that they roused Sid from the bar. He stood up and even in his drunken stupor he could see that his friends were in trouble. Valiantly he stumbled toward the melee. There was a lot of movement and Sid was having a terrible time focusing, but he found the middle of the fight and he dove in. He bounced off one of Ben’s attackers stunning him for a moment and then Sid landed with a crunch on the floor, where he stayed as Ben’s beating continued.
The bartender and several very large bouncers were not far behind Sid, and they were able to pull apart the fight from the outside. Ben had fought back ferociously, but he was only the worse for it. He was bleeding in more places than cuts were clearly visible. He now lay in a heap next to Sid. One bouncer had managed to stop Sherri’s screaming, but at the cost of a mouth-sized bite to his hand. Sherri was wimpering against the same bouncer as the police arrived. An ambulance came blaring to a halt moments later.
No one was arrested, only warned. Sid and Ben were carted off on stretchers, though Sid was likely just asleep and not in need of a stretcher. Sherri got to ride along in the ambulance, since she was not looking stable enough to leave alone.
***
As J entered McCormick’s room he couldn’t help but notice the darkness. All the lights, save one small source were out and McCormick was clearly asleep. J tiptoed quietly in so he could have a better look. When he looked he saw an old man, his ponytail hanging drowsily off the bed. He searched his face for signs of stroke, but found only wrinkles. The air smelled of antiseptic and urine. It’s no wonder people die in hospitals, J thought. With the neon lighting, horrible smells, processed food, bad vibes, poor ventilation, the list could go on for days. He wondered if the morgues actually made deals with the hospitals, or better the state governments that funded these hospitals. They probably had a death quota. It was all very disgusting, but then J remembered that a moment ago he had been having some kind of realization and his thoughts had interuppted him. This man, sleeping before him, with no one to call except for J, looked old. He was in a hospital bed, tucked under hospital sheets, death possibly knocking on his door and he had reached out for J. The weight of it hit J hard. McCormick had nobody else. At least J had Ben, Sid, and Sherri. And if he was really desperate he could call his parents. At least he thought he could. It’d been so long he wasn’t really sure anymore. Maybe McCormick was a warning, or at the very least a reminder. A tear traced a path down J’s cheek. No others would follow, just the one lonely tear on a brisk walk to the place where moustache meets beard. The room was silent save the drip of the drip. J stood and watched McCormick sleep for a few minutes before touching his cold bumpy hand and then sneaking out of the room.
The next morning, J returned to the hospital with a little bottle of whiskey hidden in his sock. He had no trouble convincing the morning nurse that while not related to McCormick he was as close to family as anybody around here was going to get. His charms must work better in the morning. When he arrived in 607, McCormick’s eyes were closed even though the sun was peeking through the window. J stopped again to consider the age of the old man and to consider his own mortality. His thoughts were brought to a screeching halt when McCormick asked, “What kind of pervert stares at an old man in a hospital bed?”
J found it especially difficult to find his sense of humor with McCormick layed up like that. He smiled a pathetic little smile. McCormick would never let him get away with such a half-hearted grin.
“Sweet Jesus,” he said as he clutched his chest. “J Jones is speechless. I must be dying.”
J couldn’t just stay silent, but McCormick looked so old and small.
“They tell me, you might live, if you stop chasing the nurses,” he barely managed to kid.
“What kind of living is that?” bellowed McCormick with a little more bravado than his body could handle at the moment. He winced and lowered his head back onto his pillow. “Those nurses make me dizzy with desire,” he whispered as he closed his eyes for a moment.
The tear was over, but J still felt so small and helpless. McCormick couldn’t help but notice.
“J,” he said, “Come here.”
J obediently came closer. McCormick’s hand twitched like he was about to reach out, but then he thought better of it.
“There are some things you can’t fight.”
He paused and J sensed that he was listening for something.
“I don’t think this is one of those things,” he said calmly. “Now go home and get me something to drink.”
J started to leave solemnly and then with a smile he turned around, reached down and pulled the whiskey from his sock. He gave it to McCormick with a laugh.
“Alcoholics are so predictable.”
McCormick started to respond, but took a swig instead. A twinkle returned to his eye at that moment. J didn’t care if it was alcohol-induced or not.
Across the city in another hospital alcohol was having very different effects on Sid and Ben. Sid had spent half the night in the hospital bathroom reviewing the contents of his dinner and the daquiri binge thereafter. The other half of the night he had spent curled up at Sherri’s feet. She slept in a chair next to Ben, who would wake up shortly feeling bruised and beaten, which unfortunately enough was exactly how he looked. For a while during the night Sherri had held his hand nervously, but he hadn’t responded and finally she had given up and gone to sleep. By morning she had squirmed and squished herself into the chair so completely that they had nearly become one. With Sid at her feet, it looked like a two-headed paisley monster of patheticness was waiting to attack an already-attacked Ben.
**
J headed back to Sid’s kitchen and was surprised to find it looking very much the way he left it, only empty. J went in to Sid's room and saw that the bed had not been slept in. He tried to
remember where Sid had ever spent the night other than home, but couldn't.
Maybe there'd been a sleepover at Ben's. He shuddered at the thought of Ben,
Sid and Sherri in uncompromising positions.
That image and the emptiness gave J the urge to clean. He started with the
glasses they'd left on the table the night before. First he moved them to Sid's
sink. Then he wiped the crumbs off the table. When that wasn't enough, he took
to scrubbing the glasses with Sid's soap-squirting sponge. J had to admit that
a few things "the Man" had come up with turned out to be pretty useful. It's
quite ingenious to combine soap and sponge into one contraption. J had to give
them credit there. The cleaning frenzy was over as fast as it started, but J was still filled with
nervous energy. He considered his options and decided that maybe a brisk walk
would do some good.
He was walking briskly again, with the look of purpose and still none to speak
of, when he recalled the plan that had started to emerge the night before.
There's nothing like a little revenge to give a man a little reason to keep
walking briskly. J wondered if the others had had any success tracking down
the cheater. It was interesting that only he was the cheater, somehow Matty
had managed to elude blame almost completely.
One advantage of being mostly unemployed was that the coffee shops were never
that busy at 10 in the morning. The disdavantage for J was that chain coffee
establishments were like boiling pots of society's ills. Usually at places like
Cup O' Joe, he found immigrants working low paying jobs serving the white, and
white collar crowd. The coffee was so processed and fortified and whatever else
they did to it, that it was barely recognizable as coffee anymore. Coffee had
become so commercialized, so regulated, that it had lost almost all its
character. Yet every so often, when the air was brisk like his gait, J found himself
inexplicably drawn to the drink. Called by coffee and tugged by consceince, J made his way into Cup of Joe, feeling around in his pants for the price of a tall cup of the house coffee. At first he had despised the size system, tall, grande, megaplex; he could never seem to remember what was small and what wasn’t. For a while he’d boycotted Cup of Joe on that principle alone, but he got tired of fighting a battle of semantics and eventually took to pointing at the cup as if he spoke another language. “I don’t speak corporate coffee” his eyes said as he ordered. His taste buds spoke it though and spoke it fluently. The hot black coffee filled his insides with warmth. Coffee as bitter and sweet and hot and delicious. He was enjoying his indulgence when he noticed a familiar face in the cushy chair in the corner. It wasn’t a really familiar face. The man in the corner didn’t look like a family member or a friend. He just had a fuzzy familiarity about him. He was like the friend of a friend, or maybe an enemy. J really didn’t have any idea, but he had long since passed appropriate glance length and had passed into inquisitive staring territory. Realizing this, he averted his eyes before being noticed.
J considered sitting to figure out who this chap might be since it was obviously going to plague him, but the thought of being caught lounging in a coffee shop was just a little more than J could bear. He did have a reputation to uphold, even if that reputation was primarily to himself. As he was leaving, he heard the phone ring and the man in the corner say, “yea. Who’s asking?”
J froze in the doorway.
“Shut the door. We’re freezing,” a couple next to the window moaned.
J came to his senses and stepped outside into the cold. It was the cheater. J couldn’t believe it. It was like the cosmic forces in the universe had lead him to the very coffee shop to face off with the very problem that had plagued him for weeks. It was a cosmically engineered coffee date with destiny. He’d read about this sort of thing somewhere. He sipped his coffee and wondered whether he should confront the oaf on the spot or follow the much more sensible route by following the cheater. He had already loitered for too long, when he noticed that the cheater was headed for the shop doors. In a fit of un-smooth, J dove behind a trashcan. Somehow, the cheater didn’t notice J cowering behind the can. J was insulted that someone could be so self-absorbed that they wouldn’t even notice him crouched next to a trash can. He counted it as another strike against the cheater. J was sick of calling him the cheater and decided to call him “Nasty Ned” from here on, but when he realized that “Nasty Ned” was nearly as syllabic as the cheater, he shortened it to Ned. Following about twenty-five meters behind, J followed Ned down the street. When Ned zigged, J zagged. When Ned turned to look back in J’s direction, J nonchalantly stared up into the sky. J examined Ned closely on their walk. Ned was a bit of a slow walker, J figured it was partly because he was dragging his monkey knuckles on the ground. Regardless of the reason, it was driving J nuts to walk so slowly. He had a mind to just run up on Ned, jump on his back and wrestle him to the ground. The 150 pounds Ned had on him prevented that course of action. He was stuck with the slow crawl to Ned’s mid-morning destination.
***
The sunlight poured across Ben, but left Sid and Sherri in a dark corner of the room. Nature roused Ben from his slumber to his painful awakening. His head pounded. He looked down at his black and blue body with his left eye. The right one seemed to be swollen shut. Rotating his head slightly he was able to see the top of Sherri’s head.
“Sherri,” he was able to say through fat lips.
Sherri woke up with a start. She leapt to her feet, which unfortunately for Sid landed on his back. He howled. She tripped and fell on Ben, who added his own howling. Three nurses arrived by the time the howling had ceased. Sherri looked at the nurses sheepishly. Ben just waved them away. Even hospitalized, Ben had very little patience. Sid remained curled up on the floor, hungover, and now with a hurting back. Sherri went over to kiss Ben, but he wasn’t in the mood to be coddled or cuddled for that matter. He was fuming. He wanted out of the bed and onto the streets to find the punks that did this to him.
Sid sat straight up and said, “We never found the cheater.”
“No.” Ben replied through clenched teeth. “We got distracted.”
“I’ve got an idea.” Sid said quietly as he lay back down.
Ben and Sherri ignored him and continued quietly talking, their hands ever so slightly touching, sending electricity and its accompanying wattage straight to their smiles.
“We call Strayer, Mayer, & Braun,” Sid mumbled from his sprawl on the floor. “We ask for Matty and then when she answers we pretend to be the cheater until she says his name.”
“Who will call?” Sid asked himself out loud. Then hissed, “I don’t know I just come up with the plans.”
Sherri bent down slightly and stroked Sid’s hair. “There, there. Let’s rest a little more before we start on any plans, ok?” She asked very sweetly. In the future they had to keep Sid away from the daquiris, she thought.
***
J watched as Ned entered the MegaCorps building. Now he at least knew where Ned worked. He could also stop with the slow walking. He wasn’t sure he could have handled much more anyway. His plan to just physically attack still seemed the most effective except for the part where he envisioned Ned flattening his face. He decided to let it go for the time being. They could bring the fight back to MegaCorps. He knew Ben, Sherri, and Sid would be up for that. MegaCorps, like most big companies, was a vat of steaming injustice.
To amuse himself on the walk back J started to picture vats of steaming injustice. He wondered if it would sell better as cans of steaming injustice, an injustice soup, Cream of injustice. That sounded dirty. He liked it. “Cream of Injustice soup, mmm. mmm. Bad.” he thought as he shook his finger scoldingly in the air.
As his legs churned along and his mind wandered to places other than nature’s oldest combination soup and revenge, he heard the words McCormick had spoken that morning. “Some things you just can’t fight,” echoed in his ears. J tried to think of something he couldn’t fight. He felt like he’d been fighting for years and there was still a lot left to fight. If he was going to be honest, he was a little worn from the tussle. “Was there another way?” he wondered. He quickly tried to put that thought out of his mind.
The chants of “Fair wages” snapped him back to a more comfortable reality. It must have been his lucky day. Local Union 539 was picketing the Kroger demanding better pay. The chants put a bounce back in his step and he sidled up to the nearest union worker.
“What’s the scoop?” J asked.
“We’re overworked. We’re underpaid,” the older woman said as she straightened her back and stood tall, her voice gaining momentum. She straightened her green vest, covered in Union buttons and said, “And we’re not going to take it any more.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” J said with a smile. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Another striker happened to overhear and said, “We’re starving. Do you think you could go inside and get us some snacks?”
J stared back horrified.
“I’m kidding.” the man said with a smile. “Relax.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” J said. “Not the snacks, but maybe I could go inside and see how it’s going. I can report back to you if you like.”
The older woman and the man looked at J and then looked at each other. That weren’t quite sure what to make of this fellow. This was their fourth strike in the last 15 years and nobody had ever offered more than a clenched fist of support.
The woman, Myrtle, guided Steve into a conference.
“He’s got spirit” she whispered. “What harm can it do?”
“What if he works for Kroger? What if he’s a spy?” Steve shot back.
“Look at those pants. Do you think a corporate type would have pants like that?” Myrtle said.
J could see them whispering; he heard “spirit” and “spy” and “pants”; he could see them tossing nervous glances in his direction. Rather than wait for a decision, he decided to argue his case a little more convincingly.
Stepping toward Myrtle and Steve, both union workers and both 15 year employees of Kroger, J explained, “I understand that you’re hesitant to trust an outsider. Kroger has burned you.” He waited for them to nod before he continued. “You’re upset and angry. But I’m not a spy. I don’t work for Kroger. When I can help it, I don’t work for anybody. You’ve got nothing to lose. Send me in there, let me poke around like some nosey customer. If I get back and you still don’t trust me or you think they’ve turned me,” he said with a wink. “Then you won’t have to listen to me. You can just drown me out with your chants. Fair?”
By this time several of the other protestors had come to listen to this curious man with his worn green pants and his coatless layered look. He looked a little like a walking Salvation Army with his mish-mash of sweaters bulging around him. All of that was set off by his blue on blue knitted stocking cap, complete with ball on the top. Yet when they looked in his eyes, the Local Union workers 539 could see sincerity in his face. The goatee, often the choice of ragamuffins, hooligans, and motorcycle riders, seemed to radiate genuiness. After a brief pause, the small collection of tired grocery workers started to shout, “Send him in!”
They watched as the walking Salvation Army walked briskly to the doors. They watched as the automatic doors opened its jaws, and swallowed their new champion. All they could do now was wait and chant, which was pretty much what they’d been doing all week. They chanted with the enthusiasm of the first day. Local 539 sensed that something was about to happen.
At first, J just strolled around the store, taking it all in. He hadn’t been to a chain grocery store in quite a while. He shopped at the Farmer’s Market when he could and frequented the local stores when that wasn’t an option. Now he found himself in the land of the processed. Aisle after aisle of consumables, sliced and frozen and fortified and mineralized. This was a monument to capitalism, an ever-changing, shelf-space to the highest bidder, spoiling food “ON SALE NOW” kind of monument, but still a monument. J knew his first priority should be the workers outside. They had lured him in here. They had trusted him for reasons even he couldn’t comprehend. They were waiting outside, but it all seemed to matter just a little bit less. J’s enthusiasm, his disgust, the fibers that ran through his body were crackling. He was in a nearly empty store filled with employee scabs. His mind reeled as he thought of all the ways that he could make a statement about fair wages of course, but also about consumer culture and the way that Kroger was contributing to society’s downfall. A tiny smile crept onto his face as he sprung into action.
This way to 12
posted by David at 3:40 AM
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