Originally published in Verbicide issue #23

I went to the mall for the job interview. “Food court janitor” it had said in the paper. That sounded like something I could handle. (I’m almost always wrong when it comes to these things.)

I ended up in a nice carpeted office. Behind the desk sat a woman, not bad-looking at all. I was stoned and had been drinking. I didn’t really want the job; I just wanted to be able to say that I’d gone down and tried to get it.

The woman looked me over and said, “Can you start this evening?”

Shit.

I had the job.
—
They gave me an apron and a little cap and turned me loose in the food court. I don’t need to describe it for you, do I? You’ve all been to the mall, right? You’ve all seen the area where everybody goes to stuff himself or herself with oozing, fat-squirting junk food? Well, this was one of those places, maybe slightly bigger than most.

It was December, only three weeks to go until Christmas, so the place was packed. It looked like downtown Tokyo or Hong Kong; hell, it looked like something out of Blade Runner or Soylent Green. Every yard, every square foot, every inch of available space was jammed with a human body. People, people, everywhere!
They pushed, hustled, and glowered; imperious, snotty, demanding. Humanity stinks, take it from me.

There were eight garbage cans, big ones, strategically situated around the place, but most people couldn’t be bothered to use them. When they were finished eating they’d just stand up and walk away, leaving all their empty cups, wadded up napkins, greasy waxed paper wrappings on the table. It was my humble task to clear this crap away, wipe the table with my handy rag, and empty the garbage cans when they got full, and since there were eight of them and the place was busier than a Brazilian slum, they were always full.

But I was not alone in my torment, oh no! I had co-workers! And a more motley collection of human debris you will never find. One of them was my age, but extremely short, a dwarf almost, and he had a walleye and moon crater cheeks. He spoke rarely, and when he did his voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a very deep shit-filled well. The other one was older, somewhere on the downside of his 30s; he looked like he’d done time in prison, probably for child molestation. He resembled the actor Eric Roberts, if Eric Roberts had been smoking crack for the past 15 years. He was skinny and high-strung. His eyes darted around constantly and his hands wiggled and flipped like fish caught on a line. Despite his overabundance of energy he was a worthless, lazy bastard. He spent most of his time locked up in the employee restroom doing God knows what…shooting speed, smoking crack, choking his chicken. He was useless.

The other two of us had to split the work. One to clean the tables and sweep shit off the floor, and the other to empty the garbage cans. It was a scramble, believe me, to keep up with the teeming, sloppy masses. It amazed me how filthy and stupid the general public could be. If they ever made an effort to actually try to throw something away and, when they finally reached the garbage cans, it was half full (and they always were), they’d simply drop what they were holding on the floor, right there next to the can. Or leave it sitting on the top of the lid, heaping up and stinking. Truly amazing.

I lasted three weeks, a miracle really, considering it was one of the most degrading and low-paying jobs I’d ever had. I ran myself ragged for that pissy little minimum wage job. And that wasn’t what really bothered me; I’d had stupid, senseless minimum wage jobs before. It was the people! The ugliness of them, all those ridiculous, rude, slovenly, ignorant people!

I do not like crowds. Give me wide-open spaces and solitude. Give me any amount of space — a room, a closet — but give it to me alone. I’m a crank, I know. A malcontent. But I am the way I am and I don’t fight it.

So I got out of there, away from the teeming anthill. I just walked away on Christmas Eve, screw it. The walleyed dwarf gave up at about the same time. He had no choice, really; without me he would never have survived out there. A cascading avalanche of garbage would have crushed him. When I last saw him he was sitting in the supply closet, scrunched in amongst the boxes of cleanser and plastic bags, calmly smoking a cigarette.

“Good luck,” I told him, “you’re on your own from now on.”

“I’m leaving as soon as I finish my smoke,” he croaked, waving his hand in small circles. He was no fool, walleyed or not.

I walked out into the food court. I had stopped working ten minutes ago. I looked around. All the garbage cans were stuffed and overflowing; trash had piled up knee-deep in mounds around them. People were standing in front of tables piled high with crap, clutching their rancid food, staring dumbly at the garbage in front of them. Surely, someone would be by to clean it up for them so they could sit and eat, right? Nope. It was just tough shit for them that night.
—
I had to go back New Year’s Eve to get my paycheck. I didn’t want to go back there, but I needed that money. I hadn’t gone through hell for nothing.

When I walked into the office, the woman who had hired me gave me a withering look of disdain and pointed to the check on her desk.

“I’m very disappointed in you,” she snarled, “I thought you were more mature.”

I picked up the check and slid it into my pocket.

“That’s what you get for thinking,” I said, and walked out.
—
Raegan Butcher is the author of Stone Hotel: Poems From Prison and Rusty String Quartet. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and has regularly contributed fiction and poetry to Verbicide since 2003. His new limited edition CD, Pale & Skinny 1986 – 1992, is now available from Scissor Press.