Tonight a few fairly attractive girls were walking by while I was working on my aisle alone. Soon after lurches one of the older guys I work with looking around as if he is a fucking groundhog or meerkat peeping out of his whole for predators. "I'm on a beaver hunt" he says snickering in a meerkat-groudhog-weasel-like way, I can smell his breath a blend of gingivitis, bud ice 40s and old. "One of these days Ryan, one of these days Ryan, Im going to mess up and go to jail for the rest of my life because of one of these 20 year old girls", I try to play it off as if its a normal thought to have and try to muster out a chuckle. I get a pinch of laughter out which is never really too hard to do when in engaged in such a droll, but daily conversation on this job, it seems just average.
Later on I am on break with the rest of the co-workers trying to wade through a biblical flood of Marlboro smoke that could block out the sun for another breath, and another older co-worker starts in on drugs he used to do back in the day. "Weed and crank, that's eet, nowadays they have all this other bullsheet, but all we had back in the day was batttub speed and weed" I look over at the result of this less than a foot away from me and can only ogle at the man's rotting corn kernel teeth, blackened, loose and missing, extracting one more breath of smoke into his terracotta lungs, I try to keep eating and hurry through this break, but he goes on. "Yeah mang we used to give it to girls back in the day, little [indecipherable drawl].. Mang they would do anytheng, yood givum, and then yood take them out to the parking lot and getcha sum ass" I look around for approval and no one says a word, so feeling sorry for the chum I force the muscles in my mouth to give out a "shyeah thats cool" and he says "Fuckin right", I smile. He starts talking again and someone says "Thats basically prostitution," but he doesn't hear them and stammers on,"All yood hafta do is pull of your pants or bend them over," I think he meant to say AND instead of OR, I distinctly remember this being odd (well grammatically). "Then your buddy wood go out and do the same aftar yoo to these ladies." First "girls" now "ladies" I am done with hearing this and imagining the faces of these women, because Ive seen them before already on the wall of my High School nurses office telling me why I shouldn't do drugs. At this point I hear a yell from outside the room that break is over and I fucking get my white suburbanite ass out of there.
I'm really happy I wont be working overnight much longer.
Labels: Short Story
