The Job Pirate Read online

  “But I’m not even … I’m not even through the third bag yet,” I exclaimed. “There’s like five more bags to go.”

  “Then you better get cracking,” he said and returned to the store.

  Get cracking, I thought to myself as I pulled out the next pair of boots, wiped a rag over them, and spray-painted the red dot onto their soles. Get cracking. I’ll get cracking on you, Robert! I’ll get cracking on you and your stupid vintage thrift store. I’ll crack your stupid head open and fill it with these rat shit pellets.

  A big rat then shot out of the bag and actually ran up my sleeve before launching itself into the rows of cleaned boots by the wall. I fell over backwards and could only muster the energy to spray-paint the air in its wake as well as part of my glove. That was the last straw. That was all I was going to take from Ritzy.

  I got back to my feet and threw off my one glove. I was going to march right into the store and tell Robert what he could do with his stupid, rat shit job. I hoped the place was full of customers, too, so they could all hear exactly what was on my mind. But when I went to open the door, it wouldn’t budge. He had locked it—he had locked me out there in that little rat-infested, boot-filled chamber. My eyes darted around for any sign of an escape route, but the place was fortified with debris and wire at every corner. A dash of fear then mixed with my anger, and I used all the strength I had left to try and push the back door open again, but it still wouldn’t move. I felt like one of the rats trying to get out of the sack, and I bounced around from wall to wall looking for any way out. I finally put my back against the big metal dumpster and pushed it out enough for me to fit through, and a cool gust of fresh air rushed in and stirred up the dust.

  I was free! Free from that green-roofed prison cell, and free from that stupid job! And the sweet air of my liberation smelled like blooming jasmine and fast-food burgers as I stepped out into the sunlight, and several rats followed suit and skittered off to a new life away from canvas sacks and combat boots.

  But I only got a few steps toward the alley before realizing that I couldn’t just walk away without giving Robert a little piece of my mind first. He could keep the damn $15 or $20 he owed me—that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was for him to remember me. What I wanted was for him to have a permanent reminder of the aspiring novelist who had said enough was enough.

  Not wanting to circle the entire city block just to shout “I quit!” through the front door and run away, I instead grabbed the can of red spray paint and wrote my departing message in five-foot-tall letters across the cinderblock wall of the boot chamber. My lanky-lettered, crimson-colored “I QUIT”would be the first thing that slave-driving Robert would see once opening that back door to look for me. And it would be the same thing he would see every day when he took the trash out until he finally painted over it, or paid some other chump $5 an hour to paint over it. But I felt avenged.

  Then I grabbed the best pair of size 12 boots I could find and got the hell out of there. Of course, I realized several blocks later that I had left my dad’s blazer back at the store, but I considered it an acceptable amount of collateral damage for such a triumphant end to Ritzy’s Vintage Finds—to my first job.

  That night as the family gathered around the dinner table, Dad asked how my first day of work had gone. And then he asked if I had a time frame for when they were going to fly me to Paris, so Mom knew when not to include me for dinner. And without acknowledging his clever sarcasm and timely wit, I calmly explained that a good education was probably just as vital to a writer’s growth as self-sufficiency and an income, and that I’d like to go ahead and take him up on his offer of enrolling in community college.

  He smiled and nodded his head without comment. I think that had been his plan all along.

  OPERATION HOT FUDGE

  JOB #6

  8:51

  The Camaro started up like a lion cub at dawn. Which was good because I was running late—not oh shit late, just come on, come on! late. I had to make it from Sherman Oaks to Studio City—about six sporadically traffic-riddled miles—in just under 10 minutes. It was doable but highly unlikely for a Thursday.

  9:02

  The freeway was a truly bad idea. I took advantage of the standstill in traffic and removed my T-tops without removing my seatbelt—just reached up, unlatched, and threw them behind me into the backseat. It was already sunny and nearing 90 degrees, which was made worse and stickier by the low-lying cloud of trapped exhaust simmering atop the fresh asphalt sea surrounding me.

  I loved my Camaro. She was a classic 1979 model with the aforementioned removable roof and an air-compressed device above the rear wheel axle that raised or lowered the entire back end of the car by several feet. She could go from gaudy hot rod (like it was now) to ghetto low-rider with just a few seconds of bicycle tire air at any gas station. And as cool as that feature was, it wasn’t even my idea—I had traded this car straight-up for my 1973 Monte Carlo, which my Grandpa left me in his will. Sure, there was some sentiment involved in the trade, and my Dad wasn’t too keen on losing his late father’s beloved car in the handful of months since the funeral … but, shit, this was a Camaro!

  And yes, it’s true, the Camaro wasn’t the most efficient car for a full-time courier to have, but it had class. It had balls. It had panache.

  9:14

  The elevator doors opened and Aldrena, the born-again Southern receptionist, told me that Edgar, the company’s lead art director, wanted to talk with me as soon as I got in. I walked into the back, through a huge bullpen of graphic artists, copywriters, and art designers darting from cubicle to office to cubicle, and found Edgar leaning against a desk nodding to a new concept for the Sniper film poster. He was a portly man in his early 40s, who looked like he would be an abusive asshole after a few drinks. I had never really spoken with him before that day—I was AdZoo’s courier and always spent my time on the road delivering ad concepts and mock-up designs to film studios. Being a courier was the life. From 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday, it was just me and my Camaro cruising the streets of Los Angeles. It was the decade right before emails and online file sharing and affordable cell phones, so things had to be delivered in person, and at the timely discretion of the driver. It was awesome.

  I grabbed a stack of papers along the way and approached Edgar from his side. “Good morning, Edgar. Aldrena just said you wanted to see me. I was …” I wiggled the papers then rolled my eyes, implying that Aldrena must have forgotten to give me the message until just that moment. She had just become my fall guy by default.

  “Oh, good. You’ve already started.”

  “How so?”

  “OK, maybe not. I need you to help out in the studio today; we’re behind schedule. We can hire a service for deliveries. We’ve got two films for Paramount, a VHS cover … and some fucking horror movie with that kid from Terminator 2 all due today. I need you working in here until it’s done.”

  “But I’m the courier. I belong out there.”

  “Being a courier is how you get your foot in the door … then you learn something and move up. This is your chance to learn something. Most people would give their left leg to have the opportunity I’m giving you. You’ve been here for close to a year, right? And you’re what … 30? You’ve got to think about your future … your future at AdZoo.”

  “I’m 21. And my only aspiration is to be this company’s courier.”

  He shook his head with more irritation than dispute. He exhaled loudly and pointed to a Xerox machine beside a table holding several stacks of paper. “You’re not a courier today. Today you’re this company’s errand boy. I need you to make forty copies of each of those stacks, collate them, and staple them into presentations. They’re our concept designs for the poster, so make sure they look good. Don’t fuck me over on this. This is big time. This is Paramount.”

  11:51

  I had been copying and stapling for damn near three hours before Edgar popped up beside me and sta
rtled me out of my automatic assembly. He was straightening his tie and looked like he had just washed his face.

  “These almost ready to go? I need to be out of here in an hour.”

  “Pretty close.”

  He picked one up and flipped through it, grimaced, and flipped through it again with a much more scrutinizing eye. He launched his head back and shouted, “Are you fucking serious?” Then he looked straight at me. “What the fuck, man? These aren’t in order!” He slowly flipped through the pages of the thin presentation so I could see. “Two, three, eight, another two I think, six, there’s a one …”

  “But there’s no page numbers—they’re just pictures. There’s no order to them.”

  “I had the stacks numbered, genius! Didn’t you see the fucking Post-It notes all over the place? They’re square and yellow with things like ‘one’ and ‘two’ written on them! That’s why I said to collate them! Do you know what the fuck ‘collate’ even means?”

  “Yes, I know what ‘collate’ means! I just didn’t think Post-It notes would have anything to do with it.” In hindsight, I had no idea what “collate” meant, nor had I ever heard the word used before. I actually thought it was a setting on the printer for richer, crisper images. Nevertheless, Edgar had taken his frustration too far by questioning a blossoming writer’s command of the English language, even if he was right. And the fact that everybody in the bullpen was now watching me getting reamed by the art director didn’t help matters much. Edgar had crossed the line.

  “Unstaple everything and start over!” Edgar slammed the presentation onto the table. “No, that’ll look like shit. Damn it! Xerox everything again and start over. And collate them this time! Page one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, staple! One, two, three, four, boom, boom, staple!”

  “See, I heard ‘collate’ on that one. Now I understand.”

  He shook his head and snarled his lip before walking back to his office. And I started the entire process over from scratch, but assembling them correctly this time. I was never one for direct confrontation—I preferred the more passive-aggressive approach to retribution. And in that near-hour of copying and stapling I devised the sweetest act of vengeance my two decades and change had ever conceived. Edgar was going to pay dearly.

  12:47

  My grin was devious and silent as I walked the stack of collated and stapled presentations into Edgar’s office. I laid them on his desk, and he shooed me away with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone.

  Edgar had no idea what was in store for him. But I did; that was why I left so cavalierly. Because I knew what was coming for poor old Edgar and his big condescending mouth. He would rue the day he chastised this company’s courier. Because I had a plan—a damn good plan. I was going to take a dump on the hood of his brand new Mercedes-Benz right before his big meeting.

  12:56

  I passed by Aldrena on a phone call and motioned that I was going out to lunch. Edgar was finishing up the project then heading straight over to Paramount studios, leaving me about 13-15 minutes to put Operation Hot Fudge into effect. I got off the elevator at the second floor, where there were no surveillance cameras, and took the stairwell down to the P2 level, where that shiny new Mercedes lazed in the corner under a flickering overhead light. I approached casually, glancing through every windshield along the way to make sure no one would be bearing witness to my act of vengeance. The coast seemed to be clear, so I walked up to Edgar’s Mercedes to scope out my “drop” angle. I had envisioned taking off my shoes and squatting with my back against the windshield, so as not to damage the car in any other way than defecation degradation. But seeing the actual distance from the sloped windshield to the hood made that theory moot—I would have only nailed the windshield wipers. I debated reversing my approach completely, where my hands would grab hold of the roof while my ass dangled over the hood of the car—what you might call a “free fall.” That seemed logical enough until I saw the faint red glow of a blinking light coming from the car’s dashboard. I hand-visored my eyes from the fluorescent above and gazed inside to verify what I already suspected: fucking Edgar had set the alarm.

  Operation Hot Fudge just got a lot more complicated, and time was ticking down. I was going to have to take this shit to the next level, and fast.

  1:08

  One bad move and the alarm would go off, jeopardizing the entire mission. Anything to do with putting my weight on its hood or roof or windshield was now out of the equation. Lunchtime for most employees was 1:15, which meant in the next seven to eight minutes there’d be hungry civilians, not to mention Edgar, all over this garage.

  I’d have to put Plan C into action. It hadn’t been fully fleshed out, but it was going to have to do. I hustled over to the stairwell, stepped in, and shut the metal door behind me. I found a 24-ounce Carl’s Jr. fountain cup, threw off the top and straw, and positioned it four inches away from the bottom step of the stairs. I held my breath for a second to silence my heartbeat and listened for any voices or footsteps entering the garage, but it sounded empty. I had to be certain—if someone opened the door, how in the hell could I explain taking a shit into a cup in a stairwell? There is no logical or even illogical explanation for something like that.

  1:11

  I lowered my pants to my ankles, spread my legs as far at the unbuttoned waistband would allow, and eased myself down until my ass rested on the precipice of the step. I used my internal eye to guesstimate where my anus was, and moved the Carl’s Jr. cup back an inch toward the step. That seemed about right. I squeezed my innards but this new squatting elevation changed my entire shitting dynamic. I was hunched much lower than my toilet at home and my waist was pinched; and that normal feeling of inner movement was nowhere to be felt. Plus, I was nervous and on a heavy time constraint, and everyone knows you can’t achieve a clean dump when there’s a time limit involved.

  But I pushed, and I grabbed the stairwell and elevated myself a few more inches, and I pushed even harder. The moving gears of the elevator hummed from behind the concrete wall beside me, and I pushed even harder. The muffled sound of a woman’s laughter echoed from the first parking level, and I kept pushing. Then finally I felt the puckered seal of the anus widen, and that deuce of vengeance eased its ugly way out and dropped into the cup with a thud. The operation was so rushed that I hadn’t even considered the toilet paper aspect, but the leaver of the cup had also left some used napkins and a wrapper, both of which worked just fine.

  I buckled up, composed myself, then retrieved the cup. It was quite heavy, heavier than I would have expected poop to be. That’s something you don’t get a chance to know unless you defecate in a cup. I slowly opened the door and peeked out; I didn’t see anybody but heard two sets of high-heel footsteps getting closer. Operation Hot Fudge was now in full bloom. I ran back to the Mercedes with the warm cup extended in front of me as far as my arm would stretch. I took one last look overhead for any cameras that I might have missed, then flung the weighty contents of the cup across the golden hood of that German automobile. It rolled briefly before coming to a halt in a crescent moon position, leaving a dotted trail several inches long in its wake. It looked surprisingly larger lying on the sparkling metal than it did in the cup. It kind of looked like a small bear napping on a frozen lake reflecting the stars overhead.

  I had a difficult time pulling myself away from the sight of it, knowing it was I who had done that. It was like something you would see in a dirty alleyway.

  1:19

  I ran back up the stairwell, got off on the second floor, and hopped onto the elevator going down. I rode it to the lobby and exited through the front doors, letting the surveillance camera capture me checking the contents of my wallet—a sure sign I was innocently going to lunch. The beauty of Operation Hot Fudge was that, for all intents and purposes, I had left documented proof of leaving the fourth floor on the elevator and arriving in the lobby from the elevator—everything in between was just lost in the works. Aldrena would
n’t remember the exact moment I left—she was on the phone—so she was unknowingly my accomplice in this operation. She was my alibi. She was my fall guy and my alibi.

  2:11

  I had had a subconscious craving for Carl’s Jr. and didn’t know why, but that was where I went to kill 40 minutes and add the factual “lunch” anchor to Operation Hot Fudge. I returned to work still sipping from my fountain drink cup just when the source of that subconscious craving for Carl’s was revealed, and I tossed the cup into the trash can just outside the elevator doors.

  Aldrena didn’t say anything as I passed her, so I walked back into the bullpen to find my supervisor Jennifer’s cubicle and hopefully retrieve a delivery order. I asked her if Edgar had made it to his meeting on time, and she said that he had arrived a little late because of my collating fuck-up as well as “something weird that came up.” But she wouldn’t go into specifics.

  She handed me a manila envelope and a pink carbon copy of a receipt, then told me to take the package to Pacific Palisades for a signature. If reality was my copilot, that would have been an hour-and-a-half delivery. But reality had never been my driving companion in the Camaro. Accompanying me on my journeys instead was a stack of AC/DC cassettes and a stash of pot in an ashtray with a false back. So, this delivery was most likely going to run out the rest of my workday.

  4:52

  The signature was obtained from Pacific Palisades without problem. I had already made it back to Studio City but found myself too stoned to return to work, so I drove around until finding a park. I read the newspaper, braided a lock of my hair, and daydreamed about being on Happy Days.

  5:35

  I returned to AdZoo Advertising well prepared to be fired and ready to quit. Edgar must have returned from his meeting by that point, and who knew how far the backlash of Operation Hot Fudge stretched. I passed Aldrena and went back to Jennifer’s cubicle and gave her the signed papers. She looked at her watch, said it was too late to send me out again, and told me to see if anyone in the office needed help until 6:00. All that meant was walk around and stay out of sight until Miller Time rolled around.