Josh had grown tired of being exiled to Siberia. It wasn't like he really needed the extra money or anything; he was selling over a hundred-lot of acid a night at the station. This situation was advantageous to me, however, since I wanted to be out of the house as much as possible and so I took over for Josh filling in on Sundays at our sister station. I thought it would be a breeze working there, as it wasn't a full service station like ours; all I had to do was sit in a locked cage all day watching television, getting high and collecting money.
The north station was run by Ted's wife, Jenny. She was almost a clone of Roseanne Barr but uglier. She had a single employee, Toad, who worked the night shifts. I had known Toad for a few years before being hired by Ted. He used to buy my cousin and me alcohol after he got off work. Toad had been a history teacher at the local high school but was fired when he was caught buying marijuana from a student.
I had been working at the home station for several weeks and began hearing gossip that Ted was deeply concerned about the books not balancing out. In fact, he was firing people in a constant stream, suspecting them of theft. It didn't matter to him that when the owner's forty-year-old son, Lee, did the books everything magically balanced out. Evidently, Jenny was equally mathematically disinclined, but she explained the problem differently. According to her, the north station was terrorized by a constant stream of dishonest customers who would fill up and take off without paying.
The Sunday shift at the north station turned out to be quite maddening. I knew I was in for a special kind of uneventful hell the first day I worked there. I had a rush that lasted an hour or so, probably right after church services had ended. After that, it was completely dead the rest of the shift. Bored by the meager offerings of Sunday television, I began reading the graffiti that was carved into the counter top with a blue ballpoint pen. Most of it orbited around a center piece of graffiti that read "ACID IS WEIRD." I realized Josh had been lucky to escape with even a shred of his sanity.
Being somewhat naive in my youthfulness, I took Jenny's word for it that the place was under attack by wretched criminals - probably bikers - filling up and not paying. I watched every customer carefully and was certain by the end of my first shift that everyone had, in fact, paid for their gas and that I had made correct change.
Astonishingly, the books didn't balance out the next day and Ted grilled me when I arrived for work at the home station.
"You sure everyone paid for their gas?" He eyed me suspiciously. Daryl and Daryl sat blankly at his post to the side of the desk.
"Yeah, dude."
"You didn't take no cigarettes and forget to pay for 'em?"
Oh for fuck's sake, "Nope." At least not two hundred dollars worth, I thought.
The room grew deadly quiet as Ted eyed me like a soldier trying to break a prisoner of war. The intensity of the moment was broken by Daryl and Daryl, who snapped from his catatonia, slammed his fist on the desk and exclaimed with intense hatred, "Maggots!" Everyone in the room had become accustomed to this behavior and ignored him as he huffed outside to the poor victim eagerly awaiting his services.
"Well, there was a big problem with money yesterday," Ted continued gravely.
"Has Lee done the books yet?"
"Not 'til tomorrow."
I rolled my eyes, immediately recognizing the same pattern I had seen at the home station for weeks. My mind responded in the only way it knew how, "basically, you're telling me your wife is a fucking idiot just like you," which was filtered, processed and repackaged by my mouth as a nonchalant "Probably just a mistake in the math or something."
I managed to successfully end the conversation, but only temporarily. As the weeks wore on, I continued working Sundays at the north station. The next day, the books would always be a mess. Ted and Jenny grew more and more anxious about the situation and managed to warp me into a paranoid mess. I knew nothing shady was going on, but I realized that it was Ted and Jenny's perceptions of reality upon which my job so delicately hinged. The last thing I needed was to be sent home - jobless again - to be put through Shafto's meat-grinder of a psyche.
The money shortages weren't the only problem with the north station. The intense boredom was also beginning to take its toll on me. There was never anything worth watching on the television and I had to be extremely careful about smoking pot, since it was basically a six-foot square coffin and the smell would linger for days. It was Josh's sage-like graffiti that came to my rescue: Acid is weird. It also made anything at all fun.
Earlier that week, I had worked with Josh at the home station and had gotten a couple of hits of blotter from him. It took every ounce of self-control I had to not take the stuff right then and there but I managed to wait until Sunday when I would once again be banished to the north station with its church-going customers and that awful green chair covered in Jenny's long greasy hairs and weird body odor.
I put the two squares of blotter under my tongue the minute I awoke that morning and got to work fifteen minutes late as usual. It was the same every Sunday, I would drag in like a wet rat while several people sat around in the lanes watching me like hungry cats as I brought out the trash cans and squeegee buckets and unlocked the pumps and finally managed to turn the "Open" sign. The impatient customers would pump their gas and throw their money through the window at me before scurrying away, no doubt hoping I would rot in hell for wasting fifteen minutes of their precious lives.
After that initial lump of customers left, I had a few hours to do nothing at all until church services were over and our one rush of the day began. Jenny kept a blue bank bag filled with change tucked away in the back of the station. With nothing better to do, I took the bag out and dumped the contents onto the counter in front of me.
My original intent had been to get together enough bills and coins so that I could make proper change without having the bag lying on the counter begging for someone to steal it. But as I poured the money out, things took on a completely different meaning. I was no longer seeing a collection of individual coins that existed as completely isolated objects. I realized that the money wasn't the image I was seeing or the scent I was smelling or the metal I was feeling. It was all of those things together. The way the coins interacted with each other, the way they transferred energy, knocking each other about, the way they spun and wobbled and rolled. It wasn't a collection of objects, it was a whole, continuous mass of movement, sound, smell, sight and interactions.
I realized I was taking my first steps on a long trip and I was ready for it.
At that moment, Travis pulled in, driving his gold Colt. He hopped out of the car, lifted his leg in the air like a dog urinating on a fire hydrant and flicked his hand in the air. I immediately lost all composure. Travis lumbered up to the window, wearing his red-striped shirt, blue shorts and high-tops, "What's so funny, man?" Travis laughed with me, even though he didn't know why.
"Travis, can you get me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?"
"What?!"
"Please?"
"Jesus Christ, Darren." Travis walked over to the store next door and brought back a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and some strawberry jam.
"Thanks, man."
I laughed wildly as Travis told me about his recent fight with his grossly overweight sister. My sandwich was a mess and I decided it would probably be better off fed to the birds. I threw the sloppy mess out the window, sending Travis jumping to the side, "Fucker!"
"Dude, I'm frying my balls off. I can't eat now!"
"Tttt-tttttttt! Well what did you want a sandwich for?! Ttt-t!"
"I forgot."
"I'm going home. You're wasted. Call me when you get off work, Dooo-doo-do!"
"Alrighty," I giggled.
Unfortunately, my encounter with Travis was going to be the best it would get that day. The church crowd wasn't nearly as ready for me as he was. I felt like I was in an aquarium and all of the multicolored cars and wide variety of people were like exotic fish swimming in and out of view as they pulled in, stopped to fill up, then left.
A light blue station wagon swam in. It was a man dressed up in a suit, with his mousy-looking wife in the passenger seat and several kids in the back. I laughed uncontrollably as it struck me that this station wagon must be the friendly dolphin, Flipper.
The man filled up his wagon then came to the window with his Phillips 66 credit card. He was a "Gold Member," meaning he cared more about his image than I did. Tears rolled from my eyes as I laughed and filled out the credit card slip.
"Having a good time?" the man smiled.
My mind reeled, I knew I couldn't possibly explain the aquarium to him. I was relieved as a thought from my childhood came to my rescue, "When I was a kid, I had a Flipper-in-the-box."
The man looked at me with a furrowed brow. I must have confused him.
"It was like a Jack-in-the-box, you know. But instead of a clown, it was Flipper that popped out and it played the theme song to the show," I burst out laughing even harder, realizing how badly I had botched this entire social transaction. "I really shouldn't be here."
"Especially stoned out of your mind," he scowled, as he snapped his copy of the credit card receipt from my hand and stomped back to his dolphin. As he started the fish, he and his wife looked back at me, frowning and shaking their heads while the children pointed and laughed, bobbing up and down like little mackerel.
Eventually, more and more sea life washed in as the rush took on full force. It was more than I could deal with. I was being attacked by mutant squid; hundreds of tentacles waved through the window holding credit cards and cash. I didn't know what belonged to whom or for how much. All I could do was laugh. Then the unthinkable happened... a cop pulled in. My mind fragmented into a thousand disjoint shards. He walked up to the window.
All at once, my paranoia and intoxication exploded in an orgasm of insanity. Intent to get rid of him, I pointed at a blue CRX that was pulling out of the station, "That guy left without paying!"
The cop rushed to his car, threw on his sirens and took off after the hapless driver like a shark bearing in on a wounded cod. I laughed hysterically even though I was shaking from the adrenaline rush.
Thirty minutes later, the officer returned, following the blue CRX into the station. Several other police cars pulled in, surrounding the car. The officer walked to the window with the young man who had been driving the CRX.
The alleged gas thief didn't seem to see the humor in the situation the way I did. "I paid you," he said grimly, staring at me intensely and biting his lip.
I failed to suppress a smile, "Oh yeah. Sorry dude." I chuckled.
The young man was escorted back to his car and left. After a lengthy debriefing among all the police officers, the original cop came back to my window and lectured me on the abuse of law enforcement resources. I didn't bother to listen to the lecture, realizing he must not have been trained in identifying a guy whose brain was frying to a crisp on LSD.
I never worked at the north station again and considered myself fortunate to have gotten out of there with my job at the home station - and my sanity - still intact. Jenny's books remained a mess for as long as she managed the station. Miraculously, Lee's calculations from my Sunday Adventure showed nothing unusual in the books. I can only imagine the horror on Ted and Jenny's faces if they knew that a damn filthy druggy stoned out of his mind on acid could do their job at least as well as they could. The effect such a thing would have on their psyches would likely keep a team of psychiatrists living like royalty on grant money.
I pitied the next poor fool who would get trapped into that shift like a fly in some exotic plant. The only thing I could offer them was a short piece of advice, which I added to Josh's own graffiti: "They call him Flipper."
Posted by DevilMonkey at 11:00 PM