3:03 - 3:23
So I've worked night shifts at the University bookstore for the last 6 weeks or so. What does one do during the night shift at the loading dock of a bookstore? Until the responsibilities waiting for me this evening, the job consists two-thirds of cleaning floors, either with broom then mop on the faux-linoleum, this shiny waxed surface with little imperfections entombed under a layer of glaze, little black flecks beyond the deepest reach of an all-purpose cleaner... or a vacuum over miles of carpet, playing tug a war with power outlets and wrangling the orange serpent of an extension cord and trying not to knock down displays while traveling in circles around them. I do the offices, back storage, textbooks, sweaters and $60 hoodies, t-shirts emblazoned with the logo of my school, my dawgs, my school I feel barely affiliated with and have no desire to emblazon myself with their logo (as I realize, in cafe racer, I drink drip from a husky mug) and it is veteran's day and a guy came in to ask for a free beer and got it from the beanie-top hat adorned graybeard at the bar who may/may not have just signed a new two year lease for this "shithole of an establishment" (words of a different graybeard in discussion) and they boarded up the obama room for reasons I don't care to ask about immediately. They bury some awful artwork in the walls like rats.
The other 1/3 is spent with trash. Handling trash. Putting bags of it in other bags of it and attempting to differentiate the compost from the recycling from the trash. The fuckers who sit and waste in the cafe seem to be unaware of the posters above each receptacle that has cute little pictures of items that belong there. The aluminum cans make their home in the recycling, if empty. I spill a lot of garbage coffee on myself. I try to save plastic bags because they remind me of jellyfish in the sea. I take the trash out in a big rolling bath tub and put them in the dumpster down the street, out the back alley. Jordan told me one time he opened the back door and heard a shout of pain. He stuck his head out to he a man posted up in the sheltered doorway with a needle in his vein, and his arm dripping blood, and imagine he may have helped this man jam it in. Then we talked about addiction. Psychotic breaks. I have heard a few stories about psychotic breaks in the store. One a drunk employee mocked a slideshow memorial of the late-CEO from a year or two ago during the company banquet. Drinks and dancing occur during this event. The night maintenance team (my team) then has to clean up after but usually continues to drink, says Mat. Beer in one hand, broom in the other. But this girl is saying offensive things during the memorial, making fun of the pictures, and some other employees tell her to shut up. This turns her on to them. She gets in their face and is verbally aggressive. One man takes her drink away "I think you've had enough," and she loses it. Starts screaming at him. Calls him a motherfucker mixed in with inaccurate racial slurs and has to be detained and while being wrestled to the ground, resorts to biting people. Her co-workers astonished, the police come and she continues to fight, and some other employees leave the party sobbing for her sanity. The night maintenance crew of the time sat and watched and laughed and drank beers.
Other time happened a few days ago. A woman, the wife of a publisher who was giving a talk in the poetry section of the store, had, what I was told, a "psychotic break" and was screaming at her kids to help her make pyramids out of books all throughout the store. I'm not sure if she had a selection process for these pyramids but I know the children were too young to be able to reach above the second shelf.
Oh, tonight. I'll drive and deliver and hack the systems of sibling stores in Tacoma, Renton, Bellevue, and Downtown. and listen to french music, the sound of existential silences, rain beating the windshield, radio talk shows, audiobooks from late nabokov, vocal lessons and meditate on the night driving blackness of a moonless sky.
