Sam Pink - Hurt Others

It made me feel really warm and stupid.

Need to get off this train and become someone else — I thought. Someone who is a success. A fucking blue-burning comet of success ready to take others in as fuel to get wherever I’m going. Someone who dies at the moment of arrival. Someone who is missed by everyone he meets once he dies.

Sitting on the Brown Line to Montrose, I was missing somebody.

But I didn’t know who.

I had a lizard when I was seven and I put too many crickets in with him and they ate his leg off.

Maybe I was missing the lizard.

Do I miss my lizard.

I’m not sure.

I shouldn’t be embarrassed about that, if that’s true.

I should just be able to admit I’m still sad about my dead lizard.

He’s never coming back.

Yes I know.

Please come back lizard.

I’m sorry I left you alone with all those crickets.

I didn’t know they did that.

If I knew they did that I wouldn’t have done that.

The loud woman on the cell phone put her feet on the metal-pole headrest in front of her.

She said, “Hell yeah, if I was him I’d hit her pregnant ass too because she always talking. Right. So he kicked her bitchass in the mouth good, yeah? Hell yeah. Dumb bitch.”

The train announced the stop and it was my stop and I got up and so did the loud woman on the cell phone.

We walked out together, me gesturing with my arm for her to go first through the open door.

I followed her out.

And I wanted to marry her.

Wanted to get her pregnant.

When I was sixteen I knew a guy named Scott. He always had people over to drink in his basement. I would go over sometimes in the summer because it was within walking distance. Also because his sister’s friends all wanted to have sex with me. One time after not seeing him for a while I heard from some people how Scott had been drinking and driving, and how when he was speeding up a hill, he hit a kid crossing the street. Scott was seventeen when it happened and the kid was fourteen. Scott didn’t go to jail. So one night after not seeing Scott for over a year, I went over. And he told me and some other people about the night of the accident. He said he held the bloody kid’s body in his arms while they waited for the ambulance. He said the kid either died in his arms, or was already dead, he didn’t know. He said holding the kid’s body was like holding “a Twizzler.” No one said anything, but I think we were all thinking about how the Twizzler comparison made sense at first, then not at all.

I got a job as a bagger at a grocery store called “Treasure Island.”

They gave me a handbook during my orientation day and that night I sat on the floor of my room reading it.

The handbook said Treasure Island was “The most European supermarket in America.”

But the store sold the same things every other supermarket did.

Plus the employees were me (American), the manager (African American), the produce employees (Mexican American), the cashiers (Puerto Rican American), the deli workers (African American, and American) and the kid who worked the customer service booth (Phillipino).

So no one was from Europe.

One of the sections of the handbook was titled “Procedure for Cash Handling.”

I didn’t read it.

Another chapter was titled “Bagging a Customer’s Order.”

I read it.

Kept trying to memorize the tips (“meat with meat” “frozen with frozen”) but then decided to just see what feels right as I’m doing it.

Like if a certain combination felt wrong, I wouldn’t do it.

This shouldn’t be hard — I thought.

In a way, it felt like I’d been preparing my whole life.

One bullet-pointed tip read: “All soft, perishable items must be packed on the top, to avoid crushing.”

I imagined myself bagging groceries and repeating “I have to avoid the crushing” over and over not looking at the customers. And the crushing came as a low tone from inside the bags and only I could hear it. And then my boss, an overweight man named Charles, would come up to me, his thin nose covered in sweat, a Newport cigarette behind his ear, and he’d say, “Are you avoiding the crushing.”

The crushing.

Making money.

I looked at other parts of the handbook.

In the chapter about Conduct, it prohibited both “horseplay” and “scuffling” in the store, as well as “catcalls” or “any similar antics.”

Antics.

I envisioned myself coordinating antics.

There would be a lot of antics.

One section under Conduct, was “Dress Code.”

In the dress code it said I had to wear a cleanly-pressed white shirt and a tie, which I would never do unless the store funded me.

Anything required to do the job would be provided or it wouldn’t be done — I thought, feeling bad-ass.

I handled my balls and looked through the handbook.

It said your skirt had to be knee length.

I considered wearing a skirt and then suing the company when they discriminated, then when I won the lawsuit I’d say, “You can keep the store open, if you rename it: ‘The Most Not-European Store in America.’”

The handbook also stated I had to wash my hands after using the bathroom.

I would not do that either.

I never wash my hands after using the bathroom.

Never!

I flipped to a random page, feeling ready to go to sleep.

At the top of the page it said: “Who is a Customer” and it featured eight definitions of a customer — reprinted from an advice column ran a decade earlier in the Chicago Tribune.

One of the definitions was: “A customer is a person who comes to us with his needs and his wants. It is our job to fill them.”

The store was in a shitty neighborhood on the border of a really nice neighborhood.

Right by The Gold Coast.

Which meant a lot of assholes came in.

Different kinds of assholes.

Ones with money, ones without money.

The way you can be an asshole to others, that’s what makes us all the same.

My first day I had to bag a lot of groceries.

It felt overwhelming but I learned to think about nothing and just do my job.

I absolutely stopped thinking about time outside of the very moment I was in.

I’d start saying dumb shit to the customers.

Like someone would come in and buy a frozen dinner, a bottle of wine, and like, dish detergent, and I’d say, “Big night” or “What’s going on here, uh oh.”

At one point today I was putting a wine bottle in a customer’s bag and I had an almost unstoppable urge to hit the customer’s child with the wine bottle, for no detectable reason.

I wanted to just take the wine bottle by the neck, then windmill it downward onto the top of the child’s head, circle of glass at the bottom of the bottle landing hard.

A sound no one would want to hear.

Then blood.

Meat with meat.

Frozen with frozen.

Midway through my shift, the guy who was kind-of training me — a guy whose rank was represented by the fact that he got “regular hours” and “weekends off”—showed me the breakroom.

The breakroom was like, in the attic of the store, on some loose floorboard and roof beams, with a folding table and a coffee maker and a bathroom.

It was really hot.

“Shit’s hot,” I said.

The guy training me said, “It’s some hot shit.”

And we looked around the breakroom, not wanting to be the one who said anything else.

He said, “So clean it before you come back downstairs and then I can show you the freezer and the coolers.”

And he went down the open stairwell, making eye contact with me at the last possible moment his head was visible over the floor.