Frustrated, nervous, and a little ashamed,
Roxy
June 26, 2012
Dear Everett,
I’ve been waiting to tell you about my meeting with Dirty Steve but you never seem to be home. (Where are you, anyway? I mean, you can’t have that many dog-walking gigs. Do you have a girlfriend and you just aren’t telling me?) Since you REFUSE TO GET A CELL PHONE, I can’t even text you about my meeting. So instead of waiting and waiting, I’m going to write it all down for you while the glory is still fresh in my mind. I made my way to Dirty Steve’s tiny windowless office, where I found him with his feet up on his messy desk. His gel-spiked hair gleamed under the fluorescent lights. I had barely sat down before he started rambling.
“You don’t know about my life,” he said. “It’s so stressful. My advice to all young men is to never, ever fuck a girl too good. You do that, you can’t get ’em to leave you alone. It’s killing me.” He paused enigmatically, as if hoping I would press him for details or reveal that I myself am actually, despite appearances to the contrary, a young man and one in need of sexual guidance. “Anyway, we need to talk about what happened yesterday,” he finally said.
I made my face blank and stony—the Hindu goddess Durga meets PJ Harvey after a rough night. I never should have sworn at a customer! If he fired me, I’d be totally fucked. I need this stupid job. I need the benefits and the crappy pay. Without them, no way will I be able to make my mortgage. But no matter what happened, I promised myself I would not let Dirty Steve see me cry. “I made a mistake,” I said. “I should have been more polite. But that woman was seriously unhinged.”
He held up a hand to silence me. “I’m going to have to suspend you,” he said. “I would say effective immediately, but Groken and Numnuts called in sick. Sick from sucking each other’s dicks.” The last part he said almost as an aside to himself, and one that seemed to cheer him. One of the highlights of Dirty Steve’s sad life is raining politically incorrect and wildly offensive abuse down on his employees. (As much as I mostly hate Dirty Steve, I respect him for being a sort of one-man holdout against corporate culture. Since he started as a bag boy at the original Whole Foods location in the early nineties, he and his ways have essentially been grandfathered in. He’s worked here so long no one has the heart/balls combo necessary to fire him.) “Also, Larry isn’t coming back.”
“Wasn’t he supposed to be done with PharmaTrial last week?” I asked, worried.
“He called and told me he has some kind of permanent kidney damage from whatever drugs they tested on him. Now he’s on dialysis or something.”
“Fuck,” I said, saddened another good one had fallen prey to the PharmaTrial lore. Everett, you were the one who first told me about poor Robert Rodriguez and how he went—broke and unknown—into a month-long drug trial for the big, bad pharmaceutical company PharmaTrial. During his stint as a Big Pharma guinea pig, he wrote the screenplay for “El Mariachi” and came out with the $7,000 he needed to film it on a low budget in Mexico. You were always so enamored by the story, and you aren’t the only one. Every local Austin artist who goes into PharmaTrial convinces himself he’s going to be Robert Rodriguez #2. It’s sad to me that it’s one of Austin’s most enduring and widespread fantasy myths—it’s a dangerous one! As much as I want you to get a job and a substantial income stream, I hope you won’t succumb to this stupid myth. Hopefully by opening my home to you in your time of need I’ve prevented you from doing something so desperate!
“Your sadness for your coworker’s idiocy doesn’t change the fact that you’re suspended,” Dirty Steve said.
I stood up. “Well, I quit.” I held my head high like Nefertiti or Patti Smith—a regal queen unaffected by the petty decisions of common men.
“Seriously?”
I savored Dirty Steve’s surprise for an all-too-fleeting moment. “I have a mortgage and two pets,” I said. “Of course I’m not quitting.” I tried to maintain my sense of nobility when Dirty Steve held up his hand for a high five.
“Good talk,” he said.
“How long will I be suspended?”
“A week?”
“Are you asking me?”
“No. I’m telling you. Seven days off, no pay. After you finish this shift.” He paused. Something about his face looked sort of unsettled and indecisive.
“Damn,” I said. “Okay.”
I turned to go, my mind already churning about the lost income. I was at the door when Dirty Steve called out, “Wait a sec! Look, my June resolution is to lie less. You’re fired. But I really need you to work this one last shift, okay? It’ll beef up your final paycheck. I know you need the money.”
“Fired?”
“I was going to tell you at the end of your shift, you know, so you’d stick around for it.”
I groaned in outrage and stormed out, but in a way that indicated I’d stay. He was right—I desperately need the money.
So I mustered my pride and went down to assume my position behind the deli counter. Luckily, Annie was there to listen to my outrage, looking gorgeous and statuesque in gold hoop earrings, her natural Afro in two big puffs.
I hope you meet her soon, Everett—she’s been a stalwart friend since we met during our volunteer shift at Austin Pets Alive! over three years ago. And actually, I have a confession to make: I met Annie only a short time after our breakup, and, amicable as it was, I still felt compelled to process some of the things that annoyed me about you, which is how I ended up telling her about your tempoary bout of erectile dysfunction brought on by your anxiety that hackers would film us having sex if I left my cell phone on the nightstand. I’m sorry, Everett. I know I swore to you I would never tell another living soul, but disclosing harrowing secrets about past relationships is one of the critical ways girls bond.
“This might be the kick in the ass you need to find something better,” Annie said. She paused. “I have to tell you something.” She gestured at the ceiling, toward the fifth floor of Whole Foods where all the corporate offices are housed. “I got the job as Topher Doyle’s assistant.”
“Holy Jupiter!” I exclaimed. “Congratulations! When do you start?”
She looked at me sadly. “I hate to say it. But this is my last day in the deli.”
“Really?” I said, and I couldn’t keep the melancholy out of my voice. “I mean, I’m happy for you, but really?”
“Really,” she said. “But look, I’m going to use my new position to really push a strong animal-rights agenda. Whole Foods tries to be conscious about animal treatment, but I think if I have Topher Doyle’s ear I can really make some serious changes that will improve the quality of life for millions of farm animals. If I play my cards right, I could convince him Whole Foods should only sell eggs from free-range chickens. And not fake free range. I’m talking chickens with room to roam. And if I could convince him to make a multimillion-dollar tax-deductible donation to PETA every year, they could expand their federal legislative agenda.”
She went on and on, talking animatedly through her goals, waving her arms to emphasize her most important points. That’s Annie for you. Energetic, passionate, a badass to the core. She hasn’t even started her new job and already she has a plan for how she’ll use it to begin an animal-rights revolution. “Great, I’m fired for covering your shift. You’re moving to the fifth floor to save the world,” I said. I was sulking a little. I couldn’t help it.