NOTE: This is the first thing I ever wrote. Ten years ago, during my second marriage, I had a shitty part-time day job at a self-serve gas station that lasted for about a year. After I left the job, I felt like I needed to make some kind of art out of the experience or else I'd feel like I'd wasted a year of my life, but I could not come up with any visual images that would convey the full monotony, seediness, offensiveness, despair, weirdness, idiocy, and sheer vulgarity of the gas station world. My then wife was a writer of sorts and when I expressed my feelings of artistic frustration to her, ending with "I wish I could write about this," her response was "Well, why don't you?" "What? You mean...just write?" I said. "Yes," she said, "just write." And so I did, since an outside force had given me the permission that my inner self couldn't, and I was surprised when the results turned out better than I expected.
Welcome Back to Cretinville
David Aronson 1996
My parents are self-employed
artists. When I was a child, they instilled in me the belief that
one should do work that one believes in; work that is personally
meaningful.
I have a gut-level reaction
of fear and disgust at people who allow themselves to get locked
into shitty, mindless, unrewarding jobs, and feel powerless to
change their lot in life. I guess they scare me because I'm afraid
of being trapped in the same situation. Despite my fears, however,
I found myself, at the age of thirty-one, working in a dingy self-service
gas station in a seedy, squalid, little piss-hole town.
For various reasons,
total self-employment as an artist still eluded me. Since graduating
from art school, I had toiled at a succession of part-time jobs,
most of them in frame shops. The work was boring and repetitive,
but at least I usually got to work with intelligent, creative
people.
As a teenager, I held
some menial, repressive, degrading blue-collar jobs, including
a mind-numbing stint in a steel factory. I fled from those jobs
in horror and swore I would never take that kind of work again,
yet, here I was, back in Cretinville.
Mark, one of my fellow
employees, was a complete idiot. A pasty-skinned man in his late
fifties, Mark was obese, balding, and wore thick glasses. With
his buggy eyes, and continual sweating, he reminded me of the
archetypal old pervert who goes to the park in his raincoat and
exposes himself to little girls.
When I first met Mark,
he immediately tried to get a rise out of me; behavior which turned
out to be characteristic of him. Mark's pathological need for
attention compelled him to provoke the customers at every opportunity
and eventually led to his getting fired.
"I'm not giving
you your cigarettes until you give me a smile," he would
say. He refused to sell customers lottery tickets unless they
walked around the counter and stood in a specific spot. If he
didn't like where customers had parked their cars, he refused
to wait on them until the cars had been moved. He flirted and
said lewd things to almost every woman who walked in the door.
It got to the point where customers would stay away from the station
when Mark was working. Complaints about him were lodged regularly,
including charges of sexual harassment.
Normal conversation
with Mark was impossible; his thought processes were scattered
and fragmented. He jumped from topic to topic before I could respond
to what he had just said and he mumbled so that I couldn't understand
half of what he said anyway. Mark consumed huge, flatulence-producing
quantities of hot dogs and meatball sandwiches and it seemed that
all of the toxins stored in his bloated digestive system were
traveling through his body and poisoning his brain. An endless
stream of babbling and muttering, nonsensical statements and half-completed
thoughts flowed from Mark's mouth. After a while, it became so
annoying that I just ignored him when he spoke.
Mark's perceptions were
often skewed and it sometimes seemed as if he lived in a fantasy-world.
For example, one day, Mark said to me, "Did you hear what
happened last night?"
"No, what?"
I asked.
"I saved the station
from being held up."
"Oh yeah? What
happened?"
"These two guys
came in to get gas and right away I knew they were trouble."
"Really? How?"
"Well, they had
long hair and, uh, they just looked like white trash."
"Oh...I see. So,
what happened?"
"Well, while one
of them was pumping gas, the other one came in and asked me if
I ever got scared working alone at night, and I told him, 'not
when I've got "Old Bessie" here.'"
At this, Mark banged
on the underside of the counter with his palm.
"What's 'Old Bessie'?"
I asked.
"You know...Old
Bessie...my sawed-off shotgun."
"I didn't know
you had a sawed-off shotgun."
"I don't."
"So then what happened?"
"They left. I scared
them off."
"Mark, what makes
you think they were going to rob you?"
"Well, uh, the
guy had his hand in his pocket the whole time."
"Oh...okay."
At this point I began
to doubt Mark's credibility. Later, I found out that almost everything
he told me about himself was a lie.
For instance, Mark told
me that his wife was dying of a rare blood disease that only strikes
people of Dutch descent, but inconsistencies in his story made
me doubt that she was sick at all. Mark said that she was too
ill to walk up a flight of stairs, yet I would frequently see
her power walking up and down the hill in front of the station.
She seemed healthier than Mark.
Mark used his "sick"
wife as an excuse to get out of working and as a way to get sympathy
and manipulate people. After Mark was fired, I spoke to a customer
who knew him. This customer told me that Mark's wife had been
"dying" for the last seventeen years. "She's not
going to live past Christmas," Mark would say. When Christmas
came and went, he would say, "She's not going to live past
Easter." I learned that in his neighborhood, Mark and his
wife were known as "the crazies."
Mark lied about his
other job. He told me that he was a press operator at a commercial
printing shop. In reality, he swept the floor and drove the van.
Mark once told me about
how he saved a woman from being raped by a black man in the subway.
"I threw a half-dollar at him and knocked him out,"
he said.
Mark was an irritating
schmuck, yet, strangely enough, he unwittingly facilitated a transformational
experience for me. I believe that angels or spirit guides can
speak through anyone or anything at any time, and one day they
spoke from Mark's blabbering mouth. I was doing a crossword puzzle
and trying to ignore Mark as usual.
"Hey, guy, I cleaned
the hot dog machine."
"Great. Thanks
a lot, Mark."
"There's some soda
there in the cooler if you want any ."
"Okay, thanks."
"Hey, you know
what's really funny? Old Bill Cosby. You ever hear any of his
old stuff?"
"Uh...yeah, I think
so."
"I've got a bunch
of eight-track tapes in my basement. I was listening to them the
other day. Man, is he funny."
"Hmm."
"And it's good,
clean humor, you know, not like today with all this swearing and
cursing. Today's comedians have no class."
At this point, I was
completely ignoring Mark and concentrating on my crossword.
"Go ahead, you
just keep your nose buried in that book," Mark said suddenly.
"I guess you're just too good to socialize like a normal,
decent person. You know, customers take offense at your unfriendly
behavior. Just the other day, I had to talk some black guy out
of beating you up."
"Fuck you, Mark,"
I said. I was fed up with him.
"Who do you think
you're talking to? You're not talking to your wife or one of your
little friends, now; you're talking to a real man. I oughtta smack
you," he said.
"Go ahead, Mark,
hit me," I said, knowing he was full of shit.
"No, I don't believe
in fighting. But I'm going to report this to Barb and it'll mean
your job."
"Oh, really?"
I said, remembering how Barb, the manager, had laughed when Mark
was going to "have my job" over a doodle I had once
left on the counter for him to see. The offending doodle contained
a penis and a speech balloon saying, "Hi, Mark." I had
thought he would get a kick out of it, but he misinterpreted it
as some kind of personal insult.
"For your information,
Mr. Self-Righteous," I continued, "I have customers
complaining about you all the time. Just today there was a woman
in here claiming that you were harassing her. She said she was
going to call the office and file a complaint"
The fight quickly fizzled
out but something Mark said had struck a nerve. He accused me
of being unfriendly to the customers and I realized that he was
right. I was letting all of the sour and unpleasant people I waited
on get to me. Many customers treated me like shit; they were arrogant,
hostile, and rude. They barked commands at me. Sometimes they
just threw money or credit cards at me without speaking at all.
Consequently, I became rather sullen. After the fight with Mark,
however, something shifted. I took the behavior of the jerk-off
customers a lot less personally and so became friendlier in general.
Barb's brother Mike
worked at the gas station. With his stubby, muscular limbs and
enormous belly, he looked like an overgrown version of one of
the seven dwarves. He was thirtyish, wore his lank, brown hair
long, and had a huge, square head which was too big for the rest
of his body.
One day, Mike told me
that he was going to the K-Mart next door and would be right back.
He didn't return for two and a half hours, and when he did, he
was obviously stoned out of his nut.
"Mike," I
said, "Are you high on something?"
"Yeah," he
said sheepishly.
"What?"
"Promise not to
tell anyone?" he said.
"Yeah, alright."
"PCP."
"Is that where
you went-to get the PCP?"
"Yeah, this dealer
I know lives near 69th Street and I Æwalked over to his
house."
"Are you going
to be alright? You look pretty fucked-up."
"I'm okay."
But he wasn't. He stood
at the lottery machine drooling and gibbering, poking erratically
at the buttons. He looked at the money that was handed to him
as if it were written in Chinese. He kept knocking things over:
the candy displays, the straws, the tic-tac dispenser. Captured
on film, it would have made good propaganda for the "just
say no" people.
After an hour or two
of Mike's chemically-induced antics, it was time for me to go
home. I left him sitting outside in front of the station in a
stupor.
When I got home, my
wife yelled at me.
"You just left
him there? What if he burns the place down?!"
"Okay," I
said, "I'll call him." I dialed the gas station. Mike
answered the phone, slurring his words like a stereotypical TV
drunk.
"Mike, is everything
alright?"
"I had to closhe
th' shtasion. Th' conshole'sh fucked up.'"
"Okay, I just wanted
to make sure you had everything under control."
The next time I saw
Mike, he looked like a football team had trampled on his face.
His eyes were tiny slits in a puffy mass of swollen, discolored
flesh. Mike's brother was responsible. He had berated Mike for
closing the station early and they had gotten into a fistfight.
One particularly witty customer insisted on calling Mike "Rambo"
for the next nine months.
After his brother beat
him up, Mike's whole personality changed. He became a model employee.
He started calling people "hon" like some old waitress
in a diner. In fact, he became somewhat annoying, giving orders
and acting like he owned the place. Nevertheless, I liked Mike;
he had a good heart.
The gas station itself
was a dingy, little brick cubicle about thirty by thirty feet.
Inside, every space that could possibly be filled was crammed
with soda, candy, snacks, motor oil, and miscellaneous other crap.
Half the merchandise in the store was left unpriced so I just
guessed at what to charge for it. The manager regularly ordered
too much soda and juice and the boxes spilled out into the store
from the back room. In addition, they were always acquiring some
new machine that had to be cleaned by hand, making more work for
me, and all the counting and tallying had to be done the old-fashioned,
time-consuming, hard way because the owner was too cheap to buy
modern equipment.
I stayed at the job
because it was within walking distance, paid a little better than
most shit jobs, and because I didn't have anyone breathing down
my neck.
The town in which the
gas station was located seemed to be nothing but one big service
garage. At least two dozen businesses devoted themselves to the
automobile: body shops, engine repair, towing, car washes, etc.
The town also boasted
a sweatshop-style yarn mill with no heat or air-conditioning where
drab, trodden-down women operated machines for slave wages. Right
next door to the gas station stood an empty, dilapidated plastics
factory. Up the street, a car wash exploited African immigrants
who could barely speak English, paying them next to nothing.
As the days passed
in the gas station, I made observations about the locals. It seemed
as if nine out of every ten males were named John and sported
tattoos. Not sophisticated, artistic tattoos, mind you, but the
cheesy, redneck kind that looked like they might have come out
of a bubble-gum machine.
One such tattooed individual
gave me the willies every time he came into the station. He would
fix me with a psychotic stare. His hands trembled spastically
when he reached for his money. I had to watch what I said to him
because he was paranoid and only needed the slightest of excuses
to become violent. He was muscular and fairly young, but his hair
and moustache were gray. Someone told me that he had been in jail
for murder and rape and digging up bones in a nearby graveyard.
He lived in the town with his mother.
Another guy practically
whispered when he spoke; his voice was barely audible. He always
seemed angry. Once, when I asked him to put his cigarette out,
he threatened to throw me through the window. Another customer,
always crabby and morose, looked like a frog with a bad toupee.
I got into the habit
of reading as I sat on my stool in front of the cash register
and some customers felt obligated to comment on the open book
in front of me. They invariably asked, "What are you studying
for?" or, "Where do you go to school?" These people
could not imagine that someone would read a book for his or her
own pleasure.
I also heard many racist
sentiments expressed in the gas station.
"This was a nice
neighborhood until the coloreds moved in."
"Black people are
all a bunch of animals. They smell."
One guy said to me, "Did you know that Indians don't believe
in God? That's right-they don't believeñ in God!"
A skinny, shriveled,
old man came in one day and asked for a pack of Camels. When I
gave him the Camels, he threw them back at me and said, "I
asked for Marlboros!"
"No, you didn't.
You asked for Camels," I said.
He started shouting and jabbing his finger in my face. "I've
lived here for seventy years!" he bellowed. "I'm a big-shot
around here! I'm the baron of Clifton Heights!"
"Oh, I'm sorry,"
I laughed, "Here's your cigarettes, your Majesty."
The most pathetic characters
were the hard-core numbers players who, day after day, pissed
away their money on the lottery. They almost never won and when
they did, it was always a piddling amount.
Tommy, a runty, middle-aged
weasel of a guy always played the same number. "I have only
one word for you--three-oh-one," he would proclaim to the
other regulars who hung out in the station. When his number didn't
come out, which was every night, èTommy would loudly issue
forth a stream of profanity. It was always the same. "Jeezis
Christ! Goddam motherfucking son-of-a-bitch!" It was his
mantra. Once, he got so angry that he threw something as he ranted,
scaring a woman who ran out the door, taking him for a dangerous
lunatic.
Tommy made use of the
services of prostitutes and he described the purchased sexual
acts in graphic detail. Once, a hooker stole his wallet while
giving him a blowjob. All his buddies thought the incident made
a pretty funny story.
My favorite regular
was John, an older man about sixty-five, who always wore a Disney
World baseball cap. He came into the station every day, without
fail, two hours before the lottery numbers were announced.
John carried a little
spiral notebook whose pages were covered with numbers written
in ball-point pen. He stood at the counter studying and writing
in the book and schmoozin]g with the other lottery players. When
I asked him what the book was for, he told me it was his system
for playing numbers.
"Oh? How does it
work?" I asked.
"Well, see, the
seven here gives you a three. The nine repeats. Six gives you
an eight..." As he spoke, he pointed, seemingly haphazardly,
at the winning numbers which were posted on a big sheet of paper
hanging on the wall. "See--threes came out here, here, and
here. Double twos gives you a nine..."
"John, I don't
see any pattern here. It all seems random."
"Look, Dave, I
told you--twos gives you a nine! Look--it's right here!"
He was shouting and gesticulating wildly.
I still didn't see any
kind of pattern with which one could make predictions, so I decided
that John was deluding himself, and since my questioning his "system"
upset him so much, I never brought it up again.
John never "hit."
He was always off by one number. "Look, Dave, I had three-eleven,
it come out three-twelve. Oh well."
John punctuated almost
every statement with "oh well." It meant something like,
"We're all powerless anyway, so why bother." He also
finished sentences with such defeatist banalities as "What're
ya gonna do?" and "I dunno, Dave, I dunno." John
was fond of philosophizing. "Dave, life's a gamble,"
he would say. My favorite pearl of John's wisdom was "You're
born, you work, you get married, you have kids, then you die.
That's all there is, Dave."
In his younger days,
John played the saxophone and piano in jazz bands. "Why don't
you go back to playing music instead of standing around in this
gas station?" I asked.
"Nah, I'm too old
for that. I don't wanna have to stay out late, y'know? Jesus Christ,
what do I need that for? If I could just hit big, just once, then
I could quit playing these stupid numbers."
The end of my employment
at the gas station came when the owner's son took over the business
and fired Mike. Mike's grungy, unkempt appearance was the ostensible
reason given. Rumors flew that Mike was dealing drugs and stealing
money from the register. When Mike went, his sister Barb went
with him.
"They've been treating
me like shit for ten years; I've had enough," she said.
We all had to start
wearing shirts and ties with the gas company logo on them.
Some jerk-off named
Joe, with the title of "District Manager" came in to
get the new manager installed. Joe was on a power-trip. He threw
tantrums and was arrogant, rude, and obnoxious to everybody. Rarely
have I known anyone more petty and childish.
On top of everything
else, he made homosexual advances toward me which included lewd
comments about the size of his penis. A regular customer informed
me that Joe had inquired as to my sexual orientation.
On one occasion, after
brooding and glaring at me for half an hour, Joe subjected me
to a Gestapo-like interrogation about a note a customer had left
objecting to Mike's dismissal. Mike had been very popular with
the customers and a lot of them never came back after he was fired.
The order from the top
was to clean up the gas station. Joe, typically, sat on his ass
giving orders while everyone else worked.
Eventually, the new
manager, Sharon, a taciturn woman in her mid-forties and Joe's
stepmother, took over. Mark, hearing about the change-over, stopped
by the station, bad-mouthing all the employees and begging for
his job back.
Meanwhile, Mike wanted
revenge. He mailed bizzare things to the gas station: gay magazines,
a wheelchair, a book on overcoming impotence. He called the main
office and told them that he had slept with Joe and contracted
a sexually transmitted disease.
Joe, for his part, decide
to institute some new procedures at the station. We were required
to tick off checklists after doing dozens of new chores, which
included cleaning the toilets after every shift. If we failed
to wear our uniforms or do any of our chores, we were given a
demerit. Three demerits was grounds for dismissal. The whole thing
was getting too anal and militaristic for me.
I refused to clean the
toilets. I told the manager that maids get paid a lot more than
what I was making. I got my first demerit.
Several regular customers
overheard Joe say he wanted to get rid of me. I figured he had
it in for me because I didn't respond to his sexual advances.
I thought about suing him for sexual harassment but the customers
who witnessed what went on were unwilling to testify in my behalf.
The last straw came
when the manager docked my pay because I forgot to turn on the
outside lights one morning. I threw my keys down and walked out.
Working at the gas station
and having to deal with ignoramuses, louts and cretins was trying.
I could say that I eventually came to have a zen-like acceptance
of the situation which turned it into a learning experience, but
I would be lying. In reality, it was a horrible experience. The
only thing I learned from it was that I needed to value myself
more and put more energy into my art career so that I wouldn't
have to work at a shit job like the gas station.