“We Should Close”
88-page long, quarter sized zine about working in a record store. Complete with silly good times and tales of weirdo collectors of vinyl. Comes with its own playlist on YouTube or Spotify. Only $3!
It’ll be available soon, and I’m STILL sorting out an online store-front. So if you want a copy right away, shoot me an email. weirdodujour@ proton.me
A handful of years ago, I was working the morning shift as a kitchen grunt in a little roadside eatery. That’s where I learned about the underbelly deals that are part of the restaurant business. Work would start at 4am, and it would be the lead cook, myself on prep, and a dishwasher. The three of us making dick jokes and banging pots and pans together like cymbal monkeys before the sun rose and all the deliveries would arrive. The restaurant owner would roll in around 10, look over receipts, and have a meltdown about the prices, especially in the slow season. Restaurant depot, linens, bread, produce…it would hit the fan. Holler and a’shout about hemorrhaging money, and sometimes in the most frenzied tantrums, equipment would get tossed around the kitchen. One time, a knife was chucked at my head for accepting a pallet of eggs that had increased in price by a dollar. All the knives were dull because we hadn’t sent them out for a sharpening service to save a buck after the holidays. Yet it was thrown with enough force to stick in the wall, a foot from my face. The cook rushed me out the door. Sending me down the street for a pack of cigarettes to calm things down and clear the kitchen out without my safety being on the line.
Linen prices always go up in the winter because of rugs catching the slush from foot traffic, so our rag consumption had to go down. Somehow, the cook had figured out a deal with our linen delivery guy. Talked the fella into fudging some numbers and hooking us up with a couple extra bags of rags and aprons in exchange for 6 Vicodin. The cook was pretty run down physically, as a cook in their late 50’s is bound to be, and the VA would over prescribe painkillers. A means of shutting up old vets with aches and pains. So our cook developed a habit of using his surplus of opioids to negotiate deals with certain individuals that lived on the seamy side of life. The linen guy was what you’d consider “squirrelly.” Lanky with a pocked complexion and 5-mile stare that’s associated with long periods of incarceration. I had made a point not to find myself alone in the dining room with him. He’d get so excited about his exchanges with the cook and sometimes ask for cigarettes, too. Often, I wondered if he was eating his handful of pills and cruising the streets in his linen van, higher than a kite.
Then there was the bakery delivery. Bread prices went up at the beginning of every year. Same company. Same practice. The delivery driver on our route was a pudgy man with crooked teeth. He had a wife and grown kids and just so happened to have a little crush on the cook. I watched the two of them flirt endlessly, twice a week for months and months. When the owner hit the ceiling about bread prices one January, the bread truck started coming more often. But not always with bread for our restaurant. The delivery man would pull into the back alley, shut his lights off, and just sit there. The cook would take his apron off and tell me to go up front and keep an eye on things while he’d disappear out the back door with no coat on. Sometimes, the dishwasher and I would stand at the back door and watch him stroll through the snow and get into the truck, where he’d stay from 20 minutes to half an hour. After a bit, he’d come back inside with a dreamy grin on his face and light up a cigarette inside the kitchen. He’d lean like a smitten school girl on the prep table, puffing away on his menthol 100 with a certain glow to his face.
“He’s bringing an extra rack of rye bread next week. I want to run a Reuben special on the weekend.”
When an actual bread delivery would happen, the driver and the cook would make eyes at one another, giggle, and once I watched the cook pinch the driver’s butt. Up until that point, I didn’t really know what was going on as I was young and simple, just starting my kitchen sentence. Once I figured it out and asked the cook about it, he told me to keep my mouth shut because it was the one thing sparing me from being a human butcher block when the knives started flying.
I took note of his warning and never said anything about his deals of pills and sex, until now… with this story.
It felt like centuries had passed by my cave before I emerged pale and pink-eyed from
whiskey and song; but the outside world and everyone in it was just as disappointing as they
ever were.
Fuck this city.
I traveled the endless cracked sidewalks of a shitty neighborhood, covered in smashed
tequila bottles and pornographic chalk drawings. A salty shuffle down a glittering path of
remorse and the whole time I’m crying under my black aviator glasses.
Walking around and crying.
It had been a weird day—after an even weirder night.
Several cans of RC were consumed to remedy the best/worst emotional hangover I’ve
encountered within a burning inch of memory. Most of that morning was spent scrubbing off all the sharpie X’s on my arms. I had held my brother down and scribbled them across his cyclist calves too. Intoxicated punk rock Voodoo rituals, I’m sure, just like throwing flaming matchsticks at one another. At this rate, we’ll surely kill ourselves before Halloween.
Well who the hell knows, man?!
The world may never know and God Damn I’ve been drunk a lot.
I was just so happy to have a few days off in front of me that I never bothered to look at a
clock or put the bottle down. Every last one of us pulled up our britches by studded belts
missing teeth and moved onto other dive bars. New mud holes, new shit spoons, and alters of watered-down liquor bottles to pray at. Burning through every poor-to-hip neighborhood from the South side on up, trying to find a place of our own. We sank every dive between here and there that had its moment of catching on just to fill the empty space in our heads and make us feel like we were part of something again.
The ghosts on those walls had a language that caught the beauty and viciousness of ordinary
talk. The plain-speak of thieves, vets, addicts, and terminal disciples that shave in the gutter.
Talk that has a fine, incisive, and dramatic tone to it. And we clung to those words like high
school hangers-on that never made it out of their hometown. Never noticed all the beautiful evenings we wasted in stuffy bars. Never considered that you’d end up on the floor after rocking on loose bar stools with loose women and air guitaring to Bad Company on cue sticks.
I might as well have been God Damned Ed McMahon, handing over my whole paycheck to a different bar each week. And in the morning, only the matchbooks and re-entry stamps will remember where I’ve gone.
There is a point for every old tavern when all the geriatrics start dropping off like flies. Lie
down and die from snuff and rotten livers or they quit drinking on doctor’s orders and hen
pecks. And then our generational blahs invade. Those soldiers of cool and idolized white trash that have fucked up one too many times in the night club district and consistently whined about
bumming smokes.
Fixies for Trixies, Wugazi, and “Jaymo-soco, bro.”
High fives for low lives, blood guts and fire trucks.
Feeling fired and inspired.
A/A propaganda, Buddhism for dummies, and Dharma Bum squat cults pushing up Daisy
Cutters.
Most are waiting for the moment when you stop talking to go on about their own
lives and it’s always a piss and moan twist and shout. Too many overusing the word “like”
and deploying fat jokes at their own expense. Even a polite laugh was a trap.
And here I was in my third decade feeling like a thing from another planet. Only capable of
relating to half humanoids that made careers of singing about isolation like Mark
Mothersbaugh or David Byrne.
So you move on. You move on because they’ve filled every booth and bike rack. Even the
can overflows with their top 40 hits. How cruel fate’s hand is when she puts a dollar in the jukebox.
Trapped in our own personal Hell of a spinning room, the night will roll upon that “break
down” hour. I told the truth and dispensed otherworldly advice, slurred and running to new
depths in circles and circles. Chasing its own tail and carving a gigantic ‘O’ into our brains.
Secrets and sins confessed. Discord, Manipulation, and Girlfriend Island.
These are truths channeled from another realm entirely. Some Shamen can unlock things with tortuous physical acts like sweat lodges or sun dances. Us scumbags consume our weight in cheap beer. So there are no longer arguments about the secret of life. Pretty sure we got it figured out…as long as we are able to find a pen to write it down before it’s forgotten.
Maybe it’s no secret at all.
Winter never fails to turn to spring.
The sun never fails to rise and shine an unflattering light onto our faces.
Hangovers get harder and every morning we notice pasty beer bellies dotted in bad stick n pokes, hanging over screaming hems. Cigarette lines scratched into lips and eyes and coal and makeup smeared across sunken cheeks. Another 7am Sunday morning glimpse into the future where we still lack any sort of direction. Errant ambition.
We could easily just drink away the rest of our youth…
Never giving up the dope, the wine, the stage, or measuring out insomnia through Nick at Nite TV shows, even after the landlord fixes the gas leak.
Under fed and overgrown from bad habits and characters into cardboard caricatures to hang on oily walls. Another brood of seasoned barflies that will live and die by law of the taverns.
-Originally Published in Wonderlust Literary Zine 2015