Another Muckin' Funday

Originally I was going to post a short story I wrote about working a temp job a few years back during the Christmas season. It was going to be the first installment in an ongoing series about various jobs I'd held (over 75 at last count) to be entitled "It Was Just Another Gig."


But work sucked a big floppy donkey dick today, so I am going to write about the one thing that motivates me get up every morning and go to work: Women. I am setting the Waybac Machine to last Saturday, when the store was graced by an extremely beautiful woman.

So, without further adieu, here is a little ditty called:

"Another Girl, Another Planet, Another Saturday Night."


I knew it was going to be a good day as soon as I heard the mellifluous strains of Sam Cooke's "Cupid" over the loudspeakers at Big Lots.


"Cupid, draw back your bow..."


One of the greatest songs of all time. Graham Parker did a nifty cover of it on Mona Lisa's Sister back in the day.


"And let your arrow fly/ Straight to my lover's heart for me..."


Yeah, nothing says Love like having a guy shoot your paramour in the heart with an arrow.


I bought a package of Maria's Gameso cookies (bread group), a bag of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky (meat/possibly dehydrated steroids group), a four-pack of cinnamon applesauce (fruit group), and two bottles of Mountain Dew Voltage (caffeine group). It was Saturday, I was filling in for Josh, and it would be the 12th out of the last 13 days that I would be working. At least Haley was working also-- I had worked by myself for the bulk of the last two weeks-- so I was feeling like a school kid on the last day of school.


It was sunny and in the 70's when I opened the store up. The parking lot was vacant and I feared it was going to be slow in the store as this was a day born for parks and backyard BBQ. We had a few packages to ship out, but for the most part it was going to be a good day to do not much of anything. A couple FOTS (Friends Of The Store) were going to be coming in, so entertainment would be free and abundant. Haley and I hit the ground running and started putting away the stacks of books that came in Friday. Friday had been a day of Romance and Mystery.


Nick showed up in his natty new Fedora, ready to do a side job for the owner: Shucking Porn. You see, we only sell new porn. It comes from a distributor in shrink wrap. We strip the wrapping off and remove the jacket from inside the fold of the case. Pulling it out slowly, we then slide the cover into a binder. Every page in the binder has a number, so we put a that number on the newly denuded DVD case. When a customer thumbs through the folder and finds something to wet his/her appetite, then we fetch the movie from storage and the discreetly slip the cover out of the folder and proceed to the checkout phase of the transaction.


Ergo: Nick's a Porn Shucker.

*


About 11:30 that morning The Mad Russian showed up. He is our resident Vinyl expert and an all-around good guy. He says he's from Brooklyn, but his accent says it's from the Eastern Bloc of Brooklyn, if you know what I mean. And I'm reasonably certain that you do. Nick is a Commie Pinko, so he and Jeff have a lot of propaganda to mull over. They are comrades-in-arms, you you could say. Hot-to-Trotskyites.


Later I'll give you a rundown, and perhaps a rubdown, on some of our other irregulars, characters like Robert, the walking Ralph Stedman cartoon. But for the here & the now I want to tell you about what happened when this particular blond came in to the store. The Mad Russian had stepped out for a bit, so I had no warning of her arrival. I was busy shipping out some books. Haley was vacuuming on the middle of the store and Nick was in the back with the porn, so this woman was able to slip into the store fairly easy. It wasn't until Haley switched the vacuum off and the store fell silent that I looked up and saw this woman.

More specifically, I saw her ass. It was majestic, like when you are driving across the flatlands of eastern Colorado and you start to see the Rockies rising in the horizon. Twas a thing o' beauty. She was standing with her back to me as she perused our Graphic Novel rack. I had yet to graphically ogle her rack, but the afternoon forecast now called for showers of attention and light drooling.

She had tight faded jeans on, and a white t-shirt. Her cornsilk blonde hair hung down past her shoulders. I gazed slack-jawed at her for a moment before my peripheral vision caught Haley, who was staring at me thinking I was staring at her. Haley looked at me quizzically, and I pointed to the blond, who was just out of Haley's line of sight. I pointed to where I was looking at and Haley peered around the corner where our store bathroom is. She turned back and gave me the "All men are dogs" eyeroll and switched the vacuum cleaner back on.


The blond worked her way back towards the front of the store and finally placed her items on the counter. She was smoking hot. You know how smoking hot actress Jeri Ryan ("7 of 9" on Star Trek: Voyager) is? Well this woman looked exactly like her.


Exactly like this:





"May I say you look more like a 9 out of 9, miss?"

I made some small talk as she flashed the roadblock on her ring finger. "Is that a real diamond, or a Dylithium crystal, miss Nine O' Nine?" She mentioned her husband as soon as there was an opening in the conversation.

She was getting some birthday gifts for him, she said. Lucky fella, like she isn't the perfect gift right there. It was clear she was as smart as she was pretty, completely without pretension or avarice, and, as I soon found out, she had a delicious sense of humor. Ten of Nine.

One of the books she was getting him was called "Bitter Grass," a screed against Marijuana written in the backlash of the Hippie movement, circa nineteen seventy-nixon. I had just stumbled across this particular book a few days earlier and saw that it bore a star next to its price on the inside page. That meant the book was posted on Amazon. It was so thin it would be impossible to find if it was filed on the shelf so I put it on a display easel. And after sitting in the store for years, the book was now being purchased. Sweet.

I told 9 of 9 that I would have to take a moment and remove the book from our Amazon inventory as to not accidentally sell a book we no longer had in stock. I then told her that we would take 20 % of the purchase price off since we had to pay that to Amazon if we sold it online. She lit up like a Christmas tree. She hadn't noticed Nick skulk behind her to perch himself against the front door. He was on the outside of it. He had put his fedora back on. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips. He looked like the spy in the movie who gets shot by the double-agent who sneaks up behind him while distracted by the beautiful dame.

I noticed all of this while I was busy keying in the wrong ISBN number on the book, providing a stall so Nick and I could savor a little of the H & the N. I stammered an apology and she said something in reply, but I heard nothing but a siren's call coming out of this perfect mouth:

I couldn't believe no one else came up to the counter the entire time she stood there. It was like there was a magical little circle around her. And the longer she stood there, the more she glowed in the natural light coming from the back of the store. The more orange the sky became the more luminous and blond she looked in contrast to every thing around her.

Goddam she was hot.

I danced the conversation around like I was Baryshnikov. She held her own in the conversation. It was great. I ran through the premise of "Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical," complete with impersonations of most of the cast. I told her she could check it out at the library, and how subversive would that be? She giggled and her straight-laced, bishop in the church, missionary-style every Tuesday husband was a million miles away, falling out of orbit with this Borgalicous babe. She was having fun.

But all good things have to come to an end. And that's what we were left with, her end, walking away after waving goodbye one last time, her bounty of greatly-reduced books in hand.

"Dude, you had her up at the counter for twenty minutes," Nick said. "You are my hero! That was fuckin' awesome!"

"All in the line of duty, comrade. All in the line of duty."

*

Later that night, on the interminable bus ride home, I thought about all the beautiful women that I've seen in the store. That I've wanted to make love too. That I am not going to be making love to. Cupid just toys with me. I'd like to shoot him with a bow and arrow. And Sam Cook, you got a lot of nerve. As a matter of fact, for the second time today, a Sam Cooke song is going through my head:

"Another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody..."

But it gives me hope for the new day. Every day the store brings beautiful women into my life: tall redheads with freckles the color of cinnamon, bosomy brunettes with eyes the color of Robin's eggs, blondes with brains and whipsmart quips.

God, I love them all.

Oh yeah, let's not forget Otto. You'll like Otto. But I'll have to tell you about her next time on...

"It Was Just Another Gig"

The First Annual Michael's Used Books Classic Parody Issue, Vol. 1

“A Congress of Buffoons”

I was almost three inches into Gravity’s Rainbow when Mr. Fineman, my employer, made a rather blustery entrance into the bookstore; the jarring sound of the bells strung from the front door made me turn sharply, forcing my stout body and keg-like arms to, in turn, knock several weighty tomes from their perch upon the antiquarian desk that doubles as our shipping area. Their fall was muted somewhat by the sudden appearance of my left food, which bore the brunt of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks like a classroom full of somnambulant freshman.

The book, itself, was leather-bound Easton Press, priced at a song: $53.96.

The other books that were sent hurtling footward were slightly slimmer volumes of equally turgid prose. Frightfully their fall from grace was compounded by the fact that I had just set a rather ample root beer float atop that particular stack, which I intended to eat after I supped on a delicious cheese steak sandwich done in the style of the Philadelphia masters.
Mr. Fineman intrusively walked around the front counter towards the shipping desk forcing me to roll my chair out of his path in order to avoid being waylaid. Curling the corners of his mouth into a scowl, he looked down at the pile of books splayed out on the dusty floor, their fine cloth covers now wearing a Jackson Pollackian masterpiece in mustard and peppers, then looked up at me and bellowed, “Where the hell do you think yer going?”
As I explained that I was merely following protocol by vacating an unsafe work area and finding refuge until my superior officer had cleared the area, I felt the effects of my sudden lurch backwards in the chair and silently passed gas. This timely event gave me the subterfuge I needed to navigate myself out of this seemingly inexorable situation.
“I smell gas!” I yelled. “Flee! Panic! SAVE YOUR SOULS!” I rocked forward to try and extricate myself from the cozy leather rolling chair, but after two vigorous attempts ceded to strategy of staying seated.
“I don’t smell nuttin’” said Mr. Fineman. He was right. The sulfuric haze that rippled through my Corduroys (ah, Cor Du Roy—the Fabric of Kings) was already beginning to lose its pungent bouquet. “Well, didja at least get all the packages shipped before da’ post man got here?”
“Well not exactly, sir. I had some quality control issues that had to be rectified before I…”
“I don’t care what you had to rectalfy,” Mr. Fineman hissed, “how many of them friggin’ books did you ship out today?”
“Numerically, the answer would be zero,” I replied slowly, wanting to savor the pocket of mustard I discovered tucked in the crook of my mouth. “I had not completed my first quality control assessment yet.”
“Wha?”
“Quality control assessment, sir. In all honesty I cannot ship an item out until it reached the standard set by this store’s very name: “Fineman’s Fine Used Books.” Because,” I said, lowering my voice to sotto, “quite frankly sir, some of these books are in less than fine condition.”
His eyebrows knitted a quilt of bewilderment. Undaunted, I drove my point onward like Patton through Palermo, “I didn’t ship anything out because I need to wade through this dreck and drivel before I can judge whether it is of fine enough quality to forward on to our beloved patrons. I would need some assistance, a secretary of some sort. And butler. There is a lot that need to be buttled around here. Why, look at this place…it’s positively ramshackled!”

[To be continued…]