I tried to calm her down by feeding her Honeycomb, but it didn’t work. It turns out that goats hate Honeycomb. To my palate it’s pretty close to Cap’n Crunch, but Jeffrey Timmons disagreed. After eating just a few, she actually refused them. I was amazed. After all, goats will eat license plates if you don’t stop them. I guess it doesn’t say much for Honeycomb.
Jeffrey was clearly off her game, and I was freaking out. We were moments away from entering the circle for the competition. The other goatherds stood with their goats calmly by their sides; Jeffrey paced back and forth angrily and refused to come to me when I called for her.
I didn’t know what to do and went into a near-catatonic panic. I stared straight ahead, and when one of the girls at the barn told me to get ready, I couldn’t even answer. Luckily, my stare locked onto a solution I hadn’t even thought of.
I quickly ran down the hill to the fir tree Jeffrey liked chewing on. She had stripped all the lower branches, but luckily, I am taller than a goat. I tore off a few branches and ran back to her. She devoured them, and miraculously, it calmed her down.
“You ready?” I asked her. I petted her, squatted down, and looked her in the eye.
When I walked back toward the other competitors, she dutifully followed and stood by my side.
Then we entered the circle—a low fence surrounded by spectators—and did a lap with the other competing pairs. We stood in our spot until the judge instructed us to walk across the pen and back. I had no idea how this was supposed to work, but Jeffrey did. When we got to the end of the pen, I awkwardly turned, but she stood still and looked at me. I realized that I was turning clockwise, toward her, and if I did, we’d bump into each other. Jeffrey waited for me to realize my mistake. I paused and turned counterclockwise, and she turned away from me. We completed our circle and triumphantly walked back together.
The other competitors took their turns. The judge walked around the circle, sizing up all of the competitors. He walked to one pair and handed them the blue ribbon. The crowd politely applauded.
Then, he walked up to Koko and spoke with her handler. Unfortunately, they were a few spots in front of me, so I couldn’t hear their conversation.
Please, not Koko, I thought to myself. Any other goat, but I don’t want Jeffrey Timmons to get beat by Koko. I don’t want to get beat by Koko.
The judge smiled at Koko’s handler. Then, he turned and walked toward me.
“How have you liked your semester?” he asked me. I was stunned to be in the running.
“It’s been great,” I said. “I’ve really bonded with my goat, Jeffrey Timmons, the World’s Foremost Goat.”
“You know she’s a girl, right?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I answered. “I named her before I knew we only worked with females.”
He smiled and asked, “What’s the most surprising quality of Jeffrey Timmons you’ve discovered in your time at the barn?”
I thought long and hard. Then, I lied.
“Her relationship with her children, 5226 and 5227,” I answered. “I assumed before I started that goats didn’t have much personality. She’s very affectionate with them, which I didn’t expect. There’s real emotion in these goats.”
He nodded, impressed. While on some level I did believe in what I said, I knew he would have thought I was a complete maniac if I had given him my real answer—“She’s a really good listener.”
The judge then stepped back to the middle of the circle. He looked toward Koko. Then he turned and looked at Jeffrey Timmons, the World’s Foremost Goat.
Finally, he stepped toward us, and he handed me the red ribbon.
We had placed second in a low-stakes competitive goat show I signed up for as a joke. I stood and smiled at the judge. Just under the surface, I was freaking out. It’s fair to say that winning this goat show was the greatest athletic achievement of my life. Externally, I was some idiot standing next to a goat way too early on a weekend morning. Internally, I knew what Aaron Boone felt like when he hit that home run against the Red Sox. I knew what Larry Johnson felt like when he hit that four-point play in the play-offs. I understood the thrill of achieving great heights, even though my great heights sadly involved standing in a small wire circle in the middle of a field while fifteen to twenty apathetic weirdos stood around fairly wondering why a goat show would even take place on a college campus.
After our red ribbon performance Jeffrey and I went on to the winner’s circle. Here, the two best goats from each preliminary round faced off. The competition was fierce; some of the seniors from Cook had been working with their goats for all four years. This time, Jeffrey and I didn’t place.
It didn’t matter to me at all. We’d won. Because even while we had our asses handed to us in the winner’s circle, I still had the privilege of looking out over the fence at Koko, who was now running around the field behind us head-butting the other loser goats.
“We’re the worst of the winners,” I said quietly to Jeffrey Timmons. She gently bumped into the side of my leg as the judge walked by. She looked up at me. I can’t be sure, but I think she felt the same quiet pride I did.
Then, she shit everywhere.
My Lows at Loews
If you hate yourself with a passion but are too much of a coward to commit suicide, I highly suggest you apply for a job at the Loews Cineplex on Route 1 in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
I was hired to work there the summer after my freshman year of college, and I immediately realized two things that spelled doom for my prospects of survival. The first was that the employees there had a built-in social scene. They hung out after work, acted chummy on the job, and made it clear who the cool kids were. The second was that I didn’t have a chance of being included in that scene at all.
“Hey, Lynne, you doing anything tonight?” I was pouring butter into a dispenser when I overheard James, one of my assistant managers, inviting Lynne, a blonde sex addict who was filling popcorn bins, out for the evening.
“Nah,” she replied. “Are people doing something?”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a house party at Ray’s place. Probably starting up at like ten or eleven. You should definitely come.”
“I’ll go,” Lynne said. “That sounds like fun.”
“Cool,” James said. He turned toward the area where I was working.
“Erik,” James called out, “you should come too. And Marcus, definitely swing by if you’re down.”
Erik was on one side of me, Marcus on the other. No one even pretended it was uncomfortable to ignore my existence. It was a caste system, where every other person I worked with was in one caste and I was the lone member of some reviled lowly tribe.
Sadly, this experience was not completely unfamiliar to me. I would say that about 80 percent of the time, people’s first impression of me is something along the lines of “Oh, I get this guy. He’s nice and funny and completely nonthreatening. I like him.” Unfortunately, the other 20 percent of the time, the reaction I inspire is one of hatred and a desire for annihilation. No mercy, no remorse.
At Loews, nearly the entire staff reacted in the latter fashion.
To be fair, two people did talk to me. One was a kid named Ayale who spoke to everyone, because he was a born-again Christian and was constantly trying to convert anyone willing to hear him out. In normal life, a conversion-hungry born-again is someone I would have avoided at all costs. But my sense of isolation was such that Ayale became a confidante. I even started offering him rides home after I found out he usually walked miles to his apartment in Highland Park each night after our shift.
“Ayale, you want a ride?” I shouted out my car window one night as he began his trudge up Route 1. It was late, after 2:30 A.M. We’d been held after that night as punishment because someone had poured excess butter into the drain of the soda machine rather than placing it back in the bottle to be reused the next day. That person was me. In my view it had been an act of protest against the cinema’s policy of reu
sing melted butter day after day. For my coworkers it was simply another reason to hate me even more.
“Sure, man,” Ayale said, jumping into the car. “You a good man, Chris. You a good man. Jesus would like you.”
“Oh, uh, thanks,” I replied. “I can’t believe they kept us so late tonight.”
“Yeah, they be working us hard,” he answered, his creepy, unceasing Christian grin directed toward me. “But hard work is good now, man, because in the next life it definitely gonna pay off.”
“Oh. . . . Right,” I said, turning onto his block. “Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, dude. I’ll be the one no one’s talking to.”
Instead of getting out of the car, Ayale stared deeply into my eyes. If he wasn’t a born-again, I would have thought he was coming on to me. Although, in the context of his world, I guess he was.
“Chris, man, you funny. You really funny. We should hang out,” he said. Then, he did his best to sound nonchalant. “You should REALLY come to church with me.”
I pretended not to hear him, lightly nodding along to the music in my car as he maintained eye contact.
“You should REALLY come to church,” he continued. After another pause, he reiterated it with a simple but forceful “REALLY.”
Again, I simply chose not to react, and instead maintained the body language and facial expression of someone who hadn’t heard the same invitation three times in a row. Eventually, Ayale got the message and sauntered out of the car, thanking me multiple times for my charity in giving him a ride.
That exact exchange happened between Ayale and me at least seven times during my summer working at Loews.
The only other guy who talked to me at work was Rhoderick, an immigrant from Ghana who was the nicest man I’d ever met. He was simply so happy to be there, working. He would cover anyone’s shift, giving it his all, a smile always emerging from behind his bushy, graying beard. Whatever atrocities he may have faced in his home country, this pit of hell that was the Loews Cineplex was obviously heaven in comparison.
One day I had to work the early shift, and when I showed up at the theater, the doors were still locked. The only other person there waiting for management was Rhoderick. He was sitting on the curb in front of the main entrance, whistling to himself.
“Jeez, Rhoderick,” I said as I approached him. “I thought I was here early.”
“Man, I been here for an hour,” he said, smiling. “I like to get up early, yeah? Just walk around, breathe the air. Listen to the birds. The sunlight . . . it’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, dude,” I said, pausing a moment to look around. “Yeah. I guess the sunlight is beautiful.”
“In my country,” he said, “it was hard to remember the sun.”
As with many things Rhoderick said, I chose to allow it to sit unexplained, knowing that any elaboration would replace the vague semi-hilarity of his statement with the brutal realities of whatever that statement meant.
Ayale and Rhoderick were outsiders in their own respective ways, the only people close to my lowly depths in the society of Loews Cineplex. Aside from my occasional conversation with them, my shifts at Loews were spent in almost complete social isolation. I certainly didn’t win myself any points with the staff or my manager the night I nearly got myself fired and the theater sued. Late one Saturday, a friend and I went to see the Omar Epps/Taye Diggs vehicle The Wood. Neither of us had any particular interest in seeing the movie, but since we were poor and since I got two free tickets through work, we went. The theater was completely sold out, filled mostly with people from Staten Island who came over the bridge because our theater had an awesome sound system.
About halfway through the movie, there was a ruckus. I turned to see two women yelling at each other about halfway up the stadium seating.
“Bitch, mind your business,” one woman shouted, “before you get yolked up!”
The other woman lunged at her. Her man was barely able to hold her back.
“Bitch,” she shouted. “Don’t be telling me what the fuck I can and cannot do.”
The first girl responded by picking up her extra-large-sized soda and throwing it into the second girl’s face. The women simultaneously broke free from the men who had been attempting to hold them back and went at each other. Rather than trying to reestablish control, both men reacted by brutally fist-fighting each other right there in the seats. The position they were standing in was perfect for projecting the silhouettes of the tops of their heads onto the screen, providing all in attendance the rare pleasure of watching hair-pulling, punch-throwing shadows share the screen with the charming and talented Mr. Taye Diggs.
One of the men bellowed, “Bitch, that’s why you’re wearing my soda,” and the entire theater erupted in applause for the insult. The roar of the crowd only fueled the fighting spirit of the two couples, and eventually they tumbled down the aisle and out the emergency exit beneath the screen.
At that point, I went back to watching the movie.
On Monday my manager approached me, baffled.
“Chris,” he said, “is it true you were in that theater the other night when a fight broke out?”
“Yeah . . . ,” I answered, not sure what he was getting at. It was rare for a manager to talk to a lowly floor worker. Usually that was left to the assistant managers. Besides, I was busy trying to restack Goobers during another shiftlong stint of being treated like a leper.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” he asked, raising his arms up in disbelief.
“I wasn’t working that night,” I said. “I was just there watching.”
“But you couldn’t do anything?” he asked, truly unable to fathom my reaction. “You couldn’t even come get someone who was working?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess I didn’t think of it.”
“Chris,” he said, shaking his head with genuine sadness in his eyes. “They went out in the parking lot and fought with knives.”
The sad truth of the matter is that I neglected stopping a knife fight mostly because I was happy to get back to watching the movie. This was in spite of the fact that I wasn’t too into the movie. It was the principle of the thing. I’d like to think that I’m the type of guy who steps up to the plate and intervenes in such situations. But I also know that I spend a majority of my time in my own world, and when I was nineteen years old it never would have occurred to me that preventing a fistfight is just a good thing to do whether you’re on the clock or not. Still, that incident qualifies as only the third-lowest moment that happened to me during my tenure at Loews.
For all the downsides, the one perk of working at Loews was the gracious opportunity to see movies for free. During the summer of 1999 that single perk nearly made up for everything. Because when it came to movies, that summer was a nerd’s dream. It was the summer The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, and a number of other hot movies came out. But above all else, it was the summer of Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace.
I was nineteen, so I wasn’t old enough to go to bars. I had no money and very few friends. Seeing movies for free was a saving grace that gave me something to do at night.
That was how I wound up seeing The Phantom Menace thirteen times in the theater.
My entire summer was spent watching that deplorable relaunch of the Star Wars franchise over and over again. I stopped after viewing thirteen only because my behavior that day has led to emotional scars that cut deeper than most people’s hatred of Jar Jar Binks.
At some point during the movie, I realized that I was hungry. Unfortunately, while the theater offered free tickets to employees, it did not offer food or drink. Considering that I was broke, I was shit out of luck. By this point The Phantom Menace had been out for a few weeks, and word had spread that it was unwatchable. I was there for an afternoon showing, and was entirely alone.
As I sat in the theater, my hunger continued to grow and my mind began to wander. I knew who was on duty, and realized there was a good chance the thea
ter hadn’t been cleaned all day. I scoured the aisles until I found a half-full bag of popcorn, which then, without much hesitation, I ate. In other words, I put someone else’s garbage into my mouth. Their grubby, greasy fingers had likely picked up and dropped a large percentage of the popcorn I was now eating. It probably would have been healthier to place the unwashed fingers of a homeless man directly into my mouth.
But for some reason, not only did I eat a bag of filthy garbage I picked up off a Cineplex floor, I didn’t even feel bad about it. My summer had gone so terribly and I had been pushed to such a point of social isolation that my descent into becoming a scavenger for another human being’s trash didn’t even depress me at the time. Not even while watching The Phantom Menace. This job had pushed me as close to subhuman as I have ever been.
Sadly, the slope was a slippery one and the popcorn had made me thirsty. I went to the garbage can and picked out an old cup. I went to the soda fountain and discretely refilled it when none of my coworkers were watching. I placed my lips onto the rim of the cardboard cup, where a stranger’s teeth marks still remained, and washed it all down with Cherry Coke.
And yet, eating and drinking garbage while watching The Phantom Menace for the thirteenth time wasn’t even my lowest point that summer.
That sad day came when I rebelled against the internal politics of Loews Cineplex in an ill-conceived act of defiance that came back to haunt me in multiple ways.
Have you ever wondered what happens to all those cool-ass posters, banners, and cardboard cutouts you see in movie theaters ? At Loews, there was a particularly spiteful assistant manager named Bassie whose job it was to dole them out as prizes for the employees. He would choose, based purely on his will and his personal feelings, who would get what. That summer, between Star Wars, Eyes Wide Shut, and The Blair Witch Project, there were a lot of cool, valuable promotional items the staff was jockeying to get their hands on.
A Bad Idea I'm About to Do Page 14
