Hurt Others

by Sam Pink

  The No Hellos Diet

  Person

  The Self-Esteem Holocaust Comes Home

  You Hear Ambulance Sounds and Think They Are For You

  Frowns Need Friends Too

  I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It

  Lazy Fascist Press

  An Imprint of Eraserhead Press

  205 NE Bryant Street

  PORTLAND, OR 97211

  WWW.LAZYFASCIST.COM

  ISBN: 1-936383-77-2

  Copyright © 2011 by Sam Pink

  Cover art copyright © 2011 by Sam Pink

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Bees

  Love

  Twizzler

  Thing About When I Worked at a

  ‘Treasure Island’ Grocery Store

  in Chicago, Illinois

  Socks

  Shoes

  Ryan Francis

  TV

  Summaries of Two Walks I Went on Recently

  Juliana

  Thing That Lists the Scars I Have

  Crackheads

  TRAINING

  MOONSHINE

  Neighbors

  Section That was Edited Out of the Novel

  The No Hellos Diet

  Fun

  Two Things About Living

  in Romeoville, Illinois

  A couple years ago, I lived in a different apartment, part of the same building as the one I’m in now.

  My roommate was someone I didn’t know and almost never saw.

  He was from India.

  The landlord set us up when I emailed her about needing another person to split the rent.

  Our rooms were right across from each other.

  Sometimes I’d open my door in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and he’d be standing by his door, looking out its slight crack.

  Other than that, I lived a year with him and our only exchanges were brief smiles in the kitchen while we drank water.

  I saw the inside of his room once.

  He was gone and he had left his door open.

  I didn’t go into his room but I did look.

  There was just a sleeping bag on the floor and garbage all over.

  The garbage made a steep pile in the corner of his room.

  It looked exactly the same as my room.

  Three days before the end of our lease, he walked up to me in the living room.

  I was reading.

  He told me he had just finished his PhD and that he wanted to buy me pizza to celebrate.

  He kept saying, “Ahm—do you like beesa hot? Beesa hot?”

  I knew he was saying Pizza Hut, but it also sounded like he was saying, “Bees are hot.”

  I was worried that he’d turn around with a back covered in flaming bees and then point to them saying, “Bees are hot,” in his tiny voice.

  Flaming bees would’ve been nice to look at I bet.

  Maybe too scary though.

  I said, “Yes, I like Pizza Hut.”

  He ordered pizza and we ate it, sitting very still on the couch.

  We only looked at each other once, to nod and smile.

  We didn’t say anything.

  I moved out the next day, into an apartment on a different floor in the same building.

  This afternoon I took the Montrose Brown Line train to go find out about getting a Link Card.

  A Link Card is foodstamps but on a thing that looks like a credit card.

  Someone at work told me I’d probably qualify.

  I went to the office and the employee gave me a form to fill out.

  I took the form and sat down with it and started to fill it out but then saw a magazine that was left in the sitting area and on the cover there was a weird-looking kid and I decided I didn’t want to be there anymore so I threw the form out and left.

  On the Brown Line back, the car I was in had four other people in it.

  To my left in the opposite aisle facing the opposite way, a woman talked loudly into her cell phone.

  In the middle of the car—sitting on the sideways seats—there was a young woman on one side and her two kids, a boy and girl, facing her from the other side.

  The young woman was taking pictures of herself with her cell phone, trying to look attractive.

  Her kids talked to each other.

  I couldn’t hear them because the woman across the aisle to my left was loud on her cell phone.

  “That’s wh’I’m saying,” she said. “I’ll fucking break the bitch’s face she keeps talking. Uh huh.”

  Then she stopped to listen, tapping the window with her knuckle.

  She said, “No that’s why he hits her pregnant ass—because she playing games.” Then her tone changed. More friendly. She said, “Oh man, last night Ricky was trying to get up on my ass while I’s sleeping. I passed out after smoking this blunt and he was trying to get some pussy and shit. I’s like, uh uh. Not when I’m all sleepy and shit, feeling crusty and sweaty and shit. He annoying as hell that bitch Ricky, and girl, yup, I’ma fuck his brother.” She listened. She laughed. “Ha ha, girl. Telling you this, I’ma fuck him.” She listened again for a little bit then laughed aggressively, slapping her leg and the back of the seat in front of her. She said, “Hell-ell-ell-ell no. What—what. No girl, I’m saying me and you we should get pregnant together so we can be pregnant together and shit. That’s wh’I’m saying. I want to do it with you, sto-pid. No, we always sisters and shit—she the one—what—no—she the one ain’t in the family. That bitch ain’t in my motherfucking family.”

  The train took a curve, leaving the downtown area.

  All the buildings were tall and black, lights on in random windows.

  Below, the Chicago River had the same lights in the same spots.

  All together, it looked like a really expensive toy.

  We passed the building for the Chicago Sun Times newspaper.

  We passed slowly, in a curve that maintained the Sun Times building at its center.

  The lettering on the building was lit yellow, and said, “Chicago Sun Times” in the same font they used on the front page of the newspaper.

  I heard the boy and girl talking.

  The boy pointed at the Sun Times building and said, “Wow, I want to live there, in that building.”

  His sister looked.

  She said, “You’d be lonely” in a tone of warning.

  He lowered his arm and swung his legs back and forth on the seat so his heels hit against the bottom of the seat.

  “I’d have a party in there,” he said, looking at the ceiling of the train, smiling.

  Their mom took another picture of herself, looking into her cell phone camera and tilting her head sideways a little.

  “You’d be lonely,” the girl said again.

  The boy said, “Party up, nahhhh!” and then threw out his hands and feet while still sitting in the seat.

  Their mom made eye contact with me.

  She was pretty.

  Her nose looked like it’d been broken before.

  She went back to taking pictures.

  Across the aisle, the loud woman on the cell phone said, “Aw fuck no—that bitch sitting next to you right now? Right now?” A pause. “Ey, tell me.” She listened, making a fist and putting the fist against her mouth. “Oooh I hate that bitch for real. What. No, I’ll come out tonight. Yeah I’ma go home and come out later. Girl we should get pregnant together for real. But no, I’ll break her face, fucking with me. Bitch got me off my square. No fucking games with me. Girl, I spi
ke the bitch. Suh-pike a bitch.” She laughed. Then she yelled, “Suh-pike a bitch in the a.m. or the p.m.”

  She laughed.

  She leaned forward, stomping her feet against the floor of the train.

  The floor of the train was gray, from snow and dirt.

  I stared at the color and wordlessly promised something to it.

  I didn’t know what I was promising, but it immediately felt gone.

  Everything I got I always immediately wanted to give away.

  Terrible kinds of weight, terrible colors, terrible people, all terrible weights.

  The kids were still staring out the window opposite, into the downtown area and its buildings.

  The boy turned sideways and looked at his sister.

  They looked at each other as best as they could with their winter coats and hats on.

  He said, “How high can you jump.”

  “Really high,” she said.

  He said, “We should see who can jump higher.”

  “Yeah but we can’t do that now,” she said. “Because of we’ll fall over because the train is so shaky.”

  “Yeah the train is too shaky,” the boy said, realizing he hadn’t thought of that. Then he swung his legs and the heels of his boots hit against the bottom of his seat. He said, “We can do it when we get off the train. Do you want to do it then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, we can do it then,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  The boy started chewing his scarf.

  “I’m going to beat you,” he said, smiling with the scarf between his teeth.

  “No you’re not,” said the girl.

  Their mom was taking my picture, holding the cell phone so as not to look like that’s what she was doing.

  It made me feel really warm and stupid.

  Need to get off this train and become someone else—I thought. Someone who is a success. A fucking blue-burning comet of success ready to take others in as fuel to get wherever I’m going. Someone who dies at the moment of arrival. Someone who is missed by everyone he meets once he dies.

  Sitting on the Brown Line to Montrose, I was missing somebody.

  But I didn’t know who.

  I had a lizard when I was seven and I put too many crickets in with him and they ate his leg off.

  Maybe I was missing the lizard.

  Do I miss my lizard.

  I’m not sure.

  I shouldn’t be embarrassed about that, if that’s true.

  I should just be able to admit I’m still sad about my dead lizard.

  He’s never coming back.

  Yes I know.

  Please come back lizard.

  I’m sorry I left you alone with all those crickets.

  I didn’t know they did that.

  If I knew they did that I wouldn’t have done that.

  The loud woman on the cell phone put her feet on the metal-pole headrest in front of her.

  She said, “Hell yeah, if I was him I’d hit her pregnant ass too because she always talking. Right. So he kicked her bitchass in the mouth good, yeah? Hell yeah. Dumb bitch.”

  The train announced the stop and it was my stop and I got up and so did the loud woman on the cell phone.

  We walked out together, me gesturing with my arm for her to go first through the open door.

  I followed her out.

  And I wanted to marry her.

  Wanted to get her pregnant.

  When I was sixteen I knew a guy named Scott. He always had people over to drink in his basement. I would go over sometimes in the summer because it was within walking distance. Also because his sister’s friends all wanted to have sex with me. One time after not seeing him for a while I heard from some people how Scott had been drinking and driving, and how when he was speeding up a hill, he hit a kid crossing the street. Scott was seventeen when it happened and the kid was fourteen. Scott didn’t go to jail. So one night after not seeing Scott for over a year, I went over. And he told me and some other people about the night of the accident. He said he held the bloody kid’s body in his arms while they waited for the ambulance. He said the kid either died in his arms, or was already dead, he didn’t know. He said holding the kid’s body was like holding “a Twizzler.” No one said anything, but I think we were all thinking about how the Twizzler comparison made sense at first, then not at all.

  I got a job as a bagger at a grocery store called “Treasure Island.”

  They gave me a handbook during my orientation day and that night I sat on the floor of my room reading it.

  The handbook said Treasure Island was “The most European supermarket in America.”

  But the store sold the same things every other supermarket did.

  Plus the employees were me (American), the manager (African American), the produce employees (Mexican American), the cashiers (Puerto Rican American), the deli workers (African American, and American) and the kid who worked the customer service booth (Phillipino).

  So no one was from Europe.

  One of the sections of the handbook was titled “Procedure for Cash Handling.”

  I didn’t read it.

  Another chapter was titled “Bagging a Customer’s Order.”

  I read it.

  Kept trying to memorize the tips (“meat with meat” “frozen with frozen”) but then decided to just see what feels right as I’m doing it.

  Like if a certain combination felt wrong, I wouldn’t do it.

  This shouldn’t be hard—I thought.

  In a way, it felt like I’d been preparing my whole life.

  One bullet-pointed tip read: “All soft, perishable items must be packed on the top, to avoid crushing.”

  I imagined myself bagging groceries and repeating “I have to avoid the crushing” over and over not looking at the customers. And the crushing came as a low tone from inside the bags and only I could hear it. And then my boss, an overweight man named Charles, would come up to me, his thin nose covered in sweat, a Newport cigarette behind his ear, and he’d say, “Are you avoiding the crushing.”

  The crushing.

  Making money.

  I looked at other parts of the handbook.

  In the chapter about Conduct, it prohibited both “horseplay” and “scuffling” in the store, as well as “catcalls” or “any similar antics.”

  Antics.

  I envisioned myself coordinating antics.

  There would be a lot of antics.

  One section under Conduct, was “Dress Code.”

  In the dress code it said I had to wear a cleanly-pressed white shirt and a tie, which I would never do unless the store funded me.

  Anything required to do the job would be provided or it wouldn’t be done—I thought, feeling bad-ass.

  I handled my balls and looked through the handbook.

  It said your skirt had to be knee length.

  I considered wearing a skirt and then suing the company when they discriminated, then when I won the lawsuit I’d say, “You can keep the store open, if you rename it: ‘The Most Not-European Store in America.’”

  The handbook also stated I had to wash my hands after using the bathroom.

  I would not do that either.

  I never wash my hands after using the bathroom.

  Never!

  I flipped to a random page, feeling ready to go to sleep.

  At the top of the page it said: “Who is a Customer” and it featured eight definitions of a customer—reprinted from an advice column ran a decade earlier in the Chicago Tribune.

  One of the definitions was: “A customer is a person who comes to us with his needs and his wants. It is our job to fill them.”

  The store was in a shitty neighborhood on the border of a really nice neighborhood.

  Right by The Gold Coast.

  Which meant a lot of assholes came in.

  Different kinds of assholes.

  Ones with money, ones without money.

  The way you can be an assh
ole to others, that’s what makes us all the same.

  My first day I had to bag a lot of groceries.

  It felt overwhelming but I learned to think about nothing and just do my job.

  I absolutely stopped thinking about time outside of the very moment I was in.

  I’d start saying dumb shit to the customers.

  Like someone would come in and buy a frozen dinner, a bottle of wine, and like, dish detergent, and I’d say, “Big night” or “What’s going on here, uh oh.”

  At one point today I was putting a wine bottle in a customer’s bag and I had an almost unstoppable urge to hit the customer’s child with the wine bottle, for no detectable reason.

  I wanted to just take the wine bottle by the neck, then windmill it downward onto the top of the child’s head, circle of glass at the bottom of the bottle landing hard.

  A sound no one would want to hear.

  Then blood.

  Meat with meat.

  Frozen with frozen.

  Midway through my shift, the guy who was kind-of training me—a guy whose rank was represented by the fact that he got “regular hours” and “weekends off”—showed me the breakroom.

  The breakroom was like, in the attic of the store, on some loose floorboard and roof beams, with a folding table and a coffee maker and a bathroom.

  It was really hot.

  “Shit’s hot,” I said.

  The guy training me said, “It’s some hot shit.”

  And we looked around the breakroom, not wanting to be the one who said anything else.

  He said, “So clean it before you come back downstairs and then I can show you the freezer and the coolers.”

  And he went down the open stairwell, making eye contact with me at the last possible moment his head was visible over the floor.

  Later, my trainer showed me the freezer, where they kept supplies.

  It was in the back of the store, in a basement-like area you accessed through a very narrow hallway.