.

I work with two girls doing grocery resets,

Cassie and Liz.

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We’re all pretty amiable,

Tired, typically,

Starting at seven in the morning and

Doing a lot of work on our hands and knees.

.

Both of the girls I find pretty enjoyable to work with

And I come from a family of myself, a mom and a sister,

So it’s my comfort zone working alongside women.

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Liz has this problem with her eyes

Whereby she can’t focus properly

On what she’s looking at

And it’s pretty much impossible to tell

If she’s looking directly at you or not.

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Sometimes when we’re looking at the same planogram

She’ll let her arm fall against mine.

.

I don’t mind.

.

I even notice her body’s contours sometimes.

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Cassie is a total bombshell.

.

When we met,

We locked in a smile,

And I totally stared at her bust for too long,

Which was pronounced in a low-cut shirt.

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We’d be quiet,

Working next to each other.

.

One day,

We were doing  a special project up in Michigan,

Which is off of our usual route,

Where they play Motown music in all the stores and

Merchandise little camouflaged drink coozies,

Two differences from our Indiana stores,

Which are approximately all about 15 miles away.

.

Anyway, Cassie and I got talking,

And the next day,

When it was just us two working together,

She wore really tight jeans,

Something she didn’t usually do.

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I was pretty much tense and shaky

The whole morning.

.

Then she left early.

.

She offered an excuse but

I’m not sure if it was valid.

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Her face is covered in piercings,

Pretty much,

Her skin is brown-ish, Hawaiian-looking, thereabouts,

She’s on meds,

She said something along the lines of

“I’m one crazy bit**,”

Now she’s living with a dude in Elkhart,

Has a kid with someone else,

And,

On any given day in the stores,

Nothing is as it seems and

We are volatile,

Incisive weapons unto each other

By way of our successes.

The “Edgewood Walk” street sign

Hit me like a burglar in the night,

In a sense,

In that I was in the midst of an obligation,

On my break from work,

And not in a position to

Walk through the wooded,

Creek-flanking backyard of an old acquaintance

And hijack a canoe

With my friends

That was sitting 30 feet up the creek or so.

.

I can’t help but wonder,

Though,

At the state of the world,

When the “Edgewood Walk” street sign

Looks the same as all the others,

In big, dumb, plain design and

Of identical length and coloration

To the general model.

.

Maybe, anyway,

One day, I’ll meet Edgewood Walk again,

And I’ll barely find it,

Buried under Autumn leaf coverage,

Name rendered in antiquated calligraphy in

Reds and oranges, like

A portal into a lost time.

I saw something on the dark, confined morning, and it kind of confirmed what I’d been seeing a lot of, in recent enterprises. It was a bumper sticker that read, “536/53/537.” It was on a car with a Notre Dame license plate which turned away from Notre Dame, and away from all the population, onto Cleveland, at seven in the morning. I never saw the person who was driving the car. He**, enough people have already seen him. He wants for the world to gravitate up that numeric range, where we’re all just faceless figures, all crammed into some dank basement like livestock, as if spawns from controlled, chemical test tubes. There is no morality up there, where 536 is so similar to 537, so documentable, so measurable and mundane, so unlikely to watch the behavior of a fly-over person, of a vessel built for low play and denial.

In the same bar

That overlooks the river

By which I grew up

I’ve talked to a bartender from San Francisco

Who moved here out of financial necessity

And hated it here,

I’ve heard doctors and lawyers

Who were in the mood for lobster

And so went to Maine for the weekend,

I’ve seen gorgeous, young girls smile at me and

Abject IUSB dudes down the way give me vituperative looks.

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Across the river,

A mile from where I grew up,

The bar closed up

Because of gun-clapping.

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A little further down,

I used to work in the industry

Doing food prep

Where a married chef

Would brag about banging one of the female coordinators.

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He kept a picture of Jesus at his desk.

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The neighborhood has been overrun by swanky tycoons,

But some of the vacated buildings still stand,

Falling apart, with boarded-up windows and

Of an esoteric color.

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Around the Christian university,

Gun violence is a constant plague and

Jesus is bandied about as a savior.

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There are churches on practically every street,

And we still hate each other, we

Want to kill each other and

I feel like a Cubist painting,

A ridiculous figure of 45-degree arm range and

Eyeballs across the street

Feeling fermented shame.

I believe in something.

But why should I use it to oppress others?

What would it have to do with this foreground

We face every day?

What I believe in

Is constant and unchanging,

Like the ground on which I walk.

It’s like “The Moon is down” by John Prine,

It’s an immovable object,

A pillar of infinite strength

That does not need daily maintenance and

Does not rely on acknowledgement

From uninformed parties.

I pressed my moistened,

Defiantly mundane visage

To the summer camp,

To the baseball game,

To the rock concerts,

.

Er,

I’ll emaciate my presence,

You’ll see,

I stifle the gods with…

.

With…

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ALABASTER…

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And now alabaster will be the focal point

Of this transcript-fulfilling endeavor here

Which I am currently quantifying

In ink defiantly black, like

A cat walking across a balance beam

On a stage

In a musical that isn’t Cats.

Across the street

From a Harding’s

In a small, suburban town near here

Sits a bookstore, fairly small,

Full of dirt-cheap, used books,

And, as far as I know,

No new ones.

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The owner is the son of the original owner,

Who was once an overweight man

With a grey Walter Raleigh mustache.

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Lots of times,

When I go to the bookstore,

It’s closed,

Even if it’s, say,

Tuesday at five in the afternoon.

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When I’m in there,

The owner is typically idling,

Fairly,

Engrossed in a newspaper or some other

Leisurely thing,

Never stocking, organizing, sorting or

Doing any other sort of “work”

You could imagine.

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His inventory is not databased.

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If you were to ask him if he had a certain title,

He would most likely have no clue whatsoever,

Unless it were by chance something he remembered seeing.

.

Still, all in all,

Despite not adding on a café,

Or a bar,

Or an outdoor patio,

Or really infusing the store

With any sort of flare,

Signature, uniqueness or distinction, whatsoever,

He still maintains a good reputation in the community.

.

His track record is operating-room-clean

And he doesn’t bother anyone.

.

And, once in a while,

Someone will go in,

Purchase an old, dusty, used book,

And leave,

All the while, apparently,

Very satisfied.

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I myself have done it,

To the tune of a phone-book-sized

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,

Hardcover, for $6.

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The book now sits in my office,

Reflecting tradition and convention

Better than just about anything these days

Save for maybe Spam and Modelo beer.

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Nobody seems upset at the owner for

What’s apparently his extreme, astronomical laziness

And apathy to his own establishment.

(From his apparently not needing to work a day job,

It can be surmised that he has money,

The type of thing which could have gone to

Adding a café, a bar, a lobby, an outdoor patio, etc.)

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Then, you get to thinking about the mental makeup

Of the people who patronize this store.

.

Who knows?

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All you can look at is their track record,

Which is likely spitshined and roadworthy.

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They likely don’t need books.

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And,

As far as the people go who do NEED books,

Maybe they’re gone.

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Maybe they’re locked up.

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Maybe they conspired to kill Trump,

The president who defunded PBS and NPR and

Obliterated the first legitimate health care program

This nation has ever seen.

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Maybe they set fire to an establishment that sold yoga pants.

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Maybe they crashed their cars

After an eight-hour stint at

Good Anuff pub,

Wherein they were cowering,

Burrowing,

Trying to hide from the din of everyday life,

From the oppression of a world

That’s got them,

By way of costs, obligations,

Condescension and expedition,

In the meat grinder.

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The bookstore still stands across from the grocer,

And nothing is at it seems,

The only certain things being

The fiery pit of rage,

Resentment, disbelief,

Exploding from the proletariat,

.

And the glib degradation of knowledge and truth

On the part of the population which

Simply doesn’t need them.

It seems that all of a sudden

The beauties, bounties and travails of life

Can be synopsized in three minutes,

With the notable help of feather-light cymbal crashes,

Robust upright bass and

Those pipes like a trained pit bull,

Like he’s seen He** and now he’s in heaven,

In Berry Gordy’s studio proffering the

Structurally succinct artistry of relationship romance,

Starting,

Stopping,

As if among so many traffic lights

And camouflaged koozies for hunting.

Oh, what did I care — I was sick of working at the root beer stand, anyway. The heat was almost unbearable, here on this vast continental mass of plains which, much to my surprise, wasn’t the most humid part of the world, according to online sources.

Everyone was usually pretty quiet. Sometimes an old dude would come up, get a burger, and start talking really loudly about the weather, or about some fish he’d just caught. All of the girls were really nice, smiling, laughing at his stories, and calling him by name was they told him to have a good day, after he got his food.

The girls didn’t talk to me very much, but sometimes they’d smile at me, toward the end of the day, when we were cleaning up and getting ready to go home, or do whatever we were going to do. I got the sense that they thought I’d been through a lot and also that I usually knew the most exciting things going on around town, on the average night. I’d usually make a little joke with them, and make them laugh, and other than that not talk to them too much or pay too much attention to them.

On one night, one of the girls, Annie, brushed up against me slightly when she was going to put the broom away, then asked me how my night had gone. I was in the midst of making a burger and fries for myself to take home. When she asked me the question, I immediately got an electric feeling in my blood and my hands started shaking uncontrollably, trying to put grilled onions on my burger.

“Could be worse,” I said.

She just laughed, smiled and bounded away.

At the art museum, a couple of summers earlier, I’d observed this one minimalist piece. The artist had rendered pretty much the entire canvas grey, with these austere, systematic little lines and convolutions saturating the piece, and one tiny, little rectangular area of multicolor pulp, standing as a stark, vivid aberration of the general theme. Life seemed like this, lots of times, and I selected the work as my Facebook cover photo, for about a year or so.

The manager at the root beer stand was this woman, Karen, about 50 or so, pretty good-looking but somewhat prone to melancholy and wine-drinking. She’d been managing the place for a while, the daughter of the owner, so it didn’t seem to offer her as much excitement as it once must have. Still, she held an amiable disposition, and of course was really kind to all of the girls, discussing their sporting events, band functions and other relevant activities with them.

“So how’s it going with you?” Karen asked me, one day, at about 7:30 on a rather slow night.

“Pretty good,” I said. “Thanks. This job’s given me some nice supplemental income.”

“Oh, good,” she said. “That’s good to hear.”

I could tell she was fairly concerned about me — an azure heart, the type to get the impetus to help other people when all of her own, personal ducks were in a row, so to speak.

“I was thinking about starting a band again,” I added.

“Oh!” she replied. “That would be so cool.”

“It’s just so time-consuming,” I then replied.

“I’m sure,” she said, kind of half-interested, getting distracted by one of the girls over in the corner who was making a shake.

Karen was dressed in khaki shorts and her legs were kind of vein-y. We got along really well, though, like an understood professionalism between us. And she was married so it was a no-brainer that I’d stay really official with her.

I didn’t usually date, anyway, myself — I was always dead tired from having to work so much, and, when I got off work, usually just wanted to drink and watch sports. To be honest, there was no way in He** I was going to start a band again. I’d just been filling conversation pulp with Karen. A couple of the girls heard me but they didn’t care at all.

The root beer stand always seemed to be kind of a utopia of good vibes and calm, civil people, in this community which, in many other places, was flooded with violent crime. I’d cooked at this other restaurant, on the south side, where one of the cooks looked like he’d been stabbed in the face. He worked frantically, like his life depended on it, and had a heroin addict girlfriend who would show up sporadically outside of the establishment, pretty calm but exhibiting weird behavior like sitting on the grassy boulevard area, and stuff.

One customer saw fit to rib me about my job.

“You behavin’ yourself around all these high school girls?” he asked, in a loud, jesting voice.

“Uh, kinda,” I said. “Sometimes I have to give ’em some checkups.”

I said this with a sly smile and the customer proceeded to laugh loudly.

“Miiiike,” said Karen. “Be good.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “False alarm, of course.”

The other two maintained jovial conversation while I hurriedly returned to the flat top grill, where I had five burgers, a chicken sandwich and a BBQ pork sandwich cooking.

I mean, what do you say when you’re working around a bunch of high school girls? I was pretty good at it, though, really. In my youth, I’d grown up with a mom and a sister in the house, so I was used to being around all females, and I’d had lots of jobs supervising youths. You just make friends with them, really. It’s not rocket science. Sometimes in the root beer stand one of the girls would strike up conversation with me, about random things like Eminem, or milk shakes, or whatever. It was a pleasant enough experience, overall.

And the girls were pretty hater-proof. What I mean by this, basically, is that barely any customers would ever complain about their food. In truth, too, it was pretty good grub. And if they did voice any issues with what they received, they were always very calm and measured about their complaints. One of the male customers, understandably enough, couldn’t believe that tomatoes cost extra — $1.00 for including on a burger.

“Wow,” he said. “I’ve never heard of that. Tomatoes costing extra. I hope they’re some really special tomatoes.”

The cashier was like 15 and just smiled and didn’t say anything back to him.

“You won’t be disappointed,” I said, to him, standing there and bored, and kind of half-joking.

He kind of nodded back in begrudging cordiality.

“Why DO tomatoes cost extra?” asked one of the girls to Karen.

“Just food costs,” she said. She was flipping through some sort of catalogue.

“I know,” said another one of the girls. “I’ve never heard of tomatoes being more expensive than other vegetables.”

She made eye contact with me and I just smiled and nodded.

“Very strange indeed,” I simply said. In my mind, I was envisioning the Beatles song “Penny Lane”; in which Paul McCartney sings “And the banker never wears a Mac / In the pouring rain / Very strange”.

You took what life gave you and made the best of it. At the root beer stand, the biggest problem always seemed to be that tomatoes cost a dollar extra. So we weren’t doing too bad, you might say. I barely even talked to any of the high school girls, though sometimes I’d look at them, if one was talking, just for fun. They didn’t seem to mind. Most guys were more forward than me, almost assuredly, even guys my age.

And we all knew what was going on in the outside world. The most heinous, bloody, gruesome events were always what flooded the newspapers, tickers and nightly local news broadcasts. Every person who came up to the root beer stand and bought something seemed like a found art object, almost — an ironic juxtaposition of a satyr character, of sorts, possessive of the superhuman resiliency required to survive in the post-COVID world, where housing costs were through-the-roof, food shortages plagued society and 11-year-old girls wore butt-hugging pants. Most of the girls in the root beer stand just wore jeans. But, I mean, it’s not like I cared, or anything.

You intersect with my eyesight

Along that clumsy, smelly

Portion of my eyes that I’ve neglected,

You lunge for what’s in front of you

Like a sheep-like consumer

Attending a blockbuster movie

Or migrating to the nearest, vapid

Neon lights within a well-populated

Set of doldrums under which

I hung my head

In miscellaneous years of laughter and carnage.