(no subject)

The fog is expected to last until tomorrow. Outside, the weather is quite unpleasant. It's jut a bit too warm to be so wet.

In happier news, I had lunch with brienze. I also saw a smart car with reindeer antlers. So things aren't all bad.

I could really use some more coffee though.

LJ Idol, Week 12: My Favorite Story

My first job was at a pet store. For five dollars an hour, I worked a forty hour week at a little pet shop run by a an older couple. One of their employees was the older girlfriend of a high school friend and it was J. who got me the job. The owners' thirty-something son also worked at the store, as well C., a stringy thin woman with a few missing teeth who had that hard look I associate with meth use and trailer parks. The store was in a shopping center with an Albertson's grocery store, a Le Fun arcade where I used to play Area 52 with both guns and a Taco Bell.

After my first ten hour day, I remember sitting in the shower in tears from the pain in my feet. The foot pain improved, but the job never did get much better. I carried forty pound sacks of dog food from the loading dock, dusted and cleaned the glass shelves of aquarium supplies, cleaned out the dozen or so cages of small rodents that sat up next to the front windows, worked an abominably archaic register and swept the floor. Retail is an unforgiving place, especially if you are a teenager and coming off the worst year of your life. I learned quickly that the only people who were ever nice were those who had reptiles. Most people who owned small dogs and birds were crazy. At one point, I was the only employee in the store because the thirty-something guy was out back smoking marijuana. I was trying to check people out at the register, answer questions, pull out hamsters and answer the phone. There was something ridiculous store rule about answering the phone by the third ring. A pink faced man with a poodle screamed at me for answering the phone. I wanted to crawl under the counter and disappear.

We had hamsters, mice, gerbils and rats. Sometimes there were a couple stinking ferrets. I fed them and filled their water bottles every day and every week I cleaned out their cages. Rodents being what they are, they multiplied exponentially in a short amount of time. (Perhaps hamsters were the real tribbles.) They soon overwhelmed the cages. The owner of the store asked me to get rid of some of them, cut down the numbers. He gave me a plastic sack and a can of engine cleaner. Instead I furtively gave away the youngest ones to people looking for snake food. I wasn't about to gas hamsters. Even if the rodents constantly bit me, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

All of this wouldn't have been quite so bad if it wasn't for the monkey.

As the story went, the owners bought a sibling pair of monkeys at some kind of animal auction. They had a baby, which the owners brought to the store and raised there. The cage was essentially a plastic mold shower stall, with two branches, a chicken wire screen on top, and a cheap Plexiglas door. If this sounds horrible, it was as bad or possibly worse than imagining. The monkey was a spot-nosed Guenon. It was not very large, maybe two feet tall at the very most. The canine teeth were rather large however. By the time I started work at the store, the monkey was about seven years old. It was in monkey puberty, angry and probably clinically insane.

One of my duties was cleaning the monkey cage. One of the other employees would take the monkey out of the cage, and I would drag it to the loading dock so I could shovel shit and hose it out. It was one of the most foul smelling chores I've ever had to do. Often I did most of my work with my eyes squeezed to slits and holding my breath. I gagged and coughed. It was even worse if someone had fed the monkey Oreos. I am not sure why it was such a putrid stench, but nothing I've ever encountered has ever been so disgusting as monkey shit.

As far as I could tell, the monkey spent most of his time masturbating. Looking back I suppose it was probably the only soothing thing to do to reduce the tedium of a miserable life. Even so it was unnerving to pass by the cage and see the monkey staring at you while frantically jerking off. Now the monkey cage was actually situated in the back area of the store in the storage area, but clearly visible to customers. One could get within a few feet of the monkey. It was a store attraction.

Because it was summer, there were often children in the store. Sometimes people just dumped them there while they went grocery shopping. They often ran wild and banged on every animal's cage, even the fish. Children would gather at the back, staring in awe at the monkey who continued to masturbate without pause.

"What's the monkey doing? What's the monkey doing?" the children asked.

"Ask your mommy!" I answered in a sing-song voice. No amount of money was going to make me explain monkey masturbation to a gaggle of seven year olds.

If the monkey wasn't masturbating, he was trying to escape. He banged on the cage, bouncing off the walls to hit the door with all his weight. It made a tremendously loud bang whenever this happened and I always flinched. I was afraid of the monkey. It scared me in a way an animal hadn't ever scared me before. The angry expression, the way he threw himself at the door as I skirted past the cage, the furious masturbation - it was all unnerving.

One slow week day afternoon things exploded. Countless blows to the door eventually broke the padlock and the monkey escaped his cage. C. and I locked the front doors to keep customers out and tried to catch him. Truthfully, C. tried and I stayed behind her. The monkey shrieked and raged, leaping from shelf to shelf. It perched by the wall near the nylon dog collars and C. approached slowly. When she tried to grab hold of the monkey, it bit her forearm. As she was so skinny and the monkey's canine's so long, it latched on and wouldn't let go. There she was screaming and flailing, a monkey attached to her arm.

Not long after this I quit. Five dollars an hour was not worth monkey terror. I was scared and awkward, and handled it badly. J. became extremely angry with me, and it drove a wedge in my friendships. My boss told me that if I was putting in my notice he was just going to fire me. I didn't bother to work the two weeks. I never put the job on my resume. I spent three months there and all I got was this lousy monkey story.