CARTBEARD pt 1: my new cart guy pees in the breakroom sink and I can't fire him because he's the last man alive who will push a cart
on mobile. sorry about the formatting
I have a bachelors degree in marine biology.
putting that first because in a minute I'm going to describe a man washing an apple, and you should know I did not get here the normal way. four years. senior thesis. I once counted barnacles on a piling in the rain for an entire summer and it was the happiest I have ever been.
anyway. I'm the assistant manager of what im pretty sure is the last Kmart on planet earth.
not saying what state. not saying the town. there are six of us, so if you find the store you've found me.
94,000 square feet. six employees. the parking lot has painted lines for four hundred cars and most days there's four cars in it and three of them belong to the employees.
somebody painted those lines by hand 2 or 3 decades ago. he went home that night and told somebody he did a good day's work.
I think about that guy.
I don't know why I think about that guy.
whatever
I've been here ten years now. came back to help my mom move, it was supposed to be six months. it might be funnier if it weren't a hell of my own making. OH WELL!
So, the neckbeard... Cartbeard has been here six months.
that's the whole post. I've been in that building a decade and he showed up in the spring and it's his building now. I can watch it happening. I know exactly what he is and I can't make him stop.
he's an invasive species. not an insult, a classification. you drop an organism into a system with no predator for it and no competitor in its niche and it doesn't win by being strong, it wins because nobody knows what to do about it. zebra mussels. lionfish. Cartbeard.
the niche was open. nobody had ever thought to defile this store because everybody who works here is dying, tired, or nineteen.
took him one season.
before I get to today, here is a partial list of things I have personally watched this man do since spring, so you understand the baseline:
he keeps a rotisserie chicken in his vest. not in a bag. in the vest. the vest has a chicken pocket now.
the little caesars in the vestibule closed in 2016 but the ovens still work, nobody knows why, and he has figured this out, and he uses them to cook hot pockets and kid cuisines. he eats like a literal toddler.
he clips his nails at the service desk and calls it "doing my books."
he refers to a specific dumpster as "the good dumpster" in a tone that suggests there is bad blood with a second dumpster. i'm not sure if a love dumpster will make an appearance, or if the good or bad one used to be the love dumpster at some point?
Cartbeard once handed a customer her receipt with a hand that had, four seconds earlier, been fully inside a chicken.
that's the version of him I had made my peace with. the BASELINE.
another shitty monday 9:38am or something
I badge in eight minutes late. nobody notices. noticing is a form of caring and we don't bother with that anymore.
The Fixture is in his chair by the door. 78. greeter. brought the chair from home in 2004. says one thing a day. saves it. does not spend it on me.
I go to the back, phone out, coffee in hand, already talking because I need such and such fixed by somebody with a pulse
and the person I wanted, who we'll call Yogurt isn't in the breakroom
Cartbeard's in the breakroom instead
At the breakroom sink with his back to me... and he is peeing into it
I've had a day to think about this so I'm going to be precise.
he wasn't near the sink. no aiming situation. i presume he just like... flopped it in... he was SQUARED UP. hips set, head tipped back like a man enjoying weather. one hand on the counter.
the other hand was holding a bag of shredded cheese.
the radio was playing steely dan. I can't hear the opening of Peg anymore. that's a real thing that's true about me now.
the sink is essentially a steel bowl. it's a drum. I stood in the doorway and got played a liquid solo. the echoes of the damned haunt me less than the sound of this neckbeard's ropey dehydrated piss in the breakroom sink.
he hears the door. does not stop. looks back, sees me, lifts the cheese. like a cheese salute.
"morning boss"
then he finishes. shudders head to foot like a labrador coming out of a lake.
that's not the worst part of course.
he takes the pull out sprayer, the one we use on the coffee pot, and hoses the basin down. circular. thorough. a considerate man tidying up his waste.
he wipes his hands on his vest.
takes an apple out of his vest pocket.
I said 'no'. out loud. in a gasp. like a woman in a haunted house.
Cartbeard holds it under the tap. turns it twice. buffs it on his sleeve. bites in, juice dribbling down his chin, and this motherfucker goes:
"you want half?" ...half of your piss-apple?
so i go seek the manager, who is a yogurt
I find Yogurt and give him the whole thing while gesticulating wildly with my hands. sink, sprayer, apple, offer. pee. pee pee. lots of pee with winky in sinky.
Yogurt is 61 with 3 months to his pension. he has the stillness of a man who negotiated with the universe and lost badly. his office is a supply closet with a window onto sporting goods, which is basically just four bikes and a kayak at this point.
(the kayak's on clearance. been on clearance ten years. drops four dollars a year. it's free in 2061. maths.)
Yogurt eats yogurt through the entire reenactment. slow. like a man with somewhere to be in about twelve years.
he says, "when's the last time that sink seemed right to you?"
i opened my mouth and let out a croak.
"I remember the sink being fine." i managed. and i guess that's my problem. I'm the only one left who remembers BEFORE. everybody else already adapted.
soap bar hasn't shrunk since june.
Content stopped filling her water bottle in that room in april. never said why. I never asked. lizard brain knew not to open that door.
and Tupperware. 19, on register, kindest person in the building, getting out of this town if I have to mail her in a crate. since march she carries her lunch container two hundred feet to wash it in the CUSTOMER bathroom. every day. for months.
I never asked because I already knew. everybody already knew. it got folded up small and put somewhere dark, like you do. i can only imagine how bad it'd be if we were british lol
Yogurt said "nobody else does."
then he tells me The Fixture clocked it in Cartbeard week one.
I said THE FIXTURE TALKS
he said "he talks when it's worth it"
so I said fine, then we write him up.
Yogurt put the spoon down. folded his hands. looked at me with the gentleness of a vet about to say slip a needle into me and said, "if you write it up, then it happened."
I said it DID happen. I WATCHED it. he waved at me WITH CHEESE.
"but it isn't documented. a thing that isn't documented is a thing corporate can't ask me about. i got 3 months. don't do it."
then he goes, "tomorrow he'll do it again, I still won't care to know about it or document it, and then in the spring I'm buying me a boat."
I asked what kind of boat.
he hasn't decided. he's had thirty years. life do be like that.
anyway
the pile
I went out to the lot. I'm an idiot with a degree, which is the worst possible thing to be.
he's in the far lot, the outer band past the light poles where the asphalt gives up. that's where staff park, out of some retail instinct that the good spots are for CUSTOMERS. there are no customers. you could hold a wedding on the good spots.
forty carts, pushing them across nine acres alone, humming.
his car's at the far edge. 97 buick, silver, WAXED, cleanest object within twenty miles and I have looked at every object within twenty miles.
next to it is the pile.
I'd been driving past it since may and filing it under "garbage." up close it's not garbage. garbage is anonymous.
it's SORTED.
it's a midden. using that term correctly. a refuse heap built up in one spot through repeated deposition by a single population, and archaeologists love them because they tell you everything, what they ate, what they valued, how long they stayed, you can date one, you can read it in layers like a...
ok you probably don't care, sorry, I get like this.
the midden is about the size of a chest freezer. collected in six months. I did the math in the car. four containers a day, every day, including the days he isn't scheduled.
somebody explain the days he isn't scheduled. nobody can. not yet.
clamshells with clamshells. pizza boxes stacked flat and SQUARE, which I've thought about it more than the sink pee. and at the bottom, a layer that stopped being containers and started being SOIL. there's a sheen. I looked one second too long and something in me died forever.
a smell like this reaches the back of your throat before it hits your nose. sweet. warm. personal. like breath.
there was a seagull standing on the trash. we are not near an ocean. it looked at me and did not leave. it had the body language of a bird that considers me the intruder.
fair enough
the conversation
he sees me and lights up. that's the thing I can't digest about him, he is ALWAYS glad to see you, no memory of the last conversation, and I had walked out there to end his career.
"HEY BOSS"
lets go of the cart train. it keeps rolling. neither of us acknowledges it.
I said: the breakroom. this morning. you were urinating in the sink.
"yeah." the way you'd confirm the time.
then he waited. companionably. because he's a generous guy, and he had nowhere to be, and he's been here six months and owns nine acres, and I've been here ten years and own nothing.
I said do you understand why that's a problem.
"no."
I said you don't understand why urinating in the sink where we wash the coffee pot is a problem.
his face got EXCITED.
"okay now SEE, I'm GLAD you asked me that. most people don't ask, they just get all" and he does a fluttering thing next to his head, indicating the general concept of other people having thoughts, "and go away mad. but you ASKED. so. two things."
"one, it's a sink." he said it gently. he was breaking it to me nice and slow. "it's a bowl that goes to the sewer. toilet's a bowl that goes to the sewer. same sewer. you're upset about the SHAPE really."
"two." voice drops, goes warm, goes PATERNAL. "that toilet's three and a half gallons a flush. I'm out here six, seven times a shift. you run that over a career, boss, that's real money. this company's money. down a hole. to move something that was ALREADY LIQUID."
over a career?? bro's been here six months and he's doing projections. we'll be lucky to last two years.
behind us forty unattended carts rolled into a light pole.
and then, and I want to be clear this happened while I was standing there deciding whether to cry, he reached into the vest, into the CHICKEN POCKET (which is the right pocket, I'll note. the apple came from his left pocket. who cares?), he pulled out a leg, and held it out to me. across the whole conversation. a peace offering. a drumstick that had been riding around a parking lot at body temperature inside a safety vest.
"you didn't take the apple," he said. like that had been bothering him. like he'd been keeping score and I was down a snack.
I said no thank you. pocket chicken is only marginally better than piss apple.
he said "suit yourself, boss" and ate it himself in about four seconds and wiped his hand on the cart meant for the customers. salmonella? maybe. i told him to wipe the handles down.
then I said "why don't you just use the bathroom?"
and for one second something moved behind his face that was almost like getting caught. he was embarassed for just a flash.
"bathroom's inside."
yes. i said.
"I'm outside."
the store is forty feet away.
he looked out across nine acres of parking lot that took him one season to annex for himself.
"sure. but then I gotta come back."
the drawer
I wrote him up. BEAUTIFULLY. it took forty minutes to find the right form but it was worth it...
sanitation. food contact surface. repeated and acknowledged. I typed "egregious," deleted it out of professionalism, then put it back out of spite.
I set it on Yogurt's desk with a pen on top.
he looks at it. looks at me. and picks up a different pen. HIS pen, out of a drawer, with the smooth practiced motion of a man who does this a lot.
signs it. "there."
I said thank you, that's all I wanted, process, it goes to corporate, it's documented, it's REAL now, something can happen.
I picked it up and turned it over.
the signature was silver.
silver metallic gel pen. the kind you buy at a craft store to write on dark cardstock at christmas.
doesn't scan. doesn't photocopy. doesn't fax. a form signed in silver gel bounces out of corporate's system in 11 to 14 days with an automated ILLEGIBLE, RESUBMIT.
I said how many of these have you signed.
Yogurt reached down, no hurry, and opened the bottom drawer.
there's a file. it's THICK. same name on every page, silver on every page, and I went to the bottom and the last one is dated his second day.
forty one write ups in six months. Yogurt never tried. he clocked it on day two and went and bought the pen.
I said what happened to the guy before him.
"fella named Ostrowski. lasted nine days. cried in the lot."
about what?
"the carts."
I sat on the floor of the supply closet holding a disciplinary form from a man's second day and I said WHY.
"because there's nobody else, kid." and he said it KINDLY, which was the worst part, because a cruel man I could work with.
"OP. nobody's applied in ages. you fire him, that's your right, I'll back your play. and monday morning the carts are in the road. they DO get in the road. somebody's camry takes a nine hundred dollar dent and calls the county."
spoonful of yogurt.
"and then it's you and me out there in the rain in our little vests, and one of us turns to the other and goes, so who's covering grocery."
i left it at that.
at 4:15 the PA plays Brandy (You're A Fine Girl). every day. only that song. nobody knows how, nobody knows why.
the sweater lady came in. she comes every week and buys one sweater. usually with a cat or a wolf on it.
and The Fixture, who had not moved or blinked since 9:38 when i walked in, says from his chair without turning his head:
"he didn't wash his hands."
what.
"cartbeard. this morning. after. he didn't wash his hands."
I said he was AT THE SINK. he was STANDING AT THE SINK. he USED THE WATER. HE USED THE WATER ON THE APPLE.
"yep."
that was his one thing for the day. he spent it on that.
I looked out the front window.
past lawn and garden, past the light poles, at the far end of nine acres he annexed in a season, Cartbeard walked between a ford f150 and a chevy suburban and glanced back over his shoulder. not furtive. not careful. a theatrical performance of the CONCEPT of privacy, staged for nobody, performed badly, by a man who has never needed any.
he had a kmart bag in his hand.
he had, at some point that day, walked up to one of my registers and helped himself to a COURTESY BAG and folded it into his vest and carried it out to the far lot.
for this.
he goes down behind the truck. only the top of his head shows.
and over the store radio, clipped to my belt, broadcast to all six of us, in a voice of enormous untroubled contentment:
"sneaky break. cartbeards out there taking a stoop poop. behind the f150."
click
behind me, Content's phone made the sound a phone makes when it starts recording.
Tupperware put down a sweater and walked fast toward the bathroom.
The Fixture said nothing, having spent it.
Yogurt, behind me, said "three months."
and on the ceiling, Brandy was a fine girl, and what a good wife she would be.
TL;DR: new cart guy, six months in, pees in the breakroom sink, rinses it with the dish sprayer, washes an apple in it, eats the apple in front of me, offers me half, then takes a dump in the parking lot behind a ford f150 into a courtesy bag he stole off my own register. can't fire him because nobody in this state will push a cart for eleven an hour, and my manager's been signing his write ups in craft gel pen since day two so they won't scan.
I've been in that building ten years. he's been there six months and it's his building now.
But I'm going to try and get him.