Misanthropy at Subway

“Misanthropy at Subway”

         

Sean could literally feel his blood pressure rising as he struggled to wrestle a marble sink off an inconveniently high shelf.  It wasn’t just the tragic fact that he was risking his life by standing on a wobbly ladder and lifting an eighty pound appliance for slightly more then minimum wage either.  No, Sean’s tension was mainly due to the obscenely obnoxious woman standing a few feet away that was literally tapping her foot with impatience while pursing the fat jowls of flesh that made up her face into some horrific combination of a scowl, grimace and frown.  This woman, who Sean had decidedly classified as a bitch about and hour earlier when she deigned him her retail servant for the day, was the source of his growing frustration. 

         Pouring sweat and quite sure his face was beat red, he managed to place the box among her sizeable collection of other items already stacked on the flatbed that served as this woman’s shopping cart.  Sean was also vaguely aware that he was working up some nice pit stains by now, the result of having to wear dress clothes at a store that sells heavy appliances and regularly requires manual labor such as this.  But this wasn’t just a “store” as he and his fellow employees sardonically reminded each other, this was a “design expo.”  “Show room” was also acceptable phrasing according to management, but words like “store” and “warehouse” were out of the question.  The reason for such censorship, along with his dress clothes, and the obligation to walk around with customers and cater to their every whim which included but was not limited to taking even the smallest of items off the shelf and placing it in their carts, was that this company was located in one of the richest towns in Sean’s resident state.  And, as Sean had learned in the past six months, rich people felt entitled to the most obsequious acts of servitude and self-deprecation their retail slaves could muster, in fact they demanded it. 

         “Now take the cart over to the kitchen section.” The woman stated flatly.  Sean had grown accustomed to the absence of the word please while working here, but he still couldn’t stomach the way his patrons never looked him in the eye when they spoke to him.  To Sean it felt worse then getting slapped or spit on, (at least those affronts required acknowledgement) this was a subtle yet stark way for these people to convey how small he was to them.  It usually made him feel sick, and today it was making him angry. 

         Sean leveraged his weight with the handles of the flatbed to swing the massive mound of stacked boxes that looked to him like a Mayan ziggurat made of cardboard and pushed it slowly forward.  The woman he was helping said she was remolding one of her bathrooms, and Sean was hoping their interactions were close to conclusion, his job was only to guide customers through the showroom, answer questions, and up sell if possible, some other poor shmuck would have to ring her up and deal with getting her ‘pile o’ shit’ to her house.  But now this bovine bitch was thudding her designer heels towards the kitchen section, where her browsing could easily degenerate into another hour or two of tyrannical commands and impromptu weight lifting.  The real problem here was that it was already twenty minutes past Sean’s regular lunch time and his stomach felt like it was eating his intestines for sustenance.  He was one of the many Americans who forgoes breakfast on most days and thus becomes a border-line cannibal by noon.  With his blood sugar low, his undershirt stinking to his body and, he imagined, his left eye probably twitching with frustration, he made it to the kitchen section where the woman looked  at him (well, not at him so much as near him lest he be misled into thinking she regarded him as a fellow human) and snapped “you really take your time don’t you, you must get paid by the hour?”

         Sean almost thought she was kidding for a moment; she couldn’t have been standing there for more then thirty seconds before he got there with her 1,000 lbs of name brand marble bathroom furnishings, but the sharp look in her eyes and the hateful quiver of her lower lip testified to her actual annoyance.  The lady was standing near an oven at the moment and Sean imagined turning on one of the heating elements and slamming her face onto to it.  Yes, it would be gruesome, she would writhe and scream as he held her hair in a tight fisted knot and forced her cheek against the stove-top, the show-room would fill up with the smell of roasting flesh and singed hair, her eyes would melt out of her ugly make-up caked head and her reign of evil would end the moment her struggling body fell limp.  Never again could she verbally abuse innocent working men trying to pay their way through college, never could she belittle anoth-

         The woman snapped near his head, “Hello are you awake?  Just take my things to the front.” 

                Sean took a step back from the cart, he felt like he was shaking with anger.  He managed to keep his voice steady, “I’m sorry ma’am, I actually have to leave for lunch, I’ll have to call someone else to help you with your things.”  Without waiting for a response, he turned on his heel and walked briskly away from the indignant and sadly un-melted face that had plagued him for the past hour.  He knew there was a good chance he would get reprimanded for leaving a customer before finishing with them, but there was only so much a man could take for ten dollars an hour. He threw his smock in his locker and punched out. Sean had learned the importance of taking off his smock before he went on break; if he didn’t there would be an inevitable hoard of customers each with exactly 12 questions and 17 problems for him to solve, keeping him from leaving the building while his strictly monitored half an hour break dwindled away like sand through his fingers.

         On his way out the door Sean saw his previous customer standing at the front check out area with a manager, she saw Sean, grabbed the manager’s arm, and pointed in his direction like someone making an accusation of witchcraft in the sixteen hundreds.  Sean pretended not to notice and walked out the door.

         The interesting thing about Lakemoore, the wealthy town in which Sean worked five days a week, was that it was about 5 minutes away from one of the poorest towns in the area.  Not a ghetto by any means, but a town replete with crappy old cars sitting in the cracked driveways of small houses that needed new siding and various other landmarks of the lower middle class.  Unless Sean found himself with the time and the money to sit down at a Japanese steakhouse on his break and have a meal grilled up in front of him by an Asian man who probably wouldn’t be Japanese but most defiantly would be capable of wowing feats with a sword-like spatula, he had to drive to this less esteemed town and eat more modestly.  On this particular day, his blood still boiling hot, he decided to eat something cold, and pulled into the parking lot of the local subway. 

         Sean’s sighed when he threw open the door and saw a row of at least ten people lined up at the counter and the adjacent wall, waiting to have their deliciously fresh and moderately priced sandwiches put together for them. He felt himself tensing up with that irrational rage people get when other people are in their way, most often felt when driving amidst bad traffic.  He checked the time on his cell-phone, he still had about 22 minutes left on his break, he would have to eat fast but he could make it. 

              Sean looked around at his fellow inhabitants of earth and studied them.  The man at the front of the line was arguing with the clerk at the register about wringing him up wrong.  The kid behind the counter looked about 16 and was freezing up as the customer berated him.  This compelled one of the sub makers, clearly more experienced, possibly even holding some meager title such as “supervisor” or “assistant manager” to go help at the register.  This of course stopped the efficient sub-production line on which Sean so desperately depended to provide him with a quick and much needed meal.  The subway associate who starts this magic process by deciding which breads, cheeses, and general sandwich ramifications  you require asked the next costumer who made it to the counter, what kind of sandwich he would, which prompted the man to pull out a crumpled list from his greasy oil stained flannel shirt pocket and declare,

            “Well, I actually need 8 subs.” 

              You…Mother…FUCKER!!! was Sean’s mental scream of protest, it was so loud in his head in fact, that it was probably audible to the people standing near him through some kind of process of telepathic osmosis. Another endless stream of swears, curses, insults, and ill-wishes ran through Sean’s mind as this ignoramus, bush-whacking, grubby looking, gap-toothed, cross-eyed, inbred, white trash scum of the earth ass wipe tediously read off the many specific requirements of his ten-thousand subs for his crack-whore of a wife and seething litter of children. Things like, “Yeah that one just needs one line of mayo, yeah just a little more, ok now I want cheddar cheese on one half and Swiss on the other, make sure they don’t touch.  Ok, put 12 pickles on there, yeah there has to be exactly twelve, and make sure you put three shakes of salt on there.  Good.”  How could someone be so blatantly thoughtless about the starving mob behind them?  Where was the decency?

Sean gave himself over to violent fantasy again, this time picturing a masked gunman running in and shooting every other customer in the restaurant but Sean.  Sean would afterwards gingerly step over their dead bodies  trying not to get blood on his shoes and calmly order his tuna on wheat from a smiling subway clerk who wouldn’t care less about the aforementioned massacre.

          Sean felt bad about these fancies, he really wasn’t a violent sociopath, but he simply couldn’t help hating everybody that day.  The world was full of selfish rich pricks who treated him like a dog, and scummy people like the woman standing in front of him, barking some kind of primitive form of English into her cell-phone, apparently yelling at her boyfriend or husband or lesbian lover or whatever she had, using the word “fuckin” before every noun or as a filler between thoughts.  Something along the lines of, “Because I let the fuckin dog out this fuckin morning, at like uh… fuckiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin 10 or something.” All this while she bounced a crying baby in her other arm.  Sean looked into that baby’s red contorted face and knew that child didn’t have a chance. It made him angrier still. 

          Finally after the majority of his thirty minute break had elapsed, Sean made it to the counter. He checked his phone again, there was just enough time to order his sandwich and eat it in the car on the way back to work.  He got it just the way he liked it, toasted, pepper jack cheese, all the fixings.  Sean was literally salivating when he got to the register and reached into his back pocket, to find it empty. A second later he remembered it was in his smock pocket which he left at work, which was ten minutes away.  He had bought a bottle of water from the vending machine at work that morning and thoughtlessly put his wallet in his smock instead of his pocket.  He was beyond anger now, he was beaten.  He apologized for wasting the sandwich and explained to the apparently uninterested clerk that he forgot his wallet.  A part of him distantly hoped that they would offer to let him pay for it later, or even just give it to him, he was somewhat of a regular after all, but his disillusionment with mankind was at an all time high and he wasn’t surprised to see the clerk absently toss his beautiful tuna on wheat –the very physical manifestation of the only goodness possible in his bleak work day- into the trash.  He drove quickly back to work, dejected.

        The second the time clock beeped acknowledgement that Sean was back on the clock, the manager called him into the office.  The assistant manager on duty that day was a guy named Mark; Sean found him to be a dick at the best of times.  “Sit down.” He snapped.  Sean was a fairly bright young man and instantly recognized the tactic here, Mark would stand in a position of authority while Sean would sit and be accosted submissively. 

          “I prefer to stand.” Sean said, surprising himself.  He had been feeling like a toilet in an unsanitary Mexican restaurant all day and he was tired of being shit on.  Sean was disgusted by the people around him; they were all deplorable animals, including this chubby jack ass standing behind the desk. The buttons on Mark’s dress shirt were pulled tight enough around his bulging midsection that Sean was fairly sure if one popped off it would move with the velocity and force of a bullet and probably kill him instantly.  That would be a lark, an obese angry manager killing his thin and starving subordinate by way of a fat powered plastic projectile.

          “SIT DOWN!” The manager yelled.  He didn’t take initial refusal well, his face was growing red. However, Sean was aware that Mark was only an assistant manager, and the extent of his punitive capabilities against him was a write-up or being sent home early.  Sean was already winning this little confrontation anyway; he had spent all his anger that day and was remaining calm, which gave him an edge. Mark was losing control of himself at his employee’s impudence.  It was a challenge to his managerial authority, which was probably the only thing this sad sack had to cling onto in his drab life.  Thinking about that made Sean feel stronger.

            “Nope.”

            Mark slammed his fist on the desk.  This was perfect, he was losing it over something Sean couldn’t even be punished for, an assistant manager can’t demand that an employee sits or stands, there’s no rules against that, it was ridiculous.  Sean noticed there was a pink write up form on the desk.  “Fine your gonna act like a child then? Whatever.  What happened with that woman earlier?”

            “What woman?” 

              The manager gave him a cold look.  “A customer told me you walked away from her when she asked you for help.  You don’t walk away from a customer with over $10,000 worth of things on her cart, she said you told her you had to stop helping her because it was your lunch time, that’s totally unacceptable.  We could have lost that sale.  Do you think your worth $10,000 to this company?  I frankly don’t think you should be working here.”

            Sean maintained his composure. “Oh, wow there must have been some miscommunication I’m sorry.  I asked her if she needed help and I could have sworn she said no.  Maybe I misheard her, so then I just kind of said ‘ok, well I’m going to go on my lunch break but if you need any more help we have other associates around’ and that was that.”  Sean almost believed his own lie.

              Mark’s anger was apparent.  “That’s not how she described it.  Why would someone say you were rude to them if you weren’t? We depend on customer service here and you didn’t give it, like I said I don’t think this is the right job for you.”

              “Well,” Sean said.  “I didn’t actually do anything wrong, and you have no way of knowing what exactly happened.  Also, whether or not you think this is the right job for me doesn’t really matter.”

              “I’ll be talking about this with Mr. Ferris tomorrow morning.” Mark said, though he seemed to be realizing the weakness of his position.

              “Ok, I’m here tomorrow morning too, we can sit down together and I’ll explain how you screamed  at me, demanded that I  sit while you stand for some reason, told me I shouldn’t be working here, and slammed your fist on the table when I didn’t do anything wrong.  Maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t be working here.”  Mark’s eyes grew wide and then narrowed, burning with clear loathing.

              “Take the rest of the day off.  Go Home. Now.”  Sean considered taking the argument further, perhaps pointing out that since no guilt had been established he can’t be sent home, or pointing out that Mark had made yet another erratic judgment in error that could be pointed out to their store manager, Mr. Ferris.  But Sean was hungry and tired so he went another route.

              “Great, I’d love to take the rest of the day off, I didn’t get a chance to eat today.  Thanks Mark.”  Without waiting for a response, Sean turned on his heel and left the office.



         Sean pulled back into the subway parking lot and walked in.  He was tired of people and didn’t cherish the thought of waiting in line behind another shiftless bunch of low lives.  He just wanted to lay in bed in the dark and be alone and away from his tormentors, that is to say, his fellow man, for a few hours.  But Sean was not ending his day without his damn tuna sandwich, he was determined.  As he entered the restaurant with wallet secured he was glad to see only a few people in front of him, a man ordering his sub and a group of three waiting behind him.  Not so bad.  As he waited Sean couldn’t help but observe the people around him, though he was certain it would only cause him further irritation.  The family in front of him seemed to be a mother and two sons, though they had a large age gap.  The older one looked to be about 16, the other boy only 6 or 7.  Sean was bad at guessing ages.  Probably a single mother, Sean thought bitterly.  Kids with no father, mother probably struggling to get by.  Wasn’t anything right in this world?

         “What were you guys doing in the basement last night” The mother asked her oldest son.  “Why was Dylan down there with you all night?” 

         “Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about this.  It was hysterical,” the older brother said.  The little boy chuckled, Sean presumed he was Dylan.  “We were playing that game where someone gets a card with an object or something on it and has to act out motions without speaking and everyone else tries to guess what it is, and halfway through Dylan comes down stairs and wants to play, and you know all my friends think he’s ‘so cute’ so they made me include him.” The older brother gave his younger sibling a playful shove. “Anyways, you wouldn’t believe the stuff that came out of his mouth, we were dying.  Like, uh…Jamie was doing a rowing motion because the word we had to guess was oar.  So I finally guess ‘oar’ and Dylan jumps up and goes, ‘I knew it!’ So I look at him and go, ‘common Dyl you don’t even know what an oar is’ and he goes ‘yeah I do, duh, this or that!’” The mother, who Sean decided was very pretty for an older woman covered her mouth and giggled and the little brother’s face grew red but he was grinning the way a child will when they know their being talked about.

         Sean smiled to himself, though he felt a little odd for eavesdropping. The man at the front of the line requested a type bread they ran out of and the subway employee’s were scrambling to bake more but Sean didn’t notice the stall.

         “Oh, that’s so cute.” The mother said.

         “There’s more.  We had him act out a word, and so he looks at the card and he goes up there and he starts barking like a dog.  So we all figure –obviously- his word was dog.  Your not supposed to use your voice but he’s a little kid so whatever, we all guess dog. But no, he shakes his head and keeps barking and howling so we guess wolf, coyote and all that and he keeps shaking his head and so finally I grab his card and it’s his word was ‘horse’”  The mother laughed again and Dylan hid his face, apparently abashed.  She grabbed her smaller son and hugged him up against her leg.

         “Oh sweetie, horses don’t bark.” She laughed.  He looked up at her and shrugged and the mother messed her child’s mop of blond hair playfully.

         “No ok this is the best one, this is great.” The older brother said.  “He gets up there again and looks at a card and starts running in place.  And of course, we couldn’t guess it.  He starts running all around the basement and looking at us like were all stupid until he’s out of breath so finally I take the card from him again and his word is ‘eraser.’”

                The mother cracked up to the point of tears and her younger son pulled away from her and looked up at them in confusion.  “Yeah, a racer I still don’t get what’s so funny.” 

         “Oh God,” The mother wiped tears from her eyes “that’s adorable. Oh! we’re next.  What did your dad say he wanted again?”  The older brother lifted the boy up so he could see the many wondrous sandwich accoutrements from over the high counter.

         Sean couldn’t help but smile, in fact he had to stop himself from laughing along with them so he didn’t look like some kind of eavesdropping voyeur weirdo.  He ordered, ate, and left feeling much better about life and not just due to the12 inches of tuna on wheat rapidly digesting in his stomach –just how could a gray mass of ground up fish stored in a bucket and portioned out with an ice cream scoop be so delectable?  That family had salvaged his view on humanity; at least until the next traffic jam or surly customer he was forced to endure. Sean felt as though he had seen and heard something profound in those few minutes, in that small and quaint conversation he listened to.  It was a moment of beauty in an ugly world and the contrast made it even more beautiful, like a light that seems so much brighter because everything else is dark.