The Spring Chickens (two)

Well, it took long enough (thanks new job), but here's part two of the Spring Chickens trilogy. It's actually been done for quite a while, but I had no way to transfer it off my laptop so I had to enlist the help of Stefania to transcribe it. Thanks, gypsy.

Gigi felt threatened by my presence. She was the younger of two assistant managers, and at thirty two, the only employee besides myself whose age didn't qualify her as a greeter at Wal-Mart. Barely an inch above five feet, she drenched herself in Sunflower perfume, spoke like a long-lost Clampett and had a dermatological problem where the skin seemed to flake off around her nose. In a doomed attempt to hide it she caked on copious amounts of make-up, and when she overheated it would dissolve and her face began to look rubbery and synthetic, like a melting android. Suffice it to say the after-lunch rush was not a pleasant shift to work with Gi3po, as I took to calling her when the unfortunate mix of nerves, heat and war paint interacted.

I only write these awful things after six months of psychological torture almost caused me to lunge over the counter one busy Friday night and try to peel off her crusty Maybelline mask, convinced that my high school bully was hiding behind the flaky dead skin, noxious perfume and hillbilly accent. When her husband Dave was around it was even worse. He stopped in a few times a week for lunch or dinner depending on her shift, and by providing an audience he brought out her vindictive nature. I've never been in a fight, but given the rage she induced I probably could have taken her, even if she was a melting, malfunctioning robot.

"I hate the North, hate it," she would pout with a petulant stomp as we unpacked the weekly shipment in the storage room. Her presence rattled my nerves, and she had to have known this because she would creep up behind me at every opportunity, tip-toeing over my shoulder while I rang up or assisted a customer by searching for a title on the computer. It's difficult to maintain your composure when someone is always lurking behind you, waiting for you to err so they can show you up, preferably in front of a crowd.

"Sorry sir, we don't seem to have that title in stock. If you like, I'd be glad to special-order it; the book will arrive to you at no extra cost in seven to ten business da--."

"Oh, we have it sir," she would confidently interject while making a dash for the storage room, leaving me looking and feeling like a lummox. Sometimes she would return triumphant, coddling the book like an infant she rescued from a burning building, sometimes empty-handed. In the latter case, the only apology she ever issued was to the customer whose hopes she had fasely raised.

If my eye was able to catch her in time, I could usually see Abby mouthing something to the effect of "fuckin' twat." At least I wasn't alone regarding my feelings for Gi3po, amd that added to my feeling of acceptance despite having absolutely nothing in common with the rest of my co-workers.


-4-


There is a task called recovery that most retail employees must complete at the end of a shift. At the bookstore, recovery is taking the Karma Sutra out of the Children's section. At the record store, recovery means taking Guided By Voices out of the V column and replacing it under G, the proper, alphabatized spot. At the landscape center, recovery is hunting down the stray alyssum and cleome trays customers leave in the gravel aisles because they opt for a perenial flowerbed at the last minute. Recovery is cleaning up a mess.

It isn't arduous work, although you have to do it at the end of your shift, and if you're in a hurry it can be a frustrating process. I was in such a rush one Friday night when I turned an aisle too fast, knocking over a James Patterson display of hardcovers. I looked down at the end table, and for several moments had no idea what I was staring at. Then, after the misfortune of picking one up and inspecting it, it became evident that I had accidently stumbled upon a stack of about ten finger and ten toenails.

"What the..."

In my periphery I saw Gi3po darting toward me from the other side of the store like the Terminator pursuing John Connor. She flashed an intrepid, intimidating glare, swept the nails off the table into her hand, marched back behind the counter and opened it over the trash can. Every Spring Chicken working maintained stoic composure until she left moments later. What followed was a minute long fit of communal laughter, one of the most beautiful sounds that man can produce. Everyone laughed except for me, who hadn't moved from the Patterson display, still wondering what the hell had just happened.

When we were sure she wasn't coming back, the remaining staff congregated in the back room and Jeanna explained a few of Dave's quirks to me. Apparently, he has a most unsanitary habit of ripping off his finger and toenails when they get long enough, then hiding little piles of them everywhere. After a month or two, when they're ripe enough, he would return to the pile and pick his teeth would the favorites. According to Gigi, who confided to Jeanna one night in a rare show of personal confession, there is toenail treasure hidden all over their house. She discovers at least one pile a week. That same night, she also told her about an evening a few months after the wedding when her parents came over for dinner, and afterward they all moved to the den for coffee. Her mom reached over a candle stick on the coffee table and knocked it over, revealing a pile of nails that numbered in the fifties, much larger than the one I had discovered in the store. This is somewhat comparable to the Allies stumbling across different sizes of concentration camps in WWII Germany. In the store I had accidentally happened upon a Landsburg; that night, Dave's mother in-law had liberated the Auschwitz of toenail clippings.

He has another hang-up that everyone knows of but is rarely acknowledged because it is simply too strange. Dave cannot urinate in public restrooms or even in a home other than his or his mother's without removing every article of clothing, down to his shoes and socks. Carol discovered this quirk one day at work when she opened the door of our bathroom in back to find him stark naked in front of the toilet, water running in the sink to help his release, clothes neatly folded on the floor. When she asked Gigi about it later that day, she said that in addition to being hopelessly neurotic, he had a narrow urethra which made urinating painfully laborious.

I sat and listened to them take turns telling Gigi stories, each one worse than the last. During her four-year tenure at Waldenbook's she managed to alienate, frustrate and eventually inspire pure hatred in the heart of every employee. Soon it became evident that something had to be done, a stand needed to be taken. It was in the storage room that Friday evening when the Spring Chickens hatched their plan to finally get rid of Gi3po.