Not Paid Enough To Care

I have a great work ethic. It's available for ten dollars an hour, or more. And like watering crabgrass, the more you throw at it the bigger and stronger it gets. I'll work like a fiend for $25. I'll work like a kid in a sweatshop for $50 an hour.

But $5.15 an hour? How much can you expect anyone to care for $5.15 an hour? This is why your burgers never look like the picture on the menu. The guy workin' the clamshell steamer isn't a bad person—or, at any rate, being one does not necessitate the other—they just aren't paid enough to care. Who can blame ‘em? A lot of good folks have spouses and kids and a paycheck that doesn't cover either. With the apathy comes resentment, and eventually you have postal clerks doing what they do best.

Delivering the mail on time.

Now the need for money and respect created by need itself, exacerbated by comic wages, creates the stuff of legends. I love Office Space, Clerks, Fight Club and other movies that glorify characters triumphing over shit jobs and horrendous wages. I've never started an underground all-male societal liberation front with my split personality (but it's on the agenda), nor played hockey on top of a convenience store, but I sure identify with the caged-rat feeling of financial entrapment.

I call it being a writer. There's dignity in starvation.

Years ago, I took a job at a chain sporting goods store at that golden standard of apathy, $5.15 an hour. I shared a counter with Brian the Computer Gamer, the kind of guy who spends his days combing football player spit out of his hair and stays up nights flaming people in chat rooms and trying to break into his dad's liquor cabinet. Not all gamers are like this, but damn, this dude was. I talked about hiking and fishing and bitched about cops pulling me over. Kid stuff. He talked about playing Doom over early internet connections, and how "people" made him angry for not paying him attention. He talked about elaborate plans to avenge his lot in life. The kid had issues. I last heard he worked for the TSA at an airport in Montana.

By shit blind luck and the magic law of averages, we were assigned to the hunting department. We were underpaid, disenfranchised teenagers with master keys to the Wall-O-Rifles. Our job was to sell five hundred dollar rifles and thousand dollar shotguns, then smile and stick out our paws for whatever was left after the taxman raped our $5.15 an hour. We could sell ten thousand dollars worth of shotguns, or pretend we didn't speak English, and take home the same pay.

This opened new opportunities for recreation. "It would increase aiming device accessory sales," I told the manager one day, "if I had a laser out for demonstration purposes." He coughed without looking up from a magazine half-hidden in a manila folder. I took that as permission and had a project-a-dot laser sight sitting, not mounted to anything, on the counter ten minutes later.

Our little red dot danced all around the store for a week. No one wants to buy a deer rifle at eight o'clock at night, on a Wednesday, in January. Nobody wants to sell deer rifles at eight o'clock on a Wednesday night in January, either. We lazed that place like Special Forces painting targets in Afghanistan. The shoe department girl was selling some Nikes to a kid in soccer shorts when we put that dot right on her forehead like an Indian bride.

One Saturday afternoon a gentleman came in and outlined a problem: rabbits were eating his vegetable plants. I gestured to the rifles on the wall. "But I live in the city, so I can't jus' take out af'er 'em with a rifle," he said. I handed him a paintball gun. That was the hardest hard-sell I could manage.

"Good idea," he said, "I shouldn't be killin' 'em any-who." He worked the bolt and trigger back and forth, his eyes lighting up like a kid on meth trashing a candy store. "I'm a preacher, it wouldn't look good, ya know." But spraying the Easter Bunnies in his garden with pink paintballs was fine. OK. It takes all kinds.

I came in one particularly dark and cold winter weekday to find Brian, more despondent than usual, arranging 9mm hollow point bullets on a display case. He made little triangles and circles, then knocked them over and watched them roll. It was how those Real Stories of the Highway Patrol episodes started. When he put 'em back in, he left the noses up to spell his initials.

"Star-Demon-Sixty-Nine dumped me," he said.
"Online girlfriend?"
"Yup."

I just walked away, over towards the fishing area. There was a confused looking man, thirties, glasses, red button down shirt, khakis.

The confused guy wasn't in the fishing section when I got there. I caught a glimpse of him with a taller, blonder woman in a blue jacket over by shoes. Arranging the lures, I spared a glance towards camping. There the guy was in camping, checking out tents, his girl unfolding a collapsible chair. Red shirt, blue coat, blonde and blonder. Them alright...on the other side of the store from themselves.

But stranger things have happened, and were happening, right behind me, in fact. Brian was completing a sculpture in .30-06 soft points. "Bullet-Henge." His keys were on the counter, the racks of rifles within reach behind him.

There was the guy in the red shirt looking at knives and optics. His girl trailed behind, staring at the paintball stuff. I turned around, facing the shoe department again, and there was the dude right next to me. Whoa.

"Sorry if I scared you," he said, his girl smiling at me.
"We do that a lot."
"Huh?"
"We're twins."
"Huh?"
"My brother and I," and then his girl spoke.
"So are my sister and I."
"We met at a twins convention," he explained as his brother came over. They dressed exactly alike.

I wonder if they wife swap? Might they accidentally?

Times were strange at the hunting counter. Twins and bullet art, lasers and boredom. But hey, they didn't pay me enough to care.