As your favorite Pope Guy, which isn't much of a distinction, given that I'm probably your ONLY Pope Guy, I find it lends credence to my leadership of the All John All The Time World Church when I share with my followers stories and anecdotes of my personal life, making me seem more human and more accessible to those to whom I have become something of an authority figure. (That and it gives me a lot of material for my silliness.)
If you didn't read my post from yesterday, 2/21, where I started to chronicle for you a day in the life of an apprentice meat-cutter stoned on marijuana, you might want to go back and do so, because it will give you a beginning point and a frame of reference for today's post. (Go ahead, I'll wait....)
...okay, glad you're back.
Picking up the narrative where I left off previously, (..."when we last saw our hero"...), Bruce, Jack, Chris and myself, well into the throes of being really "annihilated", left the hotdog place after finishing lunch and returned to the store to continue our workday; easier said than done, however, as we all learned when we got back.
Now we were all just barely past being kids, but we weren't stupid; both Jack and I were married guys with families, and Chris and Bruce were using the money they made working at the store to fund their college educations, so none of us could afford the luxury of losing a job for using drugs. (I would suspect having that on your resume would make employment interviews very difficult.) So when we got into the parking lot of the store and got out of Bruce's car, Jack, the unacknowledged leader of our little band, cautioned everyone to "be cool and act straight", and then started giggling. We all nodded our understanding, and then joined him in his laughter.
As I explained in yesterday's "chapter", the meat counter in the store where we worked was the old-fashioned type, complete with number dispenser and clock-like thingies on the wall to indicate which number we were "Now Serving". We all donned our aprons and those repulsive little paper hats we always wore, and went to work.
Of course the first problem we encountered was sharp implements; lots of them. Hey, it was a "butcher shop", to use the parlance, complete with boning knives, "butcher" knives, several bandsaws and a couple of serious-looking lunch meat slicers, which, by the way, scared me then and still scare the hell out of me today. Ever see of these monsters up close in a deli or sandwich shop? Imagine a 12" circular scalpel, rotating at about 5000 RPMs, over which you're passing a chunk of bologna or salami back and forth. Within millimeters of your fingers. (I'm literally getting the chills as I write this. God, I really hated those things.) And cleaning one of these diabolical machines was enough to give anyone nightmares, because at least when you were using them, they had "guards" that provided some protection. Once you took one apart for cleaning, there was that razor-edged blade, which had to be pulled, very carefully and delicately, from the machine and washed, by hand, in a sink. Not a fun duty, by any means. Yeah, your local grocery store Meat Department can be a very dangerous place any time, but particularly so when you're under the influence of some really good "smoke". (As I said yesterday, looking back, this had to be one of the MOST stupid things I have ever done.)
The other problem we faced was customers, and maintaining some semblance of normalcy, not an easy thing to do in our respective conditions. Ernie, one of the younger "journeyman", became aware that we were all giggling like schoolgirls and trying to hide the fact, and got suspicious, but Ernie was mostly a dipstick, so I don't think he ever figured out what was going on. (Ernie had an interesting trait; he was Italian, and I don't know what his daily diet was, but the man was afflicted with the most awful flatulence to which I have ever been exposed; he was brutal. And since he found his "affliction" humorous, he thought dropping "bombs" all over the department was hilarious, a point of view that the rest of us did not share. I'll never forget the time that Ralph, the department manager and a rather fastidious, prissy kind of a guy for a butcher, unwittingly followed Ernie into the men's room, just after Ernie had visited same for his daily, just after lunch, BM. We all knew not to follow Ernie in there, but Ralph had been doing something in back and hadn't seen Ernie go and come back; we were all watching for Ralph when he returned, anxious to see his reaction, Ralph being given to occasional bouts of melodrama, and he didn't disappoint us. He stopped in front of the first cutting block he came to, leaned over, supporting himself with his hands and began shaking his head and muttering, "My God, the guy is sick, nothing alive should smell that bad", which of course we all thought was pretty funny. Ralph did not share our concept of what was humorous.) (Ralph also was the possessor of a glass left eye, true story, to replace his real left eye, and he had never confided to anyone that I know of how the eye had been lost. If he was talking to several of us at a time, it was real tough to know specifically to whom he was giving directions; his good eye would look right at you, but the other one might be looking at you, or maybe at whoever was standing next to you. It could be very disconcerting.)
The very first customer I waited on when I called "35", or whatever, was ALL the way down at the far end of the counter from where I was standing and calling; the meat counter, being the better part of 50 feet in length, and my condition, made it something of a journey to get there. I walked down, asked the nice lady with the winning number what I could get for her, and she asked me for a pound of ground chuck. Easy enough. The ground chuck tray was about in the middle of the counter. So I turned, started away, got most of the way down to where I was going, and forgot what the lady wanted. (Remember, I'm deep in the throes of "reefer madness" at this point; simple actions like, say, breathing, required serious thought.) So I turned, walked back, and asked the nice lady to repeat her order, which she did. So I turned away again, intent on not forgetting this time, got all the way down to the far end of the counter, totally blowing right past the ground chuck tray because, once again, I had forgotten what the customer had asked for.
Somehow Bruce caught on to the fact that I was having a problem, and as I'm standing there, desperately trying to simultaneously remember what I had forgotten and to not appear foolish, he's poking Jack in the ribs and nodding at me as they're standing next to each other, wrapping the purchases of their customers in that white butcher paper that every butcher shop in the world used to use, and making fun of me. Assholes.
Well, since I couldn't remember what the lady wanted, again, there was nothing for it but to walk all the way back down the length of the counter, and ask her again. Fortunately for me, the nice lady customer in question was one of our "regulars", so I knew her well, and further fortunately, she knew and seemed to like me, so she just laughed a little and made some teasing remark about my faulty memory. Little did she know.
I was finally able to complete her order, and managed to get through the next half-hour or so, when the high watermark event of the afternoon took place. Thankfully, it was Chris this time that stepped on his johnson, not me.
Ralph, the same Ralph whose olfactory nerves had been so badly offended by Ernie's after-lunch bowel movement, had lent Chris his personal boning knife briefly, to cut something for a customer. While this was happening, Ernie had gone into the back cutting room to get a special order that had come in for a customer: a beef heart. He came out and left the beef heart sitting on the cutting block where Chris had just used Ralph's knife a moment before, and returned to the cooler for something else for his customer. When Ralph asked Chris where he had left his knife, Chris, busy with his customer, without turning, answered, "It's down there", and pointed vaguely, not being very specific.
"Where?", Ralph asked rather stridently, getting a little miffed. (He really hated it when one of us used his knife and didn't put it back where it belonged.)
So Chris, trying to juggle three things, listening to what his customer was saying, being seriously baked and attempting to answer Ralph, all at the same time, turned and announced, in a loud voice that was heard all over the department, including by most of the large group of customers standing on the other side of the meat case, "Down there, on the block with the heart on it", said block being in clear view of everyone.
Now he may have done it on purpose, or not, but when Chris made his loud answer, the word "it" didn't really come out of his mouth clearly; if you consider the sentence without the final preposition, well, you can imagine the reaction from everyone behind and at the counter.
Jack, Bruce and I, all being well within earshot, lost it. Ralph, standing just to the side of the cooler door, turned an interesting shade of red, his good eye watering vigorously while the other one wandered about, looking for a culprit. Several of the customers at the counter were laughing, but there were a couple of little old lady types who were quite shocked, to say the least.
And about this time, Ernie the smelly dipstick came out of the cooler and looked around at the commotion and inquired, with a befuddled look, "What are you guys laughing at?", which of course struck us all as even more hilarious, and we started laughing even harder. But here's the absolute topper of them all; as Ernie had come through the cooler door, this horrible stench wafted out with him, almost directly into Ralph's face.
I'm not sure, because you couldn't tell with all of us wearing aprons, but Jack was laughing so hard I think he might have piddled himself a little.
I won't tell you that your Pope and his friends never got stoned on their Saturday lunch hour ever again, subsequent to that fateful day, but I will tell you that we were a lot more careful after that.
And Ralph was equally careful to never follow Ernie into the men's room, ever again.
Good thing his glass eye didn't water.
Love and chicken breasts,
PJTT
copyright 2011 Krissongs, Inc.
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