The Job Pirate

by Brandon Christopher

  I wondered if Phil drank heavily. I raised my eyebrows, implying that I was shocked by his story, but I was really more shocked by the Geraldo Rivera reference.

  “How does this type of job sound to you?” he asked me. “Would you like something like this?”

  I didn’t like something like this, but I liked a roof over my head.

  “What’s the position pay, Phil?”

  “See, that’s the tricky part. You get paid per body, around $11. So, let’s say you pick up nine or ten bodies a day, you made yourself about a hundred bucks.”

  The idea of handling ten different corpses a day, every day, just to make a decent living was repulsive to me. I could make cappuccinos for assholes for half a day and make more than this job paid. But there were no cash registers involved with corpses. No customers—no living customers—to have to deal with. And I was hungry.

  “Sounds real good, Phil.”

  “Great! Why don’t you come in tomorrow morning and we’ll get you started. We’ll send you out with Matt for the day, he’s about your age.”

  “Terrific.” I left the stucco building and drove back home to North Hollywood only to fall asleep early, wake up, and return to the office the next morning at 8:55.

  I parked my car in the parking lot just as Matt, my new coworker, pulled up in the confidential white mortuary van and idled behind me. He rolled the window down and pointed two fingers and a lit cigarette at me.

  “You Brandon?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Matt, right?”

  “Totally,” he said and opened the passenger door for me.

  We shook hands as I crawled inside, and he flicked open his wrinkled cigarette pack at me. I pulled one out and lit it. “Thanks.” Matt was about 30, with a moustache and blond hair. A slight mullet crept down his neck. He was the type of guy in high school that would drive his old American car slowly through the parking lot blasting AC/DC.

  “All right, dude, our first one is a residential in Hollywood,” Matt explained while getting onto the freeway. He then clarified that “residentials” were people that died uneventfully and without criminal motive in their homes, not to mention a good bulk of the business. “You know, like old people and shit,” he added.

  We pulled off the freeway and backed our van into the driveway of the late Mr. Richard Fowler’s house. Matt organized his clipboard and finger-combed his moustache in the rearview mirror before we walked up to the front door.

  Before we had a chance to knock, we were greeted by a young woman with red eyes and a cried-out voice. She opened the screen door and escorted us to the master bathroom, where her 70-year-old father, the late Richard Fowler, had collapsed in the middle of the night and died in a fetal position in front of the toilet.

  “Why don’t you bring the gurney around to the back of the house while I take care of the paperwork,” Matt suggested.

  After returning to the van, I pushed the gurney around to the back of the house and parked it by the back door. I then walked into the bathroom and pulled the blanket off of the corpse on the floor, and I was quite surprised to see that his eyes were wide open. They seemed to follow me wherever I walked, like an expensive doll’s eyes. His mouth was agape, as if he was frightened—as if he had died of fright in the middle of the night.

  Matt returned to the bathroom to find me in a trance staring at the deceased. He squatted beside me and pushed Mr. Fowler onto his back, his bent arms and crouched legs moving in one solid motion. I slid the white sheet underneath him—his eyes still following me.

  “Using the sheet, we’ll lift him and walk him to the gurney on one, two, THREE!” Matt said, and we lifted Mr. Fowler and carried him to the backyard.

  The corpse had a serious case of rigor mortis, making it impossible to attach the gurney’s safety belts around his crimped arms and knees. The white sheet ballooned out above the gurney as if we were attempting to cover a large tree branch. I suspected what was about to come next but still wasn’t prepared.

  “We’re going to have to straighten him out,” Matt explained. “You do the legs and I’ll do the arms. Just grab hold of his ankle and push down on the knee.”

  Its cold ankle felt like a thawing turkey breast in my hand. But its knee felt somehow still human—I could feel its skin rubbing against the kneecap whenever I pushed down on it, making it nearly impossible to get a grip. I then pulled on its foot and pushed down on the knee in one powerful swoop, and the sound of old wood breaking erupted from under the sheet. I could actually hear the ligaments snapping in his leg, and my stomach instantly began to turn. My mouth started to salivate, and I knew I was close to vomiting. Thankfully, Matt pushed me aside and straightened the other leg for me.

  We easily fastened the safety belts around the body this time and wheeled Mr. Fowler to our van in the driveway. “Okay, I want you to slide the gurney into the van, so you know how to do it for next time,” Matt instructed. “Remember to pull up on that lever there by your hand when his head reaches the bumper. That’ll retract the wheels.”

  “Sure,” I replied, “I can handle this.”

  Mr. Fowler weighed about 150 pounds, so I was going to need to push the wheeled tray in with some muscle. As I pulled the gurney back then shoved it forward, the daughter of the deceased appeared beside us with two steaming cups of coffee. I was startled by her sudden presence and released the lever too soon. The sound was the most frightening part as Mr. Fowler’s bald head smashed into the van’s bumper and then fell to the cement with a hollow pumpkin thud. Upon impact with the ground, the white sheet had flown back, and Mr. Fowler’s wide-open eyes now watched us all from under the back of the van.

  “Oh shit!” I gasped. Matt and I kneeled down and lifted the gurney back onto its wheels and finally into the van.

  We both turned around to apologize to the daughter for what had just happened, but all that remained of her was the sound of a distant slamming screen door and two steaming splashes on the driveway where she had spilled both cups of coffee.

  After Matt apologized repeatedly to the woman, we delivered Mr. Fowler to a mortuary in Encino and headed back to the main office, at my insistence. Back in front of those leather chairs, I explained to Phil and his wife that there was no way I could go on being a mortuary driver—not even for the rest of the day. That much reality just would not work for me. Phil and his wife chuckled then he pulled out a prewritten check for $11 from his wallet. “We didn’t think you looked much like the mortuary type.”

  THE CITADEL OF TOASTER OVENS

  JOB #25

  The phrase “Hey, take care of this” can be interpreted many different ways. When attached to a bullet-ridden corpse it would most likely imply burying it in the desert in the dark of night. But if someone said “Hey, take care of this” before pointing at a wounded baby bird that had fallen from its nest, it could have meant mothering the bald little creature back to health just as easily as it could have meant dumping it in a shoebox coffin. Those five basic little words could be construed many, many different ways.

  So when a delivery of a hundred toaster ovens arrived on two wooden pallets in the center of the housewares department and I was told, “Hey, take care of this,” I did. I took care of it. I drew up some crude blueprints for a glorious European cathedral right there in the center of the second floor of Robinsons-May Co. before taping off the neighboring kitchen appliance aisles as a “Warning: hard-hats needed” zone.

  I started with the spine of the mighty structure I would call the Citadel of Toaster Ovens first, then I built walls and pillars so high they nearly touched the overhead fluorescent lights. Those rectangle packages made perfect bricks, and each one stacked so gracefully atop one another you’d think freemasons designed them. I was surprised it only took two hours of waving customers away to build the enormous stronghold, and by the end it resembled something any ten-year-old boy would love to have in his backyard on a birthday. There were lookout windows set at waist height, a tiny door that required stoopin
g over to get through, and battlements and ramparts atop each wall. I even brought two fold-up chairs inside and attempted to stay hidden until lunch, but an old woman peeked through the open entrance and dangled two packages at me.

  “Do you know anything about these?” the silver-haired woman asked from behind a veil of perfume. She was balancing two rival portable CD players in her hands, focusing on the weight of each instead of the brand names and bullet-pointed features written on the packaging.

  I didn’t know a thing about CD players. It was 1997, and I was poor. The poor still used cassettes and records. “The Quasar is far superior to the … to that one in your hand there … that one,” I explained to her as I stepped out of the Citadel.

  “This one feels better,” she said after shaking the slim box, which also shook the walking cane that formed a crescent moon around her wrist. “Feels like a better product.”

  “Because it’s heavier?”

  “Lighter,” she replied.

  “That’s interesting. Why?”

  “A lighter product means more advanced technology, which means crisper sound and a longer lifespan,” she answered, now reading the features and benefits on the winner. “And this one’s got a shock absorber so the CD won’t skip if I decide to use it while walking or jogging.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “And the other one doesn’t?”

  With her glasses nestled at the brim of her nose, she turned her gaze from the winning device to the losing device. “It doesn’t say so, which leads me to believe it doesn’t. You’d think they’d really showcase a feature like that.”

  “Especially in a bullet point.”

  “Especially,” she agreed. “Can you ring me up for this?”

  “No, I’m just the salesman,” I answered. “But you can take it over there beside the entrance and they’ll ring you up.”

  “Thank you, young man.”

  “It was a pleasure.”

  I envied that old woman as I watched her walk across the sales floor, toting her small package in a big empty shopping cart with one wild wheel. And I was proud of her for entering the technological world of portable CD players that attach to belts, especially at her age. I imagined her going home to her little retirement complex with her new battery-powered music player, wobbling contentedly to the cafeteria at dinnertime with Tony Bennett crooning through her headphones. What a brave new world she would soon be entering. Baths would never be the same again.

  I loosened my tie because it was beginning to make me gag and returned to the cash register at the center of the floor, my new hub for eight hours a day. I could have rung her up—I was supposed to have—but I still wasn’t a hundred percent comfortable with these new registers that all the big department stores were beginning to use. No longer satisfied with mere cash, check, and charge, these new elaborate devices now accepted payments to the store credit card, calculated coupons and discounts through barcodes, issued store credit vouchers, and redeemed gift certificates.

  My manager, who was a couple years younger than I, appeared almost magically beside me. He spent most of his paychecks buying new suits and ties to wear to work, leading me to believe that he was still in college and living at home or, at the very least, just living at home. He wore green contact lenses that looked like two neon buttons against his Filipino face. He pointed to my Citadel of Toaster Ovens just before those green eyes shrank to slivers, like the Hulk in reverse.

  “We can’t have a display like that,” he decreed. “We can’t have any display over four feet tall or someone could get hurt.”

  “But there were so many boxes, I thought I’d do something extravagant. It’s a citadel … like a fortress. Like ‘Fortress of a Sale’ or something. Or ‘We defend good prices.’ I didn’t know about the height thing. Next time.”

  “I’m going to need you to take that down right now, actually. The whole thing.”

  “Sure, I can do that,” I answered quite happily knowing it would keep me away from the cash register for at least another hour; three full days out of training and I still had yet to ring up a customer.

  I stood in the center of the Citadel of Toaster Ovens one last time and stared blindly into the hundred identical little boy-and-mom faces smiling deviously at me from the stacked boxes. On the far right side of every package, the giddy two were cooking a mini pizza and smiling at the ease of using a toaster oven—a mother and her son, Caucasian; she was a brunette in her 30s and the tot no more than eight. The pizza was pepperoni. Mom was fervently pointing at the warming meal behind the petite glass door, and the kid looked as if he was about to clap his hands or plan a cunning cookie heist.

  Every toaster oven box I pulled down from the walls revealed a new layer of this mom-and-son relationship to me, over and over again. By the tenth box she was burning pieces of the absent father in the little oven; by the twelfth, Mom was showing Junior where she keeps her soul warm at night. On this box, Mom had caught her little scientist cooking the family cat, and that’s why she was pointing at it so enthusiastically; by the twentieth box, the two were cooking a turd casserole together; the next few also involved feces-related food products, but eventually we saw Mom showing little Tommy how babies were cooked at 375 degrees until done, not made.

  I was peeling away so many layers of this familial riddle that I was forced to begin writing these eye-opening observations onto the fronts of every other box I pulled down. The print was subtle enough to be purchased without notice, but definitely noticeable when opening the box at home. The most horrible of comments, too, ranging everywhere from the aforementioned turd casseroles and husband penises all the way to the World War II fairy-tale-themed caption, “Li’l Jewish-Born Fairy Oven: Cook ’em till they’re magically delicious!” Eventually running out of heinous commentary to write down, I resorted to caption bubbles and colorful statements about poop and wieners for the last thirty or so. The Citadel of Toaster Ovens was finally dismantled and rebuilt into a bulky four-foot-high rectangle, with each of my sixty or sixty-five little scribbles neatly positioned out of sight.

  “Excuse me.” A much younger woman than before tapped me on the back. I was squatting on one knee admiring my handiwork and she had sneaked up behind me.

  “Hi,” I replied.

  “I need to get this; can you help me? I’m so late.”

  I escorted her back to my cash register and was surprised at how well I rang her up on a credit card sale. Activation button, enter my employee code, run the laser over the barcode, push the Visa/Master button, and cha-ching. I smiled proudly at my own prowess before telling her, “That’ll be $114.40.”

  “And I need to pay $100 to my store card first.” She was already holding out her Visa card, her Robinsons credit card, and a $100 bill, regardless of whatever her purchase came to with tax. I could tell she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  The transaction was already complete, according to the register; it just needed payment before it could move on. I wished she would have mentioned wanting to pay off her store card with cash before I rang her up on the credit function. There was a process to recall the last sale, but I couldn’t remember it. I remembered that it was quite complicated to do, so instead of trying I glanced around the sales floor for my manager. He was nowhere to be found, and she continued to stare at me impatiently. Then she crossed her arms.

  “Is there a problem?” she snapped.

  “I’m trying to void out the first sale to add in the … the cash part,” I replied. “But it’s complicated.”

  “Just do two sales! God, this is why I go to Bloomingdale’s now. Seriously.” She checked her watch, and I felt my face grow red. “It’s a simple request. It’s not really deserving of my entire lunch hour. This really can’t be that difficult.”

  I had to remedy this situation immediately but I had two credit cards and a shitload of cash in one hand and no idea what to do with the other hand. She kept goading me on, so I pushed the $100 key, pushed the Payment bu
tton, swept her Visa card then her Robinson’s card, and hoped for the best. The register computed the transaction for a second before the cash drawer sprang open with a victorious rattle of coins. I knew I had fucked up somewhere in the process but I put the $100 inside and shut it nonetheless. I ripped off the receipt and tucked it into the bottom of her bag underneath the package.

  Once she huffed off, I examined the store duplicate of the receipt for what had actually happened during the sale, but it still remained a mystery. The Visa card wasn’t charged for the $100, and it didn’t ring up as a cash sale either. The receipt clearly showed that $100 changed hands somewhere in the transaction, but the cash drawer readout stated the drawer tally still stood at the amount it was three hours prior, minus the recent credit card sale for $114.40. It was a conundrum. It was a conundrum that could probably get me fired. Although having extra money in the register was better than being short at most major department stores, it was still frowned upon at Robinson’s. I could come clean about the situation and blame it on the jitters, but my green-eyed manager was looking for any reason to get me out of there. The debacle of the Citadel of Toaster Ovens would be nothing compared to this.

  There was only one option I could think of to remedy the matter: That $100 was going to have to disappear. Like the whole thing never happened. But $100 was big time. I had stolen from retail jobs before, but $18 and a bottle of wine had been my maximum. But this wasn’t stealing—focus on that. This was simply removing something from the cash register that was never supposed to be there to begin with. I could do this—I could get away with it. After all, what employee would steal $100 on his third day at a job? They’d have to think it was a mix-up in the accounting. I’d have to be smart, though, from here on out—remove the guilty cash before going to lunch then hide it in my car. That way, if they searched me at the evening shift change, I’d be clean.