The Trouble Way

by James Seloover

  The way it was put to me, the conspiracy thing, was that none of the employees who were doing all that stuff had anything against the manager personally. It was just like it is today, a hundred years later, they felt like they weren’t even getting the smaller half of the Hershey bar. Half hell, they weren’t even allowed a whiff of the foil wrapper. I know, I was in management. It was the business plan to give the workers as little as possible. Maximize profits was the theory. Maximize profits for upper management was the reality. It wasn’t just the low-end workers that were the pawns, it included the low-end and middle managers as well.

  Back then, the minimum wage was about a buck and a quarter for hourly employees. Employees catch on pretty quickly when they’re getting their very personal cavity unpleasantly and repeatedly invaded and they weren’t about to settle for that any more than a worker today will settle for seven bucks. It may be that their paycheck shows seven bucks, gross, but you can bet your shiny butt they are getting exactly what they think they’re worth, one way or another, guar-an-fuckin’-teed, as ol’ Roy used to say.

  I read somewhere the other day that corporations lose somewhere around twenty billion dollars to shoplifting per year and around ninety percent of that is employee theft. It’s employees giving themselves what they are certain they deserve. It was the same a hundred years ago when I was an assistant manager at Big Richards.

  And, it’s not that they are getting all that in cash themselves. If they can’t pocket it, they are sure as shit going to denying it to The Man. I know it for a fact, first hand. I’ve seen it and I’ve heard it from the mares’ mouths. You’d think that it is men who dominate employee theft. Wrong-a-mundo. Many, but not all, are pretty young women ... and all of them are highly skilled.

  I’ve never told anybody about it before. It is not really all that important, if you want to know, but it’s kinda funny. It’s a good example of the minimum wage earner getting their just rewards for hard work.

  I have a hard time remembering names, but the names aren’t important anyway. I’m guessing here but think her name was Bertha or Bertie. Yeah, Bertie. She was the garden shop manager in one of the Big Richard stores I worked in. It happened in the rat-plagued store, but it could have happened in any one of the twenty stores I had worked in.

  Bertie appeared as though she drove through life as if her headlights were on low beam. That was the impression management had of Bertie’s abilities. If Bertie’s resourcefulness was a target nailed on the barn door and management aimed at it and fired, they’d have hit the chicken coop. She was a genius at making a profit for Bertie. She’d have made a good candidate for upper management. She played management for flippin’ fools; they were the ones driving without their brights on.

  Bertie wasn’t one of those pretty young women. She wasn’t even semi-good looking. What she did didn’t require looks, it required ingenuity, and that she possessed in abundance.

  She would take lawnmowers to the repair shop to have them refurbished; lawnmowers disgruntled customers had returned to Big Richards for a refund. She’d get cash from the main office to pay for their refurbishment and then take her car and pick them up. She noticed that management didn’t audit her actions when she returned the mowers to the store. Eventually, instead of bringing them back to the garden shop, she took ‘em to her home. Over a few months, she managed to accumulate a garage full of refurbished lawn mowers and sold ‘em herself. Not once did anybody check on her to make sure she brought the machines back to the store. For a little frosting, she claimed her mileage to and from the repair shop; she even added the mileage to her home.

  As business grew, she devised additional marketing strategies. She got to where she would target likely customers shopping for a mower and offer them a hell-of-a deal on a refurbished one if they could pay with cash, no questions asked. She had a waiting list. In fact, she devised a ruse to have a friend buy a mower and return it so she could build up her stock of used mowers for her operation. She’d give the friend ten bucks and gave them the cash to buy the mower.

  In the winter, she did it with snow blowers. She was a goddamn marketing genius.

  If someone questioned her on it, she’d say, “Oh, I sold that mower to Mr. Johnson the minute I got it from repair. He bought it right out of my trunk. I would have had a hard time lifting it out of my trunk with my back and all. He did all the work for me. Paid cash.”

  The “paid cash” part may have been true; she just neglected to say she sold it from her garage and kept the cash herself. Never occur to anybody to question her integrity, thinking she was too dim to think of committing fraud. As far as I know, they never did catch her.

  She was quite the merchandiser. All the lawnmowers were lined up by size on her front lawn with a real professional looking sign on each one. She had quite a line of bullshit. Something she was real proud of. Ann said she used to work in a carnival; told me all about Bertie years later, after I’d been whacked.

  The one that takes the granddaddy of purple ribbons was the trick Bertie pulled with the Christmas trees. That little venture cost Hedd about five-thousand bucks during one Christmas season alone.

  Word on the street was that Bertie spent her off time at the track during the season and needed to finance her addiction.

  Rumor also has it that that little sociopath, Candy, the rat hunter, was in on that Christmas tree scam.

  Candy took Ann for a bundle too. She dipped into Ann’s peanut jar of cash and booked on her when the rent was due. Candy took her stash of weed too. That was one mistake Candy probably wish she hadn’t made. Ann and her friend, Linda, set her up and burned her ass, but good.

  Shit, I remember one time I worked all night looking for dead rats, if you can believe that. Dead rats.

  The worst job I’d had up to that point was digging a sewer for three days so I’d have the cash to go out with a girl I was infatuated with in high school, Bernadette. I think our phone call lasted less than fifteen second. She said “No thanks,” when I asked her if she’d like to go to a movie. That was it, “No thanks.” I was speechless so I just hung up the receiver. (I saw her about fifteen years later in a nightclub and asked her if she would like to dance … “No thanks.” Bitch.)

  High school, that’s when I was really a dumb shit. I’m embarrassed to say but to prove how dumb I was, I screwed Janis between her butt and the car seat. I thought it was awful rough and cold but, heck, I’d never done it before, and, actually, it felt pretty darn good. Obviously, after a little redirection, it was infinitely better. If that’s not dumb enough, I proved to be even dumber, if you can imagine. I did that exact butt-car seat thing with Rose, the second girl I’d had my way with; different car. The seat covers were cloth. It was warm and wet by that point. If Rose hadn’t said something, I’d have been completely satisfied. How the hell was I to know? It didn’t feel all that bad. In my expert opinion, if you’re going to fuck a seat-cover, go with cloth.

  It was me and some guy named Dwight who were on the dead-rat hunting expedition. There was one girl who worked with us, Candy. Turns out, they were in it together. Candy and Dwight and a bunch of other employees were in this little loose-knit group that was out to get The Man. They stole shit and ruined stuff ... caused all kinds of damage to the place.

  I accidentally ran into one of the workers years later, Ann, and she told me a bunch of stuff. Ann wasn’t all that happy to see me, but she was pleasant and we had a beer for old times’ sake.

  Most of the employees, I don’t even remember. I worked in a butt-load of stores and it’s impossible to remember all the names.

  Anyway, Ann told me. I clearly remember her name because I slept with her. It was the first girl I fell in love with since I’d divorced the lunatic, that’s really why I remember Ann.

  I’d overcome my seat-cover/butt problem by then and I got her pregnant. She had an abortion. One day, right after the abortion, I was standing by another assistant manager and she grabbed my tie, right in front of Gen
e, and synched it up really tight, enough to make my head feel like it was turning purple, and said, “Jake ... Leave ... Me ... Alone,” real slow and as serious as a broken neck. I damn near strangled. She must have practiced Judo. Embarrassed the crap out of me. Well, I can take a hint. I guess I sort of knew she didn’t want anything to do with me anymore on account of the abortion and I might have been sort of stalking her. (This was the “not happy part,” as Bella, my little three-year-old friend said to me. She was talking about a particular point in an animated movie, not about my love life.)

  I couldn’t seem to decide on what I wanted in life, girls or otherwise, after I got divorced from that lunatic, Janis. I just sort of cruised along for quite a few years after that. Janis really screwed with my head, mainly about girls.

  Well, I did decide to marry my cousin, Priscilla, when I was nine or ten but then the “not happy part” of my life started. That lasted for another ten or so years.

  Bella is a million times smarter than I am. For example, Bella knows precisely what she is going to do in her future. She has already decided who she is going to marry, Dalton; he’s three also.

  She said when I asked her if she needed to go potty: “I’m going to pee and then I’m going to poop.” I have to say, you can’t be much more precise than that about your immediate future. I wish she had been around back in my troubled years. I sure could have used her example.

  It took a hundred years for me to actually get around to marrying my cousin Priscilla, the one I fell in love with when I was nine. I blame that on Janis too.

  I slept with a lot of women that worked at the stores I was assigned to and, the fact is, I don’t remember hardly any of their names. One was the personnel manager of the first store I was in and I’ll be damned if I remember her name. That’s pretty bad if you can’t remember a personnel manager. She just knocked on my door one night with a bottle of wine in one hand and a smile on those big red lips of hers. She had the biggest knockers I’d ever seen on a skinny woman. Said her ol’ man was a cheat.

  Anywho, we hit the sheets pretty quickly after we polished off most of that bottle of Merlot. It happened only once. She said I wore her out. Hell, I thought that was the point … wore me out too. Becky … that was it. Ms. Becky.

  Anyway, Ann told me it was Dwight, the stockroom manager, who killed the rats and stuffed them in the ceiling and in the walls. He used big wooden rattraps to catch them. She found out from her friend, Linda, who used to go out with Dwight.

  I slept with Linda too. She was a Pilipino, a gorgeous one, as a matter of record. She could sure kiss. I never could get the knack of the way she wanted me to do that. She didn’t have a problem telling me how shitty I was at it either. On the up side, I got the knack of how she liked to be screwed though. Maybe I should say on the side-by-side, side. I’ll let you use your imagination on that.

  Anyway, the store manager, Mr. Hedd, sent us on this expedition. We were supposed to find all the dead animals and get rid of them before the health department inspector showed up the next day. We smelled them but I’ll be damned if we could locate any. Dwight kept guiding us to where he was sure the odor was coming from and the truth was, he was leading us astray. He’d point this flashlight into a cubbyhole and pretended to search all over the place and finally say, “Nope, nothing there,” and we’d look someplace else. I don’t know how he stood the smell of sticking his head in that hole. He really put on a show, convinced me.

  Both he and Candy must have laughed their butts off later because we looked all night and couldn’t find one lousy carcass for the effort. Pissed ol’ Peter Hedd off having to pay the both of them time and a half for no results. Me, I was on salary. Didn’t cost the bastard shit outside of my regular pay. I had to work that entire next day too; you don’t forget getting screwed like that.

  Well, the health department inspector found an abundance of carcasses. He brought along his dog for the search. Christ, if I had a dog, I’d have found plenty myself. He and his bloodhound found eighteen dead rats and. what was left of the stray Calico cat the garden shop manager, Bertie, fed on the sly. It had been missing for a while. All that remained of it was a shifting mound of orange and black fur heaving with squirming maggots when he discovered it under a pallet of dog food.

  That old health department inspector quarantined the store for a week. It took that long to for a huge crew of employees to disinfect and scour the stockrooms, get rid of the contaminated food, and pass another inspection. That cost ol’ Peter a weeks’ worth of sales, a butt-spank in salary expense, and damn near his job.

  Braunswine, the DM, came close to firing old Pete over the fiasco. As it turns out, Braunswine was the one who ordered ten pallets of assorted dog food that we didn’t need and couldn’t sell fast enough that attracted those rats in the first place.

  When the regional manager found out who ordered the dog food, Braunswine must have kissed a bunch of butt that week because the whole brew-ha-ha was forgotten pretty damn quickly.

  I remember Ann had the hots for another employee, the Jewelry Manager, Linda. I suspected but didn’t know that for a fact for quite a while. I’d been sleeping with Ann and, one time, I bumped into Linda at the grocery store and asked her for a date. I took her to the beach and when we got back to her place, Ann was there. I remember leaving and was actually down the stairs when Linda opened the door and called me back. I was already horny as a mink; Linda and I had almost done it on the beach earlier that evening. If it hadn’t been for other people on the beach, we probably would have. Anyway, it didn’t take much coaxing to get me to return to her apartment.

  Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who was horny as hell. We’d been smoking Linda’s magic pot all evening. That shit not only makes you horny, it makes you feel invisible. They decided to show me what they liked to do. It didn’t bother me. Hell, they invited me in on the whole thing. If you don’t know, some pot makes you horny, other weed makes you have the munchies. Actually all pot make you have the munchies. Some just makes you horny and have the munchies. Linda and I were already stoned and it turned out that Ann was too. She’d been tokin’ the horny pot before we got there.

  Seemed like Linda had a never-ending supply of weed. As it turns out, she did, in fact, have a never-ending supply. Some people she met in Hawaii supplied her with as much as she could sell. She had a nicer apartment and car than any of us, including the manager. She was quite an entrepreneur, and she was one good-looking honey.

  Ann was close to naked when I walked in, she had on a purple nightie, I remember. Matched her toenails. She sure was far from invisible.

  The two of them sat next to each other and started fooling around and pretty soon, there was a touch here and there and pretty soon there was a some kissing and eventually Ann fished around in her purse and brought out her little silver vibrator. Anyway, at first, I was mostly just watching but eventually Ann invited me to get into the mix. Then it was kissing, the silver vibrator, and ol’ Jake. We eventually ended up all tangled together on the Linda’s bed like a plate of spaghetti.

  Ann and Linda were attracted to men also. I know that for a hard fact, if you let your mind wander a bit. They liked doing it, they liked drinking beer, and they liked smoking pot, and they sure as shit liked that little vibrator Ann packed around. She even had a spare set of batteries she kept in a little leather cinch sack; she showed me. The sack had colorful beads on it to match her roach clip.

  We all got some hands-on time with that handy gadget. There’s nothing like watching a babe get off with a vibrator, especially if another chick is at the controls. Each of us watched and helped the other with that contraption. They leveled that little sucker on me when my turn came.

  I’ve thought of that goddamned evening nearly every night for the past umpteen years, I shit you not.

  My mom always used that word, umpteen, to exaggerate things. Like: “I told you umpteen times to take out the garbage.” She never once told me umpteen times about anything. Sh
e could really lay the ol’ guilt trip on a guy; it was rarely even into the high single digit times, max. But that would sound weird if she said: “I told you in the high single digit times to take the garbage out.” It wouldn’t be clichéically correct. Well, when I use umpteen, it’s no exaggeration.

  It was a good thing Ann did carry an extra set of C-cells. We drained the first set on Linda and half the second set on me and when it was Ann’s turn to ride the pony, he slowed to a walk just when she began screaming for us to spur that little mustang into a gallop. Linda came to the rescue and rode Ann bareback, full out, and they both hit the tape neck and neck, in a perfect tie.

  The thing that sticks in my mind is another thing that happened that same night when Ann and Linda used Ann’s little battery operated gizmo. It’s hard to remember all the details but the essence of it is that the three of us were fooling around and we were all pretty stoned and everyone was getting off a bunch of times over the evening. Linda decided that she wanted to hop on my back while I was intimately engaged with Ann. It was pretty kinky but, what the hell, that’s what we were all like back then. Besides, we were invisible. Turned me on like mad. Ann was up for it, as if she had a choice anyway, because Linda just slid up there on my back hugging me like a monkey clinging to its mother. Apparently it turned Ann on too, she loved it, she wrapped her legs around the both of us, you know, like a toddler wraps its legs around its mother in the grocery store, and didn’t miss a beat. She ended up with a screaming orgasm. I don’t scream, but I came out okay too. Linda got another chance to scream her brains out after we took some time to catch our breath.