It was the summer of 2000.  The millennium had just hit and the world was still here.  Y2K had decided not to ruin our computers, hospitals or schools.  Since that was the case and since I was sixteen years old, I needed a job.  So, for eight dollars an hour I went to work at the grocery store up the street from my house.  I had applied to be a bag boy.  I got hired to be a bag boy.  I got trained to be a bag boy.

I got put to work as a cashier.

No training. No help.  Just hundreds of kinds of produce and lines of people screaming.  What was I supposed to do with checks?  Did you want cash back?  No, I do not know where the Spanish Almonds are, Sir.  Please go fuck yourself on aisle seven.

This particular store was a hot bed for the MILFs of the surrounding affluent neighborhood.  It was great for my sixteen year-old imagination, but at times it felt like I was pledging the junior league.  I always got scheduled on weekday afternoons.  They would line up with their items, always dressed as if aerobics were at least a possibility.

Due to my own ignorance (and lack of training) my register would always lock up, and Latasha, my only friend at work, would have to come and key in the correct weight and price for the piece of produce I had scanned incorrectly.  The concept of this particular store was that it was an “express”.  Since worthless irony doesn’t outweigh eight dollars an hour, the job fucking sucked.

Everyday I would put on my teal shirt, drag myself up there and listen to the three African-American women I worked with laugh at me for being a virgin.  I tried to convince them otherwise, but they said they could tell by my face.  One of them said it was, “the way I put my seatbelt on.”  They gave me tips that came in the form of complaints for ways “they wish they got it”.  I told them thanks, but that the girl I dated didn’t like Boyz II Men or honey.

My manager was a cross between Lou Diamond Phillips and a limousine driver.  He always walked like he was in a hurry and was always humming Bruce Springsteen underneath his breath.  It didn’t drive me crazy until we had to stock an aisle together.  Doesn’t sound that bad huh?  Try stocking eighteen cartons of Pringles with every tube being handed to you with a monotone track sampling from Darkness on the Edge of Town.  To this day I can’t hear “Badlands” without picturing 84 individuals canisters of Cheez Ums.

Halfway through the summer, my only casualties were my affinity for the Boss, the possibility I would ever listen to Boyz II Men again and my ability to consume any honey products.

Then, came the peritonsillar abscess.

I called into work and told them I thought I had gotten poison ivy in my throat.  Two days later I had lost ten pounds and was spitting up blood constantly.  My mom and I went to the ENT for a consultation and the doctor had to get a ratchet to open my jaw because the swelling had gotten so bad.  As if that didn’t hurt enough, he proceeded to, without giving me any anesthesia, stick a pair of dull scissors into the back of my throat and pierce the ever tender, ever puss-filled abscess.  He then stuck a suction tube deep into it and sucked out what I thought looked like banana gravy.

I sat there and, like all tough sixteen year-olds eager to lose their virginity, held my mom’s hand and cried buckets of hot tears that were in dry pools on my cheeks as we exited the office.

I would spend the next two weeks bed ridden, recovering from a surgery that can be described as “slightly post-western frontier”.  I ate a bunch of pain pills, drank a bunch of ICEEs and watched a copious amount of The Price is Right and the British Open (Tiger Woods won).

Then, one Sunday night as I was screaming at my brother over a video game, my parents said, “you look like you’re in pretty good shape to go back to work.”  I couldn’t argue with them.  My run had ended.

I walked back upstairs and looked at my nametag.  It hadn’t moved its place on my desk in three weeks.  It brought me back to months prior, when the customer service lady had slammed it out on the label maker- CHARLS.   Since it had been my first day at my first job, I hadn’t spoken up to tell her she had misspelled it.  I thought it was funny and we all made jokes about it.  But now, the nametag had taken on a different form.  It felt like more like a bad contract – more like a prison cell number.

In the stillness of my head a slow monotone version of “Dancing in the Dark” started to play.  I took my last pain pill, crawled into bed and secretly wished that another abscess would fill my throat while I slept.

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