Counter Culture : Adam Matcho
He was right and I completely understood the moment he pointed it out. But the man insisted to tell me how he was right and I was mistaken.
“You see that one up there has green lava and blue liquid. The one you are trying to sell me has blue lava and green liquid. And I wouldn’t mind but that blue lava is too dark. Christ, it’s almost purple.”
He kept going. I don’t know why he didn’t ask if I was okay. I was clearly in bad shape. I thought about interrupting, explaining my position. Maybe asking him to wait five to twenty minutes and I’ll be right back to get it down for him. After all, fishermen seem like the patient sort, but I knew from his voice and cantankerous demeanor, he would be mortally offended if I did this. He would probably want my boss’s number.
My boss would understand, I mean everyone shits. But his boss wouldn’t and I needed this job. Food, rent, car payments all depended on getting a paycheck. 
“…That’s more of a woodland green in that one you pointed to, but I prefer the lime green color of the one up there.” He was still going. I wondered if I could just crawl away and take my shit, then sneak back to this same spot. Would he still be talking? I would just stand up beside him. I could tell I was taller and look down my own wide nose at him and say, “Sir, step aside, I need to get a ladder.”
It didn’t matter, I decided I could not move until my stomach stopped rumbling. I had no idea if anybody else was in the store. I did not care.
Ten minutes ago I was searching for the “Back In Five Minutes” sign. Better known as the Gotta Shit sign to those of us who work here. The sign was created for these weekday opening shifts. A typical Wednesday, like today, I work until one or two in the afternoon by myself. That’s bad news for somebody who drank too much Blue Moon and Calico Jack the night before.
There were only three of us who worked these weekday morning solos and each one of us liked to drink. It was not a coincidence. That’s the way it is in a retail store in a mall. They even have a name for people like us: a nametag subculture. All the hostesses and bartenders. The bookstore clerks and busboys. Trendy clothing store workers making commission on each sale and the old guy at the liquor store who will ask to see an ID no matter how many times you show him.
We all are bought and mistreated on a daily basis. Somehow considered subservient to anybody who wants to spend money. That kind of thing is depressing and the nametag subculture knows just how to handle that: forget it, drink it off. We didn’t invent or even want that kind of lifecycle, but constant time-punching and soul crushing wears a person down.
I had no hopes of escape. Dreams, desperation, any sense of urgency, all those things are much too heavy to carry when you have to adhere to the demands of the general public with a smile and friendly attitude. Eight hours of that a day is enough to kill any aspiration of anything, except drinking a cold beer if you make it through the whole night without stabbing a customer with a ballpoint pen. Keeping your job through this kind of adversity demands a prize, a catharsis. My personal reward system was based on pot, beer and rum.
The other two who worked this shift were my boss and the poker-faced sales supervisor, Daneika. Although it is not a busy point of the day, there are strange people who stop at the novelty store at 11 am on a Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, that four-hour slice of the day is when a person’s bowels are most active when their life is based on the nine-to-ten schedule of the mall. In fact, my boss was the one who made the sign. He had his own battles with booze and sometimes he’d lose and I’d get called in on my day off to find him stuck behind the counter with the garbage can close by.
I remember one time I came in and he had taken one of the Misfits throw blankets from the shelf and cocooned himself with it. He was pale and sweaty and covered in grinning skulls. He was sitting on one of the bar stools we sell and had called me about twenty minutes ago. He was sick with drink and couldn’t keep out of the bathroom.
I never minded coming in for him, even though I never got that bad myself. My boss was about nine years older than me and booze hit him harder now. I never had the attitude that he brought it on himself somehow. I just understood. Most of the time he could push through, some days he couldn’t.
All three of us had an open relationship about bowel movements. We had worked together for three years and understood the importance of the Gotta Shit sign. Daneika held the store record for shitting nine times in one eight-hour shift.
She held her stomach all day and would say something like, “I need to release some demons,” before disappearing through the heavy door at the back of the store, where the bathroom was. I would stay on the sales floor and wonder what it was like to shit so much in such a short amount of time. After her fifth, she looked like she was losing weight.
“I forgot I ate corn the other day,” she said somewhere between number five and six.
“I think you are setting a new record,” I said. “You better hope we don’t start running low on toilet paper.”
“I already thought of that,” she said in her unsmiling and monotone way. “So I stashed a roll somewhere in the back room.”
Before she ran off to the back, Daneika had been telling me her plans to buy a taser. She lived in Braddock and felt she would be better protected if she had one. Not that she needed it. Daneika was one of the toughest females I knew. In fact, she could probably throw down with any male that pissed her off too. There was a hard living quality she exhibited. Even the mallrats, at the height of their brash and juvenile loitering, were apprehensive of her.
“Don’t tell the scary black lady on me,” a girl once pleaded, after knocking a rack of key chains on the floor.
“You better start cleaning this shit up then,” I said, hovering my foot above the pile. “She spent three hours putting them in order.”
That was a lie. Nobody ever organized the key chains, until that timid little white girl came along.
“I know where I can get a nice taser for sixty,” Daneika told me after her latest bathroom run. “That way I don’t have to punch nobody anymore. I’ll just --”
She stopped talking and imploded her cheeks like she just bit into a lemon. Her hands were behind her back and her eyes popped like she just witnessed a traffic accident.
“Number six?” I said with a hint of celebration.
I didn’t get an answer. She was halfway to the back door, both her hands on her ass.
“Almost went in my pants,” she said when she came back.
I laughed and clapped. I couldn’t believe she kept going. It was like she was a magician, pulling an endless strand of colored handkerchiefs from her sleeve.
“That would have been great,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t have. Besides, that’s already been done.”
She was right. Even though she shit eight times that day and complained the entire second half of the night because her secret stash of toilet paper had rubbed her raw, she at least made it every time.
Our boss was not that lucky.
