Cool Hand Daniel

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

By the end of my first day serving the community by attempting to avoid work at my local Goodwill charity store, the experience had become intensely depressing and demoralising. By now, on my last day, I am feeling pretty fucking sorry for myself.

The clothes are wheeled out from the mysterious back room in an endless procession of rickety rails and parked in the centre of the shop floor, designed, presumably, to cause maximum inconvenience to the largely freakish collection of desperate souls that frequent the store. From there the volunteers take armfuls of the clothes and hang them in the correct sections of the shop.

But I find almost immediately that I am unable to tell the difference between men's and women's clothing, or between women's and children's. I am simply incapable of holding up a pair of jeans and judging by its size who it would fit. Even locating and deciphering information from the labels appears beyond my capabilities. This hitherto undiscovered flaw in my analysing skills is a rather large hinderence to my performance. I am therefore reduced to merely guessing, and then shoving each item onto the ridiculously overcrowded rails at random when no one is looking.

One customer catches me putting what I thought was a skirt into the relevant department. “That's a top,” she tells me in some confusion.

“How can you tell?”

She holds up the shirt's spaghetti straps. “It's a top. See?”

“No,” I say mournfully.

While not being the world's best store clerk isn't such a big deal in my general life, its larger implications are worrying. When I try to concentrate on the job I become light-headed, spaced out, and I wonder around the shop in a kind of daze. Perhaps I have been idle for too long, or perhaps I am just no longer capable of functioning in the real world. When Lydia finally tires of my laughable attempts to attain a career in the Los Angeles TV world and the economy has picked up, she will force me to get a real job. (I did manage to make the AP website on a recent job: http://www.apimages.com/OneUp.aspx?st=k&kw=johnny%20hallyday%20in%20hospital&showact=results&sort=date&intv=None&sh=10&kwstyle=and&adte=1260910835&dah=-1&pagez=60&cfasstyle=AND&nextdah=15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2C15%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX%2CX&rids=feb877c991f94d71ac19fb6fb1946614&dbm=PThirtyDay&page=1&xslt=1&dispname=091214022658%2C%20Johnny%20Hallyday . I doubt anyone has purchased this photograph). How will I be able to fit into this world where people work forty or fifty hours a week and are expected to actually fulfill simple tasks to an adequate degree in exchange for their meager pay? It is totally beyond me how people are able to work full time in this very place.

A guy who has started his community service today has spent the entire morning circling the shop with a feather duster, lightly and ineffectively stroking the glass surfaces of the display cases. I am jealous of this genius work-avoidance move. Earlier, he told me that this was his first day of a hundred and eighty-three hours of community service.

“A hundred and eighty-three hours?” I repeated. “What did you do, kill a kid?”

He merely looked at me with dark eyes, then floated away with his duster.

Another guy, a twenty year-old Hispanic who reeks of pot, keeps sidling up to me to pass on his perverted opinions of the largely female customers.

“Definite lesbians,” he says, nodding at an unattractive pair of middle-aged ladies.

“You reckon?”

“Definitely,” he says again, speaking uncomfortably loudly. “Can't see the appeal, myself. It's too limited. I mean, I like to go down on a girl as much as the next man. Or woman. But to have to do it every fucking time. Must get depressing.”

“Huh. Well, they've got, like strap-ons and stuff, I suppose.”

He shakes his head. “I don't think so,” he says, and sidles away.

I am now one of those clueless dickheads who can't help you in shops. An older man asks me which colour is on sale today.

“They have colours?” I say.

He narrows his eyes. “Yes. They have coloured tags on everything. Every day it's twenty percent off a different colour.”

“Oh right,” I say, trying and failing to remember if I had been told this at any point. “You should ask at the front,” I suggest, gesturing towards the checkout which as usual is unmanned and surrounded by twenty impatient customers.

Another man stops me in the furniture section and asks if we deliver.

“No idea,” I say cheerfully, and keep walking.

I like it when someone asks me if I can open one of the fitting room doors. I don't know why they are locked but I'm glad they are because this is a task that even I am capable of successfully performing. I know where the key is kept and I know how to use it to unlock a door and the whole thing kills about thirty seconds.

There is nowhere pleasant to sit on my fifteen minute lunch break so I squat on a filthy cracked plastic bench in a bus stop by a six-lane boulevard. It is at this moment that I think the most seriously about my life and how this has happened. Then I remember that if I keep drinking I will be dead in twenty years or so and if I can just summon the mental strength to make it that far then it won't matter anymore.

In the afternoon I am exhausted and I have been reduced to taking just one item of clothing from the rail at a time to some distant part of the shop. I keep at it for an hour before I finally realise that someone else is loading the rail with clothes from the shop that are no longer wanted. She seemed as baffled that the rail was not filling up as I was that it never emptied.

I am picking coats off the floor when, just audible over the sex music that constantly pours from the shop speakers, I overhear a woman in one of the fitting rooms say to her daughter, “Look, you're really growing up. You're almost filling this A-cup already.”

I move away and glance at the clock. Twenty minutes of my sentence to serve.

I spot Jeff approaching me from the kids section. He nods at me and stands without saying anything.

“Can't keep away then?” I say.

“Nah. Wanted to introduce you to that guy I was telling you about.”

I notice a man behind him dressed in an expensive-looking cool black suit and no tie over a white shirt. He steps forward and holds his hand out. “Simon,” he says.

“Daniel,” I say, shaking his hand. I look at Jeff questioningly. He just returns my gaze blankly so I look back at Simon. “You're a friend of Jeff's? Or...acquaintance.”

“Simon works on Adult Swim,” Jeff says.

My mouth opens and I glare at Jeff, suddenly unpleasantly conscious of my stupid blue apron. “Huh. I didn't actually expect you to bring Simon in to meet me here.” I turn to Simon. “I volunteer here sometimes.”

“Funny,” Simon says. “Jeff told me you were driving recklessly and you were sentenced to community service.”

I start to stutter an excuse but he grins knowingly and I relax a little. “Why don't I meet you outside in twenty minutes?”

“No problem,” he says. “I need some new suits.” He winks and Jeff follows him to the men's section across the room.

I move to the back of the shop, hiding behind the extensive VHS section, plotting a way of murdering Jeff in a manner that would force him to understand his idiocy.

The Chain Gang

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Due to my virtual lack of employment, Lydia forced me to go to court to fight for a reduction in my latest speeding fine. Even some half-hearted Internet research between online games of Uncharted 2 made it clear that this was unlikely without going to trial (where I would lose because I am guilty), yet over the past three weeks I had diligently composed and recited a hundred times an impassioned speech that touched upon my relative newness to the country, the higher speed limits in Britain and my clean record in my home country. Neither the second or third parts were true, but my hope was for a middle-aged female judge who found my accent charming. And if my rhetoric appeared to be failing to achieve the desired effect, I had an optional, potentially devastating finale hinting at police corruption and government conspiracies.

In the event, a bored Asian man climbed into the chair, blew his nose into the microphone and, without looking at any of them, told the seventy anxious citizens in his court room that he wasn't interested in anything we had to say and that he was merely here to hear our plea and administer fines. Deflated but relieved, I instantly forgot my planned speech and made sure my wallet was in my pocket.

The woman before me (booked for making an illegal U-turn), claiming that she had a low income, asked for and received community service in place of the fine, and in a rush of blood to the head I found myself doing the same. The judge asked me how much I had earned in the past twelve months. Having no idea, I made up a figure. It must have been low, because the judge asked me to repeat it, and a murmuring rose up around the court room (which, when I got home and went through my payslips, made it all the more dispiriting when I discovered that I had in fact, earned less than my estimation).

“Yeah, you qualify,” the judge said with a bemused shake of his head, and sentenced me to forty hours. Which is why, this morning, I find myself wearing a blue apron and carrying a never-ending stream of clothes from a rail to, in theory, their correct spots in the shop. I am almost immediately able to slip mentally away to somewhere else and carry out my duties, incredibly badly, on auto pilot.

By chance, only a couple of hours into my first shift, Jeff walks into the shop. Jeff is the closest thing I have to a friend in Los Angeles, and I have never seen him outside of a bar or in a car on the way to or from a bar. It seems weird that he exists in the everyday world, walking around and experiencing things the same as everyone. But here is the proof.

Because it's only Jeff, I am not embarrassed by my appearance or my location, and I don't try to hide as he unwittingly approaches me in the electronics section which is largely stocked with single speakers. When he eventually spots me, he shows no surprise and merely nods his head and says, “Alright?” as though we have arranged to meet here.

“Hi,” I say.

He scratches the back of his neck. “What's going on?” he mumbles.

I shrug. “Nothing unusual with me. Just a day like any other day.”

“Cool,” he says, looking around distractedly. Already it seems that our conversation has ground to a halt, and I feel justified in blaming him for not asking questions in this situation.

“Fancy a drink this week?” he says eventually.

“Yeah,” I reply.

Jeff picks up a battered copy of a Harry Potter book that someone has thrown on top of a broken cassette player. “J K Rowling has made loads of money off these books,” he says.

Unable to handle this type of stupefyingly banal conversation without a drink in my hand, I stroll away and pretend to tidy a rail of shirts in the kids section. I can sense that he has followed me over.

“I was reading your old blog,” he practically whispers into my ear, and I disguise a shudder by turning to face him. “Have you ever thought about making it into a cartoon?”

“No, I can honestly say that I have never thought about that, Jeff.”

“Huh,” he mumbles.

“What do you mean anyway, a cartoon? I can't make cartoons.”

“You could write a script, though,” he says.

“Yeah, I suppose so. But why would I bother? I'm done with trying to be a professional writer. Besides, I hate cartoons.”

“Oh, just an idea.”

I realise I have been fiddling with the same shirt for a full minute so I step round to a pair of jeans that don't need rearranging and rearrange them. Just to break the silence, I ask him “Why?”

“It's just that my best friend is an executive or something over at Adult Swim.”

It is rare that a sentence uttered by Jeff contains something of interest, but two items of interest is unprecedented. It takes me a few seconds to decide which one to respond to first. “You have a best friend?” I say.

He looks at me blankly. “Yeah. I guess.”

“I thought that I...” I clear my throat, and move to another pair of jeans. “So your friend works at the Cartoon Network?”

“Yeah. Some big shot on those cool Adult Swim things. Not your kind of thing, I suppose.”

“When I said I hate cartoons, I thought you meant, like, Disney things,” I say. “I like the Adult Swim ones. And when I said that I was done with being a professional writer...” I trail off, searching for any possible turnaround. “That was just a figure of speech,” I end up with.

“Oh cool. Cos I sent your blog to my friend and he loves it. Said it has real potential as an animation.”

I stare at him, incredulous. “How can you mention this so casually? I mean, I try to have patience with everyone that crawls through my life but, Jesus Christ. Y'know?”

He just continues to look at me blankly, clearly not knowing. “So, you are interested?”

“Well,” I say, moving to another item of clothing, barely aware of what it is through my whirling thoughts. “I suppose I could give it a try.”

“Alright, I'll introduce you,” Jeff says, for some reason picking up a child's pair of jeans and – hopefully just my imagination – sniffing them. “I'll see you,” he says, and makes his way to the counter with the jeans.

I find it difficult to concentrate on the job for the rest of the day as I try to work out some way of writing in a style I neither admire or understand. But, at least for the moment, I am determined to make it work.

Free Counter