MEMOIR: surviving JOSH PETERSON

PART I
 
My first job was at a movie theater in Nebraska. I was eighteen years old, a concessionist and had recently lost my virginity. Something was wrong with my penis. It hurt when I peed. It hurt when I rode bicycles. It hurt when I sneezed and made popcorn. I did not tell anyone about this pain. It frightened and humiliated me.

 
A lady ordered a large popcorn “with as much butter as possible.” She was middle-aged  with a pleasing smile and sleepy eyes. A tall man with a coat draped over his shoulder stood next to her. I put as much butter as possible on her popcorn.
 
Minutes later, she returned to the concession counter, her bag of popcorn dripping butter. “The butter has stained my blouse,” “Get me the manager,”  “What were you thinking?”
 

“You said as much as possible.”

“You’re a terrible concessionist,” she said.

“Good,” I said.

 
My manager came to the concessions area. He was a linebackery fellow with a  walrus-brown mustache.
 

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“He put too much butter on this. It went through the bag and got on my blouse.”

“She said as much as possible.”

 
The manager ordered me to the back room for restocking duty. He would talk to me later. “Let me take care of this,“ he said. I slunk off to the storage area, still terrified and now more humiliated.
 
I went to a doctor the next day. It was a yeast infection. The doctor prescribed lots of yogurt.
 
PART II

 
I worked for an inventory service. We would travel around the Midwest in vans and count stores’ merchandise. Sometimes we’d be on the road for two weeks at a time. There were trips to Saint Louis and Minneapolis. But usually we’d find ourselves in smaller towns like Ord, Nebraska, or Le Mars, Iowa.
 
The best thing about the job was the booze. I was nineteen, and my coworkers would buy liquor for me and the other minors. We’d stay up all night drinking in cheap motel rooms. Our parties were so rowdy that in Des Moines, we had been banned from every motel except one, the worst one.
 
In Winner, South Dakota, me and a guy who called himself Big Worm had been drinking for hours. Big Worm was a tall, balding, overweight, white guy, a few years older than me and a manager. He was also the best at inventory. We had drunkenly eaten at a Taco Johns. Big Worm and I became lost on the way back to the hotel. It was chilly out but not unpleasant. We drank forties.
 
We wandered into a neighborhood without sidewalks where the roads were no longer paved. There were no street lamps. Suddenly, a cacophony of barks and growls erupted from the dark. Out of an alley slipped a pack of dogs. They bounded towards us, snarling and yapping. Big Worm and I dropped our beers and ran. The dogs gave up after a few blocks. We found our way back.
 
PART III

I took a job at a malt shop. To this day, I can still make killer malts, but no one ever asks me to. The job stunk, and my manager wasn’t very good.
 
One day we ran low on vanilla, and I said to the manager:
 

“Hey, we are running low on vanilla. You should get some more vanilla.”

“OK,” she said. She didn’t mean it, though.

 
For those of you who don’t know, vanilla is the most important flavor of ice cream in a malt shop. It’s as important as hydrogen is to the sun.
 
We exhausted our vanilla supply by the weekend. People would come into the shop and ask for things we didn’t have.
 

“Can I have a banana split?”

“Yeah. But we’re out of vanilla. You’ll have to substitute a different flavor of ice cream.”

“Nevermind then.”

 
Or:
 
“Can I have a vanilla cone?”

“No. We are out of vanilla.”

 
All day long I answered questions about the vanilla and then dealt with the customers’ frustrations.
 

“Why don’t you have any vanilla?”

“When will you get more vanilla?”

“How can you run a malt shop without vanilla?”

An hour before the store was supposed to close, business lulled. I locked up the shop, but before I left I wrote a sign that said ALL DEAD HERE and put it on the door. Then I wrote a second sign that said TODOS LOS MUERTOS AQUI. That way everyone would understand.

The owner of the shop saw the signs the next morning and fired me. I’ll bet not one customer complained about the lack of me.
 
PART IV

When I worked at a comic book shop, I was a manager. I was the Magic the Gathering guy. This was never a dream of mine. I just sort of fell into it. A friend got me hired on. At that time, there wasn’t a Magic the Gathering guy there, so I decided to vie for the slot. No one opposed me and soon I was the official guy.

A scruffy-looking man in a long coat came into the store with a Latino and some blond lady. The scruffy-looking man wanted to sell me Magic cards. The cards weren’t very good, but there was a little money to be made in bulk sales, so I took what he had for about six bucks. I handed him the money, and he immediately gave it to the Latino who then left with the blond lady. The scruffy-looking man stayed. He just milled about.

A bunch of Magic players came in for the Sunday Magic tournament. I ran them. This process took several hours. Every time I left the game room, the scruffy-looking man was still hanging around.

When the games were over, it was time for me to go to work behind the counter. The scruffy man was still lingering about.

“I think that guy just took one of our figurines out of the case and tried to sell it to me,” my coworker said.

“Why didn’t you kick him out?”

My coworker shrugged. “It wasn’t worth anything.“

The owner of the shop and another manager had both seen the scruffy guy around. Apparently no one wanted to kick the guy out, probably on account of how scruffy he looked. The job fell to me.
 
“You have to leave,” I told him.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t have to tell you,” I said. “We have the right to refuse service to anyone.”

“You’re a racist,” he shouted.

“We’re both white,” I said.

“Come out into the parking lot and talk to me.”

“No. I’m at work. I don’t work in the parking lot.”

He left for a little bit, but then he came back in.
 
“Come outside,” he said. “Now.”

“I’ll call the police if you don’t leave. Get out of the parking lot. It’s private property.”

I picked up the phone, and he slouched in the doorway. I called the police and told them the situation. The guy went outside but continued to loiter.
 
A policewoman came and shooed him off. She spoke to me after.
 

“He had a South Dakota driver’s license. He was likely just some drifter.”
 
PART V

At some point, I lived in Los Angeles and had a real job. I worked as an editor for an internet start-up and made more money than anyone with a Fine Arts degree should. My brother and father came to visit me, and I was going to show off my new, expensive apartment and furniture to demonstrate  how successful I’d become. When they arrived, I took them out for dinner and bought a couple hundred dollars’ worth of picture frames for all this art I had purchased. I desired for them to see that I was an adult, buying and doing adult things.

The next day, I lost my job. I went to work and found out that there was no more work. The company was done for. Everyone packed up their shit and left.

But my dad and brother were in town for a week.
 
PART VI

I worked as a freelance writer. When I started, I’d take almost any job on account of being poor. I wrote reviews for products and wrote articles about such things as laser eye surgery.

I answered an ad for an assistant writer position. It was only a few hours a week, but it paid well. I applied, and the guy asked me to come in and interview. He had this blog, and he wanted some help running it. I read the blog. It was about lawyer stuff.

The guy, a lawyer, was a slender, balding middle-aged man with slightly pockmarked cheeks. He looked clean and wore a crisp suit. When I arrived there, I told him that I read his blog.
 
“How?” he asked.

“It’s on the internet,” I said.

“I didn’t know that,” he said.

He told me that he wasn’t going to pay what he originally offered because I wasn’t as good as this other guy that he wanted to hire. I was second string. He also mentioned that he also wrote, and that I’d never be as good of a writer as him. But he looked forward to working with me anyway.

On my first day of work he asked me to think up some legal things for him to blog about, like the Duke Lacrosse Scandal or the Patriot Act. He talked about those things into a tape recorder. I transcribed what he said and put it on his blog.
    

“Do you want me to put your blog on the internet?” I asked.

“When it’s ready,” he said.

He offered to pay me in furniture or cash. My girlfriend at the time really wanted a dresser, and I asked if he had a dresser and he did. So he gave me his address. I pulled up to the biggest house that I had ever seen. He waited outside.
 
“Wow. This is some place,” I said.

“I don’t live here. Some old lady does. I live in the pool house. I’m going through a divorce.”

He lead us to a garage chocked full of furniture. He showed us the dresser. My girlfriend found it satisfactory.
 
OK,” he said. “Let me show you something first.” He pointed at a desk. “This is one of the Menendez brothers’ desk.” It looked just like a regular desk.

My girlfriend and I both touched it.
   

PART VII

Jobs were hard to find, so I applied to grad school in the South and was offered an assistantship teaching English Composition. The work was easy and then I won a fellowship. I didn’t have to teach but still got paid the same. I was a professional scholar and spent my time in bars.

As a scholar, one night I ate a pot brownie and drank a bunch of vodka. Then my friends and I went out. We played Jenga with some girls, but each time they built up the tower, I shoved it over and laughed. Everyone grew angry at me and moved to a different table. I barely noticed. I kept stacking up blocks and knocking them over.

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Josh Peterson is the Walton Fiction Fellow and an MFA student at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in FLATMANCROOKED, the New Ohio Review, the Saranac Review, Bull: Men’s Fiction and Permafrost. He has work forthcoming in Alligator Juniper.

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Image: didyk | iStockphoto