A Bad Idea I'm About to Do (20 page)

On my way to the bus stop, I stopped in the convenience store where I bought my Cap'n Crunch for Jeffrey. To my dismay they were all out.
This is a bad way to start competition day,
I thought. It was then that I realized that at some point, in spite of everything, I'd actually come to take this competition very, very seriously. I know that all athletes have routines. Jeffrey's involved consuming Cap'n Crunch from my hand. This hiccup in our regular preparation was not good on competition day. I prayed that she wasn't too discerning a cereal addict as I grabbed a box of Honeycomb instead and ran to catch the bus.

Jeffrey Timmons was okay with being shaved. She didn't like the sound of the electric clippers, but did seem to enjoy not being covered in thick hair. However, she did not like having her toenails clipped, and I didn't enjoy doing it either. Clipping a goat's toenails involves placing the goat on a wooden stand and having four agriculture majors hold her still while you take what looks like a pair of pliers and cut her toenails in half, or until they start bleeding. In my case it also involved having one of those agriculture majors quickly sense my vast incompetence before taking over and doing it for me.

Unfortunately, Jeffrey Timmons liked being shampooed even less than the toenail clipping. I took her outside to an asphalt patch behind the barn, where I tied her to a fence. I sprayed her
with icy cold water from a hose, and she hated me for it. She hissed, cried, and tried to run away. I rubbed shampoo all over her body and hosed her down again. When we were done, she was visibly upset with me. Any goodwill I'd earned from fending off Koko was out the window.

I tried to calm her down by feeding her Honeycomb, but it didn't work. It turns out that goats hate Honeycomb. To my palate it's pretty close to Cap'n Crunch, but Jeffrey Timmons disagreed. After eating just a few, she actually refused them. I was amazed. After all, goats will eat license plates if you don't stop them. I guess it doesn't say much for Honeycomb.

Jeffrey was clearly off her game, and I was freaking out. We were moments away from entering the circle for the competition. The other goatherds stood with their goats calmly by their sides; Jeffrey paced back and forth angrily and refused to come to me when I called for her.

I didn't know what to do and went into a near-catatonic panic. I stared straight ahead, and when one of the girls at the barn told me to get ready, I couldn't even answer. Luckily, my stare locked onto a solution I hadn't even thought of.

I quickly ran down the hill to the fir tree Jeffrey liked chewing on. She had stripped all the lower branches, but luckily, I am taller than a goat. I tore off a few branches and ran back to her. She devoured them, and miraculously, it calmed her down.

“You ready?” I asked her. I petted her, squatted down, and looked her in the eye.

When I walked back toward the other competitors, she dutifully followed and stood by my side.

Then we entered the circle—a low fence surrounded by spectators—and did a lap with the other competing pairs. We stood in our spot until the judge instructed us to walk across the pen and back. I had no idea how this was supposed to work, but
Jeffrey did. When we got to the end of the pen, I awkwardly turned, but she stood still and looked at me. I realized that I was turning clockwise, toward her, and if I did, we'd bump into each other. Jeffrey waited for me to realize my mistake. I paused and turned counterclockwise, and she turned away from me. We completed our circle and triumphantly walked back together.

The other competitors took their turns. The judge walked around the circle, sizing up all of the competitors. He walked to one pair and handed them the blue ribbon. The crowd politely applauded.

Then, he walked up to Koko and spoke with her handler. Unfortunately, they were a few spots in front of me, so I couldn't hear their conversation.

Please, not Koko
, I thought to myself.
Any other goat, but I don't want Jeffrey Timmons to get beat by Koko.
I
don't want to get beat by Koko.

The judge smiled at Koko's handler. Then, he turned and walked toward me.

“How have you liked your semester?” he asked me. I was stunned to be in the running.

“It's been great,” I said. “I've really bonded with my goat, Jeffrey Timmons, the World's Foremost Goat.”

“You know she's a girl, right?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” I answered. “I named her before I knew we only worked with females.”

He smiled and asked, “What's the most surprising quality of Jeffrey Timmons you've discovered in your time at the barn?”

I thought long and hard. Then, I lied.

“Her relationship with her children, 5226 and 5227,” I answered. “I assumed before I started that goats didn't have much personality. She's very affectionate with them, which I didn't expect. There's real emotion in these goats.”

He nodded, impressed. While on some level I did believe in what I said, I knew he would have thought I was a complete maniac if I had given him my real answer—
“She's a really good listener.”

The judge then stepped back to the middle of the circle. He looked toward Koko. Then he turned and looked at Jeffrey Timmons, the World's Foremost Goat.

Finally, he stepped toward us, and he handed me the red ribbon.

We had placed second in a low-stakes competitive goat show I signed up for as a joke. I stood and smiled at the judge. Just under the surface, I was freaking out. It's fair to say that winning this goat show was the greatest athletic achievement of my life. Externally, I was some idiot standing next to a goat way too early on a weekend morning. Internally, I knew what Aaron Boone felt like when he hit that home run against the Red Sox. I knew what Larry Johnson felt like when he hit that four-point play in the play-offs. I understood the thrill of achieving great heights, even though my great heights sadly involved standing in a small wire circle in the middle of a field while fifteen to twenty apathetic weirdos stood around fairly wondering why a goat show would even take place on a college campus.

After our red ribbon performance Jeffrey and I went on to the winner's circle. Here, the two best goats from each preliminary round faced off. The competition was fierce; some of the seniors from Cook had been working with their goats for all four years. This time, Jeffrey and I didn't place.

It didn't matter to me at all. We'd won. Because even while we had our asses handed to us in the winner's circle, I still had the privilege of looking out over the fence at Koko, who was now running around the field behind us head-butting the other loser goats.

“We're the worst of the winners,” I said quietly to Jeffrey Timmons. She gently bumped into the side of my leg as the judge walked by. She looked up at me. I can't be sure, but I think she felt the same quiet pride I did.

Then, she shit everywhere.

I
f you hate yourself with a passion but are too much of a coward to commit suicide, I highly suggest you apply for a job at the Loews Cineplex on Route 1 in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

I was hired to work there the summer after my freshman year of college, and I immediately realized two things that spelled doom for my prospects of survival. The first was that the employees there had a built-in social scene. They hung out after work, acted chummy on the job, and made it clear who the cool kids were. The second was that I didn't have a chance of being included in that scene at all.

“Hey, Lynne, you doing anything tonight?” I was pouring butter into a dispenser when I overheard James, one of my assistant managers, inviting Lynne, a blonde sex addict who was filling popcorn bins, out for the evening.

“Nah,” she replied. “Are people doing something?”

“Yeah,” he said. “There's a house party at Ray's place. Probably starting up at like ten or eleven. You should definitely come.”

“I'll go,” Lynne said. “That sounds like fun.”

“Cool,” James said. He turned toward the area where I was working.

“Erik,” James called out, “you should come too. And Marcus, definitely swing by if you're down.”

Erik was on one side of me, Marcus on the other. No one even pretended it was uncomfortable to ignore my existence. It was a caste system, where every other person I worked with was in one caste and I was the lone member of some reviled lowly tribe.

Sadly, this experience was not completely unfamiliar to me. I would say that about 80 percent of the time, people's first impression of me is something along the lines of “Oh, I get this guy. He's nice and funny and completely nonthreatening. I like him.” Unfortunately, the other 20 percent of the time, the reaction I inspire is one of hatred and a desire for annihilation. No mercy, no remorse.

At Loews, nearly the entire staff reacted in the latter fashion.

To be fair, two people did talk to me. One was a kid named Ayale who spoke to everyone, because he was a born-again Christian and was constantly trying to convert anyone willing to hear him out. In normal life, a conversion-hungry born-again is someone I would have avoided at all costs. But my sense of isolation was such that Ayale became a confidante. I even started offering him rides home after I found out he usually walked miles to his apartment in Highland Park each night after our shift.

“Ayale, you want a ride?” I shouted out my car window one night as he began his trudge up Route 1. It was late, after 2:30 A.M. We'd been held after that night as punishment because someone had poured excess butter into the drain of the soda machine rather than placing it back in the bottle to be reused the next day. That person was me. In my view it had been an act of protest
against the cinema's policy of reusing melted butter day after day. For my coworkers it was simply another reason to hate me even more.

“Sure, man,” Ayale said, jumping into the car. “You a good man, Chris. You a good man. Jesus would like you.”

“Oh, uh, thanks,” I replied. “I can't believe they kept us so late tonight.”

“Yeah, they be working us hard,” he answered, his creepy, unceasing Christian grin directed toward me. “But hard work is good now, man, because in the next life it definitely gonna pay off.”

“Oh. . . . Right,” I said, turning onto his block. “Well, I guess I'll see you tomorrow, dude. I'll be the one no one's talking to.”

Instead of getting out of the car, Ayale stared deeply into my eyes. If he wasn't a born-again, I would have thought he was coming on to me. Although, in the context of his world, I guess he was.

“Chris, man, you funny. You really funny. We should hang out,” he said. Then, he did his best to sound nonchalant. “You should REALLY come to church with me.”

I pretended not to hear him, lightly nodding along to the music in my car as he maintained eye contact.

“You should REALLY come to church,” he continued. After another pause, he reiterated it with a simple but forceful “REALLY.”

Again, I simply chose not to react, and instead maintained the body language and facial expression of someone who hadn't heard the same invitation three times in a row. Eventually, Ayale got the message and sauntered out of the car, thanking me multiple times for my charity in giving him a ride.

That exact exchange happened between Ayale and me at least seven times during my summer working at Loews.

The only other guy who talked to me at work was Rhoderick, an immigrant from Ghana who was the nicest man I'd ever met. He was simply so happy to be there, working. He would cover anyone's shift, giving it his all, a smile always emerging from behind his bushy, graying beard. Whatever atrocities he may have faced in his home country, this pit of hell that was the Loews Cineplex was obviously heaven in comparison.

One day I had to work the early shift, and when I showed up at the theater, the doors were still locked. The only other person there waiting for management was Rhoderick. He was sitting on the curb in front of the main entrance, whistling to himself.

“Jeez, Rhoderick,” I said as I approached him. “I thought
I
was here early.”

“Man, I been here for an hour,” he said, smiling. “I like to get up early, yeah? Just walk around, breathe the air. Listen to the birds. The sunlight . . . it's beautiful.”

“Yeah, dude,” I said, pausing a moment to look around. “Yeah. I guess the sunlight is beautiful.”

“In my country,” he said, “it was hard to remember the sun.”

As with many things Rhoderick said, I chose to allow it to sit unexplained, knowing that any elaboration would replace the vague semi-hilarity of his statement with the brutal realities of whatever that statement meant.

Ayale and Rhoderick were outsiders in their own respective ways, the only people close to my lowly depths in the society of Loews Cineplex. Aside from my occasional conversation with them, my shifts at Loews were spent in almost complete social isolation. I certainly didn't win myself any points with the staff or my manager the night I nearly got myself fired and the theater sued. Late one Saturday, a friend and I went to see the Omar Epps/Taye Diggs vehicle
The Wood
. Neither of us had any particular
interest in seeing the movie, but since we were poor and since I got two free tickets through work, we went. The theater was completely sold out, filled mostly with people from Staten Island who came over the bridge because our theater had an awesome sound system.

About halfway through the movie, there was a ruckus. I turned to see two women yelling at each other about halfway up the stadium seating.

“Bitch, mind your business,” one woman shouted, “before you get yolked up!”