Tasteful Nudes: ...and Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation (6 page)

Another bed check all-star was a guy named Barry who had a hobby of collecting feces—animal, human, whatever he could get his hands on—in small plastic bags that the staff would have to delicately coax away from him each night.

“Good evening, Barry,” I’d say. “You don’t happen to have any bags of shit in here with you tonight, do you?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Come on, Barry, it’s me, Dave. Now hand over the goods.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“Dammit, Barry, we’ve covered this before,” I’d say. “And while I don’t claim to have all the answers, I can tell you that having your own personal shit museum is just not cool no matter how good of an idea it might seem.”

It was like trying to take a chicken bone from a dog—nothing could convince him he was better off without it. Still, all of the above was a delight compared to my time spent with a new resident named Ricky, who checked into the shelter with a mean case of scabies, the popular skin infection in which tiny bugs burrow under your skin, causing nasty sores, nonstop itching, and everyone around you to freak the fuck out. The guy was covered from head-to-toe and, somehow, whenever I showed up for work, needed to have lotion applied to each and every sore. Upping the ante on things was the fact that Ricky had a penchant for completely and repeatedly soiling himself over the course of the week and somehow never quite got around to changing his clothes. It was my job to not only apply a dab of lotion to each of Ricky’s several hundred scabies sores but also dispose of his soiled clothing, supervise his shower, and make sure he put on a clean outfit when we were all done.

“The nuts—don’t forget to wash behind the nuts,” I’d suggest delicately as he lathered up.

“I already washed down there.”

“Look, this is just one man’s opinion, but you might want to take another pass,” I’d tell him, noting the sort of buildup that’s just part of the deal when you’re the kind of guy for whom “going to the bathroom” does not necessarily involve dropping your pants or making use of an actual toilet.

Once Ricky’s shower was complete, it was time for the lotion party. Young, paranoid, and totally not wanting any scabies of my own, I developed a rather elaborate ritual for the chore. First, I’d put on a pair of rubber gloves to handle the box containing the lotion. Then, I’d put another pair over the first pair to actually apply the lotion—I wasn’t taking any chances. Duly protected, I’d apply a dab of lotion in a circular motion to each of his scabies sores, one at a time, like I was feeding little baby birds.

“So you’re good mostly?” I’d ask Ricky as I gingerly applied a dime-size dollop of lotion to his left buttock.

“Yeah, things have been really great with me lately.”

“Good to hear, good to hear.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, me? Never better,” I’d say. “Hang on a sec, I just need to get a little more … lotion … out of … this tube.”

It was like some sort of extremely disturbing, alternate-universe
Karate Kid
exercise. Fortunately for both of us, his crotch was somehow spared from the outbreak. I’d like to think we both had our limits.

Spackled and dressed, Ricky would joke about whatever outfit I’d put together for him from the shelter’s donation closet that day, usually nothing more glamorous than a clean pair of jeans and a button-down shirt.

“Everyone is going to think I’m from Paris,” he’d say.

I couldn’t help but love the guy.

The more I got to know the people at the shelter, the less I minded the more character-building tasks. And even those had the positive side effect of taking my mind off whatever existential crisis I might be having that particular day, hour, or minute. If I had to, I just pretended I had accepted some sort of dare to block out the reality of my situation. And no matter how gross things got on the job, I figured it still beat the hell out of temping at some boring office where almost nobody ever shit their pants or anything.

Sometimes I even managed to turn the otherwise cringe-worthy into fun. Swapping out a urine sample for apple juice and then pretending to accidentally drink it in front of my supervisor was a trademark move I remain especially proud of. Once the rumor that I was a pee drinker spread throughout the shelter, it gave me a mystique I really enjoyed. Another time I had to deliver a stool sample to a nearby hospital for testing and giggled uncontrollably to myself the whole way back to the shelter thinking about what I’d tell my supervisor when I saw him.

“How did it go at the hospital?” he asked as I entered the front door.

“Not too good,” I snickered. “They told me to tell you they’re not gonna take any more shit from you!”

My supervisor didn’t think it was too funny, but all these years later it still feels like a home run to me.

The occasional prank aside, I was actually turning into a pretty good program aide. I began picking up extra shifts when others called in sick, and, eventually, when a supervisor was unable to make his Friday overnight shift, I was asked to jump into the breach and be supervisor in his place. I had never held a job long enough to be promoted before, and growing up I was never what one might describe as especially reliable, so I was surprised yet thrilled that someone might think I could actually handle more responsibility. Best of all, as supervisor of an overnight shift, with none of the regular staffers scheduled to return until the morning, I was effectively in charge of the entire shelter. I even got to be in charge of the shelter’s hefty key ring, which hung from a short chain and held roughly nine thousand keys. Its weight felt good in my hands, like wielding a medieval weapon.

“This is it,” I thought. “The big dance.”

I was going to supervise the fuck out of that place. And I was pretty sure the rest of the staff was as excited about it as I was. Having me supervise would be like putting Michael Jordan in during the fourth quarter of a men’s recreational league basketball game—total domination that no one would ever see coming in a million years.

I was so excited that I decided to show up a little early for my inaugural shift as supervisor, another employment first for me. As I walked through the front door, I imagined the theme from
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
playing in the background. There was a new goddamn sheriff in town and he wasn’t about to put up with anyone’s bullshit.

“So, anything I should
know about
before I put this shit on lockdown?” I asked the security guard on duty.

“Huh?” he responded.

Whatever. I didn’t expect a mere security guard to understand anyway. I wanted to get the lay of the land, find out what sort of trouble may or may not have been brewing in the hours leading up to my shift—you know, supervisor stuff. And by the time 11:00
P.M.
rolled around, I was in full-on supervisor mode, ready to bring the hammer down on any and all misconduct at a moment’s notice. I couldn’t help but have a little swagger in my step as I walked the halls of the shelter, looking for signs of mischief, disorder, or any other wrongs I would instantly right without even really trying. My supervisor key ring jingled with authority every step of the way. It was a lot for people to handle, even me.

As it turned out, most of the shelter’s residents had already turned in for the night, so unfortunately it was up to me to keep the excitement coming. I decided to put my keys to work, locking and then unlocking doors that had been unlocked and also unlocking and relocking doors that had already been locked. I had the situation under control like a motherfucker.

I ended up running out of things to do about ten minutes into my supervisor shift, so I gave the security guard on duty a nod to let him know that I would be retiring to my de facto supervisor office, an old leather armchair just outside the employee restroom, until things started to heat up again. There I sat vigilant for a good fifteen minutes, partly listening for any signs of trouble and partly taking a nap, when Russell, the weekend cook, showed up unannounced.

“Hey, Dave,” Russell said.

“Hey, Russell,” I replied, my voice deepening in the way a man’s tends to when he’s suddenly making almost ten dollars an hour as supervisor.

“Who’s supervising tonight?”

“I am, Russell,” I answered, slapping the key ring for emphasis. “I am.”

Apparently, no one told Russell that thing about how there was a new sheriff in town. And while he looked a little surprised to hear the news, I tried not to let that rattle me.

“You think I could borrow the keys?” Russell asked once it all sank in. “I need to get some meat.”

Russell had to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for everyone at the shelter the next day, so I figured he just needed to defrost something.

“Sure thing, pal,” I said, tossing him the key ring.

They landed in his beefy palm with a jangly thud.

“Just one guy tossing a huge key ring to another guy,” I thought. I felt like a man, dammit.

After Russell disappeared with the keys, I tried to get back to being vigilant, but ended up mostly napping instead. About twenty minutes later, he returned with the keys and tossed them back in my direction. I snatched them out of midair while doing my best to hide any signs of the pain one tends to experience after having a giant knot of rusty old keys thrown directly at you by a guy who doesn’t seem all that happy to see you in the first place.

The rest of my shift as supervisor held little to no action to speak of, so little in fact that I wrote “little to no action to speak of” in the supervisor logbook. At 7:00
A.M.
, it was time for the changing of the guard. I lobbed the key ring to the next supervisor and marched out of the shelter and into the city streets, confident in a job well done as the sun struggled up over Manhattan.

My next shift was at 3:00
P.M.
that same day, so when I got back home to my apartment in the East Village, I lay down on the living-room futon that doubled as my bed when my roommates weren’t watching television and caught a few hours of rest before heading back to the shelter. It wasn’t a long sleep but it was a deep sleep, the kind authority figures tend to enjoy.

Though I returned to the shelter a lowly program aide for the three-to-eleven shift, I hung on to the boss-man swagger I had adopted the night before because I knew more supervisor shifts would be just around the corner for me. I could taste it.

“Hey, Dave,” William, the security guard on duty, mumbled as I strode boldly through the front door.

“Hey, William. How’s it going?” I said, collapsing into a chair across from him in the way that a guy who’s used to being in charge tends to do.

“You hear what happened with Russell last night?”

“No. What?” I asked, concerned that something awful must have happened to him after he left the safe haven that I had made of the shelter just hours before.

“He stole three hundred pounds of meat.”

“From where?” I asked, already feeling sorry for whatever chump managed to let that happen.

“From here.”

“What do you mean ‘from here’?” I pried, still convinced the crime couldn’t possibly have happened on my watch.

“Someone gave him the keys to the freezer last night.”

“Huh … that’s weird,” I said, slowly shifting in my chair. “And then what happened?”

“Then he tossed all the meat over the fence to his buddy.”

Apparently William hadn’t been brought up to speed on the fact that I had been in charge when the alleged beef heist went down. And while I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to tell him, I wasn’t ready to quietly slink away, either. There was still the matter of why one might steal what sounded like at least half a cow’s worth of meat to get to the bottom of.

“Why did he do that?” I asked innocently.

“To sell it,” William answered, growing impatient.

“Sell it where?”

“On the street!”

“But what kind of person buys meat on the street like that?” I asked, not even realizing meat had street value in the first place.

“I don’t know. People who want meat. Anyone.” William groaned, now convinced I was a moron. “They sell it for whatever they can get for that shit.”

“I still don’t understand why anyone would go to the hassle of trying to sell discount meat on the street like that,” I continued, “especially late at night when most people are done buying meat for the day.”

It seemed like a reasonable question to me.

“So he could get money to buy crack!” William said.

“Huh?” I asked, that dusty-needle-dragging-across-a-vinyl-record sound effect playing in my head.

“Russell’s a crackhead.” William squinted at me. “Don’t you know that?”

I had worked in the kitchen with Russell dozens of times over the last few months, chatting and laughing away the whole time while I helped him serve what he kept telling me was the best meat loaf ever. Somehow the whole crack thing just never came up. It’s funny what you learn about someone after they steal three hundred pounds of meat out from under your nose.

Needless to say, the shelter bosses ended up firing Russell as soon as they found out about the meat caper since it was in violation of, well, all sorts of things really. Shortly afterward, William explained to me some of the shelter’s other recent personnel changes.

“They fired Danny after they found him in the basement sucking on the glass dick,”
4
he said. “And they fired Michelle because they found her turning tricks right down the street for crack.”

All of a sudden, I got really quiet in that way one does when you find out that two of your coworkers are full-time crackheads and another is a part-time prostitute. William then began rattling off a list of names as if he were simply reading off the shelter’s time sheet, ending with his own. As it turned out, just about all the employees at the shelter who weren’t a part of the nine-to-five staff were recovering crack addicts, William included. And, when an employee either quit or was fired, or simply stopped showing up for work one day, more often than not it was because their old friend had caught up with them. The exception, of course, was me, that guy from Cleveland with the cool hair and dreams of stardom. As it all hit me, I felt like Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
when she discovers that everyone in her apartment building is so into Satan it’s not even fucking funny. It was seriously messing with my head.