The Juice Club Memoirs
August 30
The hardest part about waking up to work in the juice club is the memory of all of the people who walk up to my little kiosk with their eyes affixed to the menu board above me. Their eyes are opened as wide as their mouths and it looks like they are trying to collect flies. Sometimes while they’re staring up with their starving looking eyes, they lick their lips.
When I stand in the kiosk within the grocery store, serving those gape-mouthed animals of earth, I stand with my false sense of superiority. I am a man among dogs for those few minutes of serving them. I am convinced that I am a demi-god. I stare into their eyes and I can see it. I can see their dog eyes say to me, “Where is my attention?” or “What did I do?” and I serve them promptly. They walk away smiling happily.
September 1
I am livid today. I want to destroy everything in my path. I want to take a watermelon and throw it at the automatic door that squeaks and moves like a bird is jammed into it. I want to knock down the rack of chips at the end of this aisle. I want to go to the back room and ram a forklift into the nearest display case. I’ll lift it up and drop it onto the hot case that has all of the rotisserie chickens. Nobody would care. They seem to be perfectly content right now, trying their damn best to get their own jobs done with the least possible resistance. They’re already daydreaming about their plans after their 9 hours of menial labor. This makes me want to take fresh cut steak and nail it onto the walls. I’ll decorate the whole damn grocery store to cheer everybody up a little. I’ll take a shit in one of the potted plants outside of the floral department and that will be one healthy plant.
I’m looking around and all I can see are gray faces. Their eyes are like coins.
We stand here, getting paid to be tied by strings, and yanked around until we must smoke cigarettes as a clever suicide. It’s easy money. It’s easy to take this money to have a good time, and forget about all those strings turning us purple from the inside out. I’m okay being purple/ I read somewhere once that purple is the royal color of the ancient Romans.
September 2
I am the judge and nobody is safe from my wrath. I am the demi-god of the juice club after all. I judge the guy with the face that says he has more worth than me. I judge the polite mother teaching her kids manners. I judge the teenage girls standing there with their low cut shirts, smiling and giggling. Their eyes are oozing and they’re ready to be fucked. Their tits are ready to grow right out of that cleavage. Nobody is safe from my eyes, not even myself.
I often tell myself that after my shift is over. After I’ve laughed at everything I was mad about. I walk out onto that parking lot with my keys already out and I can’t even see my truck yet. I love the juice club because every day, no matter how hard, I leave with a smile knowing I did my work until the skin on my hands turned into scales. I leave smiling until the juice club challenges it once again, and as I grit my teeth, I tell myself that I am the demi-god of the juice club and I am responsible for my emotions.
