Thursday, April 19, 2007

A Little Something

It was at the supermarket that I first met Jon. He was my manager. Squat body with bandy legs and chest hair that seemed to grow to his chin. No front teeth. Lost them to a lamppost that jumped him late one night. Bloodied his nose. He let me look at the small white shards of tooth that poked from his swollen gums. I remember his meaty hands on my shoulders as he tilted his head back away from me; if I hadn’t known him I might have thought he’d done it so I didn’t have to smell the stale cigarettes and last night’s beer on his breath.
Afterwards he’d given me a dressing down for wearing black shoes with my brown uniform. He made sure I knew the difference between being friend and boss.

On Saturday nights, once the supermarket had closed, we all piled to the pub, a shallow building looming over the graves in the local cemetery, it’s yellow lights throwing a malevolent glow across the tombstone-lined paths. On occasions someone – usually Jon – would run ahead and hide, jump out with banshee shouts to scare us. Once, he confessed to me, pressing up uncomfortably against me at the bar, that he’d made a girl piss her pants once doing that trick. I excused myself and took my drink over to the flashing lights of the fruit machine, my free hand tapping the shrapnel in my trouser pocket.
Even though I wasn’t legally allowed to drink by two or so years, someone always slipped a double shot of vodka into my cola. Often it was Jon buying the drinks, his gappy mouth and damaged gums grimacing as he called my name.
On Sundays I’d have to sleep late to get rid of the dull ache in my head. Jon would like to ask how debilitated I’d been on Sundays. It’s not as if I had to get to church, it was something I could handle.
Jon told me it was part of growing up. Like losing your teeth.

4 comments:

purplesime said...

This has been going around in my head awhile. Got it on paper. Now on-screen.

I'm unsure yet what to do with this. I'm playing about with ideas at the moment. This may get dealt with after my break.

Holiday in two days. Moving house in 10 days. Internet access cut off in 10 days, back on in 18 days.

This could well be it for some time.

purplesimon out...

ginab said...

Reads plenty like non-fiction and I don't know why. It's not the I. It's the nearness to the subject matter, with or without the I. If you wrote It was in the supermarket where Ian met Jon I'd still sense an esteemed closeness between the writer and his subject matter.

Something about "we all piled" suggests a group larger than two, but that's a nit. While a lot of the details here are good, the yellow lights throwing a malevolent glow across the tombstones being one, I would (and this is constructive) scale the story down to its skivvies (sp) and then dress it.

It's a story between friends who are coworkers, one overseeing the other and won't let anyone forget it really (that he's manager); they regularly go to the pub Saturday nights; the protag is young; seems Jon has a version or two of fatherhood in him and he's using one sense of it to sharpen the protagonist as he would like to have been against the other.

Just running through it. Write on, and write it out. I hope the house move ran smoothly. Thanks for saying hello!!!!

-ginab

Metalchick said...

Hi Simon,
Welcome back! I once had a best friend who became my manager at McDonald's. At first it almost ruined my friendship because during work she was my boss and not my friend. Now looking back, I actually appreciate and thank her for never giving me special treatment just because we were friends. She treated me like any other employee, which is fair. I had another friend who worked at McDonald's, and she was dating one of the managers and because of that, he let her come in one hour early and stay one hour late. She did that until the head boss caught that and put an end to it. She also had a best friend who was a manager, and everytime my friend argued back with a customer, her manager friend wouldn't fire her at all! All those things weren't fair!

Thanks for dropping by! That was nice of you to give me that link, but I'm actually mad at Chris Cornell right now and I would rather not hear him.

purplesime said...

Ginab

Thanks for the comments here, I have used your suggestions to get a new set of excerpts up.

Metalchick:

I hear you about Chris Cornell, but don't let that stop you getting good music. In time you may mellow and realise that a drug addict such as him does really stupid things that make no sense at the time. Drugs ruin people, Chris Cornell is such an example of a talent being ruined through drug abuse. Shame.

purplesimon out...