I was now working with ex cons junkies and people on rehab. You can say whatever you want about my reaction to working with these kind of people, but I didn't sign up for this shit. for the past four years I had worked with cute high school girls that I went to school with, it was fun, they were cute, and we were having a blast working there. And now 30 days later all of those girls seemed like a distant memory
I was what they called the night crew leader, which meant I was in charge of the night shift.I had a night staff which consisted of five people including myself. i had a guy working for me by the name of John. He served one year out in Kansas State penitentiary for some drug-related charge and moved out to Long Beach to stay with his brother and hopefully fly straight for a change.He was white , part Native American and part Mexican, he had a long well groomed ponytail and a clean-cut 3 line goatee and a tattoo of his girlfriends name on his left forearm. He was actually a pretty cool guy once you got to know him, but I found out eventually that he had a very short fuse and use to have a bad heroin problem, and that he was kind of a hot head. I made sure to take note of that.
The next guy they hired for the nighttime was Gary.Gary was kind of a sad excuse for an unaccomplished human being and how far you can get in life by mooching off of others and getting a little lucky here and there.Gary was 40 years old and literally did not have one thing to his name aside from his bike and a few zip lock bags of weed that he smoked. Gary moved out to Long Beach from Mississippi. In Mississippi he lived in a three-bedroom house with acres of land around him. He had gotten evicted and he had to move out somewhere else, so he moved out here to California with his uncle where he grew up for the beginning part of his childhood. He was a tall son of a gun who was about 6'1. He was half black, half white with a scruffy poorly maintained goatee. Gary smoked his pay check away every week on marijuana. He was living rent free and utility free in the building his uncle owned. All Gary had to do was take care of the lawn and take the trash out every few days, and his uncle didn't charge him a dime. Gary didn't own a car and he rode his bike everywhere. The only bill he had to pay was his prepaid phone. Every few weeks he had to go over to Verizon to put some minutes on his phone, but that all changed when he called their 1- 800 number to check his minute balance and the automated machine told him he had unlimited minutes. Gary didn't have a contract with them and he didn't even have a bank account. Someone somewhere over at Verizon had made some sort of mistake and Gary was benefiting from it. He now had free telephone usage for life essentially.
The third person was Michelle, she was a short white girl with dirty blond hair. I remember thinking that she honestly had the face of a treasure troll. She had done three months in a County correctional facility for women for drug charges and was released into a rehab program. Even though she was on the road to recovery she had gotten her two children taken away by the state and she was allowed absolutely zero visitation rights. For a mom to get her kids taken away, it takes a lot. They have to literally prove that you're a threat to their well-being and that you are no longer able to care for them. In her case they were able to prove both.
And lastly there was Espy which was short for Esperanza. She was one of the last regular employee that was still left over from the previous owner. I'm going to say it straight out, she smelled like pee, cigarettes, shit and sweat. She wore layers of make up and drew both her eyebrows and her eyelashes on. She lived in a garage with her three kids. She did stupid things like talk to customers in Jamaican or English accents because she thought it was funny. You could smell her coming from down the hall. She was what many who grew up in gang neighbourhoods would call a "Veterana". Which meant that she was a veteran gang member that had seen better days. Despite all of her imperfections, I personally didn't like her because she was slow, she stole food from the store, and she took an hour sometimes to use the restroom. Apparently she was so big, that she struggles at times to clean her self. And she didn't like me because she said I was quote " a little bitch, who had a fucken fit over everything she did wrong". I have certain expectations of people. And one of them is wiping your own ass correctly the first time.
I went from working with four beautiful young Latinas, to working with a short tempered ex con, a pot head that was mooching off anyone he could, a junky who had all of her kids taken away from her, and a lady who was not handicapped but who couldn't wipe her own ass correctly.
Life is all about adapting to the circumstances that you find yourself in. In my mind I had to do one thing and one thing only, and that was to survive. I had been their for four years, and I was gonna find a way to make things work. But I had to become.....
To be continued
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