Repetition and routine can become hopeless after a while . But they do offer a certain safety net for you in regards to what you can expect for the day. At Subway repetition and routine are a constant guarantee. My routine at Subway consisted of opening the store, setting up the food, baking bread, and making sandwiches. But aside from the required tasks, I had developed a new sense of normalcy from the one that I had previously lost.
I was dating Liz and I honestly thought I was making progress in that department, I was gonna ask her to be my girlfriend. Meanwhile Kay was making some very interesting friends in Long Beach. Kay was hanging around a lot with Moses, a new guy we hired. He was a pothead and had a real bad crystal meth addiction. But he knew how to make sandwiches and he did whatever we told him to do. If we needed someone to clean the toilet, or clean the trash cans, and sweep the sidewalk, we always asked him to do it. He and Kay started hanging out, probably because Moses smoked a lot of weed just like Kay. Kay introduced him to one of the tenants in the building that hooked him up with all of his weed. The guy that Kay knew was some big hippie guy who had been smoking since the 60s and only sold weed to a very specific clientele. And Kay was one of his clients. Moses in return introduced him to all of his friends, who for the most part were a bunch of Mexican gang members from the east side. At the time the gang members in question, who's official gang name I shall refrain from mentioning specifically, we're fighting with the asian gangs and the black gangs. So as long as Moses wasn't bringing any blacks or asians around they were cool with it. Kay now had friends that rolled in deep numbers, had guns and were not afraid to use them, and who respected Kay because they could tell he was street smart, he was down for what ever like they were, and he had some of the best weed they had ever smoke and he could get more of it. A guy like Kay is dangerous on his own, but when you add a group of other guys to him, that have no ambition in life and enjoy destroying everything around them because they live by the mentality, "I don't give a fuck", along with drugs and drug use. You create a very dangerous problem for someone. And unfortunately that someone became me to some extent.
In the fall of 2004, I was dating Liz and I was the assistant manager at Subway, I was dating a cute girl I had my own car, I didn't have to go to school since I dropped out of college and kept all the financial aid money in cash, and I felt like I was a big fish, even if it was in a small pond. But this new feeling of normalcy I had re-established would not last.
Gossip is always a bad thing, but the most fucked up thing about it is that even if you don't believe what's being said sometimes, that shit lingers like a fucken fly you can't ever get rid of. Me and Kay ran the store on Ocean in downtown Long Beach, and he had his wife working in the Subway store on Broadway in downtown Long Beach. From time to time we would send them some of our staff to help cover their staff shortages. Everybody knew that I was going out with Liz a lot and that I was sweat on her, and that I would give her a lot of slack even when she made mistake after mistake, and showed up late and Kay wanted to fire her about 3 times. One day we sent over a girl by the name of Cecilia to the broadway store, and while she was there she went on a rant, complaining to one of the girls there, telling her that I let Liz do whatever she wanted. What Cecilia apparently didn't know was that she was actually talking to Kay's wife, and that I talked to Kay's wife almost every day whenever I would go to Kay's house to play play station. But that fact that she said that wasn't what bothered me, because it was all basically true. What pissed me off was when she said that she asked Liz if her and me were dating, and that apparently Liz said "Fuck no!!! If wants to take me out then that's fine, it's like whatever but I'm not going out with that ugly ass foo". When Kay's wife told me that. I felt about 2 inches tall. I felt embarrassed , sad, worthless, and at first I was in denial, but Cecilia had no reason to lie, and neither did Kay's wife. So I did what any immature impulsive 19 year old Subway assistant manager would do, I got angry and I got even.
Liz called me the next day, and I had to be honest with myself and admit that I could no longer look or talk to her the same way I did before. So I put a plan in motion and crossed my fingers that it would work out as I was planning it. While we were talking on the phone she asked me for her new schedule, and I told her she had to come the next day from 4 to close, even though she really had to come in from 11 in the morning to 4. So when 12 o clock came and we had a huge lunch rush and were short 1 person, Kay was pissed off, and luckily for me our general manager Patty showed up. Patty brought over some girl who helped us cover her shift and finish the lunch rush. But there was still the question of what to do with Liz. Patty and Kay called me into the office and went over her four write ups, and Kay asked me, "So what do you want to do about your girl?" So I grabbed a sharpee and I crossed her name off the schedule in front of them, and said "fire her ass". They both looked at me and were kind of surprised that I said it the way I did. But nobody argued my recommendation, Kay didn't want to hire her in the first place, and Patty had heard staff complaints and customer complaints about her, and I was angry and bitter over what she had said about me. When I started these stories I stated that working in fast food is all about who you know, and who you can afford to piss off and who you can't. Unfortunately for her, she pissed off the wrong person. She came in at 4 and Kay fired her. I didn't have the guts to do it myself, so he did me a favor and took care of it. He handed her a check and that was it. To my knowledge she never found out that I was the one behind her getting fired, and whatever I was to her just kind of faded away into nothingness which only confirmed that I didn't really mean shit to her anyway.
What I didn't see at the time was that my decision to fire Liz had many un intended consequences coming my way. After that day, Kay kind of looked at me differently. I guess he didn't think I could be as cold blooded and fire someone who trusted me so much. And to be honest neither did I. But that was the least of my worries at the time. I was going to be confronted with with one of the toughest...
To be continued
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