Mr. Sandwich

So I made a new friend the other day. A new friend of sorts, anyway. This is not someone I would play pinochle with, or invite over to my house to use my toilet. It's just one of those acquaintances you meet along life's road who is momentarily interesting.

I don't even know this guy's name, but here is the deal. There is a new hoagie/submarine/grinder/combination wedge/insert-your-local-usage-here shop in a plaza next to the shitty supermarket I'm stupid enough to shop in. I do not want to get into a piss-up with this sandwich shop chain, so I will refer to it as S--way.

Anyway, I bought a salad there a few days ago and this guy waited on me. He couldn't wait to get this salad together for me, and even threw in an extra shitty hothouse tomato or two, and then when I went to pay he went to great lengths to explain the value of the S--way card, and how it would be swiped every time I bought something at S--way, and how after I spent in excess of $40,000 on subs and other miscellaneous crap I will be entitled to a free sandwich, on the House! What a fucking deal!

Anyway, this guy liked me for some reason, and I found him eerily interesting. For one thing, while making my salad he managed to get engaged into a full-pitched battle with some skanky looking woman who was breaking up with him or he was breaking up with, or something like that, and who decided that the denouement of their sad relationship would best be played out in front of 10 people in line who were waiting for their lunch and didn't give a fucking shit who dropped their drawers for someone else on the sly while the other person was working at the sandwich shop. I am sorry, but I am not interested in sordid events unless I am personally involved in them.

I should explain something else about this guy. He is interesting to look at in that he has hair down to his ass and a long beard, and his perpetually bloodshot eyes look as if he'd accidentally downloaded about two grams of cocaine. In other words, he looks like everyone I hung around with until I got married.

The other weird thing is that he is even hairier than I am, which is a good thing, because when you have an affliction like being hairy you like to see people who are worse off than you are. And being hairy would seem a bit of a drawback when you are making someone's food right in front of them. Most people do not like to see tufts of hair protruding from every possible gap in a man's shirt and from every square centimeter of a man's exposed skin when he is preparing their sandwich. That's just how it is.

Anyway, the next time I was in the store he recognized me and we shot the shit a little. Shooting the shit is pretty much a good way to describe it, because at least 50 percent of what he said was totally unbelievable, even though it was enjoyable to talk to him. Do you know what I mean? It's the old "grain of salt" thing. If you can look past the fact that someone is probably bullshitting and take all of what they say with that grain of salt (whatever the fuck that means), oftentimes people like that are fun to be around. You just don't take it seriously, and I am a firm believer that only a chump takes anything seriously. God, doing things like that will fucking kill you, so if you take stuff seriously, cut it out now.

So Mr. Sandwich told me all these tales, and one thing came evident to me right from the get-go. As likeable as Mr. Sandwich is, he embodies a lot of what the fuck is wrong with America.

First off, Mr. S informed me that he is "retired from the Army," and in the next breath mentioned that he is 37 years old. Well, conceivable, but not likely. I entered the Army Reserve at age 17, and I guess I could have retired at 37 if I hadn't been kicked out for malfeasance and general fuckupedness at age 18.

Then he mentioned that he had four grandkids at this tender age. I was an early grandpa at 49, so this seemed really odd to me, but I guess anything is possible when people have private parts that can be aligned at the right moment. But when I asked their ages he rattled off FIVE ages, and then gave the same number when I asked him to repeat what he said. Four kids with five ages. Imagine that.

But he is a nice guy, so I listened and smiled. He then told me he is working 90 to 100 hours a week, and that he is an assistant manager. Assistant managers have the worst fucking lot of anyone in life. They are like second lieutenants in the Army. It was legendary during Vietnam that a second lieutenant generally had about 25 minutes to live once he landed in country. I know this from tales I heard as a Reservist who during Vietnam saw heavy action in bars near Fort Dix, N.J., which during Vietnam was the gonorrhea capital of the East Coast.

So I asked Mr. S if he was salaried, and he guffawed at the suggestion that he could be such a chump. No sir, he gets an hourly wage, and he gets it for every hour he is there, all 90 to 100 of the fucking hours he is there, and he gets it all at straight time; no time and a half for him. All this gave me some insight as to why it didn't work out with him and the woman with whom he had the public shouting match while I was waiting for my dismal fucking salad.

However, though, think not that Mr. S is being abused. Not in the least. He leaned over the counter and whispered to me that he has a great deal going. At the end of every night he is permitted to take home four (4) submarine sandwiches that he makes with his own hands. I am not certain whether he is allowed to put an extra slice of cheap bologna on there for his trouble, but the fact remains that as an all-star member of the Mr. S--way heavy hitters club he is able to take four (4) subs home with him at the end of the night. Great, huh? Doesn't it sound wonderful to be elbow-deep in the fucking things all day, to make 60,000 subs in the course of the week, and then be allowed to take a few home with you? If I were this poor fuck I would vomit at the sight of a sub sandwich.

So this is Mr. Sandwich, and welcome to his world. Endless hours, no OT, paid in sub sandwiches, girlfriend loudly breaking up with him, indeterminate number of grandkids, barking orders at people who have an even worse lot in life than he has, getting up at 6:30 a.m. to go to work and coming home just in time to watch Letterman.

So this is America, buddy, and Mr. Sandwich is just another lucky American who is pursuing the American Dream of a Rent-A-Center 1,700-inch TV and an apartment with a cockroach population under that of the number of flaming assholes in Manhattan. I'm glad to have him as a pal, if only because it makes my fucking life seem like that of King Farouk by comparison.

The Joads hit the road

Hello, seekers:

Those of you who have been around a while - all five or six of you, the ones who somehow managed to generate thousands and thousands of hits on my prior site - may remember me giving a little insight into the people who live across the street from me.

Well, make that lived across the street from me, for they have finally vamoosed, and in grand fashion.

These were the people who tormented me with with a 10-foot inflatable asshole of a Santa Claus, backlit and everything, and who had six cars and no driveway and thus had to park at least one of their rustbucket pieces of shit in front of my house every day, and forced me to move my mailbox into someone else's yard because the mailman refused to deliver my mail while some coughing, sputtering, choking, oil-spewing rolling turd blocked him from leaning out and putting the mail in my mailbox. He claimed that "rules" prohibit him from dismounting, which I assume means getting out of his little square mailmobile, and I guess that is cool.

And that is not to mention that the neighbor and all three of his kids smoked cigarettes and took great pains when either working on the car right in front of my house or even just parking it to toss butts hither and yon in my front yard. Great!

These people weren't all bad, even though their house looks like the Addams Family house after about 75 really bad winters. They did have a beautiful daughter, whom I mentioned in a prior blog, but of course she got knocked up by some schmuck who immediately vanished or went to jail or something, so she moved out on her own. Also, the neighbor is a nice guy, though I wished he would wear a goddamned belt while he was gardening, because gardener's crack is far worse than plumber's crack because the plumber probably isn't at your house every day when the weather is decent.

But a couple weeks ago, a sheriff's deputy pulled up to their house and I saw them having a really animated discussion in the front yard. I could not hear what they were saying because this hovel rests on a really steep incline - you need to go up about 30 horribly broken-down, sinking concrete steps to get up there - and it was just out of my earshot.

However, I had a feeling I knew what the deputy was there for, and I was right. A day or two later the members of the household started parading down the steps and loading anything that was worth anything, not that any of it was worth much, into a pickup truck. Even the daughter, with her kid slung into a papoose-type affair on her back, was pressed into this duty, though it seemed she mainly carried silverware a piece or two at a time.

So they are gone now. For good. I think they moved to the other side of town, which means no more parking in front of my house and no more Camels in my front yard. No more kids playing rap music in their car in front of my house, or changing their oil and dropping their transmission 16 feet from my bedchamber at 7 a.m.

But best of all: no more inflatable Santa this year. But Christ himself only knows what the next batch of people will display during the holiday season. You would have to be nuts to buy that house, and that fact does not augur well for the days to come.
I don't hold a lot of hope for much in the neighbor department, but four or five fewer shit cars and a lack of inflatable holiday lawn treasures would be an improvement.

The Barbers of Seville (by request)

There will be some very disturbing content later in this entry. Relax for now, but be ready when the time comes.

When I went out for coffee today (see prior "Convenience" blog), I decided to go whole hog and treat myself to breakfast. Going out for breakfast is inherently stupid because almost all breakfast-type meals can be made pretty easily at home. You probably would have trouble creating the kind of fancy-ass dinner you can buy at a nice restaurant, but any dipshit -- even you and I -- can fry eggs and make pancakes at home that are at least as good as diner pancakes and eggs. But hey - live a little..

While eating breakfast (pancakes, eggs, really good coffee in a cracked, dirty cup, plates with windmills on them), I saw the town barber, who was just paying up and trying to leave. His name is Vince, of course, because most barbers are named Vince, and his partner in the shop is Nick, and all barbers who are not named Vince are named Nick. I swear this has been true in every barbershop I have been in since I was a young kid. All except for Skeeter, and we will get to Skeeter soon enough.

Vince is a great man, a great guy. He has been a barber for many, many years, and I am almost certain he fought in World War II, and I think World War II veterans should be saluted and have their asses kissed every moment of their lives. He's old but very agile, and he talks what could charitably be called a fucking blue streak. This is why I say he was "trying" to leave the diner. In sheer bulk, a daily transcript of his verbiage would make the OED look like a Zane Grey dime novel.

I have been to Vince's shop. It is basically a four-hour trip to go there on a busy day. He is a true artisan of the old school. Even though people who go to fru-fru hairstylists would scoff at his spartan scissor-cuts, he does a damned good job.

The problem is that blue streak I mentioned. Perhaps because he is about 80 years old, Vince has gotten well beyond the point of being able to cut hair and talk at the same time, so every time he has to say something he stops cutting, which means that even a low-impact haircut means 45 minutes, at the least, in his chair.

Going there, though, is great because it is a trip back in time, to use a cliche that I would probably cut out of a story that I was editing (reminder: I am a copy editor by trade). When you go in, he invites you to have a cup of coffee out of his plastic carafe. I like people who give you coffee. And then there are the doughnuts. Vince treats his customers to doughnuts. I am not talking lame-ass doughnuts here, like that soggy shit from Dunkin' Donuts or the puffy, airy crap from Krispy Kreme. These are real Doughnuts (capital D intended) from some obscure Italian bakery where they know that a doughnut is supposed to be a meal, and that after you eat one doughnut you are not supposed to eat again for six hours, or until your blood sugar has returned to only quadruple the normal number.

When you go to Vince's shop there are no people named Serge with tiny-ass glasses peering at your head with fingers up in a goalpost posture like some fucking indie film producer. There are no hairsprays "created" by Jean-Guy or Jean-Claude or some other phony name. You will get your neck shaved with hot lather, and afterward you will get your neck and ears rubbed down with Bay Rum, by God, the same Bay Rum that has been applied to men's necks since your long-dead grandfather was a boy, and you will not have some stinky shit sprayed on you that will make your hair stiffer than a high school senior's cock on prom night.

I have had a weird relationship with barbers all my life. My earliest memory of the barbershop is when I used to walk there when I was about six. My mother would give me a buck and tell me to tell the barber to keep the change. I am guessing the haircut was 50 or 75 cents. One day she must've given me a $5 bill and out of habit I told him to keep the change, and he did. I remember my mother, pissed off to beat the band, going there to demand the change back. There was hell to pay for him because he should have known that he was not going to get a $4.50 tip in 1959. Fortunately, I was held blameless.

We moved to the town I told you about in the Jersey Pine Barrens, and the barbershop there was a trip. Larry was the barber and he did an OK job, but he had a son named Skeeter who was just brutal with the clippers. Everyone at school knew when you'd gotten stuck getting a cut from Skeeter, because you had no hair and looked like a real asshole. His haircuts actually had a way of making your ears stand out from your head.

There was, incredibly, a thing worse than getting your hair cut by Skeeter, and this actually happened to a lot of the kids I went to school with. A lot of the kids were from farms and were very poor, and their mothers would cut their hair because they did not have the 75 cents it cost to pay Skeeter to make you look like a chump.

These kids got the dreaded home cuts with a salad bowl, and getting one was like asking to get the shit kicked out of you by the tough kids. We were poor when I was a kid - my parents actually became very successful after it was too late to benefit me, but when I was a kid we had next to nothing. But thank Christ we always had the money for a haircut, because having your hair cropped so close that the clippers skimmed your temporal lobe was far, far better than having a salad bowl cut, and believe me there was no mistaking the difference.

My dad did not like getting his hair cut by either of the local barbers, so he traveled 10 miles all the way to the big city, population 8,000, to get a real haircut from a "real" barber, who of course was named Vince and of course had a partner named Nick. I finally convinced mom and dad that I wanted to go there too, especially since there was a movie theater a block away. So a Saturday tradition was born: a haircut with Vince and then a double feature at the theater. It probably gave mom and dad a chance to have sex.

Speaking of which, now comes the disturbing content.

As I sat in the chair, virtually blind because my glasses were off, I always noticed the grown-up in the next chair was reading something, or at least looking at something and rapidly turning the pages. Eventually, being no dummy, I noticed that the publications they were reading were spirited out of Nick's drawer, the one under the one in which he kept his clippers and various other tools of his trade.

Eventually I figured out that they were looking at something that, chances are, I would soon be really interested in.

One day I tried the direct approach. I'd heard the guys in the next chair ask Nick for "something to read," and that seemed to be the cue to break out these mysterious publications, which I was sure included views of something I'd heard referred to as "tits" and, well, even more, but I do not want to go further than that. God gave you an imagination. so use it if you must, OK?

So after weeks of trying to get up the nerve, I sprouted a set of balls one week and asked the question:

"Can I have something to read?"

"Sure," Vince said. But he did not go into Nick's drawer. He went to the table next to one of the waiting chairs and got me a copy of Boys'Life, and I will be damned if I ever remember seeing anything called or resembling "tits" in there.

Now that I am done telling you that story, here comes the really disturbing part.

I have never told anyone this, and probably should not be telling you. There used to be an old guy who came in as a sub once in a while whose name was J----. He had white hair and a stupid little white moustache, and I guess he had some kind of deal in which he would sub for Nick or Vince when they wanted a day off.

One day, I wound up in J---'s chair. I don't know why i am protecting him; he has no doubt been dead for 15 or 20 years or more. And J---- kept leaning against me and leaning against me while he was cutting my hair. I was a very young and very naive kid, and the fact that Nick kept those magazines in his drawer and out of my clutches did very little to help me attain a degree of worldliness. But I knew one thing. J---- kept leaning against me, leaning against my arm, and there was no mistaking that there was something going on with him that would have been going on with me had I been given the opportunity to look at those magazines in Nick's second drawer.

I never said a word to anyone about this over the years, but as I got older I could not help but wonder how many kids had to put up with J---'s obvious excitement being pressed against their young bodies. While certainly I do not consider myself a victim in any sense of the word, who knows what else may have happened with some kid who was not smart enough to try to lean away when this guy was trying to jolly his pecker up with a little rub against a young fellow's body?

I hope this did not offend you, but I have wanted to tell this story for years. Whenever I took my sons to the barber, I sat with them the whole time, all because of J---.

Maybe a visit to Nick's second drawer would have straightened J--- out. I moved away long before I got a chance to get a peek at what was in that drawer, but if nothing else the mystery helped set up the thrill of the chase.

A Mighty Fortress.....

I am not sure what to think of religion, or at least the kind of religion most people have. I understand the purpose of it and all, but a lot of it is a mystery to me and, frankly, it just doesn't float my boat, if you know what I mean.

My parents were really cool when it came to religion. Their theory was that I should be at least given an exposure to the various religions and then make up my own mind what I wanted to do. My maternal grandparents were Southern Baptists, but it didn't really rub off on Mom at all, and I don't know what the hell my dad's parents were. They were probably so busy trying to scratch out a living on an apple orchard during the Depression that they didn't have time to think about what God was up to, and I can't say I blame them under the circumstances.

I went to every church imaginable when I was little. My parents would drop me off there and I would sit there and take it all in. These were different times, back nearly a half century ago, when there wasn't a goddamned pederast on every corner, so it was safe to just drop a kid off at church and then disappear. I guess all the child abusers worked in barbershops back then (see entry The Barbers of Seville).

There isn't a whole lot I remember about all those church visits. I do remember being given a little hat to wear during my visit to temple, and that an usher started to give me wine by mistake at the Catholic church and then realized he should be giving me grape juice instead. Other than those two things it was all a blur of the same old shit. The one cool thing was at one church they had a portrait of some guy named Zoroaster or something like that hanging up, and he had a great big beard with all these curls in it. I'm still not sure who Zoroaster was or why his mug was up in that church, but it was a cool picture.

But I did have two brushes with religious education. The first was at a Sunday school at the church I liked best. I must've been in about third grade. We had a blast and sang songs, but there was one thing I could not get past. The church graveyard was right outside the window of the room where the classes were held, and there was this one huge monument right smack dab next to it. It was from the '20s and was one of those really big ones, and I used to look at it in amazement.

This was a great distraction while I was being taught about God and Christ and the rest of that crew, and I am sure they were all wonderful folks but I just was fascinated by this big monument. It had a huge ball and an eagle on top of it. I wondered why someone would want an eagle on top of their gravestone. But I could not look at it without thinking of the poor guy buried there. What did he die of? What was it like to die? Did he have any idea that he had been lying there for decades? And it was interesting to think that he would be there forever. He is there right now, by gum, and when I draw my last breath he will still be there and he will be there when my children's children's grandchildren pass into old age.

Well, we moved, and that was the end of that. And I really didn't want to spend my Sunday mornings going to Sunday school anymore. The alternative was watching this TV show called Davy and Goliath. It was the standard religious Christian propaganda show for kids way back then. Did you ever see it? It was a weird puppet-stop-animation-type thing. I don't know how to describe it, but it was a little creepy. And I figured watching this show was as good as hauling my ass out to Sunday school.

The basic thing of this show was that Davy was the kid and Goliath was his dog, and they always got into some kind of jackpot that provided a chance for a religious message. The theme song for this show was a hymn that I later found out is called "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." It was a powerful damned song, too, bleated out on an organ that you could just imagine was about 150 feet high.

But the whole God thing never really made sense to me, even as a kid. I mean the standard Christian concept of God being a big guy with a beard who rewarded the faithful and smote the wicked. I saw too many good people being fucked with and not enough assholes being smitten or smoted or smited or whatever the hell it is you call it. For example, why was that fucking barber who did that to me (see Barbers of Seville) allowed to live to a ripe old age? And how about the neighborhood tough, older and much larger than me, who for laughs grabbed me from behind, knocked me down with a suckerpunch and then straddled me and beat me unconscious and then kept beating me until a kindly stranger came running and probably saved my life? Why was this monstrous fuck allowed to survive the day after that?

Who built God's throne? How did this huge throne sit in the sky? Who made his clothes? How did his robes get washed? Did they have Tide and bleach in Heaven? Where did he pee? What about No. 2, for that matter? I am sorry to engage in such blasphemy, but these are the kind of things I thought of when I was a kid. I guess I was a practical little bugger in some respects.

So for a while the sum total of my religious training was this TV show, and you can see from the questions that crossed my mind it did a piss-poor job of providing me with a healthy faith in God.

The other thing that bothered me about the show was that damned hymn, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." I never liked Sundays as a kid. I've always had a terrible tendency to not live in the moment and to be pissed off or depressed about the future. My wife says this is my most contemptible quality as a human, and believe me that is saying something.

So I hated Sundays because it was the day before Monday, and Monday meant my Dad was going back to work, and in my life there has never been anything as wonderful as the time I spent with him and it just tore me up to know he was going back to work the next day. Plus it meant there was school the next day, and that meant getting up in the morning, and who the fuck in their right mind wants to do that? So hearing "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" set off this flood of angst and depression over the fact that Monday was just a day away.

Well, after a couple years, when I was 11 or 12 or so, I took the plunge back into religious training. The local Methodist church had something called Vacation Bible School, and they had all kinds of neat posters in school advertising it, something that of course would never happen today. The posters had a depiction of Christ looking something like a guy who would have hung out with Jack Kerouac, and there were crew-cut boys with freshly scrubbed faces and little strawberry blond girls hanging out with him. This seemed OK so I signed up.

There were about eight of us in the class, and I will be damned if there were any cute girls with strawberry blond hair there. It was all boys, and two of them were pig farmers, and God bless these people for what they do but when I was a kid the pig farmers were the untouchable caste and I assume it will not strain your imagination to figure out why. So here it was hot and all and of course there was no air conditioning, and here the eight of us sat in this stifling room, and two of the kids were covered with pig slop, which is something that you don't wanton your clothes, especially in a room in which it is about 97 degrees.

The woman who taught the class was about 30 and was not married, which in those days and in that particular place was nothing short of a scandal. She seemed pleasant enough, and despite the pig farmers and the odor and the heat we did our best to have fun. I would have liked it if Christ had showed up so I could see if he really looked as cool as the poster made him look, but I guess he had other things to do, or maybe he didn't like pig slop and 90-degree temperatures and I cannot blame him for either.

But virtually everything in my life that was touted by others as being a good thing has come to a bad end in one way or another, and this sure as hell was no exception to that pathetic rule. On the last day of this Vacation Bible School class, Miss Whatsherface seemed like she was in some kind of weird mood when we all showed up. I thought maybe one of the pig farmers was especially ripe or something, but turned out it wasn't that at all.

Once we got settled, she pulled the shades. We figured this meant she was going to show a movie or slides or something, but how wrong we were. After making sure all the shades were down, she became really stern and told us all to get on our knees on the floor, right now, and started really laying it on about how sin was the ruination of the world and the ruination of all God's little children, especially us, and how due to sin and the devil little boys did things like, well, amuse themselves in an impure and disgusting fashion, and how this was the sort of behavior God has no use for.

And here we were, poor little bastards, on our knees on the hard tile floor, with this sexually repressed nut coming around and berating us individually for our sins. CONFESS, she said...give TESTIMONY to how evil we were, how we were bad and had done bad things, especially the bad thing we were probably doing in private, and you can just imagine what that was. We were told that we had to confess to doing that, and if we did not confess it was too bad for us because God knows everything and that we were appearing before the eyes of God at that moment to cleanse our souls and the only way to do so would be to lay all the sin out on the table so it could be wiped away.

We were reduced to tears and did all sorts of confessing on our knees, and it was an incredibly traumatic experience. After what seemed like an eternity of this, she told us to get back in our seats, opened the shades and then went about her business as if none of this had happened.

That was it for me, I am telling you. Just as I think about that pervert barber I told you about, I think about this woman from time to time. As the years have passed, I've come to think that she was the one who engaged in self-abuse late at night while thinking about browbeating us poor kids with all this dogma and brimstone and talk of sin.

Well, sorry if that upset you, but this life is not an easy one. And people like that sure don't help us along the way.

Squatter's rights

It's probably about time I stopped by these parts. I keep forgetting the fucking password to get into this place, and I have been pissed off that leaving A-you-know-what-L - the biggest shitheel operation on the Web, or close to it - meant that I lost access to my old "Cheeks" site.

But never mind all that. We all get what we deserve in this life, so surely I am getting what I deserve for not being able to remember one of my 570 passwords.

I just need to tell you about something that happened to me recently, one of the many stupid things that tend to happen to me. I am a magnet for idiotic occurrences, possibly because I tend to wind up in places filled with idiots, and I am not sure whether that is by accident or by design. Whatever.

Anyway, I recently found myself doing some shopping in a large bookstore, one of those enormous chain places. Let's call it B-----s here, for identification's sake, and perhaps you will be able to fill in the blanks and figure out what the name of the place is. If you can't figure it out, well, sorry.

So I am wandering around this place, shopping for a gift for my friend Liz, and of course the place is filled with touchholes of every stripe imaginable. Mainly, the place was filled with phonies, people with tiny eyeglasses, people talking in loud voices about stupid things that no one else would give a shit about, like their graduate course in Corncracker Philosophy or Greek Wainscoting or whatever. I don't understand how anyone can do this, especially in a bookstore. Rightly or wrongly, I tend to think of a bookstore as being sort of a library, where you shut the fuck up and look at books. I don't want to hear about your graduate course, or your new hybrid car, or your piles, or whatever, when I am browsing in a bookstore.

But most of the conversations were as stupid and phony as the day is long, and believe me, it was enough to make Holden Caufield go postal. That old boy would have had a grand old fucking time in that place, especially if he came in with a submachine gun.

The coffee place in B-----s is a magnet for assholes, and you had better take that as gospel. These people come in and ponder the New York Times like it is like some kind of ancient rune. Sometimes I think they just stare at the page in hopes that some other phony will come in and rip their pants off on the basis that if they are looking at the grand old New York Fucking Times, they must be someone worth fornicating with.

It's not surprising that I got a little queasy while in the midst of this nest of assholes, and eventually it got so bad that I had to make a stop in the restroom. This place doesn't even have real restrooms - it has those unisex rooms (and only two of them for a place that's continuously filled with nauseating people), the ones where you go in and latch the door and do your business.

So I pulled down on the handle and pushed the door open, And there, sitting on the toilet with a whole pile of books next to him, was a distinguised-looking man who looked at me in horror as I walked in during his "evacuation."

Note that I said he had a whole pile of books with him. Either he was scheming how to steal them (which I somehow doubt) or he was planning on spending a good hour or two browsing these titles, deciding which ones to buy and then placing the others back on the shelves for all to enjoy, along with any cryptosporidium or giardia he might leave behind on the pages.

You probably think I am cribbing this incident from a Seinfeld episode in which George takes an expensive art book in with him while he takes a major squat and afterward is forced to buy the book. I wish I could tell you that I am making this particular incident up, but I am not. The only good thing about it was the look on the poor bastard's face when I walked in on him. I could tell it is a moment he will never forget, and I kind of hope that it is the last thing he remembers as he is about to depart this world someday - the fact that he was humiliated by being exposed as someone who will take a bunch of someone else's books with him while he takes a crap.

If this guy had any decency at all, he would have bought every book he took in there. Somehow I doubt this. And why did he see fit to take eight or 10 books in there? Was he planning on spending a leisurely afternoon enjoying some fine literature and the pleasure of his intestinal odors?

Please do not do this. Please.