I REMEMBER MY FIRST DAY

MY JOB IS SODUMB it’s because there are lots of sad things and tears and robot peoppl and you’ll feel bad for me because I don’t like my job and in fact I am not safe here…usually but I don’t get paid enough to deal with any of it, that’s the only certainty.

My first day in the nursing home ohhhh it was so long ago but I remember these crisp memories I came in and met the staff  who worked there and I was confused at first because they kept throwing jars of pickles at all the nameless. But one of the nice women who worked there her name was Bethany she took me by the hand and she told me that the old creatures kept asking for snacks to eat because they usually forget to feed them over the weekend. Well I don’t think they wanted pickles but that’s what they got thrown at them, only sometimes they would toss it real slow like a football and laugh when the old women would try to snatch it in the air only to have it fumble through their wrinkled fingers and it would smash on the ground and no one would clean it up for an hour.

I remember something else about the pickles one time this old Italian man I call ‘Grapefruit’ started stealing febreze bottles from the utility closet and filling them with the leftover pickle juice and started spraying it everywhere. Only the entire building usually smelled like pickles anyway so no one noticed, except when they found loads of empty febreze bottles in Grapefruit’s room, so they actually got more pissed that he stole the febreze and also someone found him dumping the febreze liquid or whatever out his window on the little children who were selling cookies outside, so they made him go out there and apologize to them only he kept screaming at them in rushed Italian and they had dumped all their cookies in shock and Grapefruit snarfed them all up off the concrete like a bug. Anyway if I were those kids I'd be super pissed at the elderly the rest of my life and I would never get a job working here, that's for sure.

If you are wondering why I give all the elderly names I’ll tell you: it’s not because I care about confidentiality or their privacy it’s because I honestly don’t know them and if you think I ought to know them after working here twenty odd years here, if you think I ought to start learning them then you have missed your mark by quite a large margin, and that is why I also sometimes refer to them as the nameless.

Also on my first day I remember we all got a laugh when we told this old black man I call ‘Dishes’ the elevator was haunted. He lived on the top floor because he always troubled the staff so much they told me. He demanded to know how he was supposed to figure out how to get down there to play bingo or whatever, what with the stairs being in such utter disrepair. He meant that the stairs were slippery and unsafe because we sold all the handrails to buy more pickles and junk, and also he was in a wheelchair. Anyway the elevator wasn’t really haunted, we pay a homeless man some money to go in there at night and ride it up and down and bang on it real loud until he gets tired. But Dishes didn’t know that so he thought he’d take his chances with the stairs OH WHAT A MISTAKE THAT WAS.

On the video we saw him sitting at the top of the stairs the entire morning, and I remember watching the video because we were all hushed in the room and no one wanted to breathe or move or say anything. It was like we were playing God and everyone knew it. Well Dishes roared down the steps and every time I remember this I think of piano music playing and him falling out of his chair down the stairs in slow motion with his hands over his head and all his body fat jiggling like in 300 in all the cool fight scenes where everything is superslow only sometimes it’s not piano music playing in my head there’s just lots of drums pounding I TELL YOU PIANO MUSIC OR DRUMS IT IS STILL THE IMAGE I REST MY WEARY HEAD TO REST AT NIGHT AFTER A HARD DAYS WORK anyway he hit the floor and the chair rolled over him and he started screaming OBAMACARE!!! and shaking his angry black fist which in context makes sense because we told him it was Obama who took the handrails away and if he wanted them back he would have to go to Russia or something.  

I STILL PAY THAT HOMELESS MAN EVERY NIGHT TO GO IN THAT ELEVATOR HIS NAME IS JEFFERSON AND DON’T THINK THIS IS HIS ONLY JOB WE PAY HIM HERE TO DO.