The Ice Cream Man and Other Stories by Sam Pink

Author:Sam Pink
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593765941
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2019-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Machine Operator

I went to a temp agency in Tampa.

Temp agencies are big in Florida.

There’s a lot of bullshit jobs that need near-constant staffing.

The kind of jobs that ask for your weight in sweat, every day.

The kind of jobs where someone says, ‘Hey, you came back!’ if you show up after the first weekend.

And I should’ve known—by how nice and accommodating the temp office worker was—that the job would be of inverse niceness and accommodation.

I was filling out paperwork in his office.

The temp agencies always had some kind of alarmingly unclear name too, like Business Arc Solutions or Syn-Tec Distribution or whatever.

It didn’t even look like an office, but instead like some people suddenly became aware that someone was about to come in expecting an office.

The temp office worker said, ‘Alllllright man, lemme go plug this in and we can get you started tomorrow. For the position of’—he checked the paper—‘machine operator. Cool?’

‘Sounds good,’ I said.

And he left to process the paperwork.

I began to envision things like: the panic-free purchasing of food, the foreknowledge of a source for rent money, and the slightly more advanced concerns/problems I’d then discover.

Hot diggity . . .

I looked around the office.

There were stacks of papers on a shelf next to me, with a few sheets pinned up on a corkboard.

One was someone’s resume, for a custodial job.

It had his name in a huge font at the top and then the word ‘skills’ in a slightly smaller font, a bullet point beneath that said, ‘am a good worker.’

Under ‘previous jobs’ he’d put, ‘custodian/janitor’ and under ‘duties performed’ he had, ‘what a janitor do.’

The temp office employee came back and said, ‘Okay, got the paperwork in, you start tomorrow at three p.m., work until midnight. Bring a lot of water and something to eat. You got steel-toed boots?’

‘No.’

‘Hmm, shit,’ he said. ‘You need steel-toed boots.’

‘Okay I’ll get some before the shift,’ I said.

He asked what my shoe size was.

‘One sec,’ he said, exiting the room.

Came back with a box containing steel-toed boots in my size.

There was a sticky note on the box that said, ‘DeMontero Smith.’

‘Okay, this guy never showed, so you’re good to go! Tomorrow at three. It’s in Largo, address on that card I gave you!’

I thanked him and left.

I sat in the car, idling in the parking lot as it rained, staring at the box of boots and the sticky note.

DeMontero Smith.

Never showed.

DeMontero, where have you gone?

I imagined him crawling his way down the highway toward the boots, only to arrive, tattered and bloody, to glimpse through the window me accepting his boots.

No . . . NO!

Reaching to the sky with bloody hands . . .

The boots were really nice too.

One of the nicest things anyone has given me, actually.

Made me want to leave the boots back on the doorstep of the temp office with a note on them that says, ‘I can’t possibly accept these.’

And never go back.

Never show up for the job.

DeMontero, get me there.

What a janitor do.

*

I drove up to Largo the next day.

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