Retail Hell (30 page)

What I need is to find a bar and start drinking. I
don’t
care if
it’s
9: 00
a
.
m
.

Just then a customer walked up and said: “I’m looking for something big in deep, dark, chocolaty brown? Can you help me?”

It took everything in me not to direct her to the men’s room urinal. Instead I began showing her brown bags while trying not to throw up.

As gross as it was to see a human dookie bigger than my foot at 9:00 in the morning, it paled in comparison to another incident that has left me with such a revolting memory of The Big Fancy that I should have made them pay for therapy.

One summer afternoon during a lull, I was having a chuckle listening to Marsha tell me how she had trained her cat Mr. Butters to turn off her bedside alarm clock (was I ever impressed), when Two- Tone Tammy called. She informed us that one of us needed to go keep an eye on the Swim department. Neither one of us wanted to help girls find swimsuits, so we declined instantly, but Tammy turned on her Dragon voice and informed us that we weren’t being asked. Someone was out sick and the girl working over there needed to go on her lunch break.

Okay, Two-Tone! Since you so kindly put it like that. Whatever you need!
We’re
here for you!

Lucky for me, I didn’t have to become Queer-Eye Swimsuit Guy. Marsha agreed to watch Swim for an hour. The other lucky thing was that the Swim department was only a short distance away — across the aisle. Because swimsuit business had been so bad, Suzy Davis-Johnson had decided to move Hosiery temporarily into Lingerie and give Swim some exposure on the busy floor of the store.

Within minutes, I was bored. I drifted over to Marsha and joined her at the Swim counter. I didn’t totally abandon the Handbag Jungle; I kept an eye out for customers and an ear open for the phone. We were able to continue chatting about Marsha’s talented cats.

After just a few short minutes, this skinny woman in her thirties with long brown hair wearing a light blue dress and red patent high heels came out of the fitting room. Empty-handed.

“None of the suits worked for you, hon?”

The swimsuit lady looked at us both, cocked her head, and said, “Umm . . .”

“Hon, you took in six swimsuits. I asked you to bring them out when you were finished,” said Marsha, who I could tell was slightly annoyed that the lady had left them back in the room, probably all over the floor.

The lady didn’t say anything. She just walked by us.

Marsha and I exchanged “what-a-weirdo” looks with each other, and then we watched her leave.

That’s when we noticed the wet brownish liquid on the backside bottom of her light blue dress.

Our eyes could not help but continue traveling down to the back of her legs and shoes, which also had smears of something brown and wet on them . . . something that was leaving a trail across the carpet leading back to the fitting room.

“Oh my God,” I said, as we both ran toward the fitting rooms.

As soon as we entered the fitting room hallway, a septic smell strangled the air.

The worst coming from the room she’d been using. Last one on the right.

“This is like a fuckin’ horror movie, Marsha,” I said as we neared it.

Marsha opened the fitting room door like she was in a haunted house and this was the portal to hell. Little did we know, it
was
a portal.

A portal to a potty.

As the door swung open, our eyes burned and our noses almost closed up.

The weird woman in the light blue dress had shit all over the place.

Total assplosion.

The room was covered in her runny defecation like floodwaters from the Hershey highway. It was everywhere. Across the floor. Across the bench. Across the mirror. Swimsuits were strewn all over the shit-covered floor and soaked in a mucky brown crud as if she had used them as toilet paper. Hangers were equally coated. This was beyond Montezuma’s revenge — it was Montezuma’s volcano! I kid you not, it looked like the chick had bent over, raised her ass in the air like a canon, and spray-painted the walls with her shitty diarrhea.

We’re talking Jackson Pollock painting.

Dexter
crime scene.

Brutal paintball attack.

Somehow a bit of the excrement had splattered onto the ceiling.

How the fuck does shit end up on a ceiling???

It was bad enough the Shit Lady had unloaded (accidentally or not) in our fitting room, but to ruin six bathing suits and squirt it all over the walls and ceiling like she was a rotating shit-sprinkler was just beyond any thought process we could understand. This was not the sign of a person who had a medical potty accident. It was what monkeys do.

She could have at least said, “Umm . . . by the way, I just shit all over your fitting room. You might want to call someone.”

We would have called someone all right. The fuckin’ Hazmat team.

“Hon, I am
not
cleaning this shit up!” announced Marsha.

“You got that shit right,” I replied.

Marsha was aghast: “I’ll have you know my cats have never shit this bad. Even when little Shania Twain ate all that tomato sauce and got the runs.”

“This is some bad shit,” I said.

The entire fitting room area had to be closed for the rest of the day due to the shitty stench. In fact, the smell was so intense, it wafted out into the department, where browsing customers made faces and asked questions.

“What’s that smell?” a customer said.

“Oh they’re just doing some construction,” Marsha replied, “You know, welding some iron.”

Once the gross shock of what the Shit Lady had done wore off, the jokes started. I dared Marsha to approach the customer and ask her if she’d like to get a shitting room started. There are three good ones left! Marsha chimed in with, “It certainly gives new meaning to the retail version of the word dump! For dump duty you won’t need hangers — just take this can of scrubbing bubbles.”

We both cried with laughter.

Soon after the Shit Lady left her ass mark all over The Big Fancy, the Swim department salesgirl returned from lunch into what would be her Retail Hell. Marsha and I bolted. The girl was not happy about having to work the rest of her shift smelling shit, but the person I really felt sorry for was the petite Latino woman working in House-keeping that day. I’m sure she’d see more shit-storms than anyone. She actually seemed quite unfazed at the mess until she looked up and saw the brown splatter on the ceiling, to which she exclaimed, “Aiyiyiyi!!!”

And she was right. When you see something like that, it never leaves you. The Shit Lady’s mess has left me slightly poop-phobic. The vision of her ass-work has burned itself clearly into my mind’s undeletable photo album, and to this day, whenever I go into any fitting room to try on clothes, I can’t help but see shitty bathing suits and walls. When I look up to check the ceiling my mind goes wild.

How much shit was unleashed in this room? Did someone piss on the
walls?
I’m
not touching anything and
I’m
so not sitting down. Maybe
I’ll
just
take the clothes home and try them on.

Unfortunately, fitting rooms are not the only place customers have bodily function accidents.

One day there was an old man and his wife walking down the main store aisle. Apparently he’d forgotten to put on his underwear, because when he accidentally lost control of his poop while he was walking, a little log slid right down his pant leg and landed on the marbled floor. The oblivious couple kept on walking. At least it was just one turd and not a river of butt mud.

On another day a crazy customer tinkled on the Cosmetics carpet right in front of the MAC counter. She was not old. No excuses there.

And a friend of mine told me there was a woman wearing a housedress who liked to show up at the lawn and garden center of his store, stand over a drain in the ground, point a toe over the drain, and quietly let the urine drip down her leg, along her foot and toe, into the drain.
Creepy.
Maybe my next screenplay should be called
Tales
from the Sewer.

I guess the best way to deal with my shit phobia was to understand that what comes out of people’s asses is just a basic function of the human body. One that we all deal with.

It’s like that children’s book says: “Everyone Poops.”

I just wish they wouldn’t do it in front of me.

Like any retail store, The Big Fancy plans for the holidays like it’s going to war, and when your department manager is a general, no detail is left unattended.

But on December 18 at 3:02 p.m., the General had no plan ready for what happened.

She had gone to lunch, leaving Cammie, Marci, Jules, a temp named Venezuela (all the temps had weird names), and me on the floor. There were way too many salespeople, considering there were hardly any holiday shoppers. Since we were in the middle of a late-afternoon lull, we kicked out the new girl, sending Venezuela on an extended break.

Cammie and I were on box duty. The Big Fancy offered free gift boxes to customers for all their purchases. A nice courtesy, but it was a bitch for us because Suzy Davis-Satan required not only that we
make
boxes, but that we tissue-swaddle each item inside before handing the package over to the customer.

“I don’t want to see one customer leaving this store without a made box,” she said one morning at a rally, while wearing a Santa hat, “And don’t forget to say ‘Happy Holidays!’ We need to think of ourselves as elves! We are Santa’s cute little elves making life easier for all our customers.” After that
adorable
analogy, as expected, someone in the crowd pointed out that they were Jewish. Suzy didn’t miss a beat, “I would never forget my Jewish friends — why you are all just little candles of light burning brightly in the menorah.”

I wanted to puke for all my Jewish friends and light her Santa hat on fire.

But I digress . . . back to that fateful afternoon where Cammie and I constructed boxes in the back of the department. Having finished our chat about our personal lives, it wasn’t long before the monotony of folding five different size boxes crept in, box after box after box after box. As heinous Christmas music echoed over our heads, we decided to play our favorite Big Fancy holiday game: Fuck Up the Christmas Songs. The way it worked was that we’d start singing along (just loudly enough for us to hear) and change the lyrics. A little yuletide rewrite to warm our hearts.

Some of Cammie and Freeman’s Fucked-Up Christmas Song transformations:

“Let It Snow” to “What a Ho!”

“Most Wonderful Time of the Year” to “It’s the Most Fucked-Up Time of the Year.”

“Silver Bells” to “Satan’s Balls . . . It’s Time to Drink in the City” (dedicated to Suzy).

“Winter Wonderland” to “Slaving in a Winter Horrorland.”

“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to “Have Yourself a Shitty Fucking Christmas.”

So while we were popping out wallet boxes, Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” began warbling over our heads for the gazillionth annoying time. Cammie came up with the best lyrics ever, singing, “I’m dreaming . . . of a black penis . . . just like the big ones I used to know. . . .”

I almost hit the floor with laughter. We then got silly singing our new words, and as the song came to an end, we telepathically finished it off together like we were Big Fancy’s Sonny and Cher: “. . . and may all your penises be black!”

Suddenly, our retailicious holiday game was brought to a halt.

“CAN I GET SOME HELP AROUND HERE?” a voice screamed behind me, followed by a loud sneeze.

I turned around and came face to face with a craggy old white-haired woman who looked like the Burgermeister in
Santa Claus
Is
Comin’
to Town.
She wore thick brown glasses and some sort of a peach-colored crocheted shawl, and she was carrying a cane and a poinsettia-covered box of Kleenex.

My eyes couldn’t help but go straight to the poinsettia-covered box of Kleenex.

What in Christmas hell was this lady doing wandering around a department store with a box of tissues under her arm? We didn’t sell Kleenex, so I knew she wasn’t going to ask me to ring them up.

Unfortunately, the troubling mystery revealed itself all too quickly. I observed a gallon of snot dripping from her nostrils. Only it wasn’t just dripping — it was pouring out. Like a nosebleed. Like molten lava flowing out of a volcano. As fast as she wiped, the clear liquid poured.

I couldn’t help but stare in astonishment.

Then she sneezed and coughed, forcing me to back up.

This lady
shouldn’t
be shopping, she should be in bed! Or in a damn hospital!
Or quarantined underground. On an island. Far, far away from me!

My next shock came seconds later, watching this disgusting creature reach out with her wet, snot-covered fingers and fondle a black Perlina shoulder bag hanging on a nearby fixture.