Chapter Twenty-Six

It was eight o’clock in the morning and I had enough by that point! Horatio stood by my side and he was the only one. It was clear that the employees had been doing some talking in my absence because they looked grimly out the wide windows of the Fresh Face Co-Op.

All the warmth of Jerry’s body had left mine. Even though we knew that our time together had an expiration stamp on it, we could not be apart from one another for very long. In fact, most nights I spent more time at his place than at mine.

Even though there was a bit of sadness to every moment we spent together, our chemistry was amazing and he made every day end well because at least I got to end the day with him.

But I very much doubted that even seeing Jerry after work on that day would make me feel better at all. I felt cold and sick standing there, looking at the grammatically incorrect picket signs from inside the building. One of the signs even read Tieranny will not be excepted! In big bold, red, painted letters.

“This was supposed to be the day I didn’t come in until ten!” I groaned.

Even before the words came out of my mouth, I knew how whiney they sounded. Even so, I allowed myself to utter them. After all I had put myself through in the past six months, openly cursing my situation (in a family friendly way, of course) was one of the few luxuries I could afford.

“Obviously, this takes precedence over sleeping in,” said Officer Coates.

The other luxury I allowed myself was the look at the man who stood by my side in absolute disgust as he offered that gleaming, golden, precious, nugget of wisdom. He picked his nose, inspected what he fished out and flicked it aside.

“If things are bad enough that they are on strike,” he continued. “Surely, you can spare a few hours of sleep.”

I’m sure the blank stare I gave him could have melted titanium, but it most certainly did not melt the ironclad obliviousness of Officer Coates. It is tempting to serve up a tasteless barb regarding the police brutality of his stupidity, but I am not, nor was I ever the sort of person to say such a thing. But if I were.

As each fraction of a second passed, it became more and more difficult to ignore the mounting tension at the front of my head. Maybe it was because I had spent a blissful evening in the arms of a man who was exceptional in every way, only to find myself at that place, looking at the burning self-righteousness of angry, ignorant, people who had spent their entire lives only thinking about their immediate sense of comfort and fun and were angry at me that the world was no longer infantilizing them. It was like spending some time in heaven, only to crash back down to H-E-double-hockey sticks.

“So, what’s the game plan?” I asked.

“You tell me,” said Officer Coates.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Aren’t more police officers coming?”

Scanning the employees who had shown up for the strike, I could see that none of the managers were present. Maybe that meant that I could meet with them for a game plan. It was entirely possible that their absence meant that they weren’t participating in the strike. Then again, it was rare that any of them actually ever showed up this early in the morning before I showed up. Maybe their way of going on strike was reverting back to their old ways.

“Not unless things get out of hand,” Officer Coates responded to my question.

“So, you’re just going to clear them all out?” I asked. “All by yourself?”

The look on Officer Coates’ face was one belonging to someone who had just smelled a particularly rancid fart. I should not have asked the question, though. Stupid questions get stupid answers and of course I was destined to only get stupid answers in this place ergo, any question I would ask would have been stupid. I had to clench down my jaw because the taste of bile suddenly filled my mouth and I knew that I was on the verge of throwing up from a combination of anxiety and disgust.

“I’m just here to make sure things don’t get out of hand,” said Officer Coates. “They’re well within their rights to strike.”

“But what are they even requesting?” I asked.

“You should know,” Officer Coates responded.

As irritating as his words were and as lazy and stupid as Officer Coates was, he was right. Deep down inside, I knew that I had missed something along the way. Everything in the world was so confusing and it all flashed by.

“Frick!” I exclaimed ruefully. “Frick it all to heck!”

My heart began to pound with the anxiety that I had been building since I got the phone call to come in early. This was bad and I had no recourse from the people who should have been helping me. Had everyone in the world suddenly gone mad?

I frantically looked around, for someone, anyone, who could perhaps offer more insight than the slovenly officer Coates.

I wish Sara were still here, I thought to myself. She would stand by my side and help me parse through all of this.

Then, like a shining beacon, the second-best thing stepped forward and offered to help. Not only was Horatio there to help me, he was standing there in his full work uniform, all white butchers uniform and plastic hairnet, as he had been scheduled to come into work that day and would have done so, had there not been a hoard of protesting employees blocking his way.

Seeing him there filled my soul with a warm sort of benevolence. If I wasn’t working so hard to not fall prey to my own neuroticism, I would have broken down into a teary mess.

When I heard that the employees on strike were likening themselves to the farmers down South, I was disgusted that they would even draw such a comparison! To put things into perspective, they were comparing themselves to impoverished and disenfranchised individuals being forced to work under the hot sun for sometimes as long as twelve hours without bathroom breaks.

Where were you in advocating for Sara when she blacked out in the middle of her shift because you were all abandoning your posts? I thought. She was a person who was actually suffering and struggling to pay her bills and to pay off her student loans while you coasted on the efforts and the good will of others.

It was clear that they weren’t advocating for anyone who was actually disenfranchised; they were just advocating for their rights to get paid to not actually do their job and I wasn’t going to negotiate with people like that.

In fact, in my efforts to actually improve the place, I updated the air conditioning system, increased wages for the people who were actually good enough workers to stay there and even gave the cashiers stools so that they would no longer be forced to destroy their bodies if any of them happened to have the work ethic of Sara, being forced to stand fourteen hours in a row because they were far too honorable to abandon their posts when people should have been looking out for them.

These were all changes I had been proud to implement, but I couldn’t have done it without throwing out the chaff that was employees like Rhonda. It was all extremely baffling to me and I would have completely lost it, had Horatio not stood by my side with his calm and collected manner.

“It doesn’t look good that you fired the old lady,” Horatio said. “They’re pushing that part to the reporters.”

“Reporters?” I asked. “What reporters?!”

“The organizers of the strike talked to the local gazette,” Horatio enlightened me. “They’re actually planning on running an entire series on what has been going down here at the Fresh Face Co-Op since you got here.”

The local gazette: if any publication knew how to push the boundaries of “journalism”, it was them. They specialized in hit pieces aimed at various institutions around town. Once they began to publish one of their series, they would pin point the person responsible and their career was done for. The people who read the paper tended to buy into the narrative that there was always some sort of Machiavellian overlord oppressing whomever the writer of the pieces interviewed for the series. Whenever they targeted a specific business, people would immediately vandalize the building and launch smear campaigns on social media. I didn’t need three guesses to determine that the hit piece was directed at me.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I asked Horatio.

I understood not wanting to create waves. Horatio was a family man who needed to keep his job. This much was clear, considering he had run the entire meat department off of his own back for years and never left the job, but I would have appreciated the heads up.

“I didn’t know until this morning,” he said. “I’m just as much in the dark as you, man.”

That made sense, I supposed. Since I had recently promoted him, it would stand to reason that none of his coworkers trusted him and they assumed he was in my pocket.

“Just tell me,” I said with a sigh. “Who organized this protest?”

It was at that moment that the most incompetent Molotov cocktail I had ever seen constructed was hurled in my direction by the masked figure. Since neither the washrag shoved inside the bottle nor the white wine vinegar were particularly flammable, the flame died down in a minute.

And now you are up to date with who I am, how I got to that place and how things got so bad. I warned you it would be a wild ride.