Animals

A short story

My first job was working at a food warehouse. They hire almost anyone in those places — that’s how I got the job. At the job interview, the guy asked me what I wanted to be. “A writer,” I told him. That was probably the first time he had ever heard anyone ever say something like that to him in all his years at the warehouse.

On my first day of working there I met my colleagues. They turned out to be some of the most despicable so-called human beings that I ever had the displeasure of meeting.

One guy was skinny with glasses and looked like a young computer nerd; but he was actually over thirty, very low I.Q. — of course, they all were, but he especially — and he had a fat wife. He was the laughing stock of the warehouse, always being bullied and made fun of by the others. But I didn’t feel any pity for him. He was no underdog. He was just a piece of shit like the rest of them. He had a habit of disappearing, especially when work came in. And then someone would find him in some hidden corner somewhere, just standing there.

One day, he was on the load of a forklift, taking something off a top-shelf; but, before letting him go, my colleague lifted him up to the ceiling, where the guy stood trapped for a while, much to the laughter of everybody else in the warehouse. I wondered why guys like him didn’t just commit suicide, as they obviously led terrible lives. Then again, they are probably too stupid to realize how truly horrible their lives are and are perhaps also too cowardly to off themselves.

Another guy in the warehouse always had the kind of expression on his face as though he had an extra chromosome. He was our immediate supervisor, because he had been there the longest — perhaps that’s why he had that retarded look on his face. He also supposedly had a very pretty girlfriend. I had no idea how he had managed to pull off that magic trick. Once, when I did something wrong on the job, he casually told me: “No human, no problem.”

“The famous words of Hitler, right?” Another co-worker who happened to be nearby commented.

“Stalin,” I corrected him.

Then there was this bearded asshole with anger issues who always wore a beanie. He was a big guy, bigger than me, and he also had an ego about as big. And although he was about as stupid as everyone else in that fucking warehouse, on account of his huge ego, he thought he was smarter. Oh the arguments I used to have with the guy. Once we were arguing about whether it was astrology or astronomy that was a scientific field. He couldn’t tell the difference between the two. But he believed in horoscopes (he once told me he even wanted a tattoo of his fucking Zodiac sign on his back). He was probably the kind of guy who thought that the Sun went around the Earth — the Earth being his fucking ego.

One time, I asked him whether he’d like to discuss with me the sociopolitical situation of North and South Korea. He looked at me angrily.

Another time we were arguing about whether Caucasian was a nationality or a race. Try as I might, I couldn’t manage to convince him that it was not a nationality and that all of us there, including him, actually belonged to the Caucasian race. Talking to the guy was like trying to commit seppuku with a bamboo sword.

Once, I was dusting a room in the warehouse which was covered in a thick layer of dust and I happened to comment sarcastically, “What a glamorous job.” The bearded one was nearby and heard it. “Well,” he said, chuckling, “if there was a sexy secretary with big boobs” — he motioned them with his hands — “and a short skirt doing it then it would be pretty glamorous.” The guy had a strange idea what glamorous meant.

Those three were the primary guys I hung out with at the warehouse because our job was the simplest one there: stack the food and keep the warehouse clean. It was the lowest of jobs there was.

One time, as I was wandering around in the warehouse, since there was nothing to do, the bearded guy was walking towards me with our immediate superior and yelled to me: “Want me to fuck you in the mouth?”

I suppose it was supposed to be a joke of some sort. In fact, there was a lot of homoerotic lingo being tossed around there. Somehow, everyone thought that it was just the funniest thing imaginable to randomly say to a guy, “I’m gonna fuck you in the ass!”

Another time, a couple of the larger guys even shoved me against a wall and pretended that they were raping me, whilst everyone laughed. They held me so hard that they tore my uniform, which made it even more funny for them. But I was the one that had to continue wearing the torn uniform until one guy left and I got his old one (which was too small).

Despite the homoerotic “jokes”, all the guys there were hard-core homophobes. Years later, I’d learn of a scientific study where homophobes and non-homophobes were forced to watch gay porn with electrodes attached to their penises. It turned out that the homophobes got bigger erections than the non-homophobes, proving that most homophobes are actually attracted to men, but suppress it. So I suppose that all of those “jokes” may as well have been Freudian slips and the ultimate joke, indeed, is on them.

One day our job was to peel off the stickers of some large stacks of frozen meat. It turned out that the meat had expired, but the owner of the warehouse wanted to sell it anyway, so we had to try and peel off all the stickers with the expiry date on every individual meat packet, hundreds of them, which wasn’t so easy to do since the old and frozen glue of the stickers was really stuck to the plastic packaging. No one seemed to have any ethical problems with what we were doing. It seems I alone felt sorry for the people that were going to pay to eat this meat at some fancy restaurant. What a rotten world.

Another day, me and a couple of guys were doing overtime. Not that there was much work, but they were expecting a small shipment later in the day. We just waited and walked around, shooting the shit. As we were smoking outside, waiting for the shipment to arrive, one of my co-workers, who mainly dealt with bundling the food for outward shipments, told us a story.

He and a couple of his friends had been partying somewhere and one of them liked this girl a lot and wanted to have sex with her. But our co-worker and a friend of his had this “great” idea to cut the tips off of the condoms that their friend had. So their friend had sex with the girl and used a condom with the tip cut off and came inside her. Ha-ha-ha. Everyone laughed at his story and I laughed along as well, even though, all the while as he was telling it, I kept thinking: How is that funny? What a fucking wacko. What the hell am I doing working here with these idiots?

And yet another day a large shipment of canned pineapple arrived in several shipping containers. Our job was to load them out manually by hand. It was a particularly hot day and being inside the container was like being in a sauna. I was covered in sweat, doing the same thing over and over again: lifting a bunch of cans of pineapple out of the container a few at a time, building a stack of them, and then bringing them into the warehouse. It took all day to do so, with nary a moment’s rest. My hands and back ached for days afterwards. It was one of the most gruelling days I had there, since I normally just sat or walked around half the day, as there usually wasn’t enough work. I got two cans of pineapples as a “bonus” for that day. I never ate the damn things.

And yet another fucking day, the skinny guy with glasses threatened me with a packing knife. I hadn’t even said anything to the guy, but something must have set him off — maybe the fact that he had been working there for years and me only a couple of months, but still people treated him worse than me. Or hell, maybe he just thought it was funny. Anyway, he held the packing knife in front of me threateningly as we were standing in a dark corner of the warehouse. “I wonder what you would do if I were to cut you with this knife,” he said.

“We’re standing in front of a camera,” I said.

“That camera hasn’t worked for years.” He was probably right. The management up above didn’t give two shits about what happened down below.

So I began talking some legal-sounding mumbo jumbo to the guy about how I could sue him for having threatened me with a knife and how he would not only lose his job but he would also have to pay me a ton of money for psychological harassment. He was just dumb enough to believe all that shit, so by the time I had finished threatening him with my words he was almost ready to piss himself.

Nearly everyone at the warehouse had a very short fuse, except for perhaps this old alcoholic who was in charge of getting rid of the huge amounts of cardboard and plastic trash that each shipment brought in — there was just tons of that stuff; what a fucking waste, no wonder the planet’s fucked. God knows how long he’d been working there. He was a funny old guy. Every time I happened to be eating lunch at the same time as he, I heard him chew his food really loudly, constantly smacking his lips and, with a German accent, saying, “Gut!”

Aside from him, almost everyone else was constantly on edge. And everyone smoked all the time, presumably to calm their nerves. There was a conflict of some sort every day. I got threatened with getting beaten up several times because I had stacked the boxes in a way that someone didn’t like.

Once, there was even a fight between the bearded guy and some Russian cunt who always had this drooping, stupid look on his face. What was it with these guys and those inane expressions on their faces? Was that what the job did to people in such a place after they had worked there long enough? Or were they like that to begin with? Only the bearded guy did not seem to have that expression; then again, it may have been hidden underneath his beard.

I thought that I wouldn’t let it get to me. I thought that I was smarter and more refined than all those other assholes. And I was of course. But on one day I just fucking lost it. The bearded one and me were arguing again, but this time it was about something more personal. He gloated over me because he had finished high school and I hadn’t, even though he was still dumb as shit. I had enough of his constant belittling of me and had reached boiling point. So I suddenly just stood up and screamed from the top of my lungs: “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT THE FUCK UP! YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE! EVERY DAY I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH YOU HARASSING ME AND TREATING ME LIKE SHIT FOR NO REASON! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? FOR ONCE, WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST SHUT YOUR STUPID FUCKING MOUTH, YOU FUCK!” After saying all that, I went outside and had several smokes to calm myself down. The whole warehouse was silent for a while after that.

Yeah, there was a lot of testosterone in that warehouse. Until one day when the owner’s daughter came to work there for the summer. Suddenly, the homoerotic jokes disappeared and people weren’t so violent anymore. The owner’s daughter rode a motorcycle and went to college. She thought that she was better than everyone else there. She probably was. But for some reason, she seemed to treat me like shit in particular, even though I probably had the nicest, smartest looking face around. I thought that she was beautiful and I treated her nicely, yet she still treated me like shit. What a bitch. I don’t know what her fucking problem was. God, she was beautiful though.

The company had a summer event once, which lasted for two days. And even the lowest of the low, which means us, were invited. Since I had nothing better to do, I went. They rented a bus that would take us around. We stayed at this guesthouse in the forest, near a lake. It was a nice place. At the guesthouse, we first all ate together and drank a bit of alcohol. I remember one of my colleagues who sat opposite the table from me saying, “The food looks so good.” It was seafood. It was good.

“Yes, the food is quite exquisite,” I said, deliberately using a ten-dollar word for the description. “It’ll be great puking it out afterwards.”

Then we had sauna. And then we all just drank. Of course, much like at work, we all only hung out with the people that we also hung out with at work. So I stuck with my usual company of retards. We even slept, the three of us, together in the same room. We were all pretty drunk and once again, I had an argument with the bearded one. God. There was just no escape from arguments with this guy, wherever I went. It took place in the bedroom as we were all trying to go to sleep and it got pretty heated. We were soon more-or-less yelling at each other. And he even threatened to come over to my bed at one point and punch me. He didn’t. He just always liked to talk tough. He knew I was smarter than him, but his ego couldn’t take it. That’s where all the fucking arguments came from.

The next day, the management, who were in the room above (I wonder whether that was intentional), said that they had heard us arguing. Something about philosophy and whatnot. Well, I had said to the guy that he ought to read some philosophy if he wants to be as smart as me. Not that I had read a lot of it, but I had read some books by Nietzsche and a few from some other philosophers. I knew that there was a spectrum of ways to think about things. He didn’t. Hell, I doubt he even knew what philosophy was to be honest. Yeah, I was too smart for that place and I knew it. I was smart but I had no education. That’s why I was working in that shithole.

On our way back to the city, we visited what had once been a coal-mine. I don’t know why. Maybe it was to show us that, see, there are even lower jobs than ours. Anyway, I didn’t enter. I was hungover and besides, being in that warehouse was already like being in a fucking cave, so I didn’t see the point. The bearded one, for whichever reason, also didn’t go. So, despite our argument the day before, we sat nearby, waiting for the others to come back so that we could leave. Surprisingly, as we sat there, he opened up to me. He talked about his childhood. He told me he was fat once, but that one of his friends forced him to start going to a gym. He also implied that he understood he had anger issues. But that wasn’t enough to save him. Although I appreciated that he had opened up to me, I still didn’t like the guy.

As we waited and occasionally chatted there in the sun, another bus full of people arrived near the coal mine. I noticed a young woman. She had this look about her, as though she wasn’t like the others. I was immediately drawn to her. I even told the bearded one that I was. I followed her a bit, hoping that I might perhaps find a fitting moment to greet her. But then our group came back and we were ready to leave. She lingered in my thoughts for the rest of the day. I wanted a girlfriend so bad. But I was a loser.

Eventually, I was lucky enough to find another job through a friend of mine that was so much better. I had only worked at the warehouse for four months, but it had been a living hell. I would have gone crazy if I had to work there much longer. Maybe everyone who still worked there had gone crazy because they had worked there for so long. Maybe they were decent people once.

When I was asked why I wanted to leave, I only said, “A better job offer.” What I left unsaid was that I hated absolutely everybody in the place and that I wouldn’t have minded if a meteorite had landed on that fucking warehouse, killing everybody in it. I was so glad that I wouldn’t have to meet any of those people ever again. I was saved, I felt — at least, for a while.

On my last day of work, some of my soon-to-be former colleagues gathered around me just as I was about to leave (I had hoped to slip away quietly without them seeing me). I was wearing a black leather trench-coat that I had just bought; I looked good. They took turns shaking my hand.

“Will you come visit us?” an old rock fart of a truck driver asked. He had also treated me like shit.

“If I wanted to see animals,” I said, “then I’d go to the zoo.” And then I walked away.