Here are a few thoughts slowly bubbling up inside my lava lamp of a brain this early Monday morning:
Why am I up? It’s 4 a.m. The only people up at 4 a.m are zombies who got off at the wrong bus stop on their way back to their graveyard. Or stalkers. Or stalker zombies. Or people who stalk zombies.
Zombies probably don’t get a lot of stalkers. It’d too quickly get boring. “Oh, look,” you’d say if you were stalking a zombie. “There he is. Still. Couldn’t he pick up the pace a little?” But, alas, he couldn’t. Zombies don’t jog for the same reason they don’t skip rope: It makes body parts fall off.
Ew. Sorry.
When I was 17, I worked the graveyard shift at the second most often robbed 7-11 in California. We strove to be #1—I’d leave six-packs by the door, stacks of cash on the counter beside the gallon jar of pickled pigs feet—but we just couldn’t overtake some 7-11 in San Francisco that was by a bank. (I suppose people went, “Okay, we’re gonna rob that bank. Wait! Look right next to it! A 7-11! Let’s rob that place instead! Less armed guards! Plus beer!) My 7-11 was basically out in a raggedy field, right across some abandoned rail road tracks from this ancient plant where they made ice (!). The guys who worked at the ice plant used to come into the store during their break to buy tubes of model airplane glue.
“How nice,” I thought. “During their lunch hour those guys build model airplanes. And they always ask for a little paper bag to carry the glue in. What a surprisingly meticulous group!” But then I couldn’t help but notice they all had shaking hands, no teeth, and breath that vaporized my eyebrows off.
“Oh, yeah, they’re glue sniffers,” said my boss, Forrest Wang, who owned the store. “That reminds me. Only three tubes left! Order some more tonight, will ya?”
When he first hired me, Forrest took me behind the front counter of his store, and said, “You’re gonna get robbed here.” He dropped his voice and looked around conspiratorially. “Now down here,” he said, bending to reach back into some shelves beneath the cash register, “I keep something I don’t want you to ever use except in an emergency.” I sucked in and held my breath. I’dI never used a gun before. I’d hardly ever seen a gun.
“Ah,” he said. “Here it is.” He looked at me intensely. “Remember, tell no one this is here.” I considered bolting; I didn’t want anything to do with brandishing firearms at robbers. But instead of a gun, he pulled from the cubby hole the top third of a baseball bat. Its bottom half was wrapped in electrical tape, presumably to prevent its user from getting splinters.
I spoke before I could stop myself. “What am I supposed to do with this? Bunt criminals out the store?”
As it turned out, though, I actually did use that mini-bat to fight crime. One night a guy ran into the store, shot past where I was standing behind the counter, flung open the cooler door, grabbed a six-pack of Budweiser, and began his kicking, flailing rush back out the door.
“All right,” I thought, “that’s it. I hate this guy. He never says ‘hi,’ or anything—he just runs in, grabs his stupid six-pack—and why Bud??—and runs out again. Well, you’re goin’ home sudless tonight, Spazboy.” I reached under the counter and wrapped my hand around Hunk o’ Bat. I let it fly just as Mr. Beer Run was reaching for the door. I didn’t spin it through the air hard enough to kill him or anything, but it clonked him on the back of the head pretty good. The impact of it further propelled him out the door, but not in a good way. He left the cans of beer scattered on the pavement just outside the door as he stumble-rushed his way into the darkness beyond the parking lot lights, his hand clamped firmly to the back of his head.
At one in the morning I stood in the yellow light of the store looking down at the beer cans on the pavement, at my trusty bat top, at the cigarette butts, the stains, the crumbling tar of the parking lot. I looked out across the tracks at the dilapidated ice plant. I wondered how I had gotten there, and what in God’s world would ever become of my life.
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Posted by namesake on November 10, 2008 at 8:31 am
Wow! No, not the story – I mean, that’s incredible – but, Wow!, the way your mind works. Does that hurt?
Actually, though, I think I’ve stood in similar places before, wondering similar things. I can actually feel the weight of that question, which continually resonates in all of our lives, I think.
Great finish – to the story that is. To your life question, it remains to be seen, I guess.
Posted by arlywn on November 10, 2008 at 9:54 am
wow….. you were totally in the darkside before finding god in a closet. maybe its just me- but that sentence sounds way wrong…. I’m not rereading it, I dont want to know. great story.
Posted by Greta on November 10, 2008 at 10:05 am
Ditto . . . wow….you had me spellbound to my chair…my heart did flip-flops from the tension…. good story…well told!
Posted by Christine on November 10, 2008 at 4:14 pm
ditto ditto ditto……would’ve been quicker to say wow. guess you never saw yourself sitting at a comp reading comments from avid fans way back then. hope my life turns out as nicely
Posted by John Shore on November 10, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Thanks to you each. (And you’re right, Christine: I certainly never imagined, when I was in my teens, anything having anything whatsoever to do with computers. (Though, actually, that’s not true: one of my high school friend’s mother was one of the first, like, 10 employees of Apple Computers, which was born in my home town. So never mind.)
Posted by wickle on November 10, 2008 at 7:34 pm
As I said the other day, you’re wrecking my whole image of being a professional writer living in California. What’s the point, if you’re going to be up at 4am?
I guess I’ll just stick with my stupid warehousing job, then!
Yeah, so, anyway … I was reading this, and the term “stream of consciousness” kept coming to mind. I wonder why that was?
Back when I used to like my job, I worked at a Credit Union. One of the branches at which I worked was on the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The other half of our building was in the Controlled Industrial Area, which means that there was a gate directly outside our door, and in the gate house was a man with an M-16. Sometimes two men, presumably each with his own M-16 (they didn’t look like the type of guys who would share). The base police station was visible outside our window. Presumably, there were many more men and M-16’s in there. I never looked.
We never felt worried about that branch being robbed.
Posted by morsec0de on November 11, 2008 at 7:04 am
Not to try and promote another author’s book, but have you read “The Zombie Survival Guide” or “World War Z”? I think they’d be right up your alley, John!
You should write your own zombie book!
Posted by Judy on November 11, 2008 at 7:06 am
You’ve had a very colorful life, with living in the same building as a drug dealer and working at a frequently robbed 7-11. Your autobiography could be a compilations of short stories! Although, I guess your blog is kind of your autobiograph. Never mind.
Posted by skerrib on November 11, 2008 at 8:01 am
I just think it’s fantastic that you hit the guy with dead-on accuracy. If I flung a hunk of wood at someone it would have about a 1 in 10 chance or so of hitting them hard enough and in the right spot (take your pick) to knock them over.
Posted by John Shore on November 11, 2008 at 8:40 am
You know, Skerrib, It WAS a total Kung-Fu moment for me. And after I let the thing fly, I was TOTALLY aware of how, if it missed, it was going to shatter the glass of the front window and/or door. Yet I KNEW I was going to hit him. It was the ultimate Zen moment. I was, like, “Bean the man in the head, Grasshopper. Think not of his noggin, not of your bat. Head and bat are one.”
This other time, in the same store … oh, man. Never mind. You can imagine, though—given its Most Robbed status—how many … weird things happened there. And all the time, I was supposed to wear this little red paper HAT. Not.
Posted by John Shore on November 11, 2008 at 8:44 am
Wickle: Nice story! Safe place!
Morse: A zombie book! I like it! I’ll call it, “Death, Be Not Proud.” No. Wait. That’s taken. Well. Something.
Judy: Yes, my life used to be just one long experience of hanging around with drug-dealers and inept 7-11 burglers. And what fun for you to read about, I’m totally not sure at all. But thanks for saying it is!
Posted by morsec0de on November 11, 2008 at 8:47 am
How about:
“Death, Be Very Proud”
“I Eat Brains, You Don’t”
“Zombies, Pain and the Whole Shebang”
“Being UnDead: Exploring Where You, The Zombie Horde, and Brains Connect”
Posted by Latoya on November 11, 2008 at 10:24 am
yay!!! I have finally read all your blogs!! Enjoyed reading almost all of them
In case you dont go back and read comments on old posts, I’m a 23 yr old jamaican christian girl. Been married to the love of my life for the past almost six months and I loving this blog.
I must say your life seems quite interesting (especially the younger years) and I look forward to posts to come.
How do I put up a picture anyways?
Posted by John Shore on November 11, 2008 at 11:40 am
Morse: Totally funny. Anyone else got any good Zombie book titles?
Latoya: You read ALL my posts? Yikes. You are now the official president of my fan club. Oh, wait: I see where you enjoyed reading ALMOST all of them. Hmmm. You may not want that job, then. Well, we’ll see. Oh, picture. I believe you have to register (it’s free; it’s easy) with WordPress before your picture than starts showing up with your comments. Is that right, anyone? I’m quite sure it is…
Posted by victoriouslatoya on November 11, 2008 at 12:53 pm
success!!
Posted by morsec0de on November 11, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Someone needs to register a Suddenly Zombie blog…