Synaptic Damage

He was abrupt. With people. Many people disliked him because he was so abrupt. He answered questions with a hatchet. He urged you to stop wasting his time.  

His name was Karl Jerome Baumgarten and he was eighty-three years old and worked as a greeter at the Granville Busy-Mart. He was abrupt with the customers.  “Yeah, just get in.” “Okay, yeah yeah, great.” “Who the hell cares?” “Keep walking.” 

He had a titanium plate in his skull (he’d incurred a serious head injury in Vietnam. He was deployed there in 1966 after enlisting in the Marines out of some addle-brained sense of patriotic duty [which he abandoned upon his first exposure to the tropical climate: sticky, godless, Communist heat]).  

He had been struck by lightning four times in his long arduous life. He blamed his cranioplasty for attracting electricity (and for his abrupt attitude). He didn’t have time for nonsense. He just plain didn’t have time.

“Does it hurt to get struck by lightning?” people would ask.

With deep rich sarcasm, “Nah. Why would getting slammed in the head by a massive bolt of pure electricity hurt?”  

And then he’d add, “Dipshit.”

The lightning landed on his head in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Burgundy, France. Karl got around but God managed to slap him in the brain wherever he went. 

Karl died on the job. Cerebral hemorrhage. It was abrupt. 

He expired in the store on Sunday, July 15, 2012. Those that saw him collapse swore that sparks shot out of his eyes. Davey Jones (23), a nearby cashier, still maintains that his wristwatch stopped the second Karl’s brain misfired. As if he’d released some kind of magnetic discharge when his synapses went kablooey (his word). Davey insisted on a paranormal explanation for the entire event. 

But then, Davey was known to be weird and into far-out, esoteric stuff. 

For example, Davey liked to tell his coworkers his dreams. He dreamed a lot. The night after Karl’s terminal collapse he’d dreamed of meeting a beautiful woman in the produce section of the Busy-Mart. “I like my men tortured,” she told him, standing next to the grapes.

“I’m tortured,” he said.

“Then you’re for me, sweetie.”

She enveloped him in a warm hug. Her breasts mashed against his chest.

He awoke from the damp dream feeling jagged pangs of loss and futility and disgust.

He went to work anyway.

They’d already stopped talking about Karl’s epic demise. Davey manned his station (#6) as usual. He wanted to tell people about his dream but the fact that it had ended with a nocturnal emission left him with a feeling of deep shame. 

So he kept it to himself, hoping guiltily for a sequel later that night. He was in love with a dream girl from the produce section of his sleeping mind. 

His shift couldn’t end soon enough.

A tank of a woman approached Davey’s register. There was a babbling toddler standing amid the items in her shopping cart. Davey felt duty-bound to inform her that children weren’t allowed to ride in the main body of the cart. There was a special seat designed for children that was adjacent to the handle. It just folded out. The store also provided several “car-carts” which were specifically for small children, made with safety as the primary concern but also a fair amount of additional whimsy, as they were built to resemble colorful, child-sized automobiles, and these complementary carriages were available within easy, convenient reach at the store’s entrance.

The woman did not react well to the lecture. 

“You can’t fucking talk to me like that! I’m the fucking customer! If my son wants to ride in the carriage that’s his right! You can’t take that away from him! Are you saying I’m a bad mother?! How dare you! I’m the customer here! And the customer is always right! And that includes me! You smarmy little sonofabitch!”  She was shaking with rage.

Davey looked frantically for Kathy, the scheduled M.O.D. (manager on duty) but she was nowhere to be seen. It was her job to restore calm during a disruptive situation. 

But he’d been abandoned at his lonely post. He wondered if she was hiding, laying low till the storm blew over. He would be.

He looked at the woman. Her reddened expression was so hateful and full of rage that the threat of an involuntary bladder release occurred to him.

Luckily, that didn’t happen. 

Instead, he said something stupid, “And how are you doing today? Did you find everything you were looking for?”

It was a line from the Busy-Mart employee handbook. Phrases he’d been trained to say. Words he’d repeated a million times. The line spilled out of him without thought, without any wiseass intent. It occurred out of some sort of preprogrammed corporate reflex. 

It was, of course, the wrong thing to say now. To this customer. 

The woman reached into her shopping cart and pulled up a glass bottle of Italian dressing. “Fuck you!” she shrieked and struck the bottle against the edge of the counter with angry but insufficient force. She puffed out an exasperated breath when the bottle just knocked impotently against the quartz ledge without breaking. “Damn it!” 

She lifted it again and with desperate strength shattered the bottle against the counter. Italian dressing exploded with pungent force over both of them. She jabbed the broken neck of the bottle toward him and screamed, “I’ll cut your fucking face off!”

Davey instinctively tried to step back but merely bumped against the partition wall behind him. He was trapped. He raised his hands like a victim in a hold-up (which in a way, he was). “Please…” he said, shaking with fear.

“Dirty fucker!” she screamed and threw the jagged piece of glass on the floor. “And I ain’t cleaning that shit up!”

She stomped toward the exit doors. Other customers (and baffled staff) just stood frozen and aghast as she stormed away. 

She stopped suddenly, just as the automatic doors parted to permit her passage. And then she turned back. 

Davey thought she was coming back for the kill. A final death-blow. With blue cheese this time. 

But no. She rescued her (now crying) kid from the carriage and marched out holding him under her arm. The doors closed after her.

“Jeez, Davey. What happened here?” asked Kathy, sidling up to his station, looking with surprised dismay at the thick pools of zesty Italian dressing that covered the floor and just about everything at Davey’s station (including Davey). “Did something get damaged or something?”  

Davey tried to shake off his shock. He licked his lips (tasting Italian dressing) and said, “I disgruntled a customer…” immediately recognizing how wrong that sounded.

“What happened?”

As Davey described the traumatic details of the incident (just as he’d described Karl’s startling demise to her the day before) Kathy stepped carefully over the aromatic oil slick and tried to affect a managerial air. It was difficult. Davey was just so damn cute. A manager getting romantically involved with a subordinate was expressly forbidden in the Busy-Mart policy manual. It was tragic. Their situation had the piquant flavor of a doomed, star-crossed romance. But alas, it was not to be. 

Thus was the price of power. Heavy is the head and so on… 

“Just get this mess cleaned up,” she told him, then retreated back to the safety of the office.