Me and Keith never seemed destined for a memory like what went down, but I guess that’s how it goes. You move through so many years thinking you can imagine — into reality — what will unroll around you. It isn’t arrogance, I don’t think; it’s different than that; it’s more innocent.
You are greener than that and I am too. We both watched too much TV back when we were kids, maybe. Too many movies. Our imaginations morphed into visions. We pictured ourselves living masterful lives. None of us think we are going to end up drunk on the couch with a rapid heartbeat and the Christmas tree towering over us like a state cop in a ditch by the side of the interstate.
We never thought we would end up this messy. Or that certain incidents would come along that make us think, years, or even decades later, that everything is so flawlessly random. And that this whole thing just has to be a dream. I mean, it just has to be.
I don’t know. Somehow most of us end up half-believing that we can somehow wish into existence the kinds of people and experiences that we used to daydream about in algebra.
Get me the fuck out of here, we told ourselves.
Hook me up with the compelling people. Drop us off down at Better Days.
I look back now on the hot summer of my senior year of high school and I see Keith. His white teeth cutting out of his black face like a good thief opening up his bag of jewels. His smile/ sharing it with me in the parking lots of the forever mall. Him looking through me, like I wasn’t even there. Maybe I wasn’t.
It’s becoming harder and harder to say for sure.
In the final weeks of my junior year in high school, I found a summer job. It was a good one too. Paid like $5.50 an hour, no benefits, no nothing else, like most of the jobs I have ever had. But the work was simple and satisfying. I would show up at the King of Prussia Plaza early in the morning, at 7 am, and I would run this big industrial street sweeper vacuum along the outside sidewalks. Stomped-on Coke cans, styrofoam take-out containers, crumpled up cigarette packs, plastic bags, people’s dried loogies, pigeon shit, pizza crusts with beautifully specific chomp marks, snapped in half Walkman headphones, evaporating lakes of human piss, Chick-Fil-A aluminum foil wrappers with glumps of sauce pushing out from the balled-up insides like some soldier’s belly spilling out of his skin, Kool butts, Camel butts, Pall Mall butts and Parliament butts, whatever people chucked on the ground I could suck it up with this heavy-ass machine that took no prisoners at all.
I’m pretty sure I could have even sucked up a toddler if I had ever run across one just laying there on the sidewalk outside one of the entrances or whatever. Just pulled back on that smooth handlebar and eased that roaring mouth out over the kid like a third inning thunderstorm.
ShhhrrrrrmmmmmmmVWOP!
Gone.
Mine.
Cans, cigs, and one dumbass kid.
All in a day’s work, dude.
The rest of the day, after the couple of hours of vac work, was kind of up to me. I was good at sussing out what people of authority needed from me even back then. Not what they expected of me or wanted from me, mind you. But what they needed from me. And after just a week or two on the job, I had figured out that Kevin, the boss that I had to answer to, was a nervous guy who was very concerned with what his boss, whose name I can’t remember, actually expected from him. And so, I pieced it all together after a few talks with Jim.
Basically, he told me without telling me exactly, I need you to vacuum the sidewalks in the morning and then I need you to disappear. To do things that make reasonable sense out there in the vast mall exterior property, but to do them without drawing any attention to myself. In other words, what Kevin the Nervous Bossman needed from me was to stay away from him and his boss and to never waver from that pattern for approximately 8 solid weeks of full-time summer employment. In return, I would snag like a $169 check every Friday at quitting time (3 pm). As part of the deal I would be given a set of keys that opened up various small dark closets in strange isolated loading bays in various places around the mall. Ostensibly, these places were outposts of hard-lived dustpans and wide old brooms that I would unlock on an as-needed-basis in order to retrieve contractor bags or spray bottles of chemical chewing gum remover or any of the other tools or supplies that a 17-year-old high school stoner might need.
So it went. Cool clear mornings that felt like the shore, I spent them sucking up people’s mall trash, listening to Howard Stern on WYSP. By 10 or 11, as Stern went off the air, I shifted to a few hours of wandering the perimeters of the mall with a dustpan and broom and a couple of trash bags. Out there, amongst the satellite moons of weird parking lot trees/ runty Japanese maples with iron constitutions/ guiltless plants doomed to lives of lonesome screaming at one another from short stretches of shit dirt and poor quality mulch/ mothers separated from their sons/ fathers separated from their daughters/ out there, I strode, the Marlboro Kid, smoking my Reds and sweeping up the random shattered glass bottles of complete strangers I would never know or lay eyes upon, who, for some reason I will never understand, found themselves drinking and then smashing bottles of Bartles & Jaymes Wild Apple wine coolers in the far-flung spots in the inexplicably remote parking lots- half a mile from any retail doors/ in fact, so far from the goddamn mall itself to have made me wonder, at the time, if they were even mall property at all.
Still. What a time to be alive for me. I was young. I was strong. My lungs just laughed at all the cigs and I could have walked for days. The relentless sun beating down made me feel like I was in a spaghetti western. I was baked on cheap hash hits I took in secret broom closets. Day in and day out, I had responsibilities that were tied to strange freedom. And I was being paid for the absurdity of it all.
It was a dream job in a lot of ways.
Except that one day me and Keith almost tore it all down.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
