Jude Rall

Rick

All three thousand seven hundred of them sat in the Costco bar room with their Costco bar passes slid into card readers next to their right hands where they would stay for the rest of the night until the goldcart tram came down the aisle behind them and the ones left standing helped the employees drag the ones that could not stand onto the cushioned carts to be driven to their Costco condos. 

The homeless that live under the overpass directly behind the Costco mega complex and reap on their dumpsters with no divine fervor but something like disdain were once again, tonight, driven up to by the lead Costco employee, Rick, under the main and invincible streetlight and at the gate that's exact place was denoted only by amount of fear felt on approach and a small statue of Mother Mary placed there by the Costco Society Against the Oppression of Christian Peoples. He honks the horn of his modified golf cart and once again places a packet of employee application forms wrapped in twine at the skirt of the Mary statue. 

The camp did not have rules in the traditional sense. There were  different types of homeless. There were  old wanderers that don’t want to live under a government that they think is gangstalking them or doing some other possibly real thing. There was the kind that hit rock bottom, and on the way they sold everything and broke every relationship they had. If they could get one trip to the hospital to survive withdrawals then they could live as free as the previous kind. There is the kind that was on their way to rock bottom, family of theirs, if they were a good person in a previous life, sometimes comes to the camp and looks for them among the complex tunnels, tarps, and deconstructed tents that create an unlimited privacy in the low roofed under-highway. There were  people who have simply lost their homes and needed a place to raise their kids or if they have no kids needed a place to live while they figure out what had happened, why it happened, and slowly convert into the wanderer type. 

But listen, this information was not from a person who has lived under the underpass, it was from the eyes of Rick who drives by everyday on his modified golfcart to drop off employee registration forms. He picked up last week’s stack of employee registration forms and shook his head. He saw a shape in the dark of someone getting up and going to pee most likely. Rick reignited the engine of the gold cart. If the air already wasn’t so sopping with the perfume of diesel engines then he would have noticed that his engine had gone bad. And the scents from it had gone strange. He reentered the Costco lot and drove in through the back garage door he had left open and headed towards Costco brand hooters on the third right wing of the complex. The Hooters would let him get one or two drinks in before he had to go to his quarters, and maybe the manager would let him talk to the girls a little bit. He talks to them purely because he was fascinated with their lifestyle.

When he walked in the bartender got a glass out and poured him his bud light. The bartender then rushed into the kitchen and told them that they can’t close yet because Rick was here and they needed to make him a bacon burger and a tray of wings that he could share with the girls.

The girls were already sitting at the bar drinking. The two that did drink, the other ones were probably studying for college or something, Rick only really knew about these girls because these were the ones that he drank with. Rick was too busy during the evening to join the rest of the men at the main bar, so he came here where Costco Platinum Dad’s come while their wives shop during the day and in the afternoon. He liked to think that they kept the place open for him out of other reasons than fear. 

“You went to the Hobos again today?” said Sarah, the thirty three year old veteran sitting to his left (Honorably discharged on account of being a woman). 

“How could you tell?” Rick asked. Rick had been obsessively working out from 3-4 am every morning for the last year and a half. He has yet to see results that show while he’s in his pin striped work button down and work khakis. He definitely saw results in the mirror every morning but his skinny frame made it difficult for the biceps to pop out of the shirt sleeve. He has ordered a pack of new smaller shirts and they should come in the mail next week. He was sporting the sort of hair cut that was popular in the seventies and eighties and nineties before bald people took over the balding scene. Rick deeply believes that not every balding man needs to be bald. 

“You smell like the highway,” Sarah said. 

Next to Sarah was Angela. She was what Rick would call a silver fox forty five but looked as good as Sarah. She used to work as a lawyer before she was fired for being a woman. “Do you think people a long time ago thought about highway scent?” she asked.

“Here we go,” Sarah said, referring to how Angela always ran her mouth and tried to act wise. 

“Like you never read a book or watch a movie and see people putting on perfume like they do today when they walk to the parking lot.” 

“That’s because people didn’t live in great air conditioned complexes, Angela,” Rick said. “Everyone smelled bad and no one commented on it because everyone smelled bad.” 

“Wow, so smart again,” said Sarah. 

“That’s a good point,” said Angela.

“Any takers today, Rick, dear one, sweet Rick,” Sarah had a hemorrhoid the size of the tip of a thumb and kept adjusting her ass on her stool while she was talking. Rick stared unaware of the hemorrhoid’s existence. 

“None. They will not listen to me. I brought a pitcher of orange juice and a pitcher of beer to entice them last week. I went at twelve o’clock, noon.” 

“Maybe there’s no one there,” Angela said. 

“There’s no way!” Rick said. “I can hear them. And I can see their fires burning.” 

“Could we be vulnerable with each other for a moment,” Sarah said to Rick, putting a hand on his thigh. “Why do you care so much about them?”

Rick nearly started to drool from the leg touch, “I want to use that space under the overpass for extra parking.” He gulped loudly, “And we have room for them in the bronze tier quarters.” 

Inside Rick’s mind there is not much. If someone were to take his brain out and set him up as a windup toy he would continue as regular, at the same schedule, slapping the Hooters girls on the ass would be at 1 am and believing that the Hooter’s girls liked to have their ass slapped would be at 1:07 am, doing it again 1:08, a beer every ten minutes until 2:00 he’s so plastered that he goes to play darts alone, for some reason he always takes his belt off when he does this, and he throws darts with one hand and holds his khakis (they are deceptively tight, they fall down easily). While he plays darts the bartender will hold his glass up to every girl there and let them hawk monster globs of flem into the beer foam. 

The forum today went sour as soon as Classius went up and started to pontificate about the ideal buddhist lifestyle found in pure Hobo-ness, Einstein thought. The chorus moaned and groaned in the shopping cart stands. But he won the influential people over. Einstein knew better, as the oldest member of the senate, that to participate, facilitate, or ruminate on any war-like action would cause a feud so harsh between the aristocracy of the underpass community that their democracy would not recover.  

Einstein knew that the pride of Classius’ factions were too great to ever accept jobs at Costco, but it would allow them a hostile takeover at the very least. Einstein did not believe, of course, in the precepts of the Costco system and the other corporate systems that the US government had used to outsource most power and control, but he also believed in humanity. And a hostile takeover was not good for either the people of the underpass or the people in the big box store. 

Today their messenger had not brought the beer or the orange juice he had brought last week, just the forms. Einstein, still sly as a fox even in his old age, saw the messenger coming and prepped himself behind the dumpster next to the small garage door. It was easy as pie once the golf cart flew through. All Einstein had to do was roll under while the door was closing. 

He followed the golf cart through the warehouse and to the “Hooters”. He would follow the messenger all the way to where he bedded for the night. Many rumors went around about the actual internal lives of the people who live in the big box store. Einstein was old enough to know exactly how false they all were. There are more people living under the overpass than in the box store: false. People in the box store have to have no less than three wives and no more than twelve: false. There are more women living at the big box store than men: false. Most men inside the big box store cannot reproduce so the wives are given to the ones who can: false. The big box store uses corporate techniques to organize labor and classify people that hide the fact that they are pretty much feudalists and have nothing to do with democracy really: Mostly true. 

He crouched in the bin next to the place called Hooters until two young women and a middle aged man carried the messenger out and placed him on his gold golf cart. 

The box store people had a funny whiney slobbish English dialect, “Let’s just put him in the wood chipper,” said the younger girl of the two. 

“Everyones innocent when they dream. You know?” the older one said. “Rich men, poor men, all dream. Look at his face.” 

“I’m tired,” said the middle aged man. 

The younger one looked around confused, “In any other case I wouldn’t touch him.” 

“Yeah,” the older one said. 

The middle aged man said, “You can be kind for nothing ladys.” 

The older lady whacked him on the back hard. 

With the messenger thrown in the back seat and the younger orange t-shirted girl clinging off the side of the vehicle and the older woman driving they sped off. Einstein followed on foot. The cart went fast but Einstein ran like a man half his age. He was primal when it came to athletics. He could, if he needed, hunt a deer with only a spear. He only wore his bed sheet toga and sandals. He had a flower crown made from the plastic rings that keep six packs together. The last two six packs he will ever drink.

The place he was led was a facade of a home. The front two feet of an old wood house were cut and glued to the wall. Walking in there were more rooms, apartments with spots for key fobs to unlock the door digitally.

This part was tricky, but doable. He had to slip into the room while this group was dragging the poor messenger to his bed. They opened the door with his key fob and started to drag him through. One girl on each arm, heels dragging, and the man directing the whole event. When he thought they were fully through Einstein ran at the door and made for what he assumed was the bathroom. But the electronic door shut on him - literally squeezing him in. 

“Oh Darn!” he said, and the bartender opened the door to keep his chest from bursting and Einstein said, “Let me help you carry him the rest of the way.” 

“Sure,” said the older lady. 

And he carried the messenger to the bed with them and dashed into the bathroom. They didn’t seem to care when he locked the door behind him. He put his ear to it and listened. All information in the belly of the beast was important information. 

Einstein cracked the door. They undressed the messenger, not looking out of politeness, and laid him under his covers. The expressions on their faces during these maneuvers were an even split between disgust and banal satisfaction from the simplicity and base kindness of the work. The middle aged man took two pictures with a flash bulb once the messenger was under the covers. 

“What was that?” said the younger woman.  

“Proof of charity.” 

“You’re a prick,” said the older woman. 

Then they went back to work, the middle aged man letting the camera swing from his neck, the women both crossing their arms, looking at the sleeping messenger. Einstein could not see the messenger's face, but he could see everyone else's. Then, the middle aged man had fallen asleep standing up, the camera swung slightly back and forth from its strap, and the girls were thinking about, possibly, worlds where this kind of kindness could be encouraged. 

They left soon after, waking the middle aged man, and telling him that maybe he would sleep better if he wasn’t such an asshole. In Einstein's eyes, this was the first proof that in hell, people still could be good. This place is not a hive, Einstein thought. He slept underneath the sink. 

The sink cupboard door was open. The old bogey’s leg stuck out as he slept, snoring like a buzzsaw. It was six thirty AM, Rick felt sad mostly, but also tired. His muscles ached because he had done his four AM exercises in his sleep and his feet stunk because he had just stepped in the puke that had been extracted from him promptly after those morning exercises. 

He ran the shower, stuck his hooter-burger-puke foot under the blasting faucet and watched the old timer. He was surprised that a homeless person had found his way into the tech utopia Costco, but it didn’t show. Meaning: he did not feel it. He mostly felt sad, horny, alone, tired, sore, and more. So he wasn’t really surprised, like, only logically surprised. The water got too hot and he yipped. He pulled his foot out and changed the setting of the nob. He watched the old man breathe. It felt good to watch this living breathing thing. Better than watching someone look at him, watching their eyes look him over, reminding him how small he was. 

He put his foot back under the spray. He’d have to clean up the puke stain later, after work, he planned on watching the man sleeping under his sink until right before he had to jog out the door. 

It wasn’t the way that the man's body was contorted, but it was interesting. He fit under the sink, molding himself around the PBC tubing, craning his neck, folding it ninety degrees, but still looking absolutely content in his sleeping skill. 

Rick looked down and for the first time saw that he was naked. He had no idea how he had gotten this way. He had gotten pretty drunk the night before but he did not see how that had anything to do with the stripping off of his clothes. There was a mirror on the wall above the sink. And the sink, as usual, was above the cabinet that had all its tubes and everything, and below that, or in it, was the old homeless man. And above all that was his nakedness (in the mirror), not a terrible look, he thought, but as it goes, not good to look at long. It would start to morph. 

The homeless man had a beard that reached down to his toes. The homeless man reached over and scratched his hairy legs. He was wearing a toga made from an Obi-wan bed sheet. How cool he thought the hobo looked sort of made him feel sick. But mostly he felt sad. Rick, in a flash of brilliance, realized that usually if someone scratches their leg, they are not asleep. 

He turned off the shower faucet and said, “Hello.” His voice came out wet and fresh from the nightly un-use. 

“You’re in grave danger. All of your people are in grave danger," said the homeless man.  

The homeless man’s eyes were open now, but he wasn’t sure if they had been open the whole time. They could have been but he doubted it. 

“Yeah,” Rick said, agreeing. 

“My people will attack soon. A show of force would be best. To deter any thinking, any imagining of battle.” 

“Mhm, yeah. Alright. Absolutely. I don’t know if I can fit all that in today. Maybe on the weekend. I really don’t know how busy everything will be, week-wise, until, well, the middle of the week. Because in the middle of the week I can feel the build. Like the build of the crowd. I can like, uh, smell it in the air, that the weekend people are going out and about ready, for uh, ready for management, which is what I do. I don’t talk to security much. I know them a little. I’ve seen them at hooters, but I don’t really know them. We aren’t friends. I mean, management, Brian, Security Brian, he’s the manager of security. We usually use title-name delineations when speaking about peers or underlings. When talking about management just title works. Like I like to call my boss, The Regional Manager.” There was the surfacing of intense emotion inside Rick. Smelling the air, subconsciously, the fire, his brain clicking things into place, realizing that, maybe he could just let go. Like the squeezing hand, squeezing his shoulder, relaxed. The tightness he has always felt, always, relaxes, becomes calm, becomes ease, becomes trance, but less than that, rougher, like the feeling of all things, in the room, all things, becoming him. Him feeling them. Why? Why all this? He knew. He didn’t have to go to work, but not only that, never, never enough to not only, but more than that he realizes, by the strangeness of the old bogey under his sink, that it was all strange. 

Black smoke started to coast in through the vent that was made for taking shower steam. Rick noticed it when he got a whiff of it, then he looked up, saw it streaming out.  

“Oh Jesus.” 

The homeless man unfolded himself from below the sink and stood up. He was at least, Rick marveled, six foot five, but hunched to about five six. “Einstein, is the name,” he said.  

The bathroom door was closed. That was important to know. And the bathroom, this is important too, was, in a previous life, a bank vault, this is why the story is being written about these two men because they’re the two that ended up in a bank vault. Now, the bank vault was attached to a bank, and the men who built the Costcos thought this old bank with the nice marble, we’ll put some rooms in there. But the rooms, through the years, got more and more drywall until the bank was standing in this big Costco blanket. 

The door wouldn’t open. Einstein tried it. Rick was wrapping a towel around his waist. The smoke abruptly stopped and settled to just stink. Einstein tried the door again, this time with his shoulder. It moved slightly. 

Rick felt sort of happy now that the man was moving around, talking. He watched him ram the door feeling tears well up in his eyes. “God you smell,” he said to Einstein, starting to cry from happiness. 

“Help me with the door,” said Einstein, giving it another bash, getting a few more inches. 

“Um,” Rick said, still crying. “I’m going to!” He didn’t move from where he stood on the other side of the bathroom, hand on towel, eyes on Einstein. 

The overhead light went off. The room was completely dark except for one stream of light coming from the crack of the doorway. The stream was an inch thick and was crazy with particles giving it a volume like a science diagram. 

Einstein shoved the door. It squeaked. “Are you coming to help?” Einstein asked. 

Rick thought he was in a spaceship. “I don’t know if I can reach you,” he said. “I’m not sure I can move through there.” Moreover, he thought his body was a space ship. “I’m going to suffocate. I know I’m in my bathroom. I know it. This isn’t my home.” 

The room was silent. Something nauseatingly stinky came towards Rick. It wrapped a warm pair of arms around him. It was Einstein hugging him. It was sort of a good feeling, and he expected some kind of vocal niceties included. “Help me with the door,” was what Einstein said. 

Rick did not know what a hug was. Einstein had grabbed him, a hand on a wrist, no wrapping, not squeezing. It was nearly a hallucination. Rick walked him over to the door. “Will you shove?” He took Rick's hand in his and showed him where the door was and explained in a calm senatorial way how to properly bash in the door with the shoulder. Rick didn’t say yes but moaned. 

Together they rammed the door. The door busted. More light came through. A tunnel formed through spikes of wood, chunks of old marble, and drywall. Through which was a sky, if looked at closely, that had the appearance of being about to shed rain. Einstein found a way through then coached the despondent bath towel clothed Rick through. 

The big box had collapsed. What was left was a three foot layer of debris that spread like a blanket for miles. The sky was pre-rain gray. The overpass, to the left, was a dark silhouetted line but the view was hedged in by mounds of rubble. Valleys and hills, the blueprints turned into density charts with the dark red as sheet metal and drywall. 

Einstein crossed his arms, looked out. Rick, clutching his towel, moaned in grief. That was thousands of people dead. People he organized, daily. “What happened,” Rick said. 

“I don’t know,” Einstein said. “Possibly a bomb.” 

“It would be good to know what happened. For the sake of, for my sake. For my health. It would be good to know. Could we figure it out? You think?” 

“So it doesn’t happen again, you think?” said Einstein. The ‘you think’

was sarcastic, possibly. 

“If I could find my clothes around here. That would be just alright. Lovely.” He swallowed, “Could you go down there and search around for them? I don’t have shoes. And from right where I’m standing I can see broken glass and sharp metal pieces.” 

Einstein was unresponsive. He still had his arms crossed. The landscape had him, from what Rick could see, more or less thunderstruck. “The roof  (the sky) had literally fallen” in other words. He had a more sentimental nature than Rick. 

“I’ve got a pretty good spot here,” Rick said. “My left foot is on a - like bottle -like coke bottle, unbroken, I can roll it under the arch of my foot for a message sensation, and my right foot, I think I’ve stuck on a pipe of some kind-” The wind blew, the sky went from gray to gray green, a hidden emerald, and Einstein's beard sailed behind him like a long thin gray flag. His arms were still crossed. He watched comrades crest an adjacent hill with spikes and shovels for excavation. What would the security do here? What could the gutted US government do here to protect these slobs' rights to live. “-like the pipe you’d find along an internal stairwell. It’s very warm. Must have been hot water, or gas? Is gas hot? No, just when ignited. Sorry, who are they? The people coming over the hill? Oh wow they have Sarah tagging along with them.” 

“Classius,” said Einstein. 

Classius looked similar to Einstein. He had a slightly rounder face shape, a shorter beard, and his toga was a simple navy blue bed sheet.  

The two senators looked at one another. Rick rolled the bottle under his foot. He looked at Sarah across the rubble patch. It was hard to tell if she felt a distinct way about the situation. She only looked confused and shell shocked. If Rick did not feel this overflowing happiness, (he did not admit this to Einstein) he would look similar to how she looked. 

“From shit to shit, huh gentlemen,” Rick said. “What a circus.” 

“It’ll all be better for my people,” yelled Classius. 

“I’m tired of arguing with you,” said Einstein. “I hate you. I’m tired of knowing I'm right and hating you because you’re wrong. Will you kill me with your pick axe? Will you make my murder yet another one of your labors? Will you choose me? One alive in a thousand already dead? Will you bash my brains in? Victor? Can you respect me like that? Can you see that it can concern a human being to be equal to other human beings? That that can be included in a short list of desires promised? Should I do it myself? This was a long life, and now I can watch you butcher Choice, lay it in tar, and watch it sink, un-struggling.” 

“I feel like puking,” said Rick. “Is anyone else hungry? Where… you guys know that this was my home and my job?” 

Classius looked disheartened by Einstein's words. He shook his head slowly. “This is the beginning. Keep that old heart beating a little longer Senator.” 

Rick turned to Einstein, “You heard him, brother.” He was smiling ear to ear. He started to walk through the rubble bare foot. The sun started peaking through the clouds. Einstein kept talking about something pompous, something about man’s honor, it was a great bore, and Rick picked through the rubble. He let go of his towel. None of the pick, prybar, shovel totting homeless bothered him as he carefully trotted past. Sarah grabbed him. She was close enough, “Help me,” she said. 

“Mmmh,” said Rick. He looked over the group around her. “Are you being held captive?” 

“Yes,” she said. 

He looked down at himself, looked up at her, laughed, and looked at the sky. It is helpful to view Rick’s decision selfishly. He walks away, prodding for safe spaces to step while behind him the greek-style senators debate laboriously, even though, staring into each other's eyes, they thought ‘enough talk!’ They talked! Laboriously! 

What followed was Rick's one hundred and seventy one happiest steps of his life. He came about a half mile from where he started and the view changed very little. Behind him the senators could still be heard orating looking perfectly like two productions of King Lear had overlapped and neither knew about the other ten feet away. Rick, naked, glowing, feeling nothing but joy, the nail in his foot that would give him the disease that would kill him within the day, and his brain behind his eyes simmering like a pond in the sun. He kept going, not showing the limp, and found the bartender laid up impaled and slightly breathing. 

“Hello old friend,” Rick says. 

“Jesus-” 

“Not me.” 

“-this hurts.” 

“Alright. Could’ve feigned disagreement.” 

“You are-” the bartender coughed blood, he himself looked like a painting of some crucified idol. The rebar rammed diagonally through him. He was in his pajamas and his arms held down from the shoulder sockets like links of sausages “-glowing.” 

“You’ll go to heaven,” Rick said. 

“I know,” the bartender said, and died. He had stuck his hand in his pocket. He had put all the polaroids there from the night before. He was going to pull them out and give them to Rick for one last happy moment. But his hand stayed in the pocket, the hot sweaty hand going cold. There was passion and there was kindness. 

Rick didn’t realize that the bartender was dead. “I don’t know if anything before this really mattered,” he said. “I would be making sure my gold cart had enough gas about now. Hm. Do you think I’d go to heaven? I gave those homeless application forms. I lied when I said it was for parking. No one has to park there other than semis. Are you there? Earth to worm,” Rick laughed. “Oh, dead, how ‘bout that.” 

Look on at Rick: his selfish enlightenment.