TRUE TALES FROM THE YOUTH OF JOHNSON



This is me as I was growing up in all my faulted glory

*some names have been changed.



coming soon:
Weed Bust!
Summer of 1992!



More True Tales....
Volume Four: Water Street / Auto Mishap

When I was on the verge of becoming a junior in high school, it seemed like it never got dark out that summer. Everyone was always out early, and drove around in some version of a V-4 Oldsmobile, usually a Cutlass Ciera, and if you were going to smoke you had to ash out of the windows, or worse, pull over and park somewhere. It was not cool, but these were, after all, the reliable, economic vehicles of our hard-working and mostly well-behaved parents.

Sure, some loud, ugly kids drove around in loud, ugly hot rods that only ran a tad better than they looked. Several people straddled weak, starter motorcycles that they manicured and treated better than their mothers. Luckier, wealthier kids, rolled into parking lots flaunting Honda Interceptors. They were quite stealth, very popular and held in high regard. They were streamlined, Evel Knievel-red-white-and-blue crotch rockets. A purely 80's phenomenon.

On most evenings, in the vicinity of such a motorcycle, or really, any other motorized treasure, you could usually spot a tall, gawky David Koreshian-kid with the beginnings of a mustache pile his crew (more often than not a small army of very short versions of himself) out of a beat-up Dodge station wagon to admire one of these fine cycles, straighten his leather jacket (even though it was 85 degrees), and then nod approval to his girlfriend, also tagging along, who was inevitably one of two people:

1. a short, sullen, pug-nosed gal in a Judas Priest t-shirt, with feathered hair, heavy mascara and fat thumbs rung through the front beltloops of her camel-toed, tie-dyed jeans, whose house perennially smelled like the kind of unappetizing, rotting hunk of kielbasa her drunken dad had been stooped over the stove continuously frying since Vietnam ended. Between the ages of 16 and 30 she was sadly destined to hear two sentences over and over again: "Girl, if you'd ever gimme a piece a ass, I'd take ya to the goddamn carnival, sheesh," or "You're supposed to be in that line over there, thanks."

2. a lanky, sullen, bored-looking girl with beautiful hair and features who was a believer in unicorns, horrible at ballet, thought it was strange that her uncle had requested seconds on her senior picture, never had a dad, and whose mom drank cooking sherry, cried whenever it rained, and swore everyday that cats were better than people.

If you were heavily under the influence of puberty and narcotics, you found these girls and several others quite stunning. It may have been all you thought about. If you grew up in my town, chances are you were behind the wheel of one of the previously mentioned vehicles and it was on its way to Water Street.

Water Street was home to all the college taverns (and their varying uninspired motifs), a handful of fast-food restaurants, the local head shop, every obnoxious teenager in a thirty mile radius, and a full roster of the town's halfwits, milling about on three-wheeled bicycles with day passes from area halfway homes.

In the summertime, most of the college kids left and turned Water Street and all of its spoils over to kids from the three city high schools. The only college students who might remain were hardworking study bugs, who you'd never see anyway, or disillusioned fourth-year sophomores of either gender, who had sort of loose moral codes and who were slowly morphing into alcoholic zombies that hovered from tavern to tavern on any weeknight in the middle of July, keeping track of only their cigarettes.

There were also a lot of 22 year-old musician/burrito/car stereo salesmen named Rick, with freshly peroxided hair, belts made out of rope, and shabby maroon polo shirts on. They'd cajole you into investing in a dime bag or getting you to listen to their new poem/song, which most of the time ended up being about your younger sister. This situation always caused a lot of turmoil, probably because your sister was about 14 at the time. The guy would inevitably cackle, and shuffle down the block, and you'd dream all evening about how you'd strangle him and the whole town would cheer about it.

Water Street was bordered on one side by a soft, irritating river full of duck manure and sludgy chum from a belching and depressed toilet paper factory about one mile north. Its other border was a vast student ghetto full of slanting three-story houses, in varying stages of decay, whose curling linoleum floors were always one-eighth of an inch deep in stale domestic beer.

In this neighborhood, every half-hearted fondling was done in the glow of a neon Lite beer sign, every coffee table was made of hockey sticks, and every couch swallowed exploding ballpoint pens, half-eaten tacos, Hamm's bottlecaps, uncreased Biology workbooks and the broken joysticks of long outdated home videogaming systems. In later years, on drunken benders, several friends and I would "shop" in these houses during afterbars, often stumbling home at dawn with somebody else's slightly-used microwave.

Anyway, one of the fast-food restaurants on Water Street was, obviously, a McDonald's. It had a giant parking lot on its east side, and an additionally huge parking lot on the west side that it shared with a Taco John's. The parking lots basically served as bullpens for all of the city's disenfranchised and bored adolescents as they played out their own scaled-down, less interesting version of American Graffiti.

Some kid, clad in Jams and a Ron Jon surf shop t-shirt, with hot sauce running down his face, would be laughing uncontrollably as a friend or enemy barfed half-digested casserole and blackberry brandy in the shrubs and lava rocks along the perimeter of the McDonald's building. Somebody else might hurl grainy Jello mix into somebody's girlfriend's eyes. Someone else might make a crack about somebody else's high school. Someone else would be throwing menacing looks while showing off early-belt Karate moves as "Crazy Train," screamed out of the windows of a nearby Ford Maverick. The tension would build.

Jock vs. Grub fights were de rigeur. The have's and have-not's squabbled in the parking lot over what little there was to be had. And the scraps always spilled out as quickly and unpredictably as pimples on an offensive lineman's ass.

Sometimes it was Jock vs. semi-Jock fights. Maybe one jock was just too fucking stupid to understand that it was no fun being around a teenager who acted like he was already on the Cincinnati Bengals, who had no clue that his real calling was most likely going to be peddling Amway anyway. Maybe a guy like this had to be taught a lesson. Everything was about posturing, and was perhaps no more complicated than the same shit your dog may have worried about last time his fur stood on end.

Still, it was all there was. It was reassuring and freaky at the same time. Most of my friends, who were all outstanding athletes, by the way, had retired from any organized extra curricular activities the school had to offer. The sporting life no longer held much allure, now that drugs, sex and vandalism were on the menu. Besides they hated all the coaches, and all the coaches hated them.

I had failed my driving test in January. A guy at the DMV lived down the block and had been on my paper route. He was known as an old softie. When this guy rode shotgun, everybody passed. He failed me (the s.o.b. who handed him a clean, dry newspaper everyday for five years) for going too slow in the left lane of a highway. It was my own personal Waterloo. I had let everybody know that I was getting my license. Being sort of a pussy, I cried for days.

When I finally started driving, and getting my mom's silver Oldsmobile coupe on a regular basis, it was summer. Everyone had old basketball camp t-shirts, army pants and Brut 33 on. We'd all lumber into one car, and go harass the only known child molester in our Putnam Heights neighborhood, or else head straight to the soap opera on Water Street. Of course I often played designated driver, while my friends imbibed.
One night, as the moronic drumbeat of the summer dragged on and on, my car, full of juvenile delinquents, crept down a crowded Water Street. We chattered on and on about nothing. Trying to make each other laugh, or more likely, trying to make each other cry. I was driving, and barely paying attention to the road.

In front of the McDonald's, slowing down to make a left turn across oncoming traffic and into the east parking lot was an old junky pickup truck with a spastic black Lab riding in the bed, sniffing the air, and pacing back and forth for reasons unknown to me. Behind the truck was a stern, stout, bespectacled, blond, crew-cutted man on a normal, 250 cc motorcycle. At about 25, he looked like a blend of ROTC and Greco-Wrestler. His head was shaped like a newspaper vending box.

The truck, turn signal on, came to a complete stop as it waited for a clearing in the traffic. The young man on the motorcycle followed suit. I, unfortunately, did not. I was jabbering over my shoulder to the people in the back seat. By the time they informed me that I was close to killing a guy, I was probably ten feet behind the stopped motorcycle. The ROTC guy never really looked back as I jumped on the brakes and managed to slow down, from 25 mph, to about five or ten.

The grill of my car hit the motorcycle's back tire and immediately launched the ROTC guy ten feet in the air. Everybody in my car shut up and watched with wide eyes. If you needed a good definition for "ghastly" you could have come across it by peeking in my car and looking at the occupants. "Jesus Johnson," somebody muttered.

All the normal carousing of the crowded parking lots stopped. Jaws dropped. The guy lingered in the air with all the hang time of a football punt. He came down, feet first, windmilling his arms in a Geronimo-type manner. The dog was down on its haunches, looking up at the guy, and trying to figure out which way to go, how to possibly get the hell out of the way of the flying man who was about to land on its turf.

The motorcycle crumpled like an accordion and skidded underneath the truck. The ROTC guy landed perfectly, without a scratch. He was very, very unhappy. It was all slow-motion. He hopped out of the pickup bed, and I just kept watching him get closer. Without looking at anyone in the car, I said "Roll 'em up." And they did.

They looked at his freshly-fucked motorcycle. The guy looked at his freshly-fucked motorcycle. There was an audible groan. I prayed for a cop to come. I motioned through the windshield. This was long before the days of the saying, "My bad," but that's essentially what I meant. Like there was any fucking question.

"I'll take all the blame," I yelled through the closed windows, as the ROTC guy's face turned purple and he pounded his balled up fists on the hood of my mom's car.

"Let's get the hell out of here," one of my friends said.

"Uhh, no," I replied after thinking it over for a second. That would have been an even dumber . A cop showed up. I got out of the car and started apologizing. The ROTC guy cooled down and started rubbing his neck. The cops looked at everything, and made me get back in and pull over to the side of the street, until there was nothing left but a flattened motorcycle, with my mom's license plate jammed in the engine. I would have been demolished if I drove away.

In the end, my mom and dad showed up, and all my friends scattered into the evening. Some walked home, and some walked across the street to the parking lot, which was now burbling over with idiocy again. The cop wrote me up a 77 dollar ticket for inattentive driving, and the ROTC guy shook my hand. Insurance made us friends. I saw him about ten years later at a restaurant called Chicken Unlimited, and pretended I didn't know him.









True Tales From The Youth of Johnson
Volume Three


Like everybody, I worked what is commonly referred to as a "shit job" the summer before my senior year in high school. And from then on, it has always slightly pained me to see a pimply-faced kid slaving over a vat of burning fries, or chasing a mop around a greasy toilet. I knew it blew goats at the time, but when you make a note of half-assedly mentioning to people that you're looking for a summer job, they often put it upon themselves to be a hero and really dig you up something completely horseshit, that doesn't pay more than seven or eight nickels an hour. Your guilt doesn't let you turn them down, because you were the idiot who mentioned your lack of employment to them in the first place.

The winter before, I lasted all of three days as a dishwasher at Mr. Steak. For some reason my dad was under the delusion that I was a lot tougher than I really was, (like I was some boot-wearing, snowmobiling, good time Charlie who could whittle a kayak out of a hunk of driftwood in around 3 hours) and a pal of his managed the place at the time. He's often come home and mention that he had gotten me a job, or committed me to a chore. He just did shit like that. Our family had never even been to Mr. Steak, and I was a lot happier for it.

"Oh, by the way, did I tell you that I told Zeke Phillips that we'd paint his garage over the weekend?" He'd ask, effectively ruining my social life.
"No. I was going to go over to Minneapolis this weekend though." "Who gives a shit about Minneapolis? You can go there anytime. This won't take you long," He'd respond, and I'd be roped into it. I helped him paint one of his friends' dilapidated cottage one summer, for the rights to this old peddle-start Italian moped that had a mind of its own, and that I eventually crashed on, sending me to the Emergency room so that a doctor could scrub gravel out of my face with a toothbrush, but all in all, it was a helluva bargain. Had the guy offered us a chimp with rabies I think my dad would have said yes, convinced that he could get it to do at least some tricks or chores.

Anyway, there was a certain breed of high school student who could work at Mr. Steak and actually enjoy it. This was the same type of guy who played hockey, had a starter mustache, and a Scirocco with the engine strewn across his parents' lawn. There was another breed of high school student who enjoyed t.v., chronically masturbated, and couldn't even clear his place after dinner. I was the latter. I never harbored a secret wish to be a restaurant worker. I never dreamed of the kind of shit that went down at places like that either.

After three days of washing dishes and hearing stuff like, "Where the fuck are the black plates?" I knew I was not Mr. Steak material. They had a system at Mr. Steak, which, I think, is common to most restaurants. I got an assload of dishes every 35 seconds that made me want to barf, and everybody else stood around waiting for me to hand them back spotless. The cook made the mess and got the hell out of there as soon as the place stopped serving. The poor son-of-a-bitch who was washing dishes (read: me) had to finish the dishes then break down, and scrub every grill, fryer, and oven in the whole Goddamn kitchen.

Breaking down a kitchen for a seventeen year-old goof like me was pure torture. It wasn't like you could just watch the clock, and then leave at a predetermined hour. You weren't going anywhere until that place glowed.

The nightly clean-up involved hooking up hoses to 180 degree faucets and spraying everything in sight. Then I had to squeegie any remaining water, steak, toothpicks, ice, puke, pudding and milk down the floor drain. Why everything was drying, I had to haul the seventeen bags of garbage outside, cart 50 pounds of iceberg lettuce around, and organize the remaining 14,000 pieces of silverware. Inevitably, some 38 year-old with mutton chops named Gary would be there to let you know how bad you were fucking up.

"Could be getting laid right now, Johnson," he'd harp as he took a drag off a crumpled generic cigarette, his Pinto wagon idling outside in the frigid temperature. Then he'd laugh to himself, and shake his head like he couldn't believe what a sorry sack of shit someone had saddled him with. Like he was doing me a favor by looking over my shoulder with a hunk of parsley hanging out of his mouth, and a glass of warm tap water in one hand.

"Oh yeah?" I couldn't resist asking, just out of sheer curiosity as to what kind of woman would, in fact, take six or seven minutes out of her day to allow this troglodyte to plant his seed in her. As years went by though, I saw, on several occasions what kind of homemade-tattoo having, toothless, complaining, yard slut enjoyed screwing wannabe felons like this. It was grim.

"Yeah. Shit, I don't mind. In fact it's kinda nice not having to go straight out to Cindy Rae's trailer and put up with her mess. Hey, you sure that goes there?" he'd point to a stray frying pan.
"Well, maybe not. I dunno?"

"Aw, just fuckin' with ya. Say whaddaya think about. . ." and then the conversation would turn towards one of a few topics: stock cars, niggers who collect welfare and steal all the good jobs, not letting women blue-ball you, bow hunting and engine sizes. The kitchen would just about be clean, and the son-of-a-bitch would stall me by breaking out a joint and asking me if I wanted to watch the "Faces of Death" videos anytime in the near future. I naturally declined, the vision of sitting on a bunk bed in a trailer with a co-worker twenty years my senior, as he got up to fiddle with the horizontal hold and aluminum foil antennae of the t.v., or chastise me for not eating leftover gizzards with him, was too depressing to make a reality.

Obviously, I bailed on Mr. Steak. Junior Varsity basketball season was starting, and that was something that I could happily handle being mediocre at. And, while it was kind of disappointing-- remember, I'm the same guy who quit patrol in 6th grade, didn't do a science project, quit doing my Alegbra homework in 8th grade for a couple months, I had quite a pattern of being a fucking quitter going by this point-- I soon got over it. I remember trying to explain to the head guy on the phone why it just wasn't going to work, actually getting kind of emotional even, and he was just like, "Look, you worked here for 3 days, good luck, see ya."
When I told my dad, I was expecting a lecture. Instead, he just said, "Jesus, I wouldn't have worked at that shithouse. I can't believe you even took the job in the first place. Mr. Steak? Jesus H."

So the next summer, when my dad cheerfully signed me up to be a morning custodian at the YMCA, I again reluctantly accepted. My guarded optimism about the Y job was that it was just a short, four hour shift, and then I was outta there for the day. Most of my friends weren't even awake by that point. My co-workers however, made the previous batch of worker-bee peers look like Ivy Leaguers.

I was immediately introduced to the boss, who was actually a very smart and patient guy. Why he hired the nimrod squad to back him up was beyond me. I'm sure the state paid most of the tab for these fucking cat burglars. The first guy who trundled down the sub-basement stairs into the very bowels of the Y, which was where our office and break room was, was a guy I'll call Dwight.

Dwight was one of those extremely aggravating retarded citizens who likes to think of himself as "cool under pressure," and has an opinion about everything. Kind of like the half-witted "Top Gun" of janitors. If he even overheard you thinking about something, he'd surely offer up his theory on the matter. The only problem was that he was dumber than a box full of giraffe shit and the whole world knew it.

Inevitably, and this is no slight to mentally-challenged people as a whole, he proved himself to be a hot-headed guy, who'd often short-circuit under the stress of vacuuming hallways and replacing paper towels. He'd end up injuring himself by lugging around a 75 gallon garbage can because he didn't have the common sense, or patience to wait another three minutes for someone to bring him the dolly.

The other two stiffs were, to the best of my knowledge, an unconvicted fire-bug who had sawed off a couple of fingers in a wood shop somewhere and was convinced the whole world was out to get him, and a withering old, on-the-wagon, clueless drunk who suffered ritual beatings at the hands of his daughter-in-law, who'd also get lost in a cul de sac without the benefit of a map.

They shipped me across the street to an abandoned building that they were converting into an aerobics center. All it was then was a room full of 2x4s with nails randomly pounded into them. Somebody had the idea that all of the wood was salvageable, it just needed someone to pull all the nails out of it. I spent the month of June in an airless cinder block building with a crowbar in one hand and an old, nailed-up board in the other.

Dwight would pop over a few times a day to school me in the art of nail-pulling, and the other two guys would come over and pull on their scrotums, complain and chug diet sodas. The fire-bug would always have some minor rift going with the boss about a toilet paper invoice, or a new saw he wanted. He'd get mad, then his glasses would slide down his nose, and he'd use one of his sawed-digits to push them back up. I was considering suicide.

The next month though, was racquetball court painting time. Pulling nails was like being asked to be the Grand Marshal of Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade compared to this. It involved getting Dwight and the 98-pound dry drunk together to set up scaffolding every Monday morning in a blindingly white racquetball court. We'd then scrub, scrape and paint every mark we could reach. Without fail, someone would kick over a bucket of soapy water, or, in a daze, back off of the scaffolding, or worse, start humming along to a Richard Marx song on the radio.

During every break Dwight would peer into his lunch sack and tell me what he had packed, and how he packed it. There was always a problem because he was out of his favorite jelly, or a cousin who needed bail money, or emergency dental surgery called while he was making a sandwich, and he'd never quite make it the way he had intended. He then couldn't resist stuffing half of it in his mouth. He'd smile at me with teeth full of white-bread and mushed peanut butter and I'd nearly pass out. "So, what happened to your cousin?" I'd ask.

"Oh, nothing. Goddamn cops say she has to make a choice between huffing glue or breeding guinea pigs and that she can't do both at the same time. . . Say, Jeff? Do you know a fucking fat bitch by the name of Tracy who rides the city bus? Damn whore made me buy three corn dogs for her on Memorial Day. Ain't seen her since," and he'd be off on a whole new topic. The dry drunk would mumble something, and the fire-bug would claim that some bitch upstairs was out to get him fired, and then I'd wonder if he'd be tip-toeing around her shrubs later that evening with a gas can in one chopped-up hand, and an old rag and some matches in the other, trying to get even.

The summer came to an end, and by that point all the gymnasium floors had been sanded, buffed and revarnished, the aerobics building had opened, and all the janitorial staff had been reprimanded several times for arguing with each other about any number of mindless tasks.









True Tales From The Youth of Johnson
Volume Two


Some months back Rolling Stone did a big story on the fraudulent actions of mental health care providers. The gist of the article was that the residents (or clients) of such facilities aren't getting adequate care, because often enough the people that own the place invoice the government for a shitload of cash, while they employ some untrained shlubs to run their operation for minimum wage, or something only slightly less paltry.

Half the people working in the mental health industry wouldn't know Thorazine from Reese's Pieces and they are just stupid, abusive bastards.

As a result, the people who need help are in grave danger just by living at the facility.

Well, back when I flunked out of college for a year, I was panicking trying to find some kind of employment. My roommate at the time had been masquerading as an art student, smoking copious amounts of marijuana and working at a charming little nut house out in the woods south of town known as Elmview. Elmview was one of the aforementioned mental health facilities that are staffed from top to bottom by incompetent morons. They had an opening for a "nightwatchman" and there was no question that I'd fit in perfectly.

Elmview was part of a chain of about six or seven rural houses that were owned by a wealthy married couple, who fancied themselves as cultured, Trump-like scions bestowing their genius business acumen on the rest of us Midwestern serfs, who were eager to lap up any of their table scraps. The houses were scattered throughout the Chippewa Valley, where I lived. Each house had about seven or eight beds for mentally ill, or mentally retarded adults. The residents basically just sat out at the house/farm and fed rabbits, set the table at meal time, took their medication, and squabbled with each other and the staff. They'd earn a little money for doing their chores, and once a week two massively homely young women would slowly pile them into a van and take them to a down-market mall where they'd buy gum, calculators, stuffed penguins, Urkel statues and hockey cards.

The job opening was an overnight position, which basically meant that I drove out there at 11pm, kept the ship afloat and hit the trail by 7am. I was supposed to do a bed check, mop the kitchen floors, clean the bathrooms and vacuum. Initially, I would religiously do all of my chores, except vacuuming. There was no way I was going to wake everybody up by vacuuming. I walked around on eggshells to avoid any unnecessary confrontations. Not having had any formal training, save for a crash course in CPR by a bitter old lesbian with a face like a leather boot, I was more than a little apprehensive about sitting in a house in the middle of the night, in the woods, eight miles out of town with a full slate of adult goofballs, but I was in no position to do anything else. I needed the cash.

Although I was secretly harbored a paranoia of being the first victim in what was sure to be the dubbed "Late Night Attack of the Retarded Rustic Zombies," I wanted to help out, and I was at that idealistic age where I secretly thought I could change everybody who lived there if I was given enough time. I thought they'd have to close the house down because I'd be the fucking Oliver Sacks of the place and all these helpless residents would be fully independent adults after coming into contact with me.

The woman who ran the place should have been an indication of exactly how bad the whole thing was going to suck. She was a horribly insecure, petty, stout gal in her mid-thirties who used the word ain't about 45,000 times a day, and wore her hair in a lousy, five dollar home perm. She liked to frequent a cop bar in town, which was perfect because she liked to drink cheap tap beer and fuck married cops.

To make matters worse, both for herself, and for anyone who had to look at her, she had had some sort of boil removed from one of her cheeks, and the resulting canyon resembled a fleshy tourist attraction. She wielded what little power she had like a crazed SS officer. Berating retarded adults for spilled cocoa, and untied velcro tennis shoes must have held some deep seeded orgasmic appeal for her.

If things weren't going her way, she'd snap instantly. One resident often endured her wrath, as she enjoyed threatening to withhold CBA broadcasts from him. "Well, I know one thing, if you don't change your Goddamn sweatpants, you ain't watching your friggin' Catbirds," she'd yell as she trudged up and down the hallway.

I had to spend a couple weeks working dayside with the rest of the staff, just to get the hang of the whole operation. I was introduced to all the residents, and they all seemed fairly happy to see me.

The first guy, who, much as it pains me to admit became a real nemesis to me, was Warren. Warren was a bearded thirtyish guy who had a rotund belly, slicked back hair, and wasn't fond of bathing. In short, he resembled most comic book store employees. Warren talked about three things incessantly: the weather, fishing, and the untapped power of dairy products. He had a cholesterol count higher than the national debt that needed to be monitored because he often drank a gallon or more of 2% milk a day. The very mention of cheese sent him into a giddy, toe-tapping frenzy.

Shortly before I started working at Elmview, they had installed a simple lock on the refrigerator. Warren had prompted the locksmithery by sneaking into the kitchen one night and finishing off all the milk and eating a pound of raw hamburger when the night person was filling out charts in another room. He now carried a nail file that he used to jury-rig it open, if you ever left him alone for more than a nanosecond.

Naturally being the green employee, he told me in a very Jon Lovitzesque tone that he was entitled to a nightly snack, the first time I caught him standing in only the light from the fridge, wolfing down a whole pan of Jello at three in the morning.

His other big trick was to chew tobacco in the house, which was totally forbidden, and spit the juice in the houseplants, which eventually killed them all. He'd look you right in the eyes with a plug in his cheek the size of a VW Rabbit and tell you nothing was in his mouth. Sunday night was his day of the week to really cut loose. While everybody else kvetched, cackled, and shuffled off to bed, he stayed up late to watch pro wrestling, chew tobacco, and break into the fridge. By my second weekend of nightshifts, I resorted to begging him not to break into the fridge on my shift.

"You know, to be honest with you, I don't give a shit," I explained. "If it were up to me, I'd bring you a whole brick of swiss cheese every time I worked."

"Hmmm. . ." he mulled it over.

"But they say it's not too healthy for you, and I just started here." For dramatic effect, I looked around the room to make sure nobody was listening, and they sure as fuck weren't because it was just me and him in Dairy Standoff '90.

"Between you and me Warren, they are assholes. But I can't argue with them. If you break into the fridge, you screw things up for me. Look at me. I'm broke. I just can't get fired. But if you steal cheese, I get fired." I hoped he could follow my point. I shifted the blame onto a nameless, faceless entity they , who we both actually knew was the fucking bitch who ran the place.

"Well, I'm going back to watch wrestling," he said, oblivious to my speech.

"Listen, tomorrow night, go ahead and break into the fridge. I'm not working. Just do it when I'm not here, okay?"

I thought that I had smoothed it out, but the minute I left the room, he snuck back in and soiled his beard, and his Judds t-shirt with half a tray of apple crisp.

Another resident was a guy named Peter. It took the crack staff of Elmview nearly a year to figure out why his schizophrenic episodes were increasing. Something inside his brain told him that he wasn't drinking enough water, so he'd drink about six quarts a day. All the water diluted his medication, which in turn caused him to believe that a giant goose was periodically trying to kill him. Other than that, he was quiet and probably the most civil resident they had.

Peter's roommate was a guy named Larry who moved into the house from Green Bay right about the time I started working there. He was dealing with some full-on issues about having a penis, and hiding feces under his bed. He was truly troubled. My roommate was often called upon to help him shower, which was a pretty traumatic affair, because if he wasn't trying try to pull his genitals off, he was juggling his own shit.

The whole thing stemmed from a heinous childhood, and a mom who wanted a daughter not a son. He was easily the most intensely insane person I'd ever met.

When it came time to do an evening bed check for his room, which was definitely a sharp object free zone, I passed. There was no way that I was going to take a chance at waking him up once he was asleep. My only hope was that he'd stay in bed the whole night. Once in a while, if he was dreaming, he'd start chuckling which always made me pretty sure that I would soil my own trousers.

He'd often get into scraps with whoever was on the shift before me.

This was like trying to calm down a drunken Saddam Hussein after seeing his only daughter in a porno film, co-starring you. It usually involved his not wanting to take a horse pill that would sufficiently knock him on his can until sun-up.

There was Donna, a 28 year old mildly retarded woman who was about the size of Alex Karras and had the disposition of a spoiled badger. She would often go days without bathing, and would nearly suffocate the house cat by making it nest in her foul pajama bottoms. She would often float around the hallways with "Puss N Boots" in an "Of Mice and Men" death grip.

All in all, if she was motivated, she could be a real sweetheart. My roommate and I affectionately referred to her as Beast.

She could be very stubborn and uncooperative, and half the time I didn't blame her. If she didn't like what you were saying she'd stare at you, but her eyes would blink and flutter like a UHF broadcast about static.

The rest of the residents were as follows: an innocent, gregarious giant, who was being molested by another guy who lived there who was just a bully and a small-time crook, a chain smoker/insomniac that looked like Richard "the Hillside Strangler" Ramirez, and a wirey, fortyish guy who thought he knew karate and insisted his doctors were plotting to fuck him over. Maybe they were.

I started in the winter and Christmas is never more depressing than when you see a mentally-challenged adult solemnly unwrap presents like tube socks, a box of cereal, and a transistor radio, and pretend to be excited about it all. Many of them got phone calls from relatives apologizing for not taking them in for at least a couple days over the holiday. Others had tired-looking elderly parents show up in galoshes and rusted-out cars, announcing that, "Dentures Mulcahey is here to see his boy," like everyone was supposed to know that a certain Richard Mulcahey of rural Elmwood, chicken coop arsonist, and NASCAR fan extraordinare went by the moniker "Dentures".

One chilly night after fending off refrigerator raids, and faking bed checks, I sat down to rummage through some log books-- "Darryl seems to be easily irritated. He keeps on muttering about everyone being a cheater." You always had to preface everything with the word "seems" because being an untrained stooge you couldn't assume anything. Anyway, at about three in the morning there was a knock at the patio door in the basement. It startled me, but I sprinted down to find out what was going on. I am going to die, I thought.

At the door, a new resident named Mary stood shivering. I was dumbfounded. I let her in.

"What the hell is going on?" I asked.

"I tried to run away. I want to die," she said.

Immediately, I knew I was in deep shit. The wind chill was about 30 or 40 below zero.

"How long have you been gone?" I asked.

"Since, I dunno, nine?" she explained. I was overjoyed. At least it wasn't all my fault. I came in at eleven, so the earlier shift had to share at least some of the responsibility. Still, if I had done my bed check at eleven, I would have known she was gone. Her fingers were all black and purple. The frostbite unit from my half-a-day First Aid briefing flashed through my brain.

"Jesus God, look at your fingers. They're frozen. Holy cow," I was panicking.

"Oh, that's just marker, I had been coloring earlier," she said. She was slowly thawing out. I reluctantly called my supervisor. This was all going to have to be documented. Major shit was going to go down. She told me to check her toes. I was too scared.

A couple hours later, a skinny, gossiping handyman named Dale pulled in for the morning shift. I told him some pretty weird shit happened. He pretended to be on my side, like that was even possible. He had earlier been in on a plot to kill one of the farm dogs that my boss hated. He had marched the dog into a field one morning and shot it in the belly with a .22. He and my boss declared it a success until the dog dragged itself up to the front door at lunchtime, in front of all the residents, bleeding like a Serb.

My dad and I drove to a Wisconsin basketball game the next day and I couldn't enjoy myself at all. I knew that there was going to be an unpleasant moment very soon. When I got back, I got fired.

My mom, at the time, was a tad concerned. "What the hell are you going to do? You got kicked out of school. Fired. I just don't know," she said.

"Neither do I," I replied.










True Tales From The Youth of Johnson
Volume One: The Video Store vs. The Liquor Mart (Early 90's)


The liquor store was and still is one of the neighborhood's real treasures. It is run by a complete alcoholic psychopath named Leo, who weighs about 105 pounds and never bathes. He fancies himself an astute businessman who is really on the inside track of the liquor game, when in reality, everyone knows there is a fucking inelastic demand for booze, so by just unlocking the door every morning he is a pure genius.

One time, when he was really having troubles, I walked in and he was sitting on the counter wearing a pair of women's red sunglasses, completely bombed. He was smiling, which he usually never does.

"These are my Bill Gates glasses," he said.

"Wow," I said.

"I'm Bill Gates. Don't I look like Bill Gates?" he asked.

More often than not, you can see his car parked there at all hours of the day. Even as late as 4am sometimes. For a while I thought "Wow here is a guy who really gives a shit about his business." A real workaholic. It turns out that he usually just quietly goes on a shiraz bender at his desk in the backroom just about every night. He goes into a real stupor and passes out there.

The cops usually don't even hassle him anymore. You know cops can sometimes be real pricks, and try to get tough with the pushovers. The real pathetic sadsacks who probably couldn't defend themselves from a goddamn homing pigeon let alone a cop. But he is too far gone. They just let him sleep it off.

His business isn't real terrific either, because he usually annoys customers to the point of their leaving and vowing never to return. That seems to be just fine by him. He is basically a lonely son of a bitch, so any contact as intense as an argument is better than no contact at all.

He makes people show about 4 IDs before they can purchase anything or write a check. Then he asks them where they work, and how long they've banked at their bank, etc. It usually takes about twenty minutes. By this point everybody is just like, "You know, fuck you, man." At which point he's like, "Yeah, fuck you, too."

That could be the whole story. But that's not even the worst part. Or the best part. The people he hires are basically people that even agencies who beg you to hire retards wouldn't sic on you. As a rule, they are either a): dumb bastards or b): full-fledged retarded citizens who have some pretty deviant shit in their background.

This guy Jerry used to work there, and the whole town knew him as a thief. Not like a fucking t.v. set thief, or a guy who defrauded credit unions. Just a guy who would go into your locker at the YMCA and steal your pocket comb and dress socks, and like five bucks.

He would go to the YMCA for a while to ref basketball games. Like he was some big judge of fair play or something. Then he would go clean out the locker room, and he also started to wait around for guys to shower and then he'd beat off. As you might imagine, they canned his ass. He was pretty goddamned troubled.

This behavior obviously fulfilled any requirements for clerk at Leo's. He was hired on as a clerk. He was about as personable as a freshly castrated troll. But it wasn't long before he was given command of the ship, which meant Leo would leave the shop and let him run it. Leo didn't often do that because he is a paranoid, brow beating pissant to his employees.

So Jerry would work and customers would come in, and he basically couldn't do shit except say hello. And he would fuck up the till and get all flustered, and wander around in a daze. Whenever we wanted booze, we'd just walk thru the back of our store into Leo's because they shared a common hallway and bathroom, if you could call it that. But, the point is that we were fucking buying something whenever we came over, not just walking through.

Before too long, Jerry just started walking through our store for the hell of it. He'd come in just to come in. Because our till was right by the back door, I knew it wouldn't be too long before this clepto started fishing around in it. So we started locking the back door. I could tell this pissed him off, but when you are working retail, after awhile it is the little things like this that cheer you up. I mean just the ability to irritate somebody can make a whole day of sitting around a store worthwhile. You could hear him trying the door and mumbling and walking off.

It wasn't too long before everybody caught onto the fact that he wasn't wired right. To piss him off even more, we'd call up, (this was way before caller-id, which they have now by the way) and ask if they had any beer. We'd do this on a Friday or Saturday night at about 7pm, just when he'd be swamped with college kids, or assholes going on dates, or just poor bastards who wanted to get drunk.

"Yeah, we got beer," he'd say, in a huff.

"Hmm. What kinds?" You could just feel the smoke coming out of his ears. You could also hear the chatter of customers in the background, waiting for him to hang up the phone. He'd then start to list shit off.

"Well, how is it looking for a quarter barrel of Old Milwaukee?" we'd ask. Then he'd have to stop everything and go look in back. He'd come back out of breath and noticeably irritated and say yeah, they had one.

"Great. But I think we're gonna need a half-barrel, though. How'sat lookin?" This would continue on until he'd lose his marbles and start screaming at us. Then we'd go look out the front window of our store and watch all the customers filing out empty-handed, shaking their heads and shrugging. Then we'd walk in through the back door and ask how it was going that night. He'd always answer that it wasn't going very well at all, and we'd reply how we were doing just super.

You could always hear the toilet flushing around there, if you bothered to listen hard enough. On the last day that Jerry had a job at Leo's I heard it flushing a lot. As I started to notice a trend, Jim Voll walked in. He was pretty damn bored. He said what's going on. I said someone keeps going to the can. Then we heard Jerry yelling at Leo saying you shouldn't have called me in when I have the diarrhea. I told you I had the diarrhea, etc. Leo barked at him not to go to the can so much and leave the till unattended. Then Leo left.

This proved to be quite amusing to us. Leo has a crack security system that makes a loud and high-pitched buzzing noise, like a hummingbird trapped in a Trans Am's nuts anytime the door opens. This lets anyone working know that a customer is in fact, coming or going, and to wake the hell up.

Jerry went back to the can. Business was dead. Jim Voll got a weird look on his face when he heard Jerry going back to the can. He picked up the phone and called Leo's. It rang about six times, and we heard Jerry racing from the can to the telephone, swearing and slamming doors. When he picked it up, Voll hung up on him. We heard Jerry mumble some shit and march back to the can. Voll picked up the phone again. Same thing.

Then Voll really brainstormed and took a pen and ran out of the store. When compared to a door, a pen is pretty small, but generally big enough to usually leave a door slightly ajar. So Jerry was back in the can, and Voll stuck the pen in the door. The door started buzzing and after about thirty seconds, you could hear Jerry yelling from the can.
"C'mon!! Jesus!" He whined.

After about a minute the door was still wailing, and Jerry was having a fit.

"In or out! Goddamnit! C'mon!" He was almost bawling. He was melting down.

After about a minute and a half, and I'm not kidding, he started yelling even more.

"Goddamnit! I got the fucking shits! Okay? Just come in or get the hell out of here!" He wasn't going to leave the can though. Long about this time Leo came back. He walked in and the buzzer on the door was going off, and his clerk was in the bathroom crying and swearing and basically having a goddamn seizure.

We heard some loud yelling then. We winced. And then Jerry didn't ever come back to work there again.





back to the Johnson Page


back to King Who