Where the Hell is Michael

Side A: Track 5

I was a sack boy at a grocery store in my hometown in the summer of ‘97. A place called Dillon’s, but what everyone referred to as “Dirty Dillon’s.”

For almost forty years, Dirty Dillon’s was the only grocery store for the entire east side of the town. Just one store. A tiny store. A filthy store. It opened in the summer of ‘75. This was way before I ever lived in that town. I was told it was clean once, perhaps on that opening day. I’m not sure I believe it, though. The amount of dirt and grime and mouse turds swept up into the corners led me to believe that opening day must have been the same day the store lost its only broom. 

It was an interesting place. Let me take you back. So you can see it, smell it, and know it as I did. You entered through one, just one, set of rusty-hinged automatic doors that worked with a groaning scream, if they worked at all. Upon entrance, the warm, welcoming smell of dust and stiff cheese hit you full in the face. Food sat stacked on rickety shelved aisles. As you walked down these aisles, some gave you hives. Some aisles, herpes. Some other aisles food with e-x-p dates from the Reagan years. But all of them, a story. At the front of the store, there was a video rental section stocked with plastic-cased VHS tapes even as late as 2007 with such hits as “Tango and Cash” and “Howard the Duck” with bright gold stickers proclaiming them a “New Release!”  In the back corner of the store there was a deli, and on the food in this deli, a unique crust. Enough to give even a trash-eating dog pause. 

I was one of about a half dozen sack boys when I worked there. Only a few of my fellow sackers stand out in my mind today. I remember this kid named Clint. I remember he and I were both seventeen at the time. I remember Clint was trying to grow a goatee. I remember his teenage body wasn’t going along with the plan. He had a patch of long, wiry hairs sticking off his chin. It looked like pubes, and because of this, his chin looked like a ball sack hanging below his mouth. 

I don’t remember most of the others because, to be honest, there wasn’t much remarkable about any of us. None of us seemed even to want the job. I know I didn’t. I started working at Dirty Dillon’s after I’d gotten fired from a job I loved. I worked at a movie theater. It was the first job I ever had. I worked there for a year. I had designs on moving up to the new multiplex on the south side of town. I had no desire to work anywhere else. Then I got fired for being a jackass one night. I got a job at Dirty Dillon’s. It was a valuable life lesson. Dirty Dillon’s was a very effective jackass purgatory.

But among all of us disgruntled, unmotivated, ball sack chin-like teenaged sack boys, one sack boy loved his job and attacked it with enthusiasm, cheer, and unending pride. In truth, he was a sack man. His name was Michael. He was in his mid to late thirties, I think. It was hard to gauge his age, seeing as how he talked, acted, and dressed like a thirteen-year-old boy. No, I was not sure of his age, but he was much older than the rest of us. I knew that. He looked a little like the child of a human and a North American black bear. He was shaped like a pear, big, tree trunk legs, big, barrel-like round ass, tiny chest and short, little arms, and a head that was sort of permanently twisted to the side as his chin seemed to be joined too close to his neck. I’m sure his bloodstream was about seventy percent Mountain Dew, a drink he consumed at such a high rate that he would sweat a greenish-yellow. And man, did he sweat, a dripping, sopping sweat that created perspiration Rorschachs on the back of his tee shirts that I would try my best to read to learn more about the inner workings of my personal perceptions.

In addition to all of this, Michael was also one of the nicest people I have ever known. He had mental and physical disabilities and lived in an assisted living place, which happened to be located just across the parking lot from Dirty Dillon’s. The arrangement worked out great for him. Dirty Dillon’s gave him his first and only job and he embraced his duties with hard work, never missing a day. He was always in a good mood, talking out of the side of his tiny, crooked mouth, his words spit-soaked, calling people “Hot Rod” and telling people they were “A real cool person.” 

He’d always ask how you were, and when you asked him the same question, he’d smile as big as he could and say, “I’m great. I’m havin’ fun. I have fun all day!”  He’d say it in this drawl that made you expect a “Lord have mercy!” to be the next thing that came out of his mouth.

He was also an excellent sacker of groceries. When the customer’s food made that slow roll down Dirty Dillon’s old, worn, and stretched-out conveyor belts, I would see the customer’s foreheads wrinkle up with concern as they looked down at the smiling man/bear hybrid waiting for their food. You could see it on their faces. They were certain he would throw their purchases into bags, shattering jars and eggs, and crushing bread loaves, all while smiling at them and asking, “Y'all havin’ fun?” and then laughing his loud Michael laugh oblivious to his own clumsy destruction of their food. They just knew it. Michael never did that, though. He’d sack each bag carefully and diligently, never over or underloading a bag and never ruining anything. 

Not like Ball Sack Chin or myself. We never got sideways looks questioning our competence, even as we’d throw anything in a sack together. Comet cleaner? Hell, let’s throw that right in there with the bread and baby food. Speaking of bread, let me use that to cushion this sack of flour or sugar. Eggs? Don’t see why those can’t be put in the bag upside down and under a two-liter of soda. We were worthless, and worse, we didn’t care.

Michael was a Dillon’s lifer and as much a part of Dirty Dillon’s as the old, grimy walls that held it up. I left that job in August of that same summer. A lot changed for me in the years to follow. I finished high school. Married. My wife had my daughters. We moved into a house. I finished college. One thing never changed, though. Michael’s smiling, laughing, and expertly grocery-sacking, pear-shaped ass was always at that Dillon’s, still in love with his job. 

In the fall of 2011, Dirty Dillon’s was closed and torn down. The east side of town was getting a long overdue, clean, fancy replacement. The new store opened up in August of 2012. And it was fancy. Shiny, clean, and stocked with new, bright products and equipment. A fully stocked seafood department that made the whole store smell like growing pungent, warm seafood trucked in from the coasts thousands of miles away from the middle of grassland America. It was great! 

On that opening day, people crushed through the doors. Everyone wanted to see it. People sat in the sparkling clean deli and wept over its tables, looking towards the heavens and whispering soft thank you, Jesuses. Those crazy coupon ladies tore up and down the aisles, their mom jeans sliding up their ass cracks, foam flying out of their mouths as they swept thirty cans of beans in their carts to save “A whole five dollars!” 

Children gleefully ravaged hundreds of free samples sitting out. A man took his pants off and ran through the store, so overcome with joy that he laughed as the security guards tackled him to the tiled floor, and his erection was heard audibly snapping. It was a great day. 

I was in Dillon’s that day, enjoying free samples and laughing at broken boners.   I looked around at all the cashiers, sack boys, and now lots of sack girls. Everybody working at the store’s front was a good-looking high school or college-aged kid. At the time, I thought, huh, must be the first-day crew. But the next day, I was in the store, and it was the same cast of Abercrombie kids working the front. Just as it was the next time I was in there. And the next time I was in there. And so on...

Every time I went to the store, I noticed it was quieter. The boops and beeps of the scanners and registers were not being drowned out by loud man/bear hybrid’s laughs and shouts and declarations of someone being, “A real cool person!” 

It finally hit me. I was blinded by the shiny wax on the floor, the smell of clean aisles, the coolers that didn’t leak radiation. I was blind, I tell you. I should have seen it on day one. “Wait a God damned minute!”  I yelled at the cute girl at the register. “Where the hell is Michael?”

“Michael?”  She asked me with a confused look on her face. 

“Yeah, you know, the big guy that’s been sacking groceries at this location since the day he was born? Always smiling and asking people if ‘they’re havin’ fu-uh-un all day?’”

She laughed. “That guy doesn’t work here.” 

She turned and asked her sack boy, who was wearing hipster jeans that were so tight on his legs that they looked like ballet pants. “Nobody named Michael sacks groceries here,” he said, throwing my groceries in a bag as if mad at them. 

I looked at one of the other sack boys. He was doing just as shitty a job of sacking other people’s groceries. He reminded me of Ball Sack Chin. Because he, too, wore something ridiculous on his face. He had a thick western-style mustache over his lips that curled up at its tips. And he had it on his face like that… on purpose. I looked at the other sackers:  Skinny jeans. Piercings. Cutesy haircuts on the girls. My God. The new and improved Dillon’s had a mold just like the old Dirty Dillon’s. Except unlike black speckles on deli cheese, it was a mold of who they wanted to be seen at the front of their store. Was Michael gone because a man/bear hybrid didn’t fit this mold?

Did the gentrification of the town’s east side cost Michael the only job he ever had? 

I asked to speak to a manager. This would not stand. I wanted answers. The manager had no answer. No one there knew Michael. They were all new. Like the store itself. New down to the army of skinny-jeaned young kids that never told you that you were a “Hot Rod,” or that “You were a real cool person,” or at the very, fucking, least assured you that they were, in fact, “Having fun all day.”