todd of tacoma

Apparently, I chew gum like a dog with a fly in his mouth. Gums exposed, smacking at the air, shaking my head to rid myself of this nuisance I regret having caught despite having chased it around the kitchen and the living room with the zeal of a mongoose. I don’t enjoy it, I gnash it. I don’t like the flavor, it’s too strong, all of it, too much and suddenly. So I spit it out after three minutes, counterintuitive to the whole experience, I spit it out after three minutes, once the flavor’s manageable.

So I’ve been told. I’ve tried to notice it, but I can’t hold onto what I’ve noticed. I don’t think I have thoughts when I’m chewing, gnawing as I do. I was remembering this, the thing about the no thoughts, just after I had spit my gum into a trash bin, actually more near it than into it, when my coworker B’s face told me I’d offended him. I couldn’t ask him what about. He’d only have confirmed that what I just did was gross to him, probably, maybe disgusting. I didn’t want that confirmed, so I didn’t ask. I decided I’d rather have a couple hours of passive-aggressive silence instead. One word answers to questions, stuff like that.

Nope.

Nope.

Butter.

Stuff like that.

We were, all of us, a little tetchy lately, the whole workplace. It was getting to that point in the summer where everything smells like rotten straw and dead flowers. Technically, it’s still spring, this point in the summer, it’s the long days, the long ones at the end of it, the end of spring, kind of the beginning of summer, even though it’s felt like summer for a month. I was moving myself slowly closer to the door because there was a draft at the door and I was about to start sweating from chewing gum so hard and from whatever I’d been doing before, loading boxes onto a belt, probably. The air scratched the back of my throat. With, like, hot ashes. My tongue felt sunburned.

At our place of work, you can only load boxes onto a belt so fast given that the speed of the belt is predetermined and constant. At the beginning of the day, it’s too slow. At the end of the day, it’s too fast. It’s when it’s slow at the beginning of the day that fights break out. A not-too-small contingent of workers here really want to pretend like they’re able to throw at their own rate. We call it throwing even though the action is more like slinging and then setting. But you don’t sling, or throw. And you don’t drop. That’s the part that’ll get you a written warning if you get to throwing thoughtlessly. You drop boxes onto a belt and you know a middle manager is on her way and about five of your peers are side-eyeing you because they heard you drop the box and they know what’s coming, and just as many of your colleagues are rubbernecking when the manager finally arrives.

A breeze picked up and I could pretty much feel the allergens mixing with the sweat on my skin. And I was breathing through my mouth like a baby bird since my nasal passages were busy fighting back against the air with a river of mucus I could barely even dam by snorting it back in. I had to buck and rear and shake my head like a damn giraffe stallion and I’m pretty sure I looked drunk punching back at my mucus this way.

Actually, I’m utterly certain I looked drunk, and I had the manager to prove it.

HK was next to me now and she gave me a little two-fingered come here, can I talk to you a minute?

I could.

Hey. You mind following me up front?

Yeah, okay.

Do you have your things? she said.

I don’t have any things. Just my pockets.

By that I meant the contents of my pockets. Anything else would have been in my car.

Are you having a good day?

It’s fine, I said, pulling that lever B pulled on me to stop any line of inquiry into how anyone around here’s doing, even though I am usually one for small talk. And I would have liked to talk to HK in a different environment or on a different day. She seemed like someone with a story. You can tell just looking at some people. It’s the way they hold their upper lip, I’ve decided, the way they relax it in repose and the way they snarl evenly on both sides of their face when they’re listening and they purse their lips like duck lips when they’re in between sentences. And dimples. She’s got dimples like Pacific islands. Find me even one interesting person without dimples.

There’s a room they have up front for drug and alcohol testing and I knew that’s where  HK was leading me. The room serves mostly as a Multi-Faith Room, too, not just for ferreting out drugs, and there’s one guy who prays in the Multi-Faith Room every single day. I don’t keep track of when he prays, just that it’s often, so I assumed we had to rush through this testing to free up the room for him.

Because it was fast. Just a swab of the mouth and a swab of my nose, sorry for all the snot, I said, and I was on my way. If it had come back positive they’d have read me the riot act and I’d have had to fill out a bunch of papers. But I wasn’t about to let that happen, as if I could not allow that to happen. I went back to my work station and my swabbed nostril was clearer than the other and I noticed the smell on the breeze wasn’t so bad anymore. Probably there would be rain is what I thought it meant, and I was right. Started gushing at last break and lasted through my drive home.

A few months back, in the early stages of my sobriety, I wandered into the Multi-Faith Room looking for a restroom because the  main restroom next to the faith room was closed for cleaning and I was sure there was another one in there or adjacent or whatever. When the lights came on in the room I saw there was a door out the back of the room, to a hall I never knew existed. The passage was narrow and the lights didn’t go on back there and that kind of disoriented me. Just about everything made me dizzy then. I saw another room with signage that said Ablution Room and it didn’t have a door, just a threshold, and I somehow believed it was just a strange restroom for those who have faith.

I ducked in quickly and peed into one of its basins. What a twisted bidet this is, I thought. It had just a drain with a stopper and a faucet on the rim of it no larger than a water pick, but curved down. Then bladder relief started to ease up my whole body, including my neck and brain, and I started to think maybe this wasn’t really a restroom after all, but still thinking at worst I was peeing into a foot bath, so who cares. But one second later it dawned on me that I was peeing into floor-level face basin for washing your face and I seized up again and stopped peeing fast and I splashed the sides of the basin clean with water from the faucet in my cupped hands and then I wiped my hands clean on my jeans and dribbled in my drawers all the way back to my work station, having not so much shook properly, and my jeans were showing it a little, but I didn’t exactly care. I was in the early stages of sobriety, remember, and was working very hard to forgive myself a little each day.