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110%

Until the summer of 2003, the summer I turned 16, I used to work my ass off. It wasn’t a choice I made, it was just my nature.

At school I studied like crazy and, invariably, I aced everything. Mind you, it wasn’t because I was the smartest kid, I was just a madman. Through sophomore year of high school my nickname was “nolife” – that’s “nolife” as in, “that poor kid has no life.”

And I didn’t. Have a life I mean. My life was school. School was work and working was the only thing that ever felt natural to me.

Not that anyone gave a crap. Take my word for it, people don’t care about how hard you work. People don’t care if you give it your all every time. They don’t care if you give 110%. People only care about whether what you do helps them or hurts them. If what you do does neither, then no one will a give shit about what you do.

The same cannot be said about the universe. Make no mistake, the universe is a player in your life. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean the universe, as a sentience, has agency in your life. The universe listens to the things you say, and the stuff you do. It has certain rules in place. Science calls these rules physics, but that’s just a name. The rules are inherent to the universe and they’re there to protect the system.

As far as the universe is concerned, it only cares about you if you violate those rules. There ain’t no helping or hurting the universe, there’s only compliance and non-compliance. I learned the difference the hard way, and now I’m gonna teach all of you by way of my experience.

My first job was at an ice cream store. It was owned by a drug dealing, part-time public school janitor. His name was Joe and he was an asshole.

Joe was about the most conniving, immoral son of a bitch I’ve ever met. On the face of it, to some IRS agent looking over his folder, Joe must’ve looked like a model citizen: business owner; working two jobs; paying his taxes. But if you knew Joe – and boy, I knew Joe – the reality of Joe tended to punch you right in the face, sometimes literally.

One of Joe’s two jobs was as a school janitor. Everyday, Joe’s time-card would punch itself in at the school somehow, denoting that Joe had arrived on time, worked all day, and left at 10 after 5. Weird thing was, almost every day, from 9-5, Joe would also be sitting in the back of the Ice Cream store, snorting cocaine and watching porno. Now, I ain’t no scientist, but I’d wager Joe couldn’t be both washing a public school and snorting cocaine, watching porno in the back of the Ice Cream store at the same time. So, if I had money riding on it, I think it’d be a good bet someone who not Joe, was clocking Joe into work everyday down at the school.

As for Joe’s business, the Ice Cream store, well it ran on one thing and one thing alone – me. Joe had a tendency to hire only the prettiest, most beautiful teenage girls in the neighborhood. But I swear vapidity must have been a prerequisite for old Joe, cause I was the only poor bastard who ever did any work in that place.

The Ice Cream store had no name or sign. When I filled out delivery manifests, I just put “Ice Cream” whenever a form asked for the business name. That summer of 2003 I worked every single day in Ice Cream. I knew Ice Cream like the back of my hand. I could take apart, clean, and reassemble a soft serve machine in half an hour flat. By the end of that summer, I had muscles on my body I never even knew existed, and forearms that looked like Popeye’s, post spinach. I handled all the cash, all the orders, all the maintenance. I basically owned an ice cream store for two months.

Oh, and I got paid $5.00 an hour.

Once in a while Joe would stumble out of the back room and snake the toilet, whether it was clogged or not, just to look like he was responsible for something. At the end of each day Joe would take the wad of cash I’d counted and stick it into “the safe.” That’s what we called Joe’s underwear, “the safe.”

Joe said he brought that money to the bank at the end of each week, but I’m guessing “the bank” was actually Bob the drug dealer who basically took up residence across the street at the bus stop.

That was how the summer of 2003 went. I gave myself up to Ice Cream. I took a business that was a total piece of garbage, and by sheer force of will I made it better.

“By sheer force of will.” That’s a good way to put it, because as I would eventually realize, that was literally the case.

See, all summer long, something weird was happening. Things were going better for Ice Cream than they had any right to. Joe cut corners left and right. He diluted the soap we used to clean everything with so much water that it didn’t even make bubbles anymore. He would take the flavored icees, melt them down, pour half into an old plastic bin, then fill both to the top with tap water, freeze’em again and then have me serve that garbage to people.

This kind of outrageous cost cutting happened everywhere in Ice Cream. We sold expired candies and expired soft serve mix. The air conditioning hardly worked and sometimes the freezers would die for a couple of hours, melting all the product. Plus, we charged the most expensive prices in the neighborhood. Yet, still, Ice Cream was a humongous success that summer. We had lines out the door every night, and, more incredibly, never a single complaint from anyone.

But, as the summer progressed, Joe deteriorated. He broke down, slowly, day by day, losing weight, then hair, then skin tone and eventually even the cocaine enhanced light of life in his eyes. He got a whole battery of tests done, even said he went cold turkey on the drugs and alcohol, but no one could figure out what was wrong with Joe. As far as Medical Science was concerned, Joe was in perfect health. But if you knew Joe, you could see it plain as day: something was sucking Joe dry from the inside out.

Me, on the other hand, I thrived that summer. Even being paid just north of nothing, I loved working at Ice Cream. I put my heart and soul into my work, and, quite literally, I would discover, I gave it 110%. When I washed things, watered down detergent or no, they came out clean as a new mirror. When I scoped icees, they tasted full flavored and had a perfect texture, like they were fresh off the factory floor. When I poured a soft serve cone, it was as if we’d made home made custard. No matter what Joe did to undermine that place, by sheer force of will it felt to me I was fixing it.

Last day of the summer, I came in early to open the store, as I always did, but the front gate wasn’t down, and the front door wasn’t lock. It was a blazing hot morning coming on the heels of a blazing hot night and the AC had been broken for days. I stepped inside and immediately a wall of stank hit me like a baseball bat to the nose, and I knew what I’d find. I took off my t-shirt, wet it in the bathroom, and wrapped it tight around my face. Then I tiptoed toward the back room and found him there, old Joe, slumped over in his ratty chair, looking like he’d been dead for two weeks, he was so pale and skinny, even though I knew I had spoken to him just the night before.

I called the police and they came and got his body. They did blood tests, even an autopsy, but they found nothing wrong with him. No apparent cause of death, and no intoxicants of any kind in his blood. He died clean and inexplicably.

The store was shuttered. Joe’s kid got the place in the will and sold it immediately to a real estate developer who tore it down within a couple of months.

For myself, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, somehow, I’d done it – that I’d killed Joe. I ruminated on it for a week, running it around in my head, but I couldn’t find any answers. Finally, one night, I had a dream.

In this dream Joe was there, looking healthy again, coked up. He had a plastic pitcher on a table and two glasses. First he picked up the pitcher and filled one glass to the brim with orange juice. Then he looked at me and began pouring into the second glass. The juice poured out of the pitcher and began to fill the glass. But when the orange juice reached the brim, Joe just kept on pouring, and pouring, and the second glass never overflowed. Joe poured until the pitcher was finally empty and put the pitcher down. He offered me the second glass and took the first for himself. I didn’t hesitate, but drank deep, taking an unnatural amount of juice from that second glass. I drank, and drank, and Joe just watched in amazement.

Then, when I felt the glass getting lighter, I drank deeper still and out of the corner of my eye, I could see the glass in Joe’s hand begin to empty of its juice, down and down from the brim until there was nothing left in either glass.

Joe looked up at me and frowned. “You drank my juice.” He said.

Then I woke up, and I knew what I had done.

Remember, there ain’t no helping or hurting the universe, there’s just compliance and non-compliance. The universe really is a finite system, a closed loop – if you use energy on one thing then it’s got to come from something else. I really did give one hundred and ten percent that summer, and that ten percent needed to come from somewhere. It just so happened to come from Joe.

I never did work in an ice cream store again. I became an accountant, because it was the job I was least excited about doing. It’s boring work, uninteresting, unfulfilling. But that’s OK, cause it’s safe and I don’t have room on my conscience for another Joe.

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