Off The Clock

The Best Kind Of Work

Is Done Before You Punch The Clock. . .Sometimes.

Since I work in summer recreation, my work week starts on Friday following a Wednesday/Thursday "weekend". It's an emasculating way to live. I was running a wee tad late on the way to my shift, but I still needed a post weekend pick-me-up. It was very important that I get to the Wesco station and buy a large can of energy drink. It was too hot for coffee, and since I don't have any connections in Muskegon I have no access to powerful amphetamines.

Because I had hit the snooze button twice, and had fallen back asleep in the shower I thought that it would be appropriate to pass a few cars on the road. At 7:30 am most people are too tired to drive strategically. I however, drive more strategically as the parts of my brain that sense danger are unresponsive.

The first car I passed was an old man in a Ford Focus. His window was closed, but I could see him yelling at me. Can't the old man understand that I the only sleep I had gotten was 4 or 5 hours the previous early evening during daylight on the beach? Couldn't he consider that falling asleep wrapped in a bedsheet on coarse Lake Michigan sand doesn't compare to his nocturnal oasis that is his Select Comfort Sleep Number Bed™? I figure that is what he sleeps on. He looked like the kind of guy who would buy any product endorsed by Paul Harvey. I imagine he likes Ovaltine too, which is by no means a character flaw.

The only reason I had gotten any sleep was because I had consumed 3 Cuba Libres and 6 beers at the beach. I was so buzzed and exhausted that the girl to whom I had given a beer might actually have been 16, although she was probably 20.


When her boyfriend showed up, I took one look at him and it was clear that he was no older than 19. "So how old is she then?", I wondered.

He was very polite, he handed me the can and said, "Neither one of us are 21, so. . ."

"Oh, yeah I'll take the can. Thats fine.

" I said I might as well make peace with this fellow, I figured. I don't know what I would think of my life if I put myself in a position where I was competing for a 20 year old girl with a fellow who might have been 17.

"I'm David by the way!" I said as I put my hand out to shake.

"I'm Cody", He said, shaking my hand. He had a confident handshake. Maybe he is older than he looks. Plus he has a really unfortunate tattoo...some kind of symbol I didn't recognize. It was either tribal or faux-alien. No responsible parent would permit this. Then again, neither would any friend, girlfriend,boyfriend, mom, dad, step-dad, step-mother, half-brother, half-sister, half-uncle, full cousin or aesthetically conscious mail-man. But somehow he circumvented all of this and ended up with this black and green thing that could be mistaken for a gangrenous wound left by some high-end panini press.

"Say, you want one?" I asked him while holding up a beer. "No, we're not 21." He replied.

Why is he such a buzzkill? His girlfriend gladly drank the beer down pretty quickly. Maybe he didn't like Busch Light. Maybe he figured that it was going to be too warm. I didn't want to believe that a man-boy would be socially defiant enough to maim himself with a sanskrit design but not enough to enjoy a beer at the beach.

"Well, shit man, it's a lot harder to get a beer if you're under 21. In the U.S. anyway. Did you know that? Are you a tourist? Êtes-vous un Canadien?"

He laughed nervously, and scratched his arm. "Alright then, more for me I suppose. Lord knows I need it!" The girl had a short laugh, but he just kind of looked at me with a look restrained disbelief upon his face.

"How could I escape this awkwardness?", I wondered.

"Well I am going to go ahead and go for a swim." I said as I stood up, stumbling a bit.

I went in the water which was quite pleasant, unlike that scene I had left behind on the shore. I gladly traded the cruel indifference of the open waters for the bizarre embarrassment that would surely ensue on the sand under Beach Bunny's baby blue parasol.

I swam and water jogged about a half mile south, all the way to the rocks. I pulled myself up out of the water; adroitly scaling seaweed covered boulders to get on shore. I got back to the beach, and I noticed that there was a 30-something woman watching me. "That's a good workout, eh?" I said to her. "Ha ha! Yeah! It looks dangerous! Be careful!" She said.

Be careful? Doesn't she know who I am? How could she though? I didn't.

I saluted her in acknowledgment and proceeded to jog at a light pace back to my beach chair. I had to dart around children making sand castles and idiot pre-teens on skim-boards. When I finally got back to my spot Cody and Beach Bunny had said that they are going to take off and that they watched my stuff.

"Oh yeah man, thanks." I said. "Hey, take a beer with you!" I said, knowing that he wouldn't take it even though girl wanted him to. It was petty sabotage on my part, exposing his uncoolness to this makeshift beach bunny of his. Perhaps I would not benefit from this, but I hoped that she would; because she knows that the cool kids drink, and that her boyfriend had just turned down a beer.

The rest of the folks left too, but I was not good to drive. So I laid down to catch some sun. I felt a cold wind at my back. I lifted my sand covered face up for a moment. The beach was virtually empty. I was wrapped in my beach sheet very much resembling Lawrence of Arabia, or perhaps a more avant garde member of the Ku Klux Clan.

I dusted off my sand doused cellphone, which was clutched tightly in my hand. Holy shit! It was 8:30 PM...it couldn't have been later than 4:30PM when I passed out. It wasn't 2 minutes that had passed, it was 4 hours! Apparently I had also had a text message conversation with my ex-girlfriend that started pleasant and got weird.

I tasted my own mouth and nearly heaved. I needed some water. I was sore and tired, but not sleepy. Besides all that had some nasty fucking sunburn, but just on my lower back and shoulders. I knew that I wouldn't sleep well that night.

And that is why I didn't sleep well. The old man in the Focus hadn't considered any of this because just as I was waking up, he was sitting in his off-brand Lay-Z-Boy, watching Wheel of Fortune and eating a Werther's Original. So I passed him, ever the cocky young bastard with my rebellious hair and aviator sunglasses. I made eye contact with him, and shrugged with a nonchalant aspect. I knew he was enraged, but I was over it. I didn't have to flaunt this constructive recklessness, but I did. I had to drive this way at this moment, because I had to get to work, but first, I need a RedBull or a Monster. So I hit the gas.

I was riding high and free on the vacant road until a taupe Mercedes failed to calculate my speed and distance and pulled out in front of me, forcing me to hit my breaks, which brought my speedometer under 20 MPH.

I slapped my steering wheel in anger. "What the hell is wrong with you!? Do you take pride in obstructing a mans destiny!?", I yelled. Either I had channeled the ghost of General George Patton or my lack of sleep had made me prone to megalomaniacal hyperbole.

I had to pass this guy on a road that might have or might not have had double yellow lines. "Any law I break now pales compared to letting an asshole in a taupe Benz slow down traffic and impede the liberty of the peasant class!", I figured. I was doing it again! I was Che Guevara on four wheels.

"Been Swank" by the Von Bondies was playing on my iPod through my cassette adapter. I turned up my music and then I passed him. I looked at the driver out through my passenger side window with a condescending smile. I recognized this guy as a lawyer from town, though anyone else would have seen his jheri curl, and his 1970's porn-star mustache and would have understandably guessed that he was the owner of a moderately successful carpet store. He leaned his body against his door and banged his hand on the window like he was an ape at the zoo and I was playing keep-away with a banana through the cage.

I pulled up to the Wesco station and parked. I was walking and saw through the corner of my eye that the lawyer was pulling in. I cascaded through the store as though I didn't notice. I reached into the cooler and grabbed a Monster. I was thinking about getting a doughnut as I heard someone yelling erratically at the other side of the store. "Hey!" It was the lawyer, trying to get my attention. I pretended that I didn't notice him "Hey!" He says as he walks up to me.

I looked at him and said nothing, still wearing my sunglasses. Apparently this is a sign of contempt and disrespect, because an Amusement Park where I had once worked had told us to take them off when we talked to people.

"Okay!" he said. "Be a smart-ass! I'll just call it in!", he said.

"Hmph? Pardon?" Call it in? He's not a cop! He said "call it in" like he was just going to add it to the big list of things he calls in to someplace. He had no witness, it's my word against his! Besides, I'm not sure I committed a crime. He was more dangerous when he pulled in front of me and decided to drive at a pace that was just a hair above idling. Who is to say that I didn't smell cheap scotch on his breath? How could anyone trust a man whose scalp looked like Borat's pubes? Surely no one who was sober would be yelling in a rage in a busy convenience store like this at 7:33am. "I have witnesses", I said diabolically just under my breath.

"Double yellow lines!" He said to me from a distance about an aisle away. I walked up to him and noticed that he was about 5 inches shorter than me. I recognized his shirt and tie from a J.C. Penny catalog. Apparently he had spent all his money on the taupe Mercedes.

"Those lines are there for a reason!" he yelled with anger and fear in his voice. He is used to confrontation, but he isn't used to a big Irish bastard like me staring him down this close. I said nothing and stared into him, struggling to contain my grin on my otherwise expressionless face. He dashed away like a squirrel does when you walk to close too him.

He put his arms up into the air and said "Be a smartass! I'll just call it in."

"Alright man, thanks for the advice!", I said. I thought about asking him his LSAT score, because I was fairly sure that my most recent number was higher than his. But I went to pay for my Monster, I had wasted too much time on this guy.

A man ahead of me in line aged about 55 he had a concerned look on his face as he was looking at the lawyer erratically get his coffee from Wesco's rather elaborate beverage station.

"Can you believe that douchebag?" I asked him to break the tension.

"He's a pretty prominent attorney in town with a lot of connections to judges, you might just apologize while you can." he said.

I had asked, "Apologize for what? The guy is a bully. You can't appease a bully, man. Remember the Rhineland?" The old man shrugged uncomfortably. I suppose that he didn't remember the Rhineland. I considered the possibility that this kind of complacency might pave the way for a 1000 Reich. But I don't suppose that is the sort of small talk you make in line at the Wesco Station to a man who just wants to get a refill on his bucket of popcorn and leave this madness behind. Little did he know was that the real madness laid within the man who was eating popcorn before noon.

"If he is such a bigshot, why does he smell like J&B at 7:35 AM?", I asked. He pretended that he didn't hear me. I chugged my Monster and drove off. I got to work well on time but I knew that the most important work that I had to do that day was behind me.

Maybe If We Mixed Them, There Would Be More Peace In The World