Someone once suggested I write about all the people I encountered in the grocery store, so here goes.

The general manager of the grocery store had obviously been a titty-loving, vodka-downing hard-partying frat boy back in his youth but succumbed to his family's expectations of marriage and family, consequently cutting the late nights at the strip club and hungover mornings short. The grocery store was a safe bet: being a manager meant good money, job stability, and no real pressure to work hard. Teenage girls were a plentiful source of labor and Lord knows the manager had a wandering eye. It wouldn't surprise me to turn on the news and find that he had been charged with statutory rape and was facing the maximum sentence in a prison somewhere. Rumor has it he slept with an employee. Rumors ran rampant in this place. One merely had to sneeze and the entire dairy, meat and produce sections were crawling with all sorts of perverted explanations. Guys were equally as guilty as girls in the spreading of gossip. I remember one of the first nights I worked there. The player of the store, I'll call him A, came up to me and said, "Is it true your boyfriend was using a dildo in your ass and your mom walked in?"

I learned good and fast that I should never tell anyone anything that I did not mind being repeated to each and every employee in that God awful store. Petty relationships sprang up all the time and were extinguished just as quickly as they began. I made this mistake once. As a newbie I was young and naive. One boy, C, was very nice to me in my days of scanning infancy. He'd talk to me, take an interest in what I had to say and throw a few compliments here and there. Wow, I thought. Maybe I could strike up a neat little relationship all in the confines of my place of employment. Wrong. Wrong, wrong wrong. My mother found him handsome, probably more handsome than I found him, but since I had been barren in the romance field I decided that no harm could be done. One evening we made out in my room and I asked him to keep our budding relationship quiet. Sure, he promised. Of course.

He told one person. But that was his best friend, so I let it go. Soon a few other people knew and eventually trusty old A came up to me and asked if we had made out. Since I had kept my mouth shut I knew whom to blame. Damn him, damn him and his big mouth. But it was all my fault. I had committed two cardinal sins: never date someone from work and never expect anyone to keep a secret. From that point on I steered clear from anyone wearing a black smock and a name tag.

People came and went all the time. Some got fired for stealing money, others for stealing candy bars, and one was arrested for raping a 13-year-old girl in the back parking lot of a pet store. Two girls who worked there died; one was involved in a tragic car accident and the other took her own life two weeks before Christmas. One boy was fired for being drunk on the job, another for having an attitude, and yet another for being consistently late. It was a cashier-eat-cashier world out there.