I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically.  Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma.  Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground.  We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households.  We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.

But it’s cool.  Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups.  Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities.  When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances.  I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me.  I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.

Fast food workers are characters.  Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors.  Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes.  I guess a few of those could have described me.

So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window.  It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.

Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him.  His dick isn’t big enough.”  “What do you mean?,” asked family woman.  “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.”  Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter.  She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety.  Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.

I don’t think I was offended at the time.  Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do.  But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled.  Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct.  And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.

So funny.

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