My Worst Bloody Temp Job

I decided to go to grad school on a whim.  I hated my dead-end retail management job (Hollister, anyone?) and felt like doing something nutty.  So, I quit, applied to schools and ended up in New York City eight months later.  I gave all my furniture to Big Brothers, Big Sisters and packed two suitcases.  I arrived at JFK with two bags and $2000.

Little did I know how difficult the NYC job market would be.  After a stint as a server in a pretentious restaurant with a rat problem, I ended up doing temp work.  Not administrative temp work.  Pretty much anything temp work.  My first job was spending a Saturday helping two young girls move out of their apartment on the Upper East Side.  It was harmless, I got some exercise and they gave me a Coke.

Others followed.  I sorted a rich guys bills that he'd collected in a giant cardboard box.  I ran an errand here or there.  Then I accepted an afternoon gig that truly threw me for a loop.

The agency described the job as "An elderly woman whose husband had passed away and needed help packing up the apartment."  No problem.  It paid well, it was mindless, and I could wash my hands of it after eight short hours.  Only the description had been muddy at best.

I arrived at the Tribeca Tower to see a morose, frail woman speaking harshly with a doorman who was avoiding eye contact.  She knew who I was right when I walked through the sliding doors and she greeted me with a warning in a broken Russian accent.  "I don't know what the agency told you, but..."

The "but" was a big one.  It wasn't her husband.  It was her son.  And it wasn't just a death, but a bloodbath.  When we arrived at the door of the apartment on the 52nd floor, the door frame still had yellow police tape that had been torn off, but left frayed pieces behind.  Then the odor hit me like a wall of smoke.  Though every window in the apartment was open, the smell of decaying blood was startling.  As I looked around the room, I noticed several bath towels on the floor with dried brown blood stains seeped through at the entry way to the kitchen.  On the stainless steel dishwasher, there was a bloody hand print that slid down to the floor. 

Dutifully and with limited verbal interaction, I began to pack up what she put in front of me.  When she placed female clothing and jewelry in front of me, she said cryptically, "If it wasn't for her, he'd still be here."  I nodded with my best attempt at empathy over the vague, but grotesque circumstances.

At this point she started to offer his possessions to me.  Not the cherished ones.  She asked me to go through his closet and take anything I wanted.  I did to humor her, but he was an extra large and I would have looked like a kid playing dress up.  By the time she'd unloaded all she could on me (and all I could carry on the subway back to Queens), I had some lingonberry juice, 2 bottles of champagne, 2 bottles of Cabernet (which forced me to have to step on the bloody towels), and a $400 kindle which I packed up nicely for the ride home.

Toward the end of the day, we had everything packed up and taken what we could to the Fedex downstairs She refused to ride the elevator alone or stay in the apartment in solitude, so she made every trip with me, though she carried nothing.

I gathered my freebie box and stood by the door as we prepared to leave the apartment for the last time.  She then said, 'I need five minutes' and walked to the bay windows that looked out onto a stunning panorama of the city with the Empire State building standing tall not far away.  She clasped her hands behind her back, bent her head down and sobbed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes.  The deep, hard kind.

Frozen, I just stood there.  She had had  such a harsh demeanor and seemed uncapable of such frailty.  I walked toward her to offer a hug, but she just held out her hand and said bluntly, 'No.'  I went back and stood by my box at the front door.  We then rode down the elevator in silence and I left her forever.

I got a text from her several weeks later simply asking for her FedEx receipts to be mailed to her.  Which I did. I don't remember her name.  God help me, I will never temp again.

When You Grown Up in a Small Town and Leave...

"I was born in a small town.  No smaller.  Nope.  Even smaller.  In the middle of Nebraska.  You've never heard of it."

It truly boggles peoples' minds when I tell them I'm from a town of 211 people.   Especially when I'm sharing it with coworkers on the 42nd floor of a skyscraper in Manhattan, a stone's throw from Central Park.  Most of them come from such far off places as "Upstate" and "Philadelphia." 

Then I prattle off my list of facts that are equally mystifying:

• I had a graduating class of 8 people.  8.  (However, this allowed me to be salutatorian and give the lamest, last minute speech ever; also I'm not counting the one kid who didn't walk in the ceremony, because I wasn't fond of him anyway)
• The nearest movie theater, fast food, or bowling alley was 65 miles away.
• I grew up on a cattle ranch.
• I could legally drive alone to school at age 14.
• My father made me pull wild marijuana so that it wouldn't spread. 
• We chopped our own firewood for heat.
• Cattle brandings were considered a social event.  Townspeople gathered, drank cheap beer, burned cattle flesh with a scalding iron, and threw calf-balls on the fire - then ate them right there.

What I also have found, 13 years removed, is that I'm the only one allowed to make fun of it (or others who grew up similarly).  Because here's the deal, it does have it's pluses.  Chiefly among them:

• Most people are so nice.  My theory is that it is because they rarely encounter each other.  Here I'm not ever sure if there isn't somebody sleeping in my closet.
• Nature.  Dear God, I remember that.  Tubing in the river is one of my favorite childhood memories. Also, yards.  Some places people get to have yards.
• Freedom.  I rode my bike everywhere.  I swam in the river without parental supervision.  Before I was even 10!  I even kayaked by myself when I was 13.  But that was against parent's wishes.
• Prices.  I think houses there are going for $12.99.
• Nostalgia.  I like it a whole lot more in retrospect.  Those wide open spaces can seem freeing now instead of suffocating.

But when you leave a small town and return for any reason, it creates an odd sensation.  Nearly all of my friends are gone, and the one that remains has made it clear that it's a temporary stay.  My grandparents have passed away, my parents have moved, but what remains is the very fabric of the town.  You have amazing salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing people on one hand and on the other you have your run-of-the-mill washouts.  (They don't call the Midwest the meth capital of the world for nothing.)  Lovely women and steadfast gentlemen I once knew still hug me and shake my hand as if I've never left.  And if someone hated me all through high school, odds are pretty excellent that they have a bowling ball sized beer belly, still say "Git er done!", and are out shooting pheasants for no real discernible reason. So, I guess life evens itself out.

And also, I'm pretty sure I buried a Folger's can as a time capsule somewhere on our old property.  If somebody finds it, you can keep the five dollars, but I want my D.A.R.E. t-shirt back.

Contemplating 'Cabin in the Woods'

I can't stand horror movies.

I don't like watching people get murdered.  I don't like seeing organs cut out of people's bodies.  I don't like slick banter during slayings.  Call me old fashioned.  Please.

In high school, I think I even did a speech about Kevin Williamson after he started writing the Scream trilogy, so I wasn't always so stuffy.  (They were very lax with speech topics in my high school.)  I couldn't get enough of Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox running for their lives while still being just too cool for school.  But then, I also used to like singer-songwriters.  Now both are equally painful for me.

So, I decided to go see 'Cabin in the Woods' this weekend as a change of pace.  I tend to agree with most film reviewers and this one got atypically positive reviews.  Intrigued by the 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I decided to put aside my distaste for the genre and pay $13 for thing.

During the trailers, I realized I'd made a horrible mistake.  Particularly creepy was a preview for a movie about people who lived through the 80's Chernobyl disaster and (I would guess) suffered from radiation that causes you to murder people for some far-fetched reason that will be posited as totally normal.  The radiation altered the brain stem to where it only can survive on human flesh. Some nonsense like that.  But there is a child and an abandoned warehouse so I can imagine what sort of visceral pleasure suicidal teenagers could get from it.  Either way, my palms were already sweating.

Then Cabin in the Woods started.  And it was like nothing I've ever seen before.  It was a more brutal Hunger Games movie with even higher stakes (if you can believe that).  It was self-referential in a way that Scream was, but the settings were all mythological and over-the-top.  Believe me, the way this movie ends, is in no way what you would expect from how it begins.

I hated every minute of it, reminding myself that I could go to Panera after it was over.

However, when it was over, I couldn't stop talking about it.  What did it mean?  Was it supposed to be campy?  Did they know those parts were as silly?  I texted friends about it, read reviews, and forced myself to think about it before bed so that I wouldn't dream about it.  (I often employ this sort of reverse psychology on myself).  This movie really got into my head.  Everything I expected to happen, didn't.  The murders weren't even the unsettling part.  It was the general idea, the human lack of empathy, the way they weren't afraid to go there.  What's more interesting is that previews didn't even hint at the bizarre events that were going to unfold onscreen. Now there's a rarity.

Then I thought - how many movies can I say that about?  Almost none.  There are movies with little twists and turns that are twisty and turny in that way we've come to expect.  This was unexpected without being expected.  I swear that makes sense.   The closest example I can think of is 'Closer' with Julia Roberts and Jude Law from several years ago.  That movie was extremely unpleasant, but I couldn't shake it. Just the fact that I can compare this to a drama based on a play hints at how themes from this movie didn't have the typical empty horror origin.

I recommend it. I didn't enjoy it, but I recommend it.  Strangely I feel like that's the highest form of praise you can give.  And it will be YEARS before I see another horror film.