…and I swear to Buddha, Jehova or whomever else you want to swear to that I have a sign on my forehead that reads, “Only whack jobs come to my cash register line, puhleeeeeeze.” Today I’m ringing away and some guy comes up while on his cell phone.

“Okay, now I’m going to do something strange,” he says to me. And he hands me the phone.

Me, of course, being the happy-go-lucky little employee that I am says, “Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“Oh, I work at [Name]. Apparently your husband wants you to order your coffees from me.” And I’m guessing this is the case because he’s a fucking moron. As it turns out, I was not far from the truth. What I was soon to realize was that I was dealing with not one, but two, morons.

She proceeded to describe these two drinks. Her first description around totally confused me. And I’m not the fucking moron in this equation. So she says, “Okay, let me try this again because I know I can do this better.”

My response? “Okay.”

But here’s what I really wanted to say:

“Okay, you fucking idiot. What are you talking about. I’m on a cell phone at the register and the people in line behind your husband are ready to mutiny and shoot me in the bleeding head. Can you please just get this done already?”

All the while this is going on, the person who actually has to make these two drinks and the supervisor are there laughing at me because, although I’m being sweet and charming on the phone, my body language and facial expressions are belying my true feelings…the ones that are telling my brain to “kill the idiot in front of you and move the line along.”

The order turned out to be two of the largest cold drinks we offer, with a combination of hot and cold items and — between the two drinks — exactly 28 pumps of syrup. Are you fucking kidding me? Twenty-eight pumps of syrup. Oh, and then, I forgot to mention that at the end of the order she says, “Can you do me a favor?”

By now, I’m in such a state that I say, “Oh, sure.”

Here’s what I really wanted to say:

“Okay, sister, haven’t I done you enough favors already today? I’m on your husband’s cell phone taking your drink order in the middle of a one-hundred-degree-day afternoon rush. Are you kidding me?”

But I didn’t say that. So, then, she says, “Can you ask him to bring me home seven packages of Equal?”

I mean, why bother at that point? Twenty-eight pumps of syrup isn’t enough? Why go to Equal now? Just order thirty-five fucking pumps of syrup instead. WTF?

The only thing we can hope for is that these two go into a diabetic coma before they order this crap from us again. But I’m never that lucky.

I am far from done with Millipore party stories, but I simply have to interject something here. This is once again from the annals of what I say to customers versus what I really want to say. Again, I’m not going to reveal my employer’s trade name. No siree. Not today anyway, but I have to tell you that there are a lot of irritating customers who frequent my store (as well as a lot of extremely wonderful customers, I might add). Here’s what pisses me off.

One from column A

A lot of these people come off like they are so much better than anyone else. I’m sure this is proportionally related to the amount of gold jewelry they wear…at least in their minds. If they are so educated, rich and smart, why can’t they say a simple word like ARTISAN. Nope. They can’t. To many of these people, it’s ARTESIAN bread. Like what? Does the bread come from a fucking well? Maybe there is indeed a bread that is baked in an underground oven and comes flying up out of the ground under pressure. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it’s because the people from snootyville get to add a syllable and sound even smarter than others. Or maybe it’s because they don’t understand phonics. You know, PHONICS. Read the fucking label. Sound the word out. So, let’s go through this again:

ARTESIAN: Refers to a well in which water is under pressure and comes to the surface naturally.

ARTISAN: A worker who practices a trade or handicraft OR a product made by a craftsman in small quantities.

NOT EVEN FUCKING CLOSE, FOLKS. It isn’t Artesian Bread. It’s Artisan Bread. ARTISAN. There. Done with that rant.

And now, a word from the land of cluelessness

There are also people who come through the store who are simply clueless, in a fucking fog, out of touch, and disinterested in knowing what the hell they are talking about. Let’s take the issue of TRANSGENDERED vs. TRANSVESTITE. Yes, we have a transgendered person in the store. SHE is a wonderful person. One of our customers, however, refers to her as a transvestite. Okay, let’s understand the difference here:

TRANSVESTITE: A person, and especially a male, who adopts the dress and often the behavior typical of the opposite sex especially for purposes of emotional or sexual gratification.

TRANSGENDERED: A person who expresses or identifies with a gender that differs from the one which corresponds to the person’s sex at birth. These people aren’t necessarily transvestites, folks. Generally speaking, they are going through some medical process to change their gender identity.

Okay, now we have established that differentiation. The subject of his question was even more disturbing, since we have also hired a female employee of Middle Eastern origin who happens to wear the traditional head garb. He wanted to know how the “Muslim person” was getting along with the “transvestite.” You know, like we had some juicy stuff to report. Like we would? He asked me while I was at the register. I just looked at him stupefied, completely taken aback however momentarily. Then, I broke my silence and said, “You know, [NAME], we don’t have those problems in this store. We all get along and watch each other’s backs. We don’t need those problems coming in from the outside.” Later on, our manager spoke to him and straightened him out. ‘Oh, but he’s just irritant number one on this topic. There’s a woman who’s even worse.

Okay, so, she’s pregnant. But her rudeness goes beyond simple hormonal explanations. She’s just a rude bitch, plain and simple. I swear to whomever is up there that she’s going to give birth to the spawn of Satan. No question about it. The thing is going to be born with little horns and a nasty little attitude. This wonderment of nature comes in one day, walks up to the register to order, and says, “Okay, so there was a guy there on the bar yesterday with make-up on. Was he kidding?”

Employee A responded, “Oh, you mean (NAME)? No, actually she’s not kidding.”

Now, this woman is not very old. So, she doesn’t have that excuse either. She must have spent the majority of her existence under a fucking rock if she doesn’t get it. Either way, she was just out of line. Her attitude was despicable. That said, I thought Employee A was very polite to her. This is what I would have wanted to say had she come up to my cash register:

“Get a fucking clue, honey. What makes you think you deserve an explanation to begin with? Just order your freakin’ coffee and get the hell out of our store. The only thing we owe you is coffee. We don’t owe you a peep show into our fucking personal lives. End of story. Oh, and by the way, I hope your baby is a hermaphrodite. Have a nice day, you Godforsaken douce bag!”

And since I’m sure she wouldn’t have a clue what a hermaphrodite is:

HERMAPHRODITE: An animal or person having both male and female reproductive organs.

Now that I think of it, that’s a pretty harsh thing to wish on the unsuspecting spawn. Just the fact that he or she will have to grow up with the mother from hell is probably curse enough. I’m trying to envision her in say, oh, thirty years when she’s in menopause. Hide the handguns and the nukes.

A few weeks later, she’s back at my register again. We have a floater as a routine who helps move the line along with the second person ringing (that would be me). She’s a confused bitch on top of everything else. Some really nice customer places his order and she turns to him and says, “I don’t know what you are doing, but you just ordered before me.” I held my tongue and proceeded to serve her highness, but here’s what I wanted to say:

“No dickwad. He’s just fine. You simply don’t “get” the line movement. The physics are waaaay too far advanced for your tiny little pea brain. And by the way, have I told you what a fucking caustic personality you have today and every day you waltz into this store to bring a little ray of sunshine to us all?”

Okay. I’m pretty much done with this rant. I feel much better. Goodnight.

The winter dragged on. Our fifth and final cord of wood was delivered. The house was freezing and, perhaps spurred by guilt, Mr. Flashback suddenly took it upon himself to come into our house during the day when we were not there and start the stoves. Nice touch, but we were very uncomfortable with that. We felt violated, like we had no privacy with this guy working here. What really pissed us off was that his portion of the house — the workshop — was heated by propane, and we were paying pretty steep rent and freezing our butts off.

When February rolled around, it got even colder. The deep freeze made it impossible for us to have any kind of intimate relationship in the house, and we were still like little lovebunnies. We took to the Camry. I had a great 1992 Toyota Camry that became our lovenest away from our original lovenest. We’d sneak out to the car late at night, turn on the heat, crack the windows, turn on the stereo and lay the seat back. The car was parked in the driveway way back from the road, and Beth’s Honda Accord was always parked behind it. Plenty of privacy. We actually had a lot of laughs and made it a pretty good time. That car went 341,000 miles and lasted until 2003 before it died. We’ve never had another car like it.

Then, mercifully, the weather started to moderate. March and April passed with Mr. Flashback still coming in to start the wood stoves. I finally had to ask him to stop. I told him that it was a real invasion of privacy and it needed to stop immediately. He did. The warm weather brought a new set of problems. We had spiders you could saddle and ride. I mean, these things were huge. Here was Beth’s technique for killing them: She’d stand on a chair, drop a piece of cardboard on top of it, and then jump on it. Then, she’d leave it there for me to pick up when I got home. These things were so big that the cats and dog were afraid of them. They were all over the basement.  It was like visiting Aragog and his clan. I can’t believe that this guy allowed his son to sleep down there among the arachnids.

Then, Muffy (I didn’t name her) developed an odd habit. She’d jump up on the kitchen table and sit there, looking up at the ceiling for long periods of time. I used to laugh at her, and tease Beth about the cat losing her mind. Then, one day I opened the pantry door and saw that the cereal boxes had been eaten through. That was a bit unnerving. It was then that I realized that Muffy wasn’t crazy at all. She could hear the squirrels in the walls. We also had something that looked like a prairie dog running around the back yard. Regardless of whatever it was — to us it was part of the rat family. For all we knew, they could be in the house too. We began to see that the house had holes in it and that nothing really fit together structurally. That’s because Mr. Flashback must have had several flashbacks while he was building this place. No wonder these things were getting in the house.

One day, I got a frantic call at work from Beth. She was taking Simone and getting out of the house and going to the beach because Mr. Flashback was out in the backyard picking off squirrels with a handgun. She wasn’t worried about the cats because they were laying low. I called the Gloucester Police Department, told them who I was, and reported what Mr. Flashback was doing. The policeman I spoke to said that he couldn’t do that even if he had a permit. They said they were heading over and would take care of it. By the time I got home from work, Beth was back and things had settled down. And Mr. Flashback had gone home, probably pissed at us for turning him in.

Things continue to deteriorate

I have to say the summer in that house was wonderful. There were no temperature issues like there had been during the winter. We were dreading the summer because none of the windows, except for the attic room, could take an air conditioner. But we really didn’t need one that summer. We had other issues, however.  For example, Mr. Flashback was told to fix the wood stoves. He had no intention of doing that. There was still no permit hanging by the front door either. Our downstairs bathroom was a problem as well. It was made of plywood, including inside the bath tub. It was nasty and unhealthy. When we brought our first-last-security payment by, he promised he’d have the bathroom done before we moved in. It was now June or July and it was growing nastier by the day. We were at the point where we stopped using it and closed it off.

In spite of the multiple issues, we were never late with the rent. We paid as expected on August 1. Throughout the month of August, we called him about several things. He wasn’t even returning calls, and he certainly wasn’t showing up at his workshop where we could catch him face to face. I finally decided to give it up and called an attorney. He came out and met with us and we told him what had been going on. He told us not to pay the September rent, and to tell Mr. Flashback that we were not paying any more rent. In addition, the attorney was filing against the landlord so that a portion of our rent would have to be repaid.

In the meantime, the lease was up in October anyway. We had been looking around for a while. We really wanted to stay in Gloucester, but we were having a difficult time finding anything that we really liked.  The only place we found that we liked was in Beverly. We really wanted out of there badly, so we ended up taking it for October 1. The case against the landlord was still moving through the courts, and living there was not easy. One day we were putting some stuff in the car to bring to Beverly, and Beth was really aggravated at Mr. Flashback for refusing to talk to us. She began to walk towards his workshop as it was the first time he’d shown up in a couple of weeks. I yelled at her to leave it alone, but she insisted. Then it was us who got into a huge fight. What happened next was like something you see in a movie.

Somehow, the woman across the street decided to become involved in our fight. If there’s one thing you never do, it’s come in between two fighting (Italian) lesbians. She made some kind of comment about our fighting as she came up the driveway, and Beth and I turned toward her at the same time and yelled, “Shut the fuck up.” The woman immediately turned tail and left, while Beth and I burst out laughing. That was the best thing that could ever have happened because it took Beth’s mind off Mr. Flashback and re-focused her on moving.

The final day

We had help from my niece and her husband on the final day. By then, we had some kind of weird jumping fleas in the living room. We’re sure they came in with the wildlife because none of our pets were outdoor pets. The cats never went outside and the only time Simone went out was when she was walked. We never took her into the woods because we were worried about ticks. Because of the fleas, we had to leave all the carpets we bought behind because we didn’t want to bring them to Beverly with us.

We had been enjoying some party material in the back of the U-Haul truck when I remembered there was one more box of books upstairs. We ran in to get it. We ran up the first landing and turned the corner. There on the landing was a squirrel. He didn’t look any too friendly. In fact, he looked as though he was standing guard. You know, he wasn’t going to let us go upstairs. My niece’s husband turned to me and started laughing. “Screw the books. Let’s get the fuck out of here.” We laughed all the way back down the stairs. We blew out of there and never looked back.

Beth and I still talk about going back to Gloucester someday, but it probably won’t ever happen. Unless it has changed drastically, the school system sucks. Beth was living in a second-floor duplex that looked right out over Gloucester harbor. It was an  unbelievable view every morning. We should have just stayed there. But things like that usually happen for a reason. I guess.

About a month or so after we moved into the condo in Beverly, Mr. Flashback settled out of court. We got about $6,000 back.

Love makes you do stupid things. It’s as simple as that. I met Beth not long after my mom passed away. She was living in Gloucester and I was living in Melrose when we met.  Every self-respecting lesbian has heard this joke (written in the 80s by Lea DeLaria):

Q: What does a lesbian bring on a second date?

A: A U-Haul

There’s a reason for this joke. It’s pretty much true, at least that’s been my experience. Lesbians couple up quickly. I knew right away after I met Beth that we were going to move in together. However, after my experience with Miss Headcase, I was bound and determined to fight this urge for as long as I could. So, for a while we split our time between locations, four days a week in Melrose and three in Gloucester. We met in mid-July and I held out until October 1.

Because we both loved the ocean and because we wanted to try to rent a house, we decided that Gloucester was where we wanted to live. It was going to be a long commute for both of us: At the time, Beth was working in Quincy, Massachusetts and I was working in Bedford, Massachusetts. Beth’s commute was much more grueling because she actually had to go through Boston and further south. It was a great area, though, and we felt it was worth it. We found what we thought was the perfect place right near the Wingaersheek Beach salt marshes, on Concord Street. It was a contemporary, with lots of glass and heated with solar and house-burning — oops, I mean wood-burning — stoves.

Our bedroom was awesome. It was big and had a balcony that overlooked the back yard, which had a clearing where we used to play frisbee. Behind that were some beautiful bushes and trees, and directly behind the bushes was an impressive rock wall. It was just beautiful when it snowed.

Our landlord was a unique kind of guy, definitely lost in the 60s. We’re going to call him Mr. Flashback. He and his family had been living here, but now he was moving them above his retail shop, which was in Essex. So, he was renting this place. The only rub was that his actual workshop was attached to the house we were renting. He seemed like a nice enough guy, so we decided to take the place anyway. This was the beginning of the Nightmare on Concord Street.

An idyllic beginning turns sour

It was still relatively warm when we moved in. The first couple of months were a blast, really. The upstairs level became our little lovenest. We’d buy champagne on Friday nights and hang out up there — like all day on Saturday and Sunday. We had no children, just two cats and a dog,  and no other commitments. We were both working 9-5 jobs. We had the whole weekend to ourselves every weekend.

The Flashback family displayed some odd behavior. First, they hadn’t been able to catch their cat to take it with them. It was hanging around the house and was nasty. They actually set a trap for it on the back patio with a can of tuna fish and, when they finally caught it, the thing nearly ripped one of the kids’ arms to shreds. Lovely animal. I was glad to see it go since we had two peace-loving kitties (Muffy and Leni) and one very mellow Miniature Schnauzer (Simone) and didn’t want the thing accidentally getting into the house.

That wasn’t all. One morning we opened the shades covering the sliders in the kitchen. The sliders looked out on the back yard. We were eating breakfast one morning and had our backs to the sliders. We were talking, but then I stopped dead with a feeling that someone was looking at us. When I turned around, his children (the ones that were mobile) were plastered against the sliders looking in at us. I turned back to Beth and simply asked, “What would happen if I suddenly decided to throw you on the table and make love to you right now?” She burst out laughing. I made a mental note to talk to Mr. Flashback about this little oddity.

Then, the winter set in and it was freakin’ cold. Mr. Flashback said it would only take one cord of wood to heat the entire place for the winter. Mr. Flashback was either hallucinating or full of shit. We blew through that first cord in no time, and we ordered another and blew through that. In the meantime, we couldn’t seem to get the wood stoves to much affect the temperature in the house — we couldn’t seem to get the thermostat out of the fifties. And seriously, on the nights we’d meet in town and go out to Club Cafe, we’d get home late and we couldn’t get the house up out of the forties.

We bought -20 degree sleeping bags and space heaters, and camped out in the living room for the winter in front of Beth’s huge projection television. This room was largely glass and it was freezing in the winter. The bags and space heaters made it tolerable. On the other end of the spectrum we had the room where our stereo was. There was another wood stove in there, but the room was completely closed in except for the entry way. The room got so fucking hot that nobody could sit in there. In fact, the furniture got so dried out from the heat that we had to get rid of it because it splintered. In between we had the kitchen. If Mr. Flashback had thought to put a window in between the kitchen and the stereo room, the problem of extreme hot and extreme cold would have been solved.

We also had our third cord of wood delivered and this time the idiot who delivered it forgot to pull the tarp on top of it, and it got soaked in an ice storm while we were at work. One day Beth came home to find me atop the wood pile chipping away at it with her ice climbing pick and muttering more swears per minute than she could count. I had been at it for days and drying it out. The thing is, it never burns right after that no matter how much you allow it to dry, and this fact brought about the night I lost it.

“We’re having a chimney fire at 274 Concord Street”

One night we got home from work late after a day-long snow storm. The house was freezing. I went to the basement and got the stove going down there. It took forever because the wood was still damp, but I finally got it going. I left the basement door open in the hopes that some of the heat would rise. Then, I headed for the teeny room. There was no amount of paper or kindling I could burn that was going to get this wood going. It was just smoking and smoldering, generating no heat whatsoever. It was at this point that I lost it.

I immediately stood up and took the photos off the wall. I took out the photos and began burning the wooden frames. Beth came in and saw me and really tried hard not to laugh, but that was impossible. She decided that the best bet would be for her to get the hell away from the area, get under the sleeping bag and watch some Monty Python. I continued to burn decorative wooden items. Then, it happened. I remember Mr. Flashback’s words exactly:

“You’ll know you’re having a chimney fire because it will suddenly sound like a freight train is running through chimney.”

That’s exactly what I heard, but I was hoping that wasn’t what was actually going on. I turned to look out the window and the entire back yard was lit up orange. Beth came running in wondering just what the hell was going on. “Oh, I said, it was a chimney fire, but it looks like it’s stopped already.” Then the back yard lit up again and the sound resumed. I grabbed the phone and dialed the fire department. I simply told them there was a chimney fire at 274 Concord Street. They told me they were on the way.

Then I called Mr. Flashback, who had a unique response. When I told him what was going on he said, “Oh, well, we’re going to dinner. If anything bad really happens call us at this number.” Then, he proceeded to give us a telephone number to call in case we needed him. After he hung up, I looked at the phone in total disbelief. No real concern. No worry. It wouldn’t be the way I’d react if it were my house. The arrival of the fire trucks snapped me out of my stupor. Some of the firemen went up on the roof. About five or six filed into the house, tracking mud and snow everywhere. Two headed for the wood stoves. Bringing up the rear was the Fire Marshall.

He walked around the house for a while looking things over, then he walked up to Beth who, of course, rerouted him to me. He asked who I was and I gave him my name and told him we moved in October first. It was now January. Then he said, “I take it you’re not the owner.” I explained that we were renting and I gave him the owner’s name. He began to write it down and as he was writing a light apparently came on inside his head. He repeated Mr. Flashback’s real last name again. “Oh, yeah, I know this guy.” He shook his head. Then, he proceed to tell me that the wood stoves were installed improperly and that he’d have to fix them. They should be 36″ from the wall, not 12″ from the wall. He also told me that there was supposed to be a rental permit posted on the front of the house. Then he proceeded to ask me about the back-up heating system. I told him there wasn’t one. His response? “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I wasn’t. He told me that he was going to be contacting Mr. Flashback. After a three-hour visit, the firemen went on their way and I proceeded to clean the house. We both called in sick the next day, and I had a cord of dry wood delivered.

Things were getting curiouser and curiouser, and the situation would soon come to a head.

The other night we had a friend from my old corporate servitude days over for dinner. I’ve already confessed to having a Facebook account and I just randomly began typing names in one day. Bella’s name popped up and I was equally as excited to find that she lives one town over in Newburyport. To put it mildly, we had a blast. We shared stories about where we worked together that neither of us told each other about in the past.

The other aspect that was great is that our career paths since our corporate days aren’t that different. I was almost embarrassed to tell her I’ve been shucking coffee to the entitled masses for the last four years until I found out she was a cashier at Whole Foods for six years. Life is great, isn’t it? Where else but in America can you be the absolute best at what you do and end up kissing retail butt? It’s the new American dream…sort of like a reverse mortgage in drag.  Today she’s designing  jewelry and taking her stuff on the road to shows, and I’m trying to make money writing.

Anyway, we had a person in common when we worked together that I can best call certifiable. In the corporate battle of the wills between Bella and someone I’ll call Mr. Anal, Bella got the short end of the stick.  He was the problem. Not her. However, even I didn’t know how whacked he was until I had gotten fired and started using him as a freelance designer for my business.

To call this guy anal retentive would be mild. We’d miss every freakin’ deadline because he would bounce around between ideas for so long. Then, when you got the material from him, there were the inherent errors. Typos. Bad line breaks. Missing punctuation. You name it. Things that should never have happened. Sloppy. He was just plain sloppy and it drove me fucking crazy because it invariably created more delays in delivering the product. It was then that I began to realize what Bella had been up against.

The long and short of it is that this guy was obsessed with colonics and his internal piping. He was (and I hear he still is) a whack job. His wife, however, Mrs. Shrew, really wore the pants in his family. She pushed this guy around like he was a pile of trash and she was a broom. Since my Beth always calls me Freud, let me exercise my pathetically appointed psychological knowledge: Mr. Anal was obsessed with his internal piping because he felt like a pile of shit most of the time. I mean, you could almost feel like he was the worst person on the planet…until you spent more than an hour with he and Mrs. Shrew together. There would be no taming of this shrew.

Anyway, it came to the point where my business was falling apart and, believe me, I owed a lot of money. He was one of the people I owed. I mean, when I say I lost everything, I’m talking a homeless type of everything. I’m not ready to talk about that today, so don’t hold your breath. The long and short of it is, in spite of this fact, he dogged me to the point where he paid to have me arrested. You know, aside from torturing someone who did something unintentionally, there was no purpose to that. But then again, I annoyed the crazy person.

Standard coward’s disclaimer: With the exception of Beth (my wife) and myself, none of the names here are real. I’m not going to do that unless people feel comfortable enough to be named. And, as you will be able to deduce, some given names mean something while others do not. There’s no real reason for using the name Bella. It was just top of mind. There is, however, a reason for using Mr. Anal and Mrs. Shrew.