This is a reproduction of a story that I originally wrote about a year ago while I was on the clock at Barnes and Noble. I was sent to the music department for an hour while my co-worker Angela took her dinner break. The music department is, generally speaking, the most boring place in the store to work, and kind of secluded. Nobody looks in on you; without any customers you are alone.
So I am in the music department at 7:30 on a Friday night, the last hour of my shift, and the department is totally empty. And I am looking around for stuff to do, some CD’s to shelve or something, and I come upon Angela’s poetry she has been writing. And it’s really bad poetry, stuff about the darkness of her innermost self, and how when the birds sing it’s a form of prayer, and how her heart aches for a man’s touch, and so on. But it gives me the idea that I could pass some time by writing a brief story. And so I do.
I show the story to Angela, and she likes it a lot. Unfortunately she leaves it sitting on the counter where later Paula the store manager finds it. She reads it, and based on the handwriting and name of the main character concludes that I wrote it. I am busted.
On Monday morning I come in to work, and when I see Phillip he pulls me aside. He tells me what happened and that I am in trouble. He tells me that if I ever do something like that again I could be fired. He also tells me about the weekly manager’s meeting that took place that morning, and how he had been given the privilege of reading my story aloud to the group.
“Did they laugh at least?” I ask.
No he tells me, they didn’t really get into it that way, the reading was more designed to impress upon them the need to keep a better eye on their employees. I apologize for embarrassing him in front of the other managers, and Phillip, who is always a nice guy, tells me not to worry about it, and may he keep the story?
I think this introduction improves the story a great deal; the context is everything. The story itself is nothing too special, less than a page long and full of inside jokes, but when I do happen to re-read it I like to imagine the words being read in Phillip’s cheerful voice, as his fellow managers listen and soberly take to heart a lesson in productivity.
************
One day Andrew was working in the music department at Barnes and Noble, scanning and alphabetizing the Broadway shows, when Josh Groban walked in.
“Jesus!” Andrew thought, “His eyes are even closer together in person.”
Josh Groban strolled by Pop Rock, pausing only briefly by the Beatles bay, and headed over to Soul. Andrew watched him intently, trying not to be obvious about it, when suddenly Mr. Groban turned and walked directly towards him.
“Do you have any Otis Redding?” he asked.
Andrew showed him the Otis Redding selection, and then Aaron Neville. As he was finding Sly and the Family Stone, Josh Groban made a sudden move towards a nearby emergency exit door, kicking it open and sounding an alarm. Rod Stewart and Eva Cassidy ran into the room and before Andrew knew it a butterfly net had been flung over his head and he been carried out the door, into a waiting van which took off down the road at 60 miles an hour. When Joy, the manager on duty, came to see what was going on she found only an empty music department, the emergency exit door swinging open as the alarm blared.
“Why are you doing this? Where are you taking me?” Andrew asked. “Ms. Cassidy, didn’t you recently die from cancer?”
Blindfolded and then gagged, Andrew rode in the van for hours, taken to an abandoned barn in the remote countryside of Pennsylvania. There he was locked in a large room and forced to listen to the mediocre recordings of his abductors for days on end, living on a diet made up exclusively of tepid water and altoids. He died three weeks later from malnutrition, a stream of drool hanging from his lip, only the frailest shell of his sanity intact, and muttering over and over to himself, “It had to be you… It had to be you…”
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