"On a Stick"

"On a Stick"
By Kelton Sears




When I close my eyes sometimes I see little colored dots that move around. Like little neon lines that float the same way dandelion seeds do when you blow them away. Sometimes they pulsate. What the hell are those? IIs this normal? I don't know. All I find myself worrying about lately is if I'm ever going to do something. Just, anything. Something meaningful. Especially after what happened a week ago.

I was talking to my boss after work at Johnson's Co., which is really just the fancy name for a company that puts the sticks in corndogs. I don't know if you know that, but they ship out the corndogs to facilities like us and we put them in. It's really sick to watch. Can you imagine spending all day five times a week watching little sticks being shoved into supple, ready, and waiting corndogs? I feel dirty when I man the machine, like I am peeping in on an intimate doctors appointment. I hope you know what I am getting at. I feel sick.

Anyways, so I am talking to my cornboss at the corndog stick factory wearing my cornuniform, and he asks "so, how is your division?" nonchalantly, the way people high up do. Shootin' the cornbreeze, if you will. And what do I do? Vomit. I vomit all over the boss.

Now let me preface this.

I woke up that day with a huge message on my answering machine from the morgue. My grandma had died. I don't know if any of you have ever woken up with a dead grandma for an alarm clock, but it is a lot less cheerful than the one I have now that yells at me in a Mexican accent "Drop the pee-low! Eet's time to get up and drop the pee-low!" I like that alarm clock.
So I have woken up on the wrong side of the bed. I don't cry when I find out my grandma died. I don't know why. I was upset, don't get me wrong. I guess I just didn't really believe it. It seemed like a joke. I've known my grandma since I was born, and she always sent me stuff in the mail. "To The Koolest Grandson!" it would say in the speech bubble of a cat on a skateboard. The cool spelled with a "K" made it cooler apparently, or at least this is what the consultants at Hallmark had gathered. I would open up the cards and they would be really generic, but sweet. "Dear Ira, I hope you are having a 'kool' spring! Me and your Pap-pap are thinking of you out here, and we miss you very much. Love, Gran."
And now she was dead.

So I get up a little hazy, of course. Stumble around and do that morning moan that we all do. The moan of regret that we have responsibilities and places to be that are holding us back from an extra two or three hours of sleep. But my moan had a dead grandma thrown in there. Then I realize a dead grandma means a funeral.

I hate funerals.

In Mexico they celebrate death. When people die they have a fiesta and parades and kids make little skeleton candy. I thought of this when my alarm clock went off with the "Drop the pee-low!" voice ten minutes after I had gotten the call. Mexico. Didn't sound to bad right now. What is holding me back from just up and leaving south? I have enough gas in the tank to make it well out of Portland. It is always so easy in the movies. I figure that my mom and dad will be there at the funeral, crying. Everyone will be crying. If she sent everyone a "kool" card, you bet they'll be.

Maybe Mexico is poor. Maybe they do have an unstable government and all of that crap. But they know how to treat a dead guy. They make freaking candy when people die. I am going to Mexico.

I throw on my Johnson Co. corndog uniform and hop in my car.

Work is going to be a bitch today because my uniform has this little fringe somewhere that is poking the hell out of my thigh, and I can't find it. Whenever I look for it I have to dig my hands in my pants and search around for the phantom thread, and of course everyone else just assumes you're beating off. "Looking for something?" I get that one a lot. "Yeah. A thread. It's poking me. Screw off." And this has been going on for three days now. I want to just go and get a new uniform or something, but I guess you get fined for that. So I suffer in silence. Forever doomed to be a social victim of false-masturbation. Like I would masturbate. I'm not a perv. I get enough of that sick crap working at the corndog factory watching the rhythmic in and out of off sticks into greasy corn-coated hot dogs. The way the shell buckles under the pressure of the stick and then finally breaks under the enormous tension to be forcefully fed into the interior dog makes me gag. I have renounced sex completely after working at Johnson Co. Seriously.

So this thread is poking me and I am digging in my pants trying to find it in the Starbucks parking lot while a frumpy stay-at-home suburban mom stares at me as her little brat cries his eyes out. And then-

Splat.

I freeze. Hand in crotch. Time stops. Slowly I take my free hand and search around in my hair for the foreign substance. Oh! Got something. I retract in cautious disbelief, and examine the slick liquid on my hand. I won't have to send this one back to the lab for analysis. It's bird shit. Awesome.

And would you have it, the little brat stops crying.

The barista asks me three times whether or not I wanted low-fat milk in my drink. I think she just wanted to get another look at my shit-head. I need to find a bathroom.

So with droppings smeared in my scalp and a poop covered paper towel (there was no trash can in the bathroom and the toilet was taped shut) I drive to Johnson Co. Every station is playing "Jump" by Van Halen. I hate that song. I didn't the first five-hundred times, but the five-hundred first time, I had had it. I switch to AM. Who am I kidding? The last thing I want to listen to is elderly men debating about whether or not homosexuality is a sin or why gas prices aren't going down. The only talk radio worth listening to is This American Life anyway. And that's not just because me and Ira Glass share a first name. I think that this day might make a good story on there. They've never had one about a corndog stick guy before. Is this what I am reduced to? Corndog stick guy?

And then a cop pulls me over.

"License and registration."

I search around my glove compartment and a copy of Oprah Magazine falls out. Great. Now the guy thinks I am gay. Jenny always leaves her crap in here. I found a tampon the other day In the back seat. Half expected it to be used. She is not very dainty, Jenny.

And so I finally get to work, and get pass the "Ira! Is that a turd in your hair or are you just happy to see me?" jokes, which don't even make sense. And then I get past the "Ira! Is your hand in your pants, or are you just happy to see me?" jokes, which do make sense but aren't funny because the thread really itches. I get to my machine and start it up, using a delicate and technical series of button pushes and lever switches. The porno show begins, and the sticks begin their short but invigorating journeys into the very heart of America's favorite ballpark treat. The skin is so spongy. It makes this noise when it's penetrated, we call it "The Horror," because it sounds like the splatter slop noise they always use in scare-flicks when someone's bowels get ripped out. This noise fills the factory all day long, and when I first worked here it really got to me. I have a weak stomach.

But today The Horror was really getting to me. My grandma. Dead. I kept seeing her face, smiling as she wrote "Hope your spring is Kool!" on my card. She thought she was so clever. Maybe it wasn't the most original thing, but it was sincere.

And now she is dead.

I kept seeing her face on the corndogs. I often see things in the dogs. When you watch them all day, it's not unusual to start daydreaming. But seeing my grandpa superimposed over these sick slimy things that were mechanically being probed made me feel really sick. She deserved better.

I finish the days quota, feeling really ill. I had seen my grandma's sanctity violated for six hours straight now, and I just wanted to go home and wash this shit out of my hair.

And then my boss calls me over.

He is talking to someone else when I get over there. Something about NASCAR. I hate NASCAR. All I know about it is that one of the drivers' names is Dick Trickle. I don't know why he goes by dick instead of Richard. Does he realize that his name is ridiculous? Probably not. It is supposed to get up to one-hundred and ten degrees in those stock cars or something. Still doesn't mean it's a sport.

So when the boss is done he turns to me. "So, how is your division?"

He has the hairiest mole on his neck. So hairy. And these hairs are at least an inch long. No joke. And to make it worse, these were full fledged mole hairs. Those are the really dark and coarse ones. He had at least three of them and they jiggled when he talked. I felt a really quick gag and then I gave up. Warm vomit flew out of my mouth. Right on his shirt. Quirkizoid the Corndog stood smiling on his shirt, waving behind a thin coating of throw up.

And now I don't work there anymore. I quit after that. I wasn't destined to stare at a conveyor belt, feeling dirty. I am going to call This American Life. I heard they get lots of stories by people pitching them to them.