I once saw a folded bill lying beside our tomato display. Seeing its red tint, I could tell that it was a ten, with which I could probably have bought eight medium cups of coffee. I knew just how it was folded, too—the way the front of the bill was hidden, uneven and concealing Hamilton’s face. I tried to forget it was there, reminding myself that I didn’t have to get involved with the plight of responsibility. Instead, I started digging through my box of tomatoes. The vine cluster tomatoes give off this yellow-gold dust that causes irritation and can temporarily damage your skin. In the handbook, it’s recommended that employees wear plastic gloves to protect our hands. However, I learn better from watching and acting rather than instruction. It seems that nobody follows this rule. The trick is to just grab it from the base, avoiding the dust. The handbook also told me a lot of things, most of which I’ve forgotten. Actually, the entirety of my produce training brought on a lot of unnecessary anxiety. It became a lot easier to just learn by jumping into the mix than trying to take notes in a dark corner on why Basil and Oregano shouldn’t be stored in the freezer.
“Hey, buddy,” said a man in a yellow polo shirt, interrupting my thought. “I think somebody dropped this.”
He handed me the bill, asking if I had seen who dropped it. No, I didn’t. I asked the closest customer, an older woman who looked disinterested in our selection of Romaine lettuce, but I knew that she’d entered the area long after I had first noticed the bill. She just shook her head and pressed on with her shopping. I looked back to the man in anger. It’s not that I didn’t want the temptation of the ten, or that I wanted it to return to its rightful owner, I just didn’t want to be pulled into having to make the choice. I needed right and wrong to be irrelevant. Left with no other option, I assured the man that I would bring the bill over to customer service. I wanted to tell him to just pocket it, saving both of us the trouble, but didn’t.
Walking to the customer service desk is like trying to walk across the interstate. During its quiet hours, you hear the melody of squeaking carriages approaching far off in the distance. However, most of the day consists of customers leaping out of every aisle, eager to cut one another off for a spot in the express line. This death race happens to a mixture of elevator tunes and whatever chunk of popular music the management has selected for the day. You haven’t lived until you’ve experience the chaos of ‘Senior Tuesday’ to a Katy Perry song. After completing this journey, I handed the ten to the girl currently stationed at the desk. She took the bill effortlessly between gold-painted fingernails, setting it aside and turning to an approaching customer. I returned back to the tomato cart, dodging carriages the whole walk only to find one blocking the display.
Despite having to make a decision that affected other people, I was satisfied with the resolution. It was out of my hands. Of course, when the universe was still being programmed, the writers of the code threw in these lines of command called “recurring internal conflicts.” Had the universe been written in Java or C++, we could easily see and identify where the issues are coming from rather that just seeing the error messages they leave onscreen. This error message came back a week ago when I was standing beside our strawberry display. They’re out of season and not even on sale, so there shouldn’t have been any reason for them to sell this fast in the winter. This is where Adam, one of the ‘higher-ups’ that hasn’t quite reached management yet, cornered me.
“There’s money for you in the safe,” he said, making eye contact not with me, but a specific white tile on the floor. “Don’t leave without taking it.” I followed his gaze to the floor, to see that it was indeed a pretty impressive tile. It fit right into place with the pattern formed in its relation to the rest, but damn, what a tile it was. He explained that I had brought a ten dollar bill to the service desk and it became public property after the owner neglected to claim it.
“I feel like that’s… unethical,” I said. No, I really didn’t care what it is. I just didn’t want to make the decision. He assured me that we didn’t have the resources to investigate who dropped misplaced it. I thought of the man in the yellow polo shirt, how I wish I could in turn pass it down for him to deal with, but he was long out of the equation. Asshole. At this point, I don’t think it was the decision that irked me. The ten was a reminder of something I didn’t do, good or bad—that I didn’t want to have to integrate my decision making into real-world problems.
But the error is recurring. A few days ago I was driving to the bookstore with my little sister. For some reason the stars were right and our days off coincided with each other. I wanted to purchase a paperback copy of a novel printed over twenty years ago, and for some obscure reason I expected it to cost me less than a full tank of gas. Annoyed and cursing the power of the publishing industry, I settled for a new copy of a Gibson book, with which the discount was disgustingly in my favor. When I checked out, the cashier didn’t give me any percent of the discount that was stated on book’s sticker. I was angry, almost as much as my wallet was, but I didn’t say anything. On the drive back, I pulled back onto the highway and told my sister about the neglected discount.
“Why the hell didn’t you say something!” she screamed, trying to rationalize my lack of action. I tried to explain to her that I have passive tendencies, and I don’t like integrating with the world.
To a degree, I believe that the removal of one from the world is glamorized. The idea of isolation is even present in what’s considered to be a ‘creative lifestyle.’ In my Creative Writing workshop, we were asked (though not many students did) to read Robert Grudin’s The Grace of Great Things. In this book he writes, “To think creatively is to walk on the edge of chaos.” When this was discussed, the room erupted with students wanting to express their obsession with chaos, each eager to take Grudin’s words out of context. While I won’t doubt that each of my fellow students aren’t afraid to dance with madness and then reflect about it, my understanding that was that for some integrity in the creative process, there must be a willingness to remove oneself from the world to see and understand it.
Though, I think if we remove ourselves from the world for reasons other than analysis and understanding, we’re mistaking it for a hiding place. While just about everything about me can be considered ugly in the Western experience, the worst has to probably be my inability to integrate and become an active and independent participant in society. There’s nothing glamorous about living passive, and I can say that this is no result of the creative process in the least.
So now I’m left with this ten dollar bill. It’s still folded and tomato-irritation red. I put it in an envelope and wrote apartment on the side. While it only has $10, that’s ten more than it had in 2010.
Stage Fright 