RETA.I.L

Michael never really appreciated what hygienic purpose pubic hair served until he decided to shave his and expose the shamefully pink skin around his penis and between the crack of his ass to the overtly critical gaze of his underwear.  He had always considered it as a sort of springy cartilage buffering the grinding bones of humping lovers.  Michael was at first reluctant to shave the pubescent badge of maturity that had first made him feel like a man and had taken most of his preteen years to grow, but after he overheard Alice, the notoriously lurid storyteller of the Discount Warehouse employee lounge, confide to a gaggle of enthralled female co-workers that a mutual hairlessness had increase the intimacy of new boyfriend’s love making and turned him into an unstoppable (and I quote) “love machine,” Michael decided, after much unspoken deliberation, to spread an unnecessary amount of Skintimate shave gel, which his mother likely used for a similar, unsavory purpose, on his trimmed and pathetic pubis.  Forgetting the razor burn that blushed and rashed the skin surrounding his genitals for weeks due to his inexperienced irritation of the grain his hair grew in, Michael also quickly learned, and regrettably so, that pubic hair serves to cool the hot folds of skin that taper down to the apex of his legs.  What sweat would have normally collected in the dry web of hair, now condensed on the slick bumpy flesh and pooled in the seam of his buttock.  At work Michael made frequent trips to the restroom to sop up the annoying mess.  Bent forward in the stall with his pants around his ankles reaching between his legs, Michael retrieved each wad of toilet paper, bearing the yellow smear of the sweaty shit concentrate.  Embarrassed by the spectacle of it all, Michael’s penis hung limp, confused by the unnecessary exposure and the strangely distant proximity to the toilet bowl.  Michael would bizarrely sniff at the paper, musing to himself, “Ew, smells assidy,” and then throw the soiled paper in to the toilet and flush. 

Michael would walk back to his station, imagining what his co-workers must think of his frequent bathroom breaks.  He hoped they thought he was a pothead and that they joked behind his back, “There goes Mike; he’s going potty again.”  But they scarcely noticed anything he did, let alone took time to imagine what he didn’t.  Michael did though.  During the long tedious hours standing behind his register, he would fantasize about the woman who worked the returns counter.  Her name was Sydney.  She never really talked to Michael, save the few occasions he had caught her behind her desk long enough to blurt out the well-scripted icebreaker he had written in his head, rehearsed almost audibly to himself, and considered carefully for its potential discussion possibilities.  She laughed, politely Michael thought, when he had accidentally said something funny.  He had a sort of desperate humor when he talked to Sydney.  If she liked him it was only in the way that tourists like the beaches of resort islands for their beauty in relation to the backdrop of the poor slums and ghettos of the natives.  Michael would stare at her for hours.  Her long black hair, teasing the ridge of her tight black pants, tortured him with a childish urge to run his fingers through it and pull at the knots.  Michael didn’t like to make eye contact; though, he feared his eyes would betray all the sick things he thought while he leaned purposeless against the black rubber of the conveyor belt.  Like some easily coerced confessor, his gaze would lead her across the space between them, down the slope of his nerves, and into the secret kitty of all his dreams and fantasies.  Michael would turn quickly when he could anticipate her glance.  He refrained from looking back for fear that she had caught the last marker of his attention and laid in wait for his eyes to wander back.  Often he just looked down at the dull metal around his scanner.  He’d become hypnotized by his dim reflection, and he only woke when the crowding boxes of cereal, tampons, and cigarettes covered his blurred twin and shocked him from his horror.

Sydney was soon promoted to Loss Prevention, and Michael would have to make unauthorized “no sales” in order to see her.  He enjoyed the chastisements she was required to give.  It appealed to him that she approached him with the same official statement of policy, “Sales associates are not authorized to open their registers except in the execution of a sale.”  Michael always responded with the same blank look of surprise, but inside he was excited by her vague anger.  He silently considered the proper punishment for his behavior.

Michael was different outside of work.  He often wondered why he was so pathetic and docile inside the high taupe walls of the Discount Warehouse.  His girlfriend had found him exciting, surely.  He was charming and witty.  She seemed perpetually impressed by the spontaneous humor of his speech, yet as soon as the soles of his black, polishable shoes squeaked on the buffed-white tiles, his uniform face became instantly less animated.

Michael began to hate customers who insisted on talking to him about their personal lives.  He was angered when he couldn’t get through the series of programmed questions he had been trained to ask, “Did you find everything you were looking for today?  Would you like to sign up for a Discount Warehouse credit card and save ten percent on this transaction?  Would you like your receipt in the bag?  Have a nice day and thank you for choosing the Discount Warehouse for all your discount needs”  There was a soothing comfort in it.  Michael dreaded talking to people, but he could bear it if the possibility of actual emotion could be hemmed in by calculated customer service.  The precision was enough to marvel at.  Computers don’t run as efficiently as Michael did.  For every personal remark, he had his planned corporate rebuttal to steer the conversation back toward the lofty purpose of making the Discount Warehouse more money.

Michael wasn’t very good at making money; though, his monotone disinterest seduced no one into signing up for credit cards.  His supervisor, Mr. Allen, a round, intense thirty-something, directed frequent reprimands to him regarding his low credit application percentages.  He would have to promise to do better by the next quarter, or he would be replaced by someone who would.  Watching the thick sack of fat ripple on Mr. Allen’s neck, Michael looked down quickly to avoid his supervisor’s attempt to look him in the eyes.  Eventually Michael began to notice a curious stain just below the tip of Mr. Allen’s zipper.  At first Michael thought to himself that Mr. Allen was the biggest slob he’d ever met, but then he recalled Sydney’s hasty exit from the back offices with blood-red eyes and wiping a mysterious substance from her chin just before Mr. Allen had approached Michael’s station.

Michael’s suspicions were correct.  For sometime now, Mr. Allen had been holding long meetings with Sydney during the time that a fat man like himself would have normally devoted to devouring endless amounts of animal carcass and Pepsi.  Mr. Allen enjoyed the time they spent together.  Not that Sydney was all that proficient at fellatio, but he relished the new techniques she would try on him.  While she went down on him, he tried to calculate formulae and equations to predict her next deep throat or he would time the duration until she could bring him to climax, secretly plotting her progress on an Excel spreadsheet.  He recalled his days at community college when he was a math/business major, and how his former physique had frequently attracted the easily seduced.  Mr. Allen had a standing bet with his fellow math majors that he could screw more women by himself than they could collectively.  As he was the only one among them that didn’t suffer from psychological erectile dysfunction, Mr. Allen ultimately won that bet by a landslide.  But working at the Discount Warehouse for nine years had made a dramatic difference on both Mr. Allen’s success with women and his failure with dieting.  Now he was reduced to coercion and bartering for sex.  What he like most about Sydney was the confidence it gave him.  Most often he tried to hold out for as long as he could, but for an obese man like him, whose body fat triggered the release of a hormone that thwarted his attempts at sexual stamina, Mr. Allen usually came quickly. 

Sydney didn’t mind really.  The faster he was, the sooner she could go vomit his essence into the trashcan.  Sydney knew Mr. Allen was married, but she didn’t mind really.  The arrangement was purely business.  She was a terrible employee, who stole condoms and tampons, and Mr. Allen, whose wife had stopped having sex with him since his three-hundred plus pound waistline had made any sexual position virtually impossible, had the authority to reward her one valuable asset.        

Michael looked up again as the pond water ripple of Mr. Allen’s face glared back at him with its procedural expression of disapproval as if to say, “Do we understand each other?”  As Michael replied with his unenthusiastic pledge to improve, Mr. Allen, distracted by an unauthorized conversation between two cashiers in lane three, swung his enormous torso in their direction to achieve enough momentum to break the hold of gravity on his ever-increasing supply of molecules. 

“Listen, I’m not saying I voted for the guy.  I just don’t think he’s doing that bad a job,” said the cashier, who had abandoned his station in lane 2A.

“Ok, and what are you basing that on?” replied the cashier, who was carelessly neglecting the customer whose products he was scanning and whose credit application he was not pushing.

“My opinion,” said the cashier, who now noticed the approaching mass of cells that would soon send both parties temporarily back to the boredom of their assigned positions.

“And what is that based on?” replied the cashier whose back was to the advancing conglomeration of Fritos and pork rinds and who foolishly continued to converse around the customer in spite of his accomplices veiled attempts at non-verbal warning.

Mr. Allen waited until the customer had left the register with her purchases that were not paid for with a Discount Warehouse credit card, and then he approached the derelict.  His face was noticeably attempting to express his brain’s disapproval, but the cashier, whose behavior was the subject of a strongly worded reprimand that Mr. Allen was organizing in his mind, seemed carelessly unaware of the intention behind Mr. Allen’s uninvited presence in lane three. 

“You know why I’m upset, don’t you?” said Mr. Allen with all the restraint he could summon.

“No, I don’t, Bob.  Why don’t you explain your feelings?  I think if we sit down and talk this out we can all avoid an argument that both of us will regret in the morning,” jested the cashier who was not wearing his nametag.

“Forgetting your severe violations of the dress code, your disregard for the customer service needs of our guests, your reckless abandon with the merchandise, your repeated failure to offer credit applications, company policy strictly forbids the fraternizing of associates during the execution of a sale,” spewed Mr. Allen.

“Jesus, Bob, if I knew you felt so strongly about it, I would have certainly refrained from ‘fraternizing.’  I just hate repeating the same bullshit every time somebody comes up with a pack of gum.  Besides I don’t think that lady was offended.  If I shopped here, which I don’t, I would think the conversation she just witnessed would be a breath of fresh air from the stale reactionary crap we’re forced to say.  If anything I’d be more offended by that.  At least we were treating her like a human being, whose needs exceed credit cards and mindless questions about her shopping experience,” droned the cashier whose liberal arts education was beginning to pay off. 

“Well, frankly I don’t give a shit what you think.  It’s your job, and you’ll do it.  End of conversation,” said Mr. Allen.

“Ok, Bob…wait Bob.  Come here.  There’s something I want to tell you,” said the cashier whose secret knowledge of Mr. Allen’s lunch hour indiscretion was about to come in handy.  “Listen, Bob, may I call you Bob?  I know why there’s a stain on your crotch, and I know that we’re not going to have any more conversation like this.  You know why I know this, Bob?  I know this, because if you ever speak to me like that again I will make sure to tell your wife, your superiors, and most importantly Sydney’s brothers, all three of whom I believe were just drafted by the NFL as linebackers.  So let’s just forget about this little incident.  How about it, Bob?” asked the cashier whose Pepsi Mr. Allen subsequently noticed was in need of refilling.  

Sydney’s promotion to Loss Prevention allowed her to wear plain clothes in order to blend in with the customers.  She often wore tight outfits that revealed lines and contours of her breasts that Michael had only been able to partially visualize beneath the loose cotton of her Discount Warehouse uniform.  Her breasts were not as large as Michael had expected, but the new outfits teased the well-defined cleavage that seemed to suck in every molecule around it.  The gravity seemed to trap the incandescent light of the overhead fluorescent bulbs as well as Michael’s complete attention.  The diverging curves were more inviting and less critical than the fearful stare that Michael had previously avoided.  He imagined rubbing his penis inside the wet grip of Sydney’s cleavage; the tight vacuum would swallow his control and leave him broken to her will.

Michael was wetting brown paper towels in the employee bathroom sink to pat soothingly on his inflamed groin when he was overcome by the need to relieve himself.  Standing in front of the urinal, Michael was unfavorably startled as Sydney bursts into the men’s room, brandishing the letter he thought was appropriately placed in her employee mailbox, self addressed for her perusal and later return.  Michael had written a somewhat elicit story about a girl uncannily similar to Sydney who falls in love with a young cashier, much more similar to Michael than anyone else, and the two secret lovers christened unseen areas of the backrooms with the musky scent of their hairless lust.  The story was a work in progress and had an ending that demanded the kind of criticism Michael hoped Sydney could provide.  Instead she reviewed the tapes from the security camera positioned above the employee lounge to confirm the identity of the Discount Warehouse postal service abuser.  Michael couldn’t pee while Sydney was yelling at him, so he nervously tapped on the metal top of the motion sensor above the white porcelain of the urinal.  His thumb, vibrating in unison with the other four alternating digits, confused the brain of the infrared beam and magically triggered the flushing mechanism.  He wasn’t sure whether it was the cool air of the rushing water or the mounting pressure on his bladder that finally released the urine from its frightened confine, but he was not relieved to be held to the vulnerable position and the awkward conversation by the overabundance of orange juice he had drunk that morning.  The momentary reprieve from Sydney’s anger that the curious flush had granted was soon replaced with more impassioned screaming.  Michael thought to himself, while returning the emptied organ to his pants, how the combination of Sydney’s disapproval of his story and the urinal’s premature approval of his absence had left him feeling somewhat soulless, without substance and unable to answer either critic with any spiritual valediction of merit.

Sydney watched from the security monitors a pair of shoplifters palming a couple of Trojan three packs as Michael was slowly making his way back from the bathroom on the screen below.  She radioed to Steven, the Loss Prevention manager who was on the floor at the time, of the situation.  He hurriedly dropped the magazine he was reading and made his way toward the pharmacy.  Sydney switched to line two on the radio and asked Mr. Allen if he wouldn’t mind bringing her the mail from her employee box.  She had forgotten to get it for a couple of weeks.  When finally brought it over to her, all that she had received were the weekly company newsletters and a couple of direct deposit stubs that she had left behind the small locked metal door for safe and easy filing.  The request was mere subterfuge though; Sydney secretly wanted to talk to Mr. Allen about a management position that would soon be available due to the unscheduled demise of Mrs. Wilkinson, the manager of the jewelry counter.  The spot was highly coveted by several more qualified applicants than Sydney, but she had two advantages over all of them: She was Mr. Allen’s mistress, and Mr. Allen conveniently filled the role of hiring manager for all intra-store promotions and transfers.  These were the same two advantages that had given Sydney her first promotion from cashier to returns coordinator, and she had no moral hang-ups with exploiting them at any occasion.  Mr. Allen was wary of continuing the relationship after his conversation with the cashier whose name he refused to mention for fear that he would summon his attention somehow, but the sound of his slowly descending zipper and the sight of Sydney lowering her swivel chair to get below his belly quickly quelled all his passions of dissent. 

Mr. Allen was thankful for the first time that his body chemistry had prevented him from delaying his ejaculation when Steven returned to the Loss Prevention office toting two red-faced teens.  Sydney had already finished wiping her face, and Mr. Allen had safely returned his penis to his Hanes cotton heaven as Steven entered the tiny surveillance room, but the trio still shared an uncomfortable silence and a knowing series of stares.  Mr. Allen left the office without explaining why he was there, forgetting that he had innocently brought Sydney her mail. 

Steven wasn’t really interested in his excuses anyway, but he was concerned that Sydney was cheating on him.  The two of them had been dating for a couple of weeks, since she was moved to his department.  Sydney was genuinely attracted to Steven, but since there was no real advantage to sleeping with him or extending any form of intimacy toward him she had remained elusive and dismissive of his attention.  This made her even more desirable to him.  Steven put the condom thieves in the interrogation room and told them with feigned severity that he would give them the option of telling their story to the cops or their parents.  When faced with these alternatives, most condom thieves will chose to tell the authorities, but Steven never really went through with any legal action for such offenses.  Usually the threat of parental notification and the time spent sweating in the interrogation office was enough to scare teenagers into appropriately satisfying their needs for male contraception.  Steven sympathized with the male plight of buying condoms.  He recalled his own early attempts and all the extra merchandise he would buy just to hide the condoms under and away from the nearby eyes of critical grandmothers.  In small towns like the one that patronized the Discount Warehouse, the grandmother network is a dangerous agency whose aim is to prevent young men everywhere from having secret and protected sex with their girlfriends. 

Steven wasn’t really interested in Sydney as a person.  Her desires, her dreams, her ideas, these were just things he would listen to in order to seem sensitive enough for her to sleep with him.  He had mastered the art of active listening, which allowed him to passively relieve Sydney of her plain-clothes outfit.  Steven had never really had any use for seduction.  His looks had always made such techniques unnecessary, and when they weren’t sufficient he would compensate with excessive amount of alcohol and aggressive sexual advances.  With Sydney none of his conventional methods proved unable to penetrate the complex systems of defense that surrounded her vagina.  In light of these failures, Steven desperately resorted to unrelenting propositions in the LP interrogation room.  Sydney would later confront him with informal allegations of rape, but as the interrogation room has several surveillance cameras that recorded the incident during which there were no signs of struggle or violence Steven said he would use the tape, which he made several copies of, in court and also threatened to circulate the video around the store, which he did anyway.

Michael came to possess the DVD, in which Sydney and Steven had sex on the interrogation table in the LP office, through the most unlikely sequence of events.  He had taken to eating his lunch on the room of the Discount Warehouse ever since he had overheard Mr. Filbert, the maintenance specialist, mention to Mr. Allen that while he was working on fixing the wiring for the Discount Warehouse sign he happened to look down at Sydney who was taking her smoke break.  Mr. Filbert went on to add that he happened to notice that from that height he got a rather interesting insight into Sydney’s blouse.  Michael hadn’t yet been able to time his lunch half-hour with the five minute smoke break that Sydney took at an unscheduled time during her shift, but he continued to eat his lunch there as it gave him a certain eccentricity that he hoped would lead to Sydney’s interest.  On a particularly cold November afternoon, Michael was happily eating his lunch when he overheard Steven describe to one of the new cashiers about the tape that he was in possession of and offered the horny young man a copy if he were to pay handsomely.  The common interest among the male employees of the Discount Warehouse in seeing Steven have sex with Sydney seemed to fuel quite surprisingly what became the lucrative side business of selling edited versions of the LP interrogation office surveillance footage. The new cashier quickly retrieved the agreed-upon sum of cash from his pocket and Steven handed over a clear-cased DVD.  Michael was consumed with a primitive desire to take what the cashier had just rightfully purchased.  He rushed to the metal rung ladder that he had used to get on the roof and quickly slid down its entire length to come crashing down on the back of the unsuspecting cashier, who had no idea what was happening nor who had knocked him down.  Michael took the DVD from the cashier’s back pocket, and entered the Discount Warehouse via a side door before the cashier even regained consciousness.  Michael’s shift, which normally drags onto eternity, was unbearable with the promise and the curse of the DVD in his pocket.  He wanted nothing more than to view it’s contents, and yet he was overwhelmed by the possibly jealousy that he new it would inspire.  He had only suspected Sydney’s relationship with Mr. Allen, but he knew seeing Sydney and Steven have sex would cause him endless pain.  Nonetheless, Steven couldn’t resist the temptation of finally seeing the object of his desire reduced to her most vulnerable, and he watched the DVD in it’s entirety as soon as he got home.  Michael was surprised at how unarroused he was by the whole thing.  There was a look of sadness on Sydney’s face that made Michael want to cry.  He wanted to apologize to her for having ever thought of her in that way.  Unfortunately word had sufficiently spread about the DVD that the next day she was fired, and Michael never got to say it.

One day while Michael was hurriedly ringing the Christmas customers that trailed endlessly away from his register, he quickly inquired to one, “How are you today?”  The awkwardness of Michael’s pace and the parched adhesion of his tongue to the roof of his mouth ejaculated the phrase from his lips with a mumbled articulation that was received by the customer as, “Who are you today?”  The customer, whose unsatisfied Christmas list likely explained the irate response, asked Michael the only question that he had no acceptable answer to: “Who are you?”  The mechanics of his mind abruptly halted, save one stubborn cog that spun recklessly unaware of its cousins’ impotence and ground the halted gears and what human meat remained into a chewed and congealed mess of all his broken constructs.  Input.  Output.  Stimulus.  Response.  Creativity.  Conformity.  Open.  Closed.  Man.  Machine.  Human.  Program.  Circuit.  Pathway.  Pathway.  Pathway.  Path…

Michael began to feel feint, but just before his legs ceased to support his body he saw Sydney.  She was floating above the crowd of angry Christmas shoppers in Michael’s line.  She was naked and beautiful.  Her pubic hair seemed to be pulsing and reaching out to him like the angry tentacles of a jellyfish.  The tangled tresses violently whipped at the air between them and caught Michael in time to prevent his fall to the floor.  Sydney lifted Michael from his cashier station and pulled him close to her.  Cradled in the nest of her hair and warmed in the moist embrace of her vagina, Michael began to dream.