Emergency Exit

When I was twenty, I worked as a tour guide in an abandoned salmon cannery. Before that, I sold shoes at a mall store that no longer exists. Years later, between midnight and six a.m. three days a week, I faced cans of chickpeas, Campbell’s, and Canada Dry in a closed Thrifty Foods with Luke, who carried up the aisles with him a ghetto blaster that blasted sexist radio shows and Led Zeppelin. I went on to email feedback to aspiring writers I’d never meet, paying excessive attention to their adjectives. I made blue cocktails for college kids. I took a poet’s papers out of a dozen Rubbermaid bins, sorted them in chronological order, stacked them back in, and shipped the bins off to London, Ontario. Because I signed an NDA, I can’t admit to writing segments of a mystery story Neil Patrick Harris loved, but I can talk about the dinosaur erotica. I rode around in a rental van with Brian, telling Northern kids it was okay if they didn’t know what they wanted to be when they grew up, though they’d be grownups by now and I wonder what they went on to be and if they remember me at all. I told Lenny to quit teasing my servers. I picked Gala apples. I picked Suncrisp apples. I picked Mackintosh apples in a gentle and specific way because they bruise so easily. I made no-foam matcha lattes. I ordered too many cases of house wine. I helped Rhea retire. I wore a headset backstage and whispered to the Ukrainian dancing girls that they were up next on the telethon. For all these jobs, I made money. Enough to live on, amounts that always felt like too much or too little compensation for the tasks I’d performed. Like the one afternoon I did nothing but glue labels onto cans of salmon because the boss forgot about me in the office. Or that time I got so lost in the back of the Thrifty Foods that I ran out the emergency exit and walked around the entire store. I took my time, peeking through the windshield of a broken-down murder van and snapping photos with my phone of the shopping carts all lit up by streetlights and their own reflections off puddles. That’s what the apocalypse will look like in case you’ve ever wondered: shining abandoned shopping carts on cracked asphalt. It was a little past three in the morning. I was so cold and so tired I thought I’d be there, in that parking lot, forever, and it’s possible a part of me still is. Then I banged on the front doors until Luke let me back in.The post Emergency Exit first appeared on The Walrus.