I cannot describe the joy my Big Box Job sometimes brings me. People bring in their babies and puppies and bizarre stories and, as my coworker says, "It's so much better than TV." Lately, however, I have had a number of chilling interactions that have left me shaken.
The practice of "receipt shopping" seems to be gaining popularity. For those of you who are outside of the criminal loop, allow me to explain. First, you dig in the trash or haunt a parking lot until you find a receipt for an item purchased with cash. Then, you wander the store nonchalantly, working methodically to match up the number and description with the item on the receipt. You then steal this item and get it out of the store somehow. You walk back into the store with the stolen merchandise and a seemingly legitimate receipt for having bought it. The retailer then has no choice but to pay cash to buy the stolen goods back from you.
The people who are good at this look for small high-value items that fit easily into pockets or bags. The people who are bad at this bring in receipts that are ancient, crumbling, grease-stained, or torn. The less intelligent ones steal the wrong product, or boldly ask someone to find them the product on the receipt. (HINT: This lets EVERYONE know you are a thief.) The less intelligent ones attempt to return the same item multiple times with the same exact receipt. (HINT: We are on to this one. The computer stops us from returning it again.)
These people make me angry, sad, and confused. They make me angry because they are roaming around in the late hours like ghouls, stealing and stealing again to get cash to buy drugs. They make me angry because they are so obvious and I can't do anything about it. They make me sad because they present identification with pictures of themselves one year, two years ago. The smiling face in the shitty DMV picture had a job, a family, and a future. The haggard zombie in front of me bears a resemblance, but he's lost 60 pounds. He's covered in angry open sores. His eyes have lost all soul, all clarity. His hands twitch and his eyes move too fast.
I am so confused by addiction. Physiologically, I understand it. What I don't understand is the choice that's made by anybody who looks at meth and says, "I'm sure I can keep it under control. Where all others have failed, I alone will succeed." Intellectually, I understand why they can't free themselves. Emotionally, I ache for every last one of these poor, night-dwelling, sweat-scented bearers of pain. What drove you here? What could be so good that it's worth the loss of everything else, of your freedom, of your soul?
I've never seen the walking dead. I've never seen a person whose body is possessed by a demon or evil spirit. But I have seen people who don't own themselves anymore, whose eyes are vacant and whose bodies twitch with a painful hunger that makes people on the other side of the wall run in stark terror. I want to make them sandwiches and give them hugs and tell them there's another way. I want to handcuff them to detox cells and let them sweat it out, then send them to farm jobs where no one has a lab and they can see the stars again. I want to step back from their fevered gestures and stuttering insistance of legitimacy, from the smell of failure and decay.
What I don't want to do, I do every day. I hand them just a little more cash for the candyman and send them back into the hell they have made.
I am sorry I have to let people steal. I am sorry my Big Box Job does not want me to Just Say No.
Posts
