Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Carl – This is your brain on drugs…


I’ve written several times about how the owner of the store likes hiring older employees. I’ve also explained why this is a bad idea because anyone over 40 who wants to work at a porn store is probably the last person you’d want handling money or working with customers. They’re either a burnout or a thief (sometimes both) and can’t be trusted with anything.

Despite this, our regional manager hired Carl to work our overnight shift and for some reason, I had to train him.

The first thing I noticed about Carl, as I arrived at 10:45 p.m. to work an unscheduled overnight shift, was that he shakes. A lot of shakes. Throughout the course of the evening, I eventually learned why he constantly vibrates.

Carl looks like a real-life version of the Big Lebowski’s The Dude, if he was completely fried, emaciated and always wore a dirty jean jacket. A child of the 60s and 70s, Carl had a rather rough experience when he went to school at Mankato State University. He and his brother were dorm roommates that were constantly disappointed at their classmates’ lack of debauchery. He never went to class, drank incessantly, got high constantly and eventually flunked out after his second quarter. During their last night in the dorm, Carl and his brother decided to take the rest of the acid they had left between the two of them. They had 34 hits!

This was a bad idea on Carl’s part. Now the walls melt on their own if he doesn’t remember to take his anti-psychotic medications. Drinking alcohol reduces his shakes, but if he has more than two, he usually has a seizure. (I would later learn that he has a large number of seizures.) He tries to stick to Mountain Dew, but the caffeine makes his tremors worse, so he’s usually stuck in limbo between almost falling asleep and shaking himself into oblivion.

I'm sure this trend of chemical consumption continued after college, but I didn't get much information about this time of his life.

In addition to working overnights at the porn store, Carl is a tattoo artist and a piercer. I learned this after I asked about the permanent artwork on his hands. My best guess is that these images are supposed to represent a castle and a knight, but it looks as if this was attempted by a child using jumbo crayons. He explained that he had done these pieces himself and removed his ever-present jean jacket to show me the other tattoos up his left and right arms. They weren’t any better and I found myself reminded of Picasso.

A few days after training him, I learned more about Carl’s failed tattoo and piercing parlor, and why he wasn’t allowed to operate this business in Mankato anymore. For years, Mankato Ink had been the only tattoo parlor in the area. Carl decided to start his own place and compete by offering much lower prices. He was able to achieve this by not paying for little extras, like proper lighting in his store or new needles for each piercing. He told me about two girls who came in to celebrate their high school graduation with belly button rings. Carl gave them a great deal by piercing them together, sticking the first girl, wiping off the needle and then immediately piercing the next girl with the same needle. (I hope they were really close friends because they’re now sharing a hell of a lot more than friendship.)

When the owners of Mankato Ink got word of what was happening in Carl’s shop, they made a deal with their tattoo and piercing supply vendor. They’d buy from this supplier exclusively if he stopped selling to Carl. The vendor agreed and Carl eventually closed his shop because he ran out of needles, ink and (I can only hope) cleaning materials.

Now his career is in flux, so he’s just working at the porn store until he can get his parlor up and running again. I pray that he’s never able to achieve this. I also completely expect to be called in to cover numerous overnight shifts because he’s had a seizure, his tremors are too severe to operate the cash register or he finally finishes what he started in the 70s and O.D.s. 

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