Eye of the Storm

So it rained all night and who's sleeping anyway because all the days blur into one big blob and I still get up early to open the chicken door so they're not trapped in there and also I heard the trash trucks coming and I had to quick scoop a billion new piles of poop into the one last trash can and shoot it out to the curb before the big green truck comes because we need EVERY inch of trash can with four horses here and the amount of lunch they eat.

It's a nice rain though, I don't mind getting wet, and cleaning up the horses and making the bunnies and chickens comfy and dry as possible. I like being outdoors, it's bigger out here and less of the crushing reality that life is all stopped inside, less crashing into other people looking at you like really. I'm not kidding. What happened.

I get back in and feed dogs and myself and it's raining so no ride out of here on horses, so I look at my computer and think oh no. I have to write now.

Since the pandemic I have cleaned the garage (partly), chopped down bushes, framed kindergarten art that I've been meaning to do for 15 years, blown the yard, vacuumed, read, puzzled, pool chores, cooked, cleaned, sterilized, brought in firewood, taken walks, fixed bikes, I've DONE STUFF. All along I knew I was supposed to be writing King Lear but you know, today was finally the day the rain forced me to stop.

So I pulled my computer over to the thinking couch and even brought my external drive where I keep all my writing and was about to plug it in and then I get the call.

Back in March when we all got temporarily fired from school for virus frenzy, I signed up to volunteer to help get meals to LAUSD kids. I guess 5000 of us signed up, the 5000 most worried about making a living when there was no living to have. We get a stipend of some cash, so of course I signed up it's not cause I'm that nice.

They had never called me and then whammo hello I'm working. I leap away from the computer like it's diseased and head up to my daughter's high school at 8 am, even though the shift started at 6:30 but I got a late call. I haven't gone to work EVER in YEARS since March, and I'm not sure if I'm going to be outside so I wear three sweaters and muddy barn boots cause it's raining and grab a mask and some wipes in my pocket because that's our world.

There's already a line of cars of people driving through to get their grab and go food, and I snake my way into the teacher parking lot thru the exit and I've never been in that parking lot here so I park probably where I'm not supposed to and show up in the cafeteria area where the guy Mark on the phone said to go.

I go into an assembly line room full of boxes and tables and all these people putting food into bags and passing it on, and I try to find Mark but they tell me Carol is the one in charge down here Mark is up top with the cars and passing out food up there. So okay I find Carol in a weird antechamber that will soon become my life and I say hey I'm here to help. She says are you from the food bank? I say no I'm from LAUSD. She squints her eyes at me. Why are you late. I feel immediate shame only previously known by Japanese geishas. How could I disappoint Carol so EARLY, I've known her 15 seconds.

Um. I just got a call, I say earnestly. I make my eyes appear the most honest and trustworthy I can since that's the only part of my face she can see.

I can see much of her face behind her mask and hairnet, and it looks like when mud dries in the sun in the desert, the place lizards go to warm up and end up dying there.

I ran here as fast as I could, I say, to cement my love of my new job. I live right down the street, this is my kids' school.

She looks at my shoes. Which makes me look at my shoes. I feel fear. Do you have any other shoes? We're working around FOOD, she says.

How is the food going to get on my boots? I'm thinking. I'm also thinking These are my CLEAN boots. I look at them knowing the ones at home are so much worse. I do a mental indexing of my trunk with beach clothes from last summer and some spilled puzzles and old In and Out cups.

I look at her imploringly. Like dude. I do NOT have any other shoes. I RAN HERE, to get away from my writing. I didn't want my feet wet. I thought I'd be standing outside. That's OLD MUD, I felt like saying. IT'S NOT COMING OFF. I'm not going to get my SHOES on the FOOD.

Next time wear different shoes, she says briskly and I'm following her and she's showing me my hair net which comes in a little piece of paper and when she hands it to me it promptly drops out of the paper and falls on the floor. We both look at it.

Do you want another one, she says. I say uhh
She hands me another one. Don't let this one drop. DUDE. I've never had a hairnet before, I say. I didn't know it was in a little piece of paper and not sealed at all so it just falls right out like someone hands you a note folded once and if there's a hairnet in it, it will fall right out the THREE OPEN SIDES of the paper.

I ask her how to put it on because I feel like my boots have made my job on the line and I already dropped one hairnet and I know if Carol had triplets but wanted twins, she would throw me away. She tells me to put it over my whole hair and I look at hers where she left her bangs out and I'm thinking you're a liar but I go and put it on all the way and wash my hands like she told me to do and I find the box of gloves and put them on because now that is what we do.

Also, she still isn't moving. She's looking at me. You should take off that sweater. I look down. I have tiny bits of hay stuck in my fleece. I live on a farm. I try to shake it off.  If it was magnetic, you couldn't get it off with one of those car crushing electromagnets. She says just hang it on a hanger by the bathroom, indicating where the other people hung up the filthy shit they wore here.

Then she takes me back to the antechamber where I can see thru the door at all the assembly line workers filling the food bags, the money jobs, but because I'm late she's not allowing me entry to the room where the music is playing. She says here are the milks. There's a rolly board with milk crates stacked up and she tells me to open these refrigerated rolling cases full of plastic covered milk packages and to open up four and dump them into the milk crates, and then roll them into the Big Room. One crate chocolate, one crate white. Bring in four crates at a time.
Right. Got it.

I jump on my task. Rip plastic, fold out about 40 milks, repeat 4 times, next crate. I make a stack of crates, and roll them on a fat kitchen skateboard that my kids would die to careen spinning around on in here and take them to the next room where the real party is happening. After about 4 loads of doing this I feel like ok this is my life now. Also I can hear the music. Also I'm not close to anyone which makes not-virus catching better. I wonder if everyone out there is thinking I'm the milk girl loser. Then I realize everyone out there is only here for one week just like me, off of us broke and bored as hell.

It's way easier to be around people when you're wearing a mask. You don't have to do as much stuff with your face. You don't even have to smile at Carol. You can leave your lower face alone instead of instructing it to make interesting faces to make people like you. Except for having to breathe, the mask is a great way to not have to communicate or try too hard. I didn't realize how much I do with my mouth to act interested in people. My eyes get to be in charge now, and frankly, they are incredibly better face leaders. They say way more with way less work.

I'm about halfway through the four refrigerators of milk when the Big Room people go on break. I keep working because I came late, which Carol reminds me of. Oh yes no problem boss! I say without saying boss, but while slightly bowing like a monkey working for an organ grinder. I'm doing fine, no problem!

When I'm done with the milks, she has me wipe out all the refrigerators, clean up the milk crates from every room, find every rolly skateboard thingy and corral it back in the kitchen, organize organize organize! She cracks the whip. I work scrubbingly with my head down like I'm on a plantation because MAN, I WAS LATE.

The nice lunch lady who has worked at the school for 22 years slips me some hot mini corndogs and tells me to take a break in her corner when Carol goes to yell at the people in the Big Room for putting the WRONG CEREAL in the bags. I'm peeling off the cornbread from the three corndogs I take, and dip them in ketchup. They are basically little thumbs, and they taste like sand. The lady is so kind, though, and with only our eyes showing we say seriously, what has happened to the world. Both of us shaking our heads, her holding tongs.

I get back into the Big Room and I'm folding a cardboard box and I hear Carol yell HEY GIRL, like for serious, and someone else motions at me that she's calling ME.

I lightning over like she's yanking the chain on my leg shackle. I look at her with the hawk serious eyes formerly only known to members of the bomb squad.

She's holding up the cereal, Rice Chex, which is the WRONG CEREAL. You need to take all these cereals out and put in the Big Cereal, she says. She motions at the boxes on the floor. I look around for the unnamed Big Cereal, and the nice lesbian mangirl next to me gives me the I got you man look behind Carol's back. Relief floods, and I want to marry her. Or at least play some basketball later.

We dump the shitty cereal and load up the good cereal and we're sort of laughing and we're in the center of all the tables, everyone doing their jobs around us and we're in the middle of the eye of the storm and I feel happy that I'm not on the edge just doing one job and I can hear the BeeGees like it's a good thing, and we're fixing a grave error and we're happily married while remaining strangers in the eye of the storm.

We fix the cereal situation in about ten minutes and then my buddy and I are separated by different tasks and how will I know her with her mask off, and then I'm outside in the rain stacking milk crates and it's so pretty misty this school where my daughter should BE right now, on a Monday, in April of her senior year, and how did the world get so emergencied, instead.

I change the huge trash bags and can't for the LIFE of me figure out how they tie a little knot to secure the bag to the rim, is it just the gloves make for no grip or am I an imbecile and then I see a guy across the room doing it and he ties the knot BEFORE putting the bag in and then he fits the bag around the rim and I think this is the most important thing I've learned today. And then I realize that's the girl from the eye of the storm. I think.

God we all look alike.

At 11 they call it, it's over. We're supposed to stay til 11:30 but we already cleaned up. I wait around since I came in late, but Carol is on to other things, but I wait anyway. Then they give me 5 bags of food that are extra so I purel my entire body and then take my bags and drive out thumping over the curb that I didn't see because I've never parked here in the weird abscess by the school cafeteria near the field where my senior daughter probably won't get to graduate on a warm spring night like her older brother did 2 years ago.

I take off my hair net and make a pile of Virus Dirty Things in the car cupholder and head down the rainy changed-world street and realize tomorrow and the rest of the week I will have to get up at 5:30 a.m. to do it all again, make it on time, feed the animals, and wear clean boots.