you just give in and let the slime have its way with you
 This is the lovely and iconic, St. Petersburg Pier. It's an upsidedown pyramid on the water that is home to various shops and restaurants for tourists to enjoy.
One time, about ten or eleven years ago I had a job as a bus boy on the very top floor of the pier, at a restaurant called cha-cha cocconuts. I tried to get a job as a waiter at cha-cha coconuts, but I guess I wasn't qualified. I had graduated top five percent in my high school and had some college under my belt, but still I wasn't deemed competent enough to serve people frozen darquiris in plastic cups and grouper sandwhiches with french fries.
Anyway, I needed some sort of job right away so I took the job of bus boy. This job consisted mostly of picking up empty platic cups that once had frozen daquiris in them and emptying the plastic trays that once had grouper sandwiches in them. On top of that, I had to take out the trash.
Anyone who has been in the business knows that taking out restaurant trash isn't like taking out the trash at home. You don't just pull a draw string on a twenty gallon glad bag and zip it out the back door. No, taking out restaurant trash entails wrestling with giant, overstuffed barrels of all kinds of horrid food and paper waste. The cans and the bags are coated with grease and slime and other unmentionable muck. If you're a fresh faced college drop out like I was, then at first you recoil with distain at the chore, and try to do it without actually touching the decomposing slop. But after a few days on the job you just give in and let the slime have its way with you.
Anyway, while I was learning the ropes as a bus boy at cha-cha coconuts on top of the pier ten years ago, I remember there was this fat old janitor who was showing me how everything got done. He showed me where to get new cans, or new bags. He showed me how to transport the nasty garbage in a little red golf cart. And he even showed me how you drove the garbage out to this giant garbage compactor thing and crushed it. I thought the garbage compactor thing was kind of neat because it made me think of Star Wars. (I could see myself in there with Princess Leia and Chewbacca, trying to keep from getting squished. Well, maybe I didn't really think that, but I still thought it was kind of neat.)
Anyway, at first I thougt this fat old janitor was a pretty nice guy because he kept taking time out of his busy schedule to show me how to do these things. Then after a few nights of working there he asked if I might want to go out and get a beer somewhere. Not wanting to be rude, I said no, but maybe some other time. Then a night or two later that fat old janitor brought it up again. But this time he suggested that we go to his apartment to have a beer.
At this point I got a kind of creepy, chill inside of me. I mean, I wasn't the most streetwise kid in the world but I think I knew what the fat old janitor wanted. He wanted to have sex with me. I briefly entertained a vision of what this experience would be like. I could see him living in a squalid effieciency apartment with a bare bulb and a dirty mattress in the corner and roaches running here and there. I could see us having our beers (probably not heineken) at a card table which was duct taped together in a couple of places. Then I could imagine the fat old janitor stripping away his t-shirt and his shorts until he was just in these ragged, stained fruit of the looms with holes in certain places. As he came close to me with his hairy, greasy body I had to snap out of my vision. After entertaining his offer and considering its various pros and cons, I formulated my response.
"No," I said.
8:43:12 PM 
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