Joey

I get sick and tired of seeing beautiful people every day. Because the thing about beautiful people is that they know they’re beautiful and it’s all they can think about. It makes me wonder if there’s sawdust in their fucking brains. I hate people who are beautiful and know it so I try to avoid talking to them at all costs. It’s good that my job doesn’t involve a lot of talking. In fact, there isn’t any talking at all. I get paid to look around, to pay attention, to make sure there isn’t a ruckus happening. I’m a gallery attendant at an art museum. So most of the ruckus comes from either kids who get high in the bathrooms or from someone’s grandpa or grandma having a heart attack who end up dying on the floor. And I’ll tell you that the first happens way, way more than the second.

I spend all my time looking at the grandpa’s and grandma’s gawking at paint, pretending like they’ve got some special lease on life because they’re gawking at paint. I guess when you have all the money in the world, life is easy and you need made-up things to do so it feels like you are special. Bet let me tell you, staring at a piece of paint on a wall doesn’t make you special. It makes you a dressed up toy, a doll, and just have more time and luck than the rest of us. But if I think about it too hard I have to smoke a cigarette. I’m only allowed one smoke break per shift so I can’t think about it too hard. If I think about anything too hard it’ll kill me. But sometimes I can’t help it. I have nothing to do but stare at the “patrons” (we have to call them that). We’re not allowed to be seen with our phones. So I stare at them, at their pearly white teeth, their pretty gowns and $1,000 scarves, their stupid hair, their beady eyes. It makes me suddenly aware of the clothes I’m wearing, for some fucking reason. My dirty suit, my dirty dress shoes, the off-white undershirt underneath it. It makes me angry.

One thing about them is that the men are worse than the women. With the women, you can just tell that they spend some time and energy convincing their husbands to donate a tiny fraction of their money to some charity or whatever the fuck at the end of the year. Or that they’d give a buck to some guy on the street dying and begging if they felt so inclined. They’re a bit better. Though you can tell they’d be real fucking uppity about doing it all and they probably wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it, that it’d put them up even higher on their already towering high horse and feel really fucking good about themselves in a really generous and high-minded way. The feeling’d probably last them the rest of the year. The men on the other hand are the ones who say that this is all fair, like it’s the way it has to be. You can tell they wouldn’t even give a dying begging man a buck on the street because they don’t deserve it, that they somehow wanted to be dying and begging. I’ve spent the last five years of my life just staring at these fucking pricks. They look beautiful and nice, but they’re the scum of the fucking earth. Dressed up devils. If it came down to it, if it came down to either giving a dying begging man a buck or buying themselves a hot latte, they’d buy the latte without blinking. It’s fucked up, but they would. I spend all goddamned day just staring at these pricks. I should have a college degree on the subject of rich assholes by now. I’d be the fucking professor on the subject.

But I have to say, as much as I hate them, I do know that I wouldn’t mind having a ton of money. And if I was watching a rich version of myself at the museum, I’d hate him still. Regardless, most rich people are rich either by luck, inheritance, or by stealing. You know, white-collar crime. Banks and those guys are masters at this. My boss said once that banks are the biggest crooks out there. And they’re smart enough to make themselves look kind and generous by donating money and whatever. Like for our museum, a good chunk of our money comes from AmeriStar Bank. But it’s only so they can save face and write it off on their taxes or whatever. In my opinion, there’s no such thing as a rich person who’s also a good person.

One of the other worst parts of the job is when I have to be in the “modern” art section. Most of the “modern” paintings were made by some skinny rich guy in a penthouse who thinks anything he makes comes out of God’s asshole and is worth $100,000. It’s the stuff you can just tell was made by rich guys, for rich guys. So you bet your ass they can’t get enough of it. I swear, a bunch of guys in scarves spend 20 minutes staring at an orange block with a yellow background. An orange square with a yellow background. I love to listen to the conversations they have about it because they’re just absolutely mind boggling. They’ll make up the wildest theories on why it’s a block, why it’s orange, the color of the frame, what it all means. It’s hilarious. If only they could see themselves, they’d be disgusted. But that’s what money buys you I guess. A free pass to never have to see yourself in a fucking mirror. It’s like they skip that part of life entirely. It pisses me off. Anyway, they tend to gloss over the actual art in like 4 minutes. The portraits and landscapes and stuff made 200 years ago from some starving guy in France or whatever other European country. I’m not an expert on this by any stretch, which you may think if you knew I’d been working here for the past five years, but I don’t. I don’t know the names of the guys who make them, the names of the paintings, or whatever the fuck else. I could recognize some paintings if I saw them online and tell you where it was in the museum, but I couldn’t tell you the history or the story someone made up about it. Just what it looks like generally.

It’s funny, I sometimes find myself getting lost in the paintings. The older stuff anyway. It’s just funny to think it was made by some poor guy in France 200 years ago who was probably more broke than I was. Like, the only thing that probably brought him any joy in life was painting and he probably didn’t see a god damned dollar from it. And here I am, hundreds of years later, gawking at his painting, probably worth $100,000, with a hundred rich pricks a day. He probably died a sad depressed man. Poor son of a bitch.

If I’m being honest, some of the biblical stuff and whatever, is kinda beautiful. It makes me feel something, like when I stare at it for a while, it makes me feel like I’m in a different world where things were bigger and more important to the point where every living person with a pulse felt the need to paint about it and write about it and document it. I probably sound high or something. I just- I just think the paintings are interesting sometimes. It’s hard to explain. But I’m not religious at all. It all seems like another way to squeeze money out of working sons of bitches and make them feel bad for being alive. As if that was already difficult. They gotta pile on the heap. Some things never change. Rich bastards taking from poor, tired sons of bitches. That’s for a fucking fact.

But I’m not supposed to be staring at the paintings. I’m just supposed to just walk around and keep an eye on things. So if I’m walking around and I see someone who looks suspicious or something, I have to follow them to make sure they aren’t gonna steal something or get high in the bathroom or whatever else. But I’m not supposed to be obvious about it. It was emphasized to me the importance of this when I began. Which is something I’ve never really understood. If someone knows they’re being followed, they’re probably not gonna do the fucking thing they’re gonna do. Like stealing something or getting high in the bathroom. I don’t know. I just nodded when they asked if that made sense and said it did. In all honesty, it’s a pretty shitty job and it gets boring pretty quickly once an hour of your shift passes. You’re on your feet all day and there’s not a lot to do, usually. The instances of people stealing stuff has never happened while I’ve been on the job, and I’ve been working here since I dropped out of high school five years ago. It’s mostly kids getting high in the bathroom. And for the most part there’s really nothing I can do about it. If I confront them, they just deny the fact they’re high. They come out of the bathroom stinking of air freshener and cologne so it’s pretty obvious they’re concealing the smell of weed, but unless they’re breaking things or being obnoxiously loud I can only follow them around and look like I’ve got an eye on things. That’s what my boss says. It makes me feel pretty powerless.

Sometimes the kids know of me because of my brother, John. He graduated high school two years ago and had a reputation for being a punk anarchist type. During his sophomore year there was a giant scandal at the high school. Someone had broken in one night and graffitied a bunch of shit all over the walls and lockers. It said shit like ‘Fuck You’, and ‘Mr. LaHaas sucks Cock’ and a bunch of shit like that. Everyone was convinced that John, my brother, was the one who did it. He had pulled stunts and pranks before that fucked with teachers and authorities in general, but nothing like this. The police had come in and interviewed everyone, who then pointed the finger at my brother. Then they interrogated John about it for hours. Apparently they didn’t find any evidence tying it to him so he got off. I guess the cameras they have to record stuff like this don’t even work. I asked John probably like a million times if he did it and he denied it. And usually I can tell when he’s lying because when he’s lying he has this certain tone of voice, like he’s putting on an emotion that I can see through. It’s subtle and I’m the only one that can sense it. Only because I grew up with him and saw him from practically every angle and have gained an acute sense for when he’s lying through his fucking teeth. Except this time, when I asked him and he gave me his answer, I wasn’t sure. I’d ask and ask, and he’d give me the same dry answer. ‘It wasn’t me, Joey.” But he seemed serious in a way I hadn’t seen before. After a while I stopped asking because that was all I was gonna get, but I was never convinced that it wasn’t him. It threw me for a loop.

Everyone was sure John was gonna drop out that year, like I did. They said he’d carry on the family legacy of a 1.2 GPA and burnout life. But to everyone’s surprise, he didn’t. In fact, after the whole vandalism debacle, John seemed to clean up his act. He started studying for tests and got serious in a way I hadn’t seen him before, taking school actually seriously. He also seemed quieter, and stopped smiling. It was pretty weird. I was still living at home during that time and he’d be in our room with the door closed. Any time I came in he’d nose deep in a textbook or be writing something down on a piece of paper. Then I moved out and got a shitty apartment for myself and stopped hearing from him, really. But I’d hear about him sometimes if one of the high school teachers came by the museum and talked to me. Not that any of them were particularly fond of me, Joey Burnoff. But it was as if they felt a certain obligation to let me know that John was doing much better and was on track to graduate, making him the first one in our family to. They seemed very excited. As if it were some miracle they were witnessing. Then they’d leave to go gawk at paint.

It wasn’t soon after John ended up graduating high school that the real miracle had happened. Apparently, John had been saving money from his job at the gas station. He had saved over $1,000 dollars somehow. I know he kept that a secret because if my mother had known, she would have taken it to buy booze. She had a sixth sense for money. If there was money to take, she’d have taken it. I don’t know how in the hell John kept that $1,000 from her, but he did. One day, my mother called me while I was at work. I ignored it because I was on the job. But she kept calling and calling, so I snuck off to take the call. Normally, she called me because she needed money. And it always has this grand sense of urgency to it. She’d always need it right now. I don’t even know why I picked up that time but I did. I went outside to call her. It was winter so my fingers were numb while I dialed her on my cell. She picked up immediately.

“Joey where the fuck did your brother get that money?” she demanded.

“What?”

“Where the fuck did John get that money?” she pressed.

“I’m at work right now.” I was starting to lose feeling in my fingers.

“I don’t give a fuck if you’re at work. Answer my fucking question.”

“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. What money?”

“What money? What money? What do you mean what money? John got $13,000. And I wanna know how the fuck he got that!”

I felt my stomach drop. In that moment I had forgotten the cold.

“$13,000?” I asked quietly.

“Am I speaking fucking English?! I said $13,000!”

I paused. My lips dried and cracked from the cold.

“How do you know that?”

“He moved his shit out, Joey! And posted something on his social media. He dumped some money into the stock market or something, something about the price of oil, I don’t fucking know. Don’t you know how badly we need that money? How far that would go? Doesn’t he think about his poor mother?”

I didn’t say anything as I heard the desperate tone of her voice ring in my ear. She was expecting me to answer, expecting me to reassure her that she would see that money too, that it was a possibility, that suddenly her problems would go away and I would help her. I heard this and the words choked in my throat. I couldn’t reassure her. In some obscure way, I had almost sensed something like this would happen, somehow. From John. Something about the quietness that had taken him, his silence. I knew he was planning something, building up towards something. I didn’t ask because I knew he wouldn’t tell me. And here it is. What he was doing all this time. John figured out how to get money. And now he has it and my mother wanted hers. I knew what was about to follow - the hounding, the incessant demand for me to get through to John, to force him to allow her to take from him. That was always how it went. I was supposed to get through to my brother, to act on my mother’s behalf, to take from him anything worth taking. I swallowed.

I hung up the phone and felt my hands drop to my side, phone still in hand. I didn’t know what I was feeling. I just stared out at the street. My fingers and ears were burning. I watched the cars pass with the busy people driving. Across the street I saw office workers through a large glass window ten stories high. They looked like they were doing something important. A dark gray sky. I wondered how much longer it would be before it was warm again. How much longer of these blistering, gray mornings. I remembered I was on the clock, but stood for a moment longer, watching. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes and put one between my lips. I flicked the lighter and burnt the end, watching the tiny fire torch the black substance. I breathed in, holding it in, then slowly exhaled it out, watching the smoke dissipate into the air in front of me. I finished the cigarette. Then I turned around and ran up the stone stairs towards the backdoor, feeling the crunch of salt kernels beneath my dirty dress shoes.