Calm Down Partners

The grocery store is no
place for Sumo wrestling!

I used to work at a grocery store for most of high school and my first few years of college. I started out as a bag boy and moved my way up to cashier…..whooopdi dooooo! I met a lot of good friends at the old grocery store, one of which was Zackitalia (read my previous post for an explanation of the name, and yes, he was being a real Richard Noggin in this story…..that’s dickhead for you slow people). Zackitalia made the move to the produce department one summer. He eventually coaxed me into making the move to the promised land of as little work as possible, a.k.a. the produce department. The produce department became the land of giants….. and one little guy.  Zackitalia was around 6’7” and 250 pounds, I was 6’3” and 300 pounds, our boss was 5’9” and 150 pounds soaking wet.

Our duties mostly involved restocking the shelves and displays throughout the day. We would have to unload the delivery truck two or three times a week and move all the uber-perishable produce into the cooler. One summer day we had two trucks come in and we had our work cut out for us.  Actually we just had to work, but this was rare in our department. We unloaded the truck into the main store room. We were in process of sorting boxes and moving things to the cooler. I bent over to pick up a box of apples. As soon as I stood up I was nailed in the left nut with a plumb. I stood up and turned around to find Zackitalia laughing at his impeccable aim. I flew him the bird and went back to work.

I picked up a case of celery and took it into the cooler. As I was walking out I heard “Hey! Fat ass! Catch!” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a cantaloupe whizzing at me. I turned around and THUMP! I somehow caught it between my left bicep and chest. I yelled out “How do you like that you stupid mofo!”  I grabbed the cantaloupe and spiked it on the floor as hard as I could. SPLOOOOSH! Cantaloupe guts went everywhere including the floor, the walls, and all over Zackitalia. We looked at each other and laughed. Our boss was starting to get a little nervous. He kept muttering “Calm down partners, just calm down.”

We continued with our tasks. I walked to the opposite side of the store room. I starting opening up some cases of bananas and the barrage of flying fruit started again. I gave Zackitalia the evil eye and threw down the box of bananas in my hands. I yelled some obscenities which I don’t really remember, though I’m sure the f-bomb was in there many, many, many times. For some reason, my friends enjoyed getting me mad to the point where I was seriously pissed off and started inflicting bodily harm on them.  I finally reached that point. I ran at Zackitalia as fast as I could and picked him up Sumo-style. After I picked him up, I rammed him into the produce cooler door pretty frickin’ hard. There was a loud THUMP!  and I dropped him on the floor. He looked at me and said “it’s funny when you’re mad.” Then he started laughing. I looked at the cooler door. I stared in amazement and finally spit out “Dude……look.” There was a huge dent in it the shape of Zackitalia’s body imprinted in the door. It was reminiscent of a white chalk outline at a murder scene.

We calmed down and laughed a bit. We looked at each other and simultaneously said “where’s the boss man?” Just then we heard a voice from a broken down ice machine “Partners calm down, caaaaaaalmmmmm dowwwnnnnn! You’re  gonna hurt yourselves.” At that time we saw the hatch to the ice machine swing open to reveal our boss’s hiding place. He took cover as soon as I had picked up Zackitalia. We had to look almost like two professional wrestlers due to the way I picked him up and ran him into the cooler door. That had to be pretty scary to our boss who was outweighed by quite a few hundred pounds. We helped our boss out of the ice machine and went back to work. He was convinced we were really fighting. It took a while, but we eventually got him calmed down.  We were lucky we had the boss we did, or we would have both been fired on the spot. At the time of this incident, we were in the process of closing down our current store to move to a new one being built across the street. I think that was the bigger reason we didn’t get in trouble…..we were moving stores and no one gave a crap about the rundown one we were leaving behind. We are often encouraged by our parents, teachers, etc. to leave our mark as we travel through life. In this case Zackitalia literally left his mark.