This is why they dragged Francois Villon to the gallows.

Prodigious Savings banned Glenda two years ago. She may or may not have outlawed one single spicy sausage with her then boyfriend, Terrence. Her long-ago face hangs in the manager’s office, Prodigious’ Most Wanted. Gangly hair, greasy and dandruff moist from weeks of not using any shampoo. Narrow eyes that gave up on life a decade earlier. Lips so thin they paper cut her forearms.

In defiance, Glenda has resorted to walking over to the store one to two times a day and asking to speak to a manager to see if she’s still banned. Each of the three managers knows her, and with a sigh, a roll of the eyes, one of them goes outside the doors to let her know that she is, in fact, still banned for being the hungry bandit. Starving to die, hungry to live, all of us.

I take my breaks outside the store. A strip mall with Prodigious Savings at one end, and a Dollar General at the other end. In between a Suboxone clinic, barber shop, Hispanic church, and several empty stores that had gone bankrupt back in 1991 when the strip mall flourished. A time when the shoppers of Lexington, Kentucky, drove out of their way to get whatever they needed. Cars packed with happy children and loving parents who bought them a candy bar for being good boys and girls while shopping, has turned into a tiny free prison sitting next to Legend’s Field baseball park. Since the death of unions due to companies like Wal-Mart, Target, and AutoZone, the strip mall and its brick front have become a place where drifters, looters, killers, addicts and the mentally ill congregate. And if you are one of the lucky bastards like me who sit outside to get out of the meat locker for a few minutes, then you’ll hear many stories from living ghosts who sit alone most of the day. The itch to speak is tremendous. The need for love is colossal.

“You work here, right?”

“Yes,” I tell Glenda again.

“You think I’m still banned? I’m still wondering because I didn’t even do what I am accused of.”

“I am just a butcher. I’m not a manager. I can’t say.”

“Can you ask for me? I’d like to know.”

Standing there, scarecrow gaunt, Glenda hovers. Her jeans six years unwashed, the same jeans she wears every day. Her oversized T-shirt reads, Hello Hawaii. A tiny green palm tree covered in assorted stains hangs over a sandpile with a plastic shovel and matching pail.

“Can you ask?” She asks again. And she’ll stand there until you go inside and ask, staring, fit to kill, in need of recognition.

Every day, all day, I always cater to those who live on the other side of the glass. I go inside to find Judas, Lauren, or Odin, and tell them, “Hey, someone wants to speak to a manager. She wants to know if she’s still banned.” None of them worked at Prodigious Savings when she was banned. They yawn, roll eyes, say something about wishing harm on Glenda for pulling them away from a daydream. The last bastion of the violently underpaid. The only thing separating us from those outside the store, a couple of paychecks. If a daydream calls it is the place to live, float, and survive. If pulled from it, rage collides with depression.

There are others, mostly unknown with names given to them by employees. Forever haunted inside their own skin. Red, a young twenty something comes into the store daily to buy a frozen Hungry Man meal. After his purchase he asks one of the store employees to microwave it. Red drinks a handle of cheap vodka daily, then passes out in a tiny blue beach folding chair next to a garbage can. One afternoon, I found him with his head in the barrel with a pile of vomit next to his feet.

Ancient Reggie’s better days were spent at a Curtis Mayfield concert in the 1970s. He walks like a question mark obsessively pulling up his pants and dropping them and pulling them up before he can shop.  Grandpa Scooter with backwards camo hat, drives up on the walkway of the strip mall with grey beard and long grey hair flowing. A duct-taped scooter that makes loud sounds from the Medieval torture period, and a boombox bungee’d to the back cranking rap music. Grandpa Scooter tries to sell his suboxone to anyone sitting outside for “scoot scoot gas,” because “the president sucks nuts hard.”

On quiet breaks, breaks I don’t have to help the ghosts, the parking lot resembles George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. They roam bumping into one another. A weird humming noise gathers above them. I can’t tell if it’s the sound of their hungry bellies, a message from the gods, or music they create when they rub up against one another. The sounds of lives clinging to the last bit of dignity they have to offer before they’re put six feet under in a pauper’s grave. Or left in a hospital basement on a rack. Little shoe boxes full of ashes no one claims. In life alone. In death, the fading ink on a piece of tape stuck on a frayed box.

I’ve been a butcher for twenty years. Seen it all, from a man losing a finger on saw, to a coworker having a stroke on a box of eye round, to a woman taking off her top to make her husband jealous. Depending on where I was working, I’d seen every type of customer. The sick, the mentally ill, the greedy, sports stars, the rich, the hateful, the full of shit, new agers, assholes, cunts. All of them. I had seen it all until the other day.

Same day as always: turning down Grandpa Scooter’s suboxone. Finding a manager for Glenda, cooking for Red, in between it all cutting meat for people on food stamps and low-income families. No one seemed to notice, until a customer shouted “disgusting.” On the carpet in front of the sliding doors to enter the tiny grocery store that looks like the 1970s inside and plays 70s one-hit wonders; we found a giant pile of shit. Heaping and steaming, full of confidence, shouting, “Go ahead, put on that latex glove, and pick me up you under paid prick!”

Alison, a cashier who loves Jesus because he saved her after a stint in hoosegow for stealing panties from Target while on a meth binge, said, “Maybe it was someone’s dog?”

Vincenzo, a stocker, and store kiss ass to the store manager, Judas, “I didn’t do it!”  Everyone looked at him, “I’ll text Judas and let him know on his day off.”

“You have Judas’ personal cell number?” Lauren, the tatted and lanky assistant manager, asked.

“Judas is my buddy. Who else will listen to me about sobriety and my giggling ice cream dreams?”

“Boot licker!” a voice from the ether shouted.

There was a collective sigh standing over the giant pile of cocky shit, “Let’s go see what happened on the camera,” Julio said.

We gathered over Julio at the office computer. Bodies piled up and bumping into one another as if we were all watching a torpedo hit a Japanese submarine in a thriller movie starring Harrison Ford. Julio clicked on the greying and fuzzy footage.

The black and white man walked into the store. Unknown. Thin as a rail, passing through the sliding doors, thin as starvation would allow. Our eyes grew around Julio. The secret shitter walked up to the rolled tobacco rack and grabbed several boxes of Old Duke, each box holding twenty pouches. He made his purchase.

“What does his hat say?” Lauren asked.

“Wildcats, that’s everyone,” Julio replied.

The black and white man picked up his bag and walked around the corner to the carpet, then looked around. At no time did he ask for a bathroom. He didn’t stagger drunk, nor did he clinch his belly due to a sickness. He simply unbuckled his pants, dropped them, half squatted, scrunched his face, and took a massive duke of his own on the carpet. There wasn’t any looking around for other customers or workers. He nonchalantly pulled his pants back up and buckled them, looked inside his bag at the boxes of Old Duke, and he walked out like it was any other sunny day.

When the shit hit the floor there was a collective, “ewww,” then for being a championship brown-noser, Lauren sent Vincenzo to claim the giant duke with a grocery bag wrapped around his hand. The secret shitter eventually collected the moniker of Old Duke.

After an hour of running into one another and retelling the story in the back of the store, I went outside for a break. I lit up a butt, and like mosquitoes descending on summer flesh, the parking lot of pinball zombies formed a line in front of me, each one asking for a cigarette.  I swatted each one away with my own shouts of poverty, then Glenda arrived.

“Think I am still banned? Can I speak to the manager? Because you know, I didn’t steal spicy sausage. It was Terrence.”

There was nothing left in my tank, I blew out the last drag and went inside, found Lauren stocking a box of candles with a picture of a Latino woman wrapping a chain around a man, the candle read, “I dominate my man.” Where do I work? I thought. Is this a grocery store? A fever dream I can’t wake up from?

“There’s a customer outside. She wants to know if she’s banned,” I said. She rolled her eyes. We both sighed, refusing to say the name Glenda, fearing it somehow conjures the gangly scarecrow into the store.

Our side of the glass or their side of the glass, the only thing that separates us are two weeks of lost paychecks; a divorce; a broken heart; a new addiction or the resurfacing of an old one. Our faces hold a tad more light than the other side of the glass because we had vegetables, or someone told us, “I love you.” It could easily be Lauren, Judas, Julio, Vincenzo, Odin, or Alison in the parking lot following the strange sounds in the sky.

None of us own a home. Our cars are beat up, our bus passes bent, our shoes covered in blood, pain, and grease. There’s no money in our pockets after our bills are paid. None of us have been on a trip for a century. Our parents were broken and that broken and poor lifestyle passed down to each one of us. Ex cons, the religious, drifters, the hungry, the broke, the damned. All given a name tag, a weekly paycheck that couldn’t afford a trip to the gallows. The dismal paychecks that go to everything, other than a peaceful lifestyle, keeps us on our side of the glass, keeps us from shitting on the floor.  Be grateful for the early death that’ll come for us all, at least we can wash your clothes.