The good bit:
I don’t know what he told the manager, the captain, but old cap told me, “You have one more chance.” But, only after I begged him for a few minutes while customers built up in lines all around the store.
That last day in the icebox I tried very hard. Joe was very quiet, watching me like he was detecting human replicants. I was filled up with the feeling that he could like me even if it meant I had to be a good worker until… Until, I dropped a tray of ten two gallon milk containers all over the floor.
I looked at Joe and started saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over. He just sat down and looked at me.
“What do you really want to be?” he asked me.
“A teacher, “ I said because that was my real-life goal at the time.
“I hate kids,” he said.
“Why?”
“Fuck them. I don’t like how available porn has become over the last 5-6 years. Kids today have no idea how difficult it used to be to see a picture of a naked woman. When I was a kid I remember finding a singles paper with small pictures of naked women. I brought it to school; my friends and me examined it like it was the Shroud of Turin. It was all-cheap and newsprint. You could smudge a nipple off just by touching it.” He was on a roll.
He actually seemed to be smiling. “Now a kid gets 15-20 porn emails every time they open their hotmail account. It’s like, ‘How did they know I have an insatiable appetite for porn?’
“And all the fucking animal porn? You know what, I don’t think animals are putting this shit on the net.
“I don’t think a fucking horse would stoop so low. And even if horses did put porn on the net, you know they wouldn’t put themselves fucking a girl. That would be like a human fucking a bird. Horses would put themselves fucking elephants or rhinos or giraffes. Fuck humans.”
My ass was grafting to the cardboard box I was sitting on. Joe finally stopped for a second and then continued. “I think there should be a separate Internet for all you people who are actually into animal porn. So then all those animal porn buffs wouldn’t have to be repulsed by all the sick human porn.”