A Zoo Full of Asshats

The One Where I Become A Dumb Peasant

"You're fired. We're letting you go", he repeated himself, sounding unsure. My termination was a hit-job orchestrated by someone other than our boss.

"Why?" I asked, without really caring why. That question just felt something you should ask.

"The other guys say you've been distracted. You look tired. Today you're an hour and a half late" he explained, looking around searching for something else to look at other than me. In a year we had rarely spoken. He was a boss in title alone.

"Okay. I'll get my things" and I wasn't surprised when nobody I said goodbye to had much to say about me being fired.

I wasn't good at working in a warehouse. The work was boring, we sold appliances which were boring and I was busy as hell with college studying nothing in particular. Now I wouldn't be able to afford more college, so dropping out and becoming unemployed went hand-in-hand.

I drove down the street about three blocks and parked behind a hotel, smoking a cigarette and worrying. Next to the hotel, I saw a bad answer to a good question: What to do next?

I walked across the drawbridge in a state of desperation like most of the people who crossed it during off-hours probably did.

A castle in the middle of the city.

The moat was full of lily pads and the front door was locked with a sign to go around and use the service entrance, so I walked around the side and saw a golden gorilla of a man on a metal folding chair. His eyes were closed and I walked up.

"Where is the service entrance?" I asked him.

He opened an eye, "Want me to take you?"

I nodded. He stood, shorter then I was, but maybe twice as wide. He was gigantic and muscular beyond description. I found out later he had been a bodybuilder in Paraguay and ended up here seeking refuge like many did. He had long black hair that hung in tight curls halfway down his back.

Friendliest person you could meet, but he loved showing off how much he could lift or how easily he could lift you. Today he led me into the castle's back office which looked like any office on Earth might and left to return to his chair.

In the back waited an administrator like any other. She gave me a form and I filled it out. I was given a smock and some tights and told to come back in a couple hours for dinner shift.

That was how I ended up in Avalon.

The castle was a storybook that people paid to visit. Beautiful things could happen there, and disgusting things too. You couldn't leave Avalon and ever return, so people never left. Not always out of fear, either.

When you were in Avalon, you didn't belong to the real world anymore. You'd work all afternoon and evening, mornings were practice and before long the only people you knew were from Avalon, too. We joked about having a barracks there like it was a real castle and we were real knights. At least we'd save on rent.

We were peasants, kings and horsemen who drove old Toyotas and Hondas and decrepit motorcycles clinging to life. We were poor and destitute. When you're broke, you can only afford to go out to a few different cheap places, usually with people from Avalon to split the tab. You share rides, you move in together, have sex with eachother, do drugs together.

My smock made me a banquet server, but I wanted to be in the show.

My title was "peasant" or "serf".

After waiting tables for a few nights with the people who worked as peasants and wenches, I got some face-time with the head knight. He said I could come on as a squire, but I'd have to quit cutting my hair and stop smoking. I managed to grow my hair out and passed the physical without quitting cigarettes.

This turned out to be a non-issue. My boss and I would smoke together after a shift, driving the tractor full of horse feces to the dumpster.

I loved tractor duty.

You're pouring sweat all night, then you take a load of trash in the blade of the tractor with a buddy on the back. You're smoking cigarettes and screaming jokes over the rattling engine noise. When the back door rolls up, the ice cold night air hits you and your whole body steams as you drive the garbage outside against the backdrop of the city.

Buildings shimmer on a clear, winter night, and they're all part of a world that barely exists to you anymore because you're in Avalon now. You're laughing as you dump a can of old chicken parts and dirty napkins into a dumpster that smells like it's full of bodies.

How loud can two men scream "Fuck!" at the top of their lungs trying to make eachother laugh?"Who gave that fucking guy an axe? He looks like a dumb prick", you scream at the executioner from the front exhibit while he waits for his girlfriend who works in the gift shop. He's nonplussed and has a dumb tattoo from when he was a teenager. Maybe he can't even hear you over the roar of the tractor, but you don't care either way.

You're profane and poor and homeless people are in the storm drain under the parking lot trying to live their lives while you tell your friend to hurry the fuck up with the door.

"This piece of trash was built by simpletons. They're just trying to piss us off" my friend screams in front of a couple trying to get through the parking lot to their car after the show. If they weren't so drunk, they may have cared.

Somehow, I got a positive review from somebody. That never happens, so they gave me free tickets which I gave to a woman in her late 30s in a bar. She took me with her to a separate bar after my friends decided to leave and we danced and later had sex in her car.

A Miata is really difficult to have sex in with the convertible top still on. I kept hitting my head, but thankfully it was a soft top. Eventually we found a way to prop her against the back of the passenger seat and sit my ass back against the dash.

I was getting skinny from working like a dog and being too broke to eat enough. I was built for fucking at challenging angles. My ass mashed buttons on the radio and dash. If we had been fucking in the moon lander, Houston would have been pissed off by the time I came.

My story had became chaotic because my life was empty. I was in love with a girl who didn't want me, increasingly sucked into Avalon and desperate for something without a name.

For better or worse, I fit in pretty well there.