DREAMS IN THE BUTCHER SHOP

    My name is Trevor Johnston. I'm forty-five years old and live alone in a small town in the midwest. I won't tell you exactly where, because, well... After you hear my story, perhaps you'll understand.

I'm fairly content, living alone. I have a small house on the edge of town and a fair amount of money put away for my eventual retirement. But I don't see that coming anytime soon, because, after all, I've had the job of my dreams for a long time now.

And what job is that, you ask?

Well, when that question occasionally comes up, I have to choose my response carefully. The short answer is that I work in a butcher shop. So when I tell you that, you might reply with, "Oh, so you cut meat?"

But that's not exactly it. Oh, plenty of meat is processed there, to be sure. But not by me. No, I'm not the butcher. That's not my style. I'm the janitor there. I clean up after the butcher and his customers. And let me tell you, that's a full-time job. You'd be surprised how messy a butcher shop can be.

But the thing is, we have a very specific clientele at the butcher shop. Very particular you could say. They know what they want. And the butcher, well, he aims to please. He knows his business and he really takes the time to get to know his customers. Total satisfaction is what we aim for at the shop.

I guess the best way to really describe what I do there is just to tell you about an average day on the job. Like yesterday, for example.

I arrived at the shop around noon. No reason to get there too early, as the place usually isn't too messy until later. I parked my car in the alley behind the shop and went in through the metal double-doors. I walked down the long hallway between the various rooms to my tiny office in the back. A lot of times I don't really see the butcher. I've been there a long time and I know my job very well. He's a good boss and pretty much leaves me alone. I do my job.

Like I said, my office is just a small room in the back. I have a little cluttered desk there and lots of cleaning supplies. A lot of stain removers and disinfectants, large trash bags, mop buckets... You know, the kinds of things a janitor working in a butcher shop would need.

I sat at my desk for a little while yesterday morning, just listening to a morning talk show on the radio and smoking a cigarette. But, sooner or later, it's always time to get the job done, so it wasn't long before I put on my long apron and rubber boots and got ready to begin my day.

You'd think a butcher shop would be a relatively quiet place, wouldn't you? And sometimes it is. I mean, it always gets quiet in the end. But yesterday was a little busy and as soon as I entered the long hallway again, I heard the screams.

Screams you say? Well, yeah. And I know you wouldn't normally expect a lot of screaming at a butcher shop, but like I said, it isn't your ordinary kind of place.

I knew the room at the end of the hallway was vacant so I decided to start there. And let me tell you, as I opened the door, I felt a little overwhelmed by the mess I saw before me.

I don't know exactly how to explain the nature of the mess to you. Some things you gotta' see for yourself to truly understand.

But the first thing I noticed was the blood. It was everywhere. Splattered across the white floor and walls. You could smell it in the air. A lot of blood has a very peculiar scent, you know. It really hangs in the air and gets in your nose. You'll still be smelling it hours later even after you've showered and gone home. But it's like anything. You get used to it after a while.

The second thing I noticed, as I was busy pulling on my yellow rubber gloves, was a severed arm. It was laying on the floor in a pool of drying blood. It looked a little odd with its fingers frozen into an eternal claw the way they were. Looked like the owner of that arm must have had a really intense experience at the shop. But it's like that sometimes.

I then noticed a man's torso on the stainless steel table in the center of the room. It was ripped wide open. Nothing more than a shredded mass of tissue and bone, really. It sort of looked like a bomb had gone off inside the poor soul. But I understood when I looked at the clipboard on the wall. Mr. Jones had been the client checking out the room earlier that day. And well... Let's just say that Mr. Jones really gets into his work.

The funny thing is that the head was missing. Didn't matter anyway, I figured. Just less for me to clean up. And Mr. Jones had told me one morning how he collected heads.

"I have a pretty fair collection of them at this point," he had said one Tuesday morning as he stood in the doorway of my office in slacks and a yellow shirt. He had just finished a session that day and he seemed very happy. We talked for awhile. Mr. Jones is a very pleasant person to talk to, you know. Very articulate. It seems like he's always smiling. But I always kind of wondered what a person would think of that smile when Mr. Jones was coming at them with a chainsaw. Really, I hope I never find out. And I guess that as long as I keep my mouth shut and keep cleaning up the messes, I never will.

So I began my work yesterday. I mostly used a hose and squeegee to push the blood into a floor drain, because Mr. Jones is always one of our messiest customers. Still, after that chore was done, it was time to get hands on with things. You know, picking up the chunks of meat and placing them into bags. From there, they go to a large incinerator in the back, where they fill the surrounding neighborhood with the smoky aroma of roasted flesh. You should see all the cats that prowl around the backdoor to the place. The smell drives 'em crazy, let me tell you.

You'd think it would take a while, cleaning up a mess like that. But I've gotten pretty good at it over the years. And having the right equipment and supplies helps, of course. With work like mine, that's vital. And saves me tons of time to be sure.

So it wasn't long before I had Mr. Jones's mess all cleaned up and the room sparkling like new again. I had a cigarette in the alley after that and watched the cats hungrily sniffing the air. Sometimes I'd give them a few scraps. Just depended on my mood really. I've always liked animals, you see. And well, the people the scraps are made of don't seem to mind. Their troubles are over by the time I arrive on the scene.

But cigarette breaks never last long enough. And soon, I was back in the hallway heading to the next room. And by the sound of the screams filling the place, I knew it was gonna' be a really busy day.

 So that's my story, in a nutshell. Like I said before, my life is really pretty quiet. I mostly stay at home when I'm not working, but I do sometimes like to take long walks in the park in the evening time. Maybe one of these days I'll meet a special girl and fall in love. Who knows. You never know about things like love, I guess. But if I do ever meet that special woman, I'm sure she'll be glad to know that I'm a stable individual who has a really good job. And to me, it's far more than just a job. And it's more than just a place to get your favorite meat. For our customers, it's a place to really live life to the fullest. It's a place where they can live out their dreams. And even though I'm a little bloody at the end of most days, that's something a guy can feel pretty good about.