“Please Lord don’t let me die in a supermarket!”

Last night I was breaking down three dairy pallets in the stockroom, when a local heroin dealer and a junkie walked through to the bathroom. This dealer uses the men’s room at Free Food For Fat F…s to sell dope to people that need help firing up.

The dealer is a forty-year old black man who constantly mumbles cusswords. It is as if Richard Pryor was drunk, angry and stumbling around trying to memorize his jokes. I think this dude does this to project an air of menace and to keep people away. His junkie was an emaciated white boy of perhaps 20. They came through mumbling and cussing to no one in particular at 12:05.

Three employees attempted to access the two toilet men’s room over the course of the next half hour. By 12:30 the dealer was gone, cussing furiously to himself as he walked by me. Finally Zach tried to use the urinal and came back out in disgust, asking me how long the junkie had been there. I responded, “He must be having a hard time. The guy that helped him fire up just left in disgust. With any luck the coroner will be carting him off under a sheet in a few hours.”

Zach grabbed the night captain, who spent the next 10 minutes watching the bathroom drama. By the time I was out on the floor with my freight at 12:40 the junkie was staggering around the store. The night captain spent the next hour as the personal security guard and safety manager for the stoned junkie, who never ended up buying a thing.

About 15 years ago a KFC I used to walk by was closed down after a body was found to have been in the men’s room for 2 days.

The same year I saw a junkie overdose in the men’s room of a supermarket I worked in.

In December Scabby Abby was caught shooting heroin in the women’s room at Wal-Mart.

Earlier this winter a junkie was found dead in a Burger King close to where I live, having been draining in the bathroom for an entire day.

Last Friday, at the local Dunkin Doughnuts a junkie overdosed in the men’s room, and was revived by the cops and EMTs.

This past Sunday Miss Ezz, bookkeeper at Cheap Guys R Us in West Baltimore, called me.

“You would not believe what I’ve had to put up with this week with these ghetto cashiers and these drug dealer customers. We sell fifty cases of garlic powder a week [25 times normal]. The drug dealers put it in their coke and heroin to throw off the police dogs. Then, on Saturday night this junkie dies in the men’s room, a needle sticking out of his arm. Nobody missed a beat. The EMTs came and tried to revive him. The cops came and taped off the area. The CSI people and the coroner come. They eventually wheel the body out, and we keep pumping out the groceries; customers pushing their shopping carts of sodas and oodles of noodles around the corpse on the gurney. Nobody even blinked. Please don’t let me die in one of these places—please!

“Then I have to use the woman’s room—a regular pit of filth; women pissing on the walls—how does someone without a dick piss on the wall? The generals [janitors] sign the bathroom log, but they just take a dirty mop and push the germs around. It is bad enough that I have to use this room, then I get inside and the light does not work. The first thing I think is I might be tripping over a body! I had to prop the door open with the trash can to let in enough light—someone should just condemn the neighborhood.”

I would like to recommend needle exchange stations at the entrance to supermarket restrooms, a Pink Floyd music feed in the men’s room, as well as crime tape and a body bag in the janitorial closet. Bleeding hearts feel free to improvise your own Junkie aid station. In the meantime bring on the China White.