Angel had surgery. Mi pobre chiquito. Dud was in tears, of course, and then her ass of a husband got all pissy and shit because she wanted to call 'Ama for comfort. "Then what the hell am I good for?" he demanded. "I'm your husband, I can console you, not your mother!" Pendejo. It's easy for him to say because he had his mother standing right next to him the whole fuckin' time! Dud and 'Ama are a whole timezone apart! Que pinche guey culero.

So I had that shit on my mind while I was at work. It's a good thing we only got about 15 international packages. Zamira and I processed the whole bunch. Danny came (Danny's this temp guy that got hired less than two weeks ago; he'll be here until peak season is over in January) but he left right away because there was nothing for him to do. I doubt he even clocked in. And then Aaron came. The fucker. He was supposed to come in with me, Zamira was supposed to report in at 4:30 with Danny. I show up on time, and Zamira's already there. We wait around a little bit, and since Aaron never showed his ass we got to work. The kid stumbles in at almost five o'clock, drunk as hell. Seriously. He was fuckin' falling over! At first I thought he'd just overslept, as he always does. Aaron never reports in to work on time. But naw, he wobbled over to us after a while and even though he was standing at more than an arm's reach from me, I could smell the vodka on the guy. Hot damn. I can't stand drunk people. They're not even human in my eyes. Fuckin' pendejos like him are what killed Marco. Gah!

Aaron grinned at us and told us he was drunk. Zamira looked shocked and unbelieving; I ignored the dumbfuck for the rest of my three hours there. What pissed me off the most was that none of the supervisors told him jack shit. We work at a fuckin' warehouse, with heavy machinery and packages and trucks and eighteen-wheelers. Dipshit kid coulda hurt somebody, if not himself. Zamira claims she saw him nearly fall over his own feet, although I was too disgusted to look at the guy and so didn't see anything.

Don't get me wrong here; I like to drink, okay? Whiskey's pretty damn good, so is rum and tequila. But I don't bring that shit to work. This is the first job I really truly enjoy, and I respect it too much. I don't wanna lose my job. Yeah, even though I get bruises at least once a week, and my guitar nails break every other day, and I can't get the callouses out of my skin anymore. I love my fuckin' job. And even if I were still back at Penncro, which I absolutely detested, I wouldn't ever show up there drunk, nearly passing out. It's your fuckin' job, man! You're an adult, so act like it! But no, Aaron's not a grown-up yet. Didn't I say he was a kid to me? When I got home, I was steaming. I hate drunk people, they remind me of my alcoholic father and how he beat the crap outta me and my sister when we were kids; they remind me of the projects we grew up in, Dud and I, of the catcalls as we walked by the park in the evening on the way to the bakery from the drunk old farts on the benches, how I used to put my arm around my sister so they'd think I was her boyfriend or something and they'd stop staring at her pretty legs with their bloodshot eyes; they remind me of Marco and how he didn't even get to graduate and how nobody gave a shit in school that he was dead, he was gossip to those teenage idiots. But those were welt marks on my sister, the borrachios seemed to see right through my act, and Marco was my friend.... *deep breath*

Of all my coworkers, I get along with Aaron best. We were hired together, we help each other out, we kid around, we're the same fuckin' age. But we're so damn different, and it had just never come home to me the way it did this Friday. I can never be his friend, no matter how bad-ass we get along. I'm beyond him, too far ahead. And it kinda hurts, because when I first met him, he reminded me so much of Marco for some reason. I saw him almost like a little brother, same as with Marco. And I guess I'm just being too deep about shit, but I can't help it, dammit! I'm just deep and shit. It's one of the biggest reasons I scare people away. At work, they take it as aggressiveness; they've told me before, to my face. "You're so aggressive!" Roberta always tells me. I didn't know exactly what she meant, so I asked Zamira, who told me she agreed. And Homer's told me the same thing, so has Danny. I've even seen Alb�n and Ivan look at me weird out of the corner of their eye, like they don't wanna fuck with me. Well, then they shouldn't fuck with me. But Aaron's the only one who's ever looked at me like I'm normal. And I guess that's it; that's what he's got that Marco did. It's that look in their eyes, that acceptance. Marco never questioned me, despite the fact we were both avoided at in school. We were kindred, somehow, and that was that.