Jim the perve*

When I was sixteen years old I got a job as a waitress in a retirement community (not to be confused with a nursing home, I always insisted).

This place was posh alright; rich retirees looking for a social life, aerobics classes, bingo night, golf outings, etc. It was called "The Springs" and was sold as the shiz in terms of old fogie living. The pictures on all the pamphlets showed young-at-heart-but-wrinkly models with perfect dentures laughing their way through their golden years. Included in the ridiculously priced rent was a "dining experience" where you had to sit in assigned seating with other old people you probably couldn't stand and where you could enjoy the luxury of a menu that rotated Salisbury steak, liver and onions, and chicken fried chicken again and again and again until you were begging to be euthanized by your family already.

My job was to serve these people liver and onions and Chablis wine and make sure their dining experience was everything the pamphlets had promised them it would be. Normally the old folk ate in silence. When they did speak, they shouted at each other because nobody could hear a fucking thing.

There were two dinner sessions, one at 4:30 and one at 6:00 and each retiree was assigned to one depending on their preferences, but Jim came and sat down at 4:30, and sat straight through until the 6:00 hour when he would eat.

Nobody wanted to sit with Jim.

Jim was in his late eighties, had sunken in blue eyes, no hair, dentures that on a good day he remembered to wear down to the dining room. He walked very very slowly with a cane but could be quick as lightening when his meatloaf didn't sit right in his stomach.

Every single time I passed by Jim's table he made a comment along the lines of:

"Shake that ass."
"Gimme someathat."
"Be a doll and sit on my lap."

It never ceased. But occasionally the comments were more aggressive, along the lines of:

"Get your ass over here, I'd fuck the shit out of you"

to which I would reply,

"Oh whatever Jim, as if you could even get it up anymore, and even if you could, I wouldn't go near your wrinkly ass."

(Keep in mind these were the days when Viagra was probably just the wet dream of some old pharmaceutical chemist at Pfizer).

On and on we would tease each other throughout my shift, three days per week.

Mind you, I am sixteen years old, but never did it once cross my mind that this was beyond inappropriate or that it might even teeter on sexual harassment. Jim was too old to give a shit about the fact that he might have been breaking some kind of rule, if indeed he ever had. The other waitresses stayed away from Jim, but I always sort of egged him on.

Once a month I would pick Jim up in my little Toyota Corolla and I would drive him literally next door to the Native New Yorker for buffalo wings and I let him introduce me as his girlfriend, but the waitress who knew him by name always gave me a knowing wink. I would order alcoholic drinks and they wouldn't card me.

Sometimes I would let Jim put his hand on my knee for a few seconds before accusing him of being a perve and shoving it away. Then he would accuse me of not knowing how to have fun with my own body.

When Jim wasn't being a sick fuck he was kind and concerned about my schooling and my future and he gave me advice and told me stories about his children who he hadn't seen or spoken to in years.

He would bring me pictures -- proof -- from when he young and beautiful and in the Navy. He showed me these pictures as evidence that at one point in his life it was he who was the object of the gazes of the sexually deprived. He brought pictures of himself holding babies, proof that at one point he was loved by his children.

He must have looked at me in my teenage glory and thought about the cruelty of life being without second chances. Maybe he thought about all of the social conventions he had followed that got him nothing but a wrinkly face and a useless body and a Salisbury steak on Tuesday nights. Maybe he thought about the many women he had fucked when he was in the Navy or maybe he thought about all the women he would like to have fucked and didn't. Maybe he remembered his daughter and how he had made a butchery out of fatherhood.

When I graduated from high school I tried not to forget about Jim, despite having the life of a typical 18 year old that had since moved on to better things than waiting tables at an old folks home. I'd stop by every now and then but soon he had changed. He had stopped teasing me and some days he thought I was someone else, maybe his daughter.

Then one day I came to visit and Jim didn't live there anymore.

Or anywhere.

Poor Jim.

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By the way, has everyone had problems subscribing to my feed? From what I can see everything is okay in my feedburner and it says 8 people are subscribed, but commentluv can't find my feed and a few other say they are having problems. Can anyone help my ignorant ass?

*Key's post reminded me of this.

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