There are mostly downsides to unemployment. Not a lot of upsides. So far I've been able come up with exactly one upside: I no longer have to deal with my incompetent, mind-blowingly moronic former manager. And, true, that's no small thing. It's actually a really good thing. Being away from her is good for me in a lot of ways.

But.

That doesn't keep me warm at night. Or feed me. Or put a roof over my head.

Unemployment, and the phases you go through during unemployment, are confusing, demoralizing, humiliating and soul crushing. Pride? Dignity? Oh please, those were gone the third month of unemployment.

I've experienced and endured so much that I've reached a state of emotional entropy. Nothing phases me. With notable few (and extreme) exceptions, there's nothing anyone can say or do to make me feel any worse than I already do. I'm pretty sure I've experienced every emotion there is to experience, so there's not really anything left to feel.

I'm an emotional zombie.

And yes, I kinda already was emotionally dead. I worked hard to get to a place of emotional ambivalence after the breakup with HWNMNBS and it worked. So in a perverse (and clinically disturbing) sense, I could be grateful for the breakup because it forced me to strive for emotional ambivalence, which I then achieved, and so, now, when dealt with another life-altering blow I had emotional tools to cope. Gives cred to the concept that everything happens for a reason. Good and bad.

All in all, it's just another brick in the wall and I'm emotionally comfortably numb. You know it's bad when Pink Floyd summarizes your life outlook.

So I'm in this emotional zombieland, thinking emotional stasis is the best I can hope for, and taking solace and comfort in knowing I'm able to maintain an emotional ambivalence plateau.

And then blam!

Something happens to disrupt my altered sense of well-being.

I took my mother's car to the gas station. And not just the local gas station that's been in my hometown forever. She was riding on fumes so I pulled into the crappy, dirty, scary, gas station/party store in the unchartered scrub area on the outskirts of the wrong side of town. (Okay, to be fair, my hometown doesn't really have a wrong side of town, but you know what I mean. Almost every town has an adjacent area that's a little sketchy.)

My mother gave me money to fill up the car so I was paying cash. So I had to pay first. And I had zero clue what the final dollar amount would be because I was filling up.

I walked in and the guy working there was reading a boobs magazine. I didn't catch the title, but by the looks of the back cover advertising and low quality paper and printing it was something even crappier than Juggs. The floor was filthy (sticky and dirt tracked) and there was a putrid smell I forced myself to attribute to the jerky of various animals in a repurposed oversize pickle jar. A handwritten label taped to the jar said, "Jerkey  deer rabit beef wild turky" I desperately wanted the smell to be deer or "rabit" "jerkey." But something, intuition, I suppose, told me the source of the putrid smell was even more sinister than dried animal meat. This went beyond the stale cheap cigar or sour milk smell one often smells in a craptastic party store on the outskirts of the wrong side of town. I could feel the stench penetrating the fibers of my clothes and knew I'd have to a) ride home with the windows open; b) burn my clothes; c) bathe in bleach for a week; and d) shave my head. It was that bad.

As I stood there momentarily musing as to why they chose to write beef instead of cow, like the other dried animal meat (deer rabit wild turky) the clerk looked up from his boob magazine and said, "Help you?" He was missing a front tooth and had badly inked tattoos around his neck and on his hands and arms. He was really hairy so the tattoos on his arms and hands were indecipherable. The ones around his neck seemed to be botched attempts at tribal and Celtic art.  

Sidebar: Why is it that people who can't afford to go to a dentist can find money for tattoos? Even crappy, badly inked tattoos are expensive. I realize it's a matter of priorities, but why does ink win out over dental work? By definition, anyone who gets a tattoo wants or at least expects attention drawn to them by their ink, so, one can presume they are okay with calling attention to their missing and/or rotting teeth? There's an interesting psychology there. I wonder if anyone's studying it. Note to self: Get grant to study link between tattoos and lack of dentistry. Also, if a guy is really hairy, why bother getting tattoos and not keep the hair shaved? I know it's a lot of upkeep, but if you're not going to commit to the maintenance why bother committing to the permanent ink?

I said to the guy, "I need to fill up," and handed him 4 $20s.

"How much you want?"

"I am filling up, $80 should cover it."

"I need a dollar amount."

"I don't know the final amount, I'm filling up. Based on $4.12 per gallon you're charging, I'm guessing it'll be about $62."

"You want $62?"

"I don't know. I want to fully fill the tank. I'm giving you $80. Once I fill it and know the final amount you can give me the change. Is that not how these transactions usually go down?"

"Usually people know exactly how much money they want to spend." He seemed to be baiting or mocking me.

I was not going to get into an argument over the "usual" exchange of money for petroleum with this guy.

"Okay, I want $73.31 worth of gas on pump 2."

He rang in $73.31 on the cash register.

"You got a penny?" Yes. He asked me if I had the penny. And I'm reasonably certain he wasn't being funny or ironic or sarcastic or even baiting me.

"No. I have four $20 bills."

He held each bill up to the florescent light to make sure it wasn't counterfeit and gave me my change. 

Which, unfortunately, came to $6.69. Yes. I should have thought through the dollar amount before I threw out the arbitrary dollar amount, but when I threw out the arbitrary dollar amount I was being sarcastic and didn't dwell on the outcome. Lesson learned. And the Universe once again evens the score by mocking me.

The number $6.69 appeared on the huge circa 1983 cash register digital display.

This cracked up the hairy toothless tattooed boob magazine guy.

"Wooooeeeee! 69! That's my favorite number!"

No surprise there.

"You know what that means! Lucky number 69!"

Sidebar: Why do creepy guys only know one Kama Sutra position and why is it always 69? And more to my point, why do they always feel a need to proclaim, "My favorite number!" I presume it's because it's the one sexual position they heard about when they were 12 and at the time they felt it was some advanced wisdom they wanted to brag about... and they never advanced past this. But is there something more to it?In my travels around the world it's been a unifying theme among creepy, immature, pervy men. And the occasional skanky woman. "Ooooo, my favorite number!" Even if it is your favorite number why the need to proclaim it, especially with a creepy laugh?

He stood there expectantly grinning at me, his gaze stopping at my boobs, drool forming between the gap where a tooth used to be.

I prayed.

"Are you there God? It's me, Trillian. I know I'm not your favorite lamb and I know we've had our differences over the past, erm, years, but if you let me survive this without being raped and/or killed and/or held prisoner in the back room of this dirty stinky place I promise I will be more open to you. I realize I'm not a good Christian but I am a good person and in the final assessment we both know I don't deserve this."

I didn't acknowledge his "joke" about 69. I just held out my hand for the change.

He handed me change and said, "Here's your 69!" and let out a Beavis and Butthead giggle. Then he handed me the bills, but as I reached to take them he grabbed them away from me.

"C'mon, tell me your favorite number!"

"Six," I deadpanned, thinking of the $6 he had in his hand.

"Six what? Six plus nine?"

"15?" I said, because for a second I truly didn't grasp where he was going with this.

"No! 6 and 9! 69!"  he yelled at me, tinged with hostility. Oh great. I angered it. I'm dead. Or a prisoner.

"Ha. Whatever. May I please have my $6?"

"Ha. Whatever, here," he said mockingly and handed over $6 and went back to his boob magazine.

I decided no matter what the final amount of gas was I was not going back in there for my change. Couldn't be more than $5. And with luck my mother's gas tank would accommodate $73.31 worth of gas and I wouldn't have to worry about losing money.

Unfortunately my calculations were way off. The tank must not have been as empty as I thought because I could only stuff $61.77 into the tank. And believe me, I tried to put more than that into it but it started spilling onto the pavement. I overpaid by $11.54.

$11.54.

It wouldn't be right for me to not return the change to my mother. And that's no small amount of money for me. I've been living on $10 - $15/week for groceries. Pride and fear, schmide and schmear, $11.54 is a lot of money for me.

So I gritted my teeth and returned into the dirty, stinky store.

He had the boob magazine on the counter in front of him, and he was leaning over it, leaning on one hairy tattooed hand. The other hand was under the counter. He was either jerking off or had his hand on the knife he used to kill and skin the deer, "rabits," beefs and wild "turkys" for his "jerkey."

Without looking up he said, "I knew you'd be back."

Oh yes, he did. He said, "I knew you'd be back." I think he was trying to affect a "cute" creepiness. But he was just frighteningly creepy. This guy was now officially my top contender for creepiest guy of the year. And that's saying a lot because even though it's only April I've encountered some really creepy people this year.

I carefully thought out my words, knowing whatever I said next could be the difference between freedom and imprisonment strapped to a wood chair with a ball gag in the smelly back room of this place, eventually being taxidermed and skinned for "jerkey."

When I was 13 I read a Roald Dahl short story titled, The Landlady. That story, more than any other I've ever read or seen portrayed on the Twilight Zone or Night Gallery, haunts me. The theme is creepy (a little old lady takes in lodgers and taxiderms them - it's no Matilda) but it's Dahl's artful storytelling that keeps it omnipresent in my conscience. It's never fully repressed and is my go-to nightmare. And there I was, smack in the middle of a situation that resembled The Landlady.

"Yeah, erm, you owe me $11.54. I miscalculated the amount of gas I needed. By $11.54." 

And then it happened.

"Your name's Trillian. Trill McMillian." He didn't look up from the boob magazine, and uttered this as a statement of fact and accusingly at the same time.

This caught me so off guard and scared me so much that nearly wet myself. I hadn't used a credit or debit card. Unless he somehow stole my wallet there was no way he could know my name.

I didn't say anything.

One of his hands was still out of sight under the counter.

He finally looked up (hand still out of sight) and said, "I'm Jeff Carlisle," as if that explained everything.

My mind was racing. Jeff Carlisle. Jeff Carlisle. Jeff Carlisle...I couldn't come up with anything. Nothing. This guy looked several years older than me so it couldn't be anyone from school, not that I had a lot of friends there anyway, especially boys, no one who would remember or recognize me by name. Not anyone from my parents' church. A neighbor?

Apparently he construed my inability to place his name in my memory banks as an attempt to evade the fact that he knew my name.

"I recognized you before but didn't say anything. Now that fate brought you back..."

Oh crap. "Fate brought me back?" This has just turned from run of the mill creepy gas station attendant creepy to stalker creepy.

"I saw that your dad died."

Oh crap. Stalker. Definitely stalker creepy. Who is this guy? Jeff Carlisle. Jeff Carlisle. Crap. Crap!! Think girl, think!!!

"Your mother still in the same house?"

Okay, that's it. You mess with my mother you're gonna get a piece of me.

"I'm sorry, I can't place you. What did you say your name is?" trying my best to feign casual indifference.

"Jeff. Carlisle. We had government together. 2nd period. Mr. Peterson."

Not a clue. Jeff Carlisle. Jeff Carlisle. Nothing. Nadda. And yes, I had Mr. Peterson for government class, but so did half the school. We only had two government teachers. And I'm pretty sure I had it in the afternoon, 6th period. But if I say that, then I'm admitting that I was at school with him, or at least had Mr. Peterson for government.

"Sorry, not ringing any bells."

"I look a lot different, now" he offered.

"Well, don't we all," I said, forcing jocularity. "I'm kind of in a hurry so...my change?"

"You don't look much different. I knew it was you almost right away. You can change your hair but you can't change your height or your eyes. I wasn't sure for a minute, though because wow, you really, uh, blossomed."  He threw his head and gave a knowing glance at my chest then proffered another grin with drool through missing tooth space.

So much for God and answered prayers. More proof He does not exist.

This guy looked a lot older than me, but then, people always think that, don't they? No one ever thinks they look their age while everyone else looks older. Most of my classmates were two years older than me, but still, this guy looked many years older than me. Or maybe not. Maybe this Jeff Carlisle was a classmate and maybe he's a mirror of reality for me. Maybe I look as old as he does.

But there was still a disturbing angle to this. No one ever thinks the creepy perv working at a seedy gas station or Kwik E Mart or porno video store is a former classmate, either. Oh sure, we have our suspicions about some of our classmates, certain kids seem destined for certain futures. I remember a couple girls who seemed destined for the stripper pole, and, I long ago heard that's exactly where they both ended up. One of them reportedly did some "modeling" for the kind of magazines like the one my erstwhile classmate was looking at in the gas station. But I never thought about where creepy pervs come from. I mean, I knew they had to come from somewhere, but surely I didn't go to school with anyone who would grow into a sleazy gas station attendant missing a tooth with badly inked tattoos who looks at cheap boob magazines at work. These guys just appear, fully grown, adult creepy perv men, right? They don't have parents or childhoods or go to school or hang out with other kids. I didn't go to school with anyone who would become one of them. Or, maybe I did.

I was not popular in school. In fact I was a social pariah. I had friends, but they were the other dorks and geeks. We spent our school days with our heads down and noses in our books hoping to be ignored in the halls and at lunch. I am 100% certain there was not one boy harboring any sort of "feelings" for me. Certainly not well enough to notice, care about or remember my eyes. I knew a few boys, we were friends, and they were not interested in me "that" way. I know this because they used to ask me advice on how best to woo the other nerd girls.

So I am absolutely certain this Jeff Carlisle, if that is his real name, did not have a crush on me back then. And playing Devil's advocate, let's just say he did have a crush on me. He's been harboring it all these years, waiting for the day I'd walk into the gas station during his shift? It's a very small town, and those who don't make it out get trapped for life, but still...it's all completely implausible.

I instinctively hugged my arms close to my body, trying to cover my boobs.

"You were super smart. What are you doing now? Brain surgeon? Lawyer? Oh wait, no, biology, right?"

Oh crap.

This encounter has just gone from creepy to super creepy to demoralizing. 

I lied. Okay? I lied. I was not going to admit to the creepy hairy gas station attendant with a missing tooth and badly inked tattoos reading a boobs magazine that I'm unemployed and no one will hire me and I have to move in with my mother because I couldn't pay my mortgage and lost everything. To admit that would also mean admitting that the creepy hairy gas station attendant with a missing tooth and badly inked tattoos reading a boobs magazine is doing better in life than I am. He has a job. I do not. So I lied.

I've never lied about being unemployed. I don't love admitting it, but I'm not ashamed of it, either. And there's no point in lying about it, anyway. Until now.

I've been in some low places. Really low places. And that emotional ambivalence has pulled me through them. But this...this knocked me out of my emotional zombieland and into a deeper place of self-loathing and despair. Maybe if he wasn't so creepy. Maybe if he wasn't looking at a boob magazine. Maybe if he didn't gawk at my boobs. Maybe if he hadn't mentioned my parents. Maybe if he had both hands where I could see them. 

I just gave a noncommittal, "Yeah." I could be agreeing with him about the smart part, or the blossoming part, not the career part. 

"I saw in your dad's obituary you aren't married. Or you kept your name...," he said, in a leading tone. He was looking at my hands, clearly looking to see if there was a ring of any kind.

Great, this guy was not messing around. He might as well cut me up with a dull hunting knife because he was already cutting me right down to metaphorical size by jabbing at me about my career and lack of marriage. And seriously, he read the obituary and memorized it? My dad's been dead three years. He read the obituary and remembered it three years later? Who is this guy? Jeff Carlisle. Jeff Carlisle. Carlisle. Carlisle. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

"I'm not one for convention," I said flatly with a hint of "mind your own business or I'll get my 6'7" Green Beret boyfriend nicknamed Killer to come and beat you up." "I'm not one for convention" could mean that my 6'7" boyfriend and I eschew traditional societal commitments in favor of deep symbiotic emotional bonds that transcend names and rings. Right? It could mean that.

The gas station guy said, "Ha! That's a good answer! I'm gonna remember that! I been down the aisle three times, after my last divorce I said never again. 'I'm not one for convention!' Gotta remember that!"

Great. The creepy hairy gas station attendant with a missing tooth and badly inked tattoos reading a boobs magazine has convinced three women to marry him and I haven't even had a date in...well...it's been a while. 

I tried to smile politely and said, "I really am kind of in a hurry, so...my change?"

He said, "Hold on, hold on, I'm coming, I'll get you, just catching up with an old friend," as if he were addressing an impatient customer behind me. Except there was no one there but me. I was the only customer inside and outside. That I knew of, anyway. Who knows who might be tied up and ball gagged in the back room?

He handed me the coins, and as I reached for the bills he used the teasing gesture of pulling away the bills again.

"C'mon, Trill, c'mon, what's your favorite number? C'mon, we're not kids anymore, tell me what you like." He was staring at my chest again, more drool forming where his tooth used to be.

But at least I could now see both his hands. "I like to arrive at my appointments on time, so please give me my change so I can be on my way."

"Awright, awright, here you go. Sheesh, you didn't used to be so uptight."

Yeah, well, even though I don't remember you, I'm guessing you didn't used to be so creepy and hairy and gross and I presume you had all your teeth.

He handed me the bills and continued, "Sheesh, girl grows some tits and suddenly she's better than everyone."

Wanted to say: Sheesh, guy loses a tooth and suddenly he's a creepy perv with badly inked tattoos working at a gas station looking at boob magazines.

Instead, I shot him a, "You and I both know that's not true, you and I both know you're way over the line" look.

He seemed to get it because he said, "Aww, just having a little fun. Don't go away mad, girl!"

I turned and walked out to the car. The fresh air was instant relief, I got out of there alive. Freedom. Fresh air. Ahhhhh. Maybe there is a God. Sorry, God. We'll talk later.

But my relief was short-lived. I could feel his eyes on me through the window the entire walk. As I got into my mother's car I heard the overhead speaker cackle. "Wooooeeee, you always did have a nice ass, nothing's changed there! You on Facebook? Look me..." I slammed the car door before he finished the sentence. Yeah, right. I'll look you up, all right. On the most wanted bulletin board at the post office.

I have zero clue who Jeff Carlisle is. Zero. By asking my mother and siblings a few questions I've eliminated church and the neighborhood. Doesn't really matter how he knows me. But. He got to me. He knocked me from the safety of my emotional ambivalence. I didn't think I could fall any farther, didn't think there was any lower rung on the spiral of failure and despair, but apparently I haven't reached bottom. There are lower places to fall and I'm clearly still falling.

Jeff Carlisle, whomever he is, is just someone I passed on my way down. Three failed marriages, a missing front tooth, badly inked tattoos, looking at cheap boob magazines and working at a dirty, crappy gas station/party store and he's doing better than I am: At least he has a job.