Don't eat the oranges:
I was always bumming for jobs when I was a teenager. I don't know what it was. I enjoyed working. My parents liked me to work too, like most middle-class parents do, but only if not at the expense of my studies. No expense; I never studied.
I took a two-week job at the county fair. I was on the garbage detail. The job was as dirty and brain-dead as it must sound. Me and another guy walked a route through our sector of the fairgrounds. When we found a full garbage can, we pulled out the bulging bag and walked it to the nearest dumpster. The other guy snapped open a fresh liner and fitted it in the can. We swapped turns walking the full bag to the dumpster. The bags were like spent diapers for gargantuan infants: drippy, smelly, and warm from the trash's decomposing heat. The commingled liquids inevitably found their way out the bag and down your pants, as the bag would bump your leg all the way to the dumpster. By the end of each day, my sneakers were squishing.
On slow days we had a lot of free time. We walked through the other areas of the fairgrounds looking for scantily-clad girls our age and places for my partner to hide and smoke his weed. He was a small-time drug dealer. He was doing juvie time at the fairgrounds for "community service." His last name was Tripp. I'm not making this up.
Our fairground badges gave us a lot of access, probably more than the owners realized. We could walk behind the food and beverage stands and none of the vendors cared. Sometimes we filched beer from empty kegs which had been placed aside but not yet untapped. We never got more than foam out of them.
One time, behind an Orange Julius stand, we stole a cardboard crate of oranges. We found a spot under some trees and proceeded to tear into them.
Oranges should be sweet and juicy and lucious. On a hot day, your head ringed with sweat and the callouses on your hands numb from hours of work, oranges should taste like Eden's ambrosia. These oranges were rotten. I bit into one and got a mouthful of dry bitter dust; mold. We went through the whole crate and found maybe two or three good ones. The rest, rejects. I suppose pureed with ice cream and eggs, the mold would blend away. Like those smart powders they used to pour into cocktails. But not. I'll never buy an Orange Julius again.
My friend got high and we spent the rest of our break pitching the oranges into a chainlink fence. We watched them explode and mangle. The mold dust poofed into miniature spore clouds. That was fun.
This is one of my favorite memories of working at the fair.
