Mike parks his car at the far end of the parking lot of The Home Depot off Sherman Way in the San Fernando Valley. He takes his bag, in which he carries his work clothes, and deliberately enters the building through the front entrance door. Thinking he looks like a high-ranking administrator, Mike makes sure everybody notices him in his tailored Italian suit. Even though he has several times been the target of disdainful remarks and laughter by other employees, he craves respect in any way or form that he can get it. His last high position in the Iranian government, where everybody bowed to him whenever he walked down the halls, had irreversibly spoiled him rotten. Like an addict, respect has become an essential part of his existence; the lack of it causes severe withdrawal symptoms, with which he is unable to cope. There are, of course, times that he loathes himself for cunningly impersonating a man with character, when, in reality, he can hardly stand to look at himself in the mirror.
After over nine years working at The Home Depot, with all his education and managerial experience, Mike still hasn’t been promoted to upper management at the chain store, which he thinks he deserves. He is still a simple floor foreman, responsible for an awful lot of work, and with only five subordinates, who never fear or respect him like his subordinates did in Iran. It makes him feel reasonably better when he thinks the reason for not being promoted is because he is a foreigner, and worse, a Persian. And there are times that the lack of promotion troubles him so much that he feels like screaming, bloody discrimination.
The five people who have been working for him are: Leon, an old ex-Vietnamese army officer, whose ultimate wish is to return home, even though nearly all of his memories about Vietnam before his departure are not pleasant to be remembered.
At twenty-six, Little Joe, standing at just over five feet (on a good day) is a second generation Italian-American. A hardworking man, a loving and devoted father of two gorgeous kids and the kind husband of even an attractive wife, that many years of marriage have converted them to a brother and sister.
Big Jerome, a six-foot-five-inch African-American in his early fifties, with his transmittable smile, he is liked by everybody.
Mary is a forty-three-year-old, snack-loving woman who, after losing her second husband to cancer, crossed the line from being voluptuous to being classified as obese. If her enormous body is not a pleasant sight to gaze at for some people, her unique warm smile, her beautiful blue eyes and her amiable personality definitely compensate for it. As a single mother, she works hard to raise her three kids.
Victoria Aguilar is a beautiful twenty-three-year-old proud Mexican-American, who is determined to become a medical doctor. Polite, warm and caring, she is an ideal young lady that every father wishes to have as a daughter, and perhaps many men as their wife.
As Mike arrives at work, like every morning, he ignores the look on Mathew’s face―the cashier, who has never missed any opportunity to show his disapproval of him. He ignores the arched eyebrows of young Steve, the front desk clerk, and the mocking smile of Rob, working at the return merchandise desk, whose nose looks like a large bruised banana hanging from between his two brush-sized black eyebrows.
In some dark burrows of his mind Mike images that he is heading toward his immaculately decorated office in Iran, as he physically heads straight for the locker room at the rear of the building. Going through his daily metamorphosis, he changes his clothes to his working-stiff outfit―blue jeans, a long sleeved work shirt, and a pair of comfortable shoes. When he ties the khaki apron behind his back and walks out on the floor, Mike appears, at least physically, as assimilated into American working class society as one who has been here for many generations. He is ready to start his degrading day at a job he dislikes intensely, a job he feels is way beneath him, and a job that he has come to believe is depriving him from shaping and sustaining a promising and meaningful life, a job a thousand notches below his previous one in Iran.
Today’s insignificant tasks begin with a man desperate to find the right metric nuts for the sample screws he holds in his hand as if they were prized possessions. Mike directs him to the correct aisle and the man flashes an insincere smile as he scurries off.
He has to find crazy glue for an old fat Russian woman with an obnoxious attitude, who acts as if she is direct descendant of the last czar. She wants to glue pieces of her broken Russian antique porcelain pot back together. The woman is so nervous that Mike has to refrain from telling her that she should go to a pharmacy and ask for the most potent tranquilizer to glue herself together.
He sits down with an impatient, niggling emigrant couple to help them select the right mosaic tiles for the kitchen and bathroom floors of their new dream house―most probably, Mike thinks, a tastelessly built pile of lumber, but undoubtedly their Taj Mahal. He can’t guess where they come from. He doesn’t have the nerve to ask them, but with their noticeable accents, dark complexions, and straight raven-black hair, he is convinced they are either from India or Pakistan. The images of destitute people in the slums of Calcutta, India, and the city of Karachi in Pakistan, where he has visited in the past come to focus in his mind.
He shakes his head when the couple finally selects some dark mosaic tiles that Mike thinks are tastelessly ugly as volcanic rocks. In his entire life, Mike has never entertained the notion that as people come in different shades of colors, their tastes might wary the same. He stares at the couple contemptuously as he continues thinking while the customers go on arguing between themselves in their native language.
Next, Mike settles a dispute between the store and a couple who are returning two trays of withered begonias that are suffering from a severe case of dehydration, claiming they have changed their minds. He is about to lose his temper when the couple refuses to accept credit and keeps insisting on receiving nothing but cash for their purchase. Aggravated, he obliges.
In the afternoon, he takes his time to assist several more customers in finding what they are looking for: electric outlets, fuses, sprinklers, nails, garden hoses, four-ply plywood, two-by-fours, and a lost cute boy that reminds him his grandson Che. He then delegates several tasks to those who work for him and tries to catch up with his paperwork. About an hour before the end of his eight hours shift, Mike walks around between the isles to check on the arrangements of various merchandises on the shelves, and on his subordinates. Checking on the people who work under him periodically is a way to indulge himself with a small sense of superiority, even though, in the back of him mind, he knows, he is only deceiving himself.
Everybody is accounted for, except he can’t locate Mary and Little Joe anywhere on the floor. He naively likes to think they are so dedicated to their work that they might be in the stockroom, busy packing up products to stock the shelves. However, a hunch nags at him and his curiosity is ratcheted up a few notches. He sneaks into the stockroom, and is disappointed at not finding them there either. As he is about to leave and look for them elsewhere, he hears a moaning sound that seems to be coming from the rear of the room. He follows the sound, and is startled to find Little Joe and big Mary in a very compromising position in a secluded section of the stockroom behind a pile of lumber. With both their pants down on the floor, Mary is bent over a pile of cement bags, her large white rear end sticking up in the air. To compensate for his short height so he can reach Mary, Joe is standing on a box. Moaning and groaning, he is frantically struggling to mount Mary from behind. Considering the size of Joe’s tool for planting and spreading his seeds on earth, which is appropriately proportionate to his height, it is obvious that it is not physically made to match Mary’s behind. Meanwhile, Mary is impatiently waiting to be mounted and to get on with whatever she was seduced into doing. It is apparent that Joe is very displeased with the measurement of his manly tool. Attentively watching the unexpected scene, it at first appears very vulgar and repulsive to Mike. Then in an effort to rationalize the entire affair, he begins to believe that Joe’s glut of hormones have overwhelmed his sense of appreciation for beauty. It has impaired his vision so severely that he sees only sex appeal in all that excessive fat that Mary hauls around. But again, he wonders whether maybe Mary’s sexy smile and/or her agreeable personality have done the trick, blinding Joe, attracting him enough to go for it wholeheartedly.
In assessing the situation further, it dawns on Mike that everybody somehow manages to find a place to do their most-needed-thing-to-be-done in life when their testosterones start