Les Temps Perdu: Summers and nights (Employment continued)

Turning 16 in my day meant that you could get a real job. As soon as I turned the calendar I filled out a bunch of applications at country clubs and the like, assuming that summer employment would be my best bet, but these jobs were considered rather tony, and as a result, they were in high demand. I also applied to the local supermarket where we shopped, and was surprised out of my boots when I got a call a couple of weeks later to come in. The next thing I knew, I was working at the new First National up on Ridge Street.

You want to know something? I probably learned more there than I did in high school. For me, working at the First National was like debate: it showed me a new world, and it helped me grow up. I worked there summers, weekends and after school until I went off to college. It was my main extracurricular activity. I had dabbled in drama and debate and bowling (!?) and some writing gigs, but once I was working just about every afternoon, there wasn’t much time left for any of that. To be honest, I don’t think it was the best use of my time, and I would never urge anyone to take a job in lieu of some other serious afterschool endeavor, but it wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me. And as I said, I learned some lessons there that I think I needed to learn. And I got paid while I was learning them.

The good news was that back then supermarkets were only open nights on Thursday and Friday, until 9:00, and they were also closed on Sundays. I did work both those nights, though, and Saturdays. And of course full days during the summers. It wasn’t like now when the stores never close, and you could be working godawful hours practically every day. Friday night at 9:00, once it became feasible, wasn’t that late for going out with my buddies and hanging out for a while. One of my friends, a kid named Tom from the next town over, drove a car we called the Silver Ghost, which was as big as a couple of barns and always available. He and my friend Glenn would pick me up, and we'd do what we did, and we did pretty well for ourselves, all things considered.

The way things worked at the supermarket, there was the manager and two assistant managers. Meat and dairy and produce were separate universes with their own managers, and those of us in grocery didn’t have much truck with them. Our jobs were either stocking the shelves or running the registers. Since we weren’t open all night, the shelf-stocking had to take place during working hours. Some foods disappeared faster than others, and stocking was both a science and an art.

There was a set hierarchy among the stock clerks. If you had been there for a while, you had full responsibility for a certain department. This meant that not only did you keep the stock on the shelves, but you ordered the stock for the week, filling out the forms for how many cases of this, that or the other you predicted we would need. Things generally ran according to a set pattern, and if you went through six cases of small cans of Bumblebee tuna one week, you’d probably go through six cases again the next week. A good stocker kept a little ahead, just in case, but storage space was limited, so playing the game well and keeping things close was important. If you were talking about cases of, say, paper towels, one of which would be the size of a hundred cases of tuna, it became even more important. On the other hand, there were more different possibilities among canned meats alone then all of the paper goods put together. Because of the quantity of canned meats and the mass of paper goods, the clerks who got these assignments were our top guys.

Every Monday the truck would arrive with the week’s main shipment. Downstairs in the basement, each clerk would be manning his storage area. Up in the truck, the driver would load the cases onto a conveyer belt that shot everything down to the waiting clerks. Starting out, with no particular assignment, I’d be helping the driver. Later I’d be downstairs helping whoever I was assisting or filling in for. It was all the same as far as work was concerned. Unloading trucks was serious exercise, no matter what position you played.

If the high men on the totem pole were canned goods and paper, the low end of the pole was ice cream and candy. Ice cream was a stinker because you had to go into the freezer to pull your load (i.e., collect whatever you needed to bring upstairs to restock), and then you had to get the load up and into the floor freezers before it all melted. And occasionally the basement freezer broke down, usually on Sundays, and you had to clean the whole damned thing out and start over again. As for candy, this was a little like canned meat in its variety and product size, with the distinction that no one walking by a can of tuna ever ripped it open and snuck a taste. Supermarket candy was felt by some shoppers to be intended solely as free samples, and whenever you walked down that aisle, you would find the latest break-in. Cookies were not dissimilar, but the cookie aisle tended to be busy, while candy tended to be quiet, so the vandals could get away with more damage. You really didn’t have to pull that many loads of candy in a week, to tell you the truth. It was more just policing the area before the bugs found the open packages.

Needless to say, my assignment at First National, once I finally got one, was ice cream and candy.

Additionally, I was a checker. These were the days before computerized registers. Nowadays, the price code is read automatically, and all the checker has to do is stay awake while pushing the goods down the belt. Then, you looked at the price, and entered it on the register. If it was 2 for 29 and there was 1, you entered 15 cents, but first you looked to make sure there weren’t two, and if a second one did sneak along later, you had to remember that this one was 14 cents. You had to do this for every item, including the ones that were 11 for 93 or 14 for a dollar or whatever, when people bought 5. Before you could stand at the register you had to take a test, and unfortunately this was the sort of math I could do in my sleep and I became a highly preferred checker, with amazing accuracy (they compared the money in your drawer at the end of the day to the receipts, of course), and the problem was, this was the most boring job ever invented. If you were lucky, they’d put you on speed, i.e., the express line. At least there, there was a lot of turnover.

As I moved up in my supermarket career, I helped all the other clerks, and even filled in for the paper goods guy when he wasn’t around, which for me was a plum. I also filled in for the soda guy, which was not a plum because soda is heavy. Toilet paper? Not so heavy.

That was the job that I head for three summers and two school years. But that part of it was just the job part. It was the people part that was important. Simply put, the folks who worked at the First National ranged from the way-too-cool guys to the local toughs. My home town had its share of JDs, and the JDs with jobs worked at the supermarket. Everybody drove to work in Pontiac GTOs that they spent all their non-working hours tuning up. They had Danny Zuko hairdos and wore the clothes that they wouldn't allow us to wear at my Catholic high school. Pegged jeans? Cigarette packs tucked under the short sleeved t-shirts? Welcome to very first day job. Or at least my very first afterschool and weekend and summer job.

The manager wasn't much different from the rest of the cast of Grease that worked the place, except he was older and had the great sense of humor required by anybody employing a small army of adolescents, the vast majority of whom were going to night school at the local community college. One of the assistant managers was nicknamed, not to his face, Lurch, which he had worked hard to earn. He would lecture me on "merchandising," how the attractive displays he created sold more items. "It's all about merchandising." In essence all we did was pile the products neatly and keep the floor swept, but to him it was psychological warfare with the customers. The other assistant manager was an old guy named Walter, who acted exactly like the quintessential old guy named Walter. You never saw him around much, and when you did he sort of tut-tutted as he creaked away so he wouldn't have to do anything. Even at sixteen I could recognize a time-server waiting for his pension to come through. There were a couple of other adults, one of them the custodian, a short guy who constantly muttered curses under his breath as he mopped the place, although most of his working day he spent in a stall in the employee bathroom. The other adult was the guy who worked out front, loading the cars. Inside, we packed the grocery bags into containers that then rolled outside on a conveyor belt, where this guy, built like heavyweight fighter, packed them into the cars that pulled up in front, earning tips of roughly a quarter a bag. Filling in for him on his break was one of our favorite gigs, because then we would collect those quarters a bag.

This was a new and frightening world for me, way outside my comfort zone. These were the people I was always afraid of running into on a dark night, the ones that would beat me up with such disdain that they wouldn't even bother to take my lunch money. But you've probably picked up on the obvious. These were the guys who had jobs. Most of them were working their way through school at night, unable to pull off what I would, namely having parents who could afford to send me away to an expensive school so that I could do nothing but labor in the fields of academe. (Yeah, right.) These were tough guys, definitely: tough guys with a sense of responsibility and ambition and drive and a willingness to do what it took to get ahead. Yes, they talked differently than I did (it was from them that I learned to swear correctly), and they dressed differently than I did (which amused them no end, especially since at the time I favored Hush Puppy chugga boots, which they referred to as my gravity boots), but they trained me to do my job, and once I did it, they accepted me. Some of them liked me, and some of them didn't, but that's life. I didn't like all of them, either. But we all certainly got along, and I could sit around with them and chew the fat during breaks or whatever. They taught me to eat all sorts of Italian foods I had hitherto been unaware of (there were a couple of venues nearby, a greasy spoon truck with amazing chili and a bowling alley slash pool hall with amazing burgers on hard rolls). In other words, they opened my eyes. They expanded my universe. I was kicked out into the world to make a few bucks, and I did. More importantly, it wasn't that I survived this previously frightening world, but I learned that there was nothing about it that required survival. It was just a bunch of people, albeit different people, doing their thing. If I wanted to, it wasn't that I might fit right in, but I could certainly get along.

It was a great life lesson for me. If you're raised in a narrow environment (not by choice but by happenstance, in my family's case), you don't necessarily realize that other environments may not be all that different. Oh, sure, some really are, as I was to learn later, but people are people, and most of them are just doing their best to get by. Maybe this was my first step on the road to learning philosophy, via working as a checker and shelf-stocker at the local grocery store.

As I said earlier, as a result of this job, I gave up all extracurricular activities, except for some offhanded writing. I had a minor job on the yearbook, granted by a favorite English teacher who wanted me to have something other than work on my resume, but that was about it. Work took up all my time when I wasn't literally in school, or at least all the time I would have devoted to debate (which I did do for a little while, until the job came along).

You may read this and think, what a boring life. What a limited existence. Maybe, but those were the times. I love the world of today where I see an incredible mix and match of races and nationalities in the schools. In my day, the mix and match was Irish or Italian. Hell, in my home town, the Italians had their school and church, the Irish had their school and church, and the Polish had their church (although they were forced to mix in at my school), and they did not communicate. This wasn't racial segregation with all its attendant ills, but it was certainly cultural segregation. I don't think there was an Asian in my entire town, except those working at the dry cleaner or the Chinese restaurant. Downtown where I grew up is now almost entirely Latino: in my day, there was a kid named Lopez in my class, and that was it. African-Americans? The town had a big black population, on the other side of the tracks (literally). One of them—literally, exactly one black person—was a parishioner at my church. Any wonder at my insularity?

The world has changed.

Thank goodness.
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