In the fear that this blog is already becoming too pretentious and/or weighed down with a pop culture references (I saw an old Louisiana girlfriend recently and asked her about some Sonny Chiba movie or some bullshit and she said, “I don't know about stuff like that anymore. We broke up.”) I decided to bring this thing back down to earth with some stories about that most mundane and miserable of subjects, work. I worked more jobs in a three year period when I first moved here to Tallahassee than I had ever worked in the previous twenty-eight years in Louisiana. And for the most part they were all bad jobs, the kind of jobs where you drive around the place a few times and listen to those last few songs on the radio before you finally give up and clock in. Maybe no one else does that. I'm not gonna lie, I've always struggled with work. Someone once gave me The Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness at Work and that actually worked for a little while until the cynic in me asked, well what does the Dalai Lama really know about working? I mean exile is hell and all, but has he ever peeled two sacks of onions before 9 am? I bitch about work A LOT, trust me, I know. And I almost always find myself wishing I had appreciated the previous job – it's that “you don't miss your water” kinda thing. I hate routine yet I often fear the unknown. That sort of leaves me in a grey zone when it comes to finding employment. Teaching high school is ultimately the worst of both worlds –9 to 5 (7 to 3) tedium and total unpredictable unexplainable howling chaos.
I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings in the following stories. Names have been changed or not mentioned at all, though any of these places with their pronounced idiosyncrasies will be pretty obvious to those already in the know.
I fantasized about a bookstore job for years. Maybe it started with The Abortion, the Richard Brautigan novel I mentioned in my first post. The story of a young man who works in a special sort of library in San Francisco and falls in love with a woman with amazing breasts – Brautigan really spends a lot of time on those breasts, as if the breasts are a subplot. I guess the metaphor is that the library is some kind of womb, though I didn't really read it that way but right there on the surface cause I just dug the idea of living in a library, or thought I did until I started spending most of my working hours in this broken down last refuge of paperbacks that I will not name here. But first, I worked at a corporate bookstore (Books A Million). I remember my righteous indignation when they told us at a store meeting we were not allowed to blog about the company– so I went right to work on a blog that told all the ugly truths about a store that “had lots of books. Really a lot of books. It is hard to imagine the millions of books that this store is selling” . Goddamn I had so many principles then. I've completely sold out now, and my price was simply health insurance. But I digress. Books A Million was a complete corporate sweatshop nightmare, with muzak. The only good to come of it was a short story I wrote on my lunch and dinner breaks, a slice-of-life kind of thing about two aging punks checking out the historical punk rock spots of New York City. So anyway, I quit BAM to work at this smaller, local bookstore. My boss was... well, she was overweight and unattractive. She had a tongue ring that mangled her speech. She slowly (and with great relish) removed any thing I might do to entertain myself in my eight hour shifts. The books themselves were pretty hopeless ranging from Danielle Steele to novelizations of 70's action films to those weird adventure series that are always favored by the handful of true drifters I've met in my various adventures as a dishwasher (ever read any Killinger?) I found myself actually browsing Amazon for something to read while I sat there surrounded by books. She told me to stop spending so much time on line, the computer was for work only and yet the browsing history told a different, more sordid tale - I could see no real reason for so many big black cock themed websites to relate to our inventory control. Sometimes I think the hours I spent in that place were the beginning of a slow slide into a withdrawal that I still haven't quite beaten. I was living in some pocket universe of dusty books and no human contact. My diet consisted of really intense pastries and cuban sandwiches from the bakery next door. My cholesterol was through the roof. Eventually I started to know the other folks in our little strip mall – the somewhat rough looking woman that worked the morning shift at the bakery, the gay ex-Navy man who owned the florist shop and stopped by constantly to look for books about the Civil War and make eyes at me and just generally act like a stereotype. My Brautigan and Borges-inspired dreams of a library as heaven or womb were quickly turning into something more nightmarish, Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone, instead of a reader trapped with broken glasses, I was a man trapped with reading material rejected by Goodwill and an aspiring dominatrix for a boss. Nothing happened in that place. No child ever came in with a book to donate. My friends really came through for me those few months – I had them coming in on shifts. I felt like someone confined to the nutward. I made a lot of random drawings of frustrated little men in their socks raising angry fists. Eventually the story ended, as so many stories do, with our hero falling for a young woman. Living with her I knew that I was doing no one any favors trying to hold on to the bookstore job, so I said some prayers and quit.
I worked for awhile making sandwiches at a Cuban restaurant. The chef was a little man with a heavy accent and a legendary endowment. While chewing on Viagra he told me how when he was a boy the Cuban prostitutes would have sex with him for free, just to feel true satisfaction again after so many years on the job had “ruined” them. The stories of his escapades, which went really well with all the free burgundy he was always pouring me in the afternoon, were the only really interesting part of the job – most of it was tedium and the constant harassment of his wife, the true owner of the place. It wasn't long before I had enough – throwing down my knife in anger one day I shouted at her and stormed out, then realized I'd left my jacket behind so I had to creep back in for it. If I wrote or drew anything during those few months in that particular nuthouse, I don't recall it.
To be continued....
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