“So you must be the genius.”
Odd first words for anyone to say to anybody, but those were my new bosses’ first words to me.
In fact, at first I didn’t even know the lady was speaking to me.
But she was, so I needed to come up with something clever to either a. divert the conversation to something else, making me seem modest and maybe a little charming, or b. cement the fact that she had been correct in her assumption all along, and that I was the genius she had been expecting since noon.
“You speaking to me?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m no genius…….”
“There goes that plan,” I thought to myself as the woman introduced herself as Robin, and I likewise as Wes.
“You’re father told me that you were the smart one and the younger one is the athlete, or golfer more specifically.”
An hour later and I had my first job in nearly seven months. Milligan Grocery is a small little convenience store that sits no more than a quarter-mile up the road from where Milligan college students play softball or baseball, or maybe tee-ball. I have no clue.
It’s a Christian college, and since the little store I work at shares its namesake, any sort of liquor is not only sold there, it is banned in the immediate area. They allow the new Tennessee lottery tickets to be sold though, and tobacco products which sort of seems a little unfair to all the alcoholics who live nearby, but I don’t care. I’m not much for alcohol, which is to say that I don’t drink, ever, but tobacco is another story altogether. I’d feel a little more comfortable if the store sold nothing that required me to ask anyone for an id of any kind. But I can’t dictate things like that.
********
My father hooked me up with the job. He went to high-school with the woman who owns the place, and he also delivers drinks there. Dad worked for Coke for nearly fifteen years when I was growing up, and I have always benefited from him job in obtaining jobs for myself. When I was fifteen, he used his influence to win me a job at a grocery store. Two years later when that store closed down without telling me it was, I realized I was unemployed when I pulled into the parking lot, running late, and almost walked through the automatic glass door when it didn’t open. One look inside and a complete stranger would think that those shelves had been full of things like cereal not two day beforehand.
It wasn’t a week later that dad had another job ready for me. I never even had to fill out an application, I was literally hired on the spot. Dad is a charmer, and a liar, and he’s good at both, being charming and a liar. I didn’t last too long at this grocery store, only so much of, “Come here and bag these groceries faggot,” you can put up with before enough is enough. I waited until race weekend, the busiest time of the year for any establishment in the Tri-Cities before I decided that not only was I not coming in that day, but I was never walking in that store again, and any sort of phone call concerning that fact would be left unmade. I ended up backing out of the never walking in again part though. This one time I was riding around with a girl whom at the time I knew for a fact that I loved dearly and in retrospect realized that while I did love her dearly, young love is never meant to last. I was feeling a little out of mind at the time, and decided that the good people at Food City needed some form of apology from me, so I waltzed in, told two cashiers to piss off and walked right through the backroom doors, found the manager and told him that the two weeks I spent working in his establishment were the worst two weeks of my entire life to that point and that I am in fact not a faggot, am not even gay to begin with, and to prove the point that in my red truck at the moment sat a girl whom I love so much it hurts sometimes to look at her and it sucks to always be considered a friend.
After that job, I settled in for a good five years at the Food Lion. Dad got me that job as well, a fact that Sir Thomas Long reminded me of every single time I spoke to him. Which was fair enough. I met Jeff Shaw, Eli Mcduggal, Adam Morton, The Super Genius Tom Williams, Shane Hylton, Brent Harkleroad, Will Casteel, The Jackal Jack Hughes and a host of other people who became more than co-workers in that period of five years. A sudden move to Virginia for a couple of months brought that job to a halt.
*********
So now that we are all up to speed with Wes’ work history, three grocery stores in a period of eight years, we’ll go ahead and get to the cathartic part of the story.
Things have been real lazy around here for the last month or so. Wouldn’t you know that my beloved Redskins not only made it the playoffs, they actually won a playoff game against the Buccaneers, a team that beat them in the regular season by a point when they went for two in the final seconds of the game. It was the second most heartbreaking thing to happen in Redskins football this year. Chad and myself watched the game in Virginia, you see my parents didn’t make us go to church that evening because earlier my father and I got in a screaming match after I explained that going to that specific church was actually detrimental to my faith, and was pulling me away from religion. When Mike Alscott dove into the end zone I wanted to cry. It may have served me right, but I was just being honest earlier in the day.
The most heartbreaking moment came during the second round of the playoffs when the Seahawks single handily ended a Redskins season in which I didn’t miss a single game except for the first, which ironically was against the Seahawks, a game the Skins won. They didn’t go down without a fight though, pushing the game until the very end, all the way up to John Hall’s missed field goal. But I don’t blame him, it was a great game.
Without Redskins football to sustain me throughout the week I fell back on reading books. I upped my financial debt to Chad when I borrowed twenty bucks off of him for a pack of menthol cigarettes and the recently released trade paperback copy of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. It took me longer to read it than most Murakami books do, and by that I mean I didn’t finish it in one sitting. It reminds me of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World at least in its structure. There’s two conjoining narratives at work during the same time period and they are both leading up to one final conclusion. I liked it a whole lot, it just added more weight to the whole Murakami is my favorite writer at the moment thing I have going. It’s a little weird which is to be expected, and a little introspective, which is when Murakami shines I think, and an altogether easy read. I still take The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Sputnik Sweetheart over it. But that’s to say that Sputnik Sweetheart in particular is the best book I have read in years I think. It’s a lesbian love story written from the perspective of a straight male…..
So I am 23 years old these days, and I have to say that there’s nothing special about being 23 at all. Instead of just finishing college, I am just starting. I’m not married, living with my mommy and daddy like I have the 22 years before this one, and spending my days being as lazy as possible. I can’t even afford to buy my own cigarettes which is sort of a downer simply because my parents don’t smoke menthol, and addiction is a force that governs its helpless prisoner to take what he/she can get. Two weeks ago, my mother, in one of her finer moments of directed anger set the law down for me, it’s either get a job or get out. I honestly wasn’t even upset about the whole ordeal because I knew she was right. There really is no excuse.
I had tried to get a job right when I returned to glorious Tennessee. Burger King told me they didn’t need any help. Whites said they would hire me, but I wasn’t really that into it, Ingles the same. Tim’s girlfriend, and Idle Hours official editor (a little help here?), Amanda told me to come work with her at Movie Gallery, but truth be told Tim’s “other” friends are extremely intimidating to me and I don’t think I could be in “trying so hard to be at least a little bit not a dork” mode for any stretch of time. Although, in fairness to everyone, all of those guys and girls I have met seem to be really cool people. And then there’s the bookstore.
I won’t say which one, simply because I don’t know where the hyphens go, but its initials I guess are BAM. Those people there at the BAM are clever. You see, what BAM does is, they put up a Hotjobs post saying that they are looking for young inspired young men and women, who loves to read and wear framed glasses and scarves and spends all their time not reading sipping on mochalattefrappacoffees (spellchecker doesn’t realize that as a word, isn’t that crazy). After you take the time filling out the application and hit send, BAM doesn’t care that you’re stomach just flipped inside out and you’re colon is in some bad shape. You see they have this Eharmony.com personality profile for you to fill out and you have exactly thirty minutes to answer some seventy odd questions about yourself. My favorite question was the one asking if I thought I looked good in khaki pants. I clicked on the third option, sometimes. After the questionnaire is finished, it takes you to a screen telling you to hurry up and check your e-mail because the confirmation link is hidden within. I was immediately happy because I didn’t give those clever wily people at the BAM my gmail address. After the confirmation portion is complete there’s a screen thanking you for your interest in reading, literacy and pretension and considering BAM in your quest for employment.
After a couple weeks of not hearing something from the good people at BAM I decided to do something very un-Wes-like and drive by and see if maybe an in store appearance may help my chances. Below is a direct translation of the conversation that took place between myself and a woman I was later told is named Betty.
Wes (protagonist): Yeah, excuse me, hi, yeah, um, um, um, I was online the other night, y’ know the internet, and um, I saw that you guys have a job posting on Hotjobs….
Betty (antagonist): I am second in command in Hell and I hate everything that has ever lived and I hate everything that even stands a chance of one day being born and I created the internet and I hope that you one day die, and you see, young man, we aren’t actually hiring. We keep that posting up and when we are actually hiring, we just go through all of our online applications and either pick at random someone or look for whoever filled out an online application first and just go on through the list.
Wes (protagonist): That seems very misleading ma’am.
Betty (antagonist): Deal with it.
At this point in the conversation, all of which is true except for one sentence and I bet you can’t guess which one isn’t, I did something I would never do and let my anger get the better of me. See below.
Wes (protagonist): Look, alright, the last book I read was by James Joyce ok, you know who he is? People write their master’s thesis on the guy, and I don’t even go to school yet I still read the novel.
Betty (antagonist): Leave! Now!
Wes (protagonist): Seriously, there’s no reason to be hateful. I just need a job, saw you were hiring, and have always wanted to work in a bookstore. Seriously, there’s just no point in being that hateful.
And there isn’t.
*********
Last Thursday I had been up for nearly thirty-six hours when dad told me he had stopped by Milligan’s Grocery and talked to Robin, the woman who owned the place. The last thing I wanted was for me to have to not only rely on my father for a home or whatever but I really really really wanted to find a job on my own. I have been trying real hard this past year or so to get the ball moving on becoming a more responsible and mature person. As bad as my experience seemed at BAM I was sort of proud by the fact I took the initiative to find a job on my own. It’s the whole baby step process.
Dad was really excited for me, and I know that seems odd, but it’s the truth. He talked my ear off for two hours that night explaining the whole lack or alcohol thing and how it’s this real laid back job and I can bring books to read when it isn’t busy and stuff. I was really excited. The next morning, at about 11:30, I had to catch the rerun of the Gilmore Girls episode I had missed the evening before, I drove to Milligan’s Grocery, walked in and told the lady who I now know is Krista if a woman named Robin was working because I was supposed to come and meet her. She asked me what sort of meeting with her I was supposed to have and I immediately turned into the real Wes and started stuttering. She stopped me after my fourth “um” and said to come back at about 2.
So I did.
And when I walked in, Krista handed me an application and I walked to a lone part of the counter and started filling it out. That’s when I heard:
“So you must be the genius.”
She took me back into this corner office and started the whole job interview process. I know we talked about the actual job for about ten minutes then spent the next fifty or so talking about books. She told me that usually a drug test is mandatory before they hired anyone but my father had already told her that if I failed the drug test just tell him and that comment made me more than a little embarrassed. Something snapped inside of me.
“Look, I am not sure what my father told you, I am especially not a genius (wink) in fact I wouldn’t even qualify myself as smart. I enjoy thinking about things and I enjoy interesting conversation. Usually every morning around six or so I am still awake while dad is waking up for work. After he showers and gets ready and stuff, we usually sit at the kitchen table and talk about the Bible. My father respects me enough to allow me to have interpretations within the Bible that differs from things he’s heard or thought. My father makes the mistake of thinking the things I say is smart in any way. I get along great with my dad. I am 23 and I still live at home. I know it should be shameful to say such a thing, and believe me, sometimes it really honestly truly is, and it embarrasses me deeply to admit it. But I have a really nice relationship with both of my parents.
“I understand that because you know my father, I am getting hired here, it’s happened with every job I have ever had, and that honestly upsets me, to know that I am not getting this job because I was a man and came here and asked. If you want me to take a drug test, I will go right now. I will also say that I am an honest person. If I go to take the drug test, you will have nothing to tell my father because I’ll pass, trust me.”
“Look Wes,” she said, “you’re right that I am only hiring you because I know your father. But you also have no idea exactly what he told me about you. I can see that you try to stand on your own two feet, but I want you to understand that not many people have fathers who would say the kind of things Dink said about you. It sounds to me like instead of you being mature, you’re actually being quite selfish and disrespectful. You’re hired, right here on the spot, you can start tomorrow. It’s your decision whether you want to work here or not. “
What do you exactly say to that?
“Fair enough, thank you.”
The next fifty minutes was spent talking about the books we had been reading. Miss Robin, my new boss, a woman who knew my father all the way up until the day I was born, is a big Stephen King fan. She almost started crying when she began talking about how much reading Stephen King means to her, and I as a person respect that. So much so that after I finished up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a couple nights ago started reading my first Stephen King novel I have read since middle school. And the truth is I am kind of liking it.
I have now worked three days and I sort of hate the job. All of the people I work with seem like extremely nice people, I just don’t fit in with them at all. This one girl, Nikki, has been training me the three days. She’s really cool, but once again, we work mostly in silence because we have nothing to talk about. She asked me once what my passion was and I told her reading good books and trying to write good stories. This eventually turned into me waving my arms around my head like crazy talking about the selfishness of self-preservation and how the generation gap is something made up by hippy baby boomer parents who want to justify their own existence in a brand new digital age. She reacted like any sensible person would, and called me strange and odd.
There’s these rednecks who come in and buy beef jerky and coffee and then proceed to stand by the counter for two hours. It’s been the same four or five people every single night and they sort of like to have a good laugh at my expense which normally I would be ok with. Tonight though, there was something in their tones that sort of pissed me off which led me to look at them and ask if they really didn’t have anything better to do than hang out at a freaking convenience store that doesn’t even sell alcohol for two hours at a time.
Having a job again is nice, going to be even nicer on Friday when I get that first paycheck. I already plan on paying back Chad in the form of Unreal Championship 2, which is pretty cool. It’s rough though, going through the whole new guy experience again. How many times in life does a person get forced into having to build brand new relationships with people? I think about the people I have worked with in the past, and in a lot of cases, especially my boy Jeff Shaw, I realize that just by working at a place in a specific point in time, you can meet people that literally change your life forever. My father has a five dollar bet with Miss Robin and another woman that works there that in two months I will have a date with a girl who goes to Milligan. I won’t rule out the possibility I guess, but they don’t know what my father knows, which is I have never been on a date before. Truth be told, I’ve never even had a proper girlfriend. But there’s always these choices in life one has to make. Even though it embarrasses me deeply that the only reason I have ever had a job in my life is because I know my father who knows a lot of people.
I don’t like this job so far, but it’s all I have. And I have to deal with that myself.
I really pissed out there towards the end didn’t I?
wes
