My BEST Job Ever

Thursday, August 26, 2010
My BEST Job Ever
Current mood: Nostalgic
Category: Blogging

The best job I ever had came after a series of disappointing endeavors, up to and including the unfortunate plumbing episode. Once I had sworn never to work in the dastardly world of human waste, it didn’t take long for me to stumble into the equally filthy world of retail. Long known as a money-grubbing, profit-only enterprise, selling goods of popular need to the public at a profitable margin, retailers have long been considered the bottom-feeders of the business world. I tend to disagree.

The best job I ever had came to me through my friend Raoul, who worked at a hardware store called Handyman – nowadays, it would be called a “home improvement center”, selling a variety of hardware, lumber, electrical, plumbing and garden center items. Handyman was the precursor to the Home Depots and Lowes that are now sprinkled in every neighborhood in the country. Not quite as big as these warehouses, Handyman was larger than your Ace locations – in fact, one of the stores I worked at on 7th street and Camelback was home for a ToysRUs for many years.

I worked with Raoul in the building materials department, selling 2x4s and lengths of carpet from rolls, measured with a hand-held tape measure and cut with a box cutter using an eight-foot 2x4 as a straight edge. We sold sand and mortar and floor tiles and chicken wire – I once sold a section of chicken wire to a polite elderly gentleman. Being a film buff, I recognized him as Buster Crabbe, the former Olympic swimmer who had played Flash Gordon and Tarzan in the 1940s. He didn’t really resemble the Buster Crabbe of the 40s, but I had seen him on Merv Griffin or something. “You look just like Buster Crabbe,” I said. The man’s face lit up like a Christmas tree – for a moment I thought he was having a stroke. Being only nineteen years old, I was not trained for that eventuality. “I am Buster Crabbe,” he said, shaking my hand and taking the chicken wire I had cut. It was my first run-in with celebrity. I told my co-workers and no one knew who Buster Crabbe was. Raoul said he did, but I thought then and still figure that he was bluffing.

We once made a blow-gun out of a six-foot length of aluminum tubing, using a finishing nail, wound with a cone of masking tape as the dart. We practiced shooting at the rolls of carpet we stored on-end, which were wrapped in brown paper and looked like massive upright cigars. Eventually, I shot Raoul in the thigh and we were called to the office and lectured by Sam Cassius, our manager, who stood about five-foot three and was often under the knife for some heart ailment or another. We wore nametags that were issued with the Dyna-mo tape labels that were fashioned in the gun with the rotary wheel that lined up the letters and numbers. You pulled the trigger and the pressure of the mechanism stamped the tape with the letters. I often got ahold of the label-gun and made my own name tags: Ernest T. Bass, Seymore Butts, Buckwheat, Jonny Quest, Gepetto and Officer Friendly made brief appearances, but whenever I was spotted by management wearing the tags with the fake names, I was forced to retire the tape and replace it with my own proper name, which varied from J. Ford to Jerald L. Ford to JLFord, esq., depending on my mood. The fake name tags ended up stuck to the inside of the door to my locker.

The cashiers that were hired by Handyman were even younger than me and no smarter. I once told the cashier up front that Mrs. Hunt was looking for her husband and would she please page him to the garden shop. His name was Mike. “MIKE HUNT TO THE GARDEN SHOP, PLEASE – MIKE HUNT…” There was a couple of moments pause as laughter trickled from various aisles of the store, then another announcement: “JERRY TO THE OFFICE, PLEASE – JERRY TO THE OFFICE…”

Around 1983 or 1984, our band The Hired Help was playing at a little club across the street called “Lonnegan’s”. We knew all the staff there and it had become our regular hangout, even on the nights we weren’t playing. My birthday came one July and Mike Taggart, keyboard player, high-school buddy and rogue-at-large showed up at Handyman to take me to lunch to celebrate. Never big on celebrating my birthday, I reluctantly accompanied Taggart to Lonnegan’s and consumed lunch, which consisted of three bottled beers and several Kamikazees. I went back to work and my manager took one look at my flushed, smiling face – me with my vest buttoned all crooked – and grabbed me by the arm and dragged me up the stairs to the office. “You’re drunk,” she said. Her name was Jamie and she stood maybe five-foot two and weighed 80 pounds if you counted her attitude. “Nuh-uh,” I replied, stumbling up the stairs as she shoveled me along. She took me into the big office – Sam’s office and closed the door. I figured my hardware career had come to a drunken, screeching halt. “I’m going to put in some videos and I want you to sit in here until it’s time for you to go home.” I nodded dumbly, wondering just when that would be – I rarely wore a watch. She put in a video and I stretched out on the little sofa and went to sleep. My job had been saved.

I worked at Handyman for six or seven years and had many adventures, none of which featured deadly swordplay, spies, zombies or boll-weevils. I was bit behind the ear by a black widow once, which caused blinding headaches, double-vision and nausea, but that was the closest I ever came to real danger – even though I was permitted to work the table saw, cutting lumber and carried a really sharp box-cutter at all times. It wasn’t Hollywood, I wasn’t auditioning exotic strippers and I wasn't making a living writing - which to this day I have yet to figure out how to do. I didn’t make much money and was constantly in trouble with the powers that be, but these things considered, they were a lenient lot and laughed with me even as they put on their “boss” faces. I think they appreciated my moxie. I made lots of friends – my buddies in the warehouse and “Woody” Page. For these reasons and many others, I have to rank Handyman as the best job I ever had.

UFOs

Tuesday, August 17, 2010
UFOs
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Blogging

My daughter called me last night from Iowa to tell me that she and her friends were sitting on a bluff someplace at 10:30 at night watching a UFO – had been for fifteen or twenty minutes. Of course, I didn’t answer the call, so I missed all the real details, except for her disappointment that I hadn’t answered my phone. I no longer have a land-line and if I did, it would be one of the big, heavy Bakelite numbers from the forties with a rotary dial that clicked and clacked as you dialed and rang like the alarm at a fire station. Watch any Humphrey Bogart picture that wasn’t set on a boat or the desert and you will see the phone I’m talking about. Just don’t fixate on his lisp or the excess of saliva his mouth produces or you will get grossed out and miss the telephone altogether.

All I have is a cell-phone. I bought one for me and one for Allison when she lived with me (and one for Logan, too – which was eaten by a dog. No shit.) and once that was done, there was no real reason to hang onto a land-line. Now that I live alone, there is even less reason to have a home phone to remind me that no one calls. Especially if it is a forties Bakelite model. If your telephone never rings and some bill collector suddenly decides to call and that firehouse-alarm ring startles you into cardiac arrest and there is no one there to help you but an ugly little dog which doesn’t even have the physical wherewithal to dial 9-1-1, you can be truly fucked. And the last face you will ever see is that of the ugly little dog who is waiting patiently nearby to wait for you to stop breathing so it can eat your nose and all the goodies inside.

This Marie Provost death scenario is one of the reasons my cell phone is set to “vibrate”. Not only does it feel better in my pocket than the Bugs Bunny theme, it only startles me slightly and not nearly enough to cause heart failure. Anyhow, that’s why I didn’t answer my daughter’s call – my phone was on vibrate. And in the office charging. So there was no chance I was going to know about the call until this morning unless I checked it before I went to bed or did some writing after “American Pickers” and I am far too lazy to do either.

But the missed phone call is not really why I am writing today – I wanted to write about UFOs. While my daughter was gushing about the UFO she and her friends were tracking across and all around the Iowa skies, I couldn’t help but think about my own experiences with the great unknown lights in the night. I was dating a girl named Tammi back in 1980, who lived three houses down from my father. One summer night, we were sitting out on her flower box made of railroad ties at three in the morning, gazing upward at the sky. It was three in the morning and why we were gazing at the sky, I have no idea. Nor do I have a decent excuse. We must have just started dating… Anyway, as we were gazing upward into the brilliant desert sky, we saw a light speeding through the night, moving at a speed far too fast for that of a jet or a helicopter. The light was small and whenever I saw aircraft at a similar distance, they always appeared to be moving very slowly across the sky. This thing was hauling ass. “Do you see that?” Tammi asked. Before I could reply, the light did a loop-de-loop and shot out of sight, as if it were heading directly, with great purpose, the hell out of the atmosphere. “Whoa!!!” We both shouted, aware that we could possibly awaken her mother inside and face serious consequences for being out on the flower box at this hour.

We were discussing the light in great detail when another one came across the sky in the same fashion. It made the same trip, then did a gentle slalom before slingshotting out into space. We were speechless. I still recall it vividly, even thirty years later. I spoke to Tammi five or six years ago and she recalled it with equal detail. We had no doubt that we had seen something that was not of this world. It was a shared experience that will always bond us as friends.

And I think it’s pretty friggin’ cool that my daughter saw one, too. That will be one less thing that she will be able to throw in the “Dad’s just crazy” bucket.