Working for the weekend: Job 3

I was 15 when I got my first real, taxable, working-for-a-boss kind of job. It was easy for a teenager to get work in Bridgeport, but the choices didn't exactly make me want to break out in spontaneous eruptions of joyful song. My options were: a) farm work b) washing dishes in one of the handful of restaurants or c) bagging groceries in one of the two grocery stores. The choice was easy. I had little aptitude for or interest in farm work. One of my friends washed dishes for a restaurant and didn't get off work until eleven or midnight, then finished his homework afterward. The grocery stores closed at seven. What choice did I have? I applied for, and was hired at, Jack and Jill, and I spent the remainder of my high school years working there. I bagged groceries, stocked shelves, and mopped and swept the floors. I hated it. I was introduced to a world of boredom beyond my understanding. This boredom was more intense, more prolonged, more severe than I had prepared myself to expect. It was a boredom that dwarfed previous boredom champions school and church and destroyed my perception of employment as an honorable and respectable way to spend my time. This is something pounded into all of us by anyone in a position of authority, but it became pretty obvious to me after only one day at Jack and Jill that the only honorable and respectable work is work you love. If I'm doing something I hate for money, I feel like a whore. But how do I stop being a whore and get some dignity and satisfaction out of what I have to do to eat and pay the rent? I haven't been able to answer that question in my life yet, but I'm still holding out hope.
Anyway, the grocery store was owned by a divorced, middle-aged, conservative Christian with a mustache. He also cut all the meat and spent most of the day in the meat department, but he would periodically dart in and out of the aisles, making sure we (the high school help) were doing our jobs and not goofing off. He was one of those bosses who believed that even if there was no work to do, we should pretend like we were busy. I'm reminded of that Bill Hicks joke where the boss tells the employee to pretend to work and the employee (Hicks) says, "You make more money than me. How about you pretend I'm working?" Twice a week, freight was delivered. These were items we had sold out of that needed to be restocked. Freight days were the only days when there was something to do, so they were good days to be at work. Time actually leisurely strolled on freight days instead of crawling agonizingly and sickeningly to workday's end like a legless, dying turtle. Instead of pretending to stock shelves, on freight days we actually got to stock them. Oh, what a glorious adventure. My boss, let's call him Shalamar to avoid any libel suits, was a big fan of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. However, his spirit of Christian giving didn't extend to his employees. I made minimum wage the entire time I worked for him and was never given a raise, though he told me more than once that he was pleased with my work. None of my fellow teenage workers got a raise, either, except for B., a favorite of the boss and the manager and the only one of the high school help who worked full-time in the summers. He was given a ten-cent raise during his last year on the job. Shalamar was on top of everything that needed to be done in the store, but the interactions with his employees were clumsy and awkward. He was kind of a wimp, especially when it came to the store manager (let's call her Vulva). Shalamar, despite everything I've said about him, was basically a nice guy and treated me well (except for my salary). Vulva, on the other hand, was a sack of shit of a human being. She decided, shortly after I started working there, that she didn't like me. I'm not really sure why, but part of her animosity may be attributed to the utter lack of interest/ability I had in showering her with praise and buttering her up. She thoroughly enjoyed getting her ass kissed, but I am genetically incapable of putting my lips on my superior's anuses. This may have sealed my fate, but her patronizing and mean-spirited treatment baffled me. To offer just one example of her behavior, one Saturday morning I overslept and was late for work. My mother called the store for me, so I could hurry up, get ready, and be on my way. When I arrived at the store, she said to another employee loudly enough for me to hear, "He had to have his mommy call for him." This kind of thing happened about once every couple of months the whole time I worked there. I did my best to ignore it and do my job. Besides, Shalamar liked me and the mini-drama at least made the job a little more interesting. When I started working at the store, Shalamar and Vulva were dating. Within months, Vulva dumped Shalamar for the guy who delivered the Snapple. I'm laughing as I type these words. Oddly enough, Vulva kept working there and Shalamar let her keep manipulating him. All of us lowly grocery baggers found this drama compelling, hilarious, pathetic, and a little sad. Shalamar became a completely dejected sadsack, and he even fell so low that he let Vulva talk him into giving the Snapple guy some weekend hours at the store stocking shelves with us. It was a painfully awkward extended trainwreck of human misery, but it made the job more interesting for a few months. Shalamar eventually snapped out of it, fooled around with a married woman, then got a regular girlfriend. Vulva married Snapple, he moved into her house, and later dumped her and moved away.
Customers. How could I forget to talk about the customers? They made the job even worse. To digress for a second, I'm a huge proponent of humanist art. I spend a lot of time listening to music, going to concerts, watching films, reading books, looking at art and photography, reading comics and cartoons, taking an interest in comedy, and having drinks with friends because I want to connect with other human beings, I love what human beings are capable of, and I generally like people. I don't have much time for irony, cynicism, and dead-end nihilism in art and life because I think it distances us from our humanity. But, I gotta admit, I fucking hate the public. The "public" as an entity, especially when your job is to serve them, blows. Some people are just assholes, especially if you are selling a product they need. Especially old people. It's good that they're going to die soon, because a lot of them are jerks. The public at large is capable of doing things like: Keeping you waiting while they shop even though closing time was an hour ago (and they damn well know it, too, because they keep apologizing for keeping you waiting), buying $300 worth of groceries and telling you to fit it all in two bags but "don't make them too heavy, hon, I'm old and I can't carry heavy bags," making you wrap ice cream in three paper bags and two plastic ones even though it's winter time and 15 degrees outside "so it doesn't melt all over the place," bawling me out for ten minutes because the old bastard asked for a case of Coke and I accidentally brought him a 12-pack, etc., etc., etc.
Work is fun!!!!!!