take this job and

XXIV.
When you live in a town with five high schools, a community college and a university, minimum wage jobs are pretty hotly sought-after. It was the summer after high school graduation, and I desperately needed to earn some money.

I tried the clothing stores in the malls first: they were air-conditioned, they didn't require paper hats, and they offered employee discounts. They also had enough applicants that they could pick and choose the thinnest, blondest ones.

Me, filling out paper application: You know, I think it's illegal to ask for height and weight of potential employees.
Store manager: Uh, we've just filled all of our open positions.

Desperation led me to the "Sweats N' Surf", a struggling chain store selling (you guessed it) sweats, and California beach-style clothes). You know those "Big Johnson" T-shirts with clever slogans like "Liquor in the front, poker in the back"? Yeah, we carried all of those.

It wouldn't have been such a bad store except that the policies handed down from Headquarters reeked so of desperation. Stores weren't allowed to remove merchandise from displays, which meant that we had a clearance rack of T-shirts and jams that had been out of style for years. Employees were expected to make every sale at least a 2-item sale, which meant that we had to encourage any buyer to add on a matching visor or socks! It was the clothing-store equivalent of Would you like fries with that, and it was one notch worse, because teenaged boys never want to buy a matching visor with that NO FEAR T-shirt.

It was an indignity, and it was made worse by the fact that Valerie was hired at the same time. Valerie was tall and blonde and perky and pronounced her name VAL-REE!, with a shake of her head. I would stand at my station towards the back, trying to take pride in folding and re-folding shirts. A customer would walk in, and VAL-REE! would pop up as if the key had been turned in her back. HI! My name is VAL-REE! Can I help you find anything!

If it had been the Gap, customers would have cast their eyes downward and slunk around her with a mumbled Just lookin, but this was a store with a customer base of awkward and pimpled teenaged guys. Guys who had been ignored by VAL-REEs at their own schools for years. They smiled. They followed her around. She suggested things for them to buy, and they bought. She offered them matching visors, and they bought them. I have no doubt that these visors were abandoned in the mall dumpsters, bought solely as bright plastic offerings to the valleygirl gods.

I was uncharacteristically silent while on duty; I'd tried helpfulness, but the customers just looked at me weirdly, so I assigned myself to folding duty, hanger straightening duty, and the occasional mannequin re-dressing. After a while it became clear that VAL-REE felt sorry for me. She asked if I knew anything about UC Riverside; she was thinking of attending. I made a polite noise and she explained seriously, that I was bummed, because I wanted to go to PEPPERDINE, because they have like a very excellent cheerleading program and it's a pretty good school, and that's important to me, because I got a 4.0 in high school.

Really? I said, That's so odd that you didn't get in. Are they overcrowded this year?

I don't KNOW, they said it was because my SAT scores were not, you know, high enough, but I don't know about that, because I got a total 800. Combined, you know, and that's not, like, terrific, but it must be pretty okay because most of my friends didn't do that well at ALL. VAL-REE paused for breath and then asked, like one might ask a small child, Are YOU going to college?

I excused myself to the restroom.

I was a pretty poor seller, so my hours were cut back. I still always had to work with VAL-REE, though, because she'd meanwhile been promoted to full-time. That summer, the radio kept playing "Regret" by New Order:

I would like a place I could call my own
Have a conversation on the telephone
Wake up every day, that would be a start
I would not complain about my wounded heart

Just wait till tomorrow
I guess that's what they all say
Just before they fall apart

and I would listen to it, and fold my shirts, and wait for the summer to end and the next part of my life to begin.

Tuesday 19 February, 05:32 PM