Vince’s neighbors generally had no objection to us hanging on the corner. Some did, however – as I mentioned elsewhere, Angelo the special cop once stuck his gun in my face when I failed to respect his authoritah. The pasty-faced Johnson family across the street was also against our hanging-out – when the number of kids on the corner reached some arbitrary maximum decided by them, they would call the police to disperse us.
Back then there was a form of street litter rarely seen today. Birth-control pills hadn’t been invented yet and there were no in-town motels, so used condoms lay wherever they had been plopped out of quietly opened car doors. If Frankie G spotted one near Vince’s after dark, he’d pick it up with a stick and hang it on the antenna of the Johnsons’ Studebaker.
Something like this, but he needs to pull the collar back and down for the trick to work
Local girls Honey and Rita never fell for the horse-bite trick. That’s not my Hudson, I never had a Hudson.
I’ve been thinking about how I’ll spend the money once my Powerball ship comes in. One thing I can see for sure, I’ll need to hire a good lawyer. Once the word gets out about my newfound riches, it’s almost certain I’ll be sued for some past misdeed, even if it’s for something that never happened. If you follow the news, you know what I mean. The only thing I might get Me-Too’d for was showing a new girl on our corner where the horse bit me. Horsebite tricks were rare and developed organically; they were sort of an unplanned initiation into the group. Here’s how it worked: The boy pulls his shirt collar open on the left side, exposing his neck and just a bit of upper back. He asks the girl if she wants to see where the horse bit him. The girl, curious, comes closer.
To get a clear look down the back of his shirt, she has to stand on her toes, curled against him as he pulls the collar down a little more. Meanwhile, his left arm hangs at his side. As the girl presses harder against the boy to get a closer look, she realizes her undercarriage is resting in his hand. Once she realizes, the boy gets slapped. Everyone laughs, even the girl, that’s the best part. Things were different back then, and I do apologize to the girls.
++++++++++There is no excellent beauty which hath not ++++++++++some strangeness in the proportion. +++++++++++++++++— Sir Francis Bacon
When I worked for Continental Insurance, a group of us went to Texas to visit a company that wanted to sell us computers. Our hosts took us out for drinks, and we sat quietly rating the entertainers as they took the stage. One girl had a face that was perfect – she was absolutely movie-star , Miss-America beautiful.
I hadn’t thought about it consciously before, but I said such perfection made me a little uncomfortable, and I would need at least one defect for such a girl to be “real.” One of our hosts said “So, for you, a 10 is a 9 with a broken nose?” I thought about that, and about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, and told him he was correct.
As an example of “generous features”, the first time I saw newslady Maria Bartiromo on television was around 1995, before she ruined her beauty by getting her nose “fixed”, something done by insecure women who don’t appreciate what it means to be unique. Before that, she was a perfect example of a woman blessed with “generous features.”
Maria was doing the stock market reports on CNBC. She had everything right – the big eyes, the Mediterranean nose, the full lips. I watched her whenever I could, absorbing everything about her. I remember thinking “Man, if only she had been around when I was in high school.” Then I remembered – she had been around, in a sense, but she moved away. Her name was Mary Ann Potenza.
No, not Mary Ann, this is Sofia Coppola, but close. Courtesy Getty Images
She lived a half block from Vince’s but never came to the store; her aunt did all the shopping. Her house was behind the house of one of my friends from the corner, so we knew each other to see. We both went to Orange High; she was a sophomore and I was a junior. One day I saw her in the hall, got up my nerve and asked if she’d like to go to a movie with me sometime. She said yes.
I wasn’t old enough to drive, so everything happened on foot. The day of our date, I walked to her house the long way around, so I wouldn’t have to go past Vince’s and get quizzed about where I was going all dressed up.
When I got to the house, her younger sister opened the door, but the two girls looked so much alike that I didn’t realize for a moment that the sister was not Mary Ann, and wondered why she looked sort of unkempt and was wearing blue jeans. Then she said “I’ll tell her you’re here” and I said “Okay, thanks.” Her father was lying on the sofa reading and gave me a half-wave without sitting up.
We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Embassy. I suppose I should remember what movie was playing, but my mind was too busy. Did I buy popcorn? Yes, probably. After a while, I tried putting my arm around her shoulders like you’re supposed to in the movies, and it worked; plus she moved over even closer. Did we hold hands walking back? I want to say yes, but when I was older and tried holding hands walking with a different girl, it felt new and weird getting our fingers lined up right, so probably not.
When we got back to her house, we held each other for a minute and had a soft, sweet, slightly open-mouthed kiss. I walked home thinking about that.
The word of our date got out, and the next time I went to Vince’s I was greeted with “Hey! Secret lover!”, and serenaded with the first few bars of the syrupy “Once I had a secret love” song. They were just jealous.
A few weeks after our date, she came up to me in school and said she had to say goodbye, her family was moving to Sherwood Forest. I had no idea of where or even what that was, except for the place Robin Hood lives, and I was too flustered to suggest we stay in touch somehow. And that was the end of a good thing that never had a chance to grow.
Searching now with newspapers.com, I see that Sherwood Forest was a new single-family housing development in Mountainside. So her father moved his family out of Orange, a town already in decline, to a town that is still one of the 10 best in the state. Good for him.
I also ran across her mother’s obituary notice, from 1993, and in the list of survivors I saw that Mary Ann had married a nice Italian boy and was living in Poughkeepsie, New York. Good for them, too.
How can I still be embarrassed by something that happened when I was 15 years old? Recently the Italian word for laundry bleach, biancolino, literally “white linen”, appeared in the captions on a cooking show, where a pleasant old lady was reminiscing about growing up in Little Italy and how the biancolino (pronounced bee-yung-go-LEEN) man would come to your house with his gallon bottles.
I remembered being sent to Cucinotta’s grocery store by my German-English mother to get a bottle of “buy-anka-leena”, her pronunciation of the label pasted over her empty Coca-Cola Syrup makeshift bleach bottle, then eventually having to point to one, and Dolores laughing and laughing and showing her white teeth.
Everyone said Dolores looked like Pier Angeli, shown here. /courtesy livejournal.com
Writing a few days ago about Mary Ann, the first girl I ever asked out on a date, got me to thinking about Dolores, the second.
Dolores was Vince’s daughter, and ran the cash register in the family store on days she wasn’t in school. She was fun to talk to, but really out of my league. She was two years older, a lot when you’re 15 or 16. She lived all the way up in Livingston. She had a boyfriend with a car, a silly, absurd lilac-colored convertible.
She was beautiful, but unlike a lot of girls, she never acted like she knew it. An exception was made for a Fourth-of-July Festival beauty contest that her friends convinced her to enter. She won second place. First place went to the mayor’s daughter.
My crush only got worse the day she laughed at my comical mangling of the Italian word for laundry bleach.
A year later, we were in the store talking and I asked if she’d like to go bowling with me some time. She said yes, and next Saturday afternoon we met at her aunt’s house, a block from the store. We walked up High Street and then over Main to the Palladium.
She was wearing shorts, not short-shorts, just regular ones that come halfway down the thigh, all just normal clothes a girl would wear to go bowling. Still, she was hard not to stare at, and people did take notice. Each time she got up to bowl it was like everything slowed down around her. For me, anyway.
I still worked part-time setting up pins at the Palladium, so a few of my colleagues found a minute to come up out of the pits to say hello, but mainly to get a better look at Dolores.
When we got back to her aunt’s house, we had a sweet goodnight kiss, one I still remember.
A few weeks later, she invited me for dinner at her aunt’s. That was the first time I ever had a real Italian meal. I stuffed myself on the strange, never-before-seen appetizers and barely had room to sample the later courses. Through the meal, her aunt and the other female relatives kept encouraging me to eat, eat, eat. That meal was one of the life events that made me wish I’d been born Italian.
That dinner turned out to be the last time I ever saw Dolores. A few months later I had my first car, a clerk job in the next town, and a new circle of friends. Someone said she went off to college; I don’t know what happened in her life after that. I think of her and her family often. I tried looking for her name online, but no luck.
In his poem Woolworth’s, 1954 Raymond Carver recalls his youth as a stockboy, and lists the girls he went with then, “All those girls. Grownup now. Or worse.” Maybe I’m like him, and I don’t really want to know.
thief THēf/ noun- a person who steals another person’s property, especially by stealth and without using force or violence. – lexico.com
When I was in high school, I worked part time at the Kingsway supermarket in East Orange. I learned the shelf-stocking and floor-sweeping ropes from Pete, a crazy and charismatic kid who was two years older than me and working full time. Pete belonged to a Newark gang called the Roman Dukes. By legend, the Dukes were armed, and had discouraged an enemy gang incursion into downtown Newark by throwing its members off the balcony of the Empire Burlesque. Pete held some sort of leadership role in the Dukes .
Two rungs down from the Dukes, but you get the idea
Pete was a prolific thief. He would never buy anything he could steal, and anything he stole but couldn’t use, he sold. It was scary to watch him operate, but, having grown up in North Jersey, I knew and respected the principle of omerta. Pete liked me, and we got along.
Each morning, Pete backed his car into the parking spot immediately below the window of the second-floor employees’ lounge, and each evening he lifted one corner of that window’s screen and pushed out five or six cartons of cigarettes that he had smuggled away from the checkout stands by mixing them in with the trash. They landed right behind his rear bumper.
Pete got promoted to receiver and checker-in of all arriving grocery trailers, a position of responsibility that multiplied the opportunities for theft several fold. Pete’s new approach was to unstaple the multi-page invoice, remove the next-to-last page, and steal every item on it. Since the last few pages always included some carton cigarettes, this was much more productive than pushing them through the screen. When the department manager in charge of cigarettes, razor blades, candy and other things favored for employee theft later moved them into their double-locked storage cage, every item on the re-stapled invoice was present and accounted for.
One Sunday, the usual bunch was hanging around outside Vince’s store when Pete happened to drive by with some of his Roman Duke cohort. So, here we are, standing around in our All-American “Lakeside A.C.” jackets in the orange-and-black high school colors, and holy shit, here’s a carload of leather-jacketed Roman Dukes pulling over on the wrong side of the street right in front of us, Pete driving. Although our numbers were greater, we felt suddenly surrounded.
I was the only one there who had ever seen any of these Dukes, or for that matter ANY Duke, before, and there was great anxiety among us. When Pete greeted me with “Hey Paulie, is this where you hang out?”, we relaxed a bit, knowing that we weren’t going to take an immediate beating. We stood and exchanged cautious small talk with the smiling Dukes, all the while remaining alert in case they should change their minds, or Pete give them some sort of signal – not that he would with his friend from work there, but my bunch didn’t know that. After a while, Pete asked if we’d care for some beer. All we really wanted was to be left alone, but we each chipped in the two dollars suggested by Pete to pay for our order. The Dukes drove off, returning with a case of quarts. After we’d all had our fill, the Dukes drove off again, taking the empties and the remaining beer with them. We wondered how they had found a liquor store open on Sunday, but guessed the rules were different in Newark.
The next day’s Star Ledger helped us understand. East Orange police checking out a Sunday burglar alarm had found a Park Avenue liquor store’s back door kicked in and a case of beer missing. Later that day, the door was kicked in a second time and the empties returned.
Supermarkets were not open on Sunday then, so even the lowliest of clerks had the day off. One day the manager at Kingsway called all the part-timers together and told us to come in that Sunday; we would be cleaning the store. Reading our expressions, he added, “If you don’t come in Sunday, don’t come in Monday.”
I didn’t come in on either of those days. I was now seventeen and had my own car. I could work anywhere.
I bought a new used car, a 1951 Chevy, through my cousin Walter, who worked at a dealership in Nutley and kept an eye out for clean trade-ins. I wanted to give it a more thorough workout than my original test drive, in particular to see how far it could make it up a hill before it had to be shifted down to second. I called up my friend Bobby and we drove to West Orange, which is on a low mountain and has steep roads and even steeper side streets. We drove up a few hills and third gear was pretty strong, we tried a few other things and I was happy. Then we turned around to head home and there were these two girls.
We slowed down and drove along next to them, close to them. Bobby leaned out and asked where they were going, and if they’d like a ride. They answered “home!”, and “no!”, but in a not-unfriendly way. We stayed alongside them as they walked, asking where they went to school (one of the East Orange high schools, I forget which) and lots of other questions, as traffic swung out to pass us and our little group made its way down the mountain.
This probably sounds creepy to anyone who didn’t grow up in the 1950s, but that was one of the ways people met then, just boys cruising around, talking to and picking up unattached girls. By the time we got to the bottom of the mountain, everyone knew everyone else’s name, and the girls, let’s call them Carol and Becky, lowered their resistance and got in the back seat. Before we dropped them off at Becky’s house, we set up a double date to get better acquainted.
Carol and I hit it off on the double date, and we ended up dating for real. She was sweet and smart and nice to look at, but you probably guessed that already. Meanwhile, Bobby dated Becky, but not for long – he played in a band, and he had lots of other female friends.
The first time Carol and I had a real date, she told me in advance to expect to meet her mother, and made it clear that I should come to the side door of the house, not the front. By the time the day arrived I had forgotten, and I went to the front, where there was an enclosed porch with a “Nursery School” sign. I rang the bell, and in a minute an annoyed Carol opened the door, revealing two rows of child-sized porcelain toilets installed behind her. In a weary voice she said “My mom runs a nursery school,” and led me past the toilets into the house. I found out later they were a regular source of embarrassment for her, and this time it was worse because the inevitable reveal happened on a first date. I think I just said “Oh” in an understanding voice. I thought it was pretty funny, but I didn’t let on.
We developed a dating pattern, and didn’t go “out” on our dates every time. Sometimes we would go to the movies or such, but mostly we just parked and did deep kissing and what the French call frottage, that is, grinding ourselves against each other with our clothes on. It was good fun and nobody got pregnant.
We went to a house party, two paneled rooms in someone’s basement. One room was mostly high school kids like us; the other was college types. Everyone was behaving, just drinking beer and slow dancing to doo-wop music — Earth Angel and such. After a while, this big jock walked in from the other room. He wasn’t quite shouting, but his voice was angry as he asked, “FUUUCKKKK?? Did somebody say FUUUCKKKK?? In front of my GIRRRRL??” Back then nobody ever used that word in mixed company, certainly nobody had used it that night, and it was a shock to hear it loud and clear. We all froze as he glared at us, as though expecting a confession. After a moment he left. I think now that he was probably just doing a fraternity “bit”, a prank – funny in retrospect but scary for those on the receiving end. Maybe we’ll see it reenacted in a high school movie some day.
After a few months, things slowed down and we gradually stopped seeing each other. I don’t remember a reason, we didn’t have a fight or anything like that. Maybe it was just time.
The following year I joined the army, and I was feeling down. I wrote her a letter, just a kind of friendly “Hello, what’s up?” letter. I didn’t know her house number, so the envelope looked like:
Her name
Nursery school across from the Amoco station
South Harrison Street
East Orange, N.J.
I know the post office motto is “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night blah blah blah”, but they don’t seem to put much effort into the non-weather aspects of getting a piece of mail delivered – what was so hard about that address? How many nursery schools across from Amoco stations were there on South Harrison Street?
Yes, I do realize I was asking a lot. The letter came back marked “Insufficient Address”, and that was the end for Carol and me.
Setting up bowling pins paid pretty well, and I liked the predictability and orderliness of it. The customers were always 60 feet away, so they didn’t have to be dealt with, beyond making sure they got their ball back and didn’t throw a second one while I was still in the pit. Similar to my “cellar man” supermarket job later on, I could be alone with my thoughts and operate on autopilot.
In the 1950s, the Palladium in Orange had 24 lanes of modern semi-automatic pin setting machines, and eight older lanes where pins had to be set by hand. New hires were put in charge of a pair of the older, “peg” lanes, so called because each had a foot pedal to raise a set of steel pegs onto which the pins were placed. When the pedal was released, the pins stood perfectly aligned. The invention of the pegs eliminated the problem of mis-placed, or “mis-spotted” pins, and put an end to the most common bowler complaint about pinboys.
If you were a hard, fast worker, showed up for work on time and got along with management, you’d probably get promoted to the machines after two or three months. You may ask, how fast is “fast”? Truly fast pin cleanup and resetting looks something like a NASCAR tire change.
Working the pegs, courtesy Youbou Hall and Bowling Alley, via livevictoria.com. Note exposed steel peg, speed blur
The original Palladium had only the eight peg lanes; the machine lanes were added later. The peg side of the house was almost a separate room; when people came in to bowl, the desk manager assigned families with small children and anyone who looked like a troublemaker to a lane on the peg side.
The machines were only semi-automatic: you still had to toss a replacement pin into the slot for each one that got knocked down. The best feature of the machines was that they, not you, picked up the ball and got it started on its way back to the bowler. While I was working on the peg side, someone said I must get mad when a bowler throws a strike; I said no, because then I only have to pick up the ball once.
“The job was pretty much an OSHA nightmare. Pins often went flying, their wild arc broken by my feet or shins. Sometimes a pin came out of the pinsetter wobbly, and tipped over, so that I’d have to wriggle out onto the lane headfirst on my stomach after it, praying that the bowlers saw me.” – “Strikes, Spares and Bruised Shins”, Steven Kurutz, New York Times
Pinboys got 12 of the 50 cents bowlers paid for each game. This was decent money, and some “pinboys” were grownups supporting a family. About half were grown men, the rest were teenagers like me.
The air was smoky and the general atmosphere a bit seedy. Pin-setting work seemed to draw a lot of alcoholics. One of them was quite open about only wanting to earn enough to pay for his room and get a couple of bottles. Once he had enough, he’d go missing for a while.
Another pin setter carried a briefcase and wore a business suit to work every day. After he’d made his way down to the pits, he’d hang the suit up behind him and put on his coveralls. His wife probably knew what he did for a living, but his neighbors certainly didn’t.
Joe Pappas, who I think had Down syndrome, never got promoted to the machines. He was kept on the peg side, where the action was slower. Joe got paid 12 cents a game, the same as the rest of us.
Seedy or not, I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe there, except when I walked home late at night past Saint John’s cemetery and floating Jesus.
Automation today
Improvements in the machinery have made pinboys obsolete. The lanes now have automatic score sensing and tracking; bowlers no longer have to add up their score frame-by-frame across a paper form. If you can’t tell how many pins just got knocked down (the answer is ten minus the number still standing), or if you can’t clearly understand what just happened 60 feet in front of you, or if you can’t add a 1- or 2-digit number to a 2-or-3-digit number correctly and consistently, modern bowling technology has your solution.
A sad ending
Palladium destroyed by fire, Red Bank Daily Register, 3 July 1962
“A statue of Jesus Christ is lowered off the roof of St. John’s School after it toppled during a wind storm on Sept. 19, 2012.” – Julio Cortez / AP
A lot of the kids in my neighborhood went to Saint John’s parochial school, not a majority, but enough that they were a danger when they were set free in the afternoon. Local public-school kids tried to stay out of sight when Saint John’s let out. The St. John’s kids’ spirits were so crushed, and the boys so full of pent-up anger, that anything could happen. The exception to this was the Doheny kids, perpetually in a rage; there were six of them and they could go off at any time, not just after school. Anyone who crossed a Doheny kid had to deal with them all. They lived a block away from me, but their house was not on the way to my school, a public school, so I could avoid them.
Saint John’s parochial school, aka Columbus Hall, 1915
St. John’s school took up one corner of St. John’s cemetery. On top of its domed roof was a floodlit statue of Jesus Christ . At night, the statue seemed to float above the dark cemetery, its arms outstretched, either welcoming or threatening depending on the state of your conscience.
When I walked home late at night from setting up pins, I encountered a double dose of creepiness. From two blocks away I could see Floating Jesus; then I had to walk past the cemetery itself. I stayed on the other side of the street, because the high, stuccoed walls always seemed to be leaning outward. I knew the level of the earth inside the walls was higher than outside, and that the graves were old, with many burials at least two caskets deep, and I imagined a great pressure against those walls. It didn’t help that I had been reading Tales from the Crypt comics and a lot of Edgar Allan Poe.
Years later I was doing family research, and discovered that my great-grandmother Bridget had owned a family plot there. When I located it, it was mostly grass and bushes, with very few grave markers, and none of them with a family name. I think some fishy stuff goes on with ownership in these old cemeteries.
Mimi went to parochial school, in Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She had a story she told me in private, but I have repeated it so often that I might as well tell it one more time. I call it “The Fart-Detecting Nun”. When Mimi was in the early grades of parochial school, Sister heard someone fart and demanded to know who it was. When none of the girls confessed, she searched the classroom by sniffing her way up and down the aisles.
Vocal performance in the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart
One last creepy story. When we lived in Newark, we sent my older son to the parochial school at Sacred Heart Cathedral because the Newark public schools were failing. On rainy days, if his class had to travel between the school and the church, they went underground, through the Crypt of the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, where deceased parish priests and higher ranking members of the clergy were said to “await the Lord’s return” in their marble vaults. My son said it was ‘spooky’.
“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, ironworking is the 7th most dangerous job there is. Exposing individuals to unique workplace hazards and dangers, working as an ironworker requires special protection and gear to guarantee an injury-free shift. So, whether you’re just starting out on your new ironworking job or if you’ve been navigating those steep steel structures for a while now, an optimal work outfit is something you shouldn’t take for granted.” – advice verbatim, courtesy of purposefulfootwear.com
Thorogood 6″ Steel Safety Toe boot, courtesy theunionbootpro.com
“Some folks calls it a sling blade, I call it a kaiser blade.” Some folks call them ironworker boots, my family calls them bridge shoes. They are a must to get work as an apprentice in the Ironworkers Union. I’ve quit my job at Kingsway due to some bad management choices, and have resolved to stay out of the supermarket business.
Similar to the way my brother got a foothold as a lowly apprentice oiler in the Operating Engineers Union, then over the years advanced to tower-crane operator, my mother has asked a favor from one of her business connections at the Newark Athletic Club, and now I have my foot in the door to an apprenticeship in the Ironworkers Union.
Ironworkers looking for work come to the union hiring hall to “shape up”, that is, to register as available to go to work. Once the union sends them out on a job, they usually stay on that job until the project is done. Depending on experience and skill, an ironworker might install the fencing around a parking lot, or link the steel framework of a bridge or high-rise.
My brother tells me that as a would-be apprentice it’s a good idea to show up at the hall at 6:30 to register, hang around and be seen. He also says, “If they ask you if you’re okay with heights, tell them the truth.” I nod, but later I wonder, What is the truth? I think I’m okay with heights, but do I really know? I climbed that rope in school and wrote my name on the gymnasium ceiling, does that count? I’ve climbed a few ladders and trees, and tarred the railing-free roof of a six-story apartment house, what about those?
At the hall, I hand over a piece of paper introducing me, if that’s the correct word, as a candidate for apprenticeship, and I sign the job register. Seeing that many guys are here already, most looking like they’re settled in for a long wait with coffee and newspapers, I hope there are enough jobs to go around. It turns out there are not; only two guys get sent out today, to a short-term job installing fencing.
I go to the hall every morning for two weeks, but nothing happens for me, or for most of the other guys there. “The nation is in an economic lull”, somebody on TV says, so bad timing on my part. I put my bridge shoes away in case I get a shot at another semi-dangerous, high-paying job one day. Still not knowing for sure if I’m okay with heights, I turn to the classifieds. Here’s one, “Lunch Truck”.
At the office/assembly line/factory of the lunch truck company, I am given a short tour. On site, they brew gallons of coffee, make and wrap tasty sandwiches, and package Danish pastry and other single-serving sweets. Everything is scrupulously clean, and the ladies wear hairnets to keep it that way. It’s about one o’clock in the afternoon, and there’s just enough time to ride along on one truck’s last circuit of the day. It’s a standard sort of panel truck, with two swing-out back doors to serve customers when they walk up. Ten-gallon coffee jugs are attached to the inside walls, along with racks of edibles.
Our first stop is a small electronics-assembly plant in Short Hills. The ladies here also sport hairnets, but most of these ladies are young, in their twenties or not much beyond. They’ve apparently been looking for a distraction, they seem very excited about the lunch truck’s arrival. Some of them tuck their hairnets into a pocket before coming outside. They are all smiles and giggles, and a bit flirty when buying their coffee. When we get back to the office I am told if I want the job it’s mine, and to come in at six in the morning tomorrow.
For the next morning’s training run I go out on a different truck with a different driver. This is not the suburban, Short Hills lunch truck route; it’s an industrial area of Newark. Our first stop is at a loading dock on McCarter Highway. We arrive, the customers line up, and we’re in business.
The plastic coffee lids are thin and shallow; they require careful fitting to the cardboard cup. I’m a bit nervous, and after serving a few customers, when I push the lid down over one cup to get a tight seal, I press too hard. The lid gives way, and my thumb goes into the coffee. My customer asks, “Hey, motherfucker, you washing your hands in my coffee?” I don’t know what to do except say I’m sorry and that it’s my first day on the job, and I pick up a new lid and close the cup properly. Of course the right thing to do would have been to start all over with a fresh, unthumbed cup of coffee, but that doesn’t occur to me. It doesn’t occur to my customer either – apparently satisfied by the apology and explanation, he takes his coffee, pays and leaves. This is the only specific event I remember from my first full day on the lunch truck. The rest of the day goes better, but food service is not for me.
The next morning the phone rings at about 6:15 and my mother answers. She wakes me up and tells me the lunch truck outfit is on the phone, they are wondering where I am. Here I pull a dirty trick; instead of coming to the phone, I tell her to tell them I’m not coming in any more. She does, but she is not happy. Remember, this is the woman who made me write a letter of resignation when I quit a job delivering newspapers.
Still trying to avoid going back into the supermarkets, I take a clerk job at a small liquor store near the Lido Theater in Orange. It pays above minimum wage, so that’s something. I get to carry cases of wine, soda and beer upstairs from the cellar, which smells of breakage that happened before I was born. Part of the job is making deliveries using the owner’s personal car, a new and peppy Oldsmobile. There’s more or less a test; he goes out with me on the first two deliveries to make sure I’m a safe and responsible driver. He doesn’t seem to worry about the car after that. I make sure to give it some exercise whenever I can.
Not the same store, but similar. Note cellar door in sidewalk. Courtesy James and Karla Murray Photography, jamesandkarlamurray.blogspot.com
My boss is impressed – I can pull four soda bottles out of their shipping case and put them on the cooler shelf in one motion. Who said setting up bowling pins was not a transferable skill?
I sometimes get tips, but that benefit is more theoretical than real – I deliver mostly to sad drunks in rundown apartment buildings; my clientele need that tip money for their next bottle.
Between the dank cellar and the sad apartments, I decide I don’t want this job anymore, and give my notice. I need some fresh air. What about the army? I hear you can retire with a pension after twenty years.
My mother had connections with New Jersey politicians and businessmen through her position at the Newark Athletic Club. Among them were the officers of People’s Express Trucking, and she got me a summer job with People’s the year I turned 17. Once she had thought she might get me an appointment to West Point through the same connections, but that dream died as I lost interest in “applying myself” to my lessons.
As background, problems at Schlitz’s Milwaukee brewery have impacted production, and the company is shipping, by rail, a few million empty beer cans for filling. The role of People’s Express is to get the cans off the freight cars, onto trailer trucks, and then to the local Schlitz brewery. My role, and that of several other youths, is to do the actual work.
International Harvester, Cars-from-UK.com
The first day, we meet with our crew chief at the People’s Express offices on Raymond Boulevard. Three of us will drive an International Harvester pickup truck daily to the railroad yards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the others will drive in with the crew chief in his car. I volunteer to drive the truck, I’ve had my license for almost three months now, I like driving and have lots of confidence. I was unaware that by law one must be 18 to drive in New York City, but the subject never came up.
The Williamsburg rail yards are about 15 miles away: across the Jersey swamplands, through the Holland Tunnel, across lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge, then into Brooklyn to the yards.
Red and green together mean yellow
Traffic lights in Manhattan come in two colors , red and green. If the red comes on during a green, that’s the same as a yellow, act accordingly. The system worked fine; I don’t know why they changed it.
The Williamsburg bridge is old and narrow, it was built for horse-and-buggy traffic. It’s difficult to drive our truck through the tighter spots without scraping a running-board; I do that about once a week.
On the return trip to Newark, the traffic is generally worse.
Canal Street across Manhattan is always stop and go;, when it’s bad we seem to tie for speed with the pedestrians. One day we are neck-and-neck with a gorgeous woman walking with a man, they get ahead, we get ahead, as we breathe teenage sighs and make comments among ourselves about her ass. Uh-oh, he’s heard us! He walks up to the passenger window. What if he has a knife?! He speaks… “Would you boys like to fock her?” Relieved, we explain that no, we have to get back to Newark.
One day we are stuck inside the Holland tunnel for so long that we unzip and whiz into the vents along the curb.
In the rail yards, freight cars are jockeyed around to align their center doors with our work platform. There are 48 empty 12-ounce Schlitz cans in each cardboard case. After we build a pallet of 35 cases (seven tiers, five cases per tier, 3 x 2 then 2 x 3, alternating), we use a pallet jack to get it into a trailer, 28 pallets per trailer; lather, rinse, repeat, it isn’t rocket science. We fill about three trailers a day.
Not beer, but you get the idea
We fall into a routine; on our morning break we have grape soda and pastries or pie. At lunch, we buy sandwiches and more grape soda, or beer, then sit on the end of an East River dock to look over at the Manhattan skyline and watch what floats by. A visitor from England once said about the East River, “All you Americans seem to do is defecate, fornicate, and eat oranges.” I would have said bananas.
We are sometimes drunk. The college guy has a ‘bit’ he does, I guess it’s a fraternity thing. He stands in the middle of Kent Avenue, drops his pants, and shouts “I KNOW ABOUT THAT, LADY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS?” Near the end of the summer he falls out of a freight car and breaks his arm.
Our truck has an on-the-floor gear shift, nothing new to me, but I’ve been using it wrong. Believing it’s a standard H pattern, I think I am shifting 1-2-3, 1-2-3 like normal people do, when actually I’ve been shifting 2-3-4, 2-3-4 for two weeks. So far, I’ve never needed reverse. One day they send me to get something at the hardware store. I park behind someone, and when I try to back up to leave, what is reverse for normal H people is actually low-low for me, and I keep creeping up on the car ahead. I finally go back inside and ask for help. The man behind the counter comes out to show me, and I learn that I also have to push the stick down at the same time to get over and down to R. Ohh, I say, thanks! I get back to the yards with no one the wiser.
We work six days a week and when the loadings seem to get behind, we are asked to come in on a Sunday. People’s Express manager Mr. Bruno drives up in his top-of-the-line baby-blue Cadillac to supervise and help us. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over to pick up a case, his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They have been sent here on a blue-law complaint: non-emergency labor is not allowed in New York City on Sunday. Mr. Bruno tries to talk them out of it, but oddly enough gets no respect; we pick up and go home.
We finally run out of empty cans, but there is still some summer left. People’s is nice enough to transfer the crew to the Continental Can Company, which I guess is some sort of sister company that shares directors with People’s. Continental Can, whose logo of three nested C’s can be found everywhere, is located in Paterson, New Jersey. Here, we are introduced to the Steam Jenny.
Part 2: My summer of Jenny
Modern pressure cleaner, used. Courtesy Auctions International
A 1950s-era steam jenny burns kerosene to boil water to make steam to clean dirty trucks and whatever else. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t get burned by the steam, or knocked off your ladder by the nozzle kickback, it might blow up because you neglected some element of its care and feeding. Attention, attention must be paid to such a machine; this is drummed into our heads over and over by a wizened yard worker who seems genuinely afraid of the thing. Jeez, we get it, enough! Maybe he’s seen some steam-jenny carnage in his day.
We train by using the jenny to blast steam up and down the sides of a particularly dirty trailer; we use a housepainter’s ladder to get on top and clean there too. The company finds enough jenny work for us to last out the summer; we are careful, and somehow we survive.
From Google, top answer to steam jenny safety tips
People also ask
Can a pressure washer cut your finger off?
Because he received near immediate treatment at the emergency room he was able to keep his index finger, although some of its function was lost. It doesn’t matter if the fluid is water, grease or paint – all can cause permanent damage and even amputation when injected at high pressure.
Through the summer, we have been paid as grown men; we even get time-and-a-half for overtime. Those big paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why go back to pointless boredom when I can be earning good money instead? I don’t attend school very much during my senior year, and I drop out towards the end. I do stop in to pick up my yearbook, though, and years later I have an observant visitor who wonders why no one ever signed it. That’s a long story, I say.
I, (NAME), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
In our busload of newly-sworn recruits, most have volunteered for the draft, to get their military obligation over with and move on with their lives. I have signed up mainly out of boredom, and once thought I might even put in 20 years and retire. Our Fort Dix training sergeants immediately begin working to break us down and resocialize us to army life, starting with the bus trip from the reception center to our new home in the E-company barracks. Sergeant Santiago is our host on the bus ride; he is a bantam-weight tyrant who does his best to terrorize us.
After keeping our platoon awake until four in the morning hand-waxing the barracks floor to prepare for an inspection, our cadre of trainers have an idea – if we each pitch in $2, we can buy a used electric floor- buffer from a place they know of in town. They can get it right now; we can owe them until payday. We’re all for it of course, we don’t want to go through that again, and we buy a buffer that’s probably been sold to a dozen earlier training cycles.
courtesy thecmp.org
We learn to march, salute, and fire the M1 rifle, good fun that last one. However, I a become a victim of “M1 thumb”, a painful but temporary disfigurement.
Loading the M1 Garand rifle, courtesy m1-garand-rifle.com
During basic training we are out in the field for a week, sleeping in tents. During drill one rainy day, a few of us sneak off into a tent. Sergeant Johnson rips open the tent flap and threatens us with court martial and prison for “buggin’ out” of duty.
While drinking watered-down beer at the Post Exchange, we hear that one of our sergeants, a lifer, has just signed up for three more years. Since he seems otherwise normal, we ask him why. He asks where else could he get drunk and lose all his money every month, yet still have a place to sleep and three meals a day?
Our oldest sergeant is a grizzled Korean War vet. Overseeing our cleaning of the latrine, he spots a recruit trying to clean a toilet bowl while standing as far away from it as possible – with his scrub-brush extended, he looks like he’s fencing. His battle is with one particularly stubborn fleck of matter stuck tight to the porcelain. The sergeant reaches in and scrapes it off with a thumbnail. To the groans around him, he rhetorically asks, “Did j’ever see a pile of [enemy troops] that got blown up and laid there for a week?”
Some of us go on to Advanced Infantry Training, AIT, and a new set of sergeants and officers.
Sergeant Kolikowski gets word from home that his brother has been murdered. He goes to the battalion armory and signs out a M1911 .45 caliber pistol. He’s gone for a week, then returns and checks the weapon back in. Nothing is said about his absence.
We are taught to use the bayonet in offense and defense, no rules, kill or be killed. We drive it into a dummy, we pivot our rifles to bring a butt stroke to a dummy chin, we thrust and parry. Sergeant Doherty doesn’t think I’m trying hard enough; he braces himself and shouts in my face, “Come on Smithee, try to kill me!” It’s hard to say why, but caught up in all the make-believe bloodshed around me,I make a genuine effort to kill him by stabbing him in the face. He’s prepared and fast enough to move out of the way, but it’s close, very close; he is surprised and calls for a smoke break.
A few days later, he tells me I’m going on a work detail with him. Several of our barracks’ light bulbs are burned out, and it’s not easy to get replacements for such things in the army. Our mission is to drive a borrowed Jeep over to a currently vacant barracks and remove its light bulbs. Despite what his name would suggest, Sergeant Doherty is black, and I think my presence is partly to inoculate him from suspicion when visiting an empty barracks. Or, maybe he just wants the company, I don’t know. We stride in looking like we are on official army business; we gather a good number of bulbs; we leave. Mission accomplished.
One day our company commander gathers 20 or so recruits into what we might today call a focus group. It is surprisingly touchy-feely, and at one point he asks if there are any problems he should know about. It’s not like me to pass up an opportunity to complain, and I raise my hand and say there are two problems I know about, a small one and a larger one. I give the trivial one first – during breakfast, the sugar dispensers run out and don’t get refilled, so the second half of the company to arrive has no sugar for their coffee. The larger problem is that we are not getting enough to eat; half the time we leave the mess hall still hungry. He asks if anybody else feels the same way; almost every hand goes up. Looking angry, he promises to look into it.
Here I’ll mention something I saw once when on KP (Kitchen Police: pot-scrubbing, potato-peeling, other grunt work), and didn’t give any thought. A civilian truck pulls up behind the mess hall and the cooks load on 8 or 10 bulk food items; a case of canned peaches is the one that sticks in my mind.
In a few days there’s plenty of food, more than plenty, the servings overload our trays. The scam that scammed too deeply has been ended. As I dump almost half a chicken into the garbage can, the mess sergeant asks me sarcastically if I’m getting enough to eat.
Clarksville was right across the state line from the Army base where I took advanced infantry training in 1957. When we had a day off we’d put on our civilian clothes and hop the bus to get some beers or just a change of scenery. My earliest memory of the town, and of the South, came on our first trip, when I was walking along the sidewalk with a buddy. Two black guys about our age were on the same sidewalk, coming in our direction. Just as I stepped behind my buddy so the two parties could pass in single file, the two black guys stepped into the gutter and continued walking, not breaking stride, and all just as natural as could be.
Later when it came time to go back to base we headed for the bus station, stepping through its front door into a dim and dirty waiting room. It was crowded with people seated and standing, most of them appearing unfriendly or even hostile. Two older women in particular were giving us barely concealed dirty looks.
One wall of the room stopped about a foot short of the ceiling, and over it we could see bright fluorescent lighting. Assuming the space next door was a luncheonette or other place where we could get something to eat, we stepped out of the room we were in, walked 40 feet down the sidewalk to the first door we came to, opened it and stepped into… the white waiting room.
Clarksville, Tennessee relied on the soldiers from the nearby base to support their businesses, but the town didn’t really like us. One Sunday four of us put on our civies, took the bus into town and headed for the bars. After drinking beer for about an hour in one bar, we decided to move on to another. As we walked, one of us, or maybe all of us, decided to duck into an alley to take a whiz.
We had no sooner stepped inside the alley when a police car pulled in behind us. Assuming it was on its way to a crime somewhere, we stepped against the wall to let it pass, but it stopped instead. Two good old boys got out, the elder ranting about “You Army guys pukin’ all over our town, pissin’ all over our town.” I think we were just astounded and stayed silent. We hadn’t puked, and had only thought about pissing.
Then the senior cop said “You boys are all going to the police station, you’re under arrest for indecent exposure.” Being a logical person and having won many arguments in the past with my grandmother, I countered “What!? We didn’t have our penises out!” to which they replied “You boys get in the car”, to which we countered “WE DIDN’T HAVE OUR PENISES OUT!”, to which they replied “You boys get in the car right now.”
So we piled into the back seat of their shitty police car, only to have them discover that the battery was dead. I don’t know why we did it, maybe just to move things along, but the four of us got out and pushed their car out of the alley and into the street, then down the street until the driver popped the clutch and it started up. I think we all half expected they would let us go based on our good deed getting their shitty police car started again, but no. They ordered us back into the car and we headed for the Clarksville police station.
Once at the station, the desk sergeant took over. He had us empty our pockets, listing the contents and placing them into manila envelopes. Particular attention was paid to our wallets – he counted out each guy’s money in front of him, made sure he agreed on the amount, and gave us signed receipts for everything.
Knowing we were not guilty, based on the U. S. Constitution’s it-technically-never-happened clause, we asked to see the judge, but were informed the judge was not available on weekends. Some interesting math was done with our collective cash. The four amounts were added together, then the price of four bus tickets back to the base subtracted from that, then the remainder divided by four to calculate what our bail would be. Perhaps it wasn’t that overt, but that’s just exactly how it worked out.
So far the day had all been sort of a hoot, but now we were walked into the cell block and locked into what I would call a strap-iron cell. I don’t remember the facilities exactly, but it was not totally inhumane.
i
Something like this, but with better mattresses
The next morning after a trustee brought our breakfast (grits, bacon, milk, coffee), we inquired about the judge’s hours and were informed “He’s here every Thursday.” So, we gave up our quest for justice, paid our bail, collected the remainder for bus fare, and bussed on out of Clarksville. When we got back to base, our platoon was already standing in formation. Our sergeant spotted us approaching and shouted “Where the hell have you men been?” When we replied “In jail, sergeant!”, he just laughed. He knew how the town worked, and didn’t ask us for any details.
There’s a tree here in town just where the road starts a gentle curve to the left. It still has a scar from a drunk driver crashing into it 50 years ago. The car was packed with high school kids headed from one graduation party to the next. Some were killed, the rest injured. I didn’t know about the accident until I drove past years later with someone who had been in that class. She pointed out the tree and told me the driver’s name. He survived, and it turns out I know him. When I see him in town now, I try to avoid him.
There is no memorial at the spot, maybe there never was. The accident happened in the 1960s, and I don’t recall ever seeing any roadside memorials anywhere back then.
I like the idea of roadside memorials. Families and survivors usually place them near, or attach them to, any fixed object involved. They cause passers-by to think about how the memorial came to be, and in my opinion they probably save lives. It’s not always drunk driving that leads to roadside memorials, sometimes it’s just inattention or stupidity. Someone wrote a letter to the editor calling for all trees to be removed from the median of the Garden State Parkway, because people kept running into them and getting killed.
Some people don’t like the memorials because they can be tacky and garish. There’s a telephone pole across town that commemorates a more recent fatal accident. It’s covered with ribbons, photos and cheap plastic flowers. It’s directly across the street from someone’s house, and I know I wouldn’t want to see that out my front window every day.
The memorial I remember best wasn’t meant to be a memorial at all, it was simply a wrecked car put on display as a caution to young soldiers on my army post. The accident left the car mangled and lying on its roof, and it took a while to wrench it open and free the survivors.
Someone at headquarters had the idea of leaving the car on its roof and flatbedding it onto the post as an exhibit. There was a small rise just past the entrance, and the car was installed there, still on its roof, almost like an art exhibit, and allowed to ripen in the summer heat.
Over the next weeks, every soldier on the post was marched over to view the wreckage. Our NCOs made sure we got close enough to get a good look. In the silence as we reacted, we could hear flies, hundreds of them, buzzing around inside the car, attracted to the blood and vomit still pooled on the headliner. I don’t think anyone who saw and smelled that car will ever forget it.
Wear your seatbelts, kids. And don’t drive drunk.
These photos are from Bruce Wicks’ flickr album Roadside Memorials . There are over three hundred so far.
Newark trolley, courtesy Al Mankoff’s Trolley Treasures
A few things that happened before I owned a car.
Writing this makes me realize I must really, really hate throwing up; otherwise, why would I write about it so much? Do I remember every time I ever threw up? It might seem that way, but probably not. Anyway, here it comes…
Trolley car throw-up
Orange slices, courtesy Spangler Candy
My first memory of a public-transit event is toward the end of a trolley ride with my mother. I have eaten most, if not all, of a bag of candy orange slices, and I vomit them into the aisle, which fortunately is made of grooved wood to handle such events. I don’t feel sick beforehand, just surprised and embarrassed after. That orange mess sliding down into the wooden grooves is not a good memory, so for candy I stick to spearmint leaves now, they’re green.
Eastern Airlines throw-up
Before my second summer trip to Michigan, my mother asks if I’d like to fly there this time. You bet I would! At about 11 years old, I have never been on a plane, and will fly from Newark to Toledo, which is across the state line from Uncle Bert’s farm in Temperance.
The year before, I went by train, leaving from New York Penn Station, where my mother approached and drafted a pleasant Midwestern couple to more or less keep an eye on me during the trip. They were indeed pleasant, and in the dining car at mealtime the husband explained to me that the money my mother had given me to spend was New Jersey money, and only his Ohio money would be accepted on the train. I argued that he couldn’t possibly be correct, because it said “Federal Reserve” right on the alleged “New Jersey money” in my hand. He said there was more to it than that, and I finally gave in and let him pay for my meal. Thanks for the meal, Mr. Midwesterner, but I’m no rube.
Eastern Airlines junior pilot wings, courtesy bonanza.com
On the plane, the stewardesses are sweet; they know it’s my first time. They give me a set of Junior Pilot wings and tell me where the loo is, but perhaps to avoid the power of suggestion, they don’t mention anything about throw-up bags or the possible need for such a thing. Their mistake. About a half-hour into the flight I throw up, a lot, into the carpeted aisle as I run to the loo. By the time I get back, it’s all cleaned up and they are still smiling, bless them. When I get to Toledo, I make the mistake of mentioning what happened, and get a ribbing from my cousins.
Sweating with the dance instructors
This one has more to do with waiting for public transportation than using it, but here it is anyway. I was going to call it “Dance Instructors Move into the Bus Stop”, but I didn’t think anyone would get the Jackie Gleason/TV Guide reference anymore.
There’s an Arthur Murray dance studio at the bus stop near my job at Kingsway. On Friday nights, Kingsway doesn’t close until ten o’clock, and sometimes I’ll see two or three Arthur Murray ladies already there when I get to the bus stop. They work until ten o’clock on most nights, not just on Friday; I guess that’s the nature of the dance instruction business. They are nice to look at, but too grown-up and glamorous for 16-year-old me to even think about.
Paid actor, courtesy kinglawoffices.com
A comic whose name I can’t remember said “Minimum wage is what they pay you because they’re not allowed to pay you any less.” When I was at Kingsway, the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour, equivalent to $7.00 an hour now. In my youthful view of economic justice, I consider myself eligible for the employee five-finger discount, and have made use of it tonight. On top of the underwear I wore when I left the house this morning is still more underwear, six new crewneck T-shirts. It’s a cold night, maybe 20 degrees, but I am toasty warm. After a while, I start wiping sweat off my face and worry that the ladies will think there’s something wrong with me.
Girl on Greyhound
I am on leave and headed somewhere by Greyhound bus. There are other young guys in uniform aboard, one of them in the aisle seat ahead of mine, and at a rest stop I see him chatting up a girl. When we get back on the bus, I see he has persuaded the girl and his seatmate to switch seats, and she is now sitting next to him as they continue to chat.
Greyhound passengers, courtesy Pirelli .com
During the night something wakes me; I don’t know if it was a sound or her breath in my face. In the dim light I look directly into her eyes over the seatback in front. She straddles him, head over his shoulder, working her hips, and we stare into each other’s eyes as they screw.
Years later I wonder, what if I had brought my head forward and locked lips with her while the rest of this was going on? Would it even have been possible, given the geometry of a Greyhound seatback? But we shouldn’t fact-check our fantasies—it would be a sad thing to reject a fantasy just because it might be impractical.
You can’t stare into someone’s eyes that long without forming a bond. I think she would have been into it.
In the 1960s, Foodland supermarkets gave out Blue Chip trading stamps with each order, one stamp per ten cents spent. After a shopper accumulated enough loose stamps to be an annoyance, they pasted them into a small book with space for 1200 stamps. After shoppers collected enough books to exchange for an item in the premium catalog, they brought the books to a redemption center. One of my jobs as bookkeeper was keeping the cashiers supplied with stamps.
The Blue Chip premium catalog included such useful items as a Swank key ring with nail clipper attachment, 1 book; a Health-O-Meter bathroom scale, 4 ¼ books; and at the high end my personal favorite, the Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera, price many, many books. About this camera, I will just say that it took excellent pictures.
Each pad of stamps had 50 pages, 100 stamps per page, 5 thousand stamps in all, equivalent to just over four full books.
Our store had two tiny rest rooms for employees – the men’s was always dirty and in a state of disrepair, the ladies’ much nicer. When closing the store at night, after all the female employees had left, often the remaining men would use the ladies’ to wash up. In the morning, the man (back then it was always a man) who opened the store might use the ladies’ to straighten his tie and otherwise get ready for the day.
On Sundays we usually had a single female employee working, a cashier named Barbara.
One Monday when I arrived at work, assistant manager Eddie, second-in-command to manager Neil, was waiting for me. Waving a sealed pad of Blue stamps, he said “I have to fire Barbara, I found these in the ladies’ room.”
“Errrm, those are mine.”
“Oh.”
A few months later, I transferred to another store in the chain. Eddie told me they weren’t planning to change the combination to the safe after I left, adding “If it was Neil leaving it would be a different story.”
But first let me tell you about some other Things That Happened at the first Foodland I worked at.
L Three W-_]-omen, Fernand Léger 1921, via flickr
The three chain owners and their wives, sometimes just the wives, stop by occasionally on a Sunday to watch the money roll in. Perhaps one of the wives has read tips on “how to reach your customers” in a business magazine, for she has decided the store needs a suggestion box, and it should be where the checkout lines form.
After the box has been installed for a week, the wives are eager to learn what their customers think would make for a better Foodland. When the instigating wife opens the box, there’s not much inside, but the first thing she pulls out is a torn-out page of notebook paper on which is scrawled “THIS STORE SUCKS”. The woman has probably lived a life free of criticism or adversity, she is genuinely hurt . She worries aloud, “What’s wronggg with our stoooore? What’s wronggg with our stoooore?”, and seems ready to start a witch hunt among the employees until her husband settles her down. Shortly thereafter, the box is gone.
As bookkeeper, I’m in charge when the regular management is off. I have an arrangement with the manager of the movie house across the street. I let him place a placard for his latest movie in our store window; he gives me free movie passes. One day he talks me into loosely putting a bumper sticker for the latest movie on my car. He takes a photo so his management can know he’s on the ball, then unsticks the sticker.. The process seems demeaning, both me and to my car, and I don’t let it happen again.
One week, perhaps due to cashflow problems, the employees don’t get paychecks. Instead we get vouchers that can only be cashed in the store. This is not well-explained to the butchers, who usually cash their checks when having lunch at Marino’s bar across the street. Mr. Marino cashes the vouchers and sends them to the bank as though they were checks, and they all bounce. He comes into the store waving the dishonored vouchers; he’s in a rage, he thinks Foodland is broke and he’s just been burned for several hundred dollars. When I see what’s happened, I explain and he calms down. I tally up the vouchers and give him the cash; he is a happy man.
That part about Foodland being broke may not have been too farfetched. One day I try to call home, and discover the phone on my desk has been disconnected. When contacted by pay phone, the phone company tells me Foodland’s bill hasn’t been paid for several months. I call the main office and they say there’s been a small mix-up, and they take care of it.
There is a liquor store next door. A man who’s been loitering in front of our own store waiting for his wife to finish shopping beats her up because after she pays for the family groceries she doesn’t have enough money left over to suit him.
A few days before Thanksgiving, the store is crowded with customers I have never seen before. They look needy. Each family has a $25 or $50 check from the Salvation Army. I open a checkout lane and ring some of them up. Maybe they have just come from church; I hear “God bless you” several times. They seem so sweet and grateful to be well treated and shopping in a “nice” store for a change. If you’re able to, giving to “The Sallies” is a good way to help good people who happen to be struggling.
One spring day, two cashiers on their lunch hour decide to get some sun and perch on the top rail of the parking lot fence. Some leg is shown, and one passing car runs up the back of another. Embarrassed but still flattered, they hop off and run back inside the store.
After a couple of years as bookkeeper here, the company sends me to manage their small store in West New York while its manager takes vacation. The employees are nice; the town is working-class so most of the customers are nice too. When I walk into a barber shop to get a haircut, the owner is jumpy; he thinks the stranger in his chair wearing a white shirt and tie might be a cop. As we talk, I mention why I’m in town and he relaxes. Men enter the shop, speak briefly and leave; my barber is the local bookmaker.
After my stint n West New York ends without disaster, the company sends me to be assistant manager of what I’ll call Foodland II. It’s in Elizabeth, the same town as the first Foodland, but is newer and much bigger.
The manager of Foodland II, Gabe, is old for the supermarket business; he wears nubby sweaters and looks like a turtle. He has a scam as old as cash registers: he unlocks the front door to admit occasional early shoppers who arrive before any cashiers do, then tallies their purchases old-style, #2 pencil on a brown paper bag, making change out of his own pocket. I think he knows I’m on to him.
On Friday nights the store stays open until ten o’clock. I can’t leave until the store closes, and the store can’t close until all the carts are collected from the parking lot. During the evening, Gabe has the clerks doing things that could be held over until the next day. I suggest that perhaps some of them could be rounding up carts instead, so we’re not here all night. He says “No, we bring in the carts after the store closes.” I say “That’s stupid, it doesn’t make any sense.” After a bit more back-and-forth, he fires me. He probably engineered the confrontation because I’m on to his early-shopper scam, but I’m not terribly upset; I’m tired of supermarket work. Maybe it’s time to try something new.
One day at the first Foodland I worked at, I was sitting near the front door in my little raised-up bookkeeper office, what they now call a courtesy counter. I was idly watching the cashiers and making mental bets about who would be next to need a roll of nickels or a pad of trading stamps.
The main part of my job there was approving customer checks. As a general rule, if I never saw the customer before, I would ask them to bring the check back after they finished shopping and were ready to check out. That weeded out the people who thought supermarkets were banks and just wanted to cash their paycheck and be on their way.
I’d note their driver’s license or other ID on the back, then scribble my initials up in one corner to tell whatever cashier they went to that the check was okay to cash. Probably 98% of the checks I saw looked fine and I approved them. But I had a good eye for people who wrote personal checks without enough money in the bank to cover them, and if I didn’t feel right about a check, whether personal or payroll, I’d just say “Sorry, we can’t cash that.” If they argued, I’d give a reason like “Sorry, I don’t know that company”, or “Sorry, that’s an out-of-state bank.” I didn’t get fooled very often.
If they still argued, I’d call the manager over and he’d listen to their story and make a decision. If a check bounced, it was something of a demerit for whoever approved it, and of course Foodland was out the amount of the check
On this particular day, a skinny guy about 30 years old came to the desk. He looked like a regular working man, wearing working man clothes, and he had a working man’s paycheck, something like $180, a good week’s pay back then, from one of the local chicken companies. It was already signed on the back. He passed me a beat-up paper driver’s license, looking at the floor as he did so.
I’ve never seen a worse fake ID. The poor thing looked like someone took the top half of one washed-out driver’s license and the bottom half of another, put them together with scotch tape on the back, then handprinted on it the name that was on the check.
I couldn’t believe anyone would offer such an obviously fake ID, and I said “Can you just wait here a minute?”, took a dime out of my cash drawer and dropped it into the pay phone on the wall behind me. The customer asked what I was doing, and I said “I’m calling the police.” He turned and ran out the front door. Operating on pure greyhound/mechanical rabbit instinct, I was right behind him. I ran out of the office, slamming the door behind me, and began chasing him through the parking lot.
When we got to the back fence and he jumped over, I came to my senses and stopped. I didn’t have a plan, not of catching him, tackling him, or anything else; it was just blind instinct. To be honest with myself, I think it was mostly because I was insulted by being offered that terrible fake ID. I didn’t consider the possibility of getting punched, stabbed or shot in the face until I got to the fence and stopped. As I’ve admitted elsewhere here about a different subject, “I was a young guy myself then, and I too was prone to doing stupid young-guy things.”
I took my time walking back to the store, getting my breath back and trying to come up with the funniest way to tell the story of what just happened. When I got back inside, the cashiers were cashiering, the baggers were bagging, and nobody even glanced at me. I sat at my desk for a while, looking out across the checkout area, waiting for someone to meet my eye and mouth “What the hell was that about?”. But no one did.
The paycheck and fake ID were still on my desk.
As my breathing returned to normal and it became obvious that no one had noticed my impulsive chase, I was overtaken by a fresh impulse. If you have even a speck of latent opportunism in your soul, you will have already guessed what it was. I destroyed the license, scribbled my approval on the check, cashed it, and put the money in my pocket. The check went to the bank along with the rest of the day’s receipts, and of course it bounced and was reported to the police.
A few weeks later, two detectives came to the store. They had a folder with the bounced check in it, and they asked if the scribble on the back was my approval. Yes, it was. They asked if I remembered what the customer looked like. No, I don’t think so. They said if we showed you his picture, do you think you’d remember him then? Yeah, maybe. They produced a small stack of 3×5″ front-and-side view mugshot cards, maybe six in all. They told me to take my time and go through them slowly, one at a time. As I did, they watched me for a reaction. My customer was the fourth one down. When I reached the bottom of the stack without picking one out, they asked me to try again, and really pay close attention this time.
I went through the stack once more, with the same result, and opened my hands in the universal what-next gesture. They knew their guy’s picture was in that stack, he’d probably cashed those checks all over town, and I know they were disappointed in me that I didn’t recognize him. They thanked me and left.
I spent that windfall on my family, with us probably taking a jaunt somewhere we couldn’t have afforded otherwise. Yes, I am a little embarrassed by my impulsive act, but I won’t say that I regret it.
When I worked at the Foodland in Elizabeth, there was a Greek lunch counter across the street; I was there at least twice a day. I don’t normally pay that much attention to how things are cooked, but the tub, or container, or whatever you call it, of hot oil for French fries was directly across from my usual seat, and I noticed the oil got a little darker each day, then started over fresh on Fridays.
They used that fresh Friday oil all week, that’s why it kept getting darker. After a week, they used it to cook their Friday fish special. When I told my wife about this, she said “That’s disgusting.” I couldn’t say, I never ordered the fish special.
Our oldest sergeant is a grizzled Korean War vet. Overseeing our cleaning of the latrine, he spots a recruit trying to clean a toilet bowl while standing as far away from it as possible – with his scrub-brush extended, he looks like he’s fencing. His battle is with one particularly stubborn fleck of matter stuck tight to the porcelain. The sergeant reaches in and scrapes it off with a thumbnail. To the groans around him, he rhetorically asks, “Did j’ever see a pile of [enemy troops] that got blown up and laid there for a week?”
stroke to a dummy chin, we thrust and parry. Sergeant Doherty doesn’t think I’m trying hard enough; he braces himself and shouts in my face, “Come on Smithee, try to kill me!” It’s hard to say why, but caught up in all the make-believe bloodshed around me,I make a genuine effort to kill him by stabbing him in the face. He’s prepared and fast enough to move out of the way, but it’s close, very close; he is surprised and calls for a smoke break.
In a few days there’s plenty of food, more than plenty, the servings overload our trays. The scam that scammed too deeply has been ended. As I dump almost half a chicken into the garbage can, the mess sergeant asks me sarcastically if I’m getting enough to eat.
