A Walk in the Snark (20 page)

Work application in hand, Jack was not about to let this bird fly away. He knew beauty when it crossed his threshold of bland cement tiles, glaringly bad fluorescent lighting and beer. He approached this beautiful creature, all five feet ten of her; no matter that she was shopping with her swarthy, dark-haired, scowling boyfriend who had one hand on the shopping basket and the other planted firmly on her perfect heart-shaped ass. With all the false bravado he could drum up, Jack droolingly asked her to work for him in the cosmetics department. Immediately.

When she giggled yes, I think Jack actually danced a jig in the hardware aisle.

Now, it apparently didn’t matter to Jack that: A) he didn't know a thing about this girl or her sales experience or B) there were experienced girls who were already up for the part-time cosmetics positions who would be pissed as hell that he hired an outsider for several reasons, mainly that they would be missing out on the bonuses available from beauty companies that came with the spot and C) he already had three full-time girls and didn't really need a fourth. Especially one with bad skin and no experience.

Clearly Jack was not thinking with his, er, head. (Not to mention what his jealous, hard-drinking wife would think of the whole thing.)

So, starting that Monday morning, Julia began her illustrious career as a cosmetics clerk at Longs Drugs in Northern California. It might be hard for you to imagine how utterly perfect this chick’s body was, given that plastic surgery was not as common back in the late 1970s as it is now. She was all of maybe seventeen or eighteen years old, so my educated guess is that she was that way naturally. She was like a real-life Jessica Rabbit: tall, thin, perfectly curvy.

All of us chicks hated her.

At first.

This isn’t going to be one of those “then we got to know her and liked her,” stories. Julia really kind of kept to herself. She didn’t socialize with us after work. She giggled and laughed shyly behind her hand with everyone, though, trying to fit in. It was interesting, to me, to see how she interacted with people, as I’m such a people-watching kind of person. There was just no way she would become part of the crowd—her looks would never allow it.

Don’t get me wrong—we were all nice to her. It was just as if “The Body” had a palpable presence all its own.

I won’t deny that sometimes I felt short and ugly in that presence.

Julia wore a TON of makeup. For someone who was clearly very used to being stared at constantly for her physical attributes by both men and women, she was obviously uncomfortable about her skin. She was of the school of thought that if you pancake on the makeup, maybe people won’t notice how bad it is—and from far away, she was right. I can see why Jack went flying. I had acne back then. Still do on the rare occasion. But this was a whole different league—she had the kind of acne that scars you for life. I wonder if people felt somehow it was her due, and who knows, maybe so did she, given her blessings in the body department. Maybe her bad skin kind of balanced out the perfection.

But was the perfection a blessing? Really? When she showed up with bruises, black eyes, and a broken arm more than once, Jack finally stepped in; thrilled I’m sure to be chivalrous, but also trying to help this young girl who had the bod for sin without the brains for sense.

Julia didn’t last very long at our store. She just didn’t show up one day and that was it. The guys were crushed. It was as if the centerfold had been torn off the wall.

I heard she skipped town late one night. Moved to Reno and got a job at another drugstore, a different chain, with the help of one of the male managers who had been promoted up there from our store.

Julia was the kind of girl who would always be able to depend on the help of strangers. She engendered that kind of protectiveness in men that you rarely see in independent women with brains.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing.

I’m saying that’s just the way it is.

***

WHERE FOOD GOES TO DIE

On the rare occasions I did not have to work Checkstand One, I relished working in the Cosmetics Department. Sure, I wasn’t your typical long-limbed beauty queen or someone like The Body that Jack went running after, but hey, I was all girl. I knew my Maybelline from my Max Factor. Helping old ladies find their Revlon Cherry lipstick to smear on their teeth made my day, baby. And, the cosmeticians got to wear a pretty, light blue polyester smock. Oh yeah.

Other times, the managers would toss me in a section like Photo, Soap/Paper/Pet, or the dreaded straightening of the food aisle.

Food is cheap at the drugstore for a reason, my friends.

If you are ever in a hurry and think, “Well, I’ll just pick up some food at the drugstore since I’m here anyway,”—here’s my advice:
don’t.
You want to know why?

Because the drugstore is
where food goes to die
.

Think of drugstores as food graveyards, if you will. That package of Chex Mix that you think will quell your craving for salt has probably been sitting on that snack shelf since 1987—about the time I stopped working at Longs, actually.

Food in a drugstore is like a toxic chip waste dump. Once a dry snack food is put on a shelf, it usually stays there until some unsuspecting customer unwittingly buys that box of crackers that can bounce itself right out of a basketball game without breaking a sweat.

If I were you, I would think twice before purchasing that haunted Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar—I’ve seen far too many filled with worms that have actually walked off the shelf and through the automatic doors, tired of that awful fluorescent lighting.

And don’t even get me started on the stacks (and stacks) of scary Spam—no one knowingly buys that mystery meat (unless you live in Hawaii); though that stuff will most likely last through a nuclear holocaust—maybe all of us should probably purchase a can and save it for World War III, come to think of it…

Then there’s the canned ravioli ravine, the skeletal spray cheese that has hardened in the can (always a winner at parties), and the gummy candy corpses strewn about the aisle as reminders of what
exactly
it is we are putting into our bodies (“What IS that green sugary goo that won’t come off with the industrial strength acid?” I asked my manager. He just shrugged and handed me a mask and gloves with the instructions “don’t inhale” as he walked away.)

So next time you find yourself in the cereal crypt at the drugstore, walk by quickly. And don’t let those seemingly bright orange “fresh” labels fool you. I can guarantee that box of Mallomars that looks so good when you have the munchies on a Friday night will turn on you as soon as you open the box. It is a trap, I promise. I’ve seen things.

Remember this: There is no such thing as an innocent cookie bought from a drugstore.

Trust your instincts. That chill you feel on the back of your neck is real, people.

They are the ghosts of food gone by.

***

CAT LADY

I always wondered what it would be like to be at the drugstore every single day. Even the managers who worked sixty-hour weeks, like my dad, weren’t there every day.

Only the products could know what it was like to eternally be there, and they weren’t alive. Well, unless you were a candy bar.

Or of course, one of our regulars. We did have those people who came in every single day. Without fail. For cigarettes, wine, meds, food, quarters. Or maybe because they were just lonely and needed the social interaction.

We were their family in a sad kind of way. And that was okay. They needed us. Some of the employees were very good at reaching out to these people; others, not so much. I don’t know that it depended on gender or age so much as it did heart.

And then there was this chick. Sometimes the reality of working in a drugstore is all right there—in the latex-covered hands of someone like Cat Lady.

We all referred to her as “Cat Lady.”

She didn’t really look like a cat or anything.

I suppose it was because of what she purchased every time she came into the store: five cans of cat food, Nine Lives I think it was, chicken flavor, and she always paid with pennies. Painstakingly, s l o w l y, counting them out, one by one. That alone was something you would always remember, even now, all these many years later.

But what really made her stand out was that she would wear several pairs of latex gloves on her tiny, mouselike hands, afraid to make contact with even a trace of any surface. Clearly, the woman was not well.

In addition, she covered her head in a clear plastic shower cap. The overhead fluorescent lights would reflect on the plastic no matter where she was in the store, so there would be no doubt who was coming your way.

There was no hiding from Cat Lady, though my God, we would try.

You know the double doors you see around the edges of every drugstore? That was our safe zone—most customers knew not to pass into the dark, inner reaches of the sanctity of our warehouse.

Cat Lady, however, despite her fear of well, everything, knew no such fear. She was on her cat food mission and nothing would stop her. If that particular brand, in that particular flavor that was on sale for twenty-nine cents, was not in the aisle, end cap or center aisle display where it was supposed to be—or God forbid we ran out—she would come storming back through the double silver swinging doors until she found one of us.

All four-foot-ten of her. Covered in plastic. Even her feet.

Usually she went for the guys, because clearly they must have been in charge. I guess she thought we girls didn’t know how to open a case of cat food.

Which, to be honest, was fine with us. See, the way it worked was the guys stocked the floor, shouldering cases of merchandise from back in the warehouse to the front, onto huge carts, marking it and then putting it out on the shelves. Sometimes the cases were truly very heavy, so in that respect it made sense.

Cashiers were mainly girls. Managers were mainly dudes.

I say
girls
and not
women
because I started working at Longs at the age of sixteen, mainly to pay for my cheerleading uniforms and to save up for college. There were a few female cashiers who were “women.” They had been there awhile—and by awhile I mean fifteen or twenty years.

Even now, thirty years later, I can’t get my mind around that. Being a cashier at a chain drugstore is one of the worst jobs in the world.

Especially if you are on Checkstand ONE.

Checkstand ONE is exactly what it sounds like. It never freakin’ closes. If you work an eight-hour shift, you are standing on your feet, in those pretty orthopedic shoes, for one very long, back-breaking block of time. In an attractive smock (I still have nightmares about Longs green). Dealing with tools who could really give a you-know-what about you, who you are, your interests, or even that you are actually a real person with, ya know, hair.

They just want their “damn cigarettes, you goddamn bitch. No, not
those
, you stupid girl. The ones on sale.”