
Flanking a giggling Bob and Barb Gitlin, in the sleigh, are friends Glenn and Darcy Grovenstein. I met Darcy back when I was a teacher. All four of us got done dancing to The Cheektones at the Bird Cage then watched the cowboy boot drop on Whiskey Row. Happy New Year, y’all!
I may be weary, but I am happy, as the above photo will attest.
The drudgery of my final job before I retire can’t make a dent. In fact, this last chapter of working for a living might be a special seasoning.
I have a chance to reach out to others. The job makes me realize I have funds of hardbitten experience that have strengthened me.
Most folks who work Deli are or have been in some local rehab house, of which Prescott offers a plethora.
A new guy showed up after ten years in prison. I asked what he’d been in for.
“Armed robbery.”
This did not diminish or chill my liking him. He treats me with respect. He had to bicycle back to his rehab house through a snow blizzard the other day. Before he left he wanted to make sure he’d cleared away enough of the mess for me to close easily. The man has no car. And he was thinking of me.
Another guy hasn’t to my knowledge had a drug problem but was raised in a busted family and lives in a group home. I can’t tell if he’s socially tone deaf or autistic. He likes to talk more than work and is a little full of himself. In a loud voice he tried to boss me around and I blew up at him, shocking even myself with my stored anger. I had to apologize. I have a “legitimate issue,” sure. I think of myself as a grizzled dignitary among the meat slicers and chicken fryers. All this hulking kid sees is some doting old guy. Don’t get me started on young people’s lack of respect for their elders. Is it different among the Native Americans or in Japan, as I have heard? One wonders. But I got past that one and this young man and I peacefully coexist.
Lots of the addicts who get Deli jobs sample the gig a few weeks then say fuck it and go back out. One guy was Employee of the Month, mouthful of busted teeth testifying to a violent past (if not congenital disease). He went AWOL a few months ago, got wasted. I hear he’s moved to another town to do it all over again. Different rehab, if not his own apartment. Different job. I miss him. He treated me kindly and buttressed my spirit when I flailed for purchase at this physical job full of tasks foreign to me.
We might be losing Joey, who was promoted to Assistant Deli Manager, then bailed out. I saw this same thing happen at Walmart. Guys take boss jobs then tear the stripes off themselves, willingly busted back to grunt, bristling at the forms, extra unpaid hours, and general top-level bullshit. Joey took it further. Not only did he go AWOL, he gave his two weeks. But then I heard we don’t know yet. He might be allowed to straggle back in with his tail between his legs. Stay tuned.
We’d already just lost our top person, the Deli Manager. I find a special place in my heart for this Chino Valley hardass. I know the type. She had issues with everyone, and they with her. She barked orders too fast, with that earpiece stuck to her head so you didn’t know whether she was addressing you or someone across the store, then she’d change tunes to bark another directive over the top of the last one while you were already twisted in knots trying to do what she’d said to begin with. I found myself sympathetic. She suffered neck and back pain after a surgery. Even as she scolded me for letting a cut finger make me timid about cleaning slicers, Roxanne treated me respectfully. In a place failing to keep employees, I mean the quintessential revolving door, I stuck, I kept coming back. I don’t understand how the wells of compassion get filled. And that one runs both ways.
I’m still there, closing the store’s deli Sunday through Wednesday nights.
I remember Burroughs’ “spectral janitors coughing and spitting in the junk sick dawn” (apologies if an inexact quote, from Junky) or a Tom Waits number about “dawn’s early light,” alone, immersed in sinks of greasy trays, making sure the slicers gleam with Ecolab and paper towels, getting unsold chicken on trays for cold clamshell presentation next day. I work like a zealot, and I am smiling.
I seem to have stopped writing. Call this musing an aberration. I identify myself, without irony, as the night closer at the Safeway deli on White Spar. I don’t have to “be a writer.” I get out of the store at ten p.m. and feel completed.
Old ways die hard. I tell myself I will write the great American novel tomorrow.
But I never do (not that I could). I find myself of a morning drinking coffee, stroking my affectionate if meshuggah dog, watching any of a number of Taylor Sheridan TV shows on my fifty-five inch TV. Lately Mayor of Kingstown has held my interest. After Yellowstone and its related Western backstories, I’m enjoying the sooty ambience of this thing set in industrial Michigan, about a guy who makes deals inside and around a 20,000-inmate prison culture, with a rogues’ gallery of corrupt cops and gangsters.
So that is my life. I don’t have many more years to haggle over the terms of contentment.
Darcy, the friend pictured above, on the right, a superb writer and memoirist, asked why I didn’t write anymore. I said I was tired of revealing myself. I didn’t say what I felt deeper down. Where had writing got me? I’m recovering from some bitterness, yes. But overreaching the bitterness is a sort of growing amazement. When I stop recording my life and achieve some distance, I see that life for what it is. A funny movie this guy Bob Gitlin’s been thrust into. He didn’t write it. He woke up in it.
Have a Happy New Year.
May you awaken to your life smiling too.
