I was only 16

My very first job was working in the receiving department of a now defunct department store in Rockaway, New Jersey. I was 16 years old. There was no resume involved. All I did was walk in off the street one Saturday afternoon and ask the receptionist if there were any openings. She paged one of the managers, and pretty soon a stocky middle-aged man with thinning hair and a mustache came stomping down a flight of stairs that led from the store offices upstairs. I can't remember for sure what his name was. I'm pretty sure it was "Mr. Feldman."

He looked me over with a skeptical eye and asked me what I was looking for. To this day I have no idea why he even bothered to talk with me. I'm certain I looked like a scraggly, underfed and disheveled street person. I was also intensely shy at this age, and I doubt if I gave him very much eye contact, preferring instead to study my sneakers and the floor tiles. For whatever reason, kindness or sympathy, he gave me an application to fill out, told me to get a haircut, and then put me to work on the loading dock where all of the other refugees from society were safely stashed away from public view.

I learned more about life and people by working on that crummy, dirty loading dock than at any other time before or since. The store had an upstairs and a downstairs, and a huge attached warehouse and receiving area in the back. To get to work, I'd have to walk through the store, go down a big flight of stairs, navigate past the record department and the seasonal department and then push through big hanging sheets of thick plastic that led into the warehouse. It was pretty brainless work. A truck would pull up. You and a handful of other street urchins would unload whatever was in it. The truck would drive away. You'd take whatever had been in the truck and put it in its proper place in the warehouse. Another truck would arrive. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't know how I managed to fit in with the receiving crew. Sheer determination, I guess. Even at that age I wasn't easily deterred from doing something I needed to do. I needed to buy records, so I needed to work. If I didn't work, I would not have records. So I worked, and did my utmost to fit in among a mix of rough, tough and goofy teenagers, a nice but often sarcastic manager named Bob, and an old crusty security guard named Bill.

Everyone had a name given to him by the other kids. I'm not talking about names like "shrimp," or "fatty" or "retard." No, this crew of the soon-to-be-high-school-dropout crowd was far too creative for such trite nonsense. They considered every angle, weighed different names, and then decided upon the one most inappropriate as the one most appropriate.

One of the kids was called "Speedy," because he once took some speed while at work on the loading dock and raced around doing the work of 10 other people. One was "Hairy," because he already had a thick mat of hair on his chest. One was "The Armenian," since his family was from Armenia. It went on like that.

I didn't have a name at first. They didn't know what to make of me. I didn't immediately fit in with them, and for the first few weeks I just came in, did my job, ignored the stupid pranks they would play on me, and then went home. Until one day...

I came in to work, and Speedy smiled his absurdly stupid ear-to-ear smile, raced up and pulled me by the arm to a joint gathering of the loading dock crew. They all looked me over, turned to confer among themselves, looked at me again, and laughed. "It's true!" one of them said. "He looks like a vagina!"

So I got my name, and if I wanted to work there, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. I didn't even know what it meant, because I had never even heard the word before. Among my least educated brethren, and to Bob the manager and Bill the security guard, I was now Tw@#.

I learned to ignore it, but sometimes that just wasn't possible. During the holiday season, it was our job to tie Christmas trees to the roofs of customers' cars. One evening, as a man, a woman and their teenage daughter stood outside their car, I was tying a tree to the roof of their car when Bill the security guard came outside and shouted, "Hey,  Tw@#!"

I jerked slightly, but otherwise did not respond. I couldn't believe it. There were customers here. What was he doing? And then it happened again.

"Hey,  Tw@#!" Bill repeated with increasing aggravation. "Hey, Tw@#!, don't you hear me?"

I totally ignored him, and thankfully after a minute or two of shouting out this vulgar word for female anatomy, he eventually gave up and went back inside. To their credit, the man, his wife and their daughter never said a word.

After they drove off with their tree, I went inside and Bill confronted me. "Hey,  Tw@#! Why were you ignoring me out there? I had somethin' to tell ya!"

Then Bob the manager came out of his office and said, "Bill. Think about it. You were shouting  Tw@#" in front of customers. Not once, but a bunch of times. What was he supposed to do?"

Poor Bill. He was really a nice old man. We eventually became pretty good friends, and when I finally quit the loading dock about a year later, he tried to talk me out of it.

"Whatcha gotta quit for, huh?" he asked.

I told him that I had to focus more on school, but that was only part of why I was leaving. I had saved enough money to buy records for awhile, and although I was friendly with most of the guys at the loading dock, there were a couple of the really tough ones that I never got along with and just didn't want to deal with anymore. I missed Bill, though.

About a year later, having run out of money, I went back to the store and talked to Mr. Feldman again about working there. He said he'd rehire me, but this time I was going to work on the sales floor. I guess he realized that I was presentable in public after all. 

"And get a haircut!" he said as I was leaving.