A life lesson

About a month before I got fired on Christmas eve, I heard a girl screaming in the store warehouse.

I wasn't quite 19. I had been hired for the second time at a department store in Rockaway, New Jersey, and worked as a salesman in the seasonal department. The first time I worked there, I had unloaded trucks on the loading dock. Now that I was out on the sales floor, I had to wear a tie and a name tag. In addition to helping customers and stocking shelves, I assembled hibachis, grills, swing sets and other items depending upon whatever season it was. My supervisors were adamant about us wearing name tags, although they were oblivious to what the name tags actually said. Mine said "Hubert H. Humphrey."

There was an artist who had a little office off the sales floor. He was a young guy, stocky, with a red beard and a wicked sense of humor. He was really good at lettering and design, and made all of the sale signs for the store. He was also an excellent and fast cartoonist, and would create nasty cartoons of managers he didn't like and share them with me and other friends he trusted. They weren't "blue" or anything like that. He just put them in absurd situations to poke holes in their self importance. He drew a picture of me once. I can see it in my minds' eye. My manager was named "Milt," and the cartoon was of me with tiny body and gigantic head, holding a hibachi. The caption read, "Hey, Milt! What's an hibachi?" I don't know why it seemed so funny at the time, but I really wish I had that picture.

In the New York/New Jersey area at that time, there was a spaghetti sauce commercial that ran incessantly on TV showing an Italian mother in the city calling out the window, "Ann--tun-eee!!! Ann--tunn-eee!!!" And little Anthony would smile and run home to his delicious homemade spaghetti dinner with sauce that tasted just like mother used to make, as long as mother made it in a factory along with all of the other sub-minimum wage workers.

In the housewares department worked a bespectacled middle-aged salesman with thinning hair who was always doing something funny in a snarky sort of way. He was the kind of person who was certain he was too good for the job he was doing but had no other options in life except to do work that was beneath him. He had a recording of the Italian lady yelling for Anthony, and would occasionally play the recording through the store's PA system. The managers would rush around trying to figure out who had done it, but to the best of my knowledge, they never figured it out. It was funny for the first five or six times.

A friend of mine was the receptionist. She had a little kiosk at the front of the store, greeted customers as they came in through the doors and made announcements about what was on sale in the various departments. I fancied myself quite the talented faux radio announcer, so occasionally she would pass the microphone over to me and let me make an announcement about something or other. Most times, I was flawless. One afternoon, though, she asked me to announce a special over at the snack counter. I said "Sure!" and proceeded to totally screw it up. I became tongue-tied, stuttering and unintelligible, as if English had suddenly become a foreign language. I tried to correct myself, but everything I said just made it worse. As I was digging an ever deepening hole, my friend hissed "Give me the mike!" while the manager at the snack counter yelled "No! No! No!" Finally, I handed the microphone back to her, while the store manager came by and said, "That was terrible!" I nodded sadly. Thus ended my career as a radio celebrity.

During the holidays, the seasonal department expanded from the regular sales floor into part of the adjacent warehouse where Christmas trees were set up and a huge assortment of holiday decorations were put on display. On a slow morning about a month before Christmas, I walked into the warehouse and heard a girl's bloodcurdling scream. I raced to the sound and found one of the girls who worked in the beauty products department with one of her arms jammed into the rollers of the conveyor belt system that moved products from one area of the warehouse to another. The conveyor belt was still moving, with her arm grabbed by rollers up to her bicep. As she was screaming, I ran for the 3-button panel that operated the conveyor. I pressed the button that stopped the conveyor, but her arm was still caught fast. The only way to release her was to reverse the conveyor belt. But the buttons that did that were not marked. If I pressed the wrong button, her arm would get jammed even more. As she was begging me to help her, I took a deep breath, took my best guess, and correctly pressed the button that reversed the belt. I helped her pull her arm out, and as she sat on the floor crying I called security and she was soon taken to the hospital. Fortunately, although her arm was bruised, it wasn't broken. She was back to work a few days later, and never said a word to me.

At the time, I was working really long hours, opening and closing the seasonal department with practically no help from anyone. I suppose they didn't want to hire anyone else since I seemed to be able to handle it all on my own. Then one afternoon, as I was helping a customer with his purchase, the owner of the store appeared and started to chew me out for the appearance of the department. He was literally screaming at me, while the customer and I just looked at him in disbelief. He had lost it. I took it for awhile, and the rebel without a clue inside me took issue with the injustice of it all. I lost it in return, and started to yell right back at him. He stopped screaming, turned a bright shade of red, and stomped away. I looked at the customer I was helping, and he said something like, "What was his problem?! What a jerk!"

He avoided me from that point on. In my extreme naivety, I thought there would be no repercussions for standing up to the boss.

A few weeks later on Christmas eve, it all fell apart. Some friends of mine and I were in the employee break room. A bottle of cheap wine was being passed around just as one of the more aggressive security guards walked by. He started chewing us out for drinking wine during store hours, and for some reason I was completely put off by the total injustice of a world that would not allow hard working store employees to drink wine while families shopped frantically for last-second Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers. I challenged him and asked, "Why?" That was apparently the wrong question to ask. He now demanded that we put the wine away. Again, I said "Why?" I mean, who was this guy to demand that we do anything? It's a free world, after all. He grabbed me by the arm, marched me upstairs, and Milt, my manager, handed me my paycheck, complete with pink slip inside the envelope.

Milt took me aside, and was painfully nice to me. I remember that he let me go with a mix of sorrow and compassion. I didn't lose the job because of my nonsense of defying a security guard. Ever since the day that I had dared to talk back to the store owner, my job was on borrowed time. I should have expected it, but I did not. "Steve," Milt said. "You just can't tell off the boss like that and expect to get away with it." I nodded my head, thanked him, and went home.

I was just a kid, nice enough for the most part, who could be at times both self-righteous and foolish.

And I hadn't even touched the wine.