The Working Life

The other day I was thinking about how great it would be not to have to work. This sentiment is a pretty common one, I'm sure, but the more I thought about it, the more invested in the idea I became. In my head I envisioned a scenario in which I lay on a chaise lounge, sipping Mai Tais somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven in the morning, maybe reading a book or just catching up on the latest cases in Judge Judy's courtroom. As it stands, I'm currently employed in the retail field, which is to say that I get yelled at by people who want important things like toasters and "That one bedspread; my daughter said it's called 'Jasmine' " that happen to be out of stock or, more often than one might believe, completely nonexistent. For the past five years I've worked for a major department store, and for three years prior to that, I spend my after-school hours stocking shelves and ringing up tubs of potato salad at a small-town grocery store.

Eight years of working with the public has taught me one thing about myself: that I hate people.

That might not be entirely true. For every ten middle-aged women trying too hard to pull off the sophisticated demeanor of upper-middle class status by claiming that the pillow I have shown them "does NOT go with their theme," there's always one or two friendly folks who will smile back at me and offer a genuine thank-you. An elderly woman in tight, leopard-print lycra will tell me her preference for fullscreen DVDs, and when I tell her that her chosen movie only comes in widescreen, she shrugs it off and says, "Okay. Thanks, hon." Then, ten minutes later, I'm attacked by a man whose child, it seems, has been taken hostage, and the only way he can save him is to buy ammo for his staple gun, here in the home improvement section the size of a Smart car rather than, say, at the Home Depot across the street.

Having been at my job for several years, I've managed to weasel my way into a position of some responsibility. How I managed to convince anyone that I should be in charge of anything or anyone I'll never know, but having been given a supervisory role in my store means that I get the brunt of most people's aggression. A coworker will encounter an angry customer, and before anyone can get too fired up, they'll jump in and say, "Would you like to speak to my manager?" Basically, offering my head to them on a silver platter.

I can't really blame them, though. I did the exact same thing when I first started.

Often, after explaining to someone that a sign for laundry soap in one spot does not apply to another soap three spots away, I get the privilege of listening to any number of responses. These can range from the litigious "Well, this is FALSE ADVERTISING" to the malicious "You sonofabitch" to the comparatively friendly "This is why I do NOT shop here." On a given day, when I have to crush someone's dream of owning a thirty-dollar slow cooker or telling a grandchild not to climb on the shelves, I'm thought of by any number of people as an asshole.

I've developed a thicker skin, having a few years of insults, curse words, and angry glares under my belt. Still, every once in a while the inevitable confrontation will get to me. In the middle of a woman's rant, I'll sense my heartbeat quicken to something I can actually feel in my neck, the pounding so loud that I can barely make out which four-letter words she's basing her qualifiers on. Thanks to that damned fight or flight response, the part of my brain that would ordinarily make me sound not like an idiot diverts its resources, leaving my mouth numb and giving me a tendency to stumble, buffoon-like, over words a toddler could speak with ease.

In these cases, after I've been left standing victorious or wallowing in defeat, I'll conjure up the image of me resting comfortably, propped up against a mountain of cushions with a drink in my hand. The room around me sits silent with the first words of a novel. Or maybe the television offers its passing promise of more Judge Judy, coming up next. Either way, back in the real world I'll continue on, checking my watch and counting down the hours until my fantasy comes true. If not the one in which I'm free from the bonds of working life, then at least the one, more attainable, where I can clock out and call it a day until tomorrow.

Thank You for Being a Friend

It was a hot summer night, and my sister and I were taking part in our usual late-night routine. Hunkered down on the floor of my bedroom, we sprawled out onto the floor with our pillows and blankets. Staring up at my thirteen-inch television set, we waited for MASH to come on, little did we know what we were about to see…

Growing up in the 1970’s, when the show was new, my father would be ridiculed at school because he was one of the few kids who didn’t watch MASH. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to—he did—it was that his parents came from an older generation and wanted nothing to do with it.

Since this was in the ear BEFORE kids had TV sets in their bedrooms, my poor father grew-up missing out on one of the era’s greatest television achievements (with the invention of Saturday Night Live being the second). If you’ve never seen MASH, it’s a show about medical officers during the Korean War (1950’s) however the show was REALLY about the Vietnam War (which was still going on when the show first aired).
Sometime after it went off the air, my grandparents developed a love for MASH when it went into syndication. So, whenever my family would go and visit them on Sundays we’d often sit and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken—and watch MASH. My Dad adores this show, and it became a regular part of our lives to watch it with him, late at night on one of the local channels during the weekend.

We’d sit up late, and watch MASH. My dad would drink beer and we’d all eat peanuts. Then one day, ABC started putting MASH on weeknights after the ten o’clock news. We were ecstatic. This was in the pre-TV-on-DVD days, so this was our only way to see this show. Once summer began, we’d stay up late and watch MASH all by ourselves. Our Dad worked an overnight shift, and my Mom would have to go to bed fairly early…but my sister and I could certainly stay up late for MASH.

We were in TV heaven for a few months, and then something happened.

I can remember that night, just like it was yesterday. It started off like any other, first we snuggled up on the floor and patiently waited for the news to end. Then a repeat of Roseanne came on (a show which we tolerated but didn’t really feel anything for). After that it was two episodes of MASH before it was time for bed.

But that night, once Roseanne’s credits ended, instead of the faded green hills of Korea (really sunny California standing in for Korea, as I would learn later) my sister Amber and I were greeted with an aerial view of…sunny Florida?

And then the title appeared: “The Golden Girls.”

What the hell was this? Old ladies? Where was Hawkeye and Frank Burns?

Needless to say we were pissed and promptly shut the TV off. The next day we scanned the TV schedule in the newspaper and saw that rather than show back-to-back episodes of MASH, our ABC affiliate was going to show one episode of this thing called “The Golden Girls.”

I’ve always been freaked out by old people, so this show scared me at first. But, being lazy children, we started to just sit through The Golden Girls. I guess we couldn’t think of anything better to do for 30 minutes.

I can’t remember exactly how long it took, but eventually our loathing melted away. Pretty soon we both secretly liked the show. Of course, neither of us would dare admit it to the other. Instead we laughed, pretending that we were making fun of it—but we weren’t laughing at it. We were laughing with it.

Recently, before we pulled the plug on our cable (it’s too expensive and my wife and I don’t watch TV) I caught a Golden Girls marathon on Lifetime. The show surprisingly still made me laugh. But as an adult I’m not only shocked that someone like me (young, male) can find so much to enjoy in a show about four 60+ year old women living together in Florida—I’m shocked that such a show EVEN GOT ON THE AIR.

TV like all forms of American popular entertainment has always been geared towards young people. If you don’t look a certain way or if you’re over a certain age…you’re almost always excluded. Women and men over 35 aren’t very attractive to advertisers. And yet this show was put on the air, was a success, and is loved by many to this very day.

This tells me a couple of things. First off, it tells me that funny is funny regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or age. Secondly, it tells me that corporate American really is as stupid as everyone says it is. There are numerous instances of HUGE success stories that fly in the face of their “conventional wisdom,” and yet they still keep making the same “safe” choices year in and year out.

Where is our show about old women today? There is no show like that. They have Gossip Girl and Secret Life of the American Teenager, but nothing for or about anyone over the age of 30. This is not only stupid, but probably the reason why TV is so crappy (and why I don’t have cable). As the baby boomers grow even older, this huge “golden years” population is not being represented in our popular culture. I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to watch TV I can’t relate to (on at least some level). The TV Executives are going to lose a pretty big part of their viewing public, I predict (at least, even bigger than what they’ve ALREADY lost).

Anyway, when the subject of “good” TV comes up, it’s easy to point to a show like MASH and say “that was a good show.” It was a good show, it was well-written and daring. And yet, a show like The Golden Girls is almost just as daring. Imagine the meeting for both shows.

“How about a comedy about the Korean War?”

Now with shows like McHale’s Navy and Hogan’s Heroes having kinda/sort gone that route, I can see how MASH was green-lit. Even though MASH was more of a drama/comedy mix, there was still a precedent for war-themed comedy shows.

But think about the pitch for the The Golden Girls: “I want to make a show about four old ladies…hanging out together…one is a sexaholic…”

I bet you could a PIN DROP at that meeting.

So what I’m saying is: I think America needs another show about over-sexed old ladies. Thank you.

Squashing the Rebellion

I feel old at night. During the day, my body lets me do whatever I want, and usually without complaint. Kneeling down, bending over, picking things up: my body has learned it must do these things in the course of each day to keep the two of us from, say, starving. Every once in a while my knees will snap at me for trying to pick up a piece of paper, or my shoulder will pop with cruel laughter as I sit at my desk stretching. These little bumps in the road I can ignore.

At night, though, everything changes.

My legs give me no trouble, really. It’s my eyes and back that try hardest to ruin me, along with any number of other parts that lie in wait, ready for the revolt that we are all certain is one day coming. When it does, my body’s components will simply abandon their respective duties, and I will end up in a heap on a floor or a sidewalk, maybe lying draped like a blanket over my desk or slumped raggedly behind the wheel of my car.

After about eight-thirty or nine, my back starts to slack off. Usually I find myself slouched over like a hunchback at that time, and I have to constantly remind my erector spinae muscles not to give up just yet. It’s like giving a motivational speech to a crowd of sick, homeless women whose children have just been taken outside and shot. It doesn’t really work.

Depending on where I’m at and how well the talks are going between my back and me, a person might look and see an emboldened twenty-something man, chest forward and back arrow-straight; or, somewhere else — and more often than not — another person might think of me as a marionette, standing tall and slumping forward, back and forth again and again as if in the hands of a toddler.

To compound matters, my eyes start in with their issues not long after my back does.

“We’ve been working all day,” they seem to say. “We just need a break. These working conditions are atrocious. We might as well be working in Somalia, for God’s sake.”

I try to ignore them, and mostly things work out fine; they go back to doing their job, the insurrection stalled for another day, and all I have to worry about is not looking like I’m having back spasms.

Things like these usually happen at the movies, especially when it’s a late one or, when one is enticing enough, a midnight show.

When I go to late movies, I should know by now that I need a break sometime before seven o’clock. If I try to force myself through, my body starts to fail me. It’ll warn me with a yawn like a look that says, “Don’t push your luck, mister.” At the theater, to ward off sleep, I step up to the concessions counter and arm myself with an array of sugars and caffeine. To the worker, some sixteen-year-old kid who’s forced to wear puffy white shirts and caps stolen straight from a 1940s bellboy service, my order must appear intended for a small cluster of friends, but in actuality it’s all for me.

I force whoever is seeing the movie with me to carry a box of chocolate-covered mints, a soda cup the size of a football, and a licorice bag, while I cart around my gummy worms and a box of last-resort super sour candies in one hand. The other one, holding up a plastic cup of frozen coffee topped with whipped cream, shouts, “Screw you, man! This cup is freezing.”

As we leave the counter, I look at my compatriot and say, as if reassuring them, “Don’t worry. We can share.” This is a lie.

In the time between our arrival and the dimming of the lights, I occupy myself with conversation. There’s no topic I won’t talk about, from the state of poverty in the United States to vaginal discharge. It’s all fair game. And if I don’t know anything factual to share I’ll make something up. Anything to keep me awake. With the candy boxes and bags built up around me like a fortress, I feel safe against the world, but then I realize, often just as the lights reduce to orange embers in the ceiling and along the walls, that the threat comes not from without, but from within.

I feel a yawn begin to rise.

It is then that I start to gorge.

The people around me must hate me, then, as the previews are reduced to simple moving pictures against the din of ripping cardboard and tearing, crumpling plastic. The slurp of an empty frozen coffee drowns out an actress’s tagline for the newest romantic comedy, and women throughout the theater ponder just how valuable their purses would be as weapons to hurl in my direction. All I can think about, though, is that my body will give up — will, in fact, turn on me and start to sabotage everything it and I have gone through in order to buy our ticket, that little ten-dollar scrap of paper now crumpled in my pocket.

The coffee gone, I turn to the soda, and as the previews give way to the feature, I catch glimpses of men, now joining in on the beams of hatred pointed solely at me, silently pummeling fists into open palms. They aren't throwing anything, which I count as a plus, but as I weigh that against the idea that maybe they're saving their anger for outside the theater, my bladder speaks up, in a threatening voice pulled straight from a horror film: “Remember me?”

Throughout the years, I have worn holes in my shoes from the incessant kicking of seats before me, crossing and uncrossing my legs. Finally, at a lull in the movie, I stand up and make my way to the bathroom. As I stand there relieving myself, the thought does not escape me that if it really wanted to, my body could leave me right here, like a dead vagrant at the base of a urine-stained toilet. My eyes and back and the rest of them don’t say anything, and that’s the most unsettling part. I hurry to finish, and my fingers zip up so quickly that I feel sharp metal teeth where I least care to feel such things. I threaten my hands with scalding hot water, but in the end I back down, knowing that it’ll only cause strife between me and my skin, who claims to be a pacifist but really just doesn't give two shits in a woods about what goes on with the rest of us.

Back in the theater, I make my way to my seat. From that moment, I can last approximately twenty minutes before things start up again; my eyes will grow heavy, my back will slouch. Against my will I’ll sink back into the chair cushions. And when I wake up ten or fifteen minutes later I realize that they have won. The rebellion has overthrown me for now. So, I settle into my defeat, trying not to listen to the cheers and jubilation that come from each of my body’s parts, no longer paying attention to the movie but instead shifting in my little mound of empty boxes and used cups, an ousted king in a crumbling cardboard castle. Yawning, I begin a dream of redemption and reclamation, hearing my voice, as if from an increasing distance, whispering, Next time. Next time. Next time.