A Step Away From Reenacting, Dads and The Yellow Peril

Some might have the impression of me by now that I was an irresponsible, naive and spoiled brat, born to fortune and given everything in life. Never having to work to pay for school, or a car, or what have you. And to some degrees, yes I would say you're right. I do count myself fortunate. But there has been a major drawback to every fortune.

For example, my first car was a Pontiac Bonneville '92 (pearl gray of course) with a Landeau cover. It was THE hand-me-down of hand-me-downs. It started with someone we didn't know, went through another guy, then to my brother. And this was my brother's second car. It was driven all over creation, had at least one hole in it and my brother and I had done most of the repair work to get it going again before it could be driven. Then I paid my brother what he deemed the thing to be worth, a whopping $500.

This is sadly, not my car. Imagine this guy with the driver's side grill chewed up, the driver's side panel missing, a little more room in the trunk and a canvas, Landau top and you've got my baby.

Tada! First car! Long story short, it leaked every liquid it had in it at one point or other, and had nearly every other part replaced before I gave up on it (and even that wasn't my decision, I loved that car!) One of the windows didn't roll down, the high beams didn't work, it constantly blasted heat summer or winter, whether the fan was on or not and it really didn't idle so well. But it was a sweet car! And for all its faults it kept me alive.

So yes, fortunate to buy from my brother (who knew cars well), less fortunate to be like every other first car owner and get less than the absolute best.

Another example, college. Here's the plus side.

I got to attend a private Christian university for free that was less than ten miles from home, and smack dab in the middle of the community I grew up in. I could walk most everywhere in town, which helped since I didn't get the Bonneville until the beginning of my sophomore year, and because my parents insisted that being a student was my 'job' and because my tuition was free, I didn't need a job throughout the school year. I worked in the summer time but my free time at the university was my own.

Here's the downside. The reason I was able to attend this university was because my father has been teaching there with his PhD for going on 30+ years. He is devoted entirely to his students and his passion for teaching, and for doing so in an environment that encourages the application of our faith in every day life. Dad loves college students.

Dad is not, however, so hot about smaller people. Dad's MO is to go to work early in the morning, work through the day, work through the night, and come home late in the evening hungry, tired and ready to be very far away from people. This was the way he was when I was little, and it's the way he is now. So that meant that Dad was usually just...not around. Especially when were little, Dad would usually not be there for dinner, homework, getting anyone to band or drama rehearsal or youth group or....
'Call your father,' didn't mean shout for Dad to come in from the wood shed it meant call the college switchboard on the rotary phone and ask for his extension. (One of the reasons he didn't get a mobile phone until I was 21 was because Dad was always either at the school or at home. There was no 'mobile' to worry about.)

We went on whole summer vacations to New York and Texas without Dad. Most of our in-state outings were without Dad. Dad had no authority at home and really...wasn't an entity at home at all. If we spent a summer day 'with Dad' it meant he was in his air conditioned office and would bake us Pot Pies over a bunson burner when we came in from turning the college campus into our kingdom.

It was Dad's avoidance of things at home, of intimacy and love with all of us, especially my mother, and a bunch of other things, that lead to my parent's divorce when I was sixteen.

If Dad was bad when Mom was around he was the worst when she was gone. Dad hadn't a clue (as in couldn't find one if it were a glowing neon, ten-foot needle in a haystack the size of a pin cushion! "hadn't a clue") how to be a parent, now the only parent, to the two teen girls still living at home.

I don't know that Dad was intentionally avoiding us. He really was devoted to his work, and he is something of the 'absent minded professor' type. But more times than not interactions with Dad meant we kids would be blamed for things he had done, or else hadn't been around to witness, and when we showed how little we cared about that, his only recourse was to grit his teeth and call us 'wicked' children. To this day I hate it when Dad grits his teeth.

He was also for some reason the tooth decay Nazi.

Dad was a great provider though. And he is a musician and his love for music and the Lord, and his passion to introduce and teach both to his children are what has kept he and I together, along with our shared love for history. As an adult I know my father of course cares, and loves me, and even that he is proud of me. But I could not have said that as a child. (To this day he will not say, I love you. He says, "Daddy loves you.")

So back to the pros and cons of free college. Yes I got tuition remission, no I do not have tens of thousands of dollars of debt over my head. But I paid for that tuition remission by growing up without a father, and by suffering with my siblings through my parent's divorce.

Like I said drawbacks.

When I quit school, then was expelled, I knew a job was in my future. Other than summer work at the college in the dish room and occasionally volunteering for things in high school or the church I'd never had a job, never really been in the 'real world'. I knew I needed that experience before I could decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life (i.e. actually finish a degree), and I was craving that. But the message I was getting following camp, then Milly's, then the dish washing gig; was that I'm a failure. I haven't the fortitude and where-with-all and what have you to actually finish...anything. (If we're going to keep the pity-train going, I had been writing since the age of 5 and other than a three page fairy tale, I hadn't finished a novel, sketch, or play yet either.)

The reenacting thing gave me hope though. I was good at something, even if it was mostly make believe. Once I got back from Fayette I went on the application trail and in short order I recieved a call from The Great Yellow Peril aka Wal Mart. I had gone in to apply at one of their handy kiosks and since I was obviously a loser with little ability, no resume and no real time limitations, Wal Mart wanted me as a graveyard shift stock boy. The official title was something like Night Merchandise Manager...?

In no time flat I had gone through my hours of computer training, picked up my vest and my card and joined the ranks of pimply teens, college drop-outs, hard-working middle aged women and oft scary later-aged men.

I searched for 'Wal Mart night shift' on Google Images and most of the pictures made me laugh. This one had some artistic integrity to it though.

First of all I had to get used to the night shift. Sleep during the day, work at night. Seems like it should be simple. All you need are those special blinds that block out all the sunlight and you've got it made right?

Ever heard of a thing called Vitamen D?

Very important that Vitamen D. Comes in sunrays and milk. It is especially important for people that regularly suffer from things like depression.

Here's where it gets sticky, and as my voice tends to be aloof let me high-light the seriousness for a moment. If you have ever watched news stories about murder, rape, abuse, etc. and been unable to continue watching because you were so deeply disturbed; or have ever been heard to say, "Why would anyone do that?" in response to these terrible things (and never gone on to try to actually figure out why...) don't read the next paragraph.

I suffered from depression as a preteen and on down the line. Who hasn't? When I was a toddler, according to my mother, I would bite my arm and not stop when I was being scolded. I've heard of similar cases. At twelve or thirteen I started cutting, without really knowing what it was. Self-mutilation for you technical types. Now some time later I'll go through that whole saga, which does have a happy ending. The important thing for now is that whilst I was working at Wally Mart I was struggling with this particular habit (this would be the mysterious destructive habit from before), and it didn't help at all to be handed my very own box cutter as part of my official 'work kit'. Just saying.

The average day began with a dark ride into town along the back roads. All countryside. Lots of deer crossing signs. By the time I got to Wal Mart I had to march back to the layaway door, clock in as close to ten o'clock as possible and wait for the meeting to begin.

The meeting was about ten to fifteen minutes of waiting for the night manager (which changed every night), talking with my buddies, drinking horrible coffee and sometimes eating stale donuts, then finally being told how terrible (or, rarely, good) the store was doing on sales and being sent out to break up the skids. 

Break means unload, and not shatter with sledge hammers, sadly. Skids are those fun wooden crate things that people like to stack wood on. You stick a dolly under it and wheel the thing around as if it didn't weigh a ton with all the boxes of merchandise on top. If the truck had come in there would be a lot to do. If it hadn't come in yet we would have to look busy, front shelves, help in Grocery and wait...and hope the truck wouldn't dally until the day was nearly over and we were ready to go home.

At first I loved this job. Mostly because it was a job that didn't involve smelling like food every night. Go out on the floor find a box, open it with your snappy sharp object, figure out what's inside and put as much of that in its special place on the shelf as will go. If more won't go, mark it as such, put it back on the skid. The faster you get, the more boxes you go through in the night and the sooner you can move on to another area.

In addition to the skids there were always break out carts. I will never understand the logic behind break out carts. Maybe it was just to give the poor, bored, check out people something to do through the night since we were the 24-hour variety of Wally-Hell, and most of the farmers stayed at home at night. But every night, magically, there would be boxes of things arriving at the front of the store that had be opened and sorted into carts, (bound annoyingly in seperate, sealed baggies) and each group from each section of the store had to empty all those things onto the shelf as well.

Why those things couldn't be included in our skids I do not know. No one ever told me.

I usually worked in Housewares. That's the kitchen utensils, dishes, microwaves, vacuums, Rubbermaid part of the store. I loved late night house wives! I could take them to the product and price they wanted within seconds of seeing them enter my section, without them having to say a word. And if it wasn't in my section I would let them ask me, then point them to the price and product they wanted in someone else's section.  I liked knowing where things were, sliding products onto the shelf in perfect little lines with everything neat and tidy and spaced just so. I liked clearing the boxes and slicing through the tape just right and breaking the boxes down and OOOH! THE BALER!

Anyone working in retail knows about the cardboard baler. We had a big one too! Cause we were WAL MART! A giant rectangular hole, into which goes tons of cardboard. It gets squished and squished and when the squishing starts pushing the cardboard back out again out comes the long metal twine. With one guy behind the machine threading it through to another guy in front of the machine you bind up all the squished cardboard and watch it rise....and tighten....and strain, and just when you're convinced that your tieing method is inadequate and somebody is about to lose a limb cause that twine is gonna snap...the whole thing settles. You POP out the bale onto a skid and wheel it to the back. And then put in more cardboard.

Maybe that's more than the baler deserves but it was one of the satisfactions of the job. Everything had a place and not one of those places was the pie-hole of a customer.

The major problem with this job was...anyone could do it. It took me a week to get used to it, another week to get good at it, and by the third week I was already bored. First of all, those of you who don't go to Wal Mart all the time at night might not notice that the music playing over the speakers is the same...every night. Every hour of every night, the same line up, the same ads. It was starting to kill the ears of a girl brought up on musicals and Mozart and the BeeGees and Sousa. I love variety. Variety could not be had at WallyWorld.FM. Christmas was starting to look like more and more of a blessing until I'd heard the hippopotomas song so many times I wanted to puke.

Tune it out you say? For some, yes, that's a possibility. But music is my language first and foremost. I couldn't tune it out. And along with the lack of sunlight, I was starting lose it.

Some of the brighter moments were my coworkers. Two in particular were my protectors. I don't know what it is about my relationship with my father, and how that relates to all the other older men that I pick up along the way; but I tend to wander to intelligent, humorous, and somewhat torn people.

 One of them was named Carl. Carl was fun. Carl worked in the freezer most nights, and on breaks he and I would do crosswords in between witty repartee. On the nights I was too tired to think I would annoy him by filling in incorrect words. You know, the clue is 7 Down - A five letter word for intelligent. And I would cram the word "octopus" into the spaces. In ink.

He also had a weird problem with the way I sometimes held my pen, and any time I had my journal out he would ask how things were, what I was writing about etc. On the nights that I could get done with housewares early I would sneak over to the frozen section and help Carl finish out the night. He was comforting to be around. And he was something of a replacement father figure. He, and some of my other friends at work, even surprised me one night with a brownie and singing candle for my birthday.

Of course the ladies in the grocery section noticed my affinity for him and assumed something romantic was happening. That was something else we laughed about.

Scheduled on the days that Carl usually wasn't there was Larry. If Carl was smooth vanilla, Larry was hot chile pepper. Where Carl's teasing was based on sharing intelligence, Larry's was based on competing with intelligence. And Larry was a Civil War buff. We had long enduring arguments based on the fact that he was the son of a Yankee and I was a Reb. Larry usually worked in the furniture department, and since his other job was driving the transport for MOTA he didn't come in until closer to lunch time. But we would fight at lunch, he too would pay more than enough attention to my journal (even tried to read it once), and on more than one occasion I was invited out to his middle of nowhere home for a bonfire.

Larry had this devil may care attitude that out did most of the people I had ever met before. He built a huge fire, usually with discs of tree trunks a foot-and-a-half tall and soaked in diesel fuel; and sat near it in a recliner with a glass of icy lemonade. Since he was Mormon he couldn't have any stimulants, not even coffee or tea. So lemonade it was.

One of the first times I went out to his place it was partially for the sake of the bonfire, partially to enjoy a few hours arguing over his Civil War documentaries, and partially to live fire my 1863-model Springfield for the first time.

Larry liked guns and collected and melted his own lead. He had molds for mini balls, and lead balls, rounds for his hand gun, shot gun and pellet guns, and plenty of wadding, bore butter and powder. He liked to use the smokeless kind, though, and after a day of that I'd had enough. I brought my own next time.

The first time I tried to load and ram the Springfield I got the rammer stuck. Too much wadding, not enough bullet, and no bore butter. We fixed that. The second time it wouldn't fire. Enough wadding, plenty of bullet, too much bore butter. The third time was the charm. It fired and I shattered a pot shard to the four winds. The second and third times I was shooting at some of Larry's fire wood and he did me the honor of splitting it and digging out the bullet. I keep with me two of the rounds I fired that day. One of them still sits in the groove it carved, perfectly perched on the crest of a wedge of wood.

While he watched me load, Larry discovered that there were quite a few things about the civil war that his documentaries could never tell him. Like how it felt to load and fire a musket for the first time. He learned to load them the right way too and then he pulled out his more modern weaponry. Turns out I'm a damn good shot. Makes me wonder why the Yankees never fall at the reenactments. I'm pointing straight at them.

At Wal Mart, between Larry and Carl, a young lady named Elizabeth and a very good friend named Michelle; I had plenty of support. I also had three somewhat spectacular incident reports that bore my name, and in rapid succession.

The first involved Larry and I conversing as we worked, and the both of us happening to be working on end caps in the same aisle and then one of us, Larry, standing up too soon and cracking open his head on the edge of an empty shelf. He didn't know he was bleeding until I pointed it out to him.

The second involved working with Elizabeth and a ladder, and spotting her on the ladder but stepping away as she came down it and neglecting to mention that the last step of the ladder was no longer even with the skid we'd been working on. Elizabeth took out a few boxes and landed rather badly on the skid, but after she woke up she was fine.

The third was my all time greatest Jerry Lewis moment! When you think of fine China you don't think of those clunky, squared, cocoa-colored mugs and plates that are supposed to be all the rage these days. You think of small, dainty saucers and cups and dessert plates that are wafer thin, and have gold gilding and could probably be broken in half in one hand if you got angry enough. And at Wal Mart we had such plates. Of course nothing with any precious metals in it but these were the thin, dainty, pearly white plate sets.

Thin and pretty yes, but once you had a bunch of them stacked they were heavy, darn it. And unfortunately the brain kids at Wal Mart saw fit to display them on a free-form arm jutting out from the back wall of the shelf, with nothing but thick rubber to keep them from sliding back and forth and a tiny little lip of an arpeture to keep them from spilling to the floor. Display With Care, right?

Well...I had them all set and pretty. I went to the skid, grabbed another box, started past the plates on their little jutting out arm and noticed that one of them looked like it was tilting just a little. I watched it a second, frozen with the new box in my arms, until I was certain that it was my imagination that was making it tilt. Then I broke out the box and went for another. Once again I passed by and darn it if that plate hadn't been joined by another, and both of them were really starting to tilt. Obviously my stacking job was insufficient. I set down my box, righted the two plates, and tilted them back just a little more so that surely...this way...they couldn't possibly fall. I bent to pick up my box, got a bad grip.

The box leaned, I leaned. I dropped the box, bumped the shelf, saw my plates start to slide, went to grab for them, bumped the sticking-out-arm next to them...those plates fell, knocking into the plates I was originally trying to catch (one plate actually landed in my arms for a second but I fumbled so badly that it flipped in the air a few times then crashed to the floor); and since I was already off balance, half a dozen more things were wiped out with me and we all went shattering to the linoleum in a great cacophony of sound.

My neighbor came over a few seconds after the final tinkles of shattered glass had ended, pale white with alarm expecting to find me in bloody pieces under a pile of dishware. The look on her face, compared with the pure human comedy of the blunder I had just preformed caused me to burst into laughter. To this day I do not know why, or how, I was never charged for each of those dishes; nor was it deducted from my pay check. Maybe they were simply glad I was unharmed, and not interested in suing.

By the time my 90 days had ended I had signed three incident reports, been late to work twice, gone without without sleep for at least 72 hours, been in the manager's office a few more times to be questioned about the actions of  my coworkers, gained a tattoo, and watched three of the people I worked with get fired. One of them was fired the day she turned in her two-week notice.

So as February rolled around, and my plea to re-enter school on a probationary student was acknowledged, I strolled into Wal Mart, happily handed in my vest and announced I was quitting. This time...it didn't feel like a mistake.