6. Madeline Sports

I’ve sung the blues
For every broken hearted lovesick dream for you
I’ve paid my dues
Working hard-sweat, blood and tears for you

So far away, so far away, so far away
So far away, so far away, so far away

— “So Far Away”, Social Distortion

My new boss, Phil, was a thin, haggard-looking creep. He had a deceptively meek and mild air about him when he was training me. “I’m gonna throw more information at you in a short time than I ever done with anyone before,” he told me. And he did. Opening procedures, closing procedures, procedures that required a series of steps to open and close the registers that were connected to corporate headquarters somewhere in Texas. I had to total up all the day’s receipts at closing and send the info by fax to the head office. I had to open and close the metal grill on the outside of the store. My crew had to vacuum and straighten the whole store up at closing time. During the shift, Phil wanted us aggressively pursuing customers on the floor, to try and sell them sporting equipment. Every day felt like the first day of school with a bad homeroom teacher. It sucked. I hated it. But I’d been unemployed so long I didn’t have a choice. I had to work there until I found something else.

On every transaction we had to manually enter an eleven-digit number from the barcode of each individual item. Get one number wrong and you had to start all over. This meant every transaction, no matter how simple (a single Wiffleball!) took forever. Our customers expected us to be experts on all the equipment we sold: camping, fishing, tennis, golf, skiing, waterskiing, rollerblading, etc. When I would explain that I only knew a little football and baseball, the customers would inevitably ask me with great indignation, “Then why were you hired then?” “My background in retail,” I’d say. They would storm off in a huff. I felt like telling them if I was an expert in any of these pursuits, I’d be a golf pro or ski instructor somewhere, not some miserable mall employee, making a little more than minimum wage.

The only saving grace at Madeline Sports was becoming friends with two co-workers, Todd and Kevin. Todd was a short, blonde surfer kid from Huntington Beach. Kevin was a stocky, brooding Latino guy from Los Angeles. We were an unlikely trio but we were all bonded by our intense hatred of our boss, Phil. While Phil initially came off low-key and mellow when you first met him, he was just setting you up for when he would fly off the handle and rip you up and down in front of other employees and customers in the store. He did this to me after the first couple of days. So when Kevin was hired, I warned him not to trust Phil’s laidback demeanor, and sure enough, Phil made a public display of yelling at Kevin. This earned Phil Kevin’s undying hatred and it earned me no small measure of trust and gratitude from Kevin. (Todd, having been there longer, already hated Phil.)

The three of us became drinking buddies and we’d go out after work or they’d come over to the house where I’d cook up burgers and fries for us, along with my dad’s secret barbecue sauce recipe. At the store, I’d take the office phone off the hook and place it next to a boombox and play Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Smashing Pumpkins, etc., over the store’s PA system. On the sales floor, Kevin would remove a mesh cover off the basketball rim so he could shoot hoops during hours. Me and Todd would kick a soccer ball around, nearly losing it over the mall balcony at times (we were on the second floor). The three of us would play Wiffleball—with customers in the store!—nearly nailing several people with hard-hit line drives. The girls working in the stores across from us would shake their heads at us and our hijinks.

The mall was a weird place to work. There were no windows—except at one entrance to the parking lot, which had a kind of atrium—so it was hard to tell what time of day it was, or feel time passing at all. There was this strange vanilla scent that was piped in everywhere. When I’d catch a ride home with Todd (instead of having to sprint a block and a half to catch the bus), Todd would hold an imaginary Dracula’s cape over his eyes and hiss at the setting summer sun. I’d pretend my uniform red polo shirt was an alien creature burrowing into my skin. “Get it off, man! Get it off!” I’d cry in mock-panic. He’d put a cassette of Social Distortion on his car stereo and we’d blast out of there listening to “So Far Away” and the band’s cover of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”(“Let it burn!”)

I actually took the time to try and repair my relationship with Freddy and Maxine, thinking I might have to return to the liquor store someday. I brought them burgers and sauce, which immediately put Freddy in a good mood. He asked me, with sincere wonder, why I had quit. I told him I was afraid Rob was going to get the two of us shot. Freddy looked pretty skeptical of this but nevertheless, he was a lot more friendly when I had to deal with him from then on. In fact, one day, he personally made me a deli sandwich when I stopped by the liquor store on my way to the mall. It was so delicious that it made Phil quite jealous when I ate it in front of him on my lunch break. He kept hinting at wanting some. “That smells so good,” he groaned in frustration. “It’s amazing,” I told him. “You should really stop by a deli and get yourself one.”

One day, not long after my conversation with Freddy, I got a call at work from Sammy. She said, “Rob’s been shot. But he’s alive.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.

“He’s in critical condition but he’s expected to recover,” Sammy told me.

What happened was this: Sandra, a woman employee in her late forties, had been being stalked by her ex, a biker. He was in jail over the weekend for violating a restraining order but Rob continued walking Sandra home from the liquor store for her protection, anyway. Another woman employee, also dating a biker, was working with Sandra on Saturday night. When Sandra went to lock the door at 2 am, the biker boyfriend refused to leave. So Sandra pushed him out the door and locked it. Biker guy flipped out and was kicking the door and screaming all kinds of threats when Rob walked up. A fight ensued and the biker was losing. So he went to his car and got a gun and shot Rob at pointblank range. Then he fled the scene.

I was pretty freaked out by Sammy’s phone call and was digesting these developments when my boss, Phil, picked this moment to start yelling at me—in front of other employees and customers—about a cooler display I set up in front of the registers. Apparently, I upset him by placing the various picnic coolers at random and he wanted them in a line, smallest to biggest. Phil had just come off vacation, leaving me in charge the week before to deal with store’s “Once A Year” sale and a store audit on top of it. He thought he’d pick this particular moment to reassert his alpha status as Big Boss.

I walked away from him without saying anything. At the back of store, Kevin came over to sympathize. Instead of talking about Phil though, I was telling Kevin about Rob getting shot. Kevin had worked in a liquor store in Los Angeles, a much hairier situation than working in little old Shadow Valley, so I knew he’d be interested in what just happened. As we were talking, Phil’s head popped up from behind a nearby shelf.

“What are you two talking about?” he sneered, hoping to overhear me bitching about him.

I turned and glared at him. “I was telling him about my friend who got shot.”

“Oh,” said Phil, backing away.

(The next time I saw Freddy at the market, he looked at me in awe. “How did you know? How’d you know Rob would get shot?” I frowned. “I didn’t. It was just a hunch.”)

Phil was a weasel. And a creep. And a passive-aggressive bully. The bookkeeper, Rachel, who’d been with the store longer than any of us, told me that Phil was from a rich family and didn’t actually have to work. He just worked there to pass the time. During his vacation week, while we were all killing ourselves doing the “Once A Year” sale and trying to pass the annual store audit, Phil actually snuck in a couple of times to spy on us. It did not endear him to anybody, not even his little clique of employees that looked up to him.

There was Maureen, the other assistant manager. Fat and dopey, she’d put on the soundtrack to the Disney cartoon musical “Beauty and the Beast” every shift she worked while the rest of us rolled our eyes.

Ian was a skinny, red-headed nerd. Socially awkward, he was a pathological liar who had all kinds of delusions of grandeur. He’d brag about all the friends he had in Europe (he sure as hell didn’t have any over here), how he could drink vodka “like water” and so on. It was laughable and kind of sad.

Then there was Gary, a twenty-two year-old kid from Napa. Within twenty minutes of being hired, he approached me and asked to borrow fifty dollars.

“Where I come from you could get your ass kicked asking something like that,” I told him.

“What?!” He was really surprised and a little scared.

“Motherfucker, I’ve known you all of fifteen minutes. And I already don’t like you. Where the fuck do you get off hitting me up for a loan?”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

Gary was a cheerful, two-faced, backstabbing, little scumbag. If Todd or Kevin or myself was in the middle of a sale with an attractive girl, Gary would interject himself into the transaction whenever he got a chance. The first and last time he did it to me, I went to check some inventory or something and when I came back he was already ringing the girl up. I told him afterwards, “You ever do that again, I will beat your ass.” Gary’s eyes bulged. “Seriously,” I said.

Gary was Phil’s pet, his ass-kisser extraordinaire. And he had no problem ripping other employees to the boss. (This violated one of my two work commandments: 1. Don’t create work for me; and, 2. Don’t cause trouble for me with the boss.) Phil would frame and hang these “Employee of the Month” certificates. Gary won it three months running. I knew for a fact that he lied, stole, sold dope to kids in the mall on his break, and sexually harassed a female employee to the point where she was going to file a complaint against him and he had to use all of his aw-shucks, simple country kid-from-the-sticks charm on her to get her to drop it. I knew all these things because Gary himself told me about them, proudly smirking about all the shit he was getting away with.

I made up my own “Employee of the Month” certificate for Gary, taking one of the forms out of Phil’s desk, and listing all the various transgressions he had confessed to. One night, when he joined Kevin, Todd and me for a drinking session, I told him about it; and how if he actually succeeded in getting the three of us fired I would have faxed that “Employee of the Month” certificate to every store on the West Coast.

Gary’s jaw dropped. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah,” I told him as we all laughed. “Then I would have found your ass on the street.” (Was I serious about beating him up? Not really. Would I have faxed that form to all the West Coast stores as payback for being fired? Probably. I’d never been vindictive before but I was getting tired of getting perpetually screwed over my whole fucking life. Afterwards, Kevin, the one real tough guy in the room, came up and patted me on the shoulder. “Way to go, dude. I like your style.”)

What’s crazy is that when Phil was gone on vacation, the conflict between me, Kevin and Todd and his group of hangers-on, his toadies, ceased to exist. Everybody lightened up and got along. As soon as Phil returned, the turmoil returned as his little minions sought to get in his good graces by sniping and complaining about us. Phil was criticizing the three of us one day when I pointed out that my sales crew out-performed his crew in terms of total sales and profit every day. “I think it’s in spite of you,” he told me. “Oh really?” I said. “Huh. How ‘bout that?”

Rachel the bookkeeper was neutral. She didn’t take sides in all the internal conflict in the store. She was a mom with three kids involved in team sports and she kept her head down, did her job and went home. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she had seniority over the rest of us, either. Rachel worked nine to five, Monday through Friday and didn’t have to deal with Phil’s bullshit management tactics like having me, Todd, and Kevin close one night and then open the next morning or deliberately schedule us on Sundays during football season—just to fuck with us.

One day I got this black couple in their sixties buying camping equipment. The lady suggested, jokingly, that I not charge them for this purple foam camping mattress, that I just throw it in for free along with their purchase of a tent and sleeping bags, etc. “Yeah-right,” I said, grimacing at yet another customer trying to get over on me. (I had this yuppie couple once trying to sweet-talk me into giving them a deal. One of them said, “You can do it, Chris. You’re the ‘assistant manager’ It says so on your name tag.” I looked down at my name tag and then back up at them. “That’s only because ‘Glorified Cashier’ wouldn’t fit, “ I responded.) Then I thought it over. I imagined how much shit these older black people must have taken in their lives, in stores and everywhere else besides. I softened. “You know what? I am going to throw the mattress in for free.” The couple beamed in surprise and delight. I continued, “And if you have any problems with any of this equipment, come see me, no one else.” (I was trying to cover my ass so that no other employee would find out what I did.) They left, very happy and I was feeling pretty slick about the whole thing until Rachel popped up out of nowhere.

“I saw what you did,” she said. My face fell. She continued, “And I know why you did it. But don’t ever do it again.”

“I was just trying to be nice…”

“—I know you were,” Rachel said.

“…And I figured that damn purple camping mattress has been here all summer, we haven’t sold it yet so…”

“There’s a whole stack of them behind that pillar over there,” she told me.

“Oops. Well, how much are they, anyway? Twenty bucks?”

“Seventy-five dollars each,” Rachel corrected me.

“Oh, shit!”

The next week the black couple came back to shake my hand and tell me what a great time they had camping. (Score one for me.)

The majority of my interactions with customers were far less gratifying. There were a lot of trophy wives (some with kids, some without) and a lot of high school kids. Some parents were so blasé they’d let their toddlers crawl all over the weight pile, which had steel plates and dumbbells that could cause serious injury if their little kids should somehow tumble. I learned the hard way not to caution the parents. They would just snarl at me and tell me to mind my own business. (Okay…)

One day I had these three high school boys lounging around on the weight benches.

“Do you guys mind? You wanna get off those, please?” I asked.

“I’m thinking of buying one of these,” one kid said sarcastically.

“Yeah, me, too,” one of his buddies echoed. The three of them gave me these snotty, challenging stares.

I hovered briefly on the verge of a complete psychotic freakout then reeled myself back in.

“Look, fellas, I’m not trying to be a hardass but I’m gotta try and sell these things all day,” I said humbly.

The three of them jumped up, immediately contrite. “Sorry, dude.”

Some people would come in and ask me if I had obscure replacement parts for camping equipment that they had purchased years before, quite often somewhere else. Did I have a plastic cap that covered the end of this tent pole bought in 1972? “No.” Did I know where they could find such replacement? “No.” Well, what good was I then? (A question I was asking myself more and more.) Other people wanted to return everything: a pair of gloves their kid had worn all winter. Now that it was spring the mom wanted her money back. No skiing at Tahoe for awhile to come, why not return the gloves for cash? Or shoes. A guy had been wearing a pair of sneakers for a couple of months, the soles were starting to show signs of wear. (Well, no shit.) Could he get his money back? (Not from me.)

My favorite was this yuppie moron with a dented aluminum softball bat. He wanted to return the bat because it was defective. I examined it and found a fencepost-sized dent marked in field house green paint that you would find at any public playing field.

“You dented this,” I told him.

“I did?” Yuppie Moron said, acting surprised.

“Yeah, you did. You or one of your friends. You struck out and got mad and you banged your bat against the side of the backstop or a fence.”

I handed the bat back to him.

He stared back at me, sheepishly. “So I’m not gonna get my money back?”

“Not from me. But I can give you the address to Louisville Slugger and if they want to let you return it, that’s their business.”

Then there was the Angry Dad, who called me up because he’d given his daughter a pair of rollerblades as a birthday present—and there were no shoelaces in the box. I apologized and told him to come down to the store and we’d give him a pair of laces for his daughter’s rollerblades.

“You’re gonna make me drive back to the store? Can’t you deliver them to my house?” he demanded.

“Sir…I don’t have the resources to make deliveries,“ I explained. “There are only so many employees working here at one time. Just come on down and we’ll take care of you,“ I said.

When he finally made his appearance in the store, the Angry Dad was a lot less belligerent in person. Pretty subdued, in fact.

One guy who was belligerent in person was this angry redneck husband. Apparently, my fellow employee Ian was so rude to the man’s wife that he made her cry. Angry Redneck Husband told me this, hyperventilating, while balling his fists and shaking with anger.

“I am so sorry, sir. That should not have happened. I’d fire him if I could,” I said truthfully.

At issue was a pair of batting gloves for their son. I gave it to him at a sale price. Afterwards, Rachel told me it was a different kind of gloves that were on sale.

“Did you see that guy? You see his eyes?” I asked incredulously. “I don’t know what the fuck Ian did to upset his wife but I had to do whatever it took to make it right.”

“No, you were right,” she conceded.

Another time Ian pissed off this one lady customer and then some old-timer, a guy with shaggy white hair. I apologized to the woman on her way out and took over Ian’s transaction with the old guy. I did a carryout to the guy’s car in the parking lot.

“That kid doesn’t know who he’s messing with,” Old Guy said, grinning. He flipped up the trunk of his car. The trunk lid had some kind of animal fur lining the interior.

“You see that pelt? That’s from a bear I killed,” he told me. Old Guy held up an enormous Bowie knife. “Here’s the knife I killed him with. I made it myself,” he said, waving it in front of my eyes.

“Hey, how ‘bout that?” I said, more than a little freaked out.

Old Guy put a quarter in his palm. “Go ahead, try and snatch this quarter from my hand,” he challenged.

“That’s all right.” I laughed weakly as I held up my hands in surrender.

“C’mon, give it a try,” he urged, his eyes glinting at me strangely.

“That’s okay…”

“C’mon!”

“No, that’s all right. I’m good. You can keep your quarter,” I said, dying to get away from Old Guy-Mountain Man-Probably-Vietnam Vet-Ex-Green-Beret-Crazy Dude.

“Ahhhh,” he sighed with disappointment as I walked away, trying not to sprint.

The place was so dysfunctional: Phil would place weekly sales ads in the local newspaper without checking to see if we had the appropriate inventory on hand. We’d have customers lined up outside the store even before we opened, their hands clutching the steel grill like pairs of claws. The gate would lift when we opened and the horde would pour in. When they found out we didn’t have the sales items listed in the ad, the customers would flip out. (Not that I blamed them.)

“How can you run an advertised sale without having the sales items in the store?” a customer would demand. “That’s not right.”

“I agree with you, sir. But I’m not responsible. I didn’t place the ad. The man who did is right over there,” I’d say, pointing to Phil. “Complain to him.”

Afterwards, Phil would tell me that I should have ordered the sales items beforehand.

I’d strenuously disagree. “I’m not running the ads, you are. And I don’t even know how to order inventory even if I wanted to.”

“I could teach you,” he’d suggest.

“No, thanks, Phil. That’s your job, not mine. You’re on salary, I’m barely making more than minimum wage.”

One morning when I was the only management person there, the registers froze when I tried to turn them on. Customers were banging on the grill, demanding to be let in. I called corporate headquarters in Texas for advice. They gave me this procedure, then that procedure to unfreeze the registers. Nothing was working. Periodically, I’d have to turn and explain to customers at the gate that I couldn’t open the store until we could actually perform transactions. Finally, corporate headquarters gave me the names and phone numbers of three women, former employees who had been their IT specialists at one time or another.

Have you ever cold-called three married women in Texas? And had each of their husbands answer the phone first? (None of whom, I might add, were pleased that some stranger in California was calling to talk to their wife.) The women were surprised: How did I get their number? Why was I calling? “I don’t even work there anymore,” each one told me. The first two couldn’t help me, the last one talked me through some kind of techie abracadabra to get the registers working again.

The majority of our sales were sneakers. Running shoes, basketball sneakers, walking shoes even. You would think most people would know their shoe size but you would be wrong. This meant that a sneaker sale required a lot of walking back and forth between the stock room and the sales floor. Kind of a pain in the ass. Well, it turns out that the shoe companies all have different interpretations of what the shoe sizes mean; a 9 1/2 size Nike is different from a 9 1/2 size Reebok, for instance. Even so, a lot of people were nowhere close to knowing their own shoe size. Women, in particular, were coy about giving their correct shoe size. They always guessed several sizes smaller than their actual size. So this entailed many trips to the back room, fetching multiple sizes, a massive pain in the ass, especially if they were interested in multiple brands and styles of shoes (which of course they were).

I had this one fat lady who had me going for days because she was so far off her actual size, and of course, she was interested in looking at like, five different pairs of shoes. Kevin and Todd, who were responsible for the majority of shoe sales, watched my mounting exasperation with growing amusement. “How’s it going?” one of them asked me on about my tenth trip to the stockroom.

“ ‘How’s it going?’ “ I snapped. “I’m losing my mind because of fucking Sasquatch out there. I should just bring her a pair of wastebaskets to wear on her giant fucking elephant feet.”

One quiet morning I had this stout, grey-haired guy with glasses ask me about running shoes. After I showed him a couple of styles, he said, “You know, I was the first guy to introduce running shoes into the Marine Corps.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, I was the coach of the Division boxing team and I was tired of having all my guys in sick-bay with shin splints and foot problems from jogging in combat boots so I asked Higher-Up for permission and got all my boxers in running shoes. One day, me and my guys are jogging on our way out of the base as this armored unit is rolling in, and the commander leans out of his tank and says, ‘Who are all these pussies in running shoes?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Maybe you’d like to match some of your guys in a boxing match against these pussies here.’ The commander says, ‘You’re on!’ A few days later, he found out we were the Division boxing team and he came to me and apologized.”

“I’ll bet,” I said as he grinned at me.

After I sold him a pair of running shoes and he had departed, Phil approached me. “I’m surprised. You really have the gift of gab, don’t you?”

“You make it sound like a trick, Phil,” I said. “All’s I did was listen.”

The funny thing was a few days before, sitting in the back office, the two of us got into a conversation about Vietnam. I went into a long explanation of how the North Vietnamese Army had deliberately drawn American forces into the interior at the end of their logistical supply chain. The terrain was rough, the jungle was thick; rain and fog made re-supply and air cover from helicopters and planes difficult. It was a strategy that nullified all the American advantages in mobility, supply and air support. The NVA drew the Americans into bloody fights against fortified positions (prepared in advance) while luring them away from the war’s actual prize, the populated coastline where the Viet Cong was achieving growing political influence. When the Marines in I Corps tried to resist this counterproductive strategy and concentrate more on counterinsurgency, using combined patrols of South Vietnamese (ARVN) troops and Marines in the local villages, General Westmoreland, the head of MACV, the US Army general in charge of the war effort, put his foot down. He wanted the Marines in combat, wherever. He wanted body counts, not hearts and minds programs. (These were not my own insights; I was quoting largely from Neil Sheehan’s outstanding book, “A Bright Shining Lie”. It was mostly a biography of John Paul Vann, one of the first American advisers in Vietnam, but it also contained great tactical and strategic insights into the war in general.) I looked up and not only was Phil sitting there stunned, with his mouth hanging open but so were two other employees, these two young jocks, who had, up to that point, been pretty dismissive and rude to me. They treated me with a lot more respect from then on (which was kind of hilarious to me. I hadn’t served in Vietnam, I had just read books about it.)

One day Phil introduced me to Elizabeth, an assistant manager from another store, on loan to us for a couple of days. She was neither flirtatious nor hostile but seemed amiable enough. (Not that it matters, but I think she was gay.) She was, in fact, one of those most self-possessed people I have ever met. After a few hours of working with me and my crew, Elizabeth approached me and confided that Phil had warned her about me.

“Warned you? About what?”

“Phil said you’d try and find a way to charm me in conversation,” she said.

“Me? Charm anybody? I have my good points but charm is not one of them,” I told her.

We both laughed at that before we got to talking about what a weasel Phil was.

I told her how much I disliked him (and his clique) and how customers drove me nuts. Elizabeth listened patiently to me. When I asked her how she could stand working at Madeline’s and dealing with Phil, etc., Elizabeth explained she didn’t get mad because she didn’t get frustrated. She simply said what she needed to say.

“You get frustrated when you don’t express how you really feel. Just say to him or customers what you need to say, without losing your temper.”

“Fuck, I wish I could. You make it sound so simple, “ I told her.

“That’s because it is.”

I watched Elizabeth for the next couple of days, interacting with Phil and difficult customers, and damned if she wasn’t as good as her word. She’d stop Phil cold when he was in the middle of some petty complaint or snide comment; she’d put customers in their place when they were getting out of hand. All of it accomplished calmly, rationally, without undue emotion; it was one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen.

It was not something, however, that I could emulate. I tended to suppress my feelings at work until I reached the point where I would snap.

At every job I ever worked (almost always closing shifts) it was nearly impossible to leave on time because of last-minute customers. What’s the big deal? you might ask. Well, at closing time I wanted to be gone; fifteen minutes of extra pay is a joke; and I’d be exhausted. This wasn’t a once-in-awhile phenomenon—I mean like every closing shift at every job I have ever worked in my entire life, some last-minute imbecile customer was holding us up, keeping us from going home, and every motherfucking one of them thought they were the lone exception—like it didn’t happen every goddamn night of the week. (I’m telling you this to give some context to the following story.)

Now I’ve mentioned earlier how it was my nightly duty to fax the sales figures to the corporate headquarters in Texas at closing time. I was competing with seven other stores on the West Coast to fax this stuff in; if I was slow getting the fax going, I’d be getting a busy signal for the next twenty minutes. So what I liked to do was fax the sales figures in at 8:59 to get a jump on the competition— and I could only do that if we stopped selling stuff before 9 pm—so I would pull the metal gate out front down about three-quarters of the way at about 8:55. (And you’d be amazed how many customers would duck under the metal grill, anyway, even with it pulled most of the way down.) I was also trying to catch a 9:25 bus most nights. If I missed that, I was really screwed; the next one didn’t come until an hour later. (So all this information is so that you will understand how particular I was about leaving on time.)

So on this one night, near closing, metal gate almost all of the way down, I’ll be goddamned if this tubby, dark-haired, bearded guy in his thirties doesn’t ninja-roll under the gate like Indiana fucking Jones. Tubby wants to buy a 200 lb. weight set at closing and I’ll need to wheel it out to his car in the parking lot. “Sure, no problem,” I said through gritted teeth. I rang him up, gave him his receipt, and told Tubby I’d meet him in the parking lot with his newly-purchased weight set. I walked through the warehouse door marked “Employees Only”. Back there we had these huge brown cardboard cartons containing treadmills and ping-pong tables. I turned to the closest one and just unloaded with a flurry of punches like Sylvester Stallone pounding the giant slab of beef in the meat locker in ”Rocky”. I’m throwing lefts, rights, hooks, combinations, all the while swearing at the top of my lungs. I finally stopped, completely spent. I looked up and was shocked to see that Tubby had followed me back there—that he was, in fact, standing right behind me the whole time as I completely lost it for a solid minute and a half. Our eyes met and he blurted out, “I’ll come back tomorrow!”

Oops.

Well, who the hell needs weights at goddamn nine o’clock at night, anyway?

It has been suggested to me on occasion—both by well-meaning observers and other observers, not so well-meaning—that perhaps customer service in general, and retail in particular, was not my forte. (Well, no fucking shit!) It wasn’t my life’s dream or anything. I needed to earn money and I did not have a whole lot of qualifications for anything else.

It became obvious to me, very early on, when Phil revealed his true nature as a petty tyrant, that Madeline Sports was a bad fit for me. After about the second week of working there, I started looking for another job. I didn’t have a great deal of luck at first, but the longer I worked at Madeline Sports, the more my prospects improved. “Assistant manager”: it made it sound like I was in charge of something, like I was on my way up.

I applied at a chain clothing store across the way inside the mall. I asked for full-time hours and roughly the same pay. I was eventually called in for what I was told was an interview. I found myself jammed into a conference room with about thirty other applicants around a table. Some corporate lady at one end thanked us for coming and then proceeded to inform us that a lucky few would be given a job. “Fifteen hours to start!” she informed us with a bright, winning smile. I stood up. “I’m sorry,” I said, not really bothering to hide my disgust. “Fifteen hours isn’t going to cut it for me. I specifically requested full-time when I applied. This is a waste of my time.”

“Oh!” said Corporate Lady in dismay.

I was joined by a handful of other angry applicants. “What a bunch of bullshit!” we grumbled amongst ourselves as we left the conference room.

Eventually, I landed a job in Petaluma at a family owned drugstore called “Whipple’s Pharmacy”. Full-time, more money, Sunday and Monday off, four days a week stocking shelves, on Saturday only I worked a register. Compared to Madeline Sports, it sounded like a dream.

I gave two weeks’ notice to Phil.

I was working my next-to-last day at Madeline’s. It was a Friday night, I started work at Whipple Pharmacy the following Monday. It was just me and Kevin working when I got a phone call from the Madeline Sports in Marin: Mrs. Madeline was on her way!

Mrs. Madeline, heiress to the Madeline fortune, was making a tour of all the West Coast stores and each store after a visit from her would call the next one up the coast to warn them of her impending arrival.

When she arrived, I was in the middle of a conversation with an agitated redneck customer. There was some item he wanted that we didn’t have on hand—surprise, surprise—and I had just finished chilling him out by telling him we would ship the item, free of charge, directly to his house within three days. (This was something the store did all the time.)

Everything was cool until Mrs. Madeline said, “What’s going on here?” and proceeded to get the dumb redneck all worked up again by telling him, “ We really should have that item in stock, I am so sorry”, blah-blah-blah.

After he left, pissed off all over again, she turned to me and said, “Well, you don’t seem very happy in your job here.”

I replied,” I’m not. As a matter of fact, I have a new job that starts on Monday.”

“Well—“ Mrs. Madeline was so offended she couldn’t even finish the sentence. She was predictably a stuck-up, older lady with her nose in the air, expensive jewelry and designer clothes.

I headed to the back office to get away from her. She found Kevin in the shoe department and bitched him out over God-knows-what (he sold more shoes than anybody).

He walked into the back office and karate-kicked a desk. “Fuck that bitch! What is her problem?!”

I said, “I sure am glad I’m getting outta this place.” We shook our heads.

The next day when I walked into the store Phil accosted me at the front counter. “I’m gonna need your keys,” he told me.

“Sure thing, Phil,” I said, tossing him my work keys.

“You’re fired,” Phil said.

“Oh, no!” I laughed. “You mean I gotta go home early on a Saturday, with the biggest paycheck I’ve ever had in my life, and a new job starting on Monday?! Gee, whiz! If you say so…”

That was the absolute best way to get fired that I know of. My paycheck was big because we earned bonuses from our total sales. The catch was that Madeline Sports delayed bonuses two months so they did–in the end–actually screw me royally because the last two months I worked with Kevin and Todd the three of us were breaking sales records for that location. I never did receive those last two months’ bonuses but at least I was free of that fucking place.