I got a summer job at a lumber store in Bellflower. The company would end up getting its doors blown off by Home Depot and other more serious home improvement players, but in the late ’70s/early ’80s, this kind of mom-and-pop store, with maybe twenty branches, was doing OK all throughout the west.
They had a cheapo ad campaign that used stick-figure-like animation featuring a bird that was always pimping the low-price special and had a pointed beak that looked like the paper holder of a snow cone. Seen mostly during the commercial breaks during the midnight movie, one of the TV spots had the chicken surfing on a two-by-four before wiping out in a whitewash of discounted do-it-yourself merchandise.
Anyway, I started as a stock boy, shagging carts from the parking lot, sweeping floors, cleaning up messes, helping customers to their car and then unsafely tying 300 pounds of plywood to the roof of a Datsun B210. If you stuck with this job long enough, say, sixty days or so, you’d get a twenty-five-cents-an-hour raise and be assigned to a department.
Ends up I got drafted into the paint department where the most adventurous task was to mix paint. A customer would rifle through the color chips, dropping some on the floor and completely disorganizing all the others so that the former stock boy would have to spend fifty-eight minutes reassembling the little cards into the appropriate slot in the 1,000-slot chip holder, until she found the color that perfectly matched her vision of the baby’s room or breakfast nook. (It was almost always a lady, as a smart man in Bellflower or any other earthly outpost knew better than to accompany his wife to pick out paint, knowing his thoughts on the ideal paint color were welcome not in the least.) They’d hand me the chip, I’d go find the proper base paint and then we’d go over to the color machine. We had a binder that had a bunch of barcodes and after opening the paint can I‘d scan the appropriate code and the machine would make computer noises and other robotic grunting sounds and then shoot colors—heated jets of exactly-measured cyan, yellow and magenta—into the base paint. When it was done I’d hammer the paint lid back on and place it in the shaker-upper for about sixty seconds. Once the paint was sufficiently mixed, the shaking would stop, I’d remove the can, paint a sample of the color onto the paint chip and seriously, every single time, the lady would say, “That doesn’t look like the right color.”
My paint department supervisor was a dude named Craig. He was about a year older than me, had a full-face beard and a thick leather belt that held paint department tools. Actually, among all the paint department tools, he was the biggest. He had a shirt that said Dept. Manager had seventeen different keys that he was constantly twirling and was serious as fuck about his job.
He considered himself the master of the paint machine and constantly shooed me away from it, ordering me to bring up palettes of paint from the back or some such errand. Okay by me. I didn’t want to be important or have a title on my shirt or have keys jingling on my belt loop or worship at the altar of some stupid-ass paint-shooting computer, I just wanted it to be lunchtime so I could get buzzed and forget the fact that the paint in the can never looks like the paint on the chip.
Rick was a guy I met on the job, he was a stock boy too and when I got drafted by the paint department, he got sent to electrical. Rick had to be younger than me but he acted five or ten years older. He had a cratered face and greasy blond hair parted down the middle. He was skinny as hell, he was street and he knew about cars, working with his hands, Mary Jane and how to deal with people who thought they were hot shit because they worked at a home goods store.
He smoked Marlboro 100s in the gold soft pack so I started doing the same. If you worked in electrical you were always helping customers with bits of wire and electrical tape and tiny adapter pieces, and I remember Rick helping guys who looked just like him, with a cigarette dangling from his lip like he was some southern boy from Lynyrd Skynyrd, Alabama.
At lunchtime we’d drive into one of the neighborhoods around the store and burn a J, never talking about home or family, or the past or the future, just shooting the shit about rock music or about how fucked up Floyd in the plumbing department was or how hot Corinne was in hardware. Rick had a 1960s light-blue Chevelle and his hands were always dirty with engine grease and rust and carburetor dust and nicotine. He could have been living in that Chevelle for all I knew because Rick had a homely, skinny girlfriend that seemed to be sitting in that car 24/7.
I had a black Chevy Cheyenne pickup and sitting on the bench seat was a case that held 36 cassettes—every slot full. It was pretty badass, lots of Journey, Blackout by the Scorpions, AC/DC’s Back in Black, early Springsteen, Triumph, and the holy trinity of classic rock: Foreigner, Kansas, Boston. Because I was smoking Marlboro 100s and working at National Lumber and burning bud and stupid in that way that teenagers are stupid, I never locked my truck or even rolled up the windows, and one day after work I got in the truck to find that someone had pinched my cassettes.
Rick said he could find out who did it like he was some neighborhood capo in the southern rock mafia, but he couldn’t, and as the summer ended I’d never see those cassettes or Rick or the city of Bellflower again. There were worse jobs I remember thinking, and though I lost a classic rock treasure trove at least I got a colorful promotion.
Photo credit: nicholas.pantages on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC-SA