I wrote about this...gah, the end of 1992. Not revisited since. A true
story with the usual complement of writer's lies.
I was a college sophomore in New York City in 1962. Was I bored?
Probably. I was carrying 17 credits, three huge reading courses, was
doing the reading only for English. Joseph Conrad was far more
interesting that reports on rats in a maze, unless we also got to read
about the Milgram experiments which perfectly prepared me for my future
as a professional student and employee. Of course I flunked out at the
end of January.
Macy's. The job to end all jobs.
For those of you who may not know, Macy's on Herald Square used to be
and may still be the equivalent of Marshall Fields, Carson Pirie &
Scott, or Harrod's--a gigantic department store with modest as well as
obscenely expensive merchandise. Macy's on Herald Square--if I was a
shopper or browser--always made me want to change my major from English
to Shoplifting or Cutpurse Techniques. Anyway, I saw an ad. In a
Sunday newspaper--no Internet in 1962. Earn good money as a temporary
part-time Salesman or Saleswoman for the Christmas season. Yes, they
said Man and Woman and they said CHRISTMAS. Not Chanukah, Kwanzaa, or
the Wiccan harvest festival. This wasn't PC. We weren't called
Associates like we worked in WalMart but we would be treated like crap
anyway. We got 20% employee discounts. I went down and took some
50-question test. It was on paper, not on a terminal. Add 2+2. If a
customer comes in drunk, heaves on your one clean suit, and makes
disparaging comments about your mother's sex-life, what do you do?
Answer: French kiss his wife, 11-year-old daughter, or service dog. In
New York even the blind guys can be real shits.
We were trained for a week on how to run an old-time manual cash
register (you had to add by hand on a pad!) and use an order book where
you had to print clearly. And speaking of dogs, we were told about the
Pets. Because we worked 2 nights a week until 9:30, and also all day
Saturday, we might encounter one of the Pets. These were purebred
German Shepherds who roamed free 30 seconds ahead of their handler. The
public did not know about these puppies. If we were stuck late in the
store tying out the register and were heading for the exit, we might
encounter a dog. One instruction: FREEZE. Do not move. If possible,
do not breathe. Do NOT say "Nice doggie" and try to pet it. It will
take any such gesture as a threat and will clamp down on your hand or
make you eligible for studies for the priesthood in a Roman Catholic
seminary. Be assured, the animal's handler is coming. Stay calm.
Change your underwear after the doggie is gone. I guess I was lucky. I
like dogs but I never met one of THESE dogs. I saw one of the
great-grandchildren in 1987 when I brought my car to a body shop for
repairs. They had a junkyard in the back. You ever hear the expression
"Meaner than a junkyard dog"? That was the 1987 version of the Macy's
hound. Nasty brute. Shepherd and a few other things.
When they turned us loose on the floor, where was I assigned? Men's
clothes? Furniture? Music? No. BULK TOYS. Kiddie furniture, slides,
huge toys like hobby horses (I didn't know about Laurence Sterne until
almost a decade later). I've blotted out the two evenings. What I
can't forget are Saturday mornings. We had to be in and at our stations
by 9:30. At 9:45 the doors opened. Christmas, remember--mayhem and
grounds for homicide. The elevators would come up and stop on Five.
And you'd hear them--the hordes approaching from the East (end of the
store), an army of pathological children and their borderline
personality disorder parents. The kids were actually okay because they
ignored you. They'd play with the giant dolls, sit at the tea tables,
ride the hobbyhorses, get out of the way. Floor samples are meant to be
broken. The parents, however, were unspeakable. Dumb questions,
changing their minds in the middle of me writing up a longhand 4-copy
order. They're entitled? No, they're not.
But there were some laughs, usually at someone else's expense. The
supervisors were as profane a bunch of do-nothings as I've ever met.
They were like overseers or guys using racial slurs on the docks in
_Show Boat_. Some middle-aged lady asked me if a table would scratch.
It had heavy formica coating so I actually was not sure. I went in the
back. All these guys are SMOKING. Unthinkable today. The floor help
would sneak back there too for a quick Pall Mall by the open window.
Anyway, I asked one of the supervisors if the table scratched. He looks
at me, all 5'0" of him, says "Listen, what the f--- do you think? It's
WOOD. Tell the old bat [I'm being nice] we got six guys back here with
big logs, we'll show her what wood looks like!" Now yes...this is
extraordinarily vulgar, low-rent, it sounds like David Mamet dialogue,
for all I know Mamet had a Xmas job in Marshall Fields...but at the time
it was the funniest thing I ever heard (I was 18!!!!) and I had to go
out there and, straight face locked and loaded, tell the lady, yes, the
table would scratch if her grandkids took a rusty switchblade to it
after they'd finished eviscerating the family cat. In the end she did
not buy the table. Thank God I was on hourly rate, not on commission,
otherwise I'd have been tempted to lose the permanent smile I had to
keep in place and say a few abrasive things. I'm not kidding.
Poetryetc and other lists are not the only places where people deal in
daily doses of sarcasm and abrasion. Macy's trained me. After a day in
Macy's, any late-day customer who gave you a good time was inviting a
certain lack of professional attention that might culminate in questions
about the customer's birth-legitimacy.
Finally, this ended. Only four weeks? It seemed like a year. We
started at Thanksgiving. Commercialism sucked even then but it's gotten
worse as Christmas inches toward July. I got my last pay. Twenty bucks
for two nights and a full Saturday. I bought a discounted copy of T. S.
Eliot's collected poems--the old one where he's dressed like the guy who
greets you at the door of a mortuary. "And the naaaaame of your
deceased, pleeeeease?" No joke. I may even still own it.
I worked in retail twice more for the same place: an art supply store
called Arthur Brown & Brothers on West 46th Street. It made me miss
Macy's. But since I didn't coincide with my version of The Wolman's
Christmas written by Earl Hamner, I don't include it. What's here is
here, read and move on, and watch out for those dogs.
Ken
--
Kenneth Wolman
Proposal Development Department
Room SW334
Sarnoff Corporation
609-734-2538
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
-Douglas Adams
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