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