GAINFUL EMPLOY
I was never very talented at non-writing employment.
I lied about my age in order to get a job at my local 7-Eleven when I was 15; I said I was 17. I hadn’t really grasped the concept of “ownership” at that point. I treated the place like my own refrigerator. On the day John Lennon was murdered, I gave away a six-pack to a grieving man. It seemed only sensible. I believe a pack of older high school boys who worked there framed me for other thefts, because one day the fat white bearded man who owned the franchise sat me down behind the walk-in cooler and told me, rolling his gold rings on his fingers, that he believed that Jesus would send me to hell, and fired me.
I worked in a clothing store on Fisherman’s Wharf that had to be a money-laundering operation for a cocaine empire, because the bosses, a handsome middle-aged black couple, were insanely verbally abusive and drove a spangly, rust-colored Lincoln. They had risen from unspecific street level activity to a larger empire of their own design — there were several branches of the shop, around town. It was a pretty good business, and it was conducted all in cash. ‘Aisha,’ the wife, used to pick out cute wholesale looks, then re-sell them with a very modest markup, at a price so surprisingly inexpensive, there was an incredibly high sales rate. These cheap garments flew off the racks in a daily tornado of business.
As salesgirls, we had to deal with giant stacks of 20 dollar bills. We were paid in cash at the end of each day.
But ‘Skeeter,’ Aisha’s husband, would occasionally terrorize us at the end of a shift. We had to pack hundreds of garments onto the racks because of the high turnover, and he would come in, call us bitches and furiously insist that all the cheap hangers be 5mm apart. I walked out after one such tirade; they told the other girl that worked there that I had been “terminated.”
I worked in a natural bakery with this highly select bunch of artistic types, and we all had a rather anarcho-syndicalist arrangement, in that we all mutually agreed to steal $40 a night. This way nobody aroused any suspicions. The owner was a nice hippie lesbian who really wanted to adopt a child from Guatemala. I think she assumed we were stealing, and we in turn kept a lid on doing her cash register any serious damage. It was the wage we thought we deserved, and she may have been just Communist enough to be OK with it. Or she never knew. Nobody ever got caught, we just all quit eventually.
Once I tried to do singing telegrams. This was a thing that actually had a small vogue for a while, in the late eighties. A Broadway wannabe would knock on your door in a costume of fishnet stockings, dance character pumps, a spangled leotard and a sequined top-hat, a glitter bow-tie, and a red felt tutu —a real “Br-oa-d-WAYYYY” costume, from that Bob Fosse silhouette — and sing you a peppy message.
It was real campy, but kind of desperate, and poorly paid.
It was a dismal little operation, run by a large middle-aged woman who became very passionate over the costumes and the song lyrics, which were 3 ring binders filled with plastic-sleeved, typewritten words to be sung on various occasions.
I auditioned and got the job, and then I was to memorize one of their birthday songs and sing it to the boss. I guess I was internally cringing at the material, because the boss asked,
“Well, I dunno where the girl is who auditioned here. Where’s your pizzazz?”
I decided I would never be able to have that much pizzazz. That frantic tapdancing spangled bowler hat kind of pizzazz. That’s too much pizzazz.
The minute I turned 21 I started working in nightclubs. Working in bars was, at the time, lucrative enough that I could stop writing porn.
I started as a barback — the lowest of the low — before ascending to the role of cocktail waitress.
I didn’t mind cocktail waitressing so much, but after a year or so I got an idea. Everybody was drinking Jägermeister at the time, that thick brown licorice-y syrup that tasted exactly like Vicks Formula 44D, for those who remember, and cured more than the common cough, for those who blacked out on it. It fueled a lusty spirit of idiot adventure in nightclub patrons.
So I bought a bunch of vintage white support undergarments and a few white lab coats, some bedpans and irrigation syringes, and had a word with the local Jägermeister representative, to see if I could get underwritten to be a Jägermeister Shot Doctor, a title I invented.
The rep, a peppy blonde woman, took me to a meeting of fellow liquor reps, and brought me and my idea as an example of the great job she was doing. During her presentation, she drank 12 shots of Jägermeister, staggered around talking for a bit, making less and less sense and giggling uncontrollably — then she staggered back to the table where we were sitting and fell deeply asleep. This was apparently par for the course, in a regional meeting of liquor reps. Nobody seemed phased at all by this alcoholic floor show. After the meeting, she was carried by various associates and poured in the backseat of the car we came in. She slept in the back seat the entire way home, but somehow, I got the job.
I was given an enormous golden Jägermeister patch for the back of my doctor jacket, and the nightclub I worked for hired a tilting dentist’s chair for me. I dumped Jägermeister into a small, green, kidney-shaped bedpan, drew up about a shot’s worth in a large irrigation syringe, lowered the “patient” into a vulnerable, almost upside-down position, and shot the black fluid down people’s throats. They coughed it onto their shirts, a lot of the time. It was really more like Jägermeister waterboarding, in retrospect — but the bar patrons maintained that it was a good time. It became the kind of thing that young men dared each other to do.
I did this job for around two years. It wasn’t bad, at all.
I may have no formal education, but as far as I am concerned, I’ll always have my doctorate from the University of Jägermeister.
CINTRAW@gmail
Artwork: “Marie Antoinette Holding a Ringed Krait,” oil on linen, Cintra Wilson 2023
I’m an ESL teacher in New York City and was recently told that I was being “terminated” for speaking Spanish in my English class. I said loudly “Hasta la vista baby and I’ll be back!” to my boss, who alerted the security guard.
While the world needs you as a writer, I submit that you are NOT untalented at non-writing gigs--as your DIY pharma rep Jäegermeister character demonstrates. (I wonder which clubs you worked at and if I might’ve ever seen you.) But thanks for the pro tip: avoid gigs whose key requirement is “pizzazz.”