Edward Jones - Lost in the City

My father always told the story of working one week for an undertaker in Columbia, South Carolina, one of his first jobs. He didn’t like the undertaker and he knew the undertaker didn’t like him. But, and maybe he got this from his old man, my father figured that he would give the undertaker the best goddamn week of work a fourteen-year-old was capable of. And that’s what he did — for seven days he worked as if that business was his own. Then he collected his pay and never went back. The undertaker came by late one evening and at first, thinking my father wasn’t showing up because he was just lazy, the undertaker acted big and bad. Then, after my father told him he wouldn’t be coming back, the undertaker promised a raise, even praised my father’s work, but my father had already been two days at a sawmill.

I didn’t think Mrs. Jenkins was the kind of woman who would beg me to come back, but I did like imagining her sitting on her high stool, reading her damn paper and thinking of what a good worker she had lost. That was the image I took home each evening that week, so sore and depressed I could not think of fucking the world or anybody else. My mother would fix me dinner and I would sit hunched down in my chair close to the food because I had little strength left to make the long distance from the plate to my mouth if I sat up straight. Then, before I could fall asleep in the chair, my mother would run water for me to take a bath, the same thing I had seen her do for my father so often when I was a child that I didn’t notice it anymore.

In the late mornings that week, after she thought I had done enough in the yard, Mrs. Jenkins would have me sweep the area around the front of the store or provide some order to the merchandise in the storage room. On Tuesday she wanted the boxes of stuff arranged just so, but then, as if she had some revelation during the night, she wanted everything rearranged on Wednesday. Then on Thursday I had to do things different again, and then different still again on Friday. And because she claimed she planned to repaint, she also had me up on a ladder, scraping away the peeling orange paint of the store’s exterior. The paint chips would fly off into my eyes and hair, and it took me until Thursday to get smart about wearing a stocking cap and the goggles my father had once used.

Saturday morning I woke up happy. Again, I was there waiting for her to open up and again I did all the shit work while she chatted and made nice-nice with all the customers. I had already planned my weekend, had, in my mind, spent every dollar I was to be paid. But I was also prepared to get cheated. Cheating folks was like some kind of religion with people like Mrs. Jenkins — they figured that if they didn’t practice it they’d go to hell. Actually, I was kind of hoping she would cheat me, just so I could come back late that night and break all the fucking windows or something.

At the end of the day, after she had locked the front door to any more customers and pulled down the door’s shade with the little CLOSED sign on it, she opened the cash register and counted out my money. It came to about twenty-five dollars after she took out for taxes and everything. She explained where every dollar I wasn’t getting was going, then she gave me a slip with that same information on it.

“You did a good job,” she said. “You surprised me, and no one in the world surprises me anymore.”

The words weren’t much and I had heard better in my time, but as I stood there deliberately counting every dollar a second and third time, I found I enjoyed hearing them, and it came to me why some girls will give their pussys to guys who give them lines full of baby this and baby that and I’ll do this and I’ll be that forever and ever until the end of time….

I just said yeah and good night and thanks, because my mother had always taught me and my brother that the currency of manners didn’t cost anything. Mrs. Jenkins had untied her apron, but she still had it on and it hung loosely from her neck. She followed me to the door and unlocked it. “I’ll see you bright and early Monday mornin,” she said, like that was the only certainty left in my whole damn life. I said yeah and went out. I didn’t look back.

Despite my aches, I went dancing with Mabel Smith, a girl I had gone to Dunbar with. We stepped out with Lonney and Brenda. I didn’t get any trim that night, and it didn’t bother me, because there was something satisfying in just dancing. I danced just about every dance, and when Mabel said she was tired, couldn’t take it anymore, I took Brenda out on the dance floor, and when I had worn her out, I danced away what was left of the night with girls at other tables.

I got home about six that Sunday morning. In the dark apartment, I could see that slice of light along the bottom of my mother’s closed door.

I didn’t go back to the store on Monday. In fact, I slept late and spent the rest of the day running the streets. Tuesday, I couldn’t get back to sleep after my old lady left, and about ten I wandered over to the store, then wandered in. She didn’t act mad and she sure didn’t act like she was glad to see me. She just put me to work like the week before had been a rehearsal for the real thing. And she enjoyed every bad thing that happened to me. Tuesday I restocked the cereal section of shelves behind the counter with the cash register. As I bent down to dust the bottom shelves, a box of oatmeal fell on my head from three or four shelves up. Hit me so hard I’m sure some of my descendants will be born dumb because of it. Mrs. Jenkins went into a laugh that went on and on for minutes, and throughout the rest of the day she’d come up behind me and shout “Oatmeal!” and go into that laugh again.

“In the grocery business,” she said after I replaced the box, “the first law of supply in them shelves is to supply em so that nothin falls over.”

And late that Friday afternoon, as I was checking the coal oil pump to see how much was in it, a customer rushed in and the door pushed me against the pump, soiling a good shirt with oily dirt and dust. None of Mrs. Jenkins’s aprons fit me and she had said she was ordering one for me. “Sorry, sport,” the customer said.

“The first law of customer relations,” Mrs. Jenkins said after the guy was gone, “is to provide your customers with proper egress to and from your product.” Such bullshit would have been enough in itself, but then, for the rest of that day, she’d look at me and ask, “What am I thinkin?” And before I could say anything, she would say, “Wrong! Wrong! I’m thinkin oil.” Then the laugh again.

That was how it was for months and months. But each Monday morning, like a whipped dog that stayed because he didn’t know any other master but the one that whipped him, I was at the store’s front door, waiting for her to open up. And a thousand times during the week I promised myself I would give her a week of work that only my father could surpass and then, come Saturday night, get my pay and tell her to kiss my ass. But always there was something during the week to bring me back on Monday — she allowed me, for example, to wait on customers (but didn’t allow me to open the cash register and make change); and I got two new aprons with my name stitched in script over the left pocket; and I got a raise of one dollar more a week after I had been there six months; and eventually she allowed me to decide how much of what things we had to reorder. Often, at home in the evening, I would go over the day and rate it according to how many times Mrs. Jenkins had laughed at me, and it became a challenge to get through the next day and do things as perfectly as possible. By the time I got my raise I felt comfortable enough to push that laugh back in her face whenever she slipped up on something. I’d say, “The first law of bein a grocery store boss is to be perfect.”