It was the summer of 1979, a transitional year in which Elvis was dead, and Disco was next.
By the age of 16, I was already working my third job, partially to help plug some holes in the finances at what could only very loosely be called “home”
My first job at 14 had been working the night shift, selling flowers at the base of the offramp of the 5 freeway in Mission Viejo in total darkness. It was formative, I’ll hand it that, especially that Christmas Eve stint I pulled, shivering in a nearly pitch-black pouring rain storm, illuminated only by the headlights of cars turning right, up the hill. The fact that I was a soaking wet child, working in the dark on his birthday no less, seemed to have absolutely no effect on sales, or my mother for that matter, who would have been quick to remind me that there were shivering cold boys mining coal right now. “Kill the waterworks, honey…at least you’re above ground.”
After retiring from the flower industry at age 15, I embarked on my second job, a journey of self-discovery, selling newspaper subscriptions door to door for the Orange County edition of The Los Angeles Times, which, honestly, always made The Los Angeles Times seem like kind of a dick.
As on the nose as it may seem, I and the rest of the young teen salesboys were picked up and dropped off in a big white unmarked van, driven by an older guy named Mike, who made sure that the van was absolutely overflowing with pornographic magazines, primarily Penthouse and Oui, you know, the harder stuff. (I always marveled at the fact that they named an adult magazine simply Yes…) Whatever Mike’s motives may have been in supplying us with so much porn, it sure made for a quiet commute.
We would be dropped off alone in suburban neighborhoods across Orange County, ringing the doorbells of complete strangers and explaining to them that if we hit our magic sales number, we would win an all expenses paid trip to Catalina Island. That was always part of my pitch, as if to say, “Go ahead, pass on this offer, and you sleep well tonight, Ma’am, like me, here on the mainland.” Eventually, it wore me down and after coming too close to winning too many times, I wanted that Catalina monkey off my young back, and so that was my cue to move on and get a real job, a job with a timeclock.
I was 16 now, and could drive and I had saved enough money to combine it with some money from my dad to buy a Chevy Vega, a car once referred to as “The Stuff of Nightmares” due to, among other things, an engine that was prone to melting from the inside out. It was said that the reason the Vega had a rear defroster was so you could warm your hands while you were pushing it. But I couldn’t care less, because this thing was gold with a black racing stripe and looked pretty sweet in the parking lot of the Ralphs grocery store on the corner of La Paz Road and Marguerite Parkway, where I had landed what was technically my third job…but in truth, was my first real job.
I proudly wore my burnt ochre polyester apron with my Ralphs nametag over black slacks, a white short sleeved button-down shirt and a clip-on bowtie. It may be because I was young, but looking back, everything in this particular Ralphs supermarket seemed built on a vast scale…not just a market, but a SUPER market. The timeclock was big, square and loud, Sha-KUNK! You are now WORKING!!! It felt like hundreds of employees were employed there, there were seemingly thousands of shopping carts, countless check-out stands, acres and acres of just MARKET. All of the cashiers in our store were women sporting burnt ochre colored polyester pants, matching long vests and speckled blouses. All of them accessorized with a burnt ochre neckerchief that surely came down as a wardrobe mandate directly from Ralph himself. It was either sassily tied at the side of the neck, or used to hold their hair up and back or cross-fold flipped into an ascot…all of this to say, yeah, we were FOS, Front of Store, and we were proud of it.
To top it off, as legend has it, we were one of the first stores in the country, if not the world, to feature scanners, the glass panels that read bar codes on products that we all take for granted today. We were considered a test store, and only a couple of check-out stands had the scanners, to minimize the probability of in-store customer riots, because as predicted, it was not easy going at first. The public at large believed this was some sort of corporate witchcraft, designed to cheat them in some way. They didn’t like the fact that the price tag was now only on the shelf and not on the product itself. There were no digital readouts back then, so customers would wait for the receipt and then pore over it next to their basket, convinced there was certainly some kind of bullshit going on, it was just a question of which kind and how much.
My job title was that of a Bagboy, as we were known, standing at the far end of a conveyor belt, and popping those paper bags open with one hand off to my left, POP! my hip wedged against the metal plate at the back of the checkout stand and gracefully underhand scoop tossing grocery items into the air with my right hand in a fine arc, causing them to hover there for a moment, defying gravity, before descending into the darkness of the bag where my left hand was waiting to catch and place the heavier items into the four corners and then strategically backfilling lighter items into the inner core for balance and shape, before draping the crushables lightly across the top, not too heavy, not too light, then placing each masterpiece in the shopping cart like you were putting a baby to bed.
Bagboys were also expected to collect carts from all across the seemingly endless acreage of the parking lot, including the farthest corners where you would make a train of 100 carts at a time and then jump on the back, steering and riding them all the way down the gently graded asphalt like you were competing in some sort of suburban Iditarod, praying to God that those automatic doors would open in time to allow you to plow into the store, thundering into the back of the other carts like a freight train. Fear not, customers, I have returned…with CARTS!
In addition to the occasional raising, lowering and folding of the American flag, the re-shelving of abandoned items and keeping the bag inventory stocked, Bagboys were also expected to engage in what could easily be described as the most exciting aspect of their job: the identifying, pursuit and capture of thieves. Every so often, you would look up from your bagging and see someone dart out of the store or hear someone yell “Runner!” and depending on your proximity to the door, it was expected that you would at least give chase. The shoplifters were always young men. I can never once remember a woman or girl stealing from our store, it was always younger dudes with like a couple of flank steaks shoved down the front of their pants and a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon under one arm, blasting out the automatic sliding doors and just tearing ass out across the parking lot. Most of us Bagboys never had much luck chasing anyone down but it was still exhilarating. The Runners always had such a big head start, they were almost gone by the time we got outside, but should some unfortunate decide to steal from our store during any day or night shift when Mark and Bob happened to be working Front of Store together…they were in for a very different experience indeed.
Mark, less of a Bagboy and more of a Bag MAN, was a senior to my sophomore at our high school, and let me assure you, it showed. He possessed a certain level of poise and sophistication that I could only dream of at that age. He was tall, lanky, slender and graceful and being on the golf team, often wore sweaters beneath his apron. When paired with one of our Ralphs standard issue bowties, it gave him such an air of worldliness in my mind, I swear he could have pulled off a pipe, not that he wasn’t already hitting a pipe plenty before, during and after work. Mark favored a David Cassidy shag cut and wore puka shells under his shirt collar. I secretly patterned my bagging style off of his…tres facile with a touch of class.
If Mark was a Bag Man, then Bob, a student at Saddleback Junior College, was more of a Bag GOD, of the Mt. Olympus variety. He was Hercules in an apron, with massive hands that worked like grappling hooks, collecting multiple grocery items in a single savage grasp and filling bags with frightening speed. Bob’s sickening biceps were barely contained by his short-sleeved dress shirt and he always gave those sleeves a little extra roll up to show more raw arm meat. He simply wasn’t able to wear a bowtie, because his traps were so big that he had to keep his shirt open about 3 buttons down, with just a hint of pec shadow! Bob possessed a pair of cast iron glutes and yes, as you well remember, the late 70’s were considered a heyday for the male moustache and Bob’s blonde stache was the sexy icing on his ample piece of beefcake.
These two were just pure jocks and they dominated the bagging arena.
If you were working a shift with these two, and someone had the misfortune of stealing from our store, you only had to point, yell “Runner!”…and it was ON!
END OF PART ONE
My First Real Job