No Tip Rule or My Favorite Job that I Quit Prematurely by Johnny Hazard
My favorite job that I quit prematurely was as a carry-out “boy” at a well-known supermarket in Uptown, Minneapolis. I put it in quotation marks because we were almost all white, as I recall, not the people who usually had to endure being called boys, and because almost everyone was a teenager or a retired person. I was 21 and therefore of the wrong age. But I was at the right time and place. Reagan was running against Carter. When the time came I voted for the environmentalist Barry Commoner or I didn’t vote. It was my first union job, so we got fifty cents extra on Sundays. Tipping strictly forbidden. It was fall quarter in case anybody was going to school.
Before I got the job I went to the store from time to time to eat the free samples. They were most abundant on Friday afternoons. Anna was working the meat counter. I’m not completely disguising the names because Kerouac didn’t in his first drafts and because the statute of limitations for all this petty shit ran out a long time ago. So let’s call her Anna E. I have never told her this, but in high school when she went to Marshall U and I went to the local Unhip High, I would see her at the bus stop at 8th and Hennepin with a mutual acquaintance and I had “lust in my heart”, as Jimmy Carter would say. Did say. As a teen and still as a mature 22-year-old she had the longest hair I had ever seen. Anyway, I was talking to her at the deli counter (not really the meat counter) and she asked me if I had 26 cents. I said yes. She wrapped up a little piece of cheese worth that amount and threw a bunch of other cheese and pastrami, turkey breast, etc. in a bag and stapled the 26-cent receipt on it. This was pre-employee theft, a taste (yes, literally) of what was to come.
Besides Anna, one of the only people I knew who worked there when I started was Hobart H. When I had left Unhip High and was at the alternative high school someone came to recruit us to teach music to elementary kids on the North Side, and Hobart was one of those kids. Now he was in high school. He and Karl M. were among the only people who came from other parts of town to work at L%&#’s. A few years later we coincided at another job. We were bike messengers. I read in the paper then that his parents had been arrested for operating an “illegal international adoption ring”. Kids from Guyana. I told him about some good lawyers but he opted for a Mercedes-driving shyster who was a client of the messenger service. His parents got out of jail but not as fast as they should have. I told him that I didn’t know if (or that) there were adoptions in the family. He said it was just informal, not unethical, in the context of a church they belonged to. And he asked why I hadn’t caught on: “Didn’t you notice that we were all different colors?” Yeah, but I knew that his father was white, a bus driver, and that his mother was black and I figured that pigmentational diversity was a logical outcome.
And I knew two managers or under-assistant managers, a do-gooder and a sadist, respectively, from my first high school. I don’t remember having problems with the sadist on the job as I had had at school. Maybe he had quit the store before I started.
Right away I got to know Kathy K., Karl M., and Xaviera X. The X is not for the reason that Malcolm had an X. Nor is it so we could call her Dos Equis. No. This X is because I don’t remember her last initial. She was about my age and had two kids. She told me that I could not use “no time” as an excuse for not writing because she wished she had the time that I had. The father of the kids was a young long-haired non-hippie. They met where she worked as a stripper somewhere down the Mississippi. Not very far down: let’s not get all romantic and Twainian or Delta Bluesy. Prescott, Shakopee, Red Wing, someplace like that. Anyway, I think later he kicked it with a psychopath who my friends told me not to go out with, so I did. Or someone in her family. And Red Wing came up again, as it did for Dylan, because Xaviera’s next man, the fat jealous guy, had done time there. Or if that was a lie, it was less poetic than Dylan’s lie. And therefore more credible. All this she told me when she had decided to trust me. A matter of weeks or months. Was her father named Xavier and had he been planning for a Xavier Jr.?
Karl M. was 17 and was playing bass in a new group called Loud Fast Rules. Since this was a union job, we had real meal breaks. One day around 6 p.m. I told Karl I wanted one of those big yogurt containers and his break was coming up before mine. He asked me what brand or what flavor and I told him. He came through the line, followed me out to the parking lot where I was taking a cart to somebody’s car, and pulled the yogurt out from his coat. I offered him money and he indicated that he had incurred no expenses.
Kathy K. was the older woman—21 or 22—who had a crush on Karl. I think she was an English major. She knew about Marguerite Duras, Rimbaud, Patti Smith. I had a crush on her, on Xaviera, on Anna. The other women at the store were cheerleader types and I was not interested. One of these, popular in the prissy sense of the word in our high school daze, got on the mike at the supermarket one night and asked for a price check for “Kraft Fancy Italian Dressing”. Her pronunciation of “Italian” made some of the male workers yell at her: “E-y-e?”
I didn’t get many of those forbidden tips, but they amounted to more than that fifty-cent Sunday bonus. Usually it was a dollar. There was an unfortunate young man who had been “promoted” from carryout and bagging engineer to parking lot vigilant. This came with a special parka when it got colder. This dude would have been the trusty in a fucking jail. He was that committed. Karl and I and a few others were aware of which customers gave tips and especially of a woman with hair like Anna’s who drove a Volkswagen bug. One day around dusk…you think I’m gonna say she kissed me or threw me into her back seat. … She asked me to wait till the vigilant (noun) was not vigilant (adjective) and passed me a joint. This happened once or twice more with her or with somebody else.
Xaviera didn’t show up for a few days. When she came back she said: “I called in and told them I couldn’t come to work because I was in jail” But the truth was something worse?
On Halloween night I was hoping to get off early to go to a warehouse party. That was the year that they had a dead rock star lookalike contest at the Longhorn. I said I wanted to go as Jim Morrisson. Curtiss A. said I should. Just find some leather pants and some blue paint for your face so you look dead. I didn’t and later learned that hardly anyone had entered. Maybe I would have won $500. Curt’s first album had just come out and I dreamed of becoming as almost famous as he was. Anyway, I think I went as a priest to the warehouse party and that I hitchhiked downtown with the clerical collar on. In anticipation I was lobbying to get off early and one of the last customers had his tiny sports car right outside that giant plate glass window. I had put his bags into the car and was heading back in when he said: “Here’s your tip.” I held my hand behind me and looked to see that no manager was watching. But he said: “You have to turn around for this.” I did and he was holding up a spoon with cocaine. This was the last time I ever tried it, because every time it either gave me a cold or got me sexually stimulated with no outlet and no hope of sleeping.
I had a horrible sore throat for days or weeks. Tuesday was election day and here is where I remember that I was among that “anybody” who “was in school” category, because Arthur H., professor of Sociology and Afro-American Studies at Minneapolis Community College, was very grim in the class on Wednesday and was predicting most of the horrors to come.
The baggers move from one cashier to another. I stayed with Kathy K. or Xaviera X. as much as possible. I remember a young epicurean male customer who asked me not to pack in such a way as to squash his cookies. So as not to join the ranks of the unemployed that night, I did not say “You can’t be serious.” As he headed off, I was about to tell him that he had dropped a twenty-dollar bill but I stopped myself. I didn’t owe him any favors. I covered the bill with my foot for a while. Sometimes one cashier asked another for change. Xaviera passed me a receipt and a twenty-dollar bill and asked me to take it to Kathy. I knew that they were not among those math-challenged school girls we hear about: they were totaling all the “Would you like your receipt?” “No thanks” purchases for which they punched the “No sale” key to open the drawer.
The groceries courtesy of Russell T. L%&# and the four musketeers continued.
***
I went through a period of petty theft when I was younger.
True False
–Minnesota Multi-phasic Personality Inventory
***
There was also happy hour. Bars in Minneapolis still gave away large quantities of food and the staff didn’t always notice if you bought a drink. And it seemed that our break always lined up with happy hour. In Uptown the Rainbow Bar and William’s Pub were the places. One had tacos and sold screwdrivers for a dollar. They were those ground beef tacos with a hard shell, the only kind you could get in Minneapolis in those days. I felt decadent drinking one before going back to work. Karl went on his break, after mine, and said he’d drunk two. Obviously no one was checking IDs. I liked a woman named Maggie who had been a waitress at Williams, a basement bar I loved to hate. I saw her at happy hour. She had become a flight attendant or something at an airline. When I left the bar and went back to work I wasn’t worried about my breath (as we believed that vodka gave off no odor) but about the wild brown lipstick that she had left on my face. That clowny look that you get when they smear it on and around your lips. She was the only white woman I ever knew who wore that shade. I have always thought that my lust for her was unrequited, but now I am realizing. She moved to Dallas and we knew no more.
I lived in that old brick building on the corner of Franklin and Hennepin. Franklin Manor, I think it was called. I paid $190 a month, which was still a good price for an apartment all to oneself. It’s that building that’s next door to the parking lot of Lyle’s. One night Kathy and Xaviera showed up and I wondered if they had finally realized that a trio with me was what was missing in their lives. But no: They needed for me to hide a tampon vending machine that they had jacked from the women’s bathroom at the store. They must have passed it out the window to Jealous Guy waiting outside with a jalopy. They shook and shook and turned it in every direction and no money would come out, so stashing it someplace while the search for culprits was on was the thing to do. It served as a good prop for parties.
***
And then came December 8, a Tuesday. Some friends were getting married—OUTSIDE!—in the garage of Seward Café at 7 a.m. It was as cold as January. Dan K. came into my apartment—always unlocked, and not only because I had seen John Reed’s “‘Property is theft. Walk in.’—Proudhon” sign in the movie “Reds”. Anyway, Dan came in because it was time to go to the wedding. He said: “Have you heard about Lennon?”
***
She killed John Lennon.
Shot him down cold.
She tried to kill Reagan;
everybody hollered “Gun control! Gun control!”
–Prince, in “Annie Christian”.
***
Curtiss A. was going to play at Goofy’s Upper Deck that night and I was going to go. I didn’t drink much but I shore did go out every night. A mutual friend said he’d cancelled the gig, though now I know that it turned out to be the first annual John Lennon tribute. Going to bed or going to bed alone were my biggest fears. So I decided to have a party. Really. Going to bed with someone, a certain someone, who would never come back became my fear, obsession, and loss after that. In my solitude, in my virus that never went away, in my inability to tolerate the contrast between the heat of the store and the cold of the parking lot, I could not recover physically or emotionally. The only other thing I remember about the world that month is that “Sandinista” by the Clash came out. I think I took a few days off. In early January my take-this-job-and-shove-it moment came when the do-gooder manager asked me to do something and I refused, threw my uniform jacket toward his face, and said “Mail me my check”. Like all of my friends, I wanted to be a writer or a musician. A successful one. Karl and Curt were exceptions. The rest of us kept working at real jobs (as most of our famous musician friends did, too) and those jobs got more and more real as time went on.
I went back in a week. The real manager said they could not mail me my check, laughed as he took it out of the safe, and gave it to me.
The last time I remember talking with Xaviera, a few weeks later, she was still working there. She said: “We found an old check book. The account has been closed for years. We went to the other L%&#’s in the suburbs. We wanted to see if they have one of these machines to verify checks so we bought a carton of milk. They don’t, so we went back last night and got $300 worth of groceries.”
Dedicated to all of the people who had the music and whose hearts stopped somewhere along the Minneapolis-to-Hell-to Heaven highway, especially to Karl Mueller and Katie O’Brien.