A boy's first time.
Author's notes: This is for the On the Job 2023 challenge. I hope you enjoy it.
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In the days of Lyndon Johnson as president, I went to work at Charlie's Supermarket at the age of just seventeen. Living in the country, I was no stranger to working. I started working for area farmers when I was only twelve. My first job was picking berries, black and red raspberries, to be specific. It is where I was first introduced to and fell in love with red raspberries. Where we lived, black raspberries grow wild. I started picking them at a very young age. Every year, thoroughly scratched, I would bring a small bucket of them home to my mother to make pies. I loved them also, although I didn't love picking the seeds out of my teeth much. Then, of course, there was haying, which I hated, picking grapes, other crops, and other odd jobs farmers had.
Living in the country where we did, there wasn't any place else to work except on a farm. I could walk south out my parent's front door, cross the road and walk for two miles before I came to the next one, and if I went north out of the back door, I could walk four miles before I hit the first road. In either of the other directions, walking for two miles, I would cross only one road. So, I grew up in the boonies.
The closest town was a little village of about five thousand souls with two supermarkets and the only jobs that weren't farming. I was about to start my senior year in high school and thinking seriously about college. My mother had graduated from high school, the one I attended, but my father hadn't graduated. He only had a sixth-grade education and left schooling to work sharecropping with his father. That was likely the reason they encouraged me to go to college. They never forced me or demanded I go, telling me it was my decision. Completing high school, on the other hand, was nonnegotiable. On my father's side, I was the first male to graduate from high school. I had a female cousin who graduated the night before, and consequently, I can't claim to be the first in the family. On my mother's side, I had some educated ancestors. My bachelor's wasn't the first, but my master's was.
So, with my driver's license in hand and permission to drive the car to work, only if it was nights and weekends and wouldn't interfere with school, I applied to Charlie's Supermarket. Amazingly I got the job. I was to receive the minimum wage of $1.70 per hour. In those days, the average cost of a new car was around $2,800.
The first day rolled around, and I clocked in. My direct supervisor, the manager, was a guy named Stub. Please don't ask me what the etiology of that name was, I have no idea, but he always smelled of beer. He was quiet and not very open. Maybe it was because he was a World War Two veteran.
He paired me up with a guy, Carl. Carl was a guy that thought no one worked as hard as he did and was out to prove it. In the warehouse was a stacked pile of ten-pound bags of potatoes, and replenishing the display on the floor was our first mission. Now when I say a stack of potatoes, I mean a stack. It went from the floor almost to the ceiling, which was probably fourteen feet high. Stub estimated we would need one hundred bags or so.
Well, the only way that made sense was to put up a step ladder, and one of us to toss them down to the other, who would put them in shopping carts. Carl designated himself as the one to toss, and I would be the receiver. Anyone with any sense would realize that the person receiving them would need to catch them, turn his attention away to stack them, and then turn his attention to catch the next one. Thus there would be a lag between receiving and being ready to receive the next. Carl had no sense.
The first bag, I fielded with ease, and as I turned to put it in the shopping cart, Carl was about to toss the second one. He wasn't even looking at me or where he was dropping them. I threw the one I fielded into the cart, hoping it would end up in a place where I could stack them, and I just made the catch on the second one. I placed it quickly, and I barely caught the next bag. It dawned on me what Carl was doing. He was going extra fast to test me. Was I a worker or one of those lazy people?
You can call it toxic masculinity, machismo, or plain stubbornness, but I was not about to give this guy any satisfaction. The faster he tossed them, the quicker I went. When it came time to switch out shopping carts, I didn't catch the bag but punched it to change its flight path into the cart. Carl went as fast as he could, but I kept up, and eventually, I gained his respect.
Stub, as I said, was quiet and kept to himself, but he wasn't unfair. He ran the supermarket well but often butted heads with the owner Charlie. I remember we were having a sale on pop (soda pop, soda, tonic, soft drinks). Everyone calls it something different. Anyway, the pop we were selling was some cheap off-brand crap that always sold well because it was mostly the kids who drank it, and mom and dad didn't have to spend a lot. Stub's order was perfect because we had just four cases left over, which we would use to restock until the next shipment at the end of the week. About a month later, Charlie decided Stub was not ordering correctly and took over. We had the same sale with the same pop and ended up with one hundred and four cases left over. It took up a lot of space in the warehouse for months. Charlie did not do any orders after that until Stub left.
The only problem I had with Stub was he got into it with someone and, in his anger, called the guy a coward because he didn't serve in World War Two. This angered me. My dad wasn't eighteen until the middle of the war, and my grandfather went behind his back to get him a farm work deferment. In those days, it was a real stigma, even though it took ten noncombat personnel to keep one fighter in the field. So most of the guys in the service never saw combat. I think my father regretted it, and the few times he spoke of it, he seemed ashamed. Maybe this is one of the reasons I went into the military, to avoid facing that stigma, although by the time I joined, they were calling us baby killers.
Like an idiot, I jumped into a conversation I had no business in. Because he was in the heat of the battle, he snapped at me, and angry, I stomped off. Later, seeing the error of my ways, I apologized to him.
Surprisingly, he apologized to me and said, sighing, "We left enough guys over there."
As I said earlier, Stub eventually left, and we all realized why. The politest way to say it is Charlie, the owner, was a son of a bitch. Demanding and rude, he was impossible to deal with. He would fuck something up and then blame someone else. There was no training, no coordination, and no leadership. So, most of the crew left, and we were short-staffed. Evening staffing during the week was just three persons. There were two ladies at the register. In those days, guys didn't work the cash registers, and the stock boy was alone. We had to restock the shelves, pack groceries at the front when things got busy, run the deli, refill the cooler with milk and beer, retrieve shopping carts from the parking lot, do any clean-ups that might be needed, and lock up.
Finally, summer rolled around, and I turned eighteen. Because of my experiences here at Charlie's Supermarket, I decided to go to college. It would be a community college for now because I didn't have a lot of money, and my grades were not sterling. My high school guidance counselor told me I wasn't smart enough to get into any college, and my best bet was to join the Army. I finally felt I had proved him wrong when I received my MBA while serving in the Army.
Eighteen was a great year for me. I had graduated, could drink alcohol (yes, the drinking age was only eighteen), had my college acceptance, and my draft deferment was good. Even though I planned eventually to join the Army, I believed getting more education would make me more valuable.
