Flu-enhanced memories of the market and my twentysomething Saturday nights
January 22, 2003 ~ 9:20 p.m.
Sorry about a pronounced lack of updates. I was forced to take a hiatus on account of being laid up with a sinister case of influenza. This is the third such serious case of flu in my lifetime. I remember the other two�one at the tail end of 1981 and one at the very beginning of 1998. In this respect, flus are very much like severe blizzards. You never know when one will strike and lapses between the two can be considerable (it was 18 years separating the great Blizzards of '78 and '97 in Boston). But when they do strike, they are crippling. I can officially say, "Welcome Flu of '03. Please leave ASAP."
Sometimes, when you are caught between that damnable state between being incapacitated in bed and yet unable to sleep�just "drifting" along a painful, acetaminophen- and psuedoephedrine-influenced daze�you start thinking of certain events in your life. Nothing heavy. But the past can come rearing its head in ways to make you gasp.
I drifted off at one point, very lightly, and dreamt about the Cambridge, MA supermarket and the night shift I used to work throughout my college days. I put five years in at that store (I continued to work there a year after graduating).
The grocery manager was a maniac by the name of Mike Rossi. He would come in every single morning during our breaktime�about 3:30 a.m. every day and he would immediately begin to shout: "Brothers, what is this? We only had a count of 2,500, all this shit should've been up by now! Oh God, I need athletes and all I've got are alcoholics!" We used to wonder if Mike ever got more than three hours of sleep a night and if his kids even knew who he was. Richie, one of our crew, made me spit my tea out when he wise-cracked, "Hey, look Mommy, it's Mr. Paycheck!"
What I especially liked were Saturday nights. They were quite often marathon sessions, but the time-and-a-half pay was a good incentive to work the twelve straight hours. We would throw up excess stock collected throughout the week and "block" the aisles and build the sales displays. We would choose one station to blast over the intercom system�quite often, it was WZLX 100.7 FM, the Classic Rock station. It's true that I became a walking classic rock encyclopedia from those days at the market. But I still wore my own wireless radio headset with six stations to choose from. I loved it when "The Jazz Brunch" came on the alternative station, WFNX at 6 a.m. They played some really great jazz for the first two or three hours, before dipping into the acid and experimental stuff.
Although I stocked pet foods during the grand bulk of my time there, what I loved was my last year when I stocked the households aisle. It was one of the most back-breaking aisles to work�all those boxes of large detergent bottles and cases of bleach�but I loved it nevertheless. Even today, while shopping with the wife, I take a hearty sniff of the bleaches mixed with the fabric softeners mixed with the detergents, and I am reminded of those days.
Winter was actually a nice time to work there. In the summer, the sticky heat infested the supermarket and you would curse the fact that you had to wear long pants and the dust from the back rooms would clump when it mixed with the sweat. But in winter, comfortably clad in jeans and long-sleeved thermal t-shirt, back brace, and pricing gun, I would lose myself in music and deep thoughts and turn the aisles upside down and right back up. I loved doing the displays; they were always a challenge. And the whole din�the music in my ears and over the loudspeaker system, the constant ripping sound of cardboard and the clack, clack, clack of items being stocked on shelves, and the playful cowboy hollers of the crew�would be pierced by Mike's terse and worried bark. "Come on, brothers! Get this shit up! Oh God!"
Going home was often half the fun, especially on snowy mornings. I remember one Saturday, it had snowed all night and the plows had just been along, blocking access to the sidewalks. I leapt over every snowpile, jazz in my ears and, three miles later, stopped for coffee at the Little Cafe in Belmont. In early 1994, when I took part in a Boston Globe sponsored college viewpoint column (I represented UMass-Boston), I would buy a copy of the Sunday Globe and read it in the cafe with a cappuccino by my side. I would be so wired that a four-mile walk home through snowdrifts after a twelve-hour day would be nothing.
I won't pretend it was all roses. Weekdays were dull, I was often tired as all-get-out (a notion Mike always failed to understand), and I would often wake up dreading the 11 o'clock hour, especially on Saturdays after getting off a nine-hour shift on Friday. But there was a coffee/hot water dispenser by the produce section and I would gulp cup after cup of hot tea. And the night would only get better as it went along.
In late November 1995, I got in a fight with the deli manager, one that ended with me clipping him with my right hook, and I never went back. I didn't officially quit either. That night, I took the phone off the hook at 11 p.m. and continued to do so for the rest of the week. Amazingly, despite that, Mike still always told me that he'd "take me back in an instant, brother!"
I went back to the supermarket during this past vacation home in December. It is different, much different to how I remembered it during my working days. The deli area has been re-arranged. They have expanded the exotic and international foods section between aisles 1 and 2. Household and pet foods are no longer in aisle 7, but aisles 12 and 13 respectively. The hot water dispenser by produce is gone. And as it was early evening, Mike wasn't around.
Strange the things you think about when you're waylaid by a bad case of flu. But today, while drifting in and out of a haze, I thought about those Saturday nights from 1990-1995, my trusty box-cutting knife in hand, slicing through cardboard (and the occassional plastic bottle of detergent or my thumb along with it), rearranging items on the shelf, singing along to music, throwing boxtops into the other aisles and laughing at the "hey" they would elicit.
I miss those days.
Well, I've written enough for now. Back to bed with me ...
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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