Life at the Liquor Store Life Leshons
Oklahomicronies!
“Red Stripe?”
Saint Jeanne, hero of several Kronikles, on the line.
“Yes?” I, spaced out from the indulgent and identical-to-my-pattern-when-I-was-14 summer routine, answer groggily.
“The other day my hairdresser mentioned she needs help stocking and cleaning at her liquor store.”
“Ok”
Saint Jeanne continued, “When she mentioned ‘liquor’ I thought of you.”
“Aw, thanks, Jeanne.” Jeez.
“Are you interested?”
“Uh, did you say ‘liquor’? Duh! Yes!”
Saint Jeanne proceeds to give me the phone number of her hairdresser and, apparently, Mustang’s (a possibly all-white suburb of Oklahoma City) most important liquor purveyor.
I call and, over a couple of days and some surprisingly intense hand-wringing for a part-time summer job, we arrange an informal job interview.
I secure the position. Possibly because I was the only one who applied.
I am excited. My previous experience with liquor stores were, well, when I was very young, sitting outside of them in a hot car while following the instructions of my responsible and temporarily absent adults to avoid eye contact with the other big people. But, after that, after I turned 21, my experiences with liquor stores overlap pretty cleanly with my previous experiences with liquor store beer aisles so I lack a breadth of knowledge concerning all things alcoholic (but not, please note, all people alcoholic). In the hazy edges of mind where the phobia of law enforcement also lives, I recollect an early, perturbing accidental wine tasting that caused me to wonder to the depths of my soul why anyone would do that to a perfectly magical breakfast juice. To this day, I despise vinegar. And probably wine. I dunno. I stay over here and wine stays over (she motions across the room) there.
My history of liquor consumption could fit in a pamphlet if the text were fattened up with stock images of liquor bottles. I can count on one hand the number of times I have ingested hard liquor even though I always act like its way more if anyone ever asks. Here is a table summarizing my non-beer liquor consumption:
“Red Stripe?”
Saint Jeanne, hero of several Kronikles, on the line.
“Yes?” I, spaced out from the indulgent and identical-to-my-pattern-when-I-was-14 summer routine, answer groggily.
“The other day my hairdresser mentioned she needs help stocking and cleaning at her liquor store.”
“Ok”
Saint Jeanne continued, “When she mentioned ‘liquor’ I thought of you.”
“Aw, thanks, Jeanne.” Jeez.
“Are you interested?”
“Uh, did you say ‘liquor’? Duh! Yes!”
Saint Jeanne proceeds to give me the phone number of her hairdresser and, apparently, Mustang’s (a possibly all-white suburb of Oklahoma City) most important liquor purveyor.
I call and, over a couple of days and some surprisingly intense hand-wringing for a part-time summer job, we arrange an informal job interview.
I secure the position. Possibly because I was the only one who applied.
I am excited. My previous experience with liquor stores were, well, when I was very young, sitting outside of them in a hot car while following the instructions of my responsible and temporarily absent adults to avoid eye contact with the other big people. But, after that, after I turned 21, my experiences with liquor stores overlap pretty cleanly with my previous experiences with liquor store beer aisles so I lack a breadth of knowledge concerning all things alcoholic (but not, please note, all people alcoholic). In the hazy edges of mind where the phobia of law enforcement also lives, I recollect an early, perturbing accidental wine tasting that caused me to wonder to the depths of my soul why anyone would do that to a perfectly magical breakfast juice. To this day, I despise vinegar. And probably wine. I dunno. I stay over here and wine stays over (she motions across the room) there.
My history of liquor consumption could fit in a pamphlet if the text were fattened up with stock images of liquor bottles. I can count on one hand the number of times I have ingested hard liquor even though I always act like its way more if anyone ever asks. Here is a table summarizing my non-beer liquor consumption:
Liquor
Tequila Vodka Mystery Liquor Hard Punch |
Number of servings
3 1 2 .5 |
Notes
My first exposure was a ten dollar shot of Petrone during my one trip to a bar in which talking overlapped with drinking. The second was homemade Margaritas two years ago when my sister gave me a bottle of Tequila. I still have it. The third was last night because writing this made me remember I still have it. Ingested during a week-long professional development in the country. A fellow teacher, also a scientist, had been squirreling away the orange juice during the breakfasts. I think his orange-juice-and-possibly-home-distilled-vodka percolated inside his backpack for several hours during the day in a summer we Oklahomans refer, ruefully, now as “Summer of Satan’s Anus”. I remember it was very, very warm (the drink; the ambient temperature made the sun explore its inadequacy). I didn’t mind because I had been scolded earlier in the day by an old woman for burning catch-as-catch-can cinnamon rolls in the middle of the day during the Summer of Satan’s Anus and, as we drank, we beheld an unbelievably breath-taking storm dance on the edges of a lake. They were described as “chic drinks”, purchased in the whirlwind that was the aforementioned experiment with sociability within a drinking establishment. The result of my experiment was learning what people meant (well into my 30s, mind you) when they said “killer hangover” which I confronted in several, and possibly random, airports and airplanes the following day. This ended with my ride from the airport offering to stop and grab a couple of beers--an offer that I declined. Ignoble, I know. My friend volunteered at a film festival and had been invited to a rich person’s house for the after party. She dragged me along. I took a glass of the punch on my way to the backyard so I could be by myself. It tasted like amoxicillin. In the backyard, I found solitude and bucket after bucket of chilled, free Stella Artois. Have you ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Homer gallivants through chocolate land? That was me. |
It’s not that I don’t want to try these liquids that TV, movies, music, and books have all announced will set an atmospheric tone in my life. I do. That and the love of home chemistry called cooking I have fully dedicated my willing-to-be-exhaustive-in-learning-my-hobbies brain means I am terribly intrigued by the almost unending variety of spirits. What makes rye whiskey different from regular whiskey? Is vodka actually tasteless? What does that Brazilian liquor distilled from sugar cane taste like? Will it give you bad cavities? The problem is…I’m cheap. An associated condition to being cheap is a lack of adventure. If there is money in my pocket for alcohol, I buy beer. Because I know:
1. It is delicious.
2. It is cheap.
3. I have to work really hard to earn a hangover (see table).
This is why a summary of my beer-based alcohol ingestion would be a multi-volume set. Maybe this job will at least point me in a direction or grant me a greater understanding of the full extent of alcoholic offerings. Plus, it pays MINIMUM WAGE! My excitement will become understandable when I write the Oklahomicron special edition that reports the summer’s multiple, increasingly expensive car disappointments. For now, let’s just say the opportunity is fortuitous both intellectually and financially.
Life at the Liquor Store Leshon #1: Every day at the Liquor Store is the Same
At the informal interview, I met the new boss’s warning against wearing Daisy Dukes with hysterical laughter. I show up every day wearing my personal uniform (I got the idea but not the fashion from Albert Einstein) of black T-shirt and jeans. If I am feeling superclassy, I will wear a black band T-shirt. Having worked retail for ALMOST half of my life, I already know what shoes to wear and to pull my hair back.
Every Tuesday, I show up a few minutes past the appointed time of noon. Alas, work punctuality has never really been a strong suit. The guy who brings the liquor order is already there. I quickly stash my hastily filled, quietly stolen Cars-themed lunch bag and say “hey” to my new boss, Ms. Pink, and my main coworker, a tiny little dog (like way smaller than a cat) named Ewok who, even though a little dog, isn’t at all evil (although he is totally manipulative when it comes to grooming people who will pet him).
I decide, over time, that Ms. Pink is exactly who feminists had in mind when they argued for equal opportunity. She has great business acumen and spends a lot of time sweating the details but I doubt that her specific personality, including her highly probable discomfort in letting someone else provide for her, her mischievous streak, and her undying commitment to MMORPGs, would have been a natural and smooth fit for a pre-1960s ideal of womanhood. I like that we get to live in a time when women like Ms. Pink get to do whatever the hell they want.
The first work I do is pricing and putting up the “splits” or the stuff my boss needed in quantities smaller than a full case. Then I put up the cases. Then I work the beer, which, horribly racist Corona marketing material aside, I could do forever, putting it up and arranging it so no one dies by inadvertently tripping on beer (Imagine!). After that, the wine, which I now know I not only despise the taste of but also everything else about it. There are a billion different kinds and a billion different brands and stock-girls at liquor stores have to keep it all straight, even if they don’t actually care. I did notice that wine is feminized and manufacturers use that to sell wine. But most of the time, I just cursed that cursed wine aisle.
After that, I have to get at the understock which sits underneath the aisles and has random stuff in them. The problem is that if I bend at the knees more than twice a day (after a lifetime of retail, martial arts, and active soccer enthusiasm), I am fairly confident they will split open with the ease and gore of butchering a chicken’s leg, leaving me incapacitated AND responsible for mopping up the resulting mess. In the whole time I worked at the liquor store, I did all my elevation shifts by bending at the waist. After that, check and stock from the back stock.
When that is done, it is usually in between 6-7 PM. Time to shift gears. The rest of my job is to dust, sweep, mop, and take out the trash. So I do that, actively but quietly hating the activities. My mind focuses on the different kinds of liquor to keep me from running, screaming from boredom, into traffic. I also spend my mental energy, during these quiet times, blocking out the inane lyrics of the country songs crackling out of the radio for the customers’ enjoyment. As the words “drunk on you, high on the summertime” gets past my mental defenses, I reflect on how horrible radio music is—surely that song has to be the country corollary to epically awful Drake’s monumentally horrible “Started From the Bottom” (74,449,665 hits on youtube).
I usually finish with about half an hour left and I spend that half hour reading The Bartender’s Black Book so I can learn even more about those beverages I will probably never sample. Ms. Pink closes, purposefully, at 8:56 PM to avoid having to deal with the nine o’ clock loser who will inevitably malinger and pay with change.
Life at the Liquor Store Leshon #2: If you are paying with change AND your liquor purveyor has your order rung up before you get in the door, it might be time to reflect.
Other questions to ask during your momentary meditation--
Is my change sticky?
How many times have I been in today?
If my liquor purveyor were to be unethical, is it possible I might be her best target for blackmail? I remain slightly astounded at the willingness of people being rung up for one item to share all kinds of interesting and compromising information, especially considering the chummiest I ever got to the cashier who has rung up eight years of my beer purchases has been “No” in answer to “Do you need a receipt?” The number of stories people offered of legally liable and embarrassing firecracker incidents after the fourth of July was…a lot.
Out of the number of hours I have been awake today, what fraction have I spent on procuring and ingesting alcohol?
Can I still compute fractions?
Life at the Liquor Store Leshon #3: If you are reflecting on how much you drink, there is someone out there who drinks more.
The city worker who came in and bought a $67.32 bottle of Chivas Regal Scotch every day until he moved to Texas. The lady who buys $30 of wine everyday. The couple who purchases a gallon of vodka every other day. The nice young lady who arranged to have an additional 3 gallons of sangria ordered so her horrible Cruella Deville of a mother could buy them all (Hey, mom, here’s to your alcoholism AND your diabetes! Clink!).
I was unprepared and shocked by the expense and quantity of alcohol purchased by a small subset of customers. Maybe I’m shocked because I was reared a Southern Baptist. Maybe it is because I computed Cruella’s weekly wine consumption and it equaled a small town’s recommended servings. Maybe it is because $200 a week on booze exceeds what I spend on food for five people and a dog. And I eat good. I don’t know why it was such a surprise. But it was.
Life at the Liquor Store Leshon #4: Be careful, most of those bottles are glass.
As I watch the waves of humanity enter, shop, share, pay, and leave, I also have to negotiate tight spaces packed with glass bottles. With chagrin, I note that I also have to be conscious of my knees’ and butt’s whereabouts in addition to making sure I keep a tight grip on the bottles in hand. I pass the time with an eyebrow-raised, mildly horrified look permanently pasted on my face that is how I manifest the pressure of being one movement away from a wet, expensive domino course worthy of a Benny Hill episode. I repeat a soothing mantra in my head to stay present and aware. In a part of my mind, I am constantly comparing the cost of the bottle I am handling with the day’s take-home (my boss never once indicated that broken stock would come out of my pay—I just made it up, obviously to scare myself). I refuse to dust the shelf that has the Dom Perignon since it is 2.5 times my nine hours of pay. It stays dusty through my tenure. Ultimately, my conscientiousness pays off. My body count was limited to three beers and nothing else. Plus, those beers were Coronas, so, while any beer unconsumed is a tragedy, it could have been worse.
It could have been…Red...Red...never mind…
[shudder]
Until next time,
I remain
Carrie the Red (stripe)