Boarded Windows (3 page)

I
WAS DISTRACTED AT WORK ON THAT FIRST FULL DAY of Wade’s stay in Minneapolis, and my till came up ten dollars short. A few years later, the store (notwithstanding the just-noted shortfall) was granted an expensive and predictably vulgar remodel, but during the period I’m now describing, its fixtures were as battered and wobbly as some of its drunker customers, several sections of carpet were held down with duct tape, the slatwall was badly divoted, and the typeface used for what HQ insisted on calling “signage” featured a no longer fashionable variety of shadow. We—I did see myself as part of the store’s
we,
not just one of its employees, though I subjectified only with our underdog location, on a long-struggling block of the city’s busiest street, and tried not to introject the corporation’s rhetoric and policies—we barely survived selling hip-hop and R&B cassettes (sometimes CDs), plus double-A batteries, oversized headphones, softly pornographic posters, and trashy portable tape players that at least expired, against cliché, before our thirty-day warranty, leading to seemingly infinite return-exchange loops. A few professional-types came in during the lunch hour and at Christmas, but most of our regulars were young or poor or both: teenagers killing time on weekends or during the store’s relatively rushy weekday hours after school before dinner; families splurging on the first of the month; clerical workers; hotel workers; out-of-work workers; tramps (very few trammps); community collegians; lumpenproletarians; lazzaroni; strippers from the club down the street (usually buying hard-rock tapes, sometimes R&B tapes, hip hop being forbidden at the club so as not to alienate the predominant clientele of older, mostly white alcoholics). I loved helping the strippers; I tried to be calm and solicitous.

I used to say that the majority of our customers were black, but maybe that wasn’t true; maybe only forty-eight percent of our customers were black. Whatever the demographics, the chain’s faceless buyers and their digital hegemons often didn’t understand or couldn’t predict our customers’ tastes and demands, which I believed to be less manipulable, more willed, though collectively willed, than those expressed at most of the chain’s mall locations. Back then I still held the American teenager to be the greatest invention of the twentieth century (the thermos, Wade countered), had a particularly patronizing and romantic view of black youth culture, and was a dogmatic opponent of the suburbs, where I now live, alone and unprosperously. I granted that our customers’ tastes were largely sculpted and given meaning by showbiz schemers and their media collaborators, just as mine were, despite my dubious claims to bohemianism, but I was heartened to see or imagine that these schemers and collaborators were often working at low levels out of home offices, their wallets fat with unconvincing business cards, their faces fuzzy on the J-cards of dusty consignment cassettes.

Frequently, headquarters would send us scores of some expected blockbuster, some big-budget follow-up or ballyhooed debut (remember Randi Randall?) that as it turned out few or none of our customers wanted, and in the same shipment send just one or two of something (AMG, Tim Dog, Marcus M., Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs, M.C. Breed, Bytches with Problems, LX
2
, Geto Boys, Lacē, Compton’s Most Wanted) piercingly coveted by every third person through the door. Corporate buying I’m sure is a tricky gig; I’m not here to sling old arrows at the faceless. But sometimes it was hard to turn folks away, especially the teenagers who’d had a particular tape in mind on their long bus ride downtown, who’d have to ride home in the dark with no new tape (the store across the street had a smaller selection of R&B and hip hop), or a substitute tape, and whose head-phoned bedtime might as a result be inferior, untranscendent. (Although the substitute tape is sometimes the one you really need.) Occasionally, however, we were able to step in with our own buy from a one-stop distributor, and a day later we’d razor open a drop shipment of, say, an especially communicable, bubbling-under cassingle, sometimes of a song getting little or no radio or video play, a song being promoted in school hallways, on phone lines, on boom boxes at awkward parties, through the pores of cheap headphones blasting from the back benches, or the vertiginous aisle-facing benches, of happier city buses. If we timed our buy correctly, we could sell a hundred copies of such a cassingle in a week—an abnormally large volume for our store. Cassingles sold for $2.12 including tax, and the margin was minuscule, especially after paying one-stop wholesale, but I (didn’t care about the company’s margin, and) thought of these lucky or prophetic buys as simultaneous triumphs of populism and benevolent capitalism. Always I’d buy a copy of the biggest cassingles for myself, and would write, on the cassingle’s cardboard pouch, the week of its sales acme at our store. I still have three long cardboard boxes filled with those cassingles; they should make, I exaggerate, an interesting time capsule for whichever bureaucrat sorts through my surviving things.

Fear of obsequiousness keeps me from calling the store’s “employee discount program” generous (“The program is that they get a discount on their employees,” joked one backroom Bakunin), but to me it didn’t seem mustache-twistingly stingy. I probably returned ten percent of my wages to the company (a kind of tithe), every few days buying a CD, tape, or one of the few LPs we still stocked or could order. Our in-store selection was lousy in most genres—the jazz section was particularly tasteless and ahistoric—but we could special-order most things in print domestically. That was boom time for CD reissues and anthologies, and I bought a lot of those, including 1991’s Bolling Greene anthology,
Greener Pastures
(Rhino 70598). Start there if you’re curious about Bolling’s work, even if I’d dock a star for a few painful omissions, especially “West Texas Winds” (an absence rebelliously noted, at least, in Cub Koda’s liner notes), and 1983’s “High Heels, Tight Jeans, and Single Overhead Camshafts,” a cunningly self-parodying rockabilly single, cowritten by Wade Salem, that failed to meet even its modest sales expectations, despite being ably produced by Tony Kinman of then-ascendant cowpunks Rank and File. I was one of the few who did buy the single, with my paper-route money in my first Minneapolis fall. The cover featured a black-and-pastel photo of Bolling standing next to a men’s-room door, still wearing his havelock, armadillo T-shirt, and bandolier, fatter than ever, though thanks to his prominent chest and comparatively thin legs he always seemed more bisontine than hippopotamian, more gallant than galumphing. “What a stupid song,” my mother said when I played her the A-side.

We did employ some deadbeats at the store, it’s true. And I did spend some of each day leaning on counters and fixtures, chatting with colleagues, sometimes with customers. But unmistakable loafing accounted for a small fraction of my workday. I suspect I robbed my employer’s time considerably less than did the average American worker. Then as now I showed little ambition, but not because I was merely lazy. I realize that already in these pages I’ve twice denied laziness; the reader is free to interpret my repeated denials in the conventional way. I nonetheless want to stress that the full-time keyholder position wasn’t a slack job, or at least I didn’t treat it as if it were: standing for nine hours (minus a thirty-minute unpaid break); arguing the store’s return policy, stricter and more mistrusting at our location than it was at most of the chain’s suburban stores; stocking and restocking; tagging and postering; alphabetizing and categorizing; finding remote new homes for our white security bandages; correcting the mistakes of the sloppier part-timers; hounding shoplifters; ignoring generally correct accusations of retail racism, sometimes most fervently articulated by boys and men in parkas that looked like relief sculptures of portable CD players; chasing the more hapless, alarm-sounding shoplifters through the alley, blurring past the blue dumpsters so often bulging with and expectorating trash from the movie theater (now closed), the costume shop (also closed), the magazine shop (closed), the strip club (still going), giving chase sometimes all the way into the flagship of Minneapolis’s leading department store (closed—I’ll stop this now; it’s hardly worth noting that businesses close), chasing because the chase was proverbially thrilling and because to return to the store with re- and slush-covered merchandise in hand was to return a hero, a comic hero, and indeed some of the less indoctrinated part-timers, which is to say all of them, would laugh, smile, or shake their heads at those of us who were willing to risk, in the interest of a few nine-dollar cassettes ($9.62 with tax), being stabbed with a Swiss Army corkscrew behind a strip-club dumpster (I’m fabricating; nothing so violent or ignominious ever went down, though one time a crying prepubescent essayed a pathos-rich uppercut in the general direction of my chin before dropping the goods in a puddle and disappearing around the corner)—all this conflict and tedium and tedious conflict amounted to something more taut than slack, and sometimes, for instance while riding the bus home to Wanda and suddenly Wade, I lamented my decision to be so quickly kicked out of our enormous, bacon-eyed state university.

T
HAT FIRST EVENING (AND SECOND NIGHT) OF WADE’S stay with Wanda and me, when I climbed with tired legs and eyes up to our third-floor apartment, I heard Pat Metheny’s
Bright Size Life
playing through our door at a volume perhaps beyond the bounds of neighborliness, though Metheny’s music, with the possible exception of
Zero Tolerance for Silence,
which hadn’t been released yet, is neither in itself nor socioculturally the sort to goad fretful calls to the police. The music, at any rate, was loud enough to cover the sound of my opening and closing the door.

The apartment was cozier than it had ever been since Wanda and I began our tenancy about a year earlier. We didn’t trouble ourselves much with décor and atmospherics, so this isn’t saying much, but we did trouble a little, so it is saying something. One late-spring Saturday shortly after we moved in, for instance, we took a walk and wandered into an estate sale at a long-neglected Queen Anne–style house, where we bought a pastel rag rug and two unsigned oil paintings (a daub of an Ayrshire cow, a seascape not unlike one of Courbet’s elegant toss-offs). For the walk home, we hoisted the heavy rolled-up rug over our shoulders and each tucked a painting under a free arm. Before long we had to rest, using the rug as a log bench. I rubbed and rotated my neck; soon Wanda took over rubbing, and we smiled at each other because the neck’s soreness was cunnilingual. Cottonwood inflorescence and a pleasant breeze were making the city a snow globe (I collect them), and I believe I made Wanda laugh by catching some of the fluff on my tongue. At another point along the walk home, both of us, almost at the same time, noticed a smell coming from the rug, a subtle but nagging urinous smell, entirely resistant, the coming weeks proved, to various nonprofessional cleaning products and techniques. The urine, Wanda insisted from the moment we first smelled it to the moment she hefted the rug into a dumpster, was human. Feline, I suspected. She propped the paintings against the same dumpster, because she could no longer enjoy them aloofly or ironically, she said, having envisioned the deceased’s solitary, incontinent final years of endless television, the blue light gleaming through the window at indifferent neighbors. (Last night I walked by a house whose living room was TV-lit in flashes of all the primary colors, and maybe some nonprimary ones too. Do the new TVs offer more heterogeneous window light to passersby, or has blue’s dominance been overstated?) Also during our first months in the apartment, Wanda and I (I really) often lit candles from a package I’d bought one payday at a grocery store. After this supply ran out, though, we normally dwelt in bright overhead light, either because it was easier to flick one switch—or, sometimes, push one (the living-room overhead was operated by two resistant buttons, not a toggle switch)—than to spend several seconds fishing under our askew lampshades, or (we dwelt that way) for other reasons, such as Wanda’s preference for sex in the sharpest, least flattering light available.

But as you may have deduced from the above use of the word
cozy,
the living room’s overhead light was off when I walked into the apartment that first evening of Wade’s stay. He had bought a package of red dinner candles, had jammed four or five of them into our tritely bohemian wine-bottle holders, caked with piebald wax, had jammed another four or five into unfamiliar wine bottles probably scavenged from recycling tubs. The bottles were ingeniously diffused throughout the living and dining rooms: on speakers and tables, on the TV and the floor, on Wade’s record boxes and our small bookshelf; the light balance was perfect, I thought. Our two living-room lamps (one a twin-goosenecked floor lamp with megaphonic shades, the other intending to look like Hank Williams) were on, but Wade had swapped their abrasive light bulbs for softer versions (“glow pears,” he called them). Incense was burning. The whole room was yellow with red accents, cavelike and warm, warm figuratively—literally it was hot: the apartment’s radiators overtaxed themselves in fall and winter; October through March we walked around in T-shirts and unbuttoned pajama tops, shed much nocturnal blood through our noses.

Wanda: “Part of it’s just run-of-the-mill ironizing, but really I’m working with entitlement, appropriation, displacement, trying to interrogate who owns these jokes.” She was sitting at the Formica table explaining her work to Wade, who was preparing a mostly premade pizza in our tunnel-like kitchen. They greeted me and she carried on. She nearly had to shout over the music, but she had a strong, performer’s voice. For money, she answered phones for a catalog run by the public radio station, taking orders for jocular sweatshirts and Garrison Keillor cassettes, but mainly she was a cover comic, collage comedian, or conceptual stand-up. She performed under the name Shucks Miller and built routines out of old jokes by Sid Caesar, Cap Dolen, Herbie Dodd, Henny Youngman, Harry Kobinz, Robert Klein, Gabe Kaplan, Richard Pryor, Morris Wohl, Lenny Bruce, Blowfly, Barry Greer, Rodney Dangerfield, Futz Kruger, Alan King, Nat Davis, David Brenner, Jimmie Nichols, Woody Allen, Mort Sahl, Russell Jones, David Steinberg, Dick Gregory, Don Rickles, Bob Hope, and others, plus anonymous jokes from out-of-print anthologies, jokes from allergenic back-issues of
Playboy, Passages,
and
Reader’s Digest,
jokes from the squarest daily comic strips (Mort Walker, Harry Scott, Dik Browne, Bil Keane, Ted McKinley, Cathy Guisewite), these last especially awkward to cover since Wanda would have to describe the drawings as well as recite the bubbles of thought and speech: “So this youngish yet frumpy woman is standing glum-faced in a dressing room, all manner of bathing suits tossed higgledy-piggledy around her …” It was stock postmodern shtick, unserious, many would argue, but Wanda was serious about it, tried to use the method as a path to something larger. She spent a lot of time in the library, sometimes eleven or twelve consecutive hours, listening to old records under big beige headphones, poring over joke books, filling her notebook. When she got home, her ears were often still sweaty, her fingertips still dusty, and I’d kiss or lick them to reward her labor. She had several cardboard fruit boxes filled with notebooks, themselves filled with jokes she’d considered promising enough to write down, but almost all of these jokes she ultimately rejected. The second stage of keepers she wrote out on cards taken from a board game, fairly large cards (5½ x 3¾ inches), the kind that can only be read through a tinted viewer, though of course Wanda’s felt-tip writing could be read without the viewer. When planning a set, she would obsessively arrange and rearrange the cards in arcs and other potentially engrossing shapes on our scratched hardwood living-room floor, making it tricky to walk around without disturbing her provisional outline. “How much longer about do you think these will be on the floor?” I’d say. And she’d say, “Someday I’ll have an atelier for this shit, but for now we’ll just have to embrace the obstacle-course thing.” She used words like
atelier
aggressively, I thought at the time, to stress that she was smarter or at least better-read than I was, but now I think she took more pleasure from the words themselves than from the humbling effect they may have had on me.