shrinked
chapter 25
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During my time at school, I slowly understood that business, as a major discipline, didn’t really mean anything. There were classes in business law, marketing, merchandising, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and whatever else, but if there was something that it truly entailed, I discovered that thing was, essentially: networking. In those days, LinkedIn was king. It was all about crafting your personal narrative and spewing whatever word soup of buzzwords you could into your bio, or else reducing yourself to seven few-word sentences. (Mine, as part of a career-building class called ‘Navigating the Modern Job Market’, I figured out were: ‘Friendly. Deep-thinking. Innovator. Avid reader. Music-lover. Aspiring dog dad and soccer player.’) This also involved attending mixers and networking events, at which everyone seemed to want to be called ‘sales strategists’ or ‘product owners’ or, the dirtiest of words, ‘entrepreneurs.’
None of this fit me in the slightest. I didn’t join a business club, I didn’t create a LinkedIn, and I definitely didn’t go to any mixers. Although I got good grades, I discovered that most jobs I would be applying to in the ‘business’ context had the words ‘outgoing’ or ‘extrovert’ as desired personality traits for their ideal candidates, and these are antonymic to those describing me.
When I graduated from SUNY Livingston, in some ways I was less well-off than Tommy the dropout. I had a degree, but it was one I didn’t want, and I had considerable student debt, whereas Tommy had none, courtesy of his parents.
As for our old friends: The last I heard, my old girlfriend, Cynthia, had bravely switched her major to ‘Media Communications,’ transferred to USC in California, and was living out there on an internship with CBS. Danveer went to live with his boyfriend in western Massachusetts while he was getting his Master’s degree. Emma had been avoiding me, but I could glean from social media that she had moved to the Washington DC area permanently post-college and had some kind of job I couldn’t quite identify. All three of these routes could be considered a virtuous path simply because they took them outside Veddersburgh.
Tommy and I were alone but for each other, and still at home, still gestating, still embryonic, unable to participate in all the adult adventures we thought we were supposed to be embarking upon.
My girlfriend, Tommy’s cousin Maggie Goodspeed, was very aware of my predicament and every day I endured her relentless reevaluations of my choices thus far and what my options were. She was still in college, a senior, but where would we live when she graduated? That was her main preoccupation and the question she repeated to me every day, on every car ride and in nearly each of her numerous text messages, which arrived all day and never ended, not even when I was at work. I couldn’t wrap my head around how she felt so entitled to a choice of where she would live. Wouldn’t that be determined by where she found a job and nothing else?
When I’d go to Albany to visit her, we always had to go out to the clubs. She was never content to just stay in and watch a movie as I was, and therefore we always drank, and her friends drank heavily, so when we’d return to her dorm we would get into drunken fights about what I would do, what my plan would be if she wanted to move to Charlotte, or Tampa Bay, or Phoenix, or Charleston, or some other trendy Sun Belt city, and my answer was always something akin to ‘I don’t know!’ which was apparently not good enough.
Perhaps prompted by Maggie’s father (his brother) to try and encourage some form of direction, Mr. Goodspeed presented a solution to me one day after work when he called me to his office.
“Have you given thought to management, Jude?” he asked me from behind his functional, metal desk.
“Sure,” I said. I had not. “You mean, like, here? At The Big T?”
“Yeah, why not?” he asked. “I think you’d be good at it. I mean, you went to school for business, after all.”
There was absolutely no indication in my job performance in the meat room that I would be a good manager. I frequently made mistakes, showed up for the wrong shift, and was a slow worker pace-wise, as lost as I always was in my thoughts. My business degree had taught me nothing that would prepare me for whatever being a manager at a grocery store entailed.
“You’re trustworthy, smart, dependable. People like you, Jude,” he said. Perhaps all these things were true, but I didn’t see how they applied to management. “I’ll tell you what. I think pretty soon, our produce manager is going to leave. All you need to do to be produce manager is know how to place a good order. That’s what the produce department is: the order. It’s everything. You just need to make sure you order enough not to run out, but not so much that you have a lot of shrink. If you can learn to do that before he leaves, we can consider giving you the job.”
I knew the produce manager. It was some older guy named Jeb Brown who used to be Amish but excommunicated himself and now drove a Ford F-150 truck and collected license plates. I didn’t know why he would be leaving. It was the first I’d heard of it.
“What’s shrink? And how do I learn to do the order?” I asked.
“Shrink is just old shit you gotta throw out. It’s waste. If you learn to do the order well enough, you’ll minimize shrink. And you’ll learn the only way to learn anything: do it,” he said. “I’ll talk to your manager. How about any time you come in for the 5 AM shift, we have you do the produce order before you start your meat room stuff?”
I agreed, if only because, like his son, I found Mr. Goodspeed hard to turn down. He had a way of making you feel special.
I told Maggie about the offer in the next of our marathon calls. The calls lasted all evening and were eighty percent us listening to each other breathing as I read while she scrolled through social media on her phone.
“Oh my God, Jude, that’s great! If you could get that, you could make more money and maybe you could save up so that when we move you have some savings. And plus, then you’ll be a manager, so like, you’ll have that experience, and you could maybe find something really good!” she said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I could almost hear her open-mouthed annoyance with that response.
“You don’t sound excited.”
“I mean, I’m not.”
“Why not, this is good for us.”
“But is it good for me? I mean, I don’t really think I ever envisioned myself in grocery middle management.”
“You say this shit all the time, but you never say what exactly it is you envision for yourself, Jude,” she said.
I was too embarrassed to admit what I really wanted out of life. I knew, of course, that I wanted to be a writer, but also in a larger sense, I wanted the opposite of what people in high school wanted when they said: “I want something where I’m always going somewhere new and I don’t have to sit at a computer all day!” I could imagine no better job than one in which I stared at a computer all day either at an office or (preferably) at home and had to talk to absolutely no one the entire day. I couldn’t figure out what skills I needed to get a job like this, though, other than becoming a writer of novels or internet blogger or something, both of which were dreams too shameful to admit to anyone besides myself.
“I mean, does it matter?” I said, eager to pretend to go to bed, hang up, and instead stay up reading Summerland by Michael Chabon. “I’m going to do it, so don’t worry. I’ll start doing the orders, and maybe I’ll be produce manager someday.”
And thus, I achieved a minute sense of direction courtesy of The Big T Grocery.
In the meantime, Tommy, determined not to soil his hands at family business, had used his connections through Emma’s father, the honorable Judge Lightfoote (who had no resentment toward Tommy due to the breakup and/or was probably ignorant to Tommy’s treatment of his daughter), to procure a job working for the City of Veddersburgh Parks Department, which involved riding around in a truck all day with the Veddersburgh city logo on it and, as far as I could tell, not doing much of anything. The only tasks I’d ever see him performing around town were mowing lawns or watering flowers, and the only one he seemed to enjoy was picking up trash from the Whispering Pines park, which fell under the Parks Department’s purview.
At least he got to work in the sun. The meat room was cold. Even on the most brilliant days of summer I would have to wear jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, trudge through the boiling parking lot, and sequester myself into a vault of dead animals. I missed retrieving carts, but that was a dead end in terms of career-building.
The first time I came in early to help with the produce order, the assistant manager of the produce department, Marshawn, was supposed to help me.
“Why the fuck do I gotta do this?” he asked that morning, and I had to agree with him vis-à-vis the ridiculousness of it all.
He showed me how to do the order: First, you went in the back and counted what we had of everything and noted it on a spreadsheet on a clipboard. Then you cross-referenced what we had in the back with what we were expected to sell the next day based on the sales from that day last year. Then you ordered appropriately.
I was terrible at this for many reasons, but the first was that I had a hard time understanding what ‘appropriate’ meant in terms of the order. I would see that, for the same day the year before, sales were only eight-thousand, and therefore I would order a small load, only to realize that that day last year was actually a Friday. Saturday was one of the busier days, and by midday our cooler would be empty and Marshawn would be beset by questions about why we didn’t have any of the on-sale blueberries.
I would also fail to accurately count what we had. Counting the inventory encompassed the much wider and general task of retrieving the order from the trucking dock and bringing it to the cooler, an intensely physical task that involved the thighs and lower back in pulling the pallets with a hand jack down a narrow hallway canyon of stock shelves where even the slightest wrong move would result in ripped chip bags, spilled blueberries, or crushed toilet paper, all of which happened due to my volitions.
Marshawn was far better than me at this, having been a Marine and having all the discipline and physical integrity it took to do such tasks efficiently and while counting all the boxes, with time to spare. The order had a strict deadline for its submission, and by the time I was done putting the order from the day before away, I was so exhausted and harried for time that I could barely do the mental calculus (pineapples make up eight percent of department sales, and tomorrow we will do twenty thousand in sales, and there are six pineapples to a case, so how many pineapple cases do we need?) necessary.
According to Marshawn, I was producing record levels of shrink. Every day, a huge amount of our avocados went spoiled.
Then, after I put in the order for produce, I still had to do my normal work in the meat department. It was one of the most miserable periods of my life.
Meanwhile, Tommy and I had gotten our runs back up to about eight miles, with sub-nine-minute miles. The runs were the only respite for either of us, the only way to provide some sense of forward motion.
“Have you put any thought toward what you’re going to do?” I asked him one day, post-run. It was a climactic day because it was close to the time when both of us would have returned to school, and for the first time in our lives, our trajectories were untethered.
“I want to run a marathon, eventually,” he told me. “Like Pheidippides, I will bring the good news of victory.”
“I guess what I meant was, like, are you going to go back to school?”
Tommy looked down, hands on hips. He had on his Veddersburgh High School long-sleeved T-shirt. It used to be a darker shade of blue but had gone pale after so many times in the wash.
“My dad wants me to work at The Big T as well, Jude. No offense, but I can think of nothing more abhorrent. Besides, I like working for the city. It’s humble work which heals the spirit.”
“So, like, indefinitely? You’ll just work for the city and live at home…forever?” I asked. “You’re okay with that?”
“I’m not sure if I am okay with it or not. It is simply the way it is,” he told me.
Waldo came over and licked his hand and he kneeled to kiss the dog on the cheek and shower him with love.
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previous (dropout)