One year, when I gave up on university before it gave up on me, I made a last ditch effort to climb the hill and instead of going to class I studied the wall at Student Job Search, saw a piece of paper with a listing for a bookstore job. I’d always wanted one of those. So I took up the slip and registered. I aced the interview. And that was me. The new me. A worker. I’d pop down The Terrace and onto Lambton Quay and report for duty. It wasn’t a ‘great’ bookshop. But it did have books. And books are great. I found a few new favourites. But mostly we sold magazines and cards and last-minute gifts. And the books we did sell were filled with pictures and recipes or were signed by All Blacks.
One day I turned up there and the store’s owner – a grumpy cliché – was furious to find that this store was soaked. Someone had left a firehose running overnight and it had leaked through the ceiling tiles and saturated many of the cards and their envelopes. Not many books were water-damaged but the carpet was soaked. I told the boss I was sorry. And he said, “never mind that, the real fucker in all of this is the insurance won’t yet cover it. Help me push a few things over”. I thought it was a strange, dark joke. So I did my best laugh – but he looked angrily at me, as is to say we had some real work to do. And he lunged mightily at one of those rotating towers of trinkets and cards. Into the drink! Then he pushed another. “Well come on!” he bellowed.
I didn’t feel comfortable shoving anything into the water so I made out I was doing other important things – we had to get the store ready to open still. So I found a broom and swept a few puddles out of the way of the door. I told him I would get the float counted (haha, float). And start sorting out the backroom.
It was a weird day.
And then at morning tea time, Angry Boss walked past me and dumped a handful of these grotesque soft-toy frogs into the kitchen sink. He turned on the tap and ran them a cold bath.
As I made my cuppa from the zip he said, “Hey matey, you mind turning over my frogs”. And he laughed a great deal. Like he was finding new ways to fuck with the system man. This flood had provided him with an opportunity.
I worked with a woman who drove in from Lower Hutt every day with her two daughters. Which is to say I worked with all three of them. The youngest daughter was about 16 I reckon. The older one was about 19. They all smoked. Shared the same pack, and would take turns going out for a dart. None of them read. Apart from the magazines. The youngest was quite chatty and reckoned it was a great job, way better than school. Her favourite thing was ripping the covers off magazines that didn’t sell. She got to keep the back bit of the magazine. Which counted as reading. And sometimes she’d rip an extra cover or two off so she could keep those as well.
I did my best to get as involved as I could. I made a couple of up-sales, did my recommends. Managed to have a decent ‘book’ chat once a day on average. Nothing like the dozens of great book-chats I’d have in the two other bookstore jobs I would go on to have. But you got to start somewhere. And this is where I started.
But I couldn’t stay long. If the frogs and the insurance ‘top-up’ wasn’t enough. If the same pack of smokes being torn through every two days by three cackling non-readers wasn’t a grind, then it all got to be too much when Angry Boss removed me from the store and sent me upstairs to run his “Christmas Pop-Up Shop”.
He told me, outright, that “the girls” were good for business. They “looked good”. I “did not”. So I was better placed away from the main store and upstairs to take money off people that were never in need of any guidance – beyond a simple finger-point towards more ribbon or the different types of wrapping paper.
And if I thought I was above all that water-damage – literally on the next level – I was still guilty by association; Angry Boss was grabbing armfuls of things from ‘my’ store and taking them down the escalator to chuck into his puddle.
I would buy a crate of beer in the weekend and have a tall bottle each night after work, the rest over Friday and Saturday. It was an okay life. I was writing as much as I could at night. And I felt like I was actually doing something. Even though the job was getting worse each day.
Finally, I realised that Angry Boss was never going to get better, would never be calmer. Not with Christmas around the corner. He yelled at me in front of a customer once. Got the wrong end of the stick and blamed me for something someone else had done (or actually, hadn’t done as it were). The customer apologised to me after Angry Boss raged out. That shouldn’t ever happen.
On the 23rd of December I left my shift, after after being yelled at by the boss – and in front of customers. I stayed back for five extra minutes, found a spot to hide and construct a brief, handwritten resignation. Saying that it was effective immediately. I mean I was basically walking out. But I figured if I stated that it would bind in some way.
I stuffed the messily written note in one of the spare envelopes from the cards. I stashed it on his desk, sticking out so he might see it, but also might not see it straightaway. I needed time to do a casual walk out – like it was just any other shift and not also the final shift. He’d find out after I was gone that I was gone. I was doing a runner on the eve of Christmas Eve. Finishing up and leaving him in the lurch before the busiest day of the year. I knew I was a bit of a jerk for this. But I had reconciled that he was a way bigger jerk. So. There.
No way was this bookworm going to be flippin’ frogs in the sink in between serving scowling people with no patience, stressed to be in a line to get last-minute knickknacks and black-covered novelisations.
I turned the corner outside the store. And I started to run. Just in case, really. But also because I was chasing after something that felt super earned. Freedom. Freedom. I almost screamed it. And when I made it home to the flat I put a George Benson record on, used a fish-slice to un-cap a beer and nursed it in front of my stereo. I rang one of my mates and had a fucking good laugh.
PostScript to this story…
I’ve never left Wellington. I moved her to be a student, and found a home — eventually a degree. In the opposite order of the way most go about it. The bookstore where this story takes place is no longer standing, but I walk past the scene of the crime most days now, on the way to ‘grown up’ work.
The statute of limitations is well past, eh.
I was struggling to concentrate at uni, so I took a full-time job in this store, and that was my life for a while. At home, I’d write poems, and this is when I started writing short stories too. I wrote a bunch of them — the same George Benson album (above) made an appearance in another (completely fictional) short story. God knows why that was a favourite? But it is a great wee record.
I was also taking it very seriously that I had a ‘gig’ writing music reviews for New Zealand Musician, and I’d started my column for the Capital Times where I’d eventually just start making up the names of fake-bands to write about. But that’s arguably another story…
It was a pretty great summer, but it was pretty bad too. Things would eventually get better. Of course. But before then, they only got worse..
Let me know if you like this sort of thing, with the audio version of the story as an option sometimes.
A couple of years ago I recorded a few of these stories, with crude musical backing, and released an album or two on Bandcamp under the name Second Storey Teller.
Audio + Typed Short Story: Not Much Of A Bookstore Job