(This is not what the store I worked in looked like - but it's close. Image from here.)
This is the time of year when my birthday appears, & when that happens, I revisit a year of my life. This year I've made it up to 1987, & I'll play on the show some of my favorite music of 1987. On the blog here, I'll talk about my life. What I can remember of it.
In January of 1987 I turned 19 years old. I finished my first year of college. I wasn't a happy person & didn't really have much love in my life - there was a person whom I thought of as my best friend, but mostly he treated me with condescension & contempt. Most of that year we lived apart so I didn't see him much. I wish he had stopped talking to me but alas he wasn't through using my kindness yet.
What I wanted to talk about here though was 7-11. Yes, the convenience store. Because my father had worked for the Southland corporation, I was able to win a scholarship from them. I naïvely thought I might get a summer job with them in their Dallas corporate offices. They told me they'd gladly hire me - to work at one of their stores.
The store I worked at no longer exists. It was in a triangular patch of land where South First Street ran into Broadway Boulevard. This is what's there now (looking southeast from First Street):
The building behind the Auto Zone - which used to be across the parking lot from the 7-11 - is now owned by Verizon, but it used to be a Bell Telephone place. People worked there all night long - they often came over to get coffee & candy bars.
It wasn't a bad job & I didn't have a car so I didn't do much that summer. I have three anecdotes about my time working at 7-11 in the summer of 1987.
For training, I had to borrow my sister's car, which was an old red Subaru with a stick shift. I had to drive it into Dallas at some special 7-11 with little room for training in the back. The people I trained with did not like me. I think when I mentioned I was home from college, they thought I was boasting or something. One of them was particularly nasty to me. I remember she was extolling the virtues of renting-to-own, something my family didn't really do because we were too poor for even that. I was curious about it. I asked her how much she paid for her television or something. I asked how long she would be paying it. Then I asked what an average television costs. It was discovered she would own the television after paying more than three times what it was worth. I said, "Wouldn't it be smarter to save the money & then buy the television at a store?" She said, "Shut the fuck up, college boy."
One day I gave a ride home to one of the fellow trainees. She was young & pretty & I had no chance with her. I was a bit more hopeful then, I thought maybe I could charm her anyway. She lived in Oak Cliff, opposite the direction I would take to get home. When I got back to my sister's, they were furious with me. But the upside was, driving in Dallas traffic helped me learn how to use a standard or manual transmission. There were moments when getting out of first gear was life or death - I remember being in the middle of an intersection & thinking to myself, "Boy! Don't you wish you believed in some kind of god to ask for help now!"
Just as I started the job, I injured myself. A classmate named William - who would become my roommate for my second year of college - asked me if, while his family visited relatives, I would watch their dog. He assured me that I could go there twice a day, feed the dog, let it out, & it would be fine. I said yes because I am chronically nice. So I went in the evening before work, & visited after work. It became very clear the poor dog was lonely & also unable to wait for me to let it out. I found myself having to clean dog shit off the floors & carpets. I don't know how long it was before it happened, but one morning, very exhausted, I tried desperately to get the dog to go outside & do his business. I hopped around the backyard then tripped myself on a tree root growing out of the ground. I sprained my ankle pretty bad - the pain was unbearable. The dog just wanted to be loved, it was so lonely.
I managed to make it back to my sister's - it was her car I was using. The foot I sprained was my left one - you know, the one you use for the clutch. I was weeping openly because it hurt so much to change gears. To help me deal with the pain, I turned the music in the car up as loud as possible & shrieked along. I remember just hollering the Smiths' "Rubber Ring" as I made my way back to my sister's**. When I got there, she looked at my ankle, which had swollen to the size of a melon. At one point I appeared to pass out in the chair. When I came to, I said, "I think I fainted."
"No," my sister said, "you went into shock."
But I survived - I rode in my first ambulance, I believe - but the worst part was my mother "taking care" of me at home for two weeks. She meant well but boy did she complain about all the sad music I was listening to.
Finally, I was able to work at 7-11, probably starting in late May or early June. Garland at the time was dry, meaning you couldn't buy alcohol beverages anywhere, & 7-11 had phased out the mainstream pornographic magazines because of pressure from the religious right. We didn't even have a hot dog or nacho set-up. People mainly came in for soda, coffee, or cigarettes. Cigarettes were the biggest business.
There were many tasks to do & mainly the night was quiet, but usually lots of folks would show up around 2am, after the bars closed in Dallas. One such night there was a flurry of activity & when the last person left the store I remember feeling like there should be someone there. You get a sense for these things. But there was no one else in the store, so I continued doing my work, at one point going into the back room where I saw that a trash bag I had recently replaced had somehow fallen into the trash can. I sighed at my shoddy work & made a mental note to fix it later - I was probably restocking shelves.
When another group of people came in, a fellow emerged from the back room with a giant trash bag full of what I later found out were cartons of cigarette. I said "Hey!" but he strode calmly, quickly, to the front door, & once outside, ran to the left. I followed him & even got a license plate number but later got yelled at for doing so. We were to never put ourselves in danger. My young manager, who was a Southland executive whose own training involved managing a group of stores in a region before he went on to I guess was more administrative work, told me later that the car had been stolen***.
That manager liked me & was disappointed when I went back to college. I wish I had learned my lesson & just stayed in Austin for the summer, but I would repeat that mistake the next year.
Memories of 1987 are a jumble for me. These stories I tell won't be in chronological order. But I suspect I've bored you enough for today.
* It's a dumb thing to remember, but I know it was a beauty store - maybe even a salon - because before I left I went over to ask if they had any extra old posters that advertising products you can only buy in a beauty shop, with close-ups of woman's heads. I somehow thought it would be cool to decorate my apartment in Austin with those posters. They did not have any extras.
** Imagine, Bob Dylan recently said that music never saved anyone's life!
*** I wonder where he was in the back room when I came in & noticed the trash bag - which was probably full of cartons of cigarettes. Would he have assaulted me if I noticed? Was I lucky I blamed myself & had other things to do?
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