the Spring Chickens (part one)

I worked in a bookstore for six months after I graduated college, gathering experience that I would need if I ever tried to fulfill my lifelong dream of opening one of my own. It was one of those ubiquitous mall bookstores that make it virtually impossible for an independently owned mom&pop shop to compete without drastically raising their prices.

At first I was elated, but it didn't take long for the luster to tarnish. I was hired as a key-holder, and the tasks required of my position were depressingly similar to any job that payed slightly above minimum wage. A well-trained monkey could have performed my duties with ease; I was one step above the guy who puts the fry bag on the fry scooper at McDonalds. I used to spend my days shelving books while forming sociological theories from the habits and attitudes of the customers.

For instance, I've come to believe that Romance novels are the opiate of the sexually unsatisfied woman, while Science Fiction serves the same function for sexually deprived men. Since Romance and Sci-Fi seem to be cut from the same, celibate cloth, I suggested moving their sections side by side instead of keeping them on opposite sides of the store. Jeanna, my manager, said that keeping them lonely meant keeping them reading, and it was hard to argue that point. Still, I had many daydreams about inter-stellar amour occurring in my bookstore, where the corpulent slug with the Battlestar Galactica t-shirt summons the courage to ask out the shy girl with poor fashion taste buying the mass market paperback of "The Love Whistle." That kind of matchmaking would make my day worthwhile.

The only other validation of my job was selling the rare piece of good literary fiction. For every hundred copies of "Love Bunion" or whatever novel Nora Roberts churned out that month, I'd sell a single copy of "Anna Karenina" or "East of Eden." The really great days were when I would actually convince a customer to buy a good book, like Tom Robbins' "Still Life With Woodpecker," instead of just ringing it up at the register. But I could count those days on one hand, whereas most shifts were spent peddling copy after copy of the latest concocted nuclear or biological threat to America, or something along the lines of "The Viking Pool Cleaner."

Working at a bookstore also showed me how important it is to get along with your co-workers. In my case, when I started working there I loved my job, but had absolutely nothing in common with anyone else who worked there. I was surrounded by books, but I was also surrounded by old women. The youngest employee besides myself was Ruth, or "Sweet Baby," as the old men at the Elks Club called her. She was fifty-eight, and had the thickest southern-drawl I'd ever heard. Then there was Abby, who despite her age and matronly demeanor, could drink me under the table and had a predilection for curse words that would make a sailor blush. Jeanna, the manager and unofficial leader of this motley geriatric posse, was also the oldest at seventy-three.

They accepted me as a mascot of sorts, sending me on missions to the pharmacy for Metamucil and Ensure, and while the conversations never concerned anything that I could contribute to, they never made any attempt to exclude me, either. After a few months of working there, I knew more about osteoporosis than any twenty-three year old man should ever have to know. Since I was working six days a week and had only moved to Wilmington a few weeks before I was hired, the "Spring Chickens" became my social clique, and they proved to be no less fun or danger-seeking than any fraternity at Chapel Hill.