johnozed

Well this has been quite a day from hell. Once again it started last night, not a good night of sleep which carried over into today. I was pretty tried and when I went to bed, Bill still wasn’t home.

A melatonin helped a bit and by the time I started drifting off to sleep Bill had come home. It wasn’t easy falling asleep after that despite some tossing and turning. Some sleep was had but not nearly enough.

I was hoping that Bill would have been home when I arrived since I wanted to share the rare good mood I happened to be in. It seems I just get really messed up in the head when I am alone. And last night I was alone for too long.

Bill apparently met up with his friend Fred after bringing his mother back from the beauty parlor. Fred gave Bill a brandy warmer shaped like a skier to give to me, as well as a snifter.

I suppose it would be nice if I drank brandy, or drank anything really. Perhaps life would be so much better if I was an alcoholic. They seem to have all the fun and some of them turned out to be pretty good writers, up to a point.

It was a day where I would have preferred to have been left alone on my lunch hour but no, the odd customer finds me and proceeds to talk to me about U2 living in his building.

He was also impressed to see me reading a book, telling me he was donating about 250 books to the United Nations. I was hoping that he would not offer me any books. And he didn’t so that worked out well.

I started reading ‘Our Band Can Be Your Life’ by Michael Azerrad. It’s all about the underground indie scene in the 1980’s. It was definitely what I needed to read to jump start my day, only a few hours late which by the way is so punk.

I also made the mistake of playing music that I wanted to hear since Calvin was out. It’s just Bradley and Thomas and I today so I played Sandinista which turned out to be too much for the lunk heads in the man cave.

The lunk heads were vocal enough to complain so I gave the controls to Bradley who proceeded to play only the very best narcoleptic jazz music. When I came back from my lunch hour it was still playing and I realized that jazz is the silliest music around, at least in the cigar shack.

And even though I was reading about how Greg Ginn enjoyed jazz (as well as thinking the Grateful Dead were the best band ever) it still leaves me quite cold. I should have gotten it by now, but it just alienates me more and more when I hear it.

Right now, I am just looking forward to going home and seeing Bill and having a day off tomorrow. And it’s off to the bibliothèque for me tomorrow.

Glad to be home, Bill is making noise a few feet behind me. It’s been a long day and a few times I stared into the abyss. Bill was great, listening to me on the phone and greeting me when I walked through the door with a great big hug.

I am so happy to be off tomorrow. This retail world is grinding me down. You might think that after a year it would get better, but it hasn’t. Still I hang in there. There are people that don’t have a job and there are people with worse jobs than mine.

Tons of spam subscribers every day, a good portion spent deleting each and every name. Are you one of them?

Getting started somewhat. At work in the cigar shack, the shake up continues. No shakedown though. Calvin seems apprehensive about the future, worried about there being a drop in sales when he assumes control.

I tried to reassure him that it shouldn’t happen that way, but also to keep in mind that the summer is coming up and that is usually a slow slow time for us in the cigar business as well as retail in most places except for air conditioner sales and pools.

He just left to head home to the wife and kid leaving Thomas and me to run things. Thomas is as straight as Six O’clock and it seems that a few guys find him to be eye candy.

Like right now, this gent in a red Stanford windbreaker seems to be devouring him with his eyes. He seems to be a born salesman that Thomas is, so whatever it takes to close the deal he will more than likely do.

A few old customers came in today and hung out for a few hours. Was not expecting that, we (Calvin & I) figured that they were boycotting the cigar shack and wouldn’t be around anymore.

Then yesterday a fairly famous cigar magazine released the news that Marcus was leaving the cigar shack for a cigar hut. That news brought out congratulations from a lot of customers (but still not the brain dead Bradley) and the news also seemed to finish off whatever boycott might have been in the works.

So there is a change in the air and with the wind blowing for the next couple of days, maybe weeks, we won’t see how things are settled until then.

Well now I’ve written almost 300 words so I guess I will stop here and finish when I get home. Hopefully Bill will be awake and feeling better. He came home this morning, looking like and feeling like crap. He went right to bed as I would have done if I was in his shoes.

Now I am home, Bill is awake and watching stand up comedy on TV. His old friend and former crush sent him a postcard which to Bill is cool. I merely carried it up four flights of stairs, didn’t read it since it was not addressed to me. I’m sure the postman read it.

Last night I watched ‘Something Wild’ which I hadn’t seen in a while. It’s a good movie, not great though it is funny to see the Feelies playing the high school reunion band. I bunch of people from Maxwells went to see it when it first came out.

Somebody had to work at Maxwells that night so I didn’t go. I remember that I was working at Friedman, Alpren & Green at the time and an elderly secretary saw it the first weekend and expressed her disappointment with the violence that comes out in the second half of the movie, when Ray Liotta make his appearance. He was scarier in that than he was in Goodfellas.

That’s about all that I have to write about tonight. Off tomorrow, not writing. Have a good one, smell ya later.


Greg, all of your comments go directly into the spam folder. Weep no more, you ‘control’. Good luck getting things straight.

Back to work for me today and I was reprimanded soon after I came in. Thanks to the inept management and with my less than satisfactory training I messed up. I could not reconcile the credit card machine and the register.

I did try a few times but I eventually gave up due to mental fatigue. They also did not appreciate the fact that I’ve been leaving the cigar shack at 9:15 instead of 9:30. Hundreds of times I’ve closed the registers and reconciled both machine and register with no problems, but once or twice and I get into big trouble.

They claim they have scheduled me to work until 9:30 ‘to execute proper and accurate closing procedure. The extra ½ hr. is meant to give you enough time to close the cash drawer and accurately count the night’s deposit.’

So even though 99% of the time it goes smoothly and I have completed the day’s work by 9:10 now I will have to stay there for another 20 minutes and do what? Clean the glass and windows that have been cleaned throughout the day over and over, and then cleaned again by the cleaning woman?

Apparently I will have to find something to do. So no more bus riding with Hyman Gross on the way home. And leave it to me, I left tonight at 9:15 out of habit. Totally forgot the reprimand and the memo. Everything matched up anyhow. I might hear something about it tomorrow, or somewhere down the line.

Marcus and Calvin are two of a kind, with Marcus holding the leash and Calvin barking when commanded. A situation like this could have been handled in a much better manner, that is if there were competent managers running the show, but there isn’t. It’s just Calvin & Marcus. Marcus & Calvin.

I guess despite Calvin behaving like he’s a friend, he’s not. Despite him always asking if I think is this one gay. Is that one gay? Do I think Mike is gay? How about Jason? Nelson? Or any of the former regular customers who no longer frequent the cigar shack?

For a married man with a kid Calvin focuses more on gay life than I do and I’m gay. That’s why it doesn’t bother me that much (it does but I have to get over it) when Calvin poaches customers, or any other underhanded tactics he uses. He’s married with a kid and has a family to support on the hourly wages of a cigar sales clerk.

It can’t be easy. It’s not easy for me, but I do not have the same onus, and also I have Bill who keeps telling me he has my back and I know that he does.

So yeah, this is the place where a week or so ago, I erroneously wrote that I felt I was fitting in, accepting the situation that I find in from of me.

And like the conversation with Lovely Rita on the phone some time back, ‘You work retail, you really start to really hate people. And it’s not just the customers that you hate. It’s the people you work with, it’s the people you work for, it’s the people you see on the street, the people you ride the subway with, and the people you ride the bus with.’

I used to think of myself as a people person. Not so much these days.

It reminds me of that Arianna Sabatoni or known back then as Felicia of the McMann & Tate company, when Calvin and Marcus drunkenly told me how disappointed they were when they found out I was not the same person they interviewed in May of last year, Arianna said the same thing a week or so after I started.

Of course, a chick prone to riding the rails, a boozer that sneaks drinks and a dandy in love with himself aren’t really the best people to judge other people’s lives, wouldn’t you say?