Misogyny is why we’re so deep in this mess so it’s fitting men die more
I’ve been thinking about this horrible job I had in high school. It was a small corner shop that had rows of magazines and paper back novels and sold drip coffee. I loved this place because it had copies of Vogue in in numerous languages (I think Italian, Russian, French ?), Art Magazines in sleeves (we lived over an hour from the nearest Borders I didn’t know magazines could come in sleeves), British music magazines I had read references to numerous times in print but had never seen. The summer between Junior and Senior year I was convinced I needed a job — I think so I could save money for college or have experience to work while in college or something and this was where I wanted to work. I did not have any idea what people did when they had jobs. I had seen teenagers with menial jobs on TV but they never showed the characters mopping a bathroom floor where someone had abandoned a soaking diaper.
Immediately after starting I learned no one who came into the store bought the foreign Vogues or NME or The Economist. During the morning we sold a lot of coffee and newspapers. During the days elderly customers bought lottery tickets. Men and women with limited English skills would go through hundreds of dollars worth of scratch off tickets in an afternoon. Anything they won would go back to more tickets. They did not scratch the tickets off to play the game — I personally love the feeling of scratching off a lottery ticket. They immediately scratched away the code and scanned it — like an automated system.
Another big item was cheap tobacco and rolling papers. We sold a lot of loose tobacco to men who could not afford cigarettes. The area was closed off by a separate door that would ring when opened. They always stole. Always. Some would walk through the door, steal, then immediately walk out. There was a camera and I was told not to do anything.
Lastly the store sold a lot of porn. Not so much Hustler or Playboy or any title you can think of (At least I hope). At this point the internet was new enough to be foreign to a lot of older men — and this was where they went to get the porn frowned upon at gas stations. I was a virgin with no sexual experience, not even mutual hand holding. To this day I have no idea what men are into, but at 17 I learned some of them are into pregnant and lactating women, “lesbian” porn, tying women up and hitting them with phones ( big red dial phones with chords) or phone books (it was called PUNISHMENT), legs seemingly detached from the rest of the woman, Women in their 50s and 60s, “barely legal” women (one such cover showed a picture of a blonde with the headline “today is her 18th birthday!), and small volumes that were too indecent to need photography, one I remember being dedicated to incest fantasies (Family Letters.)
One old man who looked so gross he was gross in a corner store selling porn mags and tobacco (so very gross) bought one of those barely legal magazines from me at the register. The weird thing was he acted like I wasn’t even there. There was no awkwardness or guilt or anything. Often the men buying the weirdest stuff would bury it in between the wall street journal and new york times. They would avoid eye contact. But this guy placed Barely Legal next to the register as if it were a cup of coffee. No hint of acknowledgement this should be mortifying for both of us. It was like I wasn’t even there. Could he only recognized what was splayed out explicitly in the magazine?
If first jobs come up in conversation I will mention working for the porn and tobacco store that fired me for getting my nose pierced (true.) It’s funny. It was a weird first job. There aren’t a lot of first jobs where you can learn some men furiously rub their penises thinking about hitting women with red vintage telephones while the chords wrap around their necks. Some guys are into that -you can never be sure any man you know isn’t.
At one point I was working there with a woman who is probably a little younger than I am now. She had a masters degree in something — English or History — at some point I must have asked her why she worked here if she had a masters degree — which is a super shitty thing to say but I was too stupid to know. I asked her what she wanted to do. She fucking hated me. I didn’t get it at the time but of course anyone who had spent six years in college would hate the fact that they work alongside a high school junior.
I drove past Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. Both had lines around the block to get in. Everyone standing, not quite six feet apart. I thought at least since I won’t be able to find a “real job” I could work at a grocery store. For one thing I would love to have the CMU design school’s admission site list “Trader Joe’s” “Cashier” on their graduate employment stats. I thought about how I would feel if I went to work with teenagers. I can’t believe I would be nice — I would try, I doubt I would succeed. It’s difficult to see someone who has so much life ahead of them when mine feels irredeemable. I wish I could remember the name of that woman I worked with. I could send her a Facebook message letting her know there was no need to have been angry with me — my life went so wrong in so many places, I was right behind her.
