I got in from school around three-thirty. At a quarter to four, the phone in the living room rings. “Oh shit,” I thought. As my mother moved to pick up the receiver, I shouted downstairs from the landing, “tell them I’m not home, Mom. Tell them I’m not home.” I knew who was on the phone. It was Rudy Bederman, the assistant manager at the A & P on Fifth Street, and I knew what he wanted. It was Thursday. I wasn’t supposed to work until the next day, Friday.
Somebody hadn’t shown up and they wanted me to fill in. I had nothing on my afternoon agenda other than walking over to Fairhill Street to hang out with the crowd at Geever’s candy store. My mother was not to be trusted in these matters. To impart a sense of urgency, I kept up my chant. “Mom! Mom! Tell them I’m not here.” Unfortunately, in the seconds that my mother hesitated with the receiver in her hand, Rudy Bederman heard me shouting that I wasn’t home.
When Bobby Mulford, a kid up the street, got drafted in the Spring of 1953, and gave his notice at the A & P, he told Charlie Watson, the manager, that I wanted a job there. The A & P supermarket on Fifth Street was, by the standards of the day, a supermarket. Actually, it wasn’t much bigger than the suburban super-convenience stores that have sprung up in the past few years. Bobby had worked in the produce department, but I was hired as a grocery clerk and told that if things worked out, I might be trained to run a register.
I was fifteen and not unhappy with my paper route. But I had begun to feel that delivering newspapers with the twelve and thirteen-year-olds was somehow demeaning. Even though I felt I had mastered the codes of teenage hoodlum posturing and costuming, how could I maintain my credibility if I was still a paperboy? So I came in out of the cold, and in out of the heat and the rain and the snow. I freed myself of the seven-day-a-week commitment that was the big downside of having a newspaper route. At the A & P, I went on a part-time, fifteen to twenty-hour-a-week work schedule, working Fridays after school until closing at nine, all day Saturday and two afternoons a week. At a then serious pay rate of seventy-five cents an hour, I grossed under fifteen dollars a week, which after deductions; taxes, social security and union dues, netted me about twelve bucks. That was about four dollars a week more than I made serving papers. On the numbers alone, it seemed a good move. I went in only four times a week and made half again what I was getting for tying up parts of every single day on a paper route. What I quickly learned, however, was that life is about more than numbers. I hated working at the A & P.
I had made a bad trade. Serving papers, I had been a free agent. I had been on my own. Eight times a week, I would walk the almost four miles of city streets – Six afternoons and Sunday mornings delivering papers and a couple of hours on Saturday mornings knocking on doors and ringing bells and buzzers to collect from my customers. I moved at my own pace and smoked whenever I damned well felt like it. Whenever I wanted, I stopped and talked with whomever I had happened to bump into. I stopped for sodas and to browse comic books in various corner stores. I daydreamed. I unconsciously participated in the changing seasons, getting rained on, slipping on ice-crusted steps and sidewalks, nearly collapsing under the weight of seventy or eighty fat Tuesday papers in plus ninety-degree heat.
The A & P, an entry-level introduction into the adult world of work, confirmed everything I suspected about being a grown up. Adults, it seemed, existed in a kind of voluntary form of mercenary penal servitude. They spent long hours under close supervision, faking it, having to look busy even when they weren’t. It was just like school only you had to pretend you were a willing participant. In exchange, you got paid, never enough, but not so little that you could do without it. A bad bargain, I concluded.
On a different level, my part-time job was my first interaction with grownups on anything like a peer level. Although I was still a kid, there were unstated rules of engagement. This is the real world, a workplace, not a hangout. If you didn’t want to do what was expected of you, if you didn’t pull your weight, there were no special considerations, no pleadings. If you didn’t want to accept the conditions of your employment, so be it. Goodbye. Having failed abjectly at high school, for reasons I still can’t adequately explain, I felt a sort of compulsion, if not to succeed or excel in a retail grocery career, then to at least stay the course and function on some kind of acceptable terms – Until something better came along.
On the day following the phone call from Rudy Bederman, a Friday afternoon, I pushed open the big front door of the store a full ten minutes before my starting time. It had been pointed out to me that a four p.m. start time meant being aproned and ready to work when you put your card in the time clock. You didn’t punch in and then go into the back room and get ready. As I headed past the four checkout counters, I heard one of the older lady checkers giggle, and then the kid bagging for her, Freddie Cadden, stage whispered, “tell them I’m not here, Mom.” As I passed the canned fruit and vegetable aisle where Tommy McLaughlin was stocking shelves, I heard it again this time loud enough to carry over to where the produce guys could pick it up. “Mom, tell them I’m not home,” rose in a chorus from behind the counters filled with potatoes and onions. The supercilious dairy guy, Walter, couldn’t bring himself to participate but smirked at me as I ducked into the darkened back room. As the door closed, I caught the start of a three part harmony rendition of “hey Mom, tell them I’m not…” from the singing butchers at the meat counter. Inside the back room, Rudy Bederman was waiting for me.
I didn’t get fired and I didn’t quit. I stayed on at the A& P for another two years, always a part-timer. After high school, there was some pressure both at home and at the store for me to go full time. I sensed that the summer between high school and my going into the Army just might be my last time of true freedom. I didn’t want to spend anymore of it in the A & P than I absolutely had to.
For twenty hours a week, a few more whenever they could catch me, I watched the clock. I stood out front cranking the long, striped awning up or down. I snuck smokes in the back room. I mopped up broken jars of pickles, pushed hand trucks loaded with bulky cases of toilet paper, or heavy with five-pound bags of sugar or flour, or cases of soda. I spent an eternity of afternoons stocking shelves with canned goods, stamping the price on each individual can; Ann Page Fruit Cocktail, three for forty-nine cents; Campbell’s Cream of Chicken, two for thirty-nine cents. Even more mind numbing was going back with paper stickers, covering the stampings when prices changed. I cleaned the foul toilet in the back room and swept the aisles timing my pace to make sure I wouldn’t be too available for further assignments before closing time.
Most of my tenure was spent up front, at one of the four checkout counters, first as a lowly bagger and then working a register as a checker. As a bagger I learned that the best response to an unpleasant customer was to plant a “time bomb.” A time bomb was the strategic placement of heavy, hard-edged items like number ten cans in proper proximity to eggs, bread, tomatoes or any other soft fragile item. Ideally when the bags were moved, the full weight of the hard items would inflict the maximum damage on the soft ones. The ultimate time bomb was the positioning of a wet or potentially leaking item near the bottom of the large brown paper grocery bag with heavy items pressing down on it. Done properly, the offending customer would just make it out the door before catastrophe struck.
I was sixteen when Irene Rudinski replaced Mrs. Bailey in the cage. The cage was the store manager’s small, elevated stand-up office along the wall at the end of the checkout counters. Irene’s job was to handle all the store’s administrative loose strings; payroll, schedules, keep track of cash and generally help out the manager, the hopelessly mad Charlie Watson and the wise-guy assistant manager, Rudy Bederman. Irene was probably twenty or twenty one and newly married. She was a diminutive cutie, button-nosed and red cheeked and I was smitten the moment I saw her.
I had come in grudgingly for a three hour, mid-week, after school stint. As I punched in at the time clock on the outside wall of the cage, the door opened and there was Irene in a white coat apron standing next to the open safe counting stacks of tens. I looked at her and it was instantaneous. I was in love. For three hours that afternoon, I kept finding excuses to go to the front of the store, to walk past the cage, anything to get another peek at this wondrous creature. Just before closing time, on my fifth or tenth or twentieth walk past, our eyes met. I immediately betrayed myself, my face flashing the colors of a Key West sunset. Before she could lower her eyes, Irene Rudinski, so much older than me, married or not, turned a shade of crimson equal to my own. Distracted as I was, I didn’t notice Rudy Bederman standing next to her in the office. He’d witnessed the whole scene.
My five-hour, four p.m. to closing, shift on Friday and the full day Saturday were now spent in a kind of deliciously sweet torment. I couldn’t stop mooning over Mrs. Rudinski, and neither of us could stop blushing. The word had gotten around the store and everyone but the two of us were having a grand old time with it. At first, I couldn’t believe my good fortune. All afternoon on Friday, Rudy Bederman kept sending me on errands to the cage. Oblivious with infatuation, I didn’t notice that every time I came to the front of the store to stand red-faced and stammering in front of an equally discomfited Irene Rudinski, all four checkers and their baggers had stopped what they doing. Nor was I alert to the fact that the produce clerks were poking their heads around the end aisle, or that Rudy Bederman and one or more of the full time grocery guys always happened to be at the front end of one of the aisles near the office.
By Saturday morning, I knew that I had, as my father repeatedly observed, allowed myself to be carried away by my enthusiasms. But at that stage of my life, the tortured pleasures of being in love with being in love had become a central factor of my existence. If on that previous Wednesday afternoon when I clocked in, Irene Rudinski hadn’t been there to knock me off my feet, there just might have been some other sweet young thing coming into the store and creating a similar emotional dislocation in my volatile consciousness. At the age of sixteen, I was in love all of the time. I could be in love with one girl or with many more girls than one, for weeks or months on end. During those same weeks or months of serial or concurrent emotional fixations, there would also be an infinity of short features, momentary infatuations, interesting possibilities that stimulated, excited and held my attentions. I had become an absolute master of romantic multi-tasking, almost all of which took place entirely within the confines of my own mind. My self-absorbed attractions to Irene Rudinski, unlike the objects of most of my warm daydreams, just happened to spill out into a limited public domain.
Just before lunch on that Saturday, I was in the back room stacking cases of Del Monte canned fruit on a cart when Charlie Watson came in and motioned me away from where Big Stan was chopping the ends off cabbages. Even then, I had to give Charlie his due. He could have cared less if Irene Rudinski and I were carrying on like a couple in a smoker movie. Charlie had a store to run. “Listen,” he said to me. “We’re both grown men.” I was sixteen and flattered. “Mrs. Rudinski,” he didn’t call her Irene, “is a married woman.” That was all he said. I nodded my understanding. Until then, I’d regarded Charlie as just another pathetic, stressed-out lunatic clinging to a job beyond his capabilities. His tactical implications that I had even the remotest chance of consummating any kind of serious relationship in the matter under discussion were calculated to let me slip easily off the hook, and I knew it. I also recognized how much I had underestimated Charlie both as a person and as a manager, and I never did that again. By the following week, Irene Rudinski and I were able to smile and nod at each other without embarrassment. And as time passed, she even began to kid me about the state of my love life.
What little room for maneuver I had as a grocery clerk; ducking out back for a smoke, dawdling while I brought in carts, hiding in the back room, evaporated when I was called up front to work a register. My selection by Charlie Watson to become a checker was touted as if I was being promoted. There was no additional money that went with the added duties. The problem of working one of the store’s four registers is that you were trapped, a captive locked into your checkout booth, and the row of booths stood directly in the line of vision of Charlie’s office. Monday through Thursday, it wasn’t that bad. Customer traffic was light or sporadic and my usual work stint was three hours at most. And, by being up front, near the door I could get a look at every girl who came into the store. Better yet, there was that flattering rush when a girl would choose my line even when it wasn’t the shortest. Friday and Saturday were different. The store was crowded and busy until the nine p.m. closing on Friday night, and the action on Saturday was non-stop all day.
The big electro-mechanical cash registers chugged, clacked, banged and chimed, producing long paper tapes listing each figure we entered. There were no scanners, no bar codes. We read the price of each item and entered it, doing the divisions when a customer bought one can of LeSuer Peas at three for forty-nine cents, a seventeen-cent charge. I got to know which sour-faced housewives would challenge my display of flash and dash on the register’s big buttons by demanding to go over the tape item-by-item in hopes of catching a pricing mistake. One woman who had a reputation for doing it every week did catch me up one Saturday. I had undercharged her significantly on a large ham. When I smiled, apologized for the mistake and thanked her for finding it, she was pissed. For a few moments I was a hero among my peers, but the following Saturday she had the checker next to me doing another item-by- item recount. We had to weigh and price the fresh produce that was sold by weight, using daily price schedules for string beans or cabbages by the pound. Instead of powered conveyor belt surfaces, the counters had wooden handled frames that we used to pull the groceries up to our registers, and we had to know how to make change. In over two and half years, my till came out wrong only twice. Once, a buck-thirty short and the second time, twelve dollars over.
Sometimes you had a bagger working with you, most of the time you didn’t. On a Saturday working from eight in the morning until the five p.m. closing time, you got a ten-minute break in the morning and afternoon and an hour off to go home for lunch. It wasn’t anything like “breaking rocks in the hot sun,” but I was sixteen years old, and spending all day Saturday cooped up and supervised while I worked a cash register non-stop for seventy-five-cents an hour sure seemed like kind of a drag. But then again, nobody was coming around to offer me anything any better.
Right or wrong, by the time I was at the A & P, I had begun to feel like I was always on the outside looking in. Other kids got these desirable jobs; carrying mail at Christmas time, construction labor jobs all summer at three fifty an hour, city jobs where you painted fences or didn’t, and still got paid. Even then, nobody would tell you how they happened to get those plums. It seems we didn’t know anybody in positions to look out for us. What I couldn’t see was that there were kids in the neighborhood who probably wondered how I had gotten my job at the A & P.
I was sweeping the cereal and cookies aisle when Charlie Watson came up to me. With see-through seriousness done entirely for effect he said, “Peter, can I ask you to stop what you’re doing for a moment.” I think “yeah right, Charlie. I’m busy sweeping the floor.” Charlie also always called us by our proper names as if we were all equal partners in the fate of The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. “Walter is going to be out for a while. I’m going to promote you and Edward and Thomas to handle his duties while he’s gone.” I’d already had a couple of Charlie’s “promotions,” a term understood to mean more work, but no more money. Walter was a full-timer with a wavy hairdo and a horse-toothed, on-and-off smile that only the women ever got. He ran the store’s dairy counter, a job generally considered a soft deal. Between Eddie Ricks and Tommy Ward, both of who went to North Catholic, and me, all of us part timers, we’d take turns covering the dairy. At least it would keep me off a check-out register for as long Walter was going to be out. At seventeen, I had no curiosity at all why charming Walter was to be out. We learned later it was for a hemorrhoid operation.
The dairy counter was in the back of the store near the butchers and the back room door. The centerpiece of the counter was a tall, red double-batch coffee grinder with selection handles like the bridge controls on a great ocean liner. The A & P sold its own brand of coffee in one and three-pound bags; basic Red Circle in yellow bags, richer Eight-O-Clock in red bags, and the seriously strong and aromatic Bokar in black bags. Charming Walter, who always wore a necktie and a white smock instead of an apron, would grind customer’s coffee to order, selecting the right setting on one of the big machine’s two control handles. The area around the dairy counter would fill with the efficient sound of hidden machinery and the delicious smell of freshly ground coffee. A customer’s “thank you,” particularly an attractive woman’s “thank you,” would be Walter’s cue for an oily, leering recitation like “it’s my pleasure dear, I like to do everything I can to please my customers.”
Along the wall next to the coffee counter and running to the back of the store was a brightly lit refrigerated case where milk, eggs, butter and cheese were kept. The dairy person was responsible for stocking and maintaining the display. Behind the counter itself were glass cases filled with cartons of cigarettes. The dairy counter also had its own cash register, a convenience for customers who came in for cigarettes or coffee, or with small orders, could have their purchases rung up and bagged right there.
During my second week on the dairy, a Thursday after school, I was out of smokes. It was still a day till payday. At quitting time Friday night, Irene Rudinski would hand us the small brown envelopes that held our pay, the bills wrapped around our time sheet vouchers and the change loose in the envelope. I thought, “what the hell.” I’ll just grab a pack of cigarettes from behind the counter. I’ll ring up the twenty-seven cents on Saturday. Looking around to be sure nobody was watching me, I did the old drop down and pick up something from the floor routine. Squatting behind the counter, my right hand went into an open Camel carton and slid one pack of cigarettes into my pants pocket.
A solid pack a day smoker, I ran out again at work on Friday night, smoking the last of the purloined Camels during a soda break in Leon’s Luncheonette across the street. Again, it was the old “what the hell.” I’d ring up fifty-four cents tomorrow. On Saturday, Doreen, one of the checkers called in sick. I was given a till and had to spend the entire day up front. Tommy Ward worked the dairy. It was Tuesday before I was due back in, and by then I was broke and out of smokes.
The slide into allowing the A & P to finance my cigarette habit was inexorable and seemingly inevitable. Within a week, I was copping Camels two packs at a time. I mean, I still needed smokes even when I wasn’t working. I knew it was wrong. There was never any doubt, but it wasn’t like I was stealing from anybody, not from any real person who needed the lousy twenty-seven cents a pack. It was just too easy. With reliable if erratic periodicity, a news story will appear on TV or in the paper about a trusted employee caught with their hand in the jar. Or it’s the toll taker playing one for the bridge, one for me, or the devoted dad or mom who rips off the kids’ hockey or soccer club for fifty-grand. People always react with “he was good guy” or, ”she had a good job. Why did they do it?” But I know why. I know exactly how it can happen.
At closing time on a Tuesday afternoon about a week before Walter was due back, Charlie told me to come in at four the next afternoon. I wasn’t scheduled to work, but he said he wanted to talk to Edward, Thomas and me together. I don’t believe I slept that night. Wednesday in school took a month to pass. I felt sick and wanted to go to Argentina, anywhere but over to that A & P at four. I considered not showing up, but in the context of who I was and where I was, that wasn’t an option.
I didn’t bother going home from school. I sat on the low wall of the store’s tiny parking lot smoking stolen cigarettes and worrying. Eddie Ricks showed up. He looked angry. I didn’t say anything. He started absentmindedly kicking the cinderblock wall and assuming I knew what was going on, he said, “What the fuck are they going to do, send us to jail?” I thought, maybe they will, and I felt even worse. Again I didn’t say a word.
Four-o-clock and no Tommy Ward. Eddie and I went inside. Irene, who knew everything that went on in the store, didn’t even turn to face us. “Mr. Watson’s waiting for you in the back,” she said. It felt like a death march. Charlie was talking to Big Stan who took his cue and left. Silence, a long silence with Charlie just staring at us. “I think you know why I asked you to come in,” he said in his best serious manager’s voice. “Where’s Thomas,” he asked us. It was every man for himself. Neither Eddie nor I gave a shit where Tommy Ward was. “Good enough,” said Charlie. “He had his chance.”
“Edward, you know why you’re here,” said Charlie. He waited and waited and waited and waited. The pressure of the silence was awful. I was ready to blurt out, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it. I’m sorry.” But before I said anything, Eddie Ricks looks at Charlie and says, “how much do I owe you, Charlie.” Charlie had a number that he said was the average difference between Walter’s receipts and Eddie’s. “Eighty-two dollars,“ he said. Eddie dropped his head. Charlie went on. “It’s your choice,” he said pausing. “If you agree to return the money you’ve taken, fine. If not, you wait right here until the police arrive. Your friend Thomas outdid you, and because he isn’t here he is not going to get the chance I’m giving you.”
Neither Eddie Ricks or Tommy Ward smoked cigarettes, but they each had found the unsupervised cash register too much of a temptation. Over the seven-week period when the three of us had been working the dairy, the receipts for Eddie’s and Tommy’s shifts had kept coming up noticeably shorter than when Walter had been running the ship. Now it was my turn. I stood with my stomach fluttering and my muscles beginning to twitch. “Oh shit,” I thought. “How could I have gotten myself into something like this.” Charlie turned to me and said, “Peter, did you know anything about any of this?” Rays of sunlight began to peek out from behind the clouds, birds started to chirp, feeling slowly began returning to my extremities. My sphincter unpuckered for the first time in almost twenty-four hours. “No I didn’t Charlie,” I heard myself say.
What had happened was that while I was lifting a half dozen packs of Camels every week, my register tapes were close enough to the Walter standard that I was assumed to be on the up and up. But only up to a point. Once again, Charlie demonstrated a managerial savvy beyond general appreciation. I had been scooped up in the same net with Eddie and Tommy, just in case I had anything I might have wanted to get off my chest. Charlie did send the company’s security people to Tommy Ward’s house, and since nothing more was ever said I figured either he or his parents made good. I walked out of that store that afternoon with a clear understanding of the nature of moral imperatives, an understanding that’s continued to guide me now for over fifty years.
Not long ago, we began buying bean coffee and grinding it fresh as a weekend indulgence. It soon became a daily entitlement. Every so often, early in the morning, when the scent of the pulverized beans comes up at me, I’m back behind the big red grinder surrounded by colorful stacked bags of Eight-O-Clock, Red Circle and Bokar. I believe now that what I experienced at the A & P dairy counter in 1954 was nothing less than a very close call with the Devil himself.
