The Hand Painted Car

It was this same summer that I saw the hand painted car.  The particular Saturday I saw the car it was in the middle of the day around two pm.  Between one and four PM is considered "the heat of the day", and like I said earlier, normal people try to stay cool during these hours.  Being a Sacker, I was obviously not normal as I stood in my black polyester pants, white polyester shirt, and blue striped polyester tie. 

Then again all the other Sackers were so attired, so I felt, if not normal, at least not singled out in my goofy uniform.  My shift started at nine, and by now it was two and the temperature on this day  was easily over one hundred and ten.  Had we not been sitting on five square acres of asphalt, the earth might have absorbed some of the heat, instead it all just collected at about head level. 

If the store managers had the sense God gave seafood, they would have had us out in pith helmets to keep our heads from cooking, cotton clothes that breathed, and made sure we took salt pills and drank plenty of water. . .not Dr. Pepper.

The other factor that influenced the sackers was the store's air conditioning.  Since it was so darned hot outside, and the glass automatic doors were continually fanning as people came and went, it was necessary to keep the store relatively cool so that the frozen food would not melt.  My best guess is that it was kept around sixty-eight degrees year round.

 I'm not a medical doctor, but it does not take a doctorate from med school to figure out constant (twenty times an hour) temperature fluctuations of FORTY TWO DEGREES is not healthy for growing boys.

 I had a terrible head-ache, and I stank.  Each time I went outside, I sweated, and when I came back in, it dried.  Fifty repetitions later, I smelled bad enough to gag a buzzard.  As you probably know, a Sacker's main job is to sack groceries and carry them to the shopper's car.  At some stores the baggers get tips for their work, as well as an hourly wage (note that the baggers are happier at these stores). 

At our store we were paid only an hourly wage, and very few people tipped.  So we only smiled as we day-dreamed of being eyeball deep in cool water, or what we would do with all of our money, or how neat it will be to quit being a sacker.

Day-dreaming was very important to survival as a sacker.  No one could possibly listen to the ladies as they lectured you about taking care of their produce and bread.  "The last time I was here, the sacker squashed my bread with a cantaloupe, and the eggs had cans put on top of them, and blah, blah, blah." 

Sure lady.  Yeah lady.  Whatever-you-say lady.  Really, I shouldn't put the bananas on the bottom of the bag… on top of the cake?  Gee, what a revelation!  Thanks for the tip.

But day-dreaming is not a desirable trait as a Checker.  I learned that by filling in for one on a busy day and overcharging some guy one-hundred dollars on his groceries.  The funny part was that he paid it!  He later came storming in wanting his money, the manager called me over to show me the receipt.  I was supposed to feel really bad about it, and of course we gave him his money back, but I kept thinking, "How can he be mad at ME?   He's the one that paid two-hundred forty dollars for six sacks of groceries!"  Needless to say, they did not let me check out customers after that incident.

So while I stood there hot and smelly, I dutifully put item after item in this lady's bags.  It dawned on me that neither the lady nor her three kids were talking much.  I was immediately struck by the resemblance this family had to the actors in "The Grapes of Wrath" movie they made us watch in History class. 

The kids had big unblinking eyes and all stared at me except to ask their "Ma" for some candy.  Their mother had the hard miles look of a woman who washes all the family's clothes in a tub on the porch.  She clutched her purse and watched every item being rung up as if her life depended on it.  When she talked it was only the minimum amount of energy necessary to force sound from her lips. "Clem, quit poken yer sister."  Oh well, back to day dreaming, I've seen country folk before.

 After she paid, I followed her and her three kids out of the store into the sweltering heat and light.  Sweat immediately ran down my face as she led me to her car and opened the back door to let her kids inside.  I had never seen an uglier car.  This four door unrecognizable Dodge something-or-other was hand- painted day-glow green.  By hand-painted, I mean someone used their hand to hold the paint brush as they slopped the glowing paint on the car!  Why didn't they just take the poor thing out to a wrecking yard and shoot it!  Now I had my mouth open, and was glassy eyed.  The heat and the sight had me dumbfounded and zombie-like as I loaded the groceries into the back seat with the children. 

I wasn't paying any attention to what I was doing as the children hopped around in the seat trying not to stick to the hot, black vinyl as I put the last bag in and closed the door.  I looked up from the door handle right into the eyes of Clem.  His eyes were watering and his mouth moved without making a sound.  I pondered the sight.  His face was drained of color.  Funny kid, I thought. 

Soon his eyes were bulging.  Before I could figure out what the kid was up to, I heard his mother speaking over my shoulder in her same measured tone.  "You shut his fingers in the dow-wer." 

What, his what? I asked.  What's a dow-wer?" She pointed to the boy's hand stuck in the door near the window jam.  More forcefully this time: "His fingers are shut in the dow-wer!"

Sacker

Any fool hound dog knows you don't go out in the heat unless you're crazy. . . or you work at a grocery store.

 I actually fried an egg on the sidewalk in front of my house one summer.  I heard someone say it was hot enough, so I did.  Dumb kid.

 My job at the store was called a "sacker".  Why we weren't called "bag boys" like everywhere else in the world, I'll never know.  Sackers were the lowest form of life in a grocery store, and being the newest sacker, I was lower than low. 

Sackers dream of being "stockers."  A stocker was a mature sacker who helps unload the supply truck, place the boxes of food on carts, roll them out into their designated isle, price them and put them on the shelf.  You can even drink a Dr. Pepper while you are working, and you hardly break a sweat . . . heaven!

Sacker

  Everybody has stories of gross things that have happened to them.  I’m blessed by having many.  This particular one happened that very same summer.  The summer with several weeks over one-hundred degrees. 

Our particular store was pretty lenient about people snacking from the isles.  Some places really hammer down on pilfering, but this store pretty much ignored an occasional Coke or Twinkie.  I usually checked the break room for opened cookies and such, but I had a real weakness for Welch's grape juice in a can.  Man, that sugary sweet juice hit the spot.  When I was a young kid, we could never keep any around our house because it would be consumed within seconds of opening. 

 I helped myself, with full intention of paying, to a can of grape juice.  I went so far as to hide it in the frozen food so it would be icy cold when my break time came.  As luck, and a busy Saturday morning would have it, just as I really got settled to enjoy my break and had only taken a few good swigs from my juice, the intercom blared.  "ALL SACKERS TO THE FRONT, ALL SACKERS TO THE FRONT".

Darn!  I placed my can on the corner of the table and went back into the fray.  Twenty minutes later, sweating profusely, I plodded toward the break room and my delicious, sweet, cool Welch's grape juice in a can.  While I was gone, the frozen food stocker, two checkers who had not gone on duty, and one checker on break had inhabited the room.  Other than all working at the same store, these people had one other thing in common.  They all smoked profusely.

 I've never smoked, but I've never minded other people smoking around me much.  It was the seventies, and a lot of small town folks enjoyed their smoking.  Big deal.  Feeling my way through the cloud, I said my hellos, found a seat and found my delicious Welch's grape juice in a can.  Boy was this going to be good! 

I tilted the can back and started gulping. 

The bell went off in my brain about the time the cigarette butt bounced off the back of my throat.  You got it.  My can was the designated ash tray for one of the smokers.  One of them said, "Ah, is that your drink?" about the time I sprayed the remainder of my mouthful all over the room and occupants.

"Is this your cigarette?"  I said as I pulled the but from my mouth, glaring angrily.

 I did not vomit.  I wanted to, but didn't.  I leaped into the bathroom and began washing my mouth out, as the smokers cursed and wiped juice and ashes off their clothes.  Well, that's what they get for messing with a low life sacker's grape juice.  Serves them right.  Nasty habit anyway.

HOT

It seems the smaller the town, the bigger the dreams.  My town, Denison, Texas, is located sixty some-odd miles north of Dallas on the Red River.  The only really notable persons to be born there was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who visited it once, but never claimed it as his hometown since he grew up somewhere in Kansas, and John Hillerman who played “Higgins” on the eighties hit TV show,  Magnum P.I.  

Denison existed primarily as a train yard and a place for Air Force personnel to live until the

Katy Rail Road

and the Air Force moved.  Denison's main attribute is Lake Texoma, a bazillion-acre muddy lake made from damming up the muddy Red river.  The lake is held in place by Denison Dam and boasts about its humongous striped bass.

Denison has one of those “neat” weather patterns where it can be sixty five degrees on one day and twenty the next.  It also gets hot in the summer.  Hot doesn't really do the feeling justice.  Imagine a steam room where sweat rolls down your face into your clothing, and the air is so thick with water you want to breathe it with a spoon.  Hot.  Imagine bursting into a sweat just walking out to get the mail through your dead brown grass, peering up with squinty eyes to look for just one teeny little rain cloud.

Here goes...

Ok,
Here goes. I'm going to tell you some stories.  Stories that are true, though seem impossible based on the short time frame that they happened.  My goal is to turn these stories into a humor book.
I have co-written a book called "For Young Men Only" that won an award for best Christian Youth Book in 09.  It was fun because I was invited with my writing partner, Jeff Feldhahn, to go to Chicago, be interviewed by many radio stations, some TV stations too.  Very exciting.
Anyway, you probably want to know why this blog has souch a wierd title. You'll have to wait.  Trust me, that this isn't a porn, and you could let your kids read it, if you have any. It has shades of "Stand by Me" since I had a similar childhood to the characters in that story/movie.
There's lots of humor, and all of it true. I hope you like what your reading and pass it along.
Here's my contact info: ericrice@comcast.net.  Email me first. We can Skype, Text, IM, Twitter, later.

I dream of slow motion images of bright yellow mustard jars tumbling through space end over end to come crashing with a grotesque yellow spray onto a tile floor, only to be followed a second later by bright red, glass ketchup bottles,  grape jelly and maple syrup.  A collage is formed yet changes before my eyes as the various contents smash and mix forming a dangerous new substance waiting for some unlucky stock boy  to fall into the glass-laced malestorm...

One of my greatest learning experiences came from a small town supermarket.  Now that I'm all grown up, I can confidently say that I am a big advocate of making teenagers earn their own spending money.  Irritating part-time jobs provide a great way for suburban kids to be exposed to the real people that make up the world instead of the hyper-cute brats that inhabit the TV.

 For me work was an escape and a way to make money while on the proverbial quest to find myself.  Escape, in that as the baby brother, I knew I was considered "helpless" at home, and I desperately wanted to learn how to do some things on my own.  Money, in that I knew I wanted to go to college, and most colleges and universities aren't free unless of course you can run a four point  one forty while dragging two tacklers with you.

The store where I was employed on and off for two years was the typical large, bland American supermarket.  It was loaded with flickering greenish-white florescent lights, and it had a dairy isle, meat section, frozen food isle and all the other isles you would expect to find in a sleepy run down, small town.  The managers of this store were all in their mid thirties, overworked and under-utilized.  Most of them smoked continually, and their facial expressions conveyed the truth that they really wanted to be somewhere else.  For that reason we had a new manager about every six months.

I was a typical eighteen-year old pimply faced, bandy legged teenager at the time of my hiring.  I spent the majority of my working time thinking about three things:  girls, cars, and money.  I figured if you had the last two, you could surely get the first one.  College was, I knew, the real place my money would go, but it sure made time go faster dreaming about girls and cars.