Behind the Till

I used the public bathroom instead of the employee bathroom and I never wore my red lanyard because I didn’t want anyone to know I worked there. I didn’t wear a sticker that said “Ask Me What I’m Reading” for fear that someone actually would. It had nothing to do with embarrassment about the job, as the job was “cool” and for all the jobs I could have in Portland, it was the one I wanted. But when I walked through the store, I wanted to blend in. I wanted to use the bathroom and just be another girl fixing her hair in the mirror. I wanted to browse books on the shelf and not be spoken to.

Having authority wasn’t what I was after and I feared if I wore my lanyard on my precious ten minute break, what if a customer asked me a question? Maybe you’re thinking, Just take your lanyard or sticker off when you go to the bathroom! But what if I forgot to? It would take away from my freedom. My ten minute breaks were dear to me. (My co-workers often commented on how much I loved my break — one said that the closest thing I will ever come to writing a travel essay will be about where I go on my ten minute break. I’ll never tell.) At the coffee shop connected to the bookstore, the baristas never remembered my discount, and I’d have to remind them: “I work here.” “Oh,” a girl said once, “You look like you’re from the outside world. Maybe that’s a compliment.” The only time it was apparent to customers that I worked there was when I was behind the till.

My brother worked at the Strand bookstore in New York City for three years. I never worked there but I lived in an apartment with him and I remember exactly the sounds of my brother going to work in the morning. The shower, his footsteps through our railroad apartment, the cereal being poured into the bowl (LIFE), and then the jangle of his keys and the lock of the door, his feet down the stairs.

Powell’s and Strand are incredibly different so I wasn’t constantly comparing them through this past year, but sometimes the thought would dawn on me — I work at the registers the way my friends used to. I am twenty-seven, as many of them were.

The group of twenty-seven-year-old guys who worked the registers were, in a word, depraved. I perversely admired them. I had an affinity for older males that made fun of me, as my older brother and his friends ganged up on me when I was a kid. Gently being made fun of was a way I felt cared for. Though these guys took it a little far, I still liked it, craved it almost. They were older, knew cool music and books. They all had nicknames: Jesus Johnny, Malt Shop, Grease Lightnin’.

When my brother left New York for Europe, my friend Molly from upstate took his place. She needed a job and my brother directed her to talk to Charlie at the Strand. Charlie’s name was the Holy Grail and if he liked you, he could get you hired. Molly went in, talked to him, told him she knew Trevor and took the book quiz. This was a test everyone took to get hired: match the author to the book. Molly came home and said, “I didn’t know the answers. I drew a space ship instead.”

She got hired. And so my life continued to be filled with Strand parties, Strand people, Strand couples. One year we even had a Strand Thanksgiving, roasting a turkey in the oven of my apartment that would be condemned that spring. Think: Pieces of April.

Molly and I flitted around the city like we had wings. We couldn’t afford books, so we came up with something we liked to call Cough Rip: Molly would have a coughing fit while I ripped the pages from a book and put them in my pocket. (Who hates me now? I know, it was wrong.) Another time, we were really into the vitamin 5-HTP. It suppressed appetite and increased serotonin and we thought it was a miracle drug. I remember going into the Strand and handing it out to the depressed dudes in need of a boost. They all accepted it, happily taking the little white vitamin into their hands, but also rolling their eyes.

In New York, the terminology was “the registers” and in Portland it is “cashiering” or “the tills.” At Powell’s we have comfortable chairs to sit in while we ring up people’s books. This once dawned on me, the comfort of it and after work I called my friend Molly who used to work at Strand. I told her about it and asked her to remind me — did Strand have chairs? Hell no, she told me. There was one folding chair behind “the registers” and it was for the manager. If you were caught sitting in it, your ass was grass. Another difference: the Strand was divided up as the basement, main floor, and art floor. To generalize: smart nerds got placed in the basement, generic people on the main floor and the cute girls on the art floor. At Powell’s we call them rooms. The blue room is by far the favorite, since it holds the literary gems, the red room is for incense hippies and the orange room for grandmas and cooks. While my brother was still in New York, the majority of people I knew at Strand worked in the basement like him. Powell’s is well-lit, Strand is creaky and dim. I prefer the public bathroom in the Strand as it has a window, but I spend so much time at the Powell’s one that I’ve made friends with the janitor. I said to her the other day, “I can’t stand the light in here.” “I can’t stand the smell in here,” she replied, “This whole place feels like a prison, cement everywhere.”

When I moved to Portland, my book of hyper-personal essays had been released five months prior. Working at Powell’s, my co-workers were nothing but supportive. Had I been working at the Strand, I worry my life would have been hell. I am reminded of when a friend Amy sent me the text: Worst day of my life. Mike and Chris found out I have a blog and terrorized me all day. Though I didn’t have a book or a blog I remember my gut sinking for her. How terrifying! Understanding how utterly humiliating that would be. Please understand, she was not being dramatic, the boys really could be that cruel.

These guys were dark horses. There was the failed filmmaker and the depressed guy from Hawaii who never brushed his teeth and wore an oversized Dr. Seuss T Shirt. I both found it fascinating and funny that people so young could be so jaded, though at twenty-one, I thought their twenty-seven old and sad. Our favorite anecdote about Mike was the time we ran into him on the subway. He did not say hello. He instead sighed loudly, looked at us and said, “Today’s gonna suck.” This would become a joke between my female friends and me, as we were younger than Mike with more positive attitudes and hopeful dreams. We were, most days, stoked on life. We even took to saying we were “high on life.” So through the next years, waking up and saying “Today’s gonna suck” provided us with endless laughter.

Mike had a tattoo of a shovel on his arm. We knew his mom was dead but we didn’t know how she died. We knew he was from Seattle and absolutely hated it there. (Until we became better friends with him, Molly would go to work with bad anxiety about him each day, as he was always giving her shit for her out-there fashion sense.) Then there was Eugene, who had a tattoo of his dead mother’s face on his arm. There was Jack (the one I was close with) who hanged himself. I mean, he hanged himself! Death was all around. Life went on. New York was rough and beautiful. When Jack died it was a casual grieving. I thought the world would stop. I remember a text message from another Strand guy: “Hey, I just heard about Jack. You doing okay?” “Yeah, unbelievable.” “You said it.” And that was that, we went on with everything. I remember how disturbing I thought it was one Christmas Eve when one of the guys told me he had nowhere to go and I invited him upstate, though he declined, spending it at a bar instead.

And then it was me who was twenty-seven, working at the registers in a city without family and nowhere to go on Christmas Eve. One year I spent Christmas Eve cashiering, then at a shitty Diner bar drinking cocktails. I used to look at the guys cashiering, never considering what my life would be like then. But part of me pitied them. They were lost. Later I was one of them, but I was too late, and they aren’t there anymore. The night before my twenty-seventh birthday I went out with two co-workers from Powell’s. I drank as though I were with Strand guys, as though I were twenty-one and in the New York. It was a homage of a sort, I think. We drank “white trashes” (shots of whiskey and Rainier beers) and ended up at a strip club. When I got home I vomited and later was told I pissed myself. It dawned on me then that I was not getting any younger and that I was not in New York anymore. (I’ve moved so much in my twenties that sometimes I truly forget where I am, going to The Wonder Ballroom in Portland last week, I kept telling people I was going to a show at Webster Hall, and in my mind seeing Webster Hall in New York but still not catching that I was mixed up.)

You’d think the fact that my friends all worked at Strand and the fact that I was a writer would have made me want to desperately work there, but it did not. In fact, it did the opposite. This was maybe my first symptom of commitment-phobia, of being afraid to lose my identity to a job or a scene. I liked being part of the Strand scene but not working there. Looking back, I see it made me feel special, like an “other.” It made me feel cool — I got to go to Strand parties but instead of losing my life to the bookstore, I lost it to being a barista and salesperson at a jewelry store. I’ve always had one foot in and one foot out of everything I’ve done. Writing is the only thing I’ve committed to with both feet in the water, for better or for worse.

In my year at Powell’s, customers have bought me things. A man once asked me if I was hungry and did I want the Panini he just bought at Starbucks? Sure, I said, and ate it for dinner. Other nice mom type women have bought me the sixty-cent Toblerones. Another time a kind girl who had read my book insisted on buying me a book (even though we just met, she said) and so I let her, even though, I explained to her, I could get it cheaper with my own discount. The book was Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman and it made my day because I couldn’t remember the last time someone had bought me a book. A few weeks later she and I went to The Laughing Planet for salads.

Another girl, big and blonde and loud came in with her brother. She was reading my book and she wanted to talk to me. She emailed me that night and invited me to “the bluffs to watch the sunset go down” and I said yes, but we ended up not going because she came down with the flu.

Another time, right when I got to work, with my period, in a bad mood, a tiny beautiful girl fresh out of Los Angeles came up to me, saying my first name. She was an actress, and she’d been “looking all over for me.” She loved my book — no — she really loved it, and had I ever thought about writing a screenplay for it?

Then there’s always the problem (maybe problem is too strong of a word, but you know what I mean) of co-workers reading your book. One day, cashiering in the green room, the cashier to my right asks me if I am an author. I tell her yes. She became very excited, asked me if I would mind if she read my book. I tell her of course not. We talk through our shift, become buddies and then she went off to get my book. She has not looked me in the eye since.

And Sam, an operations manager said, “I just checked your book back in, I liked it.” And there is a level of embarrassment to that: Sam knows everything about me and I know nothing about him. This is one of the hard truths around writing personal essays — it’s a one sided street. Just because you give them doesn’t mean you get any back in return.

Another time a co-worker told me about ringing my book up to a girl the day earlier. He was excited. Another time my co-worker next to me said, “Hey do you know who wrote this? This girl right here” to his customer to which I blushed and thanked her for buying my book. I am trying to say that having a book of essays out can really mess with your perception and self-identity.

But, as you see, at Powell’s, I was supported. To my face, no one but one co-worker made fun of me. The fact that I can count him on one hand shows everything. (When Naomi Wolff came to read from her book Vagina, he said, “Wait, I thought that was the name of your book,” and the time I showed him this little erotic piece I had in Men’s Health he made fun of me that night. In New York, I would have never been able to live it down.) I feel if I were working at the Strand through the publication of my book, my co-workers would have made my life miserable. It was just the culture. I was writing when I was in New York, but I wasn’t publishing.

When my brother left, he never came back, except for short stints. I have had to make so many new versions of my brother, and mostly, I chose guys that made fun of me as friends. I didn’t have many stable things in my life when I lived in Portland. No relationship, and I was moving almost every month. So cashiering next to the same male over and over again was a comfort for me.

When I talk to my girl friends that used to work at the Strand, they say they miss it, that they are jealous I work at Powell’s. They miss Strand because working there, they had “instant friends.” The same is true for Powell’s — I had insta-friends.

When I was in my late teens, having a brother that worked at the Strand was the best. The books he’d bring back for me surely helped me in becoming a writer: Valley of The Dolls, Artificial Silk Girl, The Dud Avocado, Ask The Dust and Quiet Days in Clichy.

Behind the till, I was able to see what people were buying. I’d be nannying at Cheryl Strayed’s house, then ringing her books up all day, then back to her house. I sold Alcoholics Anonymous and The Karma Sutra and so many self-help books I had no idea existed. I had to keep my face neutral and my mouth shut while ringing up eating disorder workbooks and Empty Cradle, Broken Heart, Surviving the Death of Your Baby. For someone as voyeuristic as myself, this was my favorite part of the job. Another cool thing was that I could look up the “last sale date” of my own book, which I did every day when I got to work. I logged on to my register, checked my book sales, and then checked the weather. If my book had sold that day or the day before, my confidence would soar and I’d spend a few moments daydreaming and wondering who had bought it. But if it hadn’t sold since the last time I checked, my heart would go glum.

There are the breed of people in the world that want to move to New York City and there are the breed of people that want to live in Portland. I had the opportunity to meet them both. I always knew I would not stay in Portland because I was so weird about opening a bank account there. I never did it. For a year and three months, I cashed my paychecks at Fred Meyer and hid my cash in my drawers. No credit card until my mother gave me one to charge my therapy sessions on. In Blue Nights by Joan Didion, she has all this fear around changing her California license to a New York one. She says, Why then did I feel so sharp a sense of betrayal when I exchanged my driver’s license for one issued by New York? Wasn’t that actually a straightforward enough transaction? Did I seriously see it as loss? Did I truly see it as a separation? I physically couldn’t open a bank account. The one time I did sit in downtown Portland with a banker at US Bank, I panicked and after a few moments told him I would come back another time.

At work one Sunday, a man came to my register, to my till. He bought about three hundred dollars’ worth of books to be shipped back to New York. He made a comment of how great a bookstore Powell’s is, how easy it is to find things — not like the Strand in New York, he said. It’s like the dark ages in there, he said. I laughed and said something like, “Yeah that place has a lot of problems.” On his way out he said, “Go back to the Strand sometime, it’s different now — there’s air conditioning. There’s a place to get a drink.” I will, I told him. I will go back.