paint store people
Once upon a time, I worked in a paint store. Not the fun, creative kind, but the “lifetime of back pain and occasional, casual misogyny” kind. But if there was one thing that the paint store was good for, it was introducing me to some interesting characters.
I started working for this prodigious paint company when I was in college. This isn’t about the machinery I operated, but looking back, it’s crazy how normal it was to put unqualified people in potentially dangerous situations at this job. Operating a forklift laden with a literal ton of paint—definitely not certified for that. As a very green teenager who only recently learned how to drive behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry, I would be sent out in the store’s Ford F-450 to make deliveries and somehow never got in an accident—sheer dumb luck. But I was young enough to find a sort of charm in working a physical job, outside of the numbing fluorescent confines of a cubicle for once. And I loved my coworkers, a little collection of flawed individuals who would never have anything to do with each other if it weren’t for that job.
The most accurate word to describe my first store manager would be “squirrelly,” and even now I feel certain that he’d react to such a claim with a resigned shrug and a rueful nod before walking away to nurse the insult like a lukewarm beer. He chain-smoked like a prototypical paint store manager, and every other week, he’d crash out anew over his divorce, despite the fact that it was years in the rearview. He had a face-and-facial-hair combo that matched his surname: van Deman. Good guy, I liked him a lot. He later won the lottery but didn’t seem to be any the happier for it.
By some twist of fate, his assistant manager always seemed to be his diametric opposite, his hangdog energy offset by a personality perpetually unbothered. There was one assistant who looked like a young Morgan Freeman. Even when he was in a bad mood, he was a good day: like a rainstorm, even when it came down heavy, the calm was never threatened by worry. His replacement ran hotter in temperament but was ultimately just a happy-go-lucky guy, despite his history of hair metal and heavy drugs. I guess that’s the power of owning lakefront property and a boat in the far rosier days of the early 00s. My shifts often overlapped those of the assistant manager and another part-timer, a Bolivian girl and the first lesbian I ever knew. Because of her, I assume all lesbians are kind of glamorous in the same chaotic, dramatic, inherently cool way. We spent many a slow hour mixing paint samples and gossiping about the people who worked at our sister stores in town, like the sales rep and store manager whose affair turned into matching divorces, or the neurotic assistant who avoided making left-hand turns while driving.
The best part of it all was the complete lack of stress: every interaction was either good-natured shit-talking or low-level flirting.
After college, I was assigned to work in an old money neighborhood in a much bigger Texas city. The location itself had history, and logistically, history also meant inconvenience, like a parking lot ill-suited for the massive freight trucks bearing our weekly shipments. But I was just the assistant, so I left that kind of worrying to my new, chain-smoking manager. I loved my coworkers until I didn’t, because most of those relationships ended on notes sad or sour. At this stint, I worked with a young guy who left to study golf in Arizona,1 a young guy who played handball professionally, and a young guy who tightrope-walked in the park on his off days. With one, I foolishly entered a long-distance situationship that finally ended when I blocked his number. I fell out with another over a miscommunication about vacation time, a stupid way to lose someone who felt like a brother to me. I’ll always remember drinking $1 bottles of Pacifico at a short film festival with the third, and the phone call from our old manager telling me he’d been shot and killed by a security guard in front of his own apartment. He once showed me a video he made with his friends; it was like Before Sunset and that crude Seth Rogen alien movie distilled down into ten minutes. He used to feed a stray cat that hung around his building, and he would climb the warehouse racks like a monkey, and he was always happy when I called the store. I regret not playing along with his dumb bacon joke. I can still remember his voice.
I worked with some unathletic old guys too, like the one from Boston who loved Death Valley and conceiving of in-joke Christmas cards with his wife, who might have hated him. But probably the coolest people I remember from this store were the ones who set up shop in the other suites in our building. On one side, there was the couple from Mexico City who sold specialty chocolate and would invite us all out dancing; and then there was the partnership of the true blue redneck with family money and the silver-bearded gay man smoking meat in the back.2 My time at this store was like living in a fun apartment complex in a sitcom TV show: the neighbors were entertaining, even when they were fighting, and as long as I didn’t examine things too closely, the laugh track sounded real.
After a time, I ended up working in a wealthy neighborhood in another major metropolitan city. But now I was the boss, which was way, way less fun—in fact, mostly not fun at all. My very first assistant manager was karma personified: she drove me crazy the way I drove my first manager crazy. We loved each other at first, like sisters or best friends, and she’d regale me with stories of getting her tooth pushed back after rejecting a stranger in Scottsdale3 and “worming it up” with her dog all weekend, bed-rotting before that was a thing. But eventually, her college-after-graduation lifestyle started to wear on me, because as head honcho, I now had numbers to meet.4 I think we hated each other by the end, and I regret that. Then I had an assistant who wore soft suede loafers with no socks, read a book behind the counter, and was strangely hung up on her own introverted personality. Trouble was, we worked in a paint store and not a bookstore, so our relationship was steeped in passive-aggressive tension, not to mention the ever-present threat of losing manpower to a heinous foot injury.
Our customers were a trip though. One evening, I was working the closing shift alone, and my then-boyfriend came in to hang out with me. A couple came in, probably in their 40s and probably previously divorced. The store, clean and shiny and new, was empty but for the four of us, so it rang out loud and clear when the man called his companion over by impishly urging her to “Scamper, scamper!” Like an obedient but well-treated dog, she answered with a chipper “Scampering!” before skipping over. At the time, my boyfriend and I found their behavior to be harmless but decidedly odd, but now that we’ve been together for nearly fifteen years (and married for eight), I think we can both acknowledge that that kind of playfulness with your partner has its merits.
I even helped a D-list celebrity pick paint colors once. I probably never would have realized it—I never watched Kyle XY—but when your husband’s first name is Blue, a person’s bound to take notice.
There’s a short story by Haruki Murakami called “The 1963/1982 Girl From Ipanema.” The bulk of it is ostensibly about an imaginary encounter between the narrator and the bikini-clad girl immortalized in a pop song. Under the hot sun, he ponders the state of her metaphysical soles. They share a beer and she urges him to live the life she cannot. But really, the story is about a different girl, a real girl who ate salads and discussed reading assignments with the narrator in high school. She lives forever in his memory, a shadow paired with the girl walking the sandy beaches of Brazil. The narrator gets older, and those girls stay the same age, like Nara who couldn’t stay faithful and like Cameron who balanced on wires and like Brad who smoked brisket in a sweat-soaked bandana. And unlike paint, which curdles and reeks in rusty pails, the people I met in the paint stores of my past stay fresh and sealed away.
Real thing. Maybe it was golf course… management?
Not a euphemism.
Casual misogyny happened outside the store, too.
Fuck corporate America.
Oh, I loved this! What a poet you are, Ang! This took me back to my retail days, all the characters I worked with, strange and awesome. I often wonder what happened to some of them...I'm still friends with my old manager from a clothing store I worked at back in 1999-2000.
I really really liked reading this. I definitely felt some nostalgia and a sprinkle of melancholy - I really appreciate the affection you have for the people you write about. Thanks for putting this out there :)