Tales from the Underpaid: Closing Time
I learned about the party after closing in my first job at the pizza place, but it happens across all lousy jobs. When we closed the kitchen, we’d blast “Closing Time” by Semisonic when we were ready to lock up, but that didn’t mean the night was over. The lights were off and the dining room was empty, and the folks with kids were headed home.
Those of us who weren’t needed at home had other plans.
It was the same when I worked big-box retail, when we locked the doors and set the alarms, saluted the night crew and got out of there. If the store closed at 10, then we were out by 11 and turned up by midnight.
Retail employees don’t have the money to go out. The plans would be passed mouth to ear, phone to phone. Marisol’s house. Gary’s garage. Chance has a big backyard. Bring a bottle.
The mix on a retail crew is diverse. I worked with a 20-year Army vet, never married, no kids, one eye. He’d roll up to every single one of these functions with a slinky purple bag that he’d take from the bottle like a stripper offing a robe to reveal the Crown Royal he would drink and share all night. College-age kid named Joey who had School of Hard Knocks in his Facebook bio, with a cube of beers under his arm and a party trick of saying “my penis is the penis of fire” in fifteen languages. Lesbian head cashier named Danna in her thirties who I would discover making out with a much younger woman wearing a purity ring in someone’s laundry room next to an overflowing litter box sometime around 3AM. Romero, in recovery at 45, white-knuckling a Diet Coke and telling everyone he’s fine being around it.
There’s always a folding card table, a plastic picnic table, a ledge where we pile big bags of Cheetos, handles of cheap vodka, mixers from the gas station, and an improvised gravity bong (I lived in the years before vaping, youths. We used to have to do arts and crafts to get high.) Big pizza box from Little Caesar’s set upon by a drunk crowd like a gummy bear dropped on an anthill.
What do we talk about? We talk about you, the customer who came in to buy grow lights and bags of black soil, clearly starting an indoor weed farm. We talk about you, the lady with no receipt demanding a cash refund. We talk about you, the absent-minded father who let a four-year-old stick their whole arm into an industrial AC and withdraw it to find their fingertips cut to ribbons. We talk about you, demanding to speak to the manager, the manager, the manager.
Managers aren’t allowed at these parties. They sometimes show up anyway, like the time GM Dave got blackout drunk and casually dropped his balls into a lady’s beer. Like ASM Jackie who walked in and asked “who am I cheating on my husband with tonight?” and awkwardly waited for an answer. Like the owner’s son Mark who got a 16-year-old pizza cook pregnant and had to drive her to Palm Springs for an abortion. A manager at the party is a pipe bomb filled with gossip and intrigue that inevitably goes off before sunrise. It’s not worth it.
Enough hours and enough intoxicants and people will talk about life beyond work. We’ll talk about our personal lives, our plans. We’ll split the party neatly into those who know there’s another life to be had beyond this job, the ones planning to go back to school or pick up a trade… and those who took this job in “retirement,” those whose obligations will keep them pinned to this concrete rock while the vulture eats their liver every day anew, those for whom this steady employment was the blessing that they prayed for.
Exhaustion takes even the youngest closers out at 4 or 5AM. The drunks pass out and sleep where they fall, or else get driven home by someone who can. We wake up to group texts like where did I leave my car??? answered by the openers who went back in at 6AM, hungover or still wasted, to ring up plumbing parts and drive a forklift until they can go home and pass out at 3PM.
It’s still at Marisol’s. It’s safe. You’re safe.
We who could not control the pace or content of our work days, we who had to ask permission to use the bathroom or to clock out five minutes early, we who did not know what the future would bring, if anything, we took revenge on ourselves, our time, and our organs. It felt like control to be tired because we had chosen to stay up, not because that job was grinding us down. It felt glamorous to be hungover instead of just bored and without hope for another long shift. It felt like a choice to spend an extra eight hours with these people, not because their names were on the same schedule, but because we decided to kick back and blow off some steam.
It felt like valor to party all night and greet the sun with bloodshot eyes to clock in on time and start the whole cycle up again. I still think of those as crucible years, the ones that prepared me to work two jobs through college and move on to a life where I never punch a clock, but I also don’t get invited to parties like these anymore.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
Post Script: I left these shitty jobs behind to become a professional writer. I tell all kinds of stories, including this one about a fat kid’s revenge after his tour of the candy factory, or the one about the last gay bar in the universe. Thank you for reading, and there’s lots more where that came from.